Healing the World

Jonathan Magonet: This evening we are looking at activism in the world, and particularly a paradoxical activism, insofar as we are somehow acutely aware many, many Jews are involved in all sorts of areas of activism, political and other, in the world and very often when challenged on this, the fact that they happen to be Jewish is something which is either incidental or quite unimportant to what motivates them, at least at the surface value. We tend to find ourselves puzzled by this, and rabbis particularly are desperately always trying to prove: Well, it’s really some secret inner Jewish urge which is making you do this. But I’m not sure that’s always the case. But it is one of the questions which we will clearly be addressing this evening.

 

We have two outstanding speakers for this occasion, one of whom of course, and I apologise if I’m not doing ladies first, but one of whom needs no introduction. Albie Sachs was a prominent member of the ANC. He was jailed for his activities. He spent several years in exile in Britain and in Mozambique where he was, as you know, the victim of a car bombing in which he lost an arm. Justice Sachs sits in South Africa on the Constitutional Court and is clearly a major figure in the development of that society. His book The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, which has obviously been a play and also been on television, is also a significant autobiographical moment which I remember seeing the television programme and being very moved by a particular scene in which he is interrogated by his warder and they discuss the biblical book of Job. That was an interesting question too in terms of a Jewish element in the debate that was taking place there. Clearly, an inter-faith dialogue of another sort.

 

The other speaker is Dr Noreena Hertz, who is the associate director of the Centre for International Business at Cambridge and a visiting Fellow at the LSE. But she is a leading advocate of questions regarding globalisation and the critique of globalisation, and she brings this background of activity to our programme this evening.

 

Just to let you know what we are going to do: we’ve asked both of the speakers to make an initial presentation. We will then ask them to exchange a little bit with each other as a result of what’s been said. I am then going to try an experiment which I do frequently at the inter-faith conferences I organise which is a thing called ‘buzz groups’. Don’t get too frightened, but for five minutes we will invite people just to talk in two or three groups together as a first reaction to the discussion. Then we will invite questions, probably a batch of questions, to the speakers and we will start interacting as far as we can.

 

I do buzz groups, and I might as well warn you ahead of time, for a very practical reason. With such a large audience many people would want to speak, and if we only ask individuals we will get at least one or two lectures from people from the floor. This way you can give your lecture to one or two people next to you, and leave space for everyone else to participate! I think that’s enough from me and without more ado I would like to invite Albie Sachs to make the first presentation and invite you to come and join us.

 

Albie Sachs: I don’t know if any of you ever played the game – memorable first lines of books? I’m going to read from The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter, written by Albie Sachs.

 

‘Oh shit! Everything has abruptly gone dark. I am feeling strange and can’t see anything. The beach. I’m going to the beach. I packed a frosty beer for after my run. Something is wrong. Oh shit! I must have banged my head like I used to do when climbing Table Mountain in Cape Town, dreaming of the struggle and cracking my cranium against an overhang. It’ll go away. I must just be calm and wait. Watered the tropical pot plants. Stared at the ten heads on the dried African sculpture in my beautiful apartment.

Oh shit! How can I be so careless? The darkness is not clearing. This is something serious. A terrible thing is happening to me. I’m swelling. I can’t steady myself as I wait for consciousness and light to return. I feel a shuddering punch against the back of my neck and then what seems like another one. The sense of threat gets stronger and stronger. I am being dominated, overwhelmed. I have to fight. I have to resist. I can feel arms coming from behind me, pulling at me under my shoulders. I am being kidnapped. They’ve come from Pretoria to drag me over the border and interrogate me and lock me up.

This is the moment we have all been waiting for, the few ANC members still working in Mozambique, with dread, and yet with a weird kind of eagerness. ‘Leave me,’ I yell out, leave me!’ I jerk my shoulders and thrash my arms as violently as I can. I always wondered how I would react: whether I would fight physically, risking death; or whether I would go quietly and rely on my brain and what moral courage I had to see me through.

‘Leave me alone! Leave me alone!’ I demand violently, aware that I am shouting in both English and Portuguese, the official language of this newly-independent state where I have been living for a decade. I am screaming for my life, yet with some control, some politeness since after all I am a middle-aged lawyer in a public place. ‘I’d rather die here! Leave me! I’d rather die here!’ I feel a sudden surge of elation and strength as I struggle, making an immense muscular effort to pull myself free. I might be an intellectual but at this critical moment, without time to plan or think, I am fighting bravely with the courage of the youth of Soweto, even though the only physical violence I have personally known in my life was as a schoolboy being tackled carrying a rugby ball.

I hear voices coming from behind me: urgent, nervous voices, not talking but issuing and accepting commands, and they’re referring to me. ‘Lift him up. Put him there.’ ‘I’m not a him! I am me! You can’t just cart me around like a suitcase!’ But I’m unable to struggle any more. I just have to go along and accept what happens. My will has gone.

We are travelling fast. The way is bumpy. How can they leave me in such discomfort? If they are going to kidnap me, at least they could use a vehicle with better springs. I have no volition. I can’t decide anything or even move any part of me. But I have awareness. I think, therefore I am. The consciousness fades and returns, swirls away and comes back. I am lying down like a bundle. There’s a point in my head that is thinking, and then oblivion and then awareness again. No thought related to action, but passive acknowledgement that my body is being transported somewhere. That I exist, even if without self-determination of any sort.

More urgent voices, speaking with rapid energy, treating me as an object to be lifted and carried and moved this way and that. I feel the muscles and movements of people all around me, above me, at my side, behind me. Nobody engages me as a person, speaks with head directed towards me, communicates with me. I exist as a mass. I have physicality but no personality. I am simply the object of other people’s decision.

All is very still and calm and without movement or voices or muscular activity. I am wrapped in complete darkness and tranquillity. If I am dead, I am not aware of it. If I am alive, I am not aware of it. I have no awareness at all, not of myself, not of my surroundings, not of anyone or of anything.

‘Albie!’ Through the darkness, a voice speaking not about me but to me, and using my name and without that terrible urgency of all those other voices. ‘Albie! This is Ivor Gorrida speaking to you.’ The voice is sympathetic and affectionate. I know Ivor. He’s an outstanding young surgeon and a friend. ‘You’re in the Maputu Central Hospital. Your arm is in a lamentable condition.’ He uses a delicate Portuguese word to describe my arm. How tactful the Mozambican culture is, compared to the English one. I must ask him later what the word is. ‘We are going to operate and you must face the future with courage.’ A glow of joy, of complete satisfaction and peace envelops me. I am in the hands of Frelimo of the Mozambican Government. I am safe.

‘What happened?’ I am asking the question into the darkness. My will has been activated in response to hearing Ivor’s voice. I have a social existence once more. I am an alive part of humanity. A voice answers close to my ears. I think it’s a woman’s. ‘A car bomb,’ and I drift back, smiling inside, into nothingness.

I am elsewhere and other. There’s a crisp, cool sheet on me. I am lying on a couch, aware that I have a body and that I can feel and think and even laugh to myself and everything seems light and clean and I have a great sense of happiness and curiosity. This is the time to explore and rediscover myself. What has happened to me? What is left of me? What’s the damage? I’m feeling wonderful. I’m thinking easily in word thoughts, not just sensations.

But maybe there is internal distraction. Let me see. A joke comes back to me. A Jewish joke from the days when we Jews told jokes to ward off the pains of oppression and humiliation. From when I was still a young student and my mountain-climbing friend had a new joke for me each week. And I smiled to myself as I told myself the joke, and feel happy and alive because I’m telling myself a joke. The one about Hymie Cohen falling off a bus and as he gets up he makes what appears to be a large sign of the cross over his body. A friend is watching in astonishment. ‘Hymie,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know you were Catholic?’ ‘What do you mean, Catholic?’ Hymie answers, ‘Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch!’

My arm is free and mobile and ready to respond to my will. It’s on the left side, and I decide to alter the order a little. I’m sure Hymie wouldn’t mind in the circumstances.

Testicles: my hand goes down. I’m wearing nothing under the sheet. It’s easy to feel my body. My penis is all there, my good old cock. I’m alone with myself, and I can say the word that has involved me in so much happiness and so much despair, or no doubt will lead me up hill and down dale in the future as well. And my balls: one, two, both in place. Perhaps I should call them testes since I am in hospital. I bend my elbow. How lovely it is to be able to want again, and then to be able to do what I want. I move my hand up my chest. What delicious self-determination. What a noble work of art is man.

Wallet. My heart is there. The ribs over it seem intact. The blood will pump. The centre of my physical being, the part you take for granted is ok. I am fine. I will live and live robustly.

Spectacles: I arrange my fingers over my forehead and cannot feel any craters or jagged pieces and I know I am thinking clearly. The darkness is now feather light and clean, unlike the heavy opaque blackness of before.

Watch: My arm creeps over my shoulder and slides down my upper arm and, suddenly, there’s nothing there. So I’ve lost an arm. Ivor did not say which one or even if they were going to cut it off, though I suppose it was implicit in his words. And it was the right one, since it is my left arm that is doing all the feeling. So I’ve lost an arm: that’s all. I’ve lost an arm. That’s all. They’ve tried to kill me, to extinguish me completely. But I’ve only lost an arm.

Spectacles. Testicles. Wallet and watch. I joke. therefore I am.’

 

The second passage I’m going to read refers to some months later and I’m being visited by Jacob Zuma, who is now the deputy president of South Africa, and someone I’ve referred to as Comrade Kadiman, Comrade John. So I’m out of hospital and I’m reconnecting with the world.

 

‘Zuma was laughing as he received me into his arms. My Comrade John had grey sad eyes, despite my exclamation of pleasure on greeting them. Now is the moment for me to describe what happened. Often when African comrades are telling a story I feel very white and inhibited, lacking in laughter and impatient to hear the story’s end, as if what matters is the piece of factual information being conveyed and not the savour of the telling and the rich personal interactions involved in the narrative. Yet today I know that I will relate the story well, African style. No hurry. Emphasis on the concrete little episodes that illuminate the multi-faceted relationships involved, detailing the humour, irony and human quirks. A slow progression building up the narrative so that its denouement is fully prepared and yet filled with interest and surprise.

There are times for solemnity, times for earnestness, times for passionate calls to battle and times for laughter. This is a time for laughter, the listener participating in the story by means of almost continuous and celebratory laughter. I will enjoy the narration and Zuma will get pleasure from egging me on to even richer and more comic concreteness, counterpointing my reportage with a melodic accompaniment of rising and falling laughter. Zuma’s smile and good humour are famous. He even claims that a police spy gave himself up when he saw Zuma smiling at him.

John Kadiman, trade unionist since my father’s day, has known me since I was a child. I want him too to celebrate my survival with me. The arm is a detail, not the main thing, though I must remember that he himself lost one of his sons to a similar bomb blast and perhaps I remind him of his slain child. As I launch into my story, Zuma sits close by and watches me intently, ready to respond with warm chuckles and vigorous swings and shakes of his body to each statement I make.

When I describe how lying on the ground in Julius Nyerere Avenue I shouted, but politely, in English and Portuguese, he almost falls off the chair. He knows that area well. For ten years he was one of our leaders in the Pujou. Most of the time he was our chief representative there and the discussions we had over the years were extremely rewarding and always filled with humour. The bomb that got me could well have been introduced into the country to kill him and he was withdrawn just over a year ago.

I start describing the part where I thought I was fighting for my life against kidnappers from Pretoria, when really I was making a few feeble flaps with my shoulders against my Mozambican rescuers, and he lets out roars of supportive laughter, not waiting to the end of the sentence but as if to underline and share with me the poignant hilarity of the situation, accompanying the climax of my words with happy, explosive gurgles.

I look across at Comrade John, trying to force him with my vivacity to join in. But he stares back at me with sad moist eyes. I cannot require him to laugh, and yet in my soul I agree with Zuma. The situation was truly comic. We human beings really get up to the most astonishing things. Wait till I reach the Hymie Cohen falling off the bus part, surely Comrade John will respond then? And if Zuma is collapsing off his chair with laughter now, what will he be like when I actually tell the joke within a joke part?

I pause so as to give space for the Hymie Cohen joke, when the story will resolve itself in genuine euphoric comedy. I wonder if Zuma has heard it already. I expect that it’s done the rounds in ANC circles, though in the rather reduced form of ‘and the first thing Comrade Albie did in the hospital was feel for his balls’. People have difficulty remembering the spectacles, testicles part. Even Wolfie, whose cultural background is the same as mine, asked me to repeat it three times so that he could write it down correctly.

Looking directly at Zuma’s smiling face and swinging around from time to time to confront Comrade John with the humour of my story, I launch into the final portion. ‘What do you mean Catholic? Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch.’ Zuma doubles up and yells with laughter, his mouth wide open, his head rolling back and then coming down again, his eyes full of sympathetic mirth. I feel moved by the situation, by the intense interaction between us. This is what the ANC is. We do not wipe out our personalities and cultures when we become members. Rather we bring in and share what we have. Zuma’s Africanness, his Zulu appreciation of conversation and humour, is mingling with my Jewish joke, enriching it, prolonging and intensifying the pleasure.

We are comrades and we are close. Yet we do not have to become like each other, erase our personal tastes and ways of seeing and doing things, but rather contribute our different cultural inputs so as to give more texture to the whole. This is how, one day, we will rebuild South Africa: not by pushing a steam roller over the national cultures, but by bringing them together, seeing them as the many roots of a single tree, some more substantial than others but all contributing to the tree’s strength and beauty.’

 

I wrote that in 1989. I didn’t write it for Jewish Book Week. That’s what came out spontaneously at the time, and that was my very strong emotion with Zuma who is intensely Zulu in culture and background and yet profoundly South African and humanist and international in his outlook. And here we were mingling jokes and humour in a way that I just felt: this is how we are going to make a country one day. And no one believed us. We had wonderful support in this country for the anti-apartheid movement. I’m sure many of you contributed in one way and another. But how many of you really thought that one day, one day, we would peacefully negotiate a revolution? That we’d all be able to live together, black and white, on the basis of constitutional democracy?

 

Yet it was a thousand encounters like this that really paved the way. Mandela and de Klerk got on badly. If history is made by body chemistry between leaders, we’d still be fighting. But the fact was that these kinds of human interactions had proceeded over many decades. We’d shared so much. We’d got to know each other and we had established ways and means of connecting, in terms of which you don’t become an abstract, non-racial democrat without a language, without a culture, without a pass, without a background, without a history, without a place in the world. You bring in what you’ve got. You share what you’ve got. You mingle and you take from others and you enjoy, each, what the other has to contribute.

 

Was my Jewishness a significant part of what I did? I’m not going to attempt to answer that question now. Maybe right at the end, if the Chair gives us a few moments, I might say a couple of words on that. But I would like to refer to the very passionate, intense, extensive debates going on in South Africa today on the whole question of what did Jews and the Jewish community in South Africa do about apartheid? If anybody likes a nice thick fat heavy book that’s actually got a good content, Cutting Through the Mountain:Interviews with 25 South African Jews, by Emanuel Suttner, about ten years ago, deals with these themes. But it is each one of us responding to questions of that kind, with very, very varied answers.

 

More recently, this catalogue was brought out. It’s called Looking Back: Jews in the Struggle for Democracy and Human Rights in South Africa. It’s a catalogue that accompanies an exhibition which about half a dozen of us put together in Cape Town, emerging from when I returned from exile and I met people who had belonged to a group called ‘Jews for Justice’. They had taken part in the marches in the streets and they said, ‘Come up to the Caplan Centre and see the exhibition we’ve got there.’ And I went up and I said, ‘A lovely exhibition. ‘The First Rabbi’. ‘Jews in the Diamond Trade’. ‘Jews in Sport’. ‘Jews in the Professions’.’ I said, ‘Where’s Solly Sachs, my Dad, the trade union leader? Where’s Sam Kahn, the brilliant attorney who taught me everything I needed to know as a young advocate? Where’s Eli Weinberg, the wonderful photographer? Where’s Rollie Aaronstein?’ They’d been wiped out.

 

I said, ‘You should be so proud of people who’d come from the Jewish community, who took part in the struggle and they’re not even there at all.’ Well, it took us eight years to get the exhibition going, and maybe Jewish Book Week next year can actually get the exhibition and get some of the people involved to speak.

 

But I’m going to conclude by the statement made by my colleague on the Constitutional Court, Richard Goldstone, when he opened the exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Cape Town. He said:

 

‘I launch this exhibition with shame and with pride: shame that the Jewish community as a community did so little to resist apartheid and so many Jews turned a blind eye to what was going on around them; but pride in the fact that a relatively large number of Jews did throw themselves heartily into the democratic struggle.’

 

Thank you.

 

Jonathan Magonet: And now, Noreena Hertz.

 

Noreena Hertz: I am truly honoured to have been invited alongside you, Albie Sachs, to speak today about my work and my activism. You are a man who has shown true courage. By the time you were my age, in your early thirties, you had already spent 168 days in jail, and later on in life, as we know, you faced and withstood a car bomb attack because of what you stood for.

 

The prices I have paid for speaking my mind and championing the causes that I believe in are not even remotely comparable. Teargas in Genoa. Printed words in magazines. Hate mail from Black Block anarchists. Cross-examination from Jeremy Paxman! No. Not even remotely comparable. You are a gibor, a true hero in the fight against injustice. I am just an ordinary person trying to fight the good fight.

 

Thanks to the success of my book The Silent Takeover, I’ve been given the opportunity to fight my fight on tv and on radio, in print and in person at events like at this, an opportunity which I’m grabbing because I honestly believe that a better world is possible and that people like you and me can act together to bring it about.

 

But first, what are the issues that concern me? What do I see as the main problems that we collectively must address? Well if I had to synthesise what I saw to be the key issue, I would have to sum it up in one word: exclusion. Why exclusion? Because like so many in this room, I am sure, I share a fundamental concern that a deep chasm is growing between, on the one hand, the global economy and, on the other, social justice, that the world of the 21^st century is increasingly a world of haves and have-nots, of gated communities next to ghettoes, of extreme poverty and unbelievable riches. A world in which Michael Eisner, the chairman of Disney, earns in one year $576 million, the entire gross domestic product of the Seychelles. A world in which some enjoy rights that are completely denied to others, in which some have a voice but the majority remain voiceless. A world of extremes, in which millions of children in developing countries still die every single year from preventable diseases that their industrialised counterparts rarely face. A world in which four-fifths of the world’s wealth is in the hands of one-fifth of the world’s population.

 

More than eleven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there are still walls that separate the well-fed from the hungry, those that have work from the unemployed, those with decent homes from those who live in slums, those who have access to education and humanity’s cultural heritage from those who are submerged in illiteracy and complete alienation. Walls dividing those inside from those on the outside.

 

But why should we in this room do something about this? Why should we care after all about people in faraway places, in communities distinct from our own?

 

Well, what drives me to do something about this is a realisation that my own lucky lot is completely random. It is just a matter of chance after all that I was born into a middle-class home in London rather than in a poor village in Africa. Why, I then ask myself, should I be entitled to a whole host of rights just because of my inherited privilege? A whole host of opportunities, just because of where I was born, that others born elsewhere who are into other situations are being denied.

 

And if that reasoning doesn’t work for you, and I am only sharing with you what motivates me, perhaps this is a more helpful way of thinking about this. It is not in our self-interest to allow the current inequities, injustices and trampling of rights to go on. Why not? Well, I’ll give just two reasons.

 

First, in a world of increasing inter-connectedness and increasing inter-relatedness, when bad things happen in one place, the consequences are felt elsewhere too. Take global warming or the global aids crisis, for example. Both of these are cases that highlight very clearly why we cannot today only concern ourselves with our neighbours, our immediate communities, why we are forced to take a more cosmopolitan worldview. Neither disease nor environmental degradation respect national borders. Problems elsewhere, in a global world, fast become our problems too.

 

Second, desperate people with desperate lives have nothing to lose. Poverty can generate unrest and instability and can even provide the breeding ground for terrorism and fanaticism. We cannot hide out in gated communities while ghettoes rise up and encircle us, and not expect to face the consequences, especially given that the context in which we now live, a world of global media and satellite communications, a world of increasing transparency in which people in the poorest places can now see how others live, can now see the rights that others are accorded, that they are being denied.

 

I’ll never forget Owens Wiwa, the brother of the murdered Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, telling me what it was like growing up in Ogoni land. ‘And then we got television,’ he told me, ‘and then we saw that there was a whole world out there that we were entitled to but that we were being denied.’ Never before have injustice and inequity been as conspicuous as they are today. Never before has the chasm between social justice and the global economy been so apparent. Never have the excluded been so aware of their plight.

 

But is there some reason that we as Jews have an even greater imperative to act and not simply bear mute witness to contemporary inequities and injustices? Are we better placed, perhaps, than other groups to do so? Well, when I was asked to speak at Jewish Book Week, these were questions that I felt that I needed to contemplate and, having done so, I believe that yes, we as Jews do have a greater imperative to address the issue of exclusion.

 

Also, that we are uniquely positioned to do so because of our own history, because of our own past. We as Jews are perfectly placed to champion the excluded and those kept on the outside, because we as Jews, throughout history, have ourselves been the excluded and outsiders. The club we are part of is not a club that comprises just fellow Jews. It is the club whose members are those of all who don’t fit in. The club of all those outside the mainstream tent. The club of all those who have no real home, no fixed geographic roots. And this state of outsider, marginalised person, homeless one, is a state that we as Jews should not fear, nor desperately try and escape from.

 

My own response to this state isn’t a desperate attempt to integrate, assimilate or imitate in order to ingratiate myself with dominant establishments. I don’t try and disassociate myself from my sense of difference. Instead, I perceive my difference and sense of exclusion as a state to be cherished and I draw strength from this state to help champion the lots of others who are similarly excluded and marginalised, homeless, Jews and non-Jews alike.

 

My comfort with my own sense of difference, my celebration of my difference, is probably informed by the fact that I am the daughter of immigrants with foreign accents. A first generation Brit, from a family which going back for five generations is a series of first generation immigrants on each side. A personal family tree which others in this room may well share. And my cherishing of my sense of difference was manifest at a very early age. At 14, I accepted a highly-coveted place in the sixth form of Westminster School only under the condition that I be absolved from attending morning prayers in Westminster Abbey, the only person in the school’s long history to have been granted this absolution, a principle I demanded not because I gave a hoot about religion – I grew up in a completely secular home, my parents were not even members of a synagogue – but because I gave a damn about retaining my sense of difference. Because I celebrated my difference, even at that young age.

 

My sense of exclusion, my sense of being an outsider, is an integral part of who I am and it is what gives me my strength on a daily basis to question, to challenge and to confront dominant norms in the status quo. And I believe that my own experience of Judaism is applicable to many other Jews. We as Jews should not perceive our direct experience of being excluded as a plight that we attempt to disassociate from, but a strength that allows us to bring compassion and courage to the rest of the world. A state that gives us as Jews an ability to speak freely from the fringes, but also the experience to speak for others in comparable situations from a position of knowing and being. Our sense of exclusion should be used to give us strength: to look at events from the outside, to criticise and not be co-opted, to argue, to dissent and to challenge.

 

Each of us in this room has a choice as to the extent to which we individually and collectively try to make this a better world: letaken olam. And we as Jews, as people who have experienced victimisation, exclusion and the suppression of our rights, perhaps more than any other group, have more than any other group an even greater imperative and an even greater ability to act.

 

It is unconscionable in a world of such extremes, of such injustice, of such inequity as of today, to simply bear mute witness. As it counsels us in Mishnah Sanhedrin, ‘Whoever is able to protest against the transgressions of this world and does not is responsible for the transgressions of the entire world’.

 

But we in this room must acknowledge this: change comes at a cost. There is no such thing as a free lunch. And if we want a better world, we will have to give up time or money or both to see it materialise. And at times we will have to move away from our comfort zones so as to see it come about.

 

Not all of us are as brave as Justice Albie Sachs, of course. I don’t think I am. But I do, for example, go on many of the pro-justice street protests, even though I am scared to be in crowds and afraid of tear and pepper gas. I do put myself and my ideas on the line time and time again. I believe that each of us individually can make a difference, in however small a way. Moreover, I believe that each of us has an imperative to do so.

 

As Rabbi Hillel said in Mishnah Avot, ‘Im ain ani li, mi li? Ushe’ani le’atzmi, ma ani? Ve’im lo achshav, mataii?’ ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?’

 

Thank you.

 

Jonathan Magonet: I’d suggested that the first response would be in fact between our two speakers here and we’ll turn to Albie to ask if he has something to say. I would only point out that I have to admit I was also at Westminster, and I also didn’t go to the Abbey. I’m not sure what that makes me! But did you also have to go to Latin prayers, because there they took a register?

 

Noreena Hertz: I managed to get out of it. I managed to make that a pre-condition.

 

Jonathan Magonet: Oh, great. Well done. Albie, do you have something to respond to Noreena?

 

Albie Sachs: Well just a little request. This ‘hero’ thing: I don’t like it very much. So if we can equalise up, and really you are responding to your society with what you have got to offer, and I was subjected to other kinds of challenges. What is so interesting now is I make a statement that shocks some listeners when I say we were fighting with all our passion to create a boring society. So we’re working very hard to normalise our country, and you don’t have to be heroic just to do ordinary things where you can have choices, where everybody can just do things. Sometimes it’s quite daring, quite challenging. Sometimes there is no challenge at all and that is really kind of what we want. So, agreed.

 

Noreena Hertz: I was very moved by your reading and am very moved by this sense of the moving forward in South Africa, the coming together of different cultures, the reconciliation process, but also the celebration of identity and the ability to kind of have your own identity in this multi-cultural future. Those are obviously issues that deeply concern me. You have such an extreme environment in South Africa, but today the ghettoes and gated communities still exist between countries, within countries. People not having an ability to express themselves and their identity. I won’t use the ‘hero’ moniker any more, but I really did feel that as somebody who is, let’s say, a young activist today, it really was an honour to share a platform with somebody who really held a torch earlier on.

 

Albie Sachs: Well, while we are being so nice to each other, now it’s my turn. But it was quite thrilling for me to hear you speaking. There’s a lot of, I don’t know quite what to call it in Europe, people just get on with their lives. They make do and it’s almost an exclusion of passion and idealism. People are almost made to feel a little bit foolish because they have dreams and because they do something a bit out of the ordinary. I just felt so encouraged and inspired and there was a lot of emotion, what I would call totally legitimate schmaltz, which is part and parcel of life. But it was encased in a clear understanding. It’s not just ideas swimming around all over the place, ‘Let’s be nice to people’. And when you get the intellect coming together with the heart and with the emotion, then you’ve got something very, very powerful. So if I was encouraging to you, you’re encouraging to me. Thank you.

 

Jonathan Magonet: I think we need to break this mutual admiration society. Let’s have a go at buzz groups. I would invite you just to turn to one or two neighbours next to you and just respond to what you’ve heard so far. A little discussion. It’s only five minutes: don’t be frightened. And then we will invite people to raise questions to the panel. So – just five minutes ‘buzz’!

 

[Break]

 

Jonathan Magonet: Thank you. [Asks for microphone and questions or comments from the floor.] I’ll take three or four questions first of all and then we’ll invite our panellists to respond. Do keep it brief please.

 

Q.1 [female]: There are two very important questions which I want to ask. The first one is: What about all the black children, and the Zulus and all the other black children of Africa, the girls, who at the age of about four or five have to have all their sex organs cut out? So they can never lie in hospital and see if they still have them, if they haven’t got that. You don’t even worry about the fate of women, do you? They just don’t come into consideration with you. I mean I appreciate the other things you’ve done for the black people, but it’s only for the men.

 

And secondly I want to ask: How is it that someone who is as prestigious as you are and as powerful in South Africa at the moment has done nothing to protest against what’s going on in Zimbabwe, where people are being tortured as we are speaking, thrown into prison. The head of the opposition might be executed because he said ‘Eliminate Mugabe’. You could say to eliminate someone in a football match if they don’t get enough points or something. It doesn’t mean you kill someone. I mean you know that that is a spin on the world.

 

Q.2 [female]: The problem is that we all do want to do something. We all protest. The problem is, what can we do constructively? It’s very hard to find out what we can really do. I had some money a while back and I didn’t know where to give it that wouldn’t just be a bottomless pit, so I didn’t give anything. Eventually I found something that was effective, that has a brilliant strategy, and then I started giving money. And if anyone wants to know what this is and would like to come to me later, I will tell you what that is, but it is doing amazing things in Africa and India and many other countries.

 

Q.3 [male]: I must confess that I’m a bit biased here because I’m actually working on a Ph.D on Albie Sachs! But my question is: We have truth, we have reconciliation. I ask, isn’t there a contradiction in that, that the more you know about others, does it not make reconciliation difficult? But also of course because I’m from South Africa, the question I ask is: Is it mainly about truth and reconciliation, or about economic opportunities? Out of the boy, the woman or the man on the street who lives in a shanty, who sees other people who have for generations had much more than himself: is he able to reconcile himself when the economic opportunities are not there? So I wonder whether those things could be reconciled?

 

Jonathan Magonet: You want to be a footnote in your own Ph.D obviously!

 

Q.4 [female]: I have got one question for Justice Sachs, one for Dr Hertz. They won’t like either of them. Justice Sachs, I’d like to ask you why you refused to get the English cricket team to change their matches from murderous Zimbabwe to South Africa? My question to Dr Hertz is: Instead of going to Genoa and making a nuisance of yourself, why don’t you go over and help those children that you seem to care about so much, like other people have done? You’re young and healthy, do something about it! You prefer to talk about it in Cambridge!

 

Jonathan Magonet: I think Noreena actually invited precisely this level of dissident comment and we’ve got it and I would like to invite both of our speakers to respond.

 

Noreena Hertz: To the lady who raised a very important issue about women and about gender and gender and globalisation, yes, you were referring specifically to the case of female circumcision. But if we look more broadly, we see that women tend to be off the whole agenda when we talk about globalisation, despite the fact that out of the 900 million illiterate people in the world, women outnumber men 2:1. Despite the fact that it is women who typically are bearing the brunt of globalisation. When hospitals are privatised and patients sent home, it is not that they are sent home to die. It’s expected that the women will, on top of everything else that they are doing, look after them. When public services are cut back and there isn’t water for miles, it is women who go and trudge. So I think you raised a very legitimate issue, that women are often kept off the radar screen and we need to address their concerns.

 

To the question about what we can do as individuals and how hard it is, as individuals, to find what we can do. Well, I think there are a few strands that we can actively act on. If our concerns are things like sweatshop labour, exploitation of women or children in factories, environmental degradation, well then, those of us who have money in our pockets and can weigh up the kind of products we buy, can use that power in quite an effective way to make a difference. We see companies like Pepsi and Kodak and Carlsberg pulling out of Burma, say, because of consumer pressure.

 

Investors, if you have money to invest, again, there are now ethical investment funds. There are ways that you can invest your money to make a difference. These are ways that we can as individuals make a difference. I think though, and this will also address the other lady’s question, I think that a big part of what we need to do is actually be heard. Being heard, and trying to change the political agenda is actually more important and a better use of my time than the hour that I can spend holding the dying Aids baby, which is obviously a critical hour. But if I have an opportunity to actually affect the system that enables children to be dying of Aids and nothing to be done about it, a system that enables pharmaceutical companies to be hiking up the prices of their drugs and not allowing generic drugs to be delivered, a system in which aid to the poorest countries of the world has fallen in real terms by 45 per cent over the last ten years, a system in which the poorest countries of the world are getting $1 in aid and paying back $9 in debt servicing, if I have an opportunity to change that system, then I think I can have a much greater effect personally.

 

Albie Sachs: Well just in case I went away with the impression that everybody is like Noreena, I think you’ve helped me clarify that one has the same diversity here as you get in any community and there’s free speech and the possibility of debate and it’s wonderful that people feel something and that they feel strongly about it and they come out with it. So we have got to listen to you and we have got to try and respond as well as we can, and to the others. And it gives me a chance also to clarify some points which I mightn’t have had a chance to otherwise.

 

We do have circumcision in South Africa. It’s called a bris. I think some of you are familiar with it. We don’t have female circumcision. It’s not an issue in our country but we have far more women in parliament than you have in this country, far more women in government than you have in this country, I think many more women on the bench than you have in this country. Two of my colleagues on the Constitutional Court are women and they are highly admired and praised. There are no women in the House of Lords here. One can go through area after area, and that’s in a country that’s known oppression and backwardness and division. The idea that emancipation doesn’t just mean getting rid of apartheid, it means enabling everybody to be free and to use their talents and to get ahead and to overcome obstacles and disadvantages is very, very prominent in our public life, and we take these questions very, very seriously.

 

As far as Zimbabwe is concerned, as a judge I am limited in what I can do but it doesn’t mean I can’t do anything. If we believe in the separation of powers, we don’t expect judges to be criticised for doing their job by government. And I must say I’ve been amazed. If some of the things that were said by one minister here were to have been said about judges in South Africa, people would say, ‘Where’s the rule of law? Where’s the rule of law?’

 

But that also means that we don’t criticise our government for its foreign policy and what it does because we want our independence. But it doesn’t mean that we do nothing. If I see that colleagues of mine on the bench in Zimbabwe are being subjected to intimidation and exclusion, I can speak out and I have spoken out. That’s a little area, a little space that’s available to me, and I do that and I’ve done that and I’ve made no secret of it whatsoever.

 

As far as the situation generally is concerned, I’m not speaking as a judge now, I’m speaking as a person, one of the accused in the treason trial, Welshman Nkube is an old friend of mine. I was external examiner at the Law Faculty for a number of years. He was a professor there, and I have very great respect and admiration for him, and to me it is astonishing that he is on trial for treason. I am going to watch that case very, very closely. So it doesn’t mean that I accept or go along with or condone or associate myself in any way with things that are happening there. But I am limited in the responses that I can make in my capacity as a judge, and even more so when I am out of my own country visiting another country.

 

In terms of the decision on whether or not the game due to be played between England and Zimbabwe should be relocated, when I was leaving to travel to Britain, I bumped into my colleague Pious Langa, Deputy Chief Justice. He’d just come back from New Zealand. I was carrying my bags and he said, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘I’m going to England.’ He said, ‘I hope you’re safe there!’

 

But in fact, people have been very sensible and, particularly when I make it clear that the only issue, the only issue that came to me, and I’ve done work for the International Cricket Board before, I wasn’t just drafted in for this particular occasion, was an appeal by the English Cricket Board against a decision, first by the International Cricket Board, then by the Events Committee, that it was not dangerous to play. It was the only issue. There was no moral question at all. The issue of giving legitimacy to the government there was not raised. It was not before me, and in fact the English Cricket Board said expressly, ‘We are not raising political questions. The only question is the question of security.’

 

And there we had, on the one hand, six members of the International Cricket Board who had been to Zimbabwe. Then an Events Committee was established. They went, much closer to the day, and they did their own inspection. They spoke to everybody concerned whom they felt relevant. They got an expert from South Africa on security who had had to check on the World Summit, the inauguration of Presidents, whose job it is, just a professional security person high up in the police force. He said that he didn’t see any real danger, any serious threat. Then there was an international security body that had somebody from MI5, a former CIA person, who have got no interest in cricket at all, certainly not the CIA, and they said that they’d examined all the possibilities of danger and that they didn’t see any danger.

 

On the other side was one anonymous email containing some threats. If one is going to cancel games and postpone games and relocate games because of anonymous emails, then no tournament is safe anywhere in the world. Any gambler who wants to change, and any hoaxer, anybody with bad intent, can get it shifted. That was all. Subsequently another letter came through from a little kind of a body.

 

Now my job wasn’t to decide on the basic issue. It was to decide whether the appeal should be upheld or not. Was a case made out for overturning the decisions of those who’d been there, made the investigations, focusing only on the security question? And honestly I wish all my cases were technically as easy as that one. In fact, I don’t wish that. I love the difficult cases! But that was a case where all the evidence just went in one direction. But I would like to thank you for giving me the chance to make the explanation.

 

When England didn’t make it, I joked with friends of mine, ‘Have you got some dark glasses and a moustache for me?’ And I said, ‘Maybe I should apply for political asylum!’ But then I discovered I’d be much worse off applying for political asylum. It’s not the thing to do these days!

 

I’d also like to make one other point. The main thing that I can do to secure justice and equality and dignity and respect for human rights in the whole of Africa is to ensure that we achieve these things in South Africa. We’ve got to be the model. We’ve got to be the bastion. And that’s where our Court is playing such an important role and we give judgements against the government, and the government accepts it. We struck down very important proclamations of Nelson Mandela. He had to reconvene parliament at great expense. He said, ‘I, as President of South Africa, must be the first to accept my respect for the constitution and for the Constitutional Court.’ And our present President has been criticised for a number of different things that he has done or not done. Nobody has criticised him for a lack of respect for our Court. It is a very, very powerful thing that we have.

 

In terms of truth and reconciliation, I agree completely that it is unfair to burden the Truth Commission with the whole process of transformation and reunification and deep reconciliation in our country. That’s not its function. Its function is to allow people to speak in their own voices, to weep their real tears, to express their hearts, to give names and faces and personalities to what otherwise just becomes dead statistics, reports by official commissions and so on. And it humanises the whole terrible process. And when the people responsible for terrible things come forward and acknowledge, even if it is only a tiny part of what they did, they are getting some burden off themselves and they are becoming more human and humanising themselves and establishing the basis for all of us to live together.

 

I was telephoned one day in my chambers by somebody who said he wanted to speak to me. He was going to the Truth Commission. The day came and I opened the door. He had told me that he had organised the bomb in my car. Was I willing to see him? And I opened the security gate and there he was, Henry. So this is the man who tried to kill me and he’s looking at me, ‘so this is the man I was trying to kill.’ We hadn’t quarrelled. We didn’t hate each other. We didn’t even know each other till that moment. And when we walked down the passage, I remember he had a stiff military stride, so I put on my best judicial ambulatory stroll to slow him down and take command. We spoke with great intensity for a couple of hours and eventually I said, ‘Henry, I’ve got to get back to my work.’ Normally when I say goodbye to somebody, I shake his hand or her hand. We stood up and I said, ‘I can’t shake your hand but tell the Truth Commission what you know. Help South Africa. Do something for the country and maybe we’ll meet again.’

 

Then I went back to my work and forgot about him. About six or nine months, a year later, at the end of the year, I’m at a party, very tired, the music was loud, and I hear a voice, ‘Albie!’ I look around. ‘Albie!’ ‘Henry! What happened? What happened?’

 

And we get into a corner to get away from the music and he’s elated, he’s beaming and he said, ‘And you told me that….’. I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘I saw Sue and Farouk and Bobby and I told them everything I knew and you said.’ He’s using first name terms of people who were in exile with me, and he’s calling me Albie. Something has happened. And he’s absolutely beaming. And I said, ‘Henry, I’ve only got your face to tell me that what you’re saying is the truth.’ And I put out my hand and I shook his hand. He went away absolutely elated, and I almost fainted into the arms of my friend.

 

I heard afterwards that he went home and he cried for two weeks. Now this is what the Truth Commission was about, and for me it was very empowering. Not just empowering. If I should meet Henry again, I don’t want to be his friend. I don’t want to have more to do with him than is necessary. But if he sits down in a bus next to me, I don’t feel that he is an enemy. I feel we are living in the same moral territory. He has accepted something of what he did, that it was wrong, in defence of a wrong system, that we move forward. And that is the pain of our Truth Commission, because there has been such extraordinary generosity, overwhelmingly but not exclusively from African people, who suffered so much trauma and yet who are willing to live together with those who were responsible for their dispossession and the hurt.

 

But when the day’s proceedings are over at the Truth Commission, they will go to catch, we call them the ‘taxis’, the minibuses, back to a shack and they see the people who’ve owned up to what they did, the torturers and so on, getting into their cars, driving off, going to a lovely home. And as long as we’ve got that kind of inequality which is the very inequality you were speaking about on a global scale, but in our country, we are not going to have full reconciliation. But until we remove some of that denial, some of that sense that these things didn’t happen: ‘I’m not responsible.’ ‘It wasn’t important.’ ‘It had nothing to do with me.’ Until we get that out of the way, we can’t put ourselves together and work together for the economic advantages and so on. And I’m a great believer in ideas. I think ideas really matter. And I’m a great believer in values. I think that’s what one really needs: values, ideas, and then action following on all that. Thank you.

 

Jonathan Magonet: We have time for two more questions. The answers are so good, it is worth getting the questions!

 

Q.5 [male] : My question, well it’s a comment really for Dr Hertz. I agree with so much of what you said, apart from when you talk about the outsider. I think you romanticise the idea of the outsider. For many oppressed people and many communities, they don’t want to have the status as outsider. They want to be included, and it should be our aim to move towards inclusion. Exactly what Albie Sachs says when he describes the tree and the roots of the tree. I think it is very easy to romanticise being an outsider when you’re white, Jewish, middle class and privileged. I think it is very easy to feel that that is something to be celebrated. But I think we should be striving for inclusion, not celebrating being an outsider.

 

Q.5 [female]: Can I just first say a personal thank you to both speakers? Dr Hertz seemed to be talking from a very personal point of view. Nothing wrong with that, but in terms of her activism, I didn’t get any kind of sense of an association with an organisation, quite unlike Justice Sachs who related always back to his experience in the ANC.

 

And then to some extent related to that, I also agree from my point of view that being Jewish has been a major part of what has made me an activist for a great deal of my life. What I do feel is a problem is when other people expect Jews to behave better than anybody else because of their own experiences. And I came to the conclusion some years ago that this is a very prevalent view. I feel that in a way it is a kind of racism, and I have often asked myself the question, and I’d like a response if possible from both speakers on this as well the bit about whether other people, especially non-Jews, have a right to expect Jews to behave better than other people: is there a sense in which, after two or three thousand years, depending on how far your history goes back, Jews have earned the right to behave as badly as anybody else, as well as better than anybody else?

 

Noreena Hertz: My quest is for an inclusive society in connection with that gentleman’s question, a society where there is equality of opportunity, where there is equality of rights, where basic needs are met for everyone and where everyone feels part of something. But yet, I feel that that is reconcilable with a sense of difference, with a sense of, as you were saying, having a different identity. Being an outsider. The outsider-insider. Juxtaposition, I think, is not paradoxical. They actually can co-exist and should co-exist.

 

In terms of what organisation am I speaking from, unfortunately I don’t have an organisation like the ANC that I can kind of hang my hat on. I’m primarily an academic and my activism really comes from my kind of thinking these issues through and trying to challenge it first on an intellectual basis and then in a real world environment. But there are many organisations that I am close to and feel that I draw support from, whether it is things like some of the NGOs like Oxfam or Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace or World Development Movement. There is a kind of community of various non-governmental organisations or the Debt Campaign or Jubilee 2000 and various individuals out there. So there is a kind of much more informal coalition that I feel part of.

 

In terms of Jews being expected to do better than everyone else because of our history, well, I would say that we as Jews actually have not been doing very well on these broader issues of addressing global concerns like Aids in Africa, like global inequality, like injustice. The churches are actually much more involved in all of these broader concerns than we as a Jewish community are. I have countless phone calls, faxes, emails, ranging from the Pope’s office to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s office, saying: ‘We are concerned about these issues of globalisation, capitalism, exclusion’. And even though the Chief Rabbi has actually taken quite a strong position on many of these issues, Jews as a community actually haven’t been playing the role that they could do, and I think that it’s premature to say that we need to be allowed to be kind of bad rather than put the emphasis on doing more good.

 

Albie Sachs: Well I’ve been very puzzled myself by that question. But I think the corollary is that if Jews have earned the right, and always have the right really, to be as good and as bad as everybody else in the world, then we are not a chosen people and we have to bear the consequences and we must be as criticised and willing to accept criticism for misconduct in the same way as everybody else. No excuses. No special responsibilities.

 

I once said that, exactly what you’re saying, at a similar meeting in Cape Town and my progressive friends were so shocked and felt so let down by what I was saying that I’ve decided never to make that point again! So I’m hiding behind you a little bit!

 

But I think there is something there. I think that if one has a principle in life that you contribute what you’ve got, you feed in what you’ve got, whatever it might be, and in Noreena’s case, she’s got intellectual expertise. That’s her main contribution and that’s fed by her participating in demonstrations and so on, so that it’s not simply a bookish kind of a thing. But her real battlefront is the battlefront of ideas, of values, of speaking to people, communicating. I think that’s wonderful and valuable in itself.

 

And if it so happens that I come from a background where people understand pain, understand exclusion, understand the importance of idealism and hope, and if that’s something that just came to me very early on because my parents knew all that, if that’s a real quality and a real value, then I think it is something special. It’s not special because we are Chosen People, with a capital C and a capital P, but because there is something in the background, in the culture, where idealism counts and matters, where being human counts and matters. The late Joe Slovo was famous inside the ANC for his jokes, and it wasn’t just that he made people laugh. The jokes had point. They had wisdom. They had a way of making people see things from multiple points of view. It became part and parcel of the struggle of culture. Well that’s something he had to contribute. He contributed that. And so that might be a bit of an indirect answer to what you’re saying. If it so happens that there’s so much in our history and past that is infused with these values, then maybe that is something we shouldn’t hold back on. We should proudly contribute it to whatever we happen to be involved in.

 

Jonathan Magonet: Thank you. Albie mentioned earlier that he was going to talk about the Jewish puzzle that is part of it. You have a little bit more? Then, your closing remarks please.

 

Albie Sachs: A very quick final thing. I was trying to think, what is it that is just really Jewish over and above everything else? I only discovered two points. The one is that we tend to invest all the little details of ordinary life with moral significance. I’ve just noticed that. I’ve met Jews from Chile and from America and from Australia. It’s a funny kind of thing we have in common. The little details of ordinary life that other people allow to pass and go, we get quite excited about them and we convert them into a huge, moral, existential kind of a thing. The other is we always like to have the last word! Thank you.

 

Jonathan Magonet: It’s my privilege as the Chair to have the last word and on your behalf to thank Noreena Hertz and Albie Sachs for a fascinating evening. I think there is one Hebrew word which probably fits both of them in very different ways: it’s the word lev. Lev means heart, but heart in the Bible certainly means intellect and that is something which has been a crucial part of the Jewish approach to issues. There, from Noreena, we have seen the application of intellect to these major issues which affect us. But lev also means heart and emotion, and Albie is a witness and a witness brings a very special quality to the struggle which he has gone through and which, in a sense, we’ve been challenged, all of us, to address. So, on your behalf, let us thank our speakers for a fascinating and brilliant evening.