Stephanie on Trial

Looking back now, I think I've written ten or so books on my own and a couple more together with others. This one was the hardest to write. I felt there's a story that's poignant, it's real, it's two people in the struggle, the state is crushing us, it's crushing the movement, it's upholding and defending apartheid. It's using violent methods now, that reach even people from the privileged white community. Stephanie, she's beaten up. I'm subjected to sleep deprivation. And how do you resist, hang in there, hang on, fight and develop a romantic relationship in the midst of it all? That's the kind of the core of a book, and it's also leaving the scene of the struggle and ending up in England where the book will be published. I want to tell the story of people meeting through the struggle and falling in love and committing to each other. But also, we’re having great difficulty settling in. Where to stay? What to do? And Stephanie herself is completely displaced. So, I can't write with that lightness and buoyancy that I would want. And I'm writing, and I'm doing drafts, and I'm rewriting, and other drafts, and I'm slowly plowing my way through and revising and reconstructing and revising and reconstructing, but I want Stephanie to write her own experience of prison. I asked her, and I remember the Saturday morning, she took a big slug of whiskey, she sat at the typewriter, for two or three hours, and a wonderful chapter came out. It took me six weeks to get a chapter, and she gets a chapter out in three hours.

We had marvelous friends from the struggle together, and life was lively, but we didn't have a sense of joy and triumph and delight. And so now I'm telling the story of two people being ground down, both breaking, and to a certain extent getting through. It is a tribute to hanging in there, because our whole movement was going through that. In a sense, we were representing a movement that had been very buoyant for a decade and more, and at times even on the offensive. And now we're being crushed, through our own tender personal stories.

‘Stephanie on Trial’ had been published. I'm now going down to Sussex University. I'm writing what's going to become Justice in South Africa, and I get a phone call by somebody who introduces himself. He says his name is Mamoon, and he'd like to make a film with a theme based on the two books The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs and Stephanie on Trial. Am I interested? Am I interested? Wow. He's buoyant, and he has time to do it. He doesn't show me the script. He reports to me from time to time; they’re thinking of getting funding from this source to the other source. And you know what? We have a good chance of getting Jane Fonda to play Stephanie and and and Donald Sutherland to play Albie. And he comes to me one day, he says, it's 98% ready. We just need that extra 2%. That was the day I discovered that 2% in filming is everything. It's huge. It's the last meaningful bit. So, in the end, he had to say, ‘I'm sorry, Albie, but we just can't get it together.’

About five years pass, and a man who's never forgotten he had put up 500 pounds to Mamoon to develop the script and to make all the different content contacts, and he got no return. He'd heard that the Royal Shakespeare Company were looking for a play that would honour the international campaign promoted by the United Nations against racial discrimination. And he knew of the script that was already developed. And he spoke to a playwright called David Edgar who was very keen to do the job. ‘What do you think Albie?’ And I said, ‘you know, I'm on my way to Mozambique...’ So, this would have been ’77, I'm leaving soon, but he can catch me just in time. And the day before I flew to Mozambique, David came to Tufnell Park, no. 43 Anson Road, where I was living with Stephanie and the two children. And we had a wonderful interview. I'm leaving, which is fantastic for him, because I'm out of the way, but I'm going with this idea that maybe a play can be written for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Wow, this is so kind of thrilling.

So, I'm flying to Maputo with that, and I forget about it. I'm so involved in Mozambique, and the struggle in Mozambique, and learning Portuguese, and what's going on there. And I'm told the play's been accepted. And, although Stephanie and I are divorced by then, Stephanie is very delighted to be asked to help with the stage setting - what people were wearing, how they would have conducted themselves. She's connected with the whole thing and the play is put on and it gets very good reviews.

It's part of that mad world, I'm living in Mozambique, far, far, far away, totally invested, totally involved in what I'm doing. And a play is being put on at the West End by nothing other than the Royal Shakespeare Company. So, the next I heard was that the BBC was going to put it on the radio, and then it was made into a film for the BBC. It was very thrilling. Exciting for me to know that the story was getting out now to the theater public, and the viewing listening public in England.

And there were sequels to The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs. I'm blown up in Mozambique many years later, I come to London, and the Director of the Young Vic said to me that there were a number of actors who played you, Albie Sachs, in The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs stage production and they'd like to put on a benefit performance '...once you've come out of hospital, to enable you to get on your feet again.'

Now, after hospital, after the bomb, the Young Vic theater is packed with people who'd seen The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, and also friends of mine. My mother happened to be in London at that time, and I'd received a note from Dorothy Williams, who had been the person who had whistled to me when I'd been locked up for the very first time in the very first lock up at Maitland police station. And I said, ‘Dorothy, I'm out of hospital. Would you like to come to the play that's being put on?’ And I remember I hadn't been long out of hospital. I was still physically pretty trail, and I feel I'm going to milk the occasion in as theatrical way as I can. So, I walk slowly up, am given the microphone at the end, and I say, ‘what a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful performance. At the end of performance, I wanted to clap my hands, and I couldn't clap my hands, and all I could do is…' and I then clapped my left hand on my cheek, and I said, ‘there's a mention in the play of whistling, but the person I whistled to do Dorothy Adams, she's in the audience, Dorothy, will you come up’, and Dorothy, who hated the limelight, but she was so happy to be there. And then I said, my mother, who stood by me all this time, ‘Mommy, would you please come up?’ And there's a picture of the three of us in embracing.