The Free Diary of Albie Sachs

It’s the year 2000, I'd written maybe eight or nine books, and a publishing company asks whether I would be interested in doing a diary about my life over a certain period of time, and they'll publish it. I rather liked the idea, and it was a real challenge to me. The challenge wasn't simply writing a book just covering my daily activities and life, it was whether I could write about happiness. Did I need jail? Did I need being blown up by a bomb? Or could I write a full book without having to find myself in the space to deal with a form of managing disaster and turning this all into ploughshares. So, I thought, okay, that's a challenge. Vanessa and I were going to travel to Europe, in 2001, and I had various speaking engagements that would take me to London, to Belfast, Northern Ireland, Amsterdam, Germany, Stockholm, Finland, Russia and back home. I felt there'd be something evocative and interesting each one of those countries for the diary, so I kept notes and made tape recordings along the journey.

And then onto the challenge of writing The Free Diary of Albie Sachs. I enjoyed writing it in ways that didn't involve extreme tension with my mind. I enjoyed the relaxed nature. I enjoyed the fact that each city had its own scape, its own set of memories that helped to contain and structure the experience of being there. And I enjoyed the fact that I’m interacting with Vanessa in different ways, with different personality traits emerging in the course of doing it. I also enjoyed inviting Vanessa to give her comments, because she's sharp, she's quick, she's evocative, so it would make a nice counterpoint.

One of the interesting features of the book for me was that I could deal with issues I hadn't dealt with in my earlier books. They hadn't arisen, hadn't been necessary, or there were other motives. One was the breakdown of my marriage with Stephanie, and I felt, if I am chronicling my life, I mustn't just chronicle the moments of political engagement and struggle and endeavor and this and that and the other, I should include something about the breakdown. I felt I want to pay some tribute to Stephanie. She'd been very brave, and the person of the immense vitality and her courage wasn't just courage to join the resistance and plant bombs and withstand jail and go into exile. It's courage in a whole range of daily things, and it connected with the sort of feminism and independence and style of living and sharpness of mind and brightness and humour and all the rest.

Another theme that came to me unexpectedly was my Jewishness. It hadn't been a predominant theme until I come to Berlin, and we go up to the Olympic Stadium, and I'm getting gooseflesh, I'm feeling cold, almost nauseous, and I realise that I'm recalling the films made by Leni Riefenstahl of those mass gatherings in the stadium, and Hitler at the 1936 Olympics, when Jesse Owens enraged him by winning the 100 meters. I feel overwhelmed by Berlin as the place identified with Nazism. I go to the Reichstag, and my memory evokes the Reichstag Fire, which was used by the Nazis to suspend democracy, to give all power to Hitler. And I have a memory of the end of World War II, when the Red Army comes in and there's a Russian soldier with a red flag on the Reichstag that signifies the end of Nazism. All those emotions are going through me, and there is a very beautiful moment when I go with a former law clerk of mine, Felix and his wife and little child, and we go to the top of the Reichstag. I felt so relieved, and I felt so happy. This little baby was liberating me of a lot of these negative emotions. So that comes through very strongly.

In Northern Ireland, every place I see is associated in my mind with massacres, with shooting, with conflict, with British soldiers killing Irish people, Irish people killing British soldiers, Irish people killing Irish people. There's such a sense of sadness that the topography of the country is a topography of pain. A big moment for me is when I'm speaking to young people from all over the world, and I'm tired of just dealing with struggle, struggle, struggle. I say to them, ‘Instead of giving you a lecture about South Africa, when you look at me, what can you learn about me just by looking at me and listening to me?’ It's getting people to think about the variability and complexity of human beings, because you're not just the one thing. You're not just a man, you're not just a white man with one short arm who speaks English, who's tall, and who hasn't got an English accent. So, I remember that was almost a counterpoint to dealing with struggle all the time and getting past the pain.

Then Stockholm. There was something stately and organised in Sweden, with a culture that was so ancient, and a city that was so old. And I'm spending time with my great friend Per Wästberg, who was the head of the Nobel Committee for Literature. Helsinki, midsummer, totally different. I don't know what I was expecting, but the sun doesn't go down. You close the curtains as much as you like. We're looking at the architecture of Helsinki, walking, and Vanessa is going ahead of me; I'm struggling to catch up, and we agree that if she slows down 25% and I speed up 25% we can kind of walk together. And then finally, we arrive at the Finland Station in St Petersburg. For my generation, this was the place where Lenin arrived in 1917 and launched the Russian Revolution. So, in our memories it was the place where the Russian Revolution started. And who met us at the Finland Station? Representatives of the World Bank. I'm amused and am taken to the Duma, which was the parliament building. St Petersburg had been the intellectual cultural center, the center of production, the center of Russia that connected with the Western world, so it became the center of the revolution because the proletariat was there. And now it's beautifully redecorated and people from all over the world are there. The head of the World Bank, Wolfensohn, held a conference on poverty and I was presenting to a large body of judges attending.

I opened my presentation by saying that twenty to forty years ago, if you had a conference of judges, you would know you're speaking to judges because they look like judges, they talked like judges, they dressed like judges and they connected with each other like judges. Now I just see ordinary human beings looking different, dressing differently, speaking differently, from all over the world, and it's wonderful to see that judges can be so varied. And then it became a presentation on the function of the judiciary in South Africa, in a country of enormous inequalities, and what the role of the judiciary can be to confront and deal with inequalities in justices, but in a way that itself would be just, fair and inclusive. I remember now I got a very good response from the other judges there, because so many of them were disillusioned with the role of a judiciary. And South Africa, being a supporter of pluralism, of contesting for power, of elections that are meaningful, freedom of speech, but together with strong social economic programs, issues of special importance and interest to the World Bank. And the rule of law is not just the rule of law to protect foreign investments and to protect private property of the wealthy and powerful, but to enable poor people to have access to property and to earn and to develop their capacities, and much more sharing of wealth and sharing of the good things. and I realised now speaking to judges conference organised by the World Bank in the old Duma that had been the center of revolutionary power and was now just a beautiful building downgraded in the Stalinist period to make Moscow the center of power in in the Soviet Union. It was rich for me, and I think at least entertaining, if not rewarding for all the judges who were there.

So, the contradictions are continuing, and it's a very interesting space, and in some ways, a very competitive space. You all want to shine. You all want people to remember what you say. You all want to make an impact, and I enjoyed the challenge. I'm also reflecting now on communism, and part of me is astonished to see we taken on a tour that the history is wiped out. I'm also thinking about my own connection with communism and how powerful it had been for me in my years in South Africa, in the underground, a place where black, white and brown could meet as comrades, as equals, sharing risks, of common ideals, of a strong vision of human emancipation, anti-colonialism, rights for women, so many progressive themes, and giving us courage, strength, conviction and capacity to connect up so powerfully, so emotionally, so intimately with comrades from the townships, because we are together. It was the most powerful rupture of apartheid that you could possibly get, because you're not just simply saying apartheid is bad; you are shoulder to shoulder in the struggle against it. The people I knew as communists were overwhelmingly people full of fun and laughter and energy and forward looking and breaking out of the mode. It wasn't just the mode of politics. It was the mode of convention, of subordination, of conformism. What destroyed me, in that sense, was simply the impact of solitary confinement. It wasn’t an ideological disillusion or shift or repudiation, I just wasn't strong enough to carry on when I was released.

So, in a sense, that was an important theme in my life that I hadn't dealt with when I wrote The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs. I couldn't say I was a member of the Communist Party as the book wouldn't have been published. Anti-communism was so powerful. The same me, the same experience, the same things happening; being a communist made no difference whatsoever. But I always felt uncomfortable that I was telling the truth and nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth. So now in this book, now, I can tell the whole truth in a contextualized way, and it was kind of a relief for me that there's nothing in my background, my past, that I feel I'm ashamed of, or that I'm obscuring because it's inconvenient in any way.

The book cover image is a one-armed figure that was on a building in Berlin that had been designed by Le Corbusier, and the fact that it was one armed and kind of elegant and interesting and proud made it an interesting feature, and it introduced the cultural dimension. It's a rich book in terms of the reflections, with the counterpoint by Vanessa – sharp, pertinent, fresh herself. She was enjoying it and seeing buildings, now emerging as an architect herself, and enjoying the cities and traveling. She was not just my companion on the journey; we were companions of each other. So, I think the book represents an important autobiographical element.