Albie Sachs: Freedom Fighter

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Academy of Achievement

Film, Politics, Arts, Self-help, Sports, Society & Culture, Success, Literature, Humanitarian, Military, Social Justice, Technology, Podcast, Achievement, Music, Science

4.6 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2016

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Albie Sachs awoke one day in 1988 in a Mozambican hospital, with no remembrance of the car bomb that had maimed his body. But it hadn't broken his will to remain in the struggle to end Apartheid in South Africa. This episode is drawn from Sachs's 3-hour conversation with the Academy of Achievement. He tells stories, with love and with humor, about joining the movement as a young white teenager in the 1950's, about his detentions in solitary confinement, about helping to write his nation's new constitution, and about becoming one of the first justices on The Constitutional Court of South Africa. (c ) American Academy of Achievement 2016

Transcript

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0:00.0	Everything was totally, utterly, completely dark and silent.
0:14.0	And through the darkness I heard a voice saying,
0:25.0	Albee, this is Ivagorido.
0:28.0	You're in the Maputu Central Hospital in Mozambique.
0:35.4	Your arm is in lamentable condition.
0:39.8	You have to face the future with courage.
0:43.0	And into the darkness I said, what happened?
0:47.7	There was a car bomb. The year was 1988, the remarkable man telling the story is Albie Sachs, a South African lawyer and a freedom fighter who would go on to help draft his country's
1:15.4	Constitution and serve as a justice on its constitutional court.
1:20.9	I fainted back into the darkness again but with a sensation of total joy and
1:29.4	euphoria I'd been aware of something terrible happening to me of this darkness enveloping me
1:36.5	completely of being pulled people speaking I thought I'd been kidnapped to be taken back from Mozambique into apartheid South Africa.
1:51.3	And I remembered vaguely shouting,
1:54.0	leave me, leave me in English and in Portuguese,
1:56.0	but not too loudly because I was in a public place.
2:00.0	And then feeling angry if they're going to kidnap me, at least they can put me in a car with decent springs because I felt the pain as we rolled it along.
2:10.0	And then back into the darkness.
2:15.0	I'm suddenly conscious and feeling very light,
2:20.0	lying flat in my back, and I tell myself a joke. A joke about Jaime Cohn who
2:27.4	like me is a Jew he falls off a bus and he gets up and he does this and
2:31.9	someone said,
2:32.6	hi me, I didn't know you a Catholic.
	...

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