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IN ALBIE’S WORDS: 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 the environment in which 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 eighteen months, and Albie, now aged about two-and-a-half, three, ‘Tidy up, tidy up, Uncles Moses is coming.’ And Uncle Moses wasn’t Moses Cohen or Moses Kantor. 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 their skin colour just seemed quite absurd to me.
Moses Kotane ('Uncle Moses'), member of the National Executive of the ANC and General Secretary of the South African Communist Party, for whom Albie's mother, Ray, worked as a typist in the late 1930's
