Albie Sachs on Building a Constitution in South Africa
Albie Sachs, a white activist who opposed apartheid and was exiled from South Africa for 23 years, now serves as a judge on South Africa's Constitutional Court. While in exile, Sachs survived an assasination attempt. In this clip from a presentation at Facing History, Sachs discusses the process of creating a post-Apartheid constitution for South Africa.
If we want confidence, and we want everybody to feel safe, and everybody to feel that this is their constitution, not the ANC's constitution [but] the nation's constitution, we have to build in guarantees. So we agreed to 34 principles in advance that would be binding.... on the elected parliament, that we choose a government, a president, see to it that a Constitutional Court was established, and an interim Bill of Rights...and draft a final constitution according to these 34 principles...it was a two-step process....
We had debates on abortion, gay rights, and federalism, on capital punishment-on hard issues, not light-hearted, not frivolous-but you had to find a very human and telling way of communicating your point....
It wasn't saying, ‘We're going to draw up the constitution on the basis of what people are telling us,' but just involving people in the discussion, so they could understand the constitution and it was a very big public opinion campaign; one of the few, I think, that have been really effective, because people were asked at the beginning how many understood what was going on. 50% understood it. At the end of the campaign it had gone up to 70%, after 6 months.
So the process of drafting the constitution was as important as the outcome. You bring the people in; it helps you get better results...it makes them feel [that] ‘this is our constitution. We have a stake in it.' And it makes it very difficult for people in the future to unravel it.
