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Soft Vengeance

JOURNAL OF THE AFRICAN LITERATURE ASSOCIATION [USA] | VOLUME 8, NUMBER 2 WINTER/SPRING | 2014

The three Ls: Literature, Liberation, Law. I’m going to add a fourth L. OK – and a fifth L: Love and Life. I’m going to tell you a story about a story about a story. And just to give you a little advance notice, there will be two diversions involving two great Americans who influenced my life. I’m going to give you their initials to see if you can anticipate. The one is PR, and the other is HW.

The story about the story about the story:

After the bomb, it took me some time to get better. I was flown to England. I travelled first class for the first time in my life, but I was unconscious. I ended up in a London hospital, which was quite amusing because I was under an assumed name, no one was to know where I was, so I would say I was in a London hospital but would refuse to give its name. Its name? The London Hospital!

And I got better. I learned to sit up. On a marvellous day after about six weeks – my heel had been shattered, and I was as nervous as anything – the physiotherapist says, ‘Now you’re going to stand’. I’m on the edge of the bed, I move forward – that moment of courage when you thrust through your fear. I’m on my feet, and I see my head in a mirror in front of me – shaven, scarred, bandaged, looking very, very serious – going up, and I see my head coming down again. Slowly, he’s back! Look, Mummy, I can stand! That same sense of doing it on your own for the first time as a little child. And then to walk. And I’m getting better.

But there were times early in the morning when I’d wake up feeling very alone. The painkillers are wearing off and I’m totally alone: no hospital people around, no cheerful nurses, and I feel isolated and a little bit sore. And I would be singing to myself [deepens voice, sings], ‘It’s me, it’s me, Oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer. It’s me, it’s me, Oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer’. And this is where the first great American comes in – PR.

Paul Robeson. So, secular, secular, secular Albie is singing what used to be called a ‘negro spiritual’ from Paul Robeson. Robeson was our hero in South Africa. He had for us that same legendary status that Mandela has in the United States. And it wasn’t just that he was tall and imposing and impressed people. There was something about his moral stature and his capacity for embracing everybody. So similar. We adored Paul Robeson in South Africa. And it’s a bit off, you know, that you don’t all even know who Paul Robeson was. It kind of amazes me, you know? And he had a very direct influence on our struggle. I discovered afterwards that when Professor ZK Matthews was studying at the Theological College in New York, he met with Paul Robeson and Paul Robeson said to him, ‘You people in the ANC, the anti-apartheid struggle, are spending so much time denouncing apartheid – quite right. But what about projecting your vision of a future free South Africa?’ And, I was told that the idea of the Freedom Charter, which ultimately became the guiding light of the struggle in South Africa, was born in New York during this discussion between Paul Robeson and Professor ZK Matthews, who went on to become the first African head of Fort Hare University.

‘It’s not my brother or my sister, but it’s me, Oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer. It’s me, it’s me, Oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer. It’s me, it’s me, Oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer’. I thought I would get a few more voices to join in.

Now, in the youth movement I belonged to I had quite a deep bass voice, so I could sing the Paul Robeson songs. One of the songs I had learned was the Chinese national anthem. ‘Arise! You who refuse to be bond slaves’. And what’s amusing is we had the vice-president of the Chinese Supreme Court visiting the Constitutional Court in South Africa a few years ago, and his delegation was sitting on one side of the table – very, very serious. We were sitting on the other side of the table – very, very serious – and I suddenly sang, ‘Arise!’ and they looked at me in astonishment. They realised I was singing the anthem, big smiles came out and we got on quite marvellously afterwards.

The nurses would come down – 6, 6:30. Cheerful, my spirits were going up again – get through the day. And then one day, I got a note from my comrade, Bobby Naidoo, who could also have been a victim of the bomb in Maputo – ten years on Robben Island he had been.

‘Dear Comrade Albie, we will avenge you!’ And I think, ‘Bobby, what do you mean? Are we going to cut off their arms? Blind them in one eye? What kind of country would we be living in?’ And I say to myself, ‘If we get democracy in South Africa, if we get freedom and equality and justice for everyone, that will be my soft vengeance. Roses and lilies will grow out of my arm’.

And a couple of weeks later, somebody came to me very excited, ‘Have you heard? They’ve captured one of the persons who put the bomb in your car, Albie’. And I think to myself, ‘If he’s put on trial, and if the evidence is insufficient to prove that he actually did it and he is acquitted, that will be my soft vengeance’. Because that meant living under the rule of law, and that is much more important than one rascal getting sent to jail.

I don’t know if it’s all of us South Africans, but this South African has spent a lot of time turning the negativity of disaster into the positivity of hope. So I’m starting to begin to think – I wrote a book about my jail experience, The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, and I wrote a second book about my experience again in solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, torture, Stephanie on Trial. I had to write another book. And the ideas were slowly beginning to shape themselves into a narrative, and I knew what the title of the book would be: The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter.

And in fact the opportunity, my first chance to write it, came after I got out of the hospital. Several months later, I was at Columbia University in New York – the same university where Robeson had been – and I wondered, ‘Can I do it?’

I’ve just got my left hand now, but computers, personal computers are coming in. I’m nervous as anything. I type out a couple of pages, and I know. I can do it. I can do it!

And so the manuscript of Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter was typed out high up in a flat on – I forget – the thirteenth, fourteenth floor or something – in a building near Columbia University. Title page: Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter. We’re still in exile, but now it’s a time for envisaging and imagining a new South Africa.

First came imagining the soft vengeance, then living the soft vengeance. And we return from exile. Mandela’s been released; the ANC, PAC [Pan Africanist Congress], Communist Party have been unbanned. We could come back home! It’s part of that fabulous life that starts with surviving the bomb and feeling triumphant, and now we are returning home, not begging for anything, but returning home knowing we are on the road to achieving the things we’ve been fighting for.

The Constitutional Committee of the ANC is very active. We’re invited to talk all over the world, to see different constitutional systems at work – interestingly enough, every country that invited us assumed that they had the best constitution. Even England, which doesn’t have a constitution! And we come to the United States of America and this is where the HW diversion comes in. Any guesses? I’ll make it easy. Chicago. Yes. Harold Washington! Sadly, Harold Washington had died, we didn’t meet him, but his aura was there. The memories were there; they were memories of hope, of breakthrough, of possibilities. And a phrase that he used was passed on to us, I might not get it exactly right, but the sense of it was, and it was so relevant to us in South Africa: ‘No one’, he would say to the people of Chicago, ‘no one – whoever you are – can escape my fairness’. And that’s exactly what we’re thinking in South Africa: no one, whatever you’ve done, whoever you’ve been, will escape our fairness. We don’t want to be like you, only stronger; we don’t want to say, ‘Now it’s our turn’. It isn’t simply about getting into power. It is about transforming the very character of society, and feeling the power and strength of that transformation. It’s not based simply on force. It’s based on core moral ideals that can work in practice, and bring people together instead of dividing them.

And so the fable continues. Imagine you are helping to write your country’s constitution! I heard from US Supreme Court justice, Harry Blackman, a story told to him by Thurgood Marshall about the time when people were writing the Constitution in Philadelphia: ‘It’s not true that my ancestors were not in on the constitution-making process. They were there in breeches and carrying trays’.

Now in South Africa, we are all making the Constitution. And look at us! All our skills are being used not simply to undermine apartheid, or to trip up the enemy, or to denounce the people who were aggressors, but to create the vision of the country we want to live in. It’s why we would go to jail, it’s why, in my case, I lost an arm. It’s what makes sense of the pain. It takes on meaning, it’s all validated, by the accomplishment and achievement of the ideals that brought us into danger in the first place.

And so we draft a new Constitution. Many people died before we got the Constitution, even while the Constitution was being drafted. But we got it. The whole world had predicted a total bloodbath in South Africa, and yet peacefully, if with difficulty, we negotiated a new Constitution.

And in fact, that’s not enough to end the story of fables: we create a Constitutional Court. This is the body that’s now going to ensure that the principles of the Constitution are applied in practice. And I’m one of those people called to serve on it. It’s beyond a dream: the very things you’ve been fighting for in the muddy trenches of the struggle, and now you’re one of the guardians of the product of that dream. And if that’s not enough, we have to decide what kind of building we’re going to work in, and where it will be. And we choose to place our new Constitutional Court building in the heart of the only prison in the world where both Gandhi and Mandela had been locked up. Now, if that’s not an example of soft vengeance, then I don’t know what is.

It’s not denying the past, it’s not saying it didn’t happen, ignoring the history that shaped our despair and hope.

I was reading a very nice brochure about this Marriott Hotel, saying: ‘Oh what a beautiful place Charleston is!’ But there’s no mention of slaves here, no mention of struggles, no mention even of the Civil War which started here! You’ve just got details of pretty buildings and lovely gardens and this very important port, and I feel it’s eviscerating your own history.

I urge you not to be ashamed of your history, but to find a way of facing up to it and making it present as part of your ongoing sense of who you are. And that’s what we were doing as intensely as we could. If you want to have a court that is upholding the fundamental rights of everybody, you place it right in the heart of the site of the deepest pains society has had, unafraid. You have transformed the negativity into positivity. Turned the energy that’s lying in the ground – you don’t say cover it up, deny it, and suppress it, it didn’t happen, forget it. You say, ‘Yes, the energy is there, and now it must become energy for transformation and change’.

I often have the vision of a waterfall with the water thundering down, crashing down, and it gets caught in the funnels of the turbine and the turbines spin and convert the energy, the brutal kinetic energy, into positivity, turning it into light, into heat.

So my Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter is having quite reasonable sales, and getting good reviews. I meet Vanessa. She comes from a different generation – hadn’t herself been actively involved in the struggle. She has a brightness, a vitality, I find immediately attractive, and we get talking. We go our separate ways. She disappears and I forget about her. What I don’t know is that somebody has told her, ‘Albie seemed to take a real shine to you’. And she claims to have said, ‘Who’s Albie?’ I must say that given my appearance, I find that hard to accept. But her story is that she was advised to read my book. So now my book becomes a chapter in the story of our lives.

And she said she had just come out of a very abusive relationship and she found that my book was speaking very, very directly to her: a man who could cry, who could speak about things inside of himself. As time passed, she placed the book next to her bed at night and when she was feeling a little bit lonely she would read a couple of passages.

And then we bump into each other by pure chance at possibly the least romantic place in the whole world: the business-class lounge of Johannesburg airport. And she decides to make a move. And the next thing we’re meeting at a party that she’d helped to organise, and we just hit it off. More time passes, we start living together, and then another book comes out. It’s called The Free Diary of Albie Sachs. And it describes the journey we take together in Europe where I’m reminiscing about a lot of the experiences I had had during the struggle. We travel to meet different friends in different countries, going to Ireland, where the Troubles were beginning to come to an end. And she writes a counterpoint to my Free Diary. She starts off by saying how she had read The Soft Vengeance and fallen in love with the narrator, but now she wanted to know if the guy who wrote the book corresponded to the narrator, to the writer. Fortunately, she didn’t tell me that in advance, it might have made me self-conscious. She doesn’t expressly say it, but it seems I passed the test. She goes on to study architecture and becomes an architect. We’re very close together, and our son, Oliver, is born.

The work of a judge on a constitutional court defending fundamental rights in a country in the process of transformation, is exhilarating, it’s testing, but truly, truly wonderful. Every, every bit of you is using your literary skills to find the language, to find the words to define what it means to be a human being in the twentieth century, now twenty-first century, in Africa, in the world. You’re using your sense of history, your curiosity, your deep sense of fairness. Why, why, why? Why does Mrs Grootboom – and a thousand other people – have to sleep out in the open with their children, with the rains about to come, when so many people are living in beautiful homes with lots of spare rooms nearby? Why, why, why? And what can a constitution do about that? And what can we as lawyers do about that? And why, why, why do we take people who’ve killed others, and put a rope around their neck and literally kill them ourselves to show our abhorrence of killing? Is that permissible? These are profound questions of life and death.

In the last chapter of my ultimate book, The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law, I state that judges have become the great storytellers of our age. They might not be aware of it. And the story they tell might be a dull, boring iteration of a technical set of phrases, detached from the real lived-in world, without any passion and without any sense of humanity. But that is a story in itself. It’s a story about the law, it’s a story about the society, it’s a painful story because all passion, empathy is excluded. But the opinions (judgments) can be stories filled with heart and feeling, not just with emotion like happiness and sadness, anger and sorrow, but with a special kind of emotion related to fundamental rights, to humanity, to human society, to how power can be properly exercised. Writing opinions and judgments tests your literary skills, your emotional skills, your sense of history, your sense of society, your sense of your country, and your willingness to listen to your colleagues. We have to forge and shape something extremely precious and extremely pressurised, something durable. That was my job, my life, my way of earning my living.

To me that is part of the soft vengeance. And it’s extremely powerful.

The power of validating your life’s aspirations, the power of having a society with strong moral foundations that unite people and bring them together and connect them, is well beyond the power that comes out of the barrel of a gun or the placement of electrodes or the force of a boot, or even sending someone to jail.

The story’s almost over. Someone’s making a film of my life, and she decides we must go to Maputo and film me at the site where I was blown up. And I say, that’s fine, but Vanessa and Oliver must come as well. Oliver’s now about three and a half. He climbs into bed in the morning, lies between Vanessa and myself, and we play a game with short arm and long arm. He loves short arm. And long arm is speaking to short arm, saying, ‘Wakey, wakey, wakey!’ and short arm jumps up in surprise. And I want him to understand why his daddy looks funny and different, and I want him to hear it from me.

We go to the spot, and the understanding is that if the film comes out corny or false, we’re not going to use it. And I sit down on the pavement where my body lay on the ground, and hold Oliver with my left arm, and tell him how I walk down the stairs of that building, I’m on my way to the beach, my car is parked over there, and boooom! I’m hit, and I don’t know what’s happening. I find I can tell him about that, about the bomb, I can tell him all that, and also that some TV journalists happened to come by and put me in their van and took me to the hospital. I can tell him all that. I can tell him about the doctors deciding my arm is so messed up, that I’d be much happier and be in less pain, if they cut off and put bandages on the broken part. I can tell him about that. But I can’t tell him why it happened. I find I can’t.

I don’t want to tell him about apartheid. I don’t want to tell him that his mummy and I, his daddy, wouldn’t have been allowed to live together, to love each other, to conceive him. I don’t want to. I don’t want to tell him about that world where everybody’s lives were defined by race. He’ll learn – of course he’ll learn! Racism is still everywhere in the world. But I don’t want him to learn it from me. I feel it will be pulling me back emotionally, and pulling him back, from the world in which he’s growing up as a young, free child.

And I wonder to myself if possibly the time hasn’t come to stop even talking about soft vengeance, and not to think of vengeance at all, not even in this benign, transformative form. Maybe the experience of living soft vengeance has become so pervasive, that even the ambiguous phrase itself should disappear. Maybe the time has come to just live in, explore and develop the society – enjoy the society – that soft vengeance has created.