Albie

Product Information

Albie Sachs: I was how old? I was born in 1935, so now we’re 1939, so I was four and a bit. It was everywhere, on the news, people were speaking about it. I can’t say I remember where I exactly was when the first radio broadcast came of the Nazi invasion of Poland. It dominated by childhood. War, war, war. We read about it, we heard about it. It was far away. It was a big abstraction out there, the terrible enemy. I had some uncles who joined the army, and in South Africa they called it “going up north.” You went from South Africa to fight up north. Albie Sachs graduated from secondary school at 15, and entered the University of Cape Town, where he soon fell in with a group of like-minded students known as the Modern Youth Society, dedicated to free thought, progressive politics and an egalitarian, multiracial society. In 1952, at age 17, he joined a campaign of civil disobedience against apartheid, the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign. He was arrested for sitting in an area of the General Post Office reserved for non-whites. He was released when the judge learned his age, but it would not be his last run-in with the law. 21-year-old attorney Albie Sachs stands up for freedom. The Congress of the People meets at Kliptown in 1955 to adopt the Freedom Charter, calling for a mulitracial democracy in South Africa. (Robben Island Museum Archives)

Albie is a British animated series about a five-year-old boy with a wild, distorted imagination. Unfortunately, this gets him into trouble with his friends, family and his neighbour, the grouchy Mr. Kidhater-Cox. Albie was created by award-winning children's author Andy Cutbill and was based on his own childhood. Andy also helped develop Rupert Bear, Follow the Magic... for Channel 5. These series can be often seen repeated on the ITV children's digital channel, CITV. There was a clandestine, quite active sabotage movement — who supported Hitler in South Africa — of extreme right-wing Afrikaner nationalists. Very anti-British and also very racist. That was around. There’d be strange things when you entered a cinema. They always ended with playing, “God Save the King,” and you were expected to stand. Most people would stand, and some would sit. That was their little way of publicly showing their opposition to the war.Albie Sachs: It was the last throw of the securocrats in South Africa, saying, “You’re facing the total onslaught. We have to be ruthless in our response.” They assassinated an ANC person in Paris, her name was Dulcie September. A bomb exploded the Anti-Apartheid Office — the ANC office — in London, and clearly I wasn’t safe in Mozambique. But you didn’t want to give way. You didn’t want to flee because of the danger. So many people inside and outside the country were accepting risks. What brought about that release, when you were released the second time? And then what drove you into exile?

One day passes, and another day and another day and another day, and you never know when it’s going to end. You get your food. I’d be allowed out to enter a little yard for exercise. I would run round and round, favoring my right leg, and then round and round the other way favoring my left leg, and I would sing and I would whistle, and I tried to keep up my courage. And one day I hear whistling, and I can’t believe it, because it’s not just the general noise. Prison is noisy. I read. I could catch up on my reading. Oh wonderful, wonderful! The History of Science by J.D. Bernard. Always wanted to read that. The Origins of Chinese Civilization by Joseph Needham, I’d always wanted to read that. Nothing to do, no pressure, no money to earn. Just to read, read, read. And then I managed to get a scholarship to go to Sussex University, do a Ph.D. By the way, archaeologists really have discovered a flute made from bone and one clever person has even made a reconstruction that you can really play a tune on! If you’d like to find out more, you can watch his video here:Reg and Spike find a piece of paper with directions on it, and immediately decide that it's a treasure map.