The prodigious, public, personal Albie Sachs: Creator, lawyer, democrat

Very few public personas are sufficiently emotionally evolved or confident to share the most intimate aspects of their lives.

But if you have had your flesh sprawled across the tarmac and had to fight your way back to not just survival, but to a life brilliantly lived, the conceptually manufactured boundaries between intimate and public, interior and exterior, insider and outsider, exile and inside, inmate and judge blur. As does the dichotomy between creative and lawyer, emotive expressive and rationalist.

But Judge Albie Sachs has managed that with a chic insouciance that is symbolised in his Madiba/mandarin/Balinese shirt-enrobed, Panama-hat topped persona – his physical signature. That and his truncated right arm that waves and remonstrates when he talks, the shirt sleeve that is animated more than any killer-bomb could have envisaged.

At 91 years, it would appear that Sachs is not ready to shake off this mortal coil just yet. Thankfully he has chosen to curate and expansively share the many facets of a life that defied the regime’s desire to snuff it out.

From before and beyond that fateful day on 7 April 1988, when he was targeted for dead in the streets of Maputo, which marked the cruellest of his personal “divisions”; from Albie Sachs the universal freedom fighter to Albie Sachs fighter for much more personal life-restoring freedom for all: The fighter for “Soft Vengeance”; from the author of The Jail Diaries of Albie Sachs, emerged The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter.

At the time of his long recovery, Sachs swore that Democracy Won would be his life mission – the ultimate vengeance to the warlords of apartheid.

From exile as scholar, lecturer, politician, negotiator and architect of the ANC constitution, to Home as co-architect of the most celebrated national Constitution and Constitutional Court judge, and curator of the ConCourt art collection.

Sachs remains as active now as he has been over the decades, filling his days with reconstructing and curating and celebrating every single one of those 33,215 days straddling his many passions: democracy, law, art and life lived full – including his beloved Vanessa and Oliver found later in life.

He is not shy to share details of his earlier loves and family – his wife Stephanie, sons Alan and Michael who remained in England when he moved to Mozambique, and his ongoing penchant for passion – both romantic and that wild abandonment and freedom of the natural world’s oceans and mountains.

This no-holds-barred personal collation, combined with the prodigious expanse of articles, judgments, books, autobiographies, speeches spanning the personal political and public personas is preserved in an ongoing, multiplatformed curation of his life.

Currently, this includes a deeply emotional, illuminating and sensitive theatrical performance, Albie Sachs: Fathers, Sons and Soft Vengeance, at the Theatre on the Square; a year-long exhibition at Zeitz MOCAA of his own private and public collections and recollections in Spring Is Rebellious: The Art & Life of Albie Sachs, and a gloriously abundant and animated online portal – Albie Sachs’s forever digital home.

The delicately imperfect heart-shaped symbols that provide the iconography of the site are offset by the carefully crafted typography – a reconstruction of his own script, painfully recreated afresh with his left hand following the bombing.

Until 24 May, at the Theatre on the Square, Graham Hopkins, directed by Dr Fiona Ramsay with deep sensitivity, insight and intellectual power, plays Albie Sachs.

Not the mighty ConCourt judge, but the vulnerable human being – his animated severed arm a strapped-on prosthetic manipulated by Hopkins, an ironic inversion for the real limb that resisted a prosthetic but sufficiently present to remind us of the “discomfort” of his physical severance from part of his whole – and his intimate moments.

Sachs shares the complex emotions attached to being the son of the famed trade unionist and anti-apartheid activist, Solly Sachs, a distant father, like Albie bridging the gap between first-generation émigré and committed insider, buoyed utterly by his commitment to justice and democracy; his relationship with Oliver now a teenager, born late in life into a democratic era and less consumed by social justice at this time; and, his intimate relationship with himself.

At a time when the last of the stalwarts have shaken off their mortal coils, Albie Sachs towers above us all.

The many facets of Albie Sachs continue to inspire us.

The public one: The ConCourt where the abstractions of legal argument set down in law are offset by the expansive ConCourt art collection that he was instrumental in curating – personally soliciting each work as a donation.

And the private world (now public): His book, this play and the Albie Sachs exhibition at the Zeitz MOCAA.

Spring might be rebellious. But the seasons change. May the infinite spirit of change remain forever infused with Albie Sachs’s joie de vivre. DM

Albie Sachs: Fathers, Sons and Soft Vengeance is at Theatre on the Square until 24 May 2026.

Spring Is Rebellious: The Art & Life of Albie Sachs at Zeitz MOCAA closes on 23 August 2026.