When Albie met Albie

If you’re called Albie, and you’ve never met anyone else with the same name, then where better to start than with Albie Sachs.

Albie (the elder) was receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of York, and Paul Gready of the Centre for Applied Human Rights very kindly arranged for us to have a brief meeting with him. I felt very privileged to be meeting him, and I hope it was meaningful too for Albie (the younger).

As a white lawyer, Albie Sachs was active in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. He was detained, lost an arm and an eye when a bomb went off in his car (he later had a reconciliation meeting with the person who had planted it), and after Mandela’s victory ended up as a judge on South Africa’s Constitutional Court.

The inscription which he wrote for Albie in our copy of the Jail Diary of Albie Sachs reads as follows:

To Albie from Albie. Welcome to the world that was mine, and which happily we have changed.

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