Contested Legacies of the South African Constitution : An Engagement with Albie Sachs’s Oliver Tambo’s Dream

• DOI: 10.10520/EJC-19c16e5746
• Published date: 03 December 2019
• Author: Ntando Sindane
• Pages: 1-7
• Date: 03 December 2019
• Record Number: sapr1_v34_n1_a7

Book Review

Southern African Public Law

https://doi.org/10.25159/2522-6800/5777

https://upjournals.co.za/index.php/SAPL

ISSN 2219-6412 (Print) | 2522-6800 (Online)

Volume 34 | Number 1 | 2019 | #5777 | 7 pages

© Unisa Press 2019

Contested Legacies of the South African Constitution:

An Engagement with Albie Sachs’s Oliver Tambo’s

Dream

African Lives, 2017, pp 142. SKU 9780620779593

Reviewed by Ntando Sindane

Department of Mercantile Law,

University of South Africa

ntandosindane@gmail.com

Albie Sachs’s Oliver Tambo’s Dream is based on a series of four public lectures that he

delivered on four separate topics at four different universities in South Africa. The

golden thread that runs through the four lectures is Sachs’s application of the South

African Constitution to various social questions and his recounting of Oliver Tambo’s

influence on its drafting and content.

In the first lecture, Sachs opens with three ‘burning’ questions: (1) What was the one

good thing that apartheid created? (2) If you did a paternity test on the Constitution,

whose DNA would come up? And, lastly, (3) Was the object of the freedom struggle to

get a share for ourselves [fighters of the liberation movement] of the spoils of war or to

enable all the people to share in the fruits of liberation?

Sachs should know that question (1) validates the racist narrative which suggests that

apartheid (and therefore colonialism) was not all that bad. He suggests that the one good

thing about apartheid was that it created anti-apartheid. The logic is that, for people like

Sachs who come from a socialist yet urban environment, the anti-apartheid struggle was

the only way to come close to and be strongly influenced by someone of Tambo’s

stature. It is a matter of uncertainty, at this point in the lecture, whether Justice Sachs

appreciates the fact that he had made the point that apartheid’s only necessity was to

pave space for an elite group of people with middle-class aspirations to commit class

suicide, and thus forge working relationships with the people on the underside. A

problematic feature in these types of argument is that they tend to have a tinge of

wanting to trivialise ahistorically the assault that apartheid has had on the black body.