Books - review- The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law. By Albie Sachs.

Published: 11 March 2010

ALBIE Sachs carries the scars of South Africa’s apartheid regime wherever he goes. 

The judge, who played a key role in writing the country’s constitution following the fall of the racist state, and then helped heal the raw wounds of oppression when apartheid crumbled, was targeted by South Africa’s secret police in the 1980s.

They went into Mozambique, where Albie was teaching law,  and placed a bomb under the seat of his car.

It exploded. 

He lost his right arm and eye, and was lucky to survive. 

Albie has since met the government agent who tried to kill him, and has managed to find a way to forgive.

“The most dramatic experiences in my life involved terrorism and torture,” he says.

“A simple response   to my past would have been to show unrelenting opposition to those who engaged in the grossly inhuman practices of the apartheid era. How, I could have asked, could people who had mercilessly set out to negate the right to equality and a fair trial now seek to benefit from the very concepts they had sought to destroy?” 

Instead, he realised that there had to be another way for justice to be seen to be done without stopping the newly democratic country moving forward. The answer was the  Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 

The judge was a key figure in establishing it, an experience he recounts in his latest book, The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law. 

South Africa is now held up around the world as an example of how to organise a just constitution that guarantees rights for all. Albie was a key figure in this remarkable leap from Dark Age legal systems to modern courts, being on the first raft of appointees made to the South African constitutional court when the African National Congress led by Nelson Mandela won power in 1994, in the country’s first truly democratic elections.

The book covers a range of crucial cases he and his nine fellow constitutional court judges have considered during their tenure, setting new benchmarks for the country’s fledgling legislature to adhere to.

But while the layman may think of a court judgment as a dry document written in barely legible legalese, Albie’s talents lie in his ability to tell a story. His book contains examples of judgments he crafted and the background as to how they came about. 

“My 15 years involved in the court were coming to an end,” he says.

“It was like an extreme sport. It requires total involvement in what you are doing, and you are intellectually pushed to the limits.”

But the court did not solely deal with cementing political and civil rights. Economic and human rights were just as important in creating a stable state in a poverty-ridden country. He writes of judgments such as the “Port Elizabeth Municipality Case”, where the court held that it would be unfair to evict poor black families from the shacks built on land owned by white people without mediation. It is not only the dignity of the poor that is assailed when homeless people are driven from pillar to post in a desperate quest for a place where they and their families can rest their heads,” wrote Albie. “Our society as a whole is demeaned when state action intensifies rather than mitigates their marginalisation.”

It shows that the law is made up of more than just straightforward legal judgments.

“It is not just pure logic and reason,” he explains.

“It is about passion and empathy, concern for human dignity. 

“There were  groups living in dire conditions and society could not deliver basic dignity to everybody if these large inequalities were not addressed. It was not for the courts to take over the government and say how this should be dealt with. But it was a case of enshrining fundamental rights in law as benchmarks to guide our society. The South African constitutional court has pioneered a new form of jurisprudence regarding the influence of social and economic rights.

This is allied with a determination to ensure the court’s work is as accessible to as many people as possible – hence the book.

“Judges are among the grand storytellers but there are many ways of telling the story,” he states. “If the judgments are totally terse, formal, expressed in dense legalese, these are stories in itself. That is indicative of the outcome. Judgment writing has opened up in recent decades to become simplified, clearer and as a result more persuasive.”

And the court’s groundbreaking rulings have made Albie and his peers a beacon for other courts around the world. 

• The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law. By Albie Sachs. Oxford University Press £19.99