Albie Sachs

Albert "Albie" Louis Sachs is a South African lawyer, activist, writer, and former judge appointed to the first Constitutional Court of South Africa by Nelson Mandela.

Albie Sachs was born in Johannesburg at the Florence Nightingale Hospital to Emile Solomon "Solly" Sachs, General Secretary to the Garment Workers' Union of South Africa, and Rachel "Ray" (née Ginsberg) Sachs (later Edwards).

Both his mother and father fled to South Africa as children with parents who were escaping persecution against Jews in Lithuania.

Sachs shared that at the time they left, the antisemitism had become so violent that "Every Easter, the Cossacks would ride into the villages and say, "'The Jews killed Christ, we're going to kill the Jews.' And my grandparents and others were fleeing into the forests and basements of buildings... so they wanted to escape." Both of his parents were politically active and his father expressed the desire that Sachs "grow up to be a soldier in the fight for liberation." His mother was a member of the South African Communist Party and worked as a typist for its general secretary Moses Kotane. Sachs said that Kotane's presence in his family's life, in particular the way he was admired by Sachs' mother, made it clear to him that racism was absurd, inhuman, and unjust.

His parents separated when he was a toddler and he moved with his mother and younger brother Johnny to a modest beachside home in Cape Town.

Sachs excelled in school and was moved forward two grades, in part due to a shortage of schoolteachers in South Africa during World War II.

He attended South African College Schools, where he edited the school magazine, for junior and high school before graduating.

He started law school at the University of Cape Town at the age of 15, and won a prize for English in his first year.

He was admitted to the bar in South Africa and began practicing law at 21, and became an advocate for those being prosecuted under racist and oppressive laws, including people who opposed apartheid.

On 6 April 1952, white South Africans commemorated 300 years since the arrival of Dutch colonisers, particularly Jan van Riebeeck, who rooted European civilization into the country.

Many also celebrated the recent electoral victory of the National Party and the introduction of the word apartheid to the English language.

Sachs, then a second-year law student, joined two hundred Black South Africans at a meeting to support the African National Congress (ANC), the National Party's opposition, in a working-class area of Cape Town.

The ANC launched their Defiance Campaign Against Unjust Laws the same day.

Though Sachs was initially told that the Defiance Campaign was a Black campaign led by Black people, he later led a group of young white South Africans to sit in chairs reserved for Black South Africans at the post office.

In 1955, Sachs attended the Congress of the People in Kliptown.

More than 2,000 delegates supporting the ANC adopted the Freedom Charter, which envisaged equal rights for all in a future South Africa that "belongs to all that live in it, black and white."

As part of the opposition, Sachs was subject to predawn raids by the security police and governmental restrictions on his activities, including meeting with more than one person at any given time.

He was also banned from publishing.

He was eventually arrested and detained in solitary confinement under the 90-Day Detention Law.

He was released after three months but was promptly rearrested and held for an additional seventy-eight days.

He was arrested again in 1966, which he described as the "worst moment of [his] life."

He was subjected to a spell of sleep deprivation by a security team whose head had been trained in torture methods by the French Directorate-General for External Security in Algeria.

Upon his release, he was given permission to leave South Africa under the condition that he never return.

Sachs left for England accompanied by Stephanie Kemp, a former client and later cellmate.

They married, had children, and continued their anti-apartheid work in the London branch of the ANC.

His ANC work brought him to different countries in Europe but he was denied entry to the United States, which regarded the ANC as a terrorist organisation.

After policy changes, he was able to visit the US, where he attended the Trial of the Chicago 7 at the invitation of the lawyers defending the Black Panthers.

Sachs supported Bobby Seale and later met Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton.

He also published The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, which illustrated his time in detainment, in 1966 and Stephanie on Trial, which covered Kemp's imprisonment and his second arrest, in 1968.

Sachs attended Sussex University with financial aid from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and completed his doctorate in 1970 under Norman Cohn and G. I. A. D. Draper.

His thesis, titled Justice in South Africa, was published in both the UK and the USA but was banned in South Africa, with those in possession of it facing prison time.

Between 1970 and 1977, Sachs was a lecturer in the law faculty at the University of Southampton, where he wrote Sexism and the Law with historian Joan Hoff-Wilson.

Sachs moved to the newly independent Mozambique in 1977, where he worked as a law professor at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo and studied Portuguese to fluency.

He was later the Ministry of Justice's Director of Research.

While in Mozambique, Sachs visited the ANC headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia, at the invitation of Oliver Tambo, where Tambo asked him to draft a code of conduct for the ANC that forbade the use of torture and highlighted the party's democratic principles.

The ANC adopted it as a binding policy after it was presented by Sachs at a conference in Kabwe in 1985.

Sachs helped lay the foundations for the future constitution of South Africa by serving as a scribe and provided Tambo with legal support.

On 7 April 1988, Sachs opened the door to his car and it exploded.

Sachs lost his right arm and vision in his left eye, and a passerby was killed.

He was stabilized in Mozambique, then flown to London Hospital to recover.