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Tavis: I am honored to welcome Justice Albie Sachs to this program. His life is an incredible story of courage and conviction and commitment dedicated to the cause of human and civil rights in South Africa. Targeted for years by pro-apartheid governments in South Africa, he was nearly killed in 1988 during an assassination attempt on his life. That attack left him without the use of an arm and one eye.

In 1994, Nelson Mandela appointed him to the highest court in South Africa, a position he holds to this day. Justice Sachs, it is an honor to have you in the U.S., and in our city of Los Angeles.

Justice Albie Sachs: It's wonderful to be here, thank you.

Tavis: We are delighted to have you here. You have been on a speaking tour, talking to a lot of young people, I hear.

Tavis Smiley: Young people and older people and some very old people. (laugh) There's a group called Facing History And Ourselves. And it started off with Holocaust studies, but broadened it out to all forms of persecution and violence to the human spirit and to people. It's very much engaged in teaching tolerance, getting into the schools.

It started in Boston, but now has branches all over the country and very strong connections with South Africa. And I've spoken to them on several occasions, and they invited me and my partner, Ms Vanessa September, to come on a tour. We're just ending the tour. It's been actually quite a wonderful tour.

Tavis: How many cities? You lost count. (laugh)

Sachs: I lost count after seven or eight. And we went to New York twice, so that messes up things a bit.

Tavis: You spent this kind of time in the States before, here in the U.S. before?

Sachs: Yes, yes.

Tavis: So this is old hat for you, coming to the U.S. and going from city to city.

Sachs: It's sometimes, old hats, new hats, medium hats. It's something I enjoy doing very much.

Tavis: There's so much I want to talk about in the half an hour that I have with you. Let me start, though, on this very notion. How do you find the U.S. these days? As one who sits on the highest court in South Africa, this is a loaded question. I apologize. Well, no I don't. I'm going to ask you anyway. (laugh)

I don't get a chance to talk to our own members of our Supreme Court; I gotta take advantage of talking to you. How do you find our jurisprudence in the States these days?

Sachs: I find the debates very fascinating. We work in a different context, so we pursue different avenues. First of all, we have a very broad and sweeping constitution. Contemporary, comprehensive.

Tavis: Which you helped to write.

Sachs: In South Africa, I was involved in that.

Tavis: And we'll come back to that later, yeah.

Sachs: And it's a constitution not to protect the status quo, but a constitution for transformation. We also look to international jurisprudence. We feel we can only gain. We're not afraid to look at judgments of the U.S. Supreme Court, Canada, Germany, India, Namibia, United Kingdom. And we benefit enormously from looking at international jurisprudence.

Here, I believe it's an issue of great controversy which has divided your Supreme Court.

Tavis: I'm glad you said that, because I was just about to go there. In the United States, particularly under this administration, we frown on looking at international law. But what I'm hearing you suggest is that in South Africa, your supreme court is very much open to looking at international jurisprudence.

Sachs: We benefit enormously from that. We're not looking for precedence. We're not saying one American decision is worth two Canadian and three German and four Indian. We're looking for philosophy, outlook. Modern societies all over the world are grappling with very similar problems. How much rights should individuals have as against the state?

How much diversity and tolerance is somehow written into the very character of the society that provides basic principles that have to be acknowledged? Capital punishment, same-sex couples, their rights. These are problems that crop up all over the world. And you just read what other judges have written on those questions, and you don't say, I like that judge, I don't like that judge.

I like that reasoning. I like that philosophy. That chimes in well with what our constitution is getting at, with the character of our society, the problems we have in our country.

Tavis: I tell you what I always found fascinating, Justice, as a young student who was out raising banners and raising protest about apartheid in South Africa, I was pleased, as so many of us were, of course, and pleased is an understatement, when apartheid suffered a crushing blow in your country of South Africa.

I've always found it fascinating that the U.S. really was a Johnny-come-lately, quite frankly, but not for the courage of Randall Robinson at Trans Africa, and others who Mr. Mandela has thanked any number of times. Apartheid would not have come down when it did come down. We put a lot pressure, but it took a lot time.

Leon Sullivan, the Sullivan Principles. All the stuff you already know of. Just recapping history, right quick. For all that went into making South Africa come down, from the U.S. point of view, it was fascinating to me then that once you got appointed to the court by Mr. Mandela, you and your colleagues sat down to write your own constitution. You looked to the U.S. Constitution for some guidance. Is that fascinating and ironic to you?

Sachs: (laugh) No, no, everybody has got to look to the U.S. Constitution, because it was the first great modern constitution. But we look to the Canadian constitution, we look to the German, we look to the Indian, we look to the Namibian. We didn't look to copy things from them. We looked to what works there that's going to work well for us?

Tavis: So what was so fascinating for you and your colleagues at that time about the U.S. Constitution as you were helping to write South Africa's new constitution?

Sachs: The whole idea of constitutional democracy. The whole idea that from the President downwards, everybody is bound by the constitution. That no public power can be exercised outside the framework of the constitution. I think that was the central notion. The separation of powers was very important. To have a strong equivalent of your Supreme Court that it can strike down acts of Congress.

Can strike down acts of the President, if they violate the Constitution. That was the very central thing that we needed. A lot of your equal protection jurisprudence, very, very rich. Some outsiders, we find it often very confusing, very ambivalent. But rich it certainly is, with a number of different positions being adopted.

And so we benefited from studying what had happened here, and possibly trying to clarify some issues that still remain obscure for various reasons in this country. We felt we have to, for example, we have to have a clear opening to allow for active transformation for what's here called affirmative action. In a country where 15 percent of the population owned 87 percent of the land by law, and maybe 95 percent of productive capital, that's not a country. You're not going to function. So there has to be change.

Tavis: I want to ask in a moment how South Africa is doing 12 years after Mr. Mandela took office in '94, I guess it was, if my memory serves me correctly. Before I get to that, though, tell me more about the constitutional struggles that South Africa's having now. You know ours full well, and I won't bore our audience with a recap of the things that we're struggling every day. They know that as well as I do. What are the some of the constitutional issues that South Africa is struggling with as we speak?

Sachs: Well, we get the balance right between national authority and provincial authority, equivalent to your states. It hasn't been hugely problematic, but there's a tension built in there, and some of the provinces have wanted more powers, and sometimes the central government has said no, no, this can only be done on a national basis.

Tavis: Of course, as you know, that states rights issue is still an ongoing issue here in the United States every day.

Sachs: Yes, it's a much hotter issue here than it is in...

Tavis: Much hotter here.

Sachs: Here, yes, in the United States than it is in South Africa. And it's partly, we took over something from Germany called concurrent powers, in which both the central government and the equivalent of your states have powers over agriculture and education and health, all these important things. And then the constitution indicates, if there's a clash between what the state or the province says, and the national government says, the constitution indicates which one will prevail.

And we have those criteria built in. And we look very much to what we call cooperative governance. We don't like to see the states fighting against the central government. And so there are procedures in place to encourage negotiation and conciliation, if possible.

Tavis: Let me come back to your country, now, the question I said I wanted to raise a moment ago as to how South Africa is doing. Let me kind of build my way up to that, if I might, by...

Sachs: Can I just say, on some hot issues here, capital punishment; our court has declared capital punishment to be unconstitutional. It violates the principles of respect for human dignity, and it also violates clearly the right to life, and it violates the prohibition against cruel, inhuman, degrading punishment.

Tavis: Since you mentioned capital punishment, not long ago on this program, in fact, I had one of the last interviews with a guy named Stan 'Tookie' Williams, who was on death row here in California. Governor Schwarzenegger, under a lot of pressure to grant clemency, the Governor decided ultimately not to do that, which is the Governor's right.

He decided not to do that. Tookie Williams put to death, huge debate in this country kicked up again about the death penalty around that particular case. I'm just curious as to how the supreme court in South Africa justified and juxtaposes the rights of the people - the victims, is what I'm getting at. The victims have a real problem.

Of course, many victims, at least, families of victims, have a problem with people being allowed to live when they've taken life. How did you all balance that in South Africa?

Sachs: Well, those arguments were presented to us, and we felt it doesn't restore the deceased person to life by taking another life. And it's diminishing respect for human life. You're always playing into the hands of the killers, because you're getting society to say it's okay to kill if circumstances justify. We would accept self-defense.

We would accept when hostages are taken sometimes, to protect their lives, you have to take a life. But for the state to kill in cold blood, that's something that's so, particularly in South Africa, where the state had massacred people, tortured people to death, where our gallows used to have six people being hanged at one time.

Where social control and racist control is exercised very much through that extreme power of punishment through the state, we just felt, each judge had his or her own personal reactions to it. But interpreting the constitution, we just felt it goes against the kind of country we want to live in.

Tavis: So then what's the most extreme punishment in South Africa, life in prison?

Sachs: Life imprisonment, yes. Life imprisonment.

Tavis: To the country of South Africa, Mr. Mandela took office in 1994. Mr. Mbeki, Tabo Mbeki, is on his second term as the President of South Africa. How is the country doing under this new constitution?

Sachs: Well, I think we're doing pretty well. And it's not only under the constitution, but because of the constitution. Our President is going to step down after two terms. Nelson Mandela stepped down before two terms. He could have gone on for longer. And it's showing you're not a President for life. You exercise power because in our case, there is no direct right for the President.

Its Parliament chooses the President. You're answerable to Parliament, and to the people through Parliament. And it's working well.

Tavis: I was on a plane, Justice, not a few days ago, a few weeks ago, not even knowing at the time you were going on the program, we're honored to have you, again. Without even knowing you were going to be here, just doing some reading about South Africa. And I was reading a particular report that suggested that roughly a third of the people in South Africa have not at all been touched by this new government.

So apartheid has ended, but there is still a significant number of people in your country who have not at all been benefited by the end of apartheid in any personal sense. They're not being beaten, they're not being hung and tortured in the way that apartheid did, but their lives have not improved. Their quality of life has not gone up. I know this is not a legal issue per se, but just talk to me about how...

Sachs: No, no, it's correct and it's incorrect. Everybody's been touched. First of all, your dignity. Dignity really matters. And people feel that. It's not only they have the vote. They feel free. It's in their songs, in the expression. Just people walking in the streets. You don't get people getting off the pavement to make way for someone else anymore.

It's very noticeable. People are very relaxed in their bodies. But it's more than that. We've got millions of people have electricity, even in shacks who didn't have it before. They have running water, clean, healthy water, which they didn't have before. Millions of people. There are tarred roads; there are streetlights in these desperately poor areas.

But what is true is something like 25 to 30 percent of our population are living in abysmal poverty. That is a reality. But everybody talks about it. All the parties competing for the elections that, we're going to have local government elections soon, are arguing who can help the poor the most. Not who can help the rich the most, but who promised the most to the poor.

And there's intense debate about that. And many people say government's not doing enough. We've built one point six million brick houses for people living in shacks. They've moved, maybe 10 million people have moved from shacks into brick houses. But they, pretty small houses. They don't have real communities. But it is forward movement.

So it's wrong to say they're untouched. They are touched. But others have benefited much, much more. The new emerging Black middle class benefits, and sometimes in quite spectacular ways. And it's transforming our country. It's deracializing our schools; our suburbs are opening up. And that's all to the good. But it's desperately sad that there are still 25 to 30 percent of people living in abysmal conditions.

Tavis: This is my commentary brought on by your last statement, which really has no place on this television program, but I'll put it out there anyway. We have a conversation coming up in a few days on this program with Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of our House Of Representatives, about the 2008 presidential season.

Now I'm just thinking as you're talking how I would love to see a campaign for the White House where people in both parties were fighting about who could do the most for the poor. I would love to live in a country where something like that would happen. But I digress. That said, let me go to Mr. Mandela before - I'm trying to work my way around to your personal story.

Mr. Mandela appoints you to the highest court in the land in South Africa. Talk to me about what you believe, as his friend, and as one who was appointed by him, what his legacy is.

Sachs: It's what he did, but more what he represented. He just captured something in his style, his voice, his marvelous presence, his humanity, his humor, that's very deep in our movement, very deep in the African people. And he just articulated in a very beautiful way. He did more to destroy racism in our country and in the world than all the encounter groups and the UNESCO studies and so on.

Just by being so gracious, being so intelligent, thoughtful. So the legacy is enormous. But I think the strength of the legacy is because it wasn't just an individual. It's because he captured something in our culture, in our society. in the spirit of a nation that's emerging to articulate itself in a particularly contemporary, rooted, and dignified way.

Tavis: One of my friends, who is a very well known academic in this country, Professor Cornell West, who teaches at Princeton, was invited to speak at - they have a birthday celebration of Mr. Mandela every year. The Mandela Lectures.

Sachs: He came to our courts.

Tavis: Oh, he did?

Sachs: He gave a lecture in the foyer of the constitutional courts.

Tavis: Well, you know where I'm going with this, then. Professor West called me from Mr. Mandela's house while he was there, to tell me what a great time he was having. While he was there, he gave a number of speeches. One in your courts, as you mentioned. In one of the speeches he gave, which was televised there in South Africa, he referred to what he termed the Santa Clausification of Nelson Mandela.

And I said Doc, hit me with that again. (laugh) He said the Santa Clausification of Nelson Mandela is concerning him. What he gave this lecture about was that as new generations come online, they look at Nelson Mandela as this great, heroic figure. But they've got statutes of the guy, shopping malls named after him, clothing lines.

His foundation's always suing somebody for using his name in some inappropriate way. But what Dr. West was trying to get across is that this guy had courage and conviction and commitment the likes of which the world has not seen for many, many years. And we don't want to Santa Claus this guy in a way that takes away the focus on what he really accomplished.

Is it your sense that as Mr. Mandela gets older and as he approaches the end of his life, that he is not being viewed in the way that he ought to be viewed, given the contribution that he made?

Sachs: I don't think so. I don't think so. I think that danger is something to guard against. It's stronger internationally than it is in the country. He's been out of office for some years. And he says, I'm a pensioner today. We've had Tabo Mbeki as President for one term, half of the next term. And the focus has shifted quite a lot. President Nelson Mandela, Madiba, we called him.

He was that great figure bringing people together, showing that democracy can work, that racism is nonsense, and racism is harmful. It's not inevitable. And he did it quite beautifully. The focus now is on transformation and delivery, on attending to the details, on the economy. Those weren't his strong suits.

There are new debates, there are new arguments. Everybody loves Mandela. There are still songs about Mandela. And some commercial entities are capitalizing on him. But he's also capitalizing on them, because he gets a lot of boodle for his children's fund. And he's passionate about collecting money for all sorts of important enterprises, particularly in rural areas.

But I think our people are very, very realistic. And we're not looking for saints. We already had Gandhi on our shores for decades. And we say with a funny pride, we have the only prison in the world where both Gandhi and Mandela were locked up.

Tavis: Robben Island, yeah.

Sachs: No, no, the fort prison in Johannesburg.

Tavis: Oh, the Joburg prison, sure.

Sachs: And that's where we built our court. Our court is right next to the cells where they were locked up. Just to symbolize the transformation from the past to the future.

Tavis: Let me ask, before I let you get out of here, how it is - and we could have done a show just on this - but how it is and why it is and where this commitment to freedom came from for you. As I mentioned earlier, you lost an arm, lost use of an eye, all because you believe so strongly in this notion of freedom. How did that develop in you?

Sachs: I was born into it. I didn't stand a chance. My dad was a trade union leader, Solly Sachs, secretary of the Garment Workers Union. My mom was the typist for Moses Katani, (sp?) a very prominent African leader. And she would say tidy up, tidy up, Uncle Moses is coming. So I grew up in a home where the respect of human beings for other human beings was just there.

And it was racism that just seemed odd. But it was really when at university I fell in with a young crowd who shared these values, that I felt that's where I want to be. And it's been a wonderfully rich life, a wonderfully rich and validating and textured life, with tremendous friendships. I had to learn to sing, to move my body, to get out of that tight White skin.

It didn't do me any harm. (laugh) And just breaking down the barriers has been so enlightening. And not simply through doing it through your head, but through sharing risks, being in prison together, working for the new constitution, knowing people like Nelson Mandela. But it's not just Madiba.

It's Walter Sisulu, it's Ahmed Kathrada, it's Albert Lutuli. I can go on. I've only got five fingers left. So I can use them up very, very quickly.

Tavis: I'm reading Sobukwe's book right now.

Sachs: Robert Sobukwe.

Tavis: "How Can Man Die Better." That's a great book. I'm reading it now. When you're in jail, though, and you have an assassination attempt, and you lose an arm, and you lose an eye, I know a lot of people who would have thought differently about continuing to move forward. And you never did.

Sachs: Well, sometimes I used to think there's something wrong with me. I'm not eager to do to them what they did to us. But then I discovered Mandela's the same. He's meeting the former prison guards, and Ahmed Kathrada is the same. And so we belong to a generation. And as always, used to say if I cut off the arms of other people, that's not going to help me at all.

In fact, I met the guy who organized the bomb in my car. And he was going to the Truth Commission. And it was very odd, looking like we're looking at each other. So this is the guy who tried to kill me? And he's looking at me, 'This is the man I tried to kill?' But we started speaking as human beings. The war is over.

We've got to move forward. He was going to the Truth Commission. And it ended up, after he'd gone to the Truth Commission, I was able to shake his hand. I don't want to be his friend; I don't want to go to a movie with him. But if he sits next to me on a bus, we South Africans, we've got to move our country forward.

Tavis: That was one of the most powerful things for me coming out of your country, that TRC, that Truth And Reconciliation Commission, I didn't even, as an African American, I had to dig deep to find the love to understand how you all can do something like that, particularly on the part of Black Africans, I would say.

Sachs: And it helps when you're the majority. When you belong to a minority group dependent on the good will or electoral positions of others, I think life's very precarious. When you are the majority, and you elect your Parliament and you choose your President and so on, there's a scope for generosity and grace that is maybe a little bit easier, because you see things are moving your way.

You see change. You feel the transformation. You start getting the joy of living. And it comes out, your kids are going to school, going to university, qualifying, becoming broadcasters. And there's a lot of hope in our country for all the hardship that so many people have. Crime, HIV-AIDS, unemployment, are very, very heavy. But hope is growing all the time.

Tavis: Justice Albie Sachs is here wrapping up this U.S. tour, in part because they are on their recess. As you know, our Supreme Court takes a recess. So do they, for two and a half months. So they're in their summer recess now, which is what allows him to come to the States to see us. You've got four more years in your term. Twelve-year term. We have lifetime appointments. You all have 12 year appointments, and you got four more years on this term. So congratulations.

Sachs: I'm the first generation, so we were allowed 15 years.

Tavis: Fifteen years the first time around.

Sachs: And that's given me an extra three years.

Tavis: All right. Then it kicks into 12 after that.

Sachs: Right, right.

Tavis: Well, I'm glad to have you here. It's an honor to meet you.

Sachs: It's been a great pleasure, thank you.

Tavis: Justice, glad to have you here. Justice Albie Sachs. What a conversation. That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from L.A. Thanks for watching. And as always, keep the faith.