Albie Sachs: Our Shakespearian Fool

Abstract

Albie Sachs has the aura of a man who has been touched by death. One Sunday in 1988, Sachs walked to his car parked on a Mozambican beach front. As he turned the key in the lock, the car exploded. Miraculously, he was not killed, but he was severely injured. He lost his right arm and the sight of one eye. The South African security forces had set the booby trap. Sachs is fond of comparing his mutilated arm to South Africa: a withered stump, maimed by the forces of apartheid. And like the spirit of the nonracial South Africa, he is not the dying type. His audacity and humor and intelligence are as visible as his savaged arm. He moves from the crowded halls of community cultural workers to the conference rooms of academics to add, with some delight, fire to the fire of his controversial document, Preparing Ourselves for Freedom [see the text of Sachs's speech in this issue]. As a seer, a provocateur, a false prophet, an audacious white exile, a veteran ANC member, a comrade rabbi, his identity may be in dispute, but having been touched by death, he has an immunity-a license for criticism and general provocation-and a large captive audience. His martyrdom is starkly visible, and how difficult it is to criticize a martyr. Albie Sachs wrote Preparing Ourselves for Freedom for an in-house African National Congress (ANC) seminar of exiled cultural workers in 1989. The paper was first published in South Africa in a newspaper on 2 February I990-the day that President F.W. de Klerk presented his historic program of reform to the nation. The enormous response to Sachs's paper is perhaps more fascinating than the document itself. It embodies the full complexity of the South African politico-cultural nexus, and the dreams and fears and passionate polemics of South African cultural workers.