(Once again other demands seem to interfere with the timeliness of posting. If you want proof that retirement is not blessed with copious amounts of free time, look no further.)
The title to this post is deliberately understated. This particular time represented a time away from the tour and was the highlight of the trip to southern Africa.
The first stop was to visit two friends of one of Irene’s cousins who live in an area of Cape Town called Misty Cliffs – because that is what is there, at least on the day we visited. The house is situated on the shore side of the road that goes up the coast here, along the west side of Cape Peninsula (i.e., the Atlantic Ocean side). The description of Misty Cliffs notes it “is renowned … for windy and wet days, depending on the season.” Well, we certainly hit the season. We sat in the house talking and listening to the rain and winds buffet the house.
The conversation with our hosts, while interesting to us, is probably not to you, so we won’t go into it. These three photos show what it looked like outside the window in the living room, which overlooks the shore and ocean.
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| View from Misty Cliffs House Looking South |
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| View from Misty Cliffs House Looking Northwest |
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| View from Misty Cliffs House Looking West |
After a too short stay with our hosts, they drove us up the coast a bit to another section of greater Cape Town, on the same side of the peninsula. As you can see from the view from this home, we’re still in the same general territory and we also were blessed with the wind and rain at times as well.
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| View of Cape Town Coast Further North |
Our hosts here are very well known in South Africa, and I’ll introduce them and then talk some more about each of them.
Albie Sachs, former justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa is a major influence on the bill of rights found in the South African Constitution of 1996. He is a giant of South African law and justice.
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| Albie Sachs and Me |
Albie’s wife, Vanessa September, is a renowned green architect who has a number of buildings to her credit throughout the African continent.
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| Vanessa September |
Vanessa is the parent (with Albie) of a delightful 10 year old boy and she was quite busy with household chores during much of the time of our visit. She also cooked crepes so we, and her son, wouldn’t starve.
Thanks to the efforts of my former boss, Bill Vickrey, we were honored with an invitation to visit Albie at his home. (I should note that Albie wants to be called that, not Justice Sachs, or any other such formal mode of address.) About 4 days earlier I had received an email from Albie’s assistant stating that Albie would be happy to see us for one hour this afternoon. I was delighted to be going to their home because I had wanted to meet Vanessa and Oliver (their son who is named after Oliver Tambo, the former head of the African National Congress in exile during the apartheid regime). We ended up staying nearly three hours with them, and then Vanessa drove us back to our hotel in Cape Town.
Now, for those of you who may not know who Albie and Vanessa are and why they are important, a not-so-brief history.
Albie was a lawyer in Cape Town in the 1960s, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who were active in the labor movement. He became active in freedom activities and was involved with the African National Congress and its eventual successful struggle to overthrow apartheid. But at a great cost personally to Albie – a story unfortunately common among those who fought against apartheid including the many unknown blacks who lost their lives in the struggle.
Albie was imprisoned several times in solitary confinement during the early sixties. (We are fortunate that Albie is a very gifted writer who has written several books about his experiences. I’ll be referring to several of them – all of which I’ve read and which I heartily recommend.) The time in solitary confinement is described in a book called “Jail Diary” which was also made into a play by the Royal Shakespeare Company. And the book discussing the time between his release for solitary confinement and when he and his first wife went into exile is called “Stephanie on Trial.” These books will give you a first-hand experience on what it was to live under and be opposed to the apartheid regime.
You might have noticed in the picture above of Albie that he is missing his right arm and, while you can’t see it in the photo, the sight in his right eye. In 1988, while a professor and advisor to the African National Congress in Maputo, Mozambique, the apartheid regime in South Africa sent an assassination squad to Maputo to kill him. They attached a bomb to his car. Because the assassins were from South Africa, they assumed he would get in the car on the right hand side, but Albie’s car was for driving in Mozambique and thus he got in on the left side. This small difference probably saved his life although it did result in the loss of his right arm and the sight in his right eye. For a riveting description of this event, and of his long recovery from it, you should read his book, “The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter.” And you should also see the Peabody Award winning film made about Albie by Abby Ginsberg with the same name (http://www.softvengeancefilm.com).
After his return from exile and the fall of apartheid, Albie was active in the drafting of the South African Constitution and was appointed by President Nelson Mandela as one of the initial justices of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Some of the opinions he was involved with are collected and discussed in a book he wrote called, “The Strange Alchemy of Law and Life.” The decisions he was actively involved in included finding the right to same sex marriage as inherent in the freedoms of a South African (in 2005) and overturning the death penalty as inconsistent with the constitution.
Albie was instrumental in the establishment of the Constitutional Court Building in Johannesburg on Constitution Hill and especially in the art on display there. (We were fortunate to be able to tour that site later in the trip when we returned to Johannesburg, with a guided tour that Albie arranged for us.) In 2009, Albie left the court. (He refuses to use what he calls the “r” word.) He was working on something when we arrived and when I asked him what it was he said he wouldn’t tell me but that he rhought I would like it.
Vanessa is also a wonderfully interesting person. You can get a little sense of her in the book she contributed to that Albie wrote called “Free Diary” – a bookend book (if that is a permitted term) to his Jail Diary. We compared various green additions and adaptations that we have each made to our houses. As I mentioned, her last name is September, which is also the last name of several high-up activists in the African National Congress. I asked if she was related to them and she said no – that September was a fairly common last name among black Africans in Cape Town. (Vanessa is what the apartheid regime called coloured, mixed race, in her case, half black African and half Malay.) She noted that all the Septembers in Cape Town got their names not because they were related but because they descended from slaves who had been brought into Cape Town during the month of September. I asked her what other month names were common and she noted October, November, January, February, March, and April. From May through September, due to stormy weather, there were far fewer boats coming into port. And in December, well, the good Christian residents of Cape Town wouldn’t dream of engaging in the slave trade during the Christmas season.
As I mentioned earlier, Albie and Vanessa have a boy named Oliver. Being 10, he was far more interested in his friends than in a couple of old people with strange accents visiting his parents. However, since he had heard we were soon leaving on a safari, he had a joke for us that was probably popular among his age group in South Africa, where giraffes are not strange creatures in a zoo. It’s a riddle: “Why do giraffes only eat a little?” The answer – “Because a little goes a long way.”
Albie dedicates Strange Alchemy to then-two-year-old Oliver in this wonderful wording: “The lovely little boy that Vanessa and I brought into the world two years ago has to our delight just used the word ‘why?’ If one day he want to know why we named him Oliver, why his Daddy has one arm, and why his Daddy is called a Judge, he can find the answers in this book.”
Oliver, after mugging several times for the camera as any good 10-year-old would do, finally consented to a nice picture to be taken by his mother.
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| Irene, Albie Sachs, Me, and Oliver sachs in Front |
A short postscript to this post: After we left South Africa, we went back and spent a few days in London before returning to the states. While there we rented a small flat in the district known as Chiswick (the “w” is silent) in West London, near friends of ours. When we went to pick up the keys from the owners of the flat, we started chatting a bit with them. He turned out to be a retired British Circuit Judge. He asked me what the highlight of my trip was and, choosing not to mention the visit with Albie, I replied that it was the visit to Constitution Hill and the Constitutional Court. He then mentioned that prior to becoming a lawyer, he was in the British foreign service and stationed in Cape Town in the 1960s where he met a young lawyer. He told me he had kept up with the lawyer in the press. Since everything is connected to everything else, of course that lawyer turned out to be Albie. He finished by saying that a few years ago he went to the Constitution Court in Johannesburg and they were unable to get him in touch with Albie.
The evening I emailed Albie telling him of my encounter with this retired judge and that I hadn’t given the judge Albie’s contact information. Albie responded that this person had been “a very good friend at a very difficult time” and would I please forward the judge Albie’s contact information. I, of course, did so and I now seem to have a new best friend in London in the person of a retired Circuit Judge.
Tomorrow – impossible to top today but we will see one of the townships of Cape Town and visit Robben Island.
Link to Full Resolution Photos
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