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This stirring collection of essays and talks by activist and former judge Albie Sachs is the culmination of more than 25 years of thought about constitution-making and non-racialism. Following the Constitutional Court's landmark Nkandla ruling in March 2016, it serves as a powerful reminder of the tenets of the Constitution, the rule of law and the continuous struggle to uphold democratic rights and freedoms. We, The People offers an intimate insider's view of South Africa's Constitution by a writer who has been deeply entrenched in its historical journey from the depths of apartheid right up to the politically contested present. As a second-year law student at the University of Cape Town, Sachs took part in the Defiance Campaign and went on to attend the Congress of the People in Kliptown, where the Freedom Charter was adopted in 1955. Three decades later, shortly after the bomb attack in Maputo that cost him his arm and the sight in one eye, he was called on by the Constitutional Committee of the African National Congress to co-draft (with Kader Asmal) the first outline of a Bill of Rights for a new democratic South Africa. In 1994, he was appointed by Nelson Mandela to the Constitutional Court, where he served as a judge until 2009. We, The People contains some of Sachs' most memorable public talks and writings, in which he takes us back to the broad-based popular foundations of the Constitution in the Freedom Charter. He picks up on Oliver Tambo's original vision of a non-racial future for South Africa, rather than one based on institutionalised power-sharing between the races. He explores the tension between perfectability and corruptibility, hope and mistrust, which lies at the centre of all constitutions. Sachs discusses the enforcement of social and economic rights, and contemplates the building of the Constitutional Court in the heart of the Old Fort Prison as a mechanism for reconciling the past and the future. Subjective experience and objective analysis interact powerfully in a personalised narrative that reasserts the value of constitutionality not just for South Africans, but for people striving to advance human dignity, equality and freedom across the world today.
Vusi Mavimbela is one of South Africa’s foremost political adventurers and wanderers. His memoir Time is Not the Measure provides penetrating pen portraits of many South African and African political actors and a galaxy of senior ANC exiles. He illuminates the personalities of many influential people in South Africa’s early democratic governments. But the heart of Mavimbela’s narrative lies in his unique experience of working as a top administrator and counsellor in the offices of both Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. He describes the conflict between those two flawed principals and captures the drama of their struggle and its destructive fallout for the new South African state. Mavimbela offers a potent warning: loyalty and long service to a political party is no guarantee of wise and effective leadership.
Samora Machel (1933–1986) led his people through a war against their Portuguese colonizers and in 1975, became the first president of the People’s Republic of Mozambique. His military successes against a colonial regime backed by South Africa, Rhodesia, the United States, and its NATO allies enhanced his reputation as a revolutionary hero. In 1986, during the country’s civil war, Machel died in a plane crash under circumstances that remain uncertain.
One of South Africa's best-known writers during the apartheid era, Alex La Guma was a lifelong activist and a member of the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. Persecuted and imprisoned by the South African regime in the 1950s and 60s, La Guma went into exile in the United Kingdom with his wife and children in 1966, eventually serving as the ANC's diplomatic representative for Latin America and the Caribbean in Cuba. Culture and Liberation captures a different dimension of his long writing career by collecting his political journalism, literary criticism, and other short pieces published while he was in exile. This volume spans La Guma's political and literary life in exile through accounts of his travels to Algeria, Lebanon, Vietnam, Soviet Central Asia, and elsewhere, along with his critical assessments of Paul Robeson, Nadine Gordimer, Maxim Gorky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Pablo Neruda, among other writers. The first dedicated collection of La Guma's exile writing, Culture and Liberation restores an overlooked dimension of his life and work, while opening a window on a wider world of cultural and political struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century.
Many critical theorists talk and write about the day after the revolution, but few have actually participated in the constitution of a revolutionary government. Emeritus Justice Albie Sachs was a freedom fighter for most of his life. He then played a major role in the negotiating committee for the new constitution of South Africa, and was subsequently appointed to the new Constitutional Court of South Africa. Therefore, the question of what it means to make the transition from a freedom fighter to a participant in a revolutionary government is not abstract, in Hegel's sense of the word, it is an actual journey that Albie Sachs undertook. The essays in this book raise the complex question of what it actually means to make this transition without selling out to the demands of realism. In addition, the preface written by Emeritus Justice Albie Sachs and his interview with Drucilla Cornell and Karin van Marle, further address key questions about revolution in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries: from armed struggle to the organization of a nation state committed to ethical transformation in the name of justice. Albie Sachs and transformation in South Africa: from revolutionary activist to constitutional court judge illuminates the theoretical and practical experiences of revolution and its political aftermath. With first-hand accounts alongside academic interrogation, this unique book will intrigue anyone interested in the intersection of Law and Politics.
From a young age Albie Sachs played a prominent part in the
struggle for justice in South Africa. As a result he was detained
in solitary confinement, tortured by sleep deprivation and
eventually blown up by a car bomb which cost him his right arm and
the sight of an eye. His experiences provoked an outpouring of
creative thought on the role of law as a protector of human dignity
in the modern world, and a lifelong commitment to seeing a new era
of justice established in South Africa.
In his annual presidential address on 8 January 1986, ANC president Oliver Tambo called on South Africans to make apartheid ungovernable through militant action. But unknown to the world, the quiet-spoken mathematics teacher and aspirant priest turned reluctant revolutionary had also on that very day set up a secret think tank in Lusaka, which he named the Constitution Committee, giving it an ‘ad hoc unique exercise’ that had ‘no precedent in the history of the movement’. Knowing that all wars end at a negotiating table, and judging the balance of forces to be moving in favour of the liberation movement, he wanted the ANC to be prepared and to be holding the initiative after the political collapse of apartheid. Guided by a brilliant analysis by Pallo Jordan, Tambo instructed his new think tank to prepare a constitutional framework for a liberated, non-racial, democratic South Africa. Their task was to formulate the principles and draft the outlines of a constitution that could unite South Africa when the time came to talk in the fledgling days of freedom and democracy. The seven-member team, including Albie Sachs, Kader Asmal and Zola Skweyiya, started deliberating and reporting to Tambo. In correspondence, they typically addressed him as ‘Dear Comrade President’. Drawing on the personal archives of participants, Dear Comrade President explains how this process, which fundamentally influenced the history of contemporary South Africa, unfolded. Why and how did it happen? What were the first written words? When and where were they put on paper? By whom? What values did they espouse? And how did the committee’s work fit into the broader struggle? This book answers these questions in ways that have not been done before and provides paradigm-changing insights into the purposeful first steps taken in the making of South Africa’s Constitution.
The precipitous rise and controversial fall of a formidable African leader. Samora Machel (1933-1986), the son of small-town farmers, led his people through a war against their Portuguese colonists and became the first president of the People's Republic of Mozambique. Machel's military successes against a colonial regime backed by South Africa, Rhodesia, the United States, and its NATO allies enhanced his reputation as a revolutionary hero to the oppressed people of Southern Africa. In 1986, during the country's civil war, Machel died in a plane crash under circumstances that remain uncertain. Allen and Barbara Isaacman lived through many of these changes in Mozambique and bring personal recollections together with archival research and interviews with others who knew Machel or participated in events of the revolutionary or post-revolutionary years.
Many critical theorists talk and write about the day after the revolution, but few have actually participated in the constitution of a revolutionary government. Emeritus Justice Albie Sachs was a freedom fighter for most of his life. He then played a major role in the negotiating committee for the new constitution of South Africa, and was subsequently appointed to the new Constitutional Court of South Africa. Therefore, the question of what it means to make the transition from a freedom fighter to a participant in a revolutionary government is not abstract, in Hegel's sense of the word, it is an actual journey that Albie Sachs undertook. The essays in this book raise the complex question of what it actually means to make this transition without selling out to the demands of realism. In addition, the preface written by Emeritus Justice Albie Sachs and his interview with Drucilla Cornell and Karin van Marle, further address key questions about revolution in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries: from armed struggle to the organization of a nation state committed to ethical transformation in the name of justice. Albie Sachs and transformation in South Africa: from revolutionary activist to constitutional court judge illuminates the theoretical and practical experiences of revolution and its political aftermath. With first-hand accounts alongside academic interrogation, this unique book will intrigue anyone interested in the intersection of Law and Politics.
"A literate, informative, vivid, and most poignant account of what happens to a society when it officially insists on a legal order that systematically denies the overwhelming majority of its population the minimum requirements of justice."--Richard A. Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University
This publication is the outcome of a conference marking the beginning of South Africa's third decade of democracy hosted in November 2014 by the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA) and the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute (TMALI) at the University of South Africa (Unisa). The conference was entitled 20 Years of South African democracy: So where to now? The main focus of the conference was projective reflections into the next two decades of democracy. It aimed to deal with the theoretical perspectives underpinning the state of South Africa in two decades of democracy and, most importantly, prospects for the future. This publication covers the following main themes of the conference: Reflections on historical moments; The South African political economy; Values, nation formation and social compacting; Innovation and transdisciplinary knowledge for action; Building a capable development state. Contained herein are inputs from a wide range of prominent South African and international thinkers, practitioners and activists. Some are in the form of prepared papers and others are taken from transcripts of presentations. They are presented in the hope that the thought-provoking and incisive discourse that took place at the conference can contribute to the continuation of a discussion that, by its nature, can have no end.
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