Charleston welcomes legendary South African freedom fighter Albie Sachs

BY ADAM PARKER

Perhaps once or twice in a lifetime, if you’re lucky, you get to meet a truly great example of human dignity and justice, someone who has changed the world.
The South African high court justice Albie Sachs, now retired from the bench, was in Charleston to deliver a couple of talks, participate in the African Literature Association conference, hosted by the College of Charleston, and meet a few friends and admirers.
Sachs, 78, was appointed to South Africa’s Constitutional Court by Nelson Mandela in 1994, soon after the legendary anti-apartheid leader won the presidency in the country’s first inclusive democratic elections.
Like Mandela and thousands of other revolutionaries, Sachs was imprisoned for his activism during the dark days of apartheid. Twice he was jailed, on no charge, first held in solitary confinement for 90 days, released, then immediately held again. He spent a total of 168 days in a small concrete box, he said. He watched day give way to night, and then return. He lost track of time. He had only a Bible to read, which he rationed so he wouldn’t finish too quickly.
“It was very hard, harder than I imagined.”
After about a month, a guard appeared with a written order. Sachs struggled to read it, having gotten used to the Bible’s vertical columns, but soon realized that it was a court order permitting him more books.
Two years later, he was arrested again. The state’s 90-day law, permitting authorities to detain political prisoners without charge, had become a 180-day law. This time, Sachs was interrogated and tortured with sleep deprivation.

Agitation

No one ever told him what offense he had committed. But it was obvious why he was the target of the security forces.
He was thus treated because he was a humanist and an agitator for change, because his immigrant father, Solomon Sachs, a labor union leader, had written him a note many years before: “Albert, I wish you a happy 6th birthday. May you grow up to be a soldier in the fight for liberation.”
He was imprisoned because his mother had taught a young man named Moses Katani how to read and write, then went to work for him when Katani became general secretary of the Communist Party of South Africa and a prominent member of the African National Congress. “The question of race wasn’t an issue for us,” Sachs said. “She had enormous respect for him.”
He was jailed and mistreated because of his membership in the Modern Youth Society, a group of radical, mostly white students who purposefully challenged South Africa’s segregation laws.
He was detained because, for 10 years after obtaining his law degree, he defended poor blacks against an oppressive regime and challenged the state’s racist statutes, often for no pay.
Had he remained in South Africa, he likely would have been arrested again — so warned Stephanie Kemp, one of his clients and a political activist, imprisoned at the same time. He applied for an exit permit and left for London, to spend seven years in exile. That second stint in jail broke him, he confessed reluctantly.
“I’ve never really fully got over that,” he said. “Collapsing on the floor—.”
In London, Kemp joined him, they married and had two children. He earned a Ph.D and taught law. But the feelings of statelessness were too strong to endure, Sachs said. So he left England, and his family, for Mozambique, located just northeast of his homeland. In Mozambique, a black-led revolution had overthrown the Portuguese colonists, and the sense of liberation was intoxicating to Sachs. Quickly, from the city of Maputo, close to the South African border, he became active in politics again.
“Even when I was happy in England I was unhappy,” he said. “In Mozambique, even when I was unhappy I was happy.” This was the place he knew, and everything, from the feel of the earth to the smells produced after a rain, reassured him.

Renewal

One day in 1988, 11 years after returning to Mozambique, he decided to go to the beach for a swim. When he opened the door of his car, the bomb planted by South African security forces exploded, nearly killing him. Apartheid was under siege worldwide, and the Afrikaner government was lashing out at its perceived enemies.
“The bomb restored my optimism,” Sachs said, unexpectedly. “They came for me and I survived. I felt fantastic. I knew as I got better my country would get better.”
After learning how to write with his left hand, how to regain his balance walking, how to see the world through one functioning eye, he set himself to writing a new constitution for South Africa. Six weeks after Mandela’s release from his 27-year prison term, Sachs, who was at the time teaching human rights at Columbia University and who had been in exile for 24 years, returned to his homeland.
“I was back, it was joyous,” he said.
He helped organize the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a mechanism for talking about what was once unspeakable and for offering those who acknowledge their crimes an avenue to amnesty and integration. That process in South Africa, though not without controversy, enabled the peaceful transition to multiracial democracy and has served as an important model for many throughout the world.
Sachs has decided cases before the Constitutional Court which further advanced human and civil rights, including one that legalized gay marriage while at the same time affirming religious freedom.
He called that case “a touchstone for something much wider” in a diverse society.
“If we can’t manage to find equality across difference, then we are finished,” he said.

Photo by Ram Eisenberg

Biography of Detroit a sad, fascinating look at condition of post-industrial supercity

BY ADAM PARKER

DETROIT CITY IS THE PLACE TO BE: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis. By Mark Binelli. Metropolitan Books. 336 pages. $28.

On March 1, Michigan’s Republican governor and venture capitalist, Rick Snyder, declared that the city of Detroit was no longer able to manage its eviscerated budget and, pending a 10-day appeal period, he would appoint an emergency financial manager to step in and try to set things right.

It was an announcement decades in the making, and one Mayor Dave Bing and many others had hoped could be averted. It had been postponed already: In April last year, when Detroit was awash in $12 billion of debt, city council signed a compromise “consent agreement” permitting a nine-member oversight board to help implement budgetary reforms.

Attempts at a state takeover were made before that, prompted by the stubborn desolation and political failures of a city that has lost more than half its population since 1950. Today, perhaps 700,000 remain within its borders. (Most whites and blacks with means have left for the suburbs, an exodus that gained steam after the 1967 urban rebellion.)

It’s no secret that Detroit is a mess, and Mark Binelli’s “Detroit City is the Place to Be” describes the stunning decay with journalistic flare. He treats his sad subject with smart dashes of humor and wit. He refuses to wallow in uncalled-for optimism, but he doesn’t give up on his hometown either.

The result is a fabulously written case study of a major American city which, in many ways, exemplifies the sad failures of capitalism and partisan politics. The topic is Detroit, but the allegory is universal, making the book essential reading for all those who care about economic justice.

Binelli, a magazine journalist who’s written mostly for Rolling Stone, returned to his place of birth for a two-year stint to explore what all the fuss is about. There has been a lot of fuss: lately publications such as The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine and Time have been featuring photo essays and intriguing stories that emphasize either Detroit’s utter devastation or its struggling urban farmers and entrepreneurial hipsters who are moving in, clearing the burnt carcasses of abandoned homes and attempting to juice up the place a little.

One of the great accomplishments of Binelli’s book is the utter lack of sentimentality or romanticism. One might be forgiven for getting excited about the thin ray of hope cast upon the city by the few who care enough to risk their investments (and lives) in this desolated patch of earth, for it suggests redemption and rebirth. But the challenges, which have mounted substantially over the decades and which are methodically laid bare by Binelli, are profound enough to temper such enthusiasm.

The tax base cannot sustain basic city services. Whole streets go without illumination at night for lack of funds. Violent crime remains a plague engulfing what’s left of the population — mostly very poor, black people. The film industry, spurred by tax incentives that proved absurd, came for a while, then went. Whole skyscrapers are purchased for a dime, but remain largely vacant for lack of residential interest.

The city’s politics are alternatingly tragic and pathetic. A few people really are trying to address the problems, but others are too concerned with personal matters to affect any significant change. The previous mayor, the lawless and corrupt Kwame Kilpatrick, eventually text-messaged himself out of office in 2008. He was replaced by Bing, a sober technocrat, businessman and former basketball star, who nevertheless didn’t always get along with city council.

Binelli writes engagingly about the auto industry and its legacy, about the horrific crime that verges on the absurd, about the fascinating history that made Detroit into an industrial supercity, then helped undo it. All of this is presented with an observant wit and informed by lots of direct interaction with Detroit’s various actors, from politicians to emergency responders to the DIY urban farmers and post-industrial reclaimers.

Another of the book’s great attributes is its focus on people. Revealing conversations abound; and Binelli’s clever analysis and personal touch helps this urban biography add up to much more than its respective parts. The humanity thus laid bare, one is inclined not to lose all hope. But the impending state takeover is reason enough to rely little on such reverie. Binelli addresses the matter and concludes that any state oversight is unlikely to help, especially when the overseers are proponents of what’s euphemistically called “austerity.” For economic austerity is precisely what Detroit needs the least.

“Detroit City is the Place to Be” lingers in the reader’s mind long after its replaced on the shelf. The post-apocalyptic images — of Binelli and a guide scaling an abandoned skyscraper, of human scavengers transforming factory detritus into public art, of entire neighborhoods left to burn and rot — unsettle and confuse. This is the United States of America. We have allowed this to happen?

And Detroit is only the worst example. Other communities are enduring the hardship of our new age, too. Will we let them rot? Or will we transform our economy so that it might rescue those left behind?

Reviewer Adam Parker is Book Page Editor for The (Charleston) Post and Courier and a Detroit native.