I was born into struggle. Even my name Albie, I was named after Albert Nzula who was a communist, he was a trade union leader, one of the first African trade union organisers who died not long before I was born. My parents had enormous admiration for him. So, they called me Albert. I didn’t know it was an unusual home because where you grow up seems to be normal to you. But I remember very vividly my mom Ray Sachs, born Ginsberg saying to my little pikkie brother Johnny, aged then about 18 months, and Albie, now aged about 2 and a half, three, ‘Tidy up, tidy up, Uncles Moses is coming.’ And Uncle Moses wasn’t Moses Cohen or Kantarowitz. It was Moses Kotane. He was the general secretary of the communist party. And my mom had enormous admiration and affection for him. And she was his typist. So, I grew up in a home where it was quite normal to see a white woman showing great respect and affection for an African man who was her boss. And to me that was normal. And that world outside where people were treated in a very discriminatory way because of the skin colour just seemed quite, quite absurd to me.
My mom and my dad were separated. So she had her two little kids and came down to Cape Town. And the very first place she stayed in was with Cissie Gool, then living with Sam Kahn in Glen Beach. And my mom just found it fantastic living near the sea. So she then moved to Clifton. And my whole early childhood was spent in Clifton, which was a bit different in itself. Tiny little living space just like a bedroom, everything room with a kitchenette and a toilet but a fantastic voorkamer, a fantastic front room which was the beach and the sea and meeting the other kids there. So that was a bit different for us – that barefoot feeling. An almost romantic feeling of being close to nature, the sand between your toes, the sound of the sea. I grew up with that.
It had visitors coming down on holiday from Johannesburg. Maybe people working in town coming specially on Sundays. Very little food, but whatever we had, we shared. Bright, energetic, strong women. Pauline Podbrey. I remember on one occasion she was with some workers union, and she lay down in the road in front of the trucks to stop the scabs from coming through and everybody was like cheering her on. So, these were the normal points of reference for me.
When I was packing to go into exile, I found some old documents and there was a postcard – I wished I’d kept it – from my father. ‘Dearest Albie or Albert...’ Now this is during World War Two. ‘Dearest Albert, may you grow up to be a soldier in the fight for liberation.’ I think it’s a bit heavy for a 6-year-old even during war time, you know, when being a soldier was the thing for all young kids. Certainly, for all young white kids to be a soldier was kind of normal.
We went to a kindergarten which was run by Mrs Tischower, whose husband had died in a Nazi concentration camp, and she’d come as a refugee to Cape Town. And my mom got into trouble because her children were going around saying you mustn’t say the Germans are bad. You must say the Nazis are bad. And my mom was then seen as a Nazi German sympathiser because of what her very politically correct little Johnny and little Albie Sachs were saying.
The other kids celebrated birthdays. The centre of their life was the birthday and presents. We didn’t have birthdays. But if you asked me growing up afterwards, when did the Battle of Stalingrad begin, how many Nazis were captured there, I could have told you in the finest detail.
My childhood was in a sense overwhelmed by WW2. It filled the news. We would have memorials at school if the father of one of the kids died. We all dreamt of getting the Victoria Cross for bravery and courage. We would read stories about the brave pilots in the spitfires. It was a very masculinist kind of world where courage, bravery was the number one virtue and loyalty, and a kind of obedience in battle, you know, was kind of a number one virtue. And yet here I’m in a home with my independent mother, with her activist women friends. But at school there was another kind of a world.
And we learnt afterwards about the Holocaust and the gas chambers and so on. And it was the fight against Nazism, against fascism, against Japanese imperialism. It was a global battle involving people from all over the world. And the sense of internationalism was very powerful. But also, Europe was the place of the biggest convulsions. Later on, I’d be told, ‘Albie, eat your potatoes; think of the poor starving children of Holland.’ I love telling that story when I go to the Netherlands now because they’re always thinking of the poor starving people of Africa. We grew up: ‘Think of the poor starving children of Europe.’ Dictatorship was worse in Europe than it’s ever been in Africa, and it’s been bad in Africa. Racism was violent there. You can’t ascribe these qualities to continents, to peoples. They’re moments in history; any society is susceptible to it. And that’s not something I learnt from books. I just grew up with that knowledge and with that understanding.
I remember when the royal family came in 1946. I was dying to see them. But we were boycotting – it wasn’t [an] obligatory thing to attend. So, when they arrived and rode up Adderley Street, I wasn’t there. Because we belonged to an anti-monarchist family. Monarchism, imperialism, domination, racism all kind of went together.
But fortunately for the little Albie, Princess Elizabeth turned 21 and they had a celebration for her at Youngsfield Airport. And this was obligatory to attend. So, I said, ‘Mom, I think I’ve just got to go.’ And I saw the young Elizabeth going through. So that kind of torn feeling you have, you want to be with everybody else, and curious like everybody else but you know that you’re different.
I think that sense of being different and learning to be different and being proud of being different. But being different didn’t make you better or superior or crazy. You were just different. But that’s who you were. I think that came to me very, very, very early on.
My dad had a particularly strong hatred for Rhodes. Rhodes, the Chamber of Mines, the British investors coming into this country and shooting down the workers, white workers, black workers. And he particularly hated Rhodes, and he said Rhodes was one of the biggest villains who ever lived because to become the chief villain in Kimberley, fighting the crooks from all over the world, you really had to be very ruthless and very smart. And in one exam question – I used to get A’s for history – I said Rhodes was one of the biggest ruffians who ever lived, and I got a C for history.
1948: I would have been in Standard 8. The results are coming in and the United Party under General Smuts seems to be winning. And suddenly, after about two days, it’s clear the Nationalist Party are going to win. And one of our teachers – Mr.Wagenaar – comes in and he’s wearing a big National Party rosette. He’s beaming. He made some comment about now there’s a new dawn in South Africa. And apparently, I stood up and said, ‘Mr Wagenaar, not all of us regard it as a new dawn.’ And the class were like stunned that there was this pupil who had the effrontery or the courage or the chutzpah or the madness to stand up and challenge the teacher.
I remember an awkwardness. I’m in high school and my best friend is Lennie Hoffman. And we lived in a very modest flat off Orange Street in Oranjezicht. I used to walk up to his house in Sidmouth Avenue in Oranjezicht. And he had a big dining room table, you could play ping pong on it. He was very bright intellectually, very conservative in his outlook. And we enjoyed the intellectual interchange and the fun. We would argue and fight and battle and then, come tea-time, and a domestic worker – I think her name was Emily – would give us a gorgeous piece of cake and tea. And just every now and then, her little boy Albert – Albert Adams was his name – would come and stay with her. And he was bright and irrepressible, and he was obviously dying to join in the play, and all my instincts would say, ‘come and join us, of course, of course, of course.’ But this wasn’t my home, I’m visiting Lennie’s home. And, you know, in those days – and unfortunately today even – white families felt their white kids have to be protected from too much friendship and closeness with black kids. They went to different schools, they lived in different areas, they belonged to a different part of the world. And so that poor little kid would be watching us and he couldn’t join in and it kind of broke my heart that I couldn’t say, ‘Albert come and join in.’ We happened to have the same first names as well, it made it even more poignant.
And I mention that because Albert turned out to be a brilliant artist; did very well in London. And there’s a picture that he did that went back to his childhood. He’d come back to South Africa after maybe 50 years. And it’s a huge experience for him coming back. He said he felt free, but he felt tethered. Free but not free. And he remembered the only toy he had as a child was a little monkey. And the picture he painted was of a monkey walking on a tightrope – bright, warm colours – but the monkey’s tethered. And it’s in the Constitutional Court now, that picture.
I grew up in a world where my mom’s boss was Moses Kotane, where Pauline Podbrey and H.A. Naidoo would come and visit. Cissie Gool and Sam Kahn were like Aunty Cissie and Uncle Sam to me. And that just established a normality of people being people, but with energy and fun and hope. That was normal. So it wasn’t like some event that I saw that triggered. I just knew from my earliest moments that our whole society was completely wrong. And I was living already in another kind of a world. I have people whom I met in the struggle afterwards were shocked by some event that they saw of injustice, and it made them challenge the world that they were in. But I could just see injustice around me everywhere, all the time. And the normal for me was to be anti-racist and this world of segregation, of exclusion, of marginalisation, of seeing some people as superior to others was kind of abnormal.
