The impact of solitary confinement is so hard to convey. Nothing I'd read had prepared me for it. In our political culture, we all knew we were likely to end up in jail and could very well be tortured. We'd read books about torture, resisting torture, and people locked up. It doesn't help you. It's so specific to each culture, each person, each body. But the idea of writing came to me, I'm not sure how precisely and how soon, but I thought, there's one good thing that can come out of this hell. I can write. I can become a writer. I'd often dreamt and imagined I'd become a writer, but I'd been so busy with my legal practice and writing those intensely worded, extremely logical kinds of things that didn't want imagination. They wanted a certain kind of connectedness of thoughts and ideas in relation to legal issues, framed in a particular way.

I could become a writer, and I'm having an experience that is so extraordinary, so beyond anything I've ever imagined or been through, and I'm going to tell that story, and I'm going to tell that story to all the Albies out there. They could be in Alaska, they could be in Thailand, they could be in Argentina, they could be in Berlin or London or Nairobi. All involved in freedom struggles, connected in freedom struggles. I can convey what it's like. And then I can even have that kind of special joy, fun, existential elation of writing within this chaos, these feelings of rage and joy, but also of intense, internal sorrow that life can be so wretched and miserable and meaningless.

I can't resist them, I can’t hold out. It's awful. They're stronger than me. They turn the key and lock the door that I'm in. They bring me my food. They allow me out for exercise for 20 minutes a day. They're in charge. But I'm going to be in charge of the story. It's a hugely opportunistic response of turning the negative into the positive. Why? Because I can control those words, I can control my thought and my thinking. I can get some order out of the chaos.

And I think it was on the 27th day. I've now got pencil and paper. Now I can write in prison, and I'm scared. I've been holding onto my thoughts. I've been refusing to answer questions. Anything I write, they can see, they can read. My 90-day period was up. I was released for a few minutes, and I was redetained again. They took away my tie, they took away my watch. I had to depend on hearing chimes of the Cape Town City Hall clock. And after 168 days, I'm released.

I can't believe it. It's true, it's happening this time: ‘It's real. It's real. It's real.’ I'm still under my banning orders, restricted to paradise. I go into my office. I do some legal work, but my head is spinning, ‘I'm going to write. I'm going to write. I'm going to write.’ And it's giving me a certain sense of determination, a certain sense of feeling that I'm in charge, a little bit.

I describe it afterwards as writing behind open curtains. I couldn't go into a dungeon. The police would want to know what's this guy doing. So I'm carrying on my regular daily routine, advocates’ tasks. But I'm starting to write. And I begin with a feeling that I've got to convey to the reader, a little indication of what it's like, the experience. And I'm thinking, ‘Okay, I'm just going to give that little sense of myself now, habituating myself. I'll be now in this cube, concrete cube, and the reader will come in with me.’ I wrote the whole book in the present continuous tense to try and convey the emotion of what it's like through remembering it in the present tense, telling it in the present tense with that continuity and that subjectivity. It's not remembered, it's experienced to convey the experience.

I was released in March. By July, I've got quite far and suddenly the three typists working on the different drafts all contact me and they hand the materials back. Why? Because police raids had been conducted all over Cape Town. And amongst the people picked up would have been Stephanie Kemp, who later on became my client and later on we developed a romantic relationship. And now the typists were worried that they could be in trouble because they were committing a criminal offence by just typing out my notes.

But as time passes, their courage comes back, I'm writing a bit more, people feel more relaxed, and finally, I write the words, the end.

I've written a book, I've written a book. And I know somebody who's going to London and I give them a copy of the manuscript. The next message I get is that the publisher, Mr Collins himself, is coming to Cape Town to meet various authors and he'd like to speak to me. We fix a date.

There's a knock on the door and I see the big guy and I push the door open, and I pull him in. He thinks I'm a little bit berserk, you know, I've been too long in solitary confinement. I say, ‘Terribly sorry, Mr Collins, but my office is probably bugged.’ So we had a little conversation in the corridor and he said, ‘We're planning to publish the book. It might have repercussions for you. What do you feel?’ And I said, ‘Go ahead, go ahead.’ But then I'm locked up a second time and this time it's sleep deprivation, it's much worse, and I couldn't envisage even another year in jail. So the message goes out, wait until I come to England. And fairly soon after my arrival, The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs is in my hands and it's one of those feelings I'll never forget.

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.

I've often wondered why, from an intellectual point of view, I got so much pleasure out of working on my PhD, ending up with the book Justice in South Africa. And I think the answer was given indirectly by Jean Paul Sartre, who was taken to watch a football game. He'd never been to one in his life, and he said, ‘It's lovely, you kick a ball around, but there's only one problem with soccer, you've got an opposition.’ And I think I loved working on my PhD, because it's almost the only time when I wasn't striving against an opposition. I didn't have to pass any exams, all I had to do was defend, and it was just carving out sectors of knowledge, making discoveries, and putting it all together in interesting and accessible ways, with a bit of fun and a bit of surprise. At that stage in my life, as far as law was concerned, I had two major guiding criteria: One, I wanted to get out of law, and two, I didn't want to write another exam in my life, have all that stress of the exam, the worry, Will I get a decent mark? Will I pass the exam? So, the PhD gave me time to deal with living in England, getting some support, producing something useful out of that, and I can discover what else I can be in life.

You don't have to be just one thing in life, and I wouldn't have to write an exam; Sussex University, in a way, was perfect for me. And the people recruited there were people with fresh thinking, dynamic and new, not steeped in heavy tradition, not scholars removed from anything that has anything to do with ordinary life, but people who immerse themselves in ordinary life, in politics, in depth psychology, in the stresses of public life and the internal stresses that human beings have had as individuals. And in the turmoil in my head and my heart and my mind, and the solitary confinement, and the sleep deprivation, and the struggle, and people dying and being killed, it was wonderful to have an area of relative calm where I'm working with sources to be found mainly in libraries, where I can accumulate information in a fairly random way that all had a bearing on this strange creature–the South African judiciary–this creature that I'd lived with and worked with, and been involved with, and written on top of, and been written by.

What were its origins? How did it develop the culture–that strange, mixed, totally, utterly contradictory culture that it had; being responsible for a hundred people being hanged every year; tens of thousands being whipped by judicial order; tens of thousands of juveniles being caned by judicial order; people forcibly removed from their homes in response to a state order, upheld by the judiciary, however arbitrary, unjust and inhuman it was. And at the same time, you could argue cases, you could get acquittals, you could expose torture sometimes, and you could get degrees of kindliness and humanity on the bench that you couldn't get almost anywhere else in official South African society. It was a real puzzle; the mixed origins and contradictory character of the courts as an instrument of colonial domination and colonial legitimation, on the one hand, but also an instrument that people could use to at least soften the impact of colonial, racist, apartheid domination. So, it was an interesting challenge, an intellectually interesting project, and something that could be useful for the struggle. Everything had to be for the struggle.

It was very clear from the beginning; I was on my own. I had to have supervisors. The one supervisor at Sussex was Colonel GIAD Draper, who'd been a prosecutor at Nuremberg, part of the British military–and they didn't have a law school then–but I think he dealt with questions of international law. He said, ‘Mr Sachs, I offer you only one piece of advice: A good book makes a bad thesis, and a good thesis makes a bad book. Please remember that.’ And I said, ‘I will remember that, thank you for the advice, Colonel Draper.’ And I defied him from the beginning. I couldn't see why a good thesis should be unreadable and boring, and I couldn't see why a good book shouldn't be scientific and evidence based. So, I pretended to go along with him, and I brought him chapter, by chapter, by chapter. They remained unread on his desk. The pile got higher, and higher, and higher. He told me most wonderful, extraordinary stories about his time at Nuremberg. I wish I'd recorded them. I wish I could even remember them. I just remember his voice, and that piece of advice that he gave me–the only piece of advice he gave me–advice which I ignored totally, utterly, 100%.

My second supervisor was Professor Norman Cohn, and he'd been in the British Army as well. He'd become very involved in the world of psychoanalysis, and his puzzle was to understand: How could millions of German speaking people blindly follow Hitler? What's going on there? So, the book he wrote was called Pursuit of the Millennium and became quite famous for a number of years. And at a time when the catastrophe of the war, the madness and the unimaginable cruelty of the genocide left people wondering how ordinary social science can't provide explanations of what's going on, we have to look at something in the psyches of people. He had set up a center for the study of persecution at Sussex University. And he said the South African experience didn't fit very neatly, but it does deal with organised persecution, and the motivation of it. And he said, ‘*Albie, you know what you want to do. You go ahead and do it.’ *

I loved going to seminars. English seminars in those days, maybe even today, were something of a kind. The worst physical arrangements you could imagine in terms of comfort and beauty, but the discussions were open-ended and, I took a decision very early on that I lay my cards on the table. At that stage, many people would make discoveries and hide their sources. I’d found something special, and it was going to get me my PhD. And I'm glad I took that decision as one consequence was people would offer me materials that they picked up in their research that were useful for me, but the most important thing was it enabled me to write down my ideas in a chapter dealing with a particular theme, and then get ten, twelve, fifteen people, none of them necessarily interested in South Africa or the judiciary in South Africa, but all smart intellectuals doing their PhDs and masters saying ‘I don't get the logic of it’ or, ‘This looks a bit far-fetched’ or, ‘That's unclear’ or, ‘Why don't you go to the library there, you'll find something else.’

It was a collective way of working where we all contributed to each other, and it fitted in, strangely enough, very well with our struggle ethos, our comradeship of sharing on the basis of equality; not that we all have the same knowledge, and the same information, and the same education experience, but we all had the same right to offer an opinion, and you wanted the work to be as interesting to an outsider as it would be to an insider. It wasn't just for people like you interested in that particular topic. And I would imagine that certainly all the historical chapters in my book would have gone to seminars of that kind, and it also brought me to different universities, meeting different people.

Now the sources; it wasn't like scientifically worked out or planned. I would go to a library. I would discover the Cape Law Journal. This is now in the 1960s, and I would just go from page one to the end, looking for anything that touched on the judiciary and race. I ended up with maybe ten, twelve files with different materials in them that I could use. And I was particularly interested in quotable, piquant, spicy statements that were made in different times and that carried a bit of energy with them; flavour interesting to the reader but also telling you a bit about the time. And I felt if they could write like that, then I can also put in a little bit of pepper and salt, a little bit of sparkle. Why should a thesis be boring and difficult to read?

And I did research that lawyers just didn't do in South Africa then – nothing on capital punishment in South Africa, the patterns of it, the numbers involved, the rationale given; nothing on the use of the law for forced removals, the pass laws; no statistics about how the law was being used to chain people up to prevent their movements, to dominate, to beat them; not even mentioned. So now I'm filling in material about the 1910s, I'm getting annual reports from Parliament, from the Ministry of Justice, shocking information, and seeing patterns all the way through. And then the theme on African attitudes to the law; very ambivalent. They could sometimes get some support, some defence, some voice in the courts that they couldn't get anywhere else in public life. And there were a few lawyers who sided with the African people and people of colour; who stood out as individuals. And then there were Gandhi, and Mandela, and Tambo. And I discovered Alfred Mangena and other professors, like ZK Matthews, and their stories needed to be part of the record.

So, I'm putting all of that in, none of which I had anticipated. And then a very interesting thing I noticed when I was sent to the Royal Commonwealth Society which had been the Royal Colonial Society and had a library that went deep into the ground. I would go down, and I'd open a book that I felt hadn't been opened for sixty, seventy years, and I would have this kind of fantasy that nobody would know I was there because they’re five stories up, and they'd lock me up and I wouldn't be discovered for another fifty years, where somebody would come and see my bones lying there at an open page dealing with something from the 1870s. And one of the things I noticed was that the attitude towards black African people in the 1870s in the Royal Colonial Society was far more paternalistic, but protective, than it was round about the 1890s. What's going on here? You'd think there'd be more enlightenment rather than less. And of course, it is the discovery of gold and diamonds. Industrialisation and race relations got worse with industrialisation. Capitalism developed the migrant labour system. Cheap labour and a dehumanisation of African people much greater than had been present before. And I was able to track that through the statements made in the annual reports of the Royal Colonial Society. So, it became a source of great, rich discoveries for me.

And interesting following through to the current day, and right at the end, I had to decide, now what's my last word? And I'm thinking: Is the judicial system so embedded in apartheid oppression, so complicit that all it does is legitimise something inherently evil that you’ve got to denounce it systemically and totally acknowledge the one or two decent judges as a matter of fact? Or should it be seen as part and parcel of South African society, where there are some individuals of conscience who could play an important role? And I decided to go for the latter.

And I wasn’t so much looking to the future. I was thinking now there's somebody like Michael Corbett, who had fought against Hitler in World War II, who had sentenced my comrade in the underground; Fred Carneson, charged with treason and sabotage act, to five years imprisonment, when others would have given him fifteen, and who I think had stopped the intensive interrogation to which I'd been subjected; and there were other people like him. Let them feel they're not totally lost, they're not totally abandoned, that maybe they can save a few lives even now, and they can, in a way, make a contribution. So, my last statement was: Not only must justice be seen to be done, it must be done, full stop, the end.

I'm exiled, living in England, and I'm going to devour everything English I can, not with a view to becoming more English than the English, but with a view to learning. What can I bring home with me for future South Africa? It was wonderful. I suppose it's another example of turning a negative into a positive, finding a way of developing a dilemma that you come out on top. And the energy of the dilemma is a positive energy, because you get something productive out of it.

So now teaching at Southampton, I can now absorb so much through my teaching, through lettering, through meeting with colleagues, through attending their seminars, through sitting in on some other classes. I find myself more and more embraced by the theme of sexism, and it was hitting me quite powerfully. In South Africa, the issue of racism was overwhelming, and the struggle against racism was totally dominant, and the theme of rights for women would crop up. My mother, single woman, looking after the two kids, independent woman, she had strong women friends who were trade unionists, and I grew up in a world of strong women, and that turned out to be very helpful for me. But now in England, the issue of masculinity and sexism is becoming quite a big issue in public life.

The whole question of patriarchy is being raised, and I find myself immensely fascinated by and attracted to the suffragettes, and I'm almost wondering, Why am I so drawn to them? And then I realise that they were literally putting their bodies on the line. They didn't have guns, they didn't have money, they didn't have power. All they had was their bodies and their minds and determination. So, they would go on hunger strike and protest through the suffering of their body. One woman, Emily Davidson, threw herself in front of the king's horse at the Derby, and she was killed. I read about this young girl who is invited to be a debutant at a ball organised by the Queen of England, and she curtsies and says, ‘Votes for women, Your Majesty.’ And I'm thinking of the courage of that young girl, and I'm seeing the disputes in the ranks of the feminists, with the more polite people saying, Don't go for hunger strikes. Don't break the law. Be nice and persuade.

And in fact, it was one of those groups that had the library and the books that I'm now reading. And I pick up one of the books, and it's by Sylvia Pankhurst, and she'd been friendly with Olive Schreiner, who'd become one of my heroes. The daughter of a German missionary in the Karoo, she wrote The Story of an African Farm, a beautiful book that's virtually unknown in South Africa today, but she went to live in England and it took London my storm. She wrote it under a man's name, Ralph Iron, and then only came out as a woman.

I'm reading Silva Pankhurst autobiography, and I see there's a star on one of the pages, and a footnote. It's obviously been added at a late stage of printing and the star refers to a case which Pankhurst’s father Richard Pankhurst had taken in Manchester in the 1880s claiming the rights of women to vote, and the suffrage law, electoral law, said every person who owns property of so many pounds is written proper should have the right to vote. And two women went to the local registrar and said, ‘We are persons. We own property. We would like to vote.’ And the registrar said, 'Fine, I would love you to do so, but you are women, and you can't. Women have never had the vote and can't have the vote.' So, they went to the High Court in Manchester and the High Court said that women were not persons. I shake my head. I read it, re-read it again, and again. And the asterisk in the footnote says, now 40 years later, for the first time, the Privy Council of the House of Lords had held that women are persons, reversing 40 years of legal decisions saying women are not persons. I'm stunned. I've never heard of that. I'd heard of class bias by British judges, how they had penalised men for going on strike and calling these combinations against the property interests of the owners and how much of the common laws it was called made by the judges was based on masters and servants’ propositions. I never heard about these persons cases, so I decided to follow them up, and I went to the Manchester voting case. And then I discovered the case of Sophia Blake in Edinburgh. She'd applied to be admitted to the medical school, and they'd said, Yes, you can. And she got the medical school, and she was allowed there on the basis that anatomy lessons, she would sit next to a curtain so she wouldn't be together with the men, but she would see the same body that’s been dissected. But the men were so enraged that they organised a protest demonstration. They even brought sheep in with them, and the University Council buckled and said, Sorry, woman can't attend anymore. And it went to the top Scottish court, and I think twenty-five judges sat, and they divided thirteen to twelve against the women. And what was so fascinating was the arguments used by the thirteen, and the arguments were always to say excluding women should not be indicated as a sign of disrespect. On the contrary, it's because we respect them so much that we are protecting them from the roughness and the hurly burly of that kind of life. The statements were like unimaginable and not like medieval times. You know, this was now in the 1880s so it was less than a hundred years before.

And then I see Bertha Cave gets a degree at Oxford with top honours. She applies to practice as a barrister, and it isn't even a statute where the word person now can be said to be person means historically, male person. It's up to the lawyers themselves. They're not bound by what the judges said. And they say, sorry, you’re out. A woman applies to stand as a candidate for a city council, and she's refused. And the comment is at the time when Queen Victoria was the queen of the country - a woman can hold the highest office in the land, but not the lowest office. And then I see in Australia, the same decisions, in Canada, similar decisions, in South Africa, similar decisions.

And the only judge in the whole of the British Empire who said women are persons was a Judge Maasdorp in the Cape and even Justice Ennis, who belonged to a family surrounded by feminists, even there, he said, If the intention of the lawyers refusing to allow women to become registered as lawyers is based more on protecting their own employment and work and source of income, or it's based on the reasons they give, I'm bound by the precedent established elsewhere.

1926 a case comes on appeal from Canada to the Privy Council, which is a section of the House of Lords, the top Court in England, which heard appeals from the Empire and from the Commonwealth, and the Labour Government has come into power, they've appointed a Lord Sankey as head of the Court, and now he's head of the Privy Council, and he said, Of course, women are persons, it's so obvious. And she had noted that.

So, I decided this story needs to be told. And I decided this is my contribution, my thank you to English public life. If my thank you to Mozambique was the book on the murals of Maputo, my thank you to English public life is the book ‘Sexism and the Law’. It was the first book of that kind, certainly in the English language. You can't take pleasure in exposing ugliness, but there's a kind of pleasure that you're bringing it to light.

Then, the question was getting the book published, and University of California Press said, Sexism and the Law in England is an interesting theme, but it wouldn't have great attraction for Americans. Could you get an American version? And I had a friend from she's from a National Lawyers Guild, a very left-wing group of American lawyers who took up civil rights cases, anti-Vietnam War cases, war resisters, rights of immigrants and so on. She put me on to Joan Hoff-Wilson who produced her half. I came to the US. I met her for the first time. She was at Radcliffe, at Harvard. We hit it off very quickly. We did a preface together, and it was then published in England and the US by good publishers in each.

Mozambique was such a different world for me in so many ways. I used to say that I got a lot of knowledge in England. I was exposed to people from all over the world. I read things that were beautifully written. I felt very well informed about so many things. But the big discoveries, I made in Mozambique; the deep discoveries; the profound existential themes and issues, that were much more significant to my life, came in Mozambique. And it wasn't through masses of information and being with bright, competent, well-informed people; it was through living so intensely in a country undergoing transition, with people who'd volunteered, who'd come there voluntarily, who were thinking about the world, reshaping the world, exposed to danger, where everything you said and did and thought and connected with had significance, it had meaning, and could literally be life or death. It was strong and profound.

The first phase there, for me, was one of intense joy and recovery, of hope and resilience and courage coming back, and very much connected with the arts movement. The second phase was more complex, trying to build up and create a new justice system in a country that had been ravaged, not only by the oppression of colonialism but by war, and now was being subjected to intense pressure from apartheid South Africa, and racist Rhodesia, to undermine everything that was happening. Attacking the economy, sabotaging electricity supply, attacking and killing ANC people, and in general trying to make the country unworkable, ungovernable, as we had done in a way through our guerrilla tactics in South Africa. Now the governments of neighboring countries were putting an immense squeeze on Mozambique.

Indres Naidoo, a veteran of uMkhonto weSizwe, and who spent ten years on Robben Island for being involved in sabotage attacks in South Africa, was now in exile in Mozambique. A wonderful talker, he could speak about Robben Island and Nelson Mandela and what conditions were like on the Island. He could even speak about his own family. His grandfather had gone to jail with Gandhi, and his grandmother had gone to jail at the time of Gandhi, his father had gone to jail, his mother had gone to jail, he had been to jail, his sister Shanti went to jail, and his brother Prema went to jail. So this was somebody now steeped in the tradition of resistance and his ten years on Robben Island were during the worst days at the beginning. I'd hear him telling these stories, and I said, ‘We've got to write these stories down. They belong to the nation.’

So, we worked out, he would come to my apartment three days a week after work, and he’d dictate stories to me for an hour. First week he's there. Indris was a non-stop smoker. I hated smoke. I actually gave up - in 1960. My eyes got really irritated by smoke, and in that heavy subtropical air, it would be even more difficult. So, he'd sit right in the corner of the room, so that I could hear him, and I'd be taking the notes. And the stories were so evocative, not just filled with factual information, but talking about the relationships, the lives. The one thing he could never tell me was 'Indres, how did you feel when this was happening?' ‘I was shocked,’ he’d say. 'Tell me how did you feel when you saw a warder beating up a prisoner?’ ‘ I was shocked.’ He didn't get terrorised at all.

There were two interconnected reasons why I wanted the story told: The one was for the struggle. People would say free Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners, but they had very little knowledge of what was happening on the Island, which is a very important part of our struggle to communicate to the world. And they were exciting stories of resistance, of courage, of doing things together, of thinking things through, and often quaint, strange, odd things that were happening, and sometimes ingenious ways of getting around the guards, and often exceptionally painful moments when abuses were taking place. Hard, hard, hard, but getting through, living through, fighting their way through.

The other reason was very personal. I'd had two books published on my own experiences. Privileged, even in prison, in the sense that yes, I was subjected to sleep deprivation, but I wasn't subjected to the wet bag, I wasn't subjected to electrodes on my genitals, I wasn't hung outside of a window. Privilege followed my white skin, in a way, even into the dungeons. But maybe the strength of the story was its very personal, intimate nature. Turning that into an element of the story I'm telling. But I'm feeling this other story of hundreds, now becoming thousands of people on the Island, that have got to get out. And I, Albie, have a chance now to communicate it through recording interesting stories. So, in a way, it was an antidote, a counterpoint, if you like, to my own prison writing, to now be writing of the experience of the majority of our prisoners, representing the majority of our people. So, it was a very powerful personal motivation for me as Albie the thinker, the writer, the comrade.

The first week he is there, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Second week, he is there Monday, can't make it Wednesday, struggling with Friday. It got more difficult as time went by. And I'm very, very stern, like a school headmaster, and I'm bullying him and pressurising him. And he comes along. He comes along. And maybe that's – I don't know if it's a strength or it's a characteristic of focus – seeing things through, attending to detail, being organised, I suppose all the books I've written have had an element of that, and they all based on a conviction that this story deserves telling. The best way to respond to the necessity is through writing. And writing requires focus, attention, organisation, stamina, shaping, thoughtfulness, stepping back and looking at it and critiquing your own work and looking at it again, and again, and again. So, I had pages and pages and pages of recorded anecdotes, but a selection of anecdotes is not readable, there's got to be energy, there’s got to be flow, there's got to be movement. It's got to be a sense of things developing, evolving over time. And that became my task. As the editor, I imagined nothing at all, but the actual integration of the materials, the coherence given to it, the cadences, the up moments and the down moments, the sense of flow and movement, are things that I had to interpose in the writing and the presentation. The only piece that was actually written by me was the introduction. And when I had the text ready, I spoke to Oliver Tambo and we agreed that the ANC representative in London, Francis Milley, would do the introduction. And he asked me to prepare a draft.

The draft in fact was the whole thing. He took it as it was, and he added one paragraph of his own right at the end. So, it's under his name, but that first part was actually written by me. The very last sentences were written by him. But the rest is all taken from the actual words of Indres Naidoo, and it was magnificent for me, Albie as a comrade, to read about what my comrades on the island were doing, how they organised themselves, the debates they had. One very amusing debate he mentioned to me was when a German millionaire called Gunter Sachs, it was announced, was going to marry Brigitte Bardot, a famous French actress. And he said the comrades would discuss, what could this mean for the struggle? The only issue in any news is, 'What does it mean for the struggle?'

Another part that Oliver Tambo asked me to modify was Indres had some very critical words about Mothopeng, the lead of the PAC. Oliver Tambo said, 'It's up to you and Indres, comrade Albie, but maybe you could think about not criticising,’ and he would have the larger vision that it was much more important in maintaining external unity between the liberation forces, than it was exposing failures for which the PAC might have been responsible.

So, the book, then, is ready for publication, and I think I send it to Penguins in London, and then, it's published in the United States as well. And years later, Indres brought out an edition under his own name. It was his story, and I was more than just a scribe. I pushed him to tell the stories, I organised the material and included many stories and pieces of information, making them into a book. It's a different process. It’s not just getting the words down in sequence, it requires discovering rhythms and connections and cadences and so on. I'm very happy that Indris, and the role that he and that generation played, was honoured. It's a very powerful book, dealing with a very powerful part of our history that's very much under-researched and under-known. Maybe the kind of thing that would give greater insight to young people reading today. It's not just the hardship, but the intensity of the idealism of the older generation; the passion and the commitment; and it may take away some of the cynicism and some of the disdain that is prevalent in the younger generation.

I'm in Maputo, slowly learning Portuguese and learning to find my way around. The phone rings in my apartment and a very British voice gives her name. She invites me for dinner at the Polana Hotel, and I say yes. They serve beautiful prawns and it's a nice place to go – a calm, elegant, relic of the past that was now serving the revolution. I turn up there, I meet her, and she introduces me to her husband who had come from Britain with the reputation for being the world's leading Marxist expert on trees and was helping in the Ministry of Agriculture. With them is Jaime Toha who was the Deputy Minister of Agriculture and his wife Moira Toha, who is a landscape architect. She says, 'Albie, if you're interested, at 6am tomorrow morning I'm working on a mural at the Ministry of Agriculture. Would you like to join us? We can pick you up at 5:30am.' So now I'm very excited. As a young university student, I've been fascinated by modern art.

So, half past five, I'm picked up, and six o'clock I'm at the mural, and there's a big pot of black paint. There’s a brush, and I'm told we just dip the brush in the paint and follow the line that had been drawn by Malangatana. It is joyous moment, and in a way, very strange, because Moira Toha was a very solemn person, having experienced a lot of tragedy. She's living in exile, she's quiet, she's inward, but she paints a girl on a swing with a big rainbow. And Malangatana is jolly, singing while he's painting, joyful, cracking jokes, yet he paints sad faces. It was like the artist was the other of the person that you saw, and it worked as a joint project.

That was another thing I learned in Mozambique, that many hands can make bright, lovely work. Even if their styles and techniques are very different, they interact with each other at that particular space. So that was now a little personal involvement for me, and I think it was the beginning of my friendship with Malangatana, which became strong and rich afterwards.

So, I was very taken by the whole way that art came into life in Mozambique, and I connected with the revolution, transformation, and change. It also went with the fact that the country was very short of resources, and the whole visual arts and murals movement stopped because we ran out of paint.

The murals of Maputo had enchanted and given spirit to me. It wasn't just something nice to see. It was part and parcel of my own revival as a passionate freedom fighter, and I decided we've got to capture these images. The first person to go to was Moira Forjaz. She and her husband, José Forjaz, a brilliant architect, had come to Mozambique with independence, and she was now working as a photographer. She very graciously offered her services and produced slides for me of a number of murals. At some stage, a young photographer from the United States named Susan Meiselas rolled up in Mozambique with a camera. She'd heard about the revolution and wanted to get pictures, so I asked her to take some images of the murals. So, we now had two outstanding photographers providing a big bunch of photographs of the murals. What to do with them?

I'm not sure who put me on to David King in London, a brilliant designer, very much connected with world revolution and transformation. I produced a text, and he selected the images and divided the book up into chapters dealing with different works of art, and this rather wonderful book emerged and was published.

Recently the idea occurred to us that with modern digital techniques of reproducing books, we can give it another go, enhance the colour and add some pictures that we hadn't used in the original print such as me standing in front of the mural that was painted in front of the Ministry of Agriculture. I'm sad to say, it's been painted out subsequently, but happily, the main mural, which is the mural near the airport at a big circle with the big star, and where five top leaders of Mozambique, including Samora Machel and Eduardo Mondlane, are buried. Outside the circle, along this winding wall, must be one of the most powerful, rich, thoughtful, meaningful, imaginative murals ever produced anywhere in the world. And it came out of that moment, out of those energies, and out of a revolutionary spirit that picked up on the passion for change and the importance of artistic representation.

There's not much of the Mozambican revolution left in Mozambique, but at least that mural is there. The book is a way of keeping that spirit and imagination alive, linking up across frontiers in Africa, moments of history, moments of production, moments of imagination. We produced the book out of nothing; just imagination, skills, hard work and focus, with a wonderful design from the British designer who saw himself as a socialist, happy to be involved in the project, not asking for any funding. The photographers didn't ask for any funding. I didn't ask for any funding. I think the printers got some funding for their costs. But it's for the nation. It's for the people. It's to capture part of the history and the vision. We decided we must have a launch in front of Malangatana’s mural at the back of the Museum of Natural History, in the spirit of the making of the murals, with spontaneity and energy and creativity,

So, seeing these books having a later life map gives me great joy, reminding me of not only the time when I had two arms, but the time when, in the midst of war and hardship and difficulties, we kept alive at that core flame of struggling for humanity.

The first time I came to Mozambique, I gave a series of public lectures at the university. I loved it. It was total adoration at first sight, and I wanted to come back. A year later, I'm back, and I'm teaching at the university, and I'm regarded with great esteem. For the first year, I'm teaching with translators. The second year, I'm teaching in Portuguese. I go from hero to minus not even zero – zero would have been better – and people are astonished, as if I'm totally useless; and slowly I recover some esteem. It was at times quite painful for me, and sometimes the negativity would be about South Africa. ‘Why are you people so slow? Ten years after our armed struggle, we've got victory’, they’d say, and ‘The problem with South Africa is...’ and they would tell us why we're not winning in South Africa. It could be quite hurtful. But generally, I'm exalted, I'm thrilled, I'm excited. I'm learning so much. I'm seeing beautiful art; I'm hearing wonderful poetry. I'm meeting engaged people from all over the world. Overwhelmingly, it's very positive.

And one of my pleasant activities would be Saturday afternoons playing bridge with what I call the remnants of the old colonial bourgeoisie: young white people, children of Portuguese colonists, who'd come to work in Mozambique, they had now grown up in Mozambique - it was the only country they really knew. Portugal was the country of their parents. One I remember was a professor at the university, the other was a heart surgeon, the other a general surgeon, the fourth, I think, was an engineer. Indres Naidoo would play bridge, Joe Slovo occasionally would join them, and bridge was fun. There were two strict rules: you didn't discuss politics, and you didn't discuss work. It meant you could gossip; you could talk about food you'd had, about romances and bridge and cards and cards and cards, but it was giving you head space ... a little bit of relief from the intensity of work, the intensity of politics. One day, I'm dealing the cards, and we're bidding. The one surgeon says, ‘Albie, what do you think about the closing down of the law school?’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, 'Didn't you hear? It was on the radio. Samora Machel has closed the faculty of law.' What? That's where I'd come to teach, working on family law and international law. And that was the first I heard that he closed it down. It turned out he was very disappointed with the people who were coming out of the faculty. We thought we were all revolutionary and progressive in our outlook and manner and style and so on. But it seems as soon as some of them graduated, they went to their briefcase. They went to pomposity. They picked up the idea of the 'important lawyer' which was so hostile to the comradeship that been established in the armed struggle, people like Samora Machel, four years of schooling, self-taught, brilliant mind, doing things together and very anti-hierarchy other than the hierarchy of political structure and organisation necessary for running things. But otherwise, total equality of voice and here now are these pompous people leapfrogging the whole university experience. He just closed it down. It turned out much easier to close a law school than to open it. And when, years later, it was reopened, it was more conservative. It was more oriented towards intentionally, producing exactly the kind of people that Samora couldn't stand.

So, what's going to happen to me now? I've learned the language. I'm embedded in society. I want to live there. I'm reporting to Mozambicans on South Africa. I'm reporting to South Africa about Mozambique. Not military stuff, but politics. So, they offer me a job at the Ministry of Justice, and I'm very happy to go there. The Ministry of Justice is now helping to create a new justice system for a newly independent country, working from the grassroots upwards. And the main emphasis was on the creation of what were called 'tribunais populares', popular tribunals in the communities. Popular meant of the people, not of the state. It was immensely impressive. I would go to what we call the township in South Africa – the reed city. You have the cement city – high blocks up on the hillside near to the Polana hotel, older buildings from early colonial times afterwards, made of bricks and stone and so on – and then the reed city – self-constructed by the people with thatched roofs and just reeds to create the compartments. The tribunais populares would mainly be held in the reed cities. The people would choose their own judges, and they would have five judges. Normally, two would be women, which was revolutionary. They were chosen not because they were learned in the law, but because the people trusted them as neighbourhood persons with fairness, intelligence, wisdom, working together; and the procedures developed there were very much based on traditional dispute resolution, where you call the parties together, they give their complaints, you listen to both sides, you call witnesses, people from the community can all join in, and it's done in a very collective way. It's seen as a problem not just of A and his wife, or C and a husband. It's a problem of the neighbourhood, of the community. They must all contribute to the solution in a very fair way that's drawing on tradition.

What was new was the rules that applied. And the rules didn't come from whether you were Shangaan or Nyanja, or belong to this tribe or the other, or whether you were Catholic or Christian or secular, the rules came from the principles of the Constitution, and the rules were seen as socialism. In practice, that meant sharing. It meant equality. It was very important for women, because it gave them equal status to men. There was no hierarchy. There was no sense of patriarchy governing and ruling. And the fact that there'd be at least one woman – usually a strong woman – on the court, was important, and women could speak out. That was very vital. Most of the work dealt with family disputes and small-scale crime; theft of a goat, stealing some money, things of that kind. If it would be serious homicide, that would go to the other courts at a higher level. In my work in the Ministry of Justice I would sit in on the disputes and be hugely impressed.

I remember one year we flew up to Pemba, that's right up in the north, and took a bus quite deep into the bush, and then we got onto a Jeep and drove over a very bouncy track to arrive at this village. No electricity, no radio, no telephone, only people coming occasionally, and only one literate person, the school master, and he's training kids. This school master would keep a record of the proceedings in the local popular tribunal, and I would read. I came up with a very sad phrase: the universality of matrimonial misery. It was a time when Prince Charles and Princess Diana were having problems. The whole world knew about their problems, and here I'm finding the same problems in this village that you could only reach by plane, by truck, by Jeep; and it's usually an abusive man, philandering with other women, violence, not providing support in different ways; and you would have to look after the interests of the children, and share of the property.

Because these their homes were self-constructed, sometimes if it was a zinc home it literally meant that if there were twenty sheets, ten would go to the husband, and ten to the wife. You literally split the home into two. And then the children would normally stay with the mother, and the father would be ordered to provide grain and produce monthly – they didn’t have cash. So, it was impressive for me to see justice now being meted out in a way that was important for the people in the community. I was recording it and writing about it, and we were asked to prepare research on future family law in Mozambique. We had every kind of family there. Families married according to Muslim rights and traditions, especially along the coast and in Niassa; families married in the church or the cathedrals according to Christian rights; then families in the south living in patriarchal communities, where cattle would be given or something in lieu of cattle, and the woman would go to the husband's family, and her family would receive the cattle in exchange. It was called ‘lobolo’. Frelimo was denouncing ‘lobolo’ as a form of price for the woman in the patrilineal families in the South. In the Center and the North, there were matrilineal families where the man would go to live with the woman, and it meant her parents now had a much stronger position. She wasn't trapped in the same way.

We felt the basic law should be the same for everybody. If the relationship is sufficiently strong, they've constituted a union. If they married in the civil office in Maputo, fine. If they married in the Catholic Church, fine. If they married according to Muslim Rights, fine. If there was some exchange, fine, that's their choice, and that would be the customary law or the religious faith law that they could apply or not apply. But if you come to the state, the interest would be in protecting the integrity of the family, protecting the weaker members of the family, and protecting the rights of the children. We did research and we found that's what people wanted all over the country. I found that very valuable for my own thinking about future South Africa. Not that we followed exactly that position.

How to get this information out? We didn't have law journals, we didn't have paper – we had one newspaper that was all the paper of the country, and paper used for posters, sometimes beautifully designed. But we got funding, I think it was from a Norwegian development agency, to bring out a publication called Justiça Populare – Popular Justice. I don't say 'people's justice'. In some parts of the world, people's justice became very cruel. It justified executing traitors to the people, and it could be without due process of law, without a defence, without proper trials. But popular justice, community justice, in the Mozambican sense, worked in a very empathetic way, very participatory, very wise. It drew on important elements of traditional African law – we call it Ubuntu in South Africa today – interdependence, collective responsibility, everybody helping their neighbours, developing your own personality through recognising and supporting the personalities of others; all of that was writ large, it was strong, and we would publish it in different ways.

In Justiça Popular we tried to make it look attractive, less like a boring, dull legal journal, and make it a popular form of popular justice. And then the idea was to get some of these stories together in a book. Gita Honwana Welch – who was the Director General of the Ministry of Justice, and under whom I worked as Director of Research – and I were to bring out the book. She said, ‘Albie, it's really your book.’ I said, ‘Gita, you created the ambience, the setting. You provided such an important voice yourself, and it's appropriate that your name appears’, and she contributed some aspects herself, very directly.

I remember at the time I wrote that the big issue was: Would Mozambique remain a people's republic with a socialist orientation, or would it end up following what was called the capitalist road, opening up everything to the market, developing a multi-party system of government, but making de facto private property the center of economic life? And I remember writing at the end, saying, 'This is the future that Mozambique faces,' hoping that they would choose to remain on the socialist road. But in fact, after the bitter, terrible, horrible civil war, a capitulation of the aspects that at times could be authoritarian and very harsh, but overwhelmingly were pro people, pro poor, pro enriching the lives of people on the ground, rather than top leaders; those aspects got lost. So eventually, long after I've left Mozambique, The People's Republic of Mozambique becomes the Republic of Mozambique. The People's aspect is lost. I think the gun is taken out of the flag. The anthem is changed to a certain extent, and it's a multi-party democracy. And today we're hearing that Frelimo is clinging to power, even although they've lost popular support. I can't comment on that. I don't know enough, but it's a source of great sadness that with the achievement of multi-party democracy, which I support, and I learnt to support in Mozambique, came degrees of corruption. They were there before, but now much more entrenched, much more powerful, and a 'grab me' kind of ethic became much more pronounced than it had been before.

So, the book Liberating the Law. Creating Popular Justice in Mozambique was published, at a time when I think I was already in hospital, by Zed Press, a radical publishing house in London. It captures a lot of the thinking of those times, and I think it's an important register of what was going on, and how things were organised. But it's become a sort of museum piece, because I don't think they went on to draw on the aspects of popular justice, that we were really working the community courts in the poorer areas of the towns, in the rural areas, drawing on rich African interpersonal connectivity.

I think back to that period, now out of hospital, minus an arm, but with a full heart, because getting well was a political act; it was defiance of the bombers, it was for the struggle, for the people, and for me at the same time. I received a beautiful letter from Oliver Tambo in his handwriting, and the ANC arranged for me to fly to Dublin to work with Kader Asmal on a draft bill of rights for a democratic South Africa. It was the best therapy in the whole world! From living in our heads, from living in dreams, from imagining a decent world emerging from the ruins, we’re now doing something constructive. We'd spent our whole lives denouncing apartheid, the pass laws, executions, capital punishment, floggings, the dispossessions from the land, and now it's something positive. Some of us were aching to heal, to build, to construct, and I was certainly one of those. It required almost an energy of contestation, of courage, of warding off the blows, and you've got the force and the power to push through things that are wrong and ugly in the world. A resoluteness and a determination and a place in history. And now we can start imagining - not just the Freedom Charter as a vision in abstract words, 'all shall be equal before the law, and there shall be security, peace and comfort, and the land shall be redistributed, and human rights and country belongs to everybody who lives in it, black and white'; lovely formulations, enabling and unifying, but what does it mean specifically, and how will it be? What's our ongoing vision of what it would be like living in a free South Africa?

I'd flown from Maputo via Paris to London with nothing other than bandages! Later, a suitcase came with some documents and a few changes of clothing. Fantastic, I said to myself, I am reinventing myself now; I've got that chance. I wanted to come out of hospital striding out like a survivor who's getting on. I think Einstein said it. It's amazing how often chance favours those who are ready for it. The chance, for me, is Shula Marks, the Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, whom I'd done a lot of work with, and Mary Simons, who wanted to see me. And Shula asked, ‘What would like to do now?’ I said, ‘I'd love to start working on ideas and thinking about a new Constitution for South Africa.’ ‘Fantastic!’, she said, ‘At our Institute, we have a bathroom upstairs, we can convert it into an office, and I'm sure we'll get money from the Swedish International Development Agency and Ford Foundation for you.’ Six weeks later, I was in that office, and I'm provided with an office, administrative support, space, and a telephone. I can think, I can read, I can write, I can type. Wow.

The main thing I was working on at that stage was a Bill of Rights for democratic South Africa. I had been very skeptical of this Bill of Rights stuff: lawyers’ language, giving judges a lot of power, parliament must establish the rights representing the people and out in the streets, and you can't leave it to that small class of clever, crafty judges to say what fundamental rights of the people should be. That’s a common view amongst critical legal studies, realist lawyers, as people turned themselves against the formalism of law. And I turned around completely, because of internal debates inside the ANC. There'd been a paper produced by Pallo Jordan, one of the top intellectuals in the mid 1980s, as an answer to group rights on power-sharing. He said that will simply entrench tribalism, racism, and ethnic division, and there'll be no way forward. What we need in South Africa is a Bill of Rights, which will protect the rights of people, not because they're majority, minority, black, white or brown, but because they're human beings, and there I saw straight away, that's our way forward. A Bill of Rights.

Students in Durban set up an anti-Bill of Rights committee. They see it as a Bill of whites. And the idea of a Bill of Rights would be okay, you get the vote for everybody, but a Bill of Rights will entrench the existing property relationships and white supremacy now would be protected by the Constitution, not as white but simply as the people controlling the economy, owning the land, in charge of the lives of others. So, I wrote a paper then why we must set up an anti-anti-Bill of Rights Committee, and why should we hand over a Bill of Rights to conservative forces? Why can't the Bill of Rights be emancipatory? Why can't a Bill of Rights reach the people in the factory, not stop at the factory doors, reach the mine workers, not stop at the entrance to the mines, reach the front door of the house and not stop before reaching the people in the home.

It was liberatory for me now, as a lawyer, seeing how that concept of fundamental rights, which people had fought in many countries in many ways, could be liberatory in South Africa, and could destroy the notion of group rights with shared presidency and negotiations between leaders of different ethnic groups. We needed a completely different vision. And then I came across the idea of the three generations of human rights. A Czech working at the United Nations wanted to promote environmental rights. It didn't fit in with fundamental civil and political rights of the 18th century. It didn't fit in with social and economic rights of the 19th and 20th centuries. So, he said, fundamental rights in the 18th century, revolution, decolonisation of the Americans, freedom of speech, right to vote, great social economic rights coming later, right to housing, education to health, 19th century, 20th century, late 20th century, rights to environment, rights to peace, rights to development. That was a very progressive way of looking at rights, and very valuable for us. So now I introduce the idea of the three generations of human rights as something now that could be embraced. I’m writing about the emancipatory vision of a bill of rights, and how we must claim the content of those rights to make sure that it doesn't simply protect existing power structures, on the contrary it becomes a mechanism for enabling people to enjoy rights.

So much depends on the language you use, and a lot of the language of our struggle was about power. But we needed cooler, calmer, warmer, more embracing, more inclusive language; language of international discourse; language of people now who are confident, confident about the vision they have of society they want, and the rights that people will want. So, the tone and modalities of writing had to be such that they could reach out to the middle ground. A lot is spoken in those days about the middle ground, and on one side would be the masses, the people, the press, the money without rights. On the other side, the oppressors got everything. That middle ground then became a ground of contestation. To reach the middle ground and the emerging small group of black capitalist entrepreneurs, for them to feel there's a role for them, space for them, they can even benefit from change, they're not simply seen as bourgeois lackeys of the whites, that language was important to reach the faith communities. It is very important to have rights for workers, that workers in the New South Africa would have independent unions, not unions dominated by the government and simply supporting the government as transmission belts for top-down forms of control. The women's movement is now speaking out loud and clear in many countries inside our own struggle itself. What about gender in New South Africa? We've got to take initiatives, we've got to be up there with people like Zanele Mbeki writing beautiful, vivid papers and Fene Ginwala and others are establishing a thematic and they want to feel that their aspirations won't be sidelined, that men won't be controlling the whole process of transformation and change. And what about religion? Will the ANC coming to power close the churches, and the mosques, and the synagogues; and that kind of idea was being promoted heavily to frighten people. Where do we stand on that? And then on race? Is it simply going to be a reversal of racial domination now, with the majority doing to the whites what the whites had done to them? Will there be families in the New South Africa? Will everything be collectivised? And these were fears, with counter propaganda being pumped into the masses through various forms of media, that the idea of transformation and change would be to bring in new forms of oppression.

I see my role then as thinking for myself, articulating the kind of ideas we had when we went for the Freedom Charter, adopted by acclamation. In practical terms, what's going to happen to the future of Roman Dutch law? So, I sit down in my office, and I write. The words came out easily. I don't want to write stereotypical jargon that you get in the textbooks about freedom and religion. What does it mean to us in in reality? I'm very secular. I had to fight hard for my right not to pretend to have a belief. I'm surrounded by believers, Jewish and Christian, and I saw how much religion meant to people in our struggle. So I write position papers on all those things. I include my paper preparing ourselves for freedom. I work on different themes. To believe or not to believe? What does democracy mean? And it means liberating faith in the sense it can express itself without being dominated by race and the power structures of racism. The one I enjoyed the most writing was judges and gender. For me, the key thing to bring out was that this was not a racial matter. It was being projected that African society is very male dominated, and women are subordinate, as though white society wasn't patriarchal; it was extremely patriarchal. So, I opened with an observation that the one truly nonracial institution in South Africa is patriarchy. That was the most important point to be made. It's not a matter of blacks and whites and so on. Patriarchy permeates every area. And then a whole series of things followed from that. We knew the land issue was going to be huge, land dispossession, together with cheap migrant labour went with disenfranchisement. The three were connected, and full emancipation for the black majority required dealing with the land issue. It didn't mean you had to wait till you had land redistribution before you got the vote. Getting the vote would be a major mechanism for access to land and to decent employment. Children's rights, freedom of speech, future Roman Dutch law – I'm saying we just end up with South African Law. All presented in a calm tone, readable, not polemical.

In 1990, the ANC is unbanned, Mandela's released, we’re back in South Africa, and I'm at the University of the Western Cape. My office was called the South African Constitutional Study Center (SACS). I’m writing, writing, writing to South Africa, giving presentations at the University of the Western Cape Constitutional Committee meeting in South Africa. I'm collecting all these papers together, I speak to Oxford University Press, South Africa, and they publish this lovely book, capturing that sense of excitement we felt. We were going to get that new South Africa. The initiative, and the impetus was very much with us, because we had a vision that fitted in with world views on certain basic rights and entitlements that everybody should have. And instead of creating some kind of strange concoction for South Africa, because South Africa had such a so-called 'complicated complexion', it was actually very simple, very straightforward, very much based on the essential humanity of all human beings.

I get an invitation from the House of Culture in Stockholm, to speak at the conference they’re having, and they’re opening an exhibition of artworks from Southern Africa; four Mozambican artists, four Angolan artists, four Zimbabwean artists, and four South African artists. And will I give the keynote address at the beginning? They mentioned something like forty-five minutes. Closer to the time I get a letter with the facts, and they say the program is getting quite full, and would you mind if your presentation is thirty minutes? Then later they say they have some wonderful speakers, could I speak for fifteen minutes? I think by the time I'm there, I'm down to five or seven minutes, and I'm feeling a little bit pissed off, because you're preparing for something and living with it, and going through your mind all the time, and planning to say this and that and the other, and if they'd said from the beginning five minutes, I would have said, fantastic, buy my airfare, I'll travel comfortably, and I'll be there. We attend the exhibition, and there’s a big crowd, mainly people from community art centers all over Sweden, and that's why so many of them are speaking. They've been invited, and they must be given their five minutes, and they've all walked past Mozambican artwork, Angolan artwork, South African artwork, Zimbabwean artwork, smiles on their faces, they all come to the platform, and they say, 'Art is a weapon of struggle. Art is an instrument of culture to bring about social change.’ And now I've got combined elements of pissed-offness, and of anger. One, that I've been my time has been reduced so much. Two, they say nothing. All, they're saying is nothing. So, I think, okay, I'm down to five minutes. I'm going to give it to you. And my first statement is, ‘We don't want your solidarity,’ and there's dead silence in the room. ‘We don't want your solidarity. We want real engagement with the art. We don't want solidarity criticism. If you like the art, say so. If you don't like the art, say so. If you don't understand, ask the artists.’ And that was a real, coming from my heart now. It is shallow and patronising. They just moved past and say, ‘Oh how lovely. How nice. How lovely. How nice. Art is a weapon and struggle. We've got to support our brothers and sisters in southern Africa fighting for freedom.’ Okay, of course we want that, but the way you give it is to engage seriously with the artwork and think about it and respond to what the artists are trying to do.

And then my second is that I'm a kind of pacifist, but I love hand grenades from time to time, and my second hand grenade was saying, ‘We must stop saying art is a weapon of struggle.’ Now I'd been saying that for ten years and supporting the idea of artists working together and being part of the struggle, and not seeing themselves as outside of the struggle, getting on with creating their beautiful worlds and their own beautiful minds for other beautiful people that they must engage with the real struggle, real people, and the art must engage with that. And we need artists in the struggle. And I was only too happy when the Department of Arts and Culture was set up under Barbara Masekela to make it something organised, not just an occasional thing to happen now and then with an occasional concert and so on. So I say that I'm totally against censorship, but for five years we must be banned from saying art is a weapon of struggle. Art is much richer, and more important than that, and can contribute more to the struggle if it's deeper and more penetrating, and deal with the contradictions; something of that kind. So, Barbara comes up to me afterwards and she says ‘Albie that was so exciting. We're having a conference on culture in Zimbabwe later in the year, you must be there to say it’. And I say that it's so hard for me to travel, I'm exhausted, and it takes a lot out of me, but I'll write a paper.

I had such fun writing that paper, and it all came from having lived in Mozambique for eleven years; being involved and engaged with artists in Mozambique, their dilemmas, their problems, the approach of Mozambicans and they wouldn't get by with some simple slogan. They had to deal with the realities of putting on a concert, having a show, painting something, and it was a vitality and an energy and diversity of views which gave me courage to speak out on cultural issues. Also, when you've lost an arm and you survived, you don't care what happens. Let them call me bourgeois, haha. I just don't care. I don't care at all. I'm going to say it, I'm going to put it out there, and I'm going to have fun, and I'm going to be a provocateur in chief, we all know where South Africa is. Do we know what South Africa is, and the theme of Preparing Ourselves for Freedom? Are we prepared for freedom? We are not. We’re prepared for fighting, we’re prepared for challenge, we’re prepared to tear down apartheid, we’re prepared to have a new constitutional order in South Africa, but are we prepared for freedom in our minds, in our heads? Can we engage, or will we be trapped in the ghettos of our minds, created by apartheid? 'Will the enemy be camping in our heads?' is a phrase I picked up from somewhere, dominating us so that everything we write is against the enemy, and not enough is about ourselves and our own misery, hopes, excitements, contradictions. Will we stop?

Then I discovered that it actually had produced a marvellous response. Now it's 4 February, we're going back to South Africa, and she realises that this paper can do a huge amount of good, because it's representing the ANC as people who think, who debate, who're interested in language, who have feelings of emotion and passion and a sense of humour, so different from what had been projected as blood-thirsty terrorists coming back, or as the way the counter-information did.

And now, is it right that we should stop saying 'art is a weapon of struggle,' and that's coming from inside the struggle. It's not that I dance outside the conservative liberal people and outside saying art mustn't have anything to do with politics, because politics will always paint art. So, she sends it to the Mail & Guardian, they publish extracts, and now there's a huge debate in South Africa. Papers are written on the Albie Sachs paper, and mostly critical from one point of view or the other. And Ingrid de Kok and Karen Press, both poets, they get together, and they decide to collect the papers and publish them in a book titled Spring is Rebellious, and when I read them for the first time, I must say, I was rather disappointed by the huge disconnect between English literature and what I'm saying and doing. They're in another world of ideas, following ideas, pursuing ideas, and ideas about ideas, and language about language, and just kind of not getting it. And then some would be predictably and understandably hard line saying, ‘It's okay for Albie, who are the artists here? It's Hugh Masekela, and it's Mariam Makeba and it's Abdullah Ibrahim, and they’re famous. They're making it.’ But the theme I was projecting with them wasn't the theme of their success, it was the theme of the huge amount they were doing for liberation, singing about love, drama, loss, people, personalities, the music that they're playing was music to create a different energy. It was very powerful, very South African and very for the people, and it wasn't based on slogans, and neither musical slogans, in terms of musical formations, nor word slogans. And Miriam’s singing was such an overt, strong expression of South African personality through the voice of an African woman who's got a wonderful means of projection and wonderful crowd connection. And that's the point I'm getting at. It's something that they created, a genre that drew on musical forms from throughout the world, but very South African in origin, very African in terms of sound and modulation, but using the trumpet and using the piano and using other instruments and the voice to project something a kind of new amalgam, a new fusion, a new South Africanity that's powerful, and that's the point that I'm making, and that's what we needed in our literature, in our poetry. The musicians were ahead of us. I'd said often before our jazz musicians wrote our constitution in music before we always wrote it in words. And that's the kind of theme that I'm trying to get at.

The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter is the both the easiest book I've written, and the hardest because I was still physically so weak. I think it has become my most successful book because it's a bridge between the early part of my life – fighting and resisting apartheid – and the later part of my life as part of the new society with new values, and a new Constitution. It's an emotional connection between different phases of my life, but also an intellectual connection, a bridge head, in a way, for my story, but to some extent paralleling the story of South Africa. The occasion for writing it presented itself very neatly. Blown up on 7 April 1988, out of hospital several months later in London, and I have an invitation to lecture at the law school at the University of Columbia. It was a perfect setting, because I had no other obligations. I enjoyed the teaching. It was contained, and the rest of the time I could write. And now it's just me, my computer, my memory, and I got to produce a draft of the book.

The computer wasn't easy. I'd had lessons in London. I'm typing now with one finger – I used to type with two fingers, left hand and right hand – so it's slow, but I got up to a speed about equal to my handwriting speed. I know how I'm going to start: ‘Oh shit! Something terrible is happening…’, and I'm trying to bring myself back into those moments. How do you speak about unconsciousness in a meaningful way? About sliding in and sliding out of unconsciousness? I see it as a kind of technical issue. Your writing is in sentences, but experience isn't in sentences with full stops and capital letters. Experiences flow one into the other, and it's kind of broken up, but I have intuitions, half memories, little things that come back to me, emotions, sensations, feelings… and then I start telling that story: I don't know what's happening at first. I know I'm going to the beach. I know that something bad has happened. It reminded me of the sensation when I was very active mountain climber. I would bang my head on an overhang and have concussion. I'd just wait a moment, and the concussion would go away; but now the concussion was not going away. In fact, there's a further blow and further kind of shadow. I have a memory of people pulling me and feeling that I'm being kidnapped, to be thrown into jail in South Africa. And I remember vaguely that I'm saying in Portuguese and in English, ‘Leave me, leave me. I'd rather die here.’ I'm hearing voices, and I can't hear what they're saying. I'm cross with them. I'm not a thing to be moved, I'm Albie, bring me into the picture. It's half distant memories of that, and then fading into darkness, and then a very distinctive voice saying, ‘Albie, this is Iva Garrido speaking to you. You're in Maputo Central Hospital.’ I can hear very clearly, and he's speaking slowly. I know Iva – I used to play bridge and cards with him – and he says, ‘Your arm is in lamentable condition. You must face the future with courage.' I remember distinctly saying into the darkness, ‘What happened?’, and a woman's voice saying, ‘It was a car bomb.’ And then my sense of joy knowing I'm safe. I'm safe that moment you are waiting for as a freedom fighter every day, every night, it's there all the time, nonstop. You're not consciously thinking it's part of you. They’d tried to kill me, and they'd failed. I felt joyous with a total conviction that as I would get better, my country would get better. Now, all those themes and emotions are kind of coming to me. And then my next memory was of that sense of quiet happiness, of lightness, great lightness. I'm kind of floating on my back. I'm sure I was under very heavy sedation, but I'm feeling very light, and I tell myself the Himie Cohen joke, and I even have that feeling ‘I joke therefore I am'. I'm not sure if that phrase actually came to me then, or it only came when I was writing. It’s a self-consciousness of the process that I'm going through.

I remember vividly the bandages being taken off me, and they put them in boiling water, dry them, and put them on again. The needles used for injections were sterilized and used again. They had nothing in terms of equipment and materials in that hospital. Sadly, they had great experience in dealing with trauma, and the doctors in London were amazed, hopes and beat that everything correctly from beginning to end. They saved my life, there's no doubt about it, and the amputation of the arm was absolutely inevitable. The worst thing would have been to have a hanging arm that was neither a functioning arm, nor the absence of an arm. I write about I'm recovering, and I remember feeling very strong, and have a strange relationship with the journalists in that I'm comforting them; some of them knew me. And I'm feeling that joy and excitement of survival and recovery, and that the regime hadn't been able to kill me.

I write about Lucia, whom I'd been deeply in love with and had been totally shattered when she chose somebody else, and dumped me. I had been in a kind of depression, and had happily snapped out of it one or two weeks before. So, I lost my love and my arm together. I was now over the loss of love, and accepting of it. I remember taking her picture out of my wallet and throwing it into the drawer with pictures from my past. I described the quaintness of how she wants to hug me, but I'm covered in bandages. And where can she kiss me? I think she found some spot in the back of my head. And I'm loving these details, because I'm alive, and I'm able to notice these things and feel these things, and I'm going to get better.

I remember advice given to me by a South African writer, David Lytton, who had some success in London. He said, ‘Albie, I'm going to pass on one tip to you. One normally thinks that you've got to finish a session of work at the end of a chapter, or end of the theme. This is a big mistake. Rather leave your work hanging in the middle of a sentence, because when you start the next morning, all you have to do to get the juice flowing is finish the sentence; it loosens you up.' That was enormously helpful for me. I made quite sure that I ended every day in the middle of a sentence, a thought, a process, or an episode, so that would be easier to carry on the next day.

After about three days, I'm feeling very buoyant. I'm writing in present continuous tense, which seems to be working, and then something happens, and it's all lost. Now I'm feeling absolutely desperate. I've lost three days’ work on the computer. It turned out to be the luckiest mishap, because I'm starting from the beginning again, and something made it so easy. I'm not trying to remember what I said, I'm re-telling the narrative, but it had been through all the agonising, and the changes, and the variations, and now it's telling itself. A week passes, I've got up to so many pages in chapters, I'm seeing the natural breaks: the plane leaving Maputo, arriving in London, experiences there; I used to write down little episodes and events, not in any sequence or order, on a big sheet of paper so that I didn't forget them; things that stood out as landmark experiences and moments. Or I would prepare for the next chapter, and jot down things to put into that chapter, and then let my imagination and storytelling take over. I often tell myself that the story finds itself in the story, and it comes out in ways that are often quite unexpected. They're little conjunctures, bits of humour, surprises, or something you think is very big that turns out to be very small, something you thought was very small turns out to be very big. That's all in the nature of the narration of the storytelling within a strong regimen – that satisfaction you get out of having an orderly way of doing things, feeling on top of the process, and seeing results emerging.

As the weeks follow on, I'm making more progress. I'm enjoying the teaching. I'm enjoying the food. I'm going out maybe a little bit more, because I'm a little stronger than I was, but still sticking to my overall regime of working from Tuesday morning to Sunday night, one night off Monday night, maybe for a movie, and maybe sneaking in a movie when I'm very tired watching it whenever I want. I'm feeling fantastic and happy and joyous as a result of hard, productive work with my heart, my time, my energy, my imagination, my belief, my language, my skills, and my experience. I got such joy and pleasure out of writing it and even dealing with the sad moments. The writer in me was glad that I had moments of panic and despair, because they provided some shade in all the light.

It's become my most reproduced book. It had a second edition in University of California Press, and then years later, I speak about my books at the Bath Literary Festival, and there's a man there who comes up to me afterwards, and he said he's a publisher of Souvenir Press, and he's looking to reprint books that deserve to be reprinted. He wanted a different cover, and I suggested David Goldblatt, whom I'd known and who’s work I'd seen. And I remember, I got off the plane, I drove straight to his house. He sat me in a chair. I was very tired, a bit disheveled. I'm still wearing my plain jersey. It's the best picture has ever been taken of me, and now it's on the cover of the book. It captured me a little bit tired after the journey, but wanting to look kind of good inside myself, and it's a wonderful cover.

Soft vengeance is a positive vengeance. It's a victorious vengeance, because it's soft and it's creative and it's transcendent, and it's beautiful, and maybe that was now the epitome of all my writing which had been, in a way, a form of soft vengeance. It was picking up on pain, on distress, on hardship, on disadvantage, but turning it around into something beautiful because it's literary, because it's reaching imagination, because it's pro human beings. It's pro human love and affection and solidarity in the Jail Diary and now in the soft vengeance in that story as well. Then we come back to South Africa to write our new Constitution – soft vengeance. We get together and we draft the Constitution – soft vengeance. I'm put on the Court that's defending the values that we were fighting for – soft vengeance. And we build a wonderful building on the site of the Old Fort Prison, the site of oppression, and we now have the building that defends the rights you were fighting for – soft vengeance. So it that became the theme of my life, transforming, helping to transform negativity into positivity, despair into hope. Not through incantation, but through really picking up on the energies and finding the positive that can emerge from transforming those energies; the sword into plowshares and into positivities. And maybe that's the unifying theme of all the books I've written, that theme of immersing myself in the hardship, the disadvantage, the pain, the negativity, taking into my imagination and body, if you like, a lot of that hardship, but not with the view to self-immolation, but with the view of turning it upside down, and turning it into positivity and hope and something that reconnects and becomes a source of genuine optimism, not through simply saying, ‘Be optimistic’, but through the optimism shining through everything that I'm speaking about.

I think it was Shakespeare in Twelfth Night, who used the phrase 'appetite grows by what it feeds on'. So I had that lovely book published, Protecting Human Rights in the New South Africa, and I thought, I must follow up with another book now that we're preparing for negotiations, we're thinking about constitutional texts, we're thinking about structures of government, and we're thinking about living under a constitution. Themes have been included: freedom of speech, children's rights, gender rights, land rights, a whole range of different things, but now we need a kind of hard nitty gritty, particularly in the economic sphere. I had come up with the theme of preparing ourselves for freedom, and I felt we needed to balance it with now preparing ourselves for power. Freedom meant liberating our minds, opening up, being more engaging, taking more risks, culturally, intellectually, delving deeper, seeking out contradictions, rather than avoiding them. But now our Constitution means structuring power, and I'm invited by the University of Cape Town to be an honorary professor there, and I get an honorary degree. So, my main base is University of the Western Cape where I have an office and am assisted by Dorothy Williams, to whom I'd been whistling in prison years and years before, and I'm working now on basically the theme of preparing ourselves for power.

I give my inaugural lecture on perfectibility and corruptibility. All constitutions are based on aiming for perfectibility and guarding against corruption. So, we didn't have this idea of ‘We're coming back. We’ll liberate South Africa. We'll be in charge,’ and ‘To you, the political kingdom, and all else will be given unto thee,' as Kwame Nkrumah said. We knew, from our own organisation’s problems and from what we'd experienced elsewhere in Africa and other parts of the world, that even heroic freedom fighters could go on to become authoritarian people dominating their states, benefiting their families, creating cliques around them. We'd seen that happening. I know how strongly our generation felt that our biggest gift to South Africa, especially those of us who've been abroad and been able to think about things, not with that daily survival in prison, in the underground, working with this struggle and that struggle, but the broader kind of vision. We really had to do something for the ages, for good weather and bad. And that would be a major historic vision. It went well beyond any idea of just getting the ANC into office and into power. It was our biggest gift to honour those who've struggled, to the nation in general: a new constitutional order.

I had been very skeptical of constitutions as being lawyer-dominated, and bills of rights as being property-oriented; too much power for judiciary: a class of people belonging to the upper reaches of society, identifying with the interests of the wealthy families and so on. Now, like many converts, I'm super enthusiastic about the idea of a bill of rights, constitutions and fundamental rights for everybody. I'm writing now for people in the struggle, and I'm writing for people outside. What are our positions on property, on land and redistribution, on affirmative action, which is a big theme that came from America: how to deal with systemic forms of disadvantage, so that even when you take away the official law that says 'whites only, whites only, whites only', you remove all that, but the structures still benefit those who had created these weapons to be supreme and to be dominant. How to deal with that. And you have to acknowledge the existence of racism, to tackle racism. You simply couldn't say non-racism; we don't pay any regard to race whatsoever. This was an enormous area of contestation. The question of property: We wanted property rights for people, for the poor. They had been dispossessed of their land and chucked out of their homes. They had a right to feel this is my home, this is my space. So, property rights shouldn't be seen simply as the rights of the wealthy to own huge tracts of land and to buy and sin as they wish and dispose of human beings like they dispose of old motor cars and worn-out tyres. We needed to find ways of dealing with the injustice of the past that didn't involve new forms of injustice, simply because the aim was a good one. These are the kinds of issues that are now developed.

This time, I'm aware now I'm writing for a book. The whole issue of federalism... We needed strong national government for national tasks, but we also needed strong local government. And there was a deep tension inside the ANC, the liberation movement, because we always believed in the masses, the grass roots, not top down. On the other hand, we wanted a strong central government to redistribute land, to provide education for everybody, health for everybody, and it was being projected about the 'F-word’, 'federalism', which was being advanced by people who were building up support on a tribalistic basis, wanting to have spheres of sovereignty belonging to their traditional communities, as they saw it, also by language groups, and also by white industrialists and others who were scared of a strong state - which they had created: a strong state to have the pass laws, domination, control and all the formal structures of apartheid, but now they wanted a weak state, so that the formal structures of apartheid couldn't be dismantled.

I was developing the themes of 'it's not the national versus the local.' We need the national, the regional and the local, and getting people to think creatively, constructively about that. When I look at the themes I see reshaping South Africa, problems of federalism, minorities and property rights, and a section on civil society. Will there be civil society in the new democratic South Africa? Will the state do everything? I was arguing very strongly in favour of not the state versus civil society. It's the state having to perform state function, but civil society to enable communities and groups to influence the state, to demand things of the state, and to work with the state. They're not inherently in competition. Affirmative action is such a critical thing with people who've been the biggest racist their whole life suddenly becoming the biggest non-racist by saying race doesn't matter anymore, apartheid's gone, what's the problem? And those of us who've been anti-racist and strongly non-racist saying that if you don't look at the reality of race, you're not looking at the reality of oppression and exploitation in this country; you've got to take account of it. And it doesn't automatically go, because advantaged people continue to have children who are advantaged, and their grandchildren who're advantaged: they're advantaged in education, in wealth, in confidence and everything. You need targeted, conscious, intentional interventions, but those interventions mustn't be cruel, they mustn't be unduly abrasive, but they must be very effective and very, very real. And the objective always is to create a sense of social cohesion, of national identity, of pride in being part of this thing called South Africa.

Then there is a whole chunk on culture: Such as ‘Black is beautiful, Brown is beautiful, White is beautiful’, ‘A Bill of Rights for South African Artists,’ from when I wrote a paper for the ANC conference on culture. There are two strong themes: One is we must ban saying 'Art is a weapon of struggle', and the other theme is 'Black is beautiful,' and the other theme is 'White is beautiful.' I thought there would be uproar about 'White is beautiful.' There wasn't. Nobody seemed to even notice it. I deliberately used that provocative title because in Mozambique, I'd heard one of the leaders there, who was asked by Comrade Sergio what's Frelimo's position on the phrase 'Black is beautiful'? And he said, *'Black is beautiful, brown is beautiful, white is beautiful. All people are capable of being beautiful. Whites have made whiteness ugly because it's been used for exclusion, for oppression, for areas of practices of superiority. But intrinsically, there's no reason why it shouldn't recapture beauty.’ *

The book is then published, it's circulating, it's being read, it's helping to change the debate. It's creating different points of reference, a different tonality, and it is inherently revolutionary. It's looking at a country of massive disadvantage, associated with race, and it's calling for pervasive change. But not threatening with AK47s and raised fists and ‘we're going to enforce this’ and bustle. It's encouraging people from the oppressed communities to have a vision of human solidarity and of an opening up future and a sense of connection, responsibility, bringing about the change, and for the oppressors to feel they don't have to fight to the death, they don't have to say 'to the last drop of blood,' and in fact, this is actually quite reasonable and, yes, you know, let's think about it in these terms: For the one to live the other doesn't have to die. There are ways we can live together, but we won't be able to live together if we simply carry on with the status quo, and we won't live together if one group now goes in for a counter revenge and new forms of disposition and so on. There are constitutional ways, organised ways, principled ways of bringing about change. So in a sense, this book is a good testimony to the nature of the debate in those days. It certainly refutes the idea that we were all starry-eyed and thinking that with freedom, everything changes automatically, and we've got wonderful leaders like Mandela and there is nothing to worry about. We didn't have that in mind at all. On the contrary, we very much had in mind the temptations, the seductions, the insecurities of power. We'd seen it working in our own ranks. We'd seen it affecting countries we'd lived in. We'd even seen it in countries like Tanganyika, Tanzania, with Julius Nyerere, the very decent, wonderful, totally non-corrupt person, idealistic, a good leader. But problems occurred there, and there were difficulties. Things don't unroll automatically, you have to work at it, think about it, work with others, be intelligent and full of heart all the way through. Advancing Human Rights in South Africa captures those moments, and those kinds of thinking.

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.

My term on the Court was coming to an end. It had been so fascinating, so interesting, so full of surprises, amazing. South Africa having been the land of apartheid, the kind of the country used as the example of a horrible society with a horrible Constitution and horrible presence in the world. Now suddenly, the first will be the last, the last shall be the first. And we now have an extraordinary, progressive, interesting Constitution. We have a Constitutional Court, and I'm a member of that Court. Each case is fascinating, interesting from a human point of view. Should there or should there be capital punishment in the New South Africa? Should prisoners have the right to vote? Can Nelson Mandela issue proclamations in the way that he was doing when asked by Parliament, or should Parliament do that itself? The very nature of cases that reached the Constitutional Court were cases where the law was in doubt, where there was a tension between competing values.

Most legal work is routine; guilty or not guilty. Are you liable? Were you negligent or not? It can go one way or the other. The very nature of constitutional issues is fascinating because they deal with broad issues that affect more than just the parties to the case, and the basic role of the Court is so profound because it's not only a brand-new Constitution, but also a Constitution that is against almost everything of the past. Everything's turned upside down, and you want as much disruption as possible, because that whole society was so wicked. On the other hand, you want as much continuity as possible, so that democracy isn't associated with chaos and people helping themselves and anything goes. That tension is built into the very nature and character of the adjudication by the Court. We had to invent a whole new technology; forms of reasoning different from the approach of the judges in the earlier days was we don't make policy; we just carry out the law as determined by Parliament. So, it distances the Judges from moral, ethical responsibility for what they're doing, and they pretend they’re simply the instruments of the design and intention of others.

Now we've got a Constitution that's very intentional. The whole first portion of it is devoted to values, the preamble. We have foundational values and deep, profound pillars in terms of values of the Constitution and then the Bill of Rights, very expansive and comprehensive. A whole new value system based on respect for humanity. So, to the extent that the Court is now involved in ensuring that values are inserted into government at every level, and values are inserted into what citizens and people in the country can claim as their right

There's nothing more exciting than being involved in a project that requires intelligence, thoughtfulness, a sense of history, use of language, and collegiality. It is enthralling and tedious and hard, and details matter, and it requires massive research, knowing the record and knowing the arguments; to feel the excitement that you can get through an intellectual project that has enormous public and social meaning. And I wanted to tell that story, I want to tell the story of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Not in a technical literary way.

We have these cases. What are the decisions? What are the arguments? What goes through a Judge's mind? What are the issues? What are the background factors that are relevant? How does it come to pass that you took a decision in a particular way, in a particular case? To share that and the experience of being a Judge with a brand-new Court, a brand-new Constitution in a country that is seething with issues and problems, massive expectations and hope, lots of pain, lots of divisions. How does that Court manage its work, frame the issues, come to the conclusions that it comes to, and disagree when we disagreed.

And I'm thinking of the issues capital punishment being debated all over the world, freedom of expression debated all over the world, the rights of homeless people, not all over the world, but in our Constitution, social and economic rights are there? What does it mean? The right to health, a huge case dealing with the provision of antiretrovirals with massive implications for the country. The powers of the president, such as President Nelson Mandela, who we loved. Can we strike down important proclamations that he issued? So, the range of the cases, the range of the issues, the way they push the boundaries of judicial reasoning, and certain core features of the functioning I felt had to be conveyed.

I also wanted to convey something of the experience of being a Judge. It's not the simple psychology of a judge, it's there were so many surprises. So how to do it? I have a sabbatical every seven years and I applied to Ford to become what they call a scholar in residence in New York. It was important to be out of South Africa, away from the Court, away from all those daily things that distract you to create space. It's not just physical space. It's like a temporal space. It's an emotional space to be in another world, and New York was like another world.

I thought writing about judgments would be so easy. We’d work very collectively and collegially. I'm writing now for the Court, not just for myself. Why is it so hard? And I remember my chapter dealing with that. I opened with the sentence, ‘Every judgment I write is a lie.’ I know it's going to grab attention. That lie is that the judgment was written in the way it appears in the final version. And in fact, most times the opening sentence of the judgment is the last sentence I write. It's when I've got everything composed and in order with the conclusion that's arrived at, and then I’ll go back to the start and say, ‘This case is about…’ And, in a sense, that's a lie. It looks as though you wrote it in the order of A, B, C, D, E, F, G, but in fact, you might have written it as D, A, C, and so on. Why was it so difficult? Once visiting University of Toronto in Canada, I'm with political scientists, and I tell them about my dilemma with this. And they say, ‘No, Albie, you lawyers won't understand. We understand. It's the difference between the logic of rationality and reason, and the logic of discovery.’ Wow, that's a discovery for myself. The reasonableness, the persuasion, the evidential support; a lot of legal work is just that; but the discovery is about how does it all comes together? What's the overriding theme that binds everything together? So that was my big discovery, and I want to convey this to other judges.

I'm also saying this strange thing: that some of the statements that I've written in my judgments that have traveled around the world came to me lying in the bath, when I'm not thinking at all, and a beautiful sentence just emerges in my head that brings everything together, and I would get out of the bath write it down before I forgot. And that fitted in with the logic of discovery. It comes from lots of research. It's not just automatic. You are dealing with the subject, you’re discussing it, debating it, writing it, thinking about it, hearing your colleagues arguing, they've spoken about it in Court, and you're just lying flat in the bath. Ping! It all kind of comes together. I want to share that.

I might mention this is one thing I'm picking out of many different chapters in the book. There was a reading group of top judges in England who wanted to use The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law for their next session, and they said they would love to discuss it in my presence. One of them spoke about that moment of enlightenment, described by writer Malcolm Gladwell as bed, bath and bus. And this judge said, ‘Bed, bath, bus and bicycle’ – places where that moment would come from nowhere.

Then there's that other core, almost existential, functional dilemma of Judges: that connection between reason and passion. Reason is implacable, one and one makes two, whether you like it or not. That's it. It's impersonal, it's outside of you. We often learnt at law school that judges must be neutral. Judges must be completely outside of the realm that they're discussing and talking about and that's a good judge. And I thought, no, we are part and parcel of the people, ordered by the Constitution to ensure that there's more justice in society. We're living in a very unjust South Africa, very unequal, very unfair in all sorts of ways. You've got to take a stand. We've inherited practices that are terrible: of using violence to solve social problems, of beating people down, of marginalising people; we've got to take a stand on that. And you're not neutral on torture, you're not neutral on abuses, you take a stand. But you are impartial in the sense that you listen to everybody equally.

So, I'm now battling with the fact that I even subjectively feel quite emotional about decisions I'm giving. Not that I want to be right, and I want to be smarter, cleverer than my colleagues and so on, but because that's what the Constitution demands. It wants a better world, and it wants people to be able to express their humanity in better ways. And it wants the institutions of democracy to function properly and well; to promote those kinds of things.

The technically interesting part that emerged for me was that the book was coming out with three different accordant registers, three different modes of telling a story. The one would be extracts from our judgments. You write in a certain way. It's very constrained, even if the language is forceful and dramatic. There's a kind of cadence and a tonality that a sonority, in a way. That's the judicial style of writing, and even if I'm saying something that might be amusing such as opening one of my judgments with the sentence ‘Does the law have a sense of humour?’ there's a kind of a seriousness in that writing.

Then there's another part of the book where I'm dealing with reason and passion; judgment and reason. It's a philosophical mode of arguing. Not as tense and tight as judicial reasoning, but not as loose as ordinary narration. This happened in the Treatment Action Campaign Case when I came out of the Court, and I cried. Not because so many people were being afflicted by HIV in South Africa, I cried because I found on a Court that can do something about it. When we wrote the Constitution, we weren't even thinking about HIV, and now we've got the possibility of doing something that enables hundreds of 1000s of millions of people to have access to antiretrovirals and it’s saving lives. The narrative of that has a different cadence. So, you've got the narrative cadence, the philosophical argumentation and reasoning, And so the book took on a structure of its own, emerging from the kinds of issues that I was dealing with.

And then each chapter had extracts from judgments towards the end. So eventually, I felt that the theme of the strange alchemy of life and law was what was working its way through the book. Life needs law, and in the case of judges, law is central to the way you are occupied in your life. But law also needs life and needs connection with life. I call it an alchemy, because it's strange, it's not automatic, and they're not spheres. There is life on the one side, there’s law on the other, and they're interacting with each other. All sorts of things influence the outcome - there's an element of mystery, of real discovery, surprise in it, and I felt The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law is, in effect, the strange me: The strange experience of being a Judge, being on a Court, when your connection with the law has been to be imprisoned without trial, to be nearly assassinated, to be part of working within the press community, dreaming of liberation, and being part of the process of writing the new values of our new Constitution.

In some ways, this was the easiest book that I wrote, because I didn't write it - I didn't write it as a book. I'd noticed books by some very famous people such as Edward Said’s book Orientalism, a collection of essays he'd written at different times and put it together in a book. And I thought there is quite a lot I've written along the way, lectures that I've given, occasions when I've been being asked to make comments on something that's happening: Inaugurating a new Supreme Court in Kenya, speaking to legal historians in South Africa about the future of customary law… all over the place... and maybe I could put it all together in a book. So, I did some research. I'd forgotten about quite a few of the pieces, and bit by bit, the book started to have a beginning, middle and end in terms of the timing and to some extent in terms of the content.

I approached the Wits University Press. I was very friendly with Corina van der Spoel who had run an exceptional bookshop in Johannesburg. It was a joy to go there Saturday mornings; you'd meet so many people; there'd be lovely debates and discussions; and literature from the world. She's now working for Wits University Press, so I approach her, and I ask whether they would be interested in a collection of work? And the overarching theme for me would be that I am a proud, self-proclaimed activist Judge. It's not an accusation, it's an appellation. Activist in furthering the principles of an activist Constitution. In fact, I'd once been invited for lunch at the American Supreme Court, and Chief Justice, John Roberts, very gracious host. Cuisine, well, I won't say anything about the cuisine, it was nothing: The conversation was marvelous. And the first question put to me was from Justice Alito, a well-known very conservative judge, Justice Sachs, would you say the South African Constitutional Court is an activist court? And I said, Yes, Justice Alito, and we have an activist Constitution. So, if you follow what the Americans were saying, conservative Americans, then we must look at the intent of the people who framed the Constitution, to interpret the Constitution today and not add our own gloss. Then, even from that very conservative approach towards constitutionalism, I'm doing the right thing by being activist, and our Constitution demands transformation and change and dealing with facing up to the inequities, and then the hardships, and the imposed disadvantages that people have in South Africa, dealing with them and finding gracious and implementable and principled responses. So, I like the idea of saying I'm an activist judge.

I discovered quite an interesting trove of things that I've produced over the years. I put them together. I cluster them, and each belongs to a different phase. One was the period of transition from apartheid. The other, through to democracy. And then a later period where we are now finding problems in the new society and are having to deal with them. Problems of restorative justice as opposed to punitive justice, dealing with that particular cluster. And customary law, always seen as a kind of thing out there for people who want it, yet so meaningful for the majority of the population. But how do you look at it properly? Traditional leadership? How to look at traditional leadership and trying to encourage traditional leaders now to embody the values of true leadership, being close to the people being able to give leadership, helping with modernisation, moving into a different kind of a society rather than retreating into patriarchy, retreating into a form of dominion that's totally out of sync with the democratic era and with the non-sexist kind of world that we want.

These are issues that I'm dealing with all the way through, and I'm reinforcing some themes at a time when there's quite a lot of disillusion in South Africa about the workings of democracy and also concerns about the failure to achieve the full equality that people were hoping would come with the democratic dispensation. At least we have equality of vote, equality of voice, equality of movement, but not equality of education in real life, not equality of actual access to health services, not equality of housing as a matter of reality, and certainly not equality in terms of land ownership and wealth accumulation. So, I wanted to deal with those themes and to get away from that notion that we were all idealists when we created the Constitution, that we thought everything would be hunky dory and if we just get the vote and everything will follow, and we have wonderful leaders. We weren't like that. What we were saying was dealing with a tension between perfectibility and corruptibility.

I'm reminding people of what we were saying in those days. And I'm also dealing with a theme saying that we support multiculturalism. We don't want a uniformity of society, we don't want a dominant language, a dominant culture, a dominant anything. South Africa, belongs to all, united in our diversity. Diversity is part and parcel of what we united, not steamrolled into unity, but united coming to it as we are, with our cultures, our beliefs, our cuisines, our preferences and so on. We bring it in, and we share it.

I'd been invited by the FW de Klerk Foundation – he was still alive then – to make a presentation at a conference on multiculturalism. I accepted the invitation with a mixture of some discomfort, because De Klerk didn't like Albie Sachs. When I met him publicly, he would be correct, but very, very cold. I heard from somebody who'd been in the Government of National Unity, that De Klerk had bitterly opposed Mandela's desire to appoint Albie Sachs to the Constitutional Court. And the person told me he didn't like De Klerk himself, but he felt sorry for the chap because Mandela was so rude, overriding him on that issue. But okay, I faced difficulties in other aspects of my life, I can face speaking for De Klerk. But I also want him to hear what I have to say because the De Klerk Foundation is very concerned about the future of Afrikaans culture fitting into democracy and not being marginalised, and rejected, and despised in any way. I think to his total surprise, I mentioned my contact with Afrikaners in my youth: The artist Gregoire Boonzaier, the painter, wonderful storyteller, very, very progressive. The poet Uys Krige. And then my dad was General Secretary of the Garment Workers Union, of mainly Afrikaans-speaking women, whose parents had been dispossessed by the British after the Anglo Boer War, their farms burnt down. They're poor people living in the towns and Solly Sachs is organising them. Johanna Scheepers, Johanna Cornelius, Esther Cornelius and others. I’d met them, they were great, they were cheerful and they looked after me as a child when visiting my dad. So, I saw Afrikaners as warm people with progressive ideas and very much part of the nation.

The problem in apartheid South Africa was that multiculturalism was used as the foundation of political rights. And it enabled people to become superior and others inferior, treated by law as such. What was needed then was to get a political system based on equality, and then within that system, multiculturalism will flourish quite spontaneously and naturally, as long as it was dislodged from political power. I think that was a whole new approach for the people in most of the people in the audience. And when I'm leaving, I see a detective is blocking my way, he speaks in Afrikaans, and he says that his father, Jan de Klerk, was a school principal in the then-Transvaal and the National Party took him away from the school to fight against the Garment Workers Union led by my father, and he said that De Klerk had become Minister of Labour and got legislation accepted that prevented black unions from being able to organise and go on strike; legislation which he, De Klerk, had repealed. He shook my hand and allowed me to go. It was actually a rather lovely moment, and I appreciated it because it was spontaneous from him. It had a personal dimension to it. And that became the opening salvo of this book.

One of the themes of South Africa now in the 21st century is a new way of looking at issues. It would have been a new way of looking at perennial issues of people with very diverse historical experiences, cultural backgrounds, way of living in the world, seeing the world, all in one country, and having been at each other's throats until quite recently. Now we're kind of living together, and what does that mean? And to actually see that unity becomes a fantastic foundation for diversity because you're not being treated differently, you're not losing out because of who you are, and your culture, and your language; and you're not gaining because of your culture and your language. You've got equal rights, and you can express yourself in any way that you choose, and language will play a very big role, and faith will play very big role, and culture, and there'll be lots of overlap, and fusion, and contradiction, and new things emerging. I saw that all this is very positive. So, it's in that sense a bit of a fruit salad book, but I like to feel with interesting ingredients.

I think I can say with great degree of confidence that the most remarkable legal partnership in any country, anywhere in the world, anytime, was the partnership of Mandela and Tambo. And why do I make this bold claim? It's because they broke the law, in a way that no other lawyers had broken the law, to recreate the law. And they were a younger generation. Our top leaders were Albert Luthuli, Yusuf Dadu and Walter Sisulu of an older generation. These were the middle generation. Nelson Mandela: passionate, fiery, vigorous; he was asked to join uMkhonto we Sizwe, the underground resistance in South Africa. Oliver Tambo was sent out to get international support to isolate South Africa, to keep the ANC together and to get sanctions imposed. Each did his job in his sphere in a magnificent way, with style, with energy, with resolution, with thoughtfulness, with dignity. And they stayed the course all the way through. They represented a continuity of endeavor, of principled organisation, of finding allies wherever possible, of isolating the enemy, the opposition, and enlarging the scale of the people involved in the resistance, and being utterly, totally unafraid; unafraid to speak the truth, unafraid to fight powers that were very, very powerful; but they were flexible and thoughtful and responsive to changing conditions and changing needs.

And so I'm so proud looking back on my own history: this young, idealistic lawyer, Albie Sachs, from a very different background, and benefiting so much from having leaders of that quality and style who truly represented the nation in excellent ways, and then helped to reconfigure the very notion of civilisation – that civilisation wasn't the white man with all his airs and graces and capacity for cruelty with a smile. The civilised human being was Nelson Mandela, after 27 years in jail, coming out and saying, ‘How can we build the country now?’ The civilised human being was Oliver Tambo with that intense internal kindness and generosity of spirit, and open arms, and thoughtfulness, and creativity. They helped to reconfigure the nature of revolutionary leadership and the nature of what political beings could be like, persons with humanity, and grace, and warmth, and intelligence, and laughter, and compassion.

I had an interesting connection with them, in a way quite personal. The first was completely unexpected. I joined the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign as a 17-year-old, second year law student; volunteer number 8942, or something like that, and I discover volunteer number one is a certain Nelson Mandela who happens to be a lawyer. I had never heard of him before that, but we are connected by the struggle. I used to say afterwards, ‘What's the one good thing apartheid did?’, and people get worried, as if I'm going to say colonialism at least brought railways and stuff like that. The one good thing apartheid did was create anti-apartheid, and that enabled me to be connected.

As a law student, when I went to Johannesburg during vacation time, I would always drop into the office of Mandela and Tambo, and I'd be offered a cup of tea by the office manager. I would meet the one partner or the other. How's the struggle doing in Cape Town? It was just a beautiful embrace on their part, and it was an acknowledgement, on my part, of their role.

Later in exile, I worked very closely with Oliver Tambo when I moved to Maputo, which is fairly close to Lusaka. I helped with the creation of a code of conduct for the ANC, to prevent the use of torture against captured enemy agents. I helped with redrafting the statutes to upgrade them, and he appointed me, together with many others, to the Constitutional Committee to prepare for a new constitutional order in South Africa. He played a magnificent guiding role in our work, with a sense of timing, a sense of getting things right and giving his own vision and words very late in the day; he didn't want us to think ‘Now, what does our president think?’ and ‘How can we please our president?’ On the contrary, he wanted to keep back and let us work, talk, engage, fight with others, and when we've got something ready right at the end, he will make his impact, put on his imprint. It was remarkable. Very interesting things were happening, and a special bond emerged between us.

He was deeply religious. He was planning to marry Adelaide, his partner, in December 1956 and to become ordained as an Anglican priest. Instead, he was raided. I also happened to be raided at that time. He was put on trial for treason. I was kept in reserve. And he felt providence had a different destiny for him. But when he came to prepare a speech for a world conference on religion in London, he came to me to help him write it, and not to the religious desk. He wanted something soulful, something deeply humane and spiritual, that he would feel as a Christian African nationalist, and I would feel as a secular freedom fighter. It was easy for me to find words that could feed in. I think he felt it was enriching what he had to say. So, there was a kind of tender bond between us.

I think there was another connection – softness. Struggles need hard, tough people. They need the iron, they need the resolution, the forcefulness. But struggles also need soft people, and he was a soft person in his bearing. He's dealing with people in his thought, even in his voice, and I see myself as a soft person. I think we felt an intuitive connection in that sense. If there's something resolute and steely, it's not in manner, it's not in style, it's not in our vocal and physical presentation; it's more in a sense of anchoring everything with deep foundations of ideals and meaningful principles. In his case, meaningful in terms of a life of the hereafter, in my case, meaningful in terms of a life that ends when it’s over and I'm gone.

When I was elected to the National Executive of the ANC in 1991, I came up onto the platform, and he’d had a stroke and was weak, but he was there, and everybody was cheering, and I lifted the missing arm I always raised, in this moment of symbolic of acknowledgement of what’s happening. I got onto the platform, and he wanted to greet me, but his right arm, I think, was paralysed, and my right arm was missing, and I had to kind of lean forward, and he kissed my hand to express that tenderness.

So, I tell the story, to say why, when the centennial of his birth was commemorated in the country, I felt I must speak; I must tell people. Mandela, known almost over; known to a point of adulation, and then often a point of repudiation. Oliver Tambo, a name from the past, virtually unknown. I decided to speak at four different universities. University of Pretoria, University of Cape Town, University Western Cape and Stellenbosch University. It was a different theme for each one, and I felt so proud and so connected, and there was so much I was conveying. Not speaking as a praise singer but speaking as somebody who worked closely with Tambo and benefited from him; borrowed so much from him. I came from that revolutionary socialist internationalist background, very cosmopolitan, very important for me. He represented another world; very African, in a way rural, traditional in manner and style, deeply influenced by Christianity, and very aware that he was heir to a tradition of leaders of the ANC, and he's carrying that responsibility through the generations, from the past to the future. He helped, in that sense, to Africanise me in ways that were enormously beneficial. In fact, when I went to Canada for the first time after the bomb, before we got democracy, the ANC representative in Ottawa was very amusing. He said, ‘Albie the Boers have Africanised you; you've got scars like Oliver Tambo.’ And I felt fantastic. I wanted to have scars like Oliver Tambo. And if I'm on TV, don't paint out the scars, I’m really proud of those scars.

So, four lectures, they’re recorded, they’re transcribed, I make certain corrections, and I think they will make a book. At a memorial for a former friend of mine, whom I loved very much, André Odendaal was attending. As an historian, he had worked on the papers of Lionel Forman, who'd been an advocate ahead of me, and who influenced me in style, and manner, and humour, and a whole range of different things. I spoke to André about publishing the book, and he put the book together. He found this terrific picture of the younger, bright Oliver Tambo. And the scars are picked up, even in the aspects of the design. The book was quickly, and cost effectively produced and bought by law schools for first year law students to read, and a second edition was printed. It's a book that I give out quite generously wherever I go. It captures a lot of my life as somebody who learned so much from the struggle, and when I inscribe the book, I always say ‘Oliver Tambo’s Dream, which is still our dream.’

This was a massive undertaking. It's the heaviest literary work of my life, in a way. I was involved in the project because I'd been through that whole process of imagining having a Constitution, setting up the Constitutional Committee, the ideas we had long before the Berlin Wall fell, long before Mandela met with captains of industry; we were already laying the foundations. Oliver Tambo was key to that, and it's a great story for the world to know. The initial idea was, André Odendaal and I would work together, but we actually couldn't work together. Two white guys of a certain age, dogged, independent, forceful, butting heads quite a lot, always intellectual about it; and we ended up with a modality. André had a knowledge of South African history seen from the point of view of African writers, thinkers, journalists and church people, going back for 200 years. It was almost unique, black and white. He was more knowledgeable, I think, than anybody, and through his research and work he had been there, and knew about families, connections, and relationships.

I knew about the inner workings of the ANC in relation to a particular theme. And we ended up where he would produce texts, and I would provide him with materials. He'd do his own research, and I would then jump in on what he said. I would support some things, and I would cut out others and add different things. He would take out some of my additions and put other items back. I would give racy titles and strong opening sentences, like I used to do with judgments in the court. One way and another, we ended up with, I think, one of the great pieces of literature produced in South Africa, maybe in the world of historical presentation, reasoning, very well documented.

He was so precise, a real historian in a classical, old-fashioned sense of if you make a statement, you've got to give your source. If it's your own view, it's got to be clear it's your own view. And I'm introducing an experiential side, filling in gaps, pointing to things that you might know about. The documents don't contain everything. There's lots of stuff that's not the real documents, helping with the periodisation, the emphasis, the importance of things, learning so much from him.

When I was blown up, I was out of off the scene for almost the whole of 1988 when the Harare declaration was being developed, which became the basic template developed by Oliver Tambo support from Govan Mbeki and other people inside the ANC. That was all new to me, as well as many of the historical connections between people, the backgrounds, and family relationships – all very rich and very new to me.

Finally, the book came out. There was one little amusing scene where we had a launch in the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg. It was quite dark, and there was a platform; it's my turn to speak, and I rush forward, and I go over the edge and disappear. I'm very independent, particularly when I've fallen in front of everybody. And I want to show up, so I get up and go to the platform, and I have my say.

This book has had a major impact. What it shows is African agency in the imagining, crafting and final drafting of the Constitution, deep in African history, with huge African thought going into it, with Oliver Tambo, Pallo Jordan and others playing an absolutely critical role in all the major decisions all the way through. And the exiles who'd lived everywhere in the world and had seen firsthand how constitutions worked, and we were able to draw from the problems such as with the people's republic of Mozambique, with so many wonderful breakthroughs made, but a lack of openness, the civil war and destruction; we were learning all the time. And that story is told here in this book.

All the stories don't end with our generation. They don't end with our books. They’re waiting to be told, and they are rich stories. We've got something here in South Africa. There's something in our culture of resistance, the culture of accommodation, the culture of finding solutions, the culture of love of language, the culture of speaking to each other, even when we’re fighting with each other. I'm, in that sense, hopeful that great books will come out in future that will record in an honest and exciting and attractive and sometimes puzzling and delighting and dismaying, and all the different ways that books can enchant and disenchant, all of those things will come forward in future, even if I'm not around forever to be part and parcel of the production.