Achieving the Impossible

Head Table Guests

John H. Tory, Partner, Tory Tory DesLauriers & Binnington and 3rd Vice-President, The Empire Club of Canada; Jacinth Herbert, Associate with the law firm, Mary Eberts and Past President, The Delos Davis Law Guild; Larry Lowenstein; Partner, Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt and Co-ordinator, Canadian Supporters of the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa; Marilyn Pilkington, Dean, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University; The Rt. Rev. Bishop Finlay, Anglican Diocese of Toronto; Patrick C. Evans, Consul General, South African Consulate; Denise Cole, Special Assistant, Social Policy and Media Relations to Mayor, City of Toronto and a Director, The Empire Club of Canada; Henry G. Blumberg, Gardiner, Blumberg and Convenor of the University of Capetown Alumni Association; Stephen Pincus, Goodman & Goodman and Chairman, South African Business Network; and The Hon. Charles Dubin, Chief Justice of Ontario.

Introduction by John Campion

Mandela Forgives Diaz and Rhodes

It was July, 1991, almost 18 months to the day, when the sun had set on the old South Africa. Eighteen months prior to that July day, F.W. de Klerk had stunned the world, and black and white Africa alike. The President of South Africa had lifted a thirty-year ban on the African National Congress and other organisations and allowed political exiles to return. de Klerk had ended restrictions on the political activities of 500 anti-government activists, including Nelson Mandela.

On that July day in 1991, waiving the stump of his right arm in amandla power salute, Albie Sachs walked to the front of the hall to claim his position as a member of the ANC's policy-making national executive committee at the Watershed Congress of the ANC. He had been mutilated by a bomb planted in his car in Maputo in 1987. Albie Sachs' life was testimony that whites too had made terrible sacrifices in the struggle against apartheid.

Mr. Sachs stood with many but stood uniquely as a white man against a history of oppression against people the government had called blacks and coloureds. The original inhabitants of the beautiful Southern Africa were the Khoikhoi and the San and the Bantu-speaking population. The systematic oppression of those people had been in place since the founding of the Dutch East India Company in 1652. Conquest, slavery, economic enslavement and formal government policy had all worked a vicious encirclement of oppression.

The history of South Africa was not without its colourful characters. They included Bartholomeu Dias who first led the Portuguese expedition to reach South Africa in 1487. It involved Cecil Rhodes and Peter Kruger; it involved Ghandi, Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. As you know, it is the story of gold, diamonds and wine; it is the story of deprivation, death and enslavement.

Mr. Sachs is more than a courageous advocate, reformer and theorist on human rights. He is a man by all reputation, who has suffered imprisonment, solitary confinement, exile, an attempted murder and remains quiet-spoken, literary and civilized. Mr. Sachs wrote the moving and powerful book, The Jail Diary describing his period of confinement. The book was turned into a play and performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company and on numerous occasions throughout the world. Mr. Sachs has taught at the University of Southampton and written on sexism and the law and human rights in South Africa.

In 1976, Mr. Sachs was invited by the government of Mozambique to draft a new Civil Code for that country and asked to set up a system of legal education there. Within the ANC, Mr. Sachs helped establish the legal department, worked closely with Oliver Tombo on a Code of Conduct for the organisation and was a member of the Constitutional Committee. He has been awarded the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for a book called, Island in Chains and the Allan Patton Memorial Prize for The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter.

No one who has even the remotest interest in world affairs could have been anything else but moved by the description of voters going to the polls for the first time in their adult lives to elect a government or moved even more to welcome South Africa back into the Commonwealth with Canada as its friend and sister nation, as opposed to a South Africa which was an oppressor nation in the world.

Albie Sachs had a role to play in this dramatic political transformation. Please welcome Mr. Sachs to our first breakfast meeting.

Albie Sachs

Well thank you very much for that very eloquent presentation--a bit solemn for 7:30--and also solemn considering the joy in our country right now. The pain is still there and the problems are still there, but the feeling, the outlook and the sense of lightness are very, very, new and that's what I hope to communicate a bit of in my contact with you today.

I'm going to do something I've never done in my life. I'm going to wave a flag. If you are wondering what this stick is in my pocket, it is not a lolly-pop. It is quite an amazing flag because it's got too many colours. They clash. The shape of a Y refers everybody to Y-front jockey underpants. When we first saw it in the newspaper, we were horrified, and we love it. We love it. It has one huge advantage: it is not the old flag. It has another advantage for other South Africans: it is not the ANC flag. If you look closely you can see a lot of the old flag in it, and you can see a lot of the ANC flag in it. The fact is that it is a flag for everybody. We've defied all the rules of flag making. It's been made by a committee. Aesthetically it works. And it works because it brings everybody in. It makes everybody feel represented and not excluded.

That's really how we are developing our new South Africa--with that sense of participation and involvement of everybody. That is our great human achievement, and perhaps the reason why we emphasise that ours is not only the anti-apartheid approach now. Everybody matters. There are no great groups or small groups. There are no important languages or unimportant languages. There are no major races or minor races. There are no significant cultures or insignificant cultures. It is enough that you are a human being. It's enough that you live in the country to count, to be included, to matter--and in a way it is quite extraordinary that these very elementary--if you like, ultra-simplistic, almost banal--notions are the underpinnings of everything that we have managed to achieve. That sense of joy and sense of release and achievement has come about not simply because we've managed to overcome strife and conflict and to diminish the hatreds, but because there is a kind of almost primitive human recognition, a basic acknowledgment of the humanity of everybody. I think this is wonderful anywhere in the world but you cannot always achieve it. People are almost embarrassed to be so naive as to recognize their common humanity with others. We live in a world that is so street-wise that one is almost denied the opportunities to be generous, to be forgiving and to be loving. You have to apologize for those things that should be the most normal things in the world. And you have to come up with some kind of excuse or justification for being so open, so vulnerable, so honest and so trusting.

Well, our historical moment has given us that opportunity. It has emerged out of pain; it has emerged out of suffering; it has emerged out of prolonged and intense negotiation, struggling, fighting with each other, bargaining; so it is a combination, then, of that very elementary, almost primeval, acknowledgment and recognition of humanity on the one hand, and very, very hard tough realistic bargaining on the other. When these two met, we got our Constitution, we got our elections, we got our Parliament, and we got our country.

I'm going to say a few words about the phase that we are in now. The fun, the joy, the sense of release is still strong in South Africa. It's interesting how people are still telling each other stories. It's as if we don't want to let go of these marvellous moments, the way we tell stories about standing in the line for the elections, and what it meant to everybody. We'll tell the same story over and over and over again. Everybody will tell the story of how they stood in the line. In a way, nothing could be more boring in the world than standing in a line and yet it becomes revolutionary in South Africa--the patience, the acceptance, the sense of equality and neighbourliness, and the facts that the temple didn't collapse and the sky didn't fall and that all the candles and the canned goods that people stockpiled are now filling the pantries for nothing. And a few of us who almost didn't buy food, because we didn't want to show any panic, went out and started buying food after the elections. Everybody has an anecdote, everybody has a story, because we want to savour (and not to release and let go) what's been a very, very special period for ourselves. Those of us who are fortunate enough to be invited to Parliament and the union buildings for the inaugurations have also our extra, very special stories. Again there was a sense of naturalness and spontaneity that helped us to do what we claimed we wanted to do.

We want to South Africanise South Africa. We want all the dimensions of our country--the inputs, the cultures, the traditions--all to emerge and to interact with each other, not by putting the one against the other, not by forcing choices between one world view and another world view, but just by allowing them all to mingle naturally. Where better to do that than in Parliament itself--particularly in this period of the new Parliament, in effect, the first Parliament, the first South African Parliament.

And so instead of all being dressed (excuse me saying so) like most of you are dressed, which was your right and your entitlement, people who felt they would like to dress in a robe or in a sari, or wear a particular kind of cloth, because that's how they felt comfortable and how they felt themselves, dressed like that. Before, there were certain traditions in Parliament by which you don't applaud, but can shout the most rude and nasty things. Somehow, that's regarded as parliamentary, but a bit of spontaneous clapping is regarded as a total violation of the spirit of the House. Well, all the new people coming in felt it to be our day and our time. We want to be natural. We are not diminishing the dignity of the House by showing joy, pleasure and excitement. On the contrary: we're giving it a real vitality, and we're not subordinating ourselves to a kind of enforced and often rather hypocritical culture of frequently nasty interchanges masquerading as politeness. And so it was that the buildings were liberated, were opened up. When the praise singer came in, it was, I think, a little bit horrifying for some of the traditionalists. Interestingly, the traditionalists were mostly Afrikaner nationalists, who themselves had been fighting the British Empire and had been fighting to establish a more South African personality for that building and who had somehow incorporated and taken over an ancient version of Westminster that doesn't even apply in Westminster anymore and who had become the most solemn defenders of those values and culture. They are a little bit horrified at the new South Africans going in there including a praise singer dressed in a traditional kind of outfit, introducing new vibes, a new personality and a new resonance into that building. But there were very, very few people like that. Somehow the South African nation generally, in all its variety, felt this was right--felt comfortable, felt you don't bring the walls down by having a praise singer. On the contrary, you are introducing an extra dimension. You're helping to legitimize the building and all the proceedings that are going to follow afterwards.

When the 40-year exile Frene Ginwala, whom some of you might know, was elected speaker of the House, again it was a violation of a kind of a tradition--not a formal tradition, but a tradition more powerful because it is not formal, but it is invisible and is just taken for granted: that the speaker has to be a man with a powerful voice who can shout everybody down. Frene Ginwala has a soft voice, uses the microphone and wears a sari. She is very gracious and elegant and she reintroduced a tone of respect and sensitivity that worked very well in this new kind, human, psychological mix that's emerging in our country. We don't know exactly how it's going to work out.

Ken Owen, the editor of The Sunday Times, and our most brilliant polemicist has attacked everybody, and with a sharp pen, he has the kind of poison that prickles you, and puts you on your guard, and makes you think. Everybody reads him. A few days ago, at the Alan Paton Memorial presentation for the best book of the last year, Owen said that he's been to Parliament and that he finds himself crying and crying and crying. And to hear this now from--I don't know if you have an equivalent in Canada--somebody who is a natural polemicist and naturally sharp, but also makes a name out of it and has to keep it up is remarkable. You don't want that kind of a person to cry, but now that person can cry, and he can stand up in public and say he's crying because he's seeing what our nation is capable of. He shows a kind of generosity and concern for the school feeding of children and for a whole series of programmes. Joe Slovo previously a military commander but now a minister of housing says that it's not just houses that we need, it's homes that we need. People need to feel that they are human beings, not just to have some bricks and a roof over their heads.

So this is a lot of what we are achieving in our country now. Maybe one of the blessings of exile is that you see the world and you come back from exile with the values of the world. These are not always the good values of the world but, we hope, the best values of the world. We've learnt from the mistakes that have been made in the countries in which we've lived. We've lived everywhere. We've lived in China, the former Soviet Union, East Germany, West Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Portugal, North Africa, Central Africa, Asia, Canada and the United States. A few of us, though not too many, have been to Latin America. We've seen all the attempts and all the styles. We've participated in the political debates. We come back and we bring back with us what we hope is a distillation of certain late twentieth-century common ideals of humanity. I wouldn't say they are non-controversial, but they are basic decent ideas that we want to introduce in this period of renovation. We are very proud of the fact that we're fighting against capital punishment in South Africa. I know different people have different views on an issue like that. We feel that in our country, where there has been so much brutality, killing and violence of person against person, it's a very important symbolical move to make. Our state will not take the lives of the members of our society. And it also has a practical value because we have people from the rightwing, from the left-wing, and from all sorts of different groups on death row. And how do you choose? If you release so-and-so, then you have to release somebody else and somebody else and somebody else. So what turns out to be the humane, moral and principal position actually becomes very practical and very functional in reducing the level of tension and anxiety in our country.

I know the question of gay and lesbian rights is very much on the agenda and I know that people have different views on that question. One can respect the different views that people have, but our feeling, and I am very proud to say it's been accepted inside the ANC, is that the right to be different is a fundamental human right, and that for society to impose a stereotype of behaviour on human beings is a violation of something that's very, very important for the human personality. It's not a question of whether you are gay or straight. If you have to proclaim: "I'm fighting for gay and lesbian rights but I'm straight" you deny the very idea that you're trying to communicate. People have the right to be as they are. The fact is that despite all the cultural conservatism in our country that is found in all the different cultures, the declaration of rights is not specific to any racial or national group, it's now part of our Constitution. Our clause pertains to unfair discrimination on a whole variety of grounds, including sexual orientation. It remains to be seen whether or not the kind of issue that's cropped up here in Ontario, whether to enable gay partnerships to have legal recognition or not, will be a constitutional question that will crop up in due course. There is a whole series of issues like that.

I've become involved with the disabled people's movement. We have a wonderful organisation in South Africa called Disabled People of South Africa and I'm sure that if I hadn't been blown up and lost an arm, I would never have had contact with them. It would have been just another one of those umpteen groups out there which you know about and feel vaguely sympathetic towards. Shortly after my return to South Africa, they invited me to one of their meetings to speak on the constitutional position of disabled people. For me it's a particularly moving organisation because it has black, white, brown, male and female South Africans in it. It is an embryo of the South Africa we want. The members of the Disabled People of South Africa have come together as disabled people fighting for their human rights as disabled people and overcoming the prejudices, the barriers and even the differences of background that is part of the South African set-up. And on the basis of their solidarity as disabled people, they've created a very powerful movement that is active, participatory, and part of that broad, civil society that is so important to ensure that government doesn't try to do everything when people are fighting for their own rights where they are. The first time that I spoke to them I remember saying, "Well, what you must do..." and I thought, "No, no, that's wrong. What I must do..." They smiled and said that I would get used to it. That was my transition to acknowledging and accepting myself as part of the disabled movement. And again it is a tribute to the richness of the new culture that's emerging in South Africa that two people in this disabled movement are on the ANC. It so happened that one is white and one is black. They were two prominent personalities. One was elected to Parliament.

Again, this is regarded as part and parcel of what we are trying to do. It's not simply to overcome the massive injustices. It is not simply to ensure that people have access to land, to education and to health, important though that is. It's dealing with the human side, with the human being. There we draw on something that's very strong in traditional African culture, and that hasn't been destroyed--that sense of deep interpersonal communication, the courtesies, the refinements of speech, the kinds of acknowledgment and recognition that is part and parcel of a popular culture. It comes out in song, it comes out in movement, it comes out in dance. To those of you who saw the inauguration in the union buildings, I don't know if they showed the spontaneous singing of the people at the back at the time when we were waiting for all those cars of all the VIPs to line up, and for the VIPs to come out in the order of protocol. Instead of simply grumbling and muttering, the people started singing and moving around. It turned what could have been an awkward moment into a very joyous moment that gave spirit and lasted through the whole occasion. Well that is part and parcel of our culture.

Now all these good, progressive ideas of international humanity are coupled with very hard-headed constitutional arrangements that have been thrashed out over years. It has been about three years now of battling, frequently in smoke-filled rooms, and I speak as an anti-smoker. I cried and cried and cried but not like Ken Owen. I cried simply because of the fumes in my eyes. But it was for democracy. The smokers of the ANC got together with the smokers of the National Party and they figured out government of national unity by having unity between the smokers and the anti-smokers. We won a few, they won a few.

But where do we stand now? We've got through the problems of the impossible. I'm not comfortable with the statement that we hear over and over again: "It was a miracle." There are two kinds of miracles. There are real miracle miracles, and maybe somebody on this platform can help me about the miracle miracles. But there are also what I call hard-work miracles, where the outcome is miraculous in the way it affects people, and faith, conviction and belief certainly go into it, but these miracles require intelligence, hard work and co-operation over a long period of time. The investment of your souls, of your minds and of your belief in certain ideas can be shared by many, many people. That's been there in our generation. We've worked at it.

In my case, it was in the 1950s, when I was a young student. I just saw the possibilities, and I got in touch with my fellow countrymen and women, from whom I had been cut off by the system in which I'd grown up, and I just found such joy and pleasure and I felt so much enriched by it. To me it is not a question of sacrifice for something. It is a question of living a very wonderful life that's full of meaning, and, instead of being frightened of my neighbour, getting to enjoy being with my neighbour, associating and giving something to my neighbour and learning something from my neighbour. In that sense, ours is such a rich country. We've had such marvellous human solidarity in exile, in prison, and back in the country now. It's been extremely rewarding and a pleasure and a joy to participate in that whole process. And there are many whites involved in the process, I'm happy to say, more now than there were when I first started. There are many people of Asian origin, people of mixed descent, and of course millions and millions of black people involved. We're very happy that it is a broad movement of that kind.

In any event, we've now reached the stage at which we've achieved the impossible. People said you could never have universal suffrage in a divided country like South Africa. Not only did we have it, but having it transformed our country. It wasn't like a root canal treatment that you feel pleased with afterwards because it is over and because it takes some of the pain away. It was a joyous event in itself. The medium was the message. The voting as equals, the patience, the sense of emotion was the message in itself.

So we've achieved the impossible. Now we have to go for the nearly impossible, and that should be much easier. But with that same sense of faith, that same sense of commitment, now we need houses which are homes, we need neighbourhoods which are communities, we need people to have a sense of pride in their work and have work in terms of which they can have pride and we need a decent health-care delivery system that reaches everybody. We need an approach to health that isn't based simply on technology and treatment, but is based on a clean environment and nutrition. We need a pride in our humanity and in the uniqueness of each personality, a pride protected by the law with institutions and mechanisms to achieve that uniqueness. We need economic growth and development that's not simply a blind force based on mathematical calculations but one which takes into account both the importance of efficiency and maximum utilization of resources and is caring. We can deliver the goods to everybody. We need a cultural upsurge so that we can get away from a lot of frequently sterile arguments about closing down the opera houses and Euro-centred versus Afro-centred art. We want South Africa-centred art but South Africa has people from all over the world bringing in the cultures, the languages, the musical forms and the traditions from all over the world. We need them all in our country. We need to develop our own operas, our own dance forms, our own painting and our own visual arts.

All these things now are possible on the basis of give-and-take, sharing and respect. We've got it in the government. We're going to have fights and there are going to be set-backs. We mustn't panic, and we mustn't allow these huge human achievements to be destroyed by the first set-back and the first disaster that happens. I think we can do it. I think that there is enough sense of achievement and goodwill and human happiness in our country to make it possible for us to use our huge resources, and I think that we have enough backing, friendship and support from outside, from the world at large, to facilitate that whole process.

It amuses me and it gives me great pleasure to ask people to fill their glasses with South African wine and drink a toast to the new South Africa. Of they don't drink wine I ask them to fill their glasses with South African fruit juice and, if they don't drink South African fruit juice, we've even got very good mineral water in South Africa.) I think that people who want to invest in our country will find that not only are there decent hotels and golf courses, and not only are there lawyers who speak the language they can understand and accountants who count in a way that they're used to, but they will find that it's a country that's rich in resources. To a certain extent South Africa is undercapitalized in every possible way, because we have been held back, and we've held ourselves back, by the whole apartheid set-up. It is a good place to invest in and an interesting place to invest in. People don't invest to help anybody else. People invest to make money, and I think that's the best basis for investment. But if you can make money in a country with the additional satisfaction that you are participating in this process of human growth and renewal, so much the better. We are expecting quite a lot of investment in that sense.

But in addition to the direct capital investment and transfer of technology which we look forward to, Canada has a very special role to play, in terms of the culture, the history, the style, and even the language. There are lots of points of contact and correspondence, and we feel very comfortable and easy in Canada. Maybe the reason why so many South Africans put up with your winter is that in other respects it's a relatively easy country to settle in. I've been speaking to many judges and legal people, and if I can say so, immediately we hit on to a common wavelength. You're speaking a similar kind of language and encountering very similar problems. We speak to your medical people and realize that we are going to need some kind of comprehensive health service in our country. You've got wonderful experience here. Maybe you complain about it or it's not as good as it ought to be, but it is a very, very rich experience of a basically decent kind of health-delivery service from which we can learn a great deal in our country. You've got film makers who've had to overcome the idea that we can't make movies, and you've developed their own cultural imagination. You've got a language problem and we've got a language problem. There is a lot that we can share and, in addition, there is a kind of basic decency that you take for granted. You are not as cynical as the Americans. Maybe you've got less to be cynical about. It's that kind of acceptance of the normal decencies of life that we need more than anything else in South Africa and I find that is very extensive in Canada. So we are not asking you to export a kind of brilliance to us. We have to achieve our own brilliance, but we do look forward to your normality. Thank you very much.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by John H. Tory, Partner, Tory Tory DesLauriers & Binnington and 3rd VicePresident, The Empire Club of Canada.