Albie

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And I think it was about midday or early afternoon, I indicate that I’m going to say something. And they get the paper and I say, “I’m making this statement under duress, after being kept awake right through the night into the morning, water being poured on me.” There was a clandestine, quite active sabotage movement — who supported Hitler in South Africa — of extreme right-wing Afrikaner nationalists. Very anti-British and also very racist. That was around. There’d be strange things when you entered a cinema. They always ended with playing, “God Save the King,” and you were expected to stand. Most people would stand, and some would sit. That was their little way of publicly showing their opposition to the war. Albie Sachs: There weren’t near as many children’s books then as there are now, but I would have read a few. A little bit older are the books that I remember. And yet, extremely important to me, there was one book that was fables.

Albie Sachs: I remember at the time of the millennium, people looked at predictions made before, and almost none of them came true. A whole range of other things happened, so I think unpredictability is something we’ve got to live with.Albie wakes in the night to go to the bathroom. But when he gets there, he finds that the bathroom fixtures have been removed. Albie is building a snowman when he's interrupted by Mr. Kidhater-Cox, who accuses him of stealing his new gloves.

The issues of conscience played a bigger role in my life than issues of race. I didn’t have to overcome the usual racial stereotypes and prejudices that most white kids had growing up and battle for years afterwards to get rid of those prejudices. I wouldn’t say I wasn’t influenced by them. They seep in all the time consciously and unconsciously. It wasn’t a major battle for me. But the question of integrity of conscience — what it means to you as a human being, as a person, to believe in what you believe, not to pretend to believe because people expect it of you, even people close to you, even people whom you love, or your community or your peers at school, but because you truly believe, because it’s true to you and it’s part of who you are — that I kind of worked out at that age. And as I say, I often felt very, very lonely, very lonely and — but I got through it. Warped, funny, with extraordinary plots, most episodes end with the innocent Albie getting the blame, and some very angry person shouting "ALBIE!" Albie's piano lesson with Olga is interrupted when he spots three hippos acting suspiciously in the garden.Albie Sachs graduated from secondary school at 15, and entered the University of Cape Town, where he soon fell in with a group of like-minded students known as the Modern Youth Society, dedicated to free thought, progressive politics and an egalitarian, multiracial society. In 1952, at age 17, he joined a campaign of civil disobedience against apartheid, the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign. He was arrested for sitting in an area of the General Post Office reserved for non-whites. He was released when the judge learned his age, but it would not be his last run-in with the law. 21-year-old attorney Albie Sachs stands up for freedom. The Congress of the People meets at Kliptown in 1955 to adopt the Freedom Charter, calling for a mulitracial democracy in South Africa. (Robben Island Museum Archives)