Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

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Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

Robben Island prison in South Africa held thousands of black opponents of apartheid, including Nelson Mandela. This book reconstructs these political prisoners’ resistance strategies to show how these men created a political and social order behind bars. Survival was their ﬁrst goal; challenging apartheid was their true aim. So although Robben Island was designed to repress, it was continually transformed by its political inmates into a site of resistance. The book theorizes that, where material conditions permit, the most far-reaching and effective forms of resistance involve constructive political action that seeks to remake existing power relationships. This theory is demonstrated in three focuses of the book: the activism of Robben Islanders, the effects of political prisoner resistance on the apartheid state machinery, and comparative cases that illustrate various international instances of political prisoners’ shaping both prisons and political orders. Fran Lisa Buntman is Assistant Professor of Sociology at The George Washington University. Her research interests and publication topics include African politics, criminal justice, law, race, and imprisonment. Her recent work concerns policing in South Africa, race and U.S. constitutional interpretation, and juvenile probation in the United States.

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

FRAN LISA BUNTMAN The George Washington University

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521809931 © Fran Lisa Buntman 2003 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2004 isbn-13 isbn-10

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Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To Barbara and John Buntman, my parents And to Manuel Orozco, my husband

Contents

List of Abbreviations Foreword by Ahmed M. Kathrada Acknowledgments 1 2 3 4 5

Introduction: Prison as a Source of Politics Politics and Prison: A Background Resistance for Survival Resistance Beyond Survival Prisoner Politics and Organization on Robben Island

6 Debates and Disagreements 7 Inﬂuencing South African Politics

page ix xi xiii 1 14 33 61 81 112 146

8 Political Imprisonment and the State 9 Theorizing Islander Resistance 10 Beyond Robben Island: Comparisons and Conclusion

193 236 272

Appendix I: Diagrams of Robben Island Prison Appendix II: Methodological Notes on Oral and Archival Sources

293 295

Appendix III: Capsule Biographies of Interview Respondents Select Bibliography Index

299 313 329

vii

Abbreviations

ACOA ANC APDUSA APLA ARM AZAPO AZASO BCM BOSS BPC CC CIA CO COSAS DC DMI DP EPG FOSATU FRELIMO HO HRC ICRC IDAF IDT INLA IRA ISA MFA MK

American Committee on Africa African National Congress African People’s Democratic Union of South Africa Azanian People’s Liberation Army African Resistance Movement Azanian People’s Organization Azanian Students’ Organization Black Consciousness Movement Bureau of State Security Black People’s Convention Coordinating Committee Central Intelligence Agency Central Organ Congress of South African Students Disciplinary Committee Directorate of Military Intelligence Democratic Party Eminent Persons Group Federation of South African Trade Unions Front for the Liberation of Mozambique High Organ Human Rights Commission International Committee of the Red Cross International Defense and Aid Fund Independent Development Trust Irish National Liberation Army Irish Republican Army ideological state apparatus Makana Football Association Umkhonto we Sizwe ix

x

MP MWASA NACTU NAYO NECC NEUM NICRO NIS NGO NLF NP NUM NUMARWOSA NUSAS OAU PAC PIRA PEBCO PLO PP PRO RSA SACC SACP SACTU SAIRR SAPA SASM SASO SAYRCO SC SWAPO UAW UDF UNISA ZAPU

Abbreviations member of parliament Media Workers Association of South Africa National Council of Trade Unions National Youth Organization National Education Crisis Committee Non-European Unity Movement National Institute for Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation of Offenders National Intelligence Service nongovernmental organization National Liberation Front National Party National Union of Mineworkers National Union of Motor Assembly and Rubber Workers of South Africa National Union of South African Students Organization of African Unity Pan Africanist Congress Provisional Irish Republican Army Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organization Palestine Liberation Organization political panel public relations ofﬁcer repressive state apparatus South African Council of Churches South African Communist Party South African Congress of Trade Unions South African Institute of Race Relations South African Press Association South African Students’ Movement South African Students’ Organization South African Youth Revolutionary Council section committee South West African People’s Organization United Automobile, Rubber and Allied Workers’ Union of South Africa United Democratic Front University of South Africa Zimbabwe African People’s Union

Foreword

Robben Island and political imprisonment played a signiﬁcant role in South Africa’s struggle against apartheid and for democracy. Today, Robben Island prison is a museum and World Heritage Site which receives tens of thousands of visitors from around South Africa and the world. Having served a term of imprisonment on Robben Island, and as chairperson of the Robben Island Museum Council, I ﬁnd Fran Buntman’s book a welcome addition to the much-needed literature on apartheid prisons. Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid is invaluable in explaining why thousands of political prisoners who spent years in prison for the cause of liberation found the experience enriching and a source of pride. There was no room for bitterness, hatred, anger, or revenge. Although there are many valuable memoirs by former Islanders and political inmates of other apartheid prisons, this book offers an original scholarly account of the apartheid years in Robben Island’s prison. Buntman’s book makes a vital and innovative contribution to showing how and why political prisoners were able to survive and, in many ways, to ﬂourish. It shows how we used our imprisonment to resist apartheid and contribute to a free and democratic South Africa. The research for this book is both broad and deep. Fran Buntman identiﬁes and explains the signiﬁcance of the many complex aspects of prison life. These themes range from comparing the impact of conﬁnement in the single cells and general cells, to identifying changes and continuities over time, to demonstrating how the apartheid regime was itself inﬂuenced by its political prisoners. Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid documents and analyzes the role and development of the different political organizations in prison as well as looking at our cooperation and mutuality. The focus ranges from sport and studies to politics and privation and draws the connections among the apparently divergent facets of Robben Island life. Indeed, our prisoner community was proud that we always remained united against our xi

xii

Ahmed M. Kathrada

common enemy, despite our diverse organizations and perspectives and even our sometimes heated debates. It is my hope that this book will inspire readers to visit Robben Island and inﬂuence additional scholars and writers to add to the knowledge of apartheid prisons. We especially need to know more about the experience of political prisoners incarcerated in prisons other than Robben Island, including our white and female colleagues who were jailed elsewhere. This thorough, insightful, and well-written work shows that the antiapartheid struggle can better be understood by taking into account the role of political prisoners in shaping resistance and democracy, protest and political change. Ahmed M. Kathrada Chairperson, Robben Island Museum Council

Acknowledgments

This book is the product of profoundly enriching and deeply rewarding interactions with many people to whom I owe an enormous debt of gratitude. My research was possible only because they shared their accounts of Robben Island and its signiﬁcance. For the generosity with which they shared their testimony, I therefore thank the following people, whom I had the honor of interviewing: Dr. Neville Alexander, Natoo Babenia, Fikile Bam, Vronda Banda, Dr. Ni¨el Barnard, Hennie Botha, Henk Bruyn, Lazarus (Lassie) Chiwayo, Kobie Coetsee, Dr. Saths Cooper, Eddie Daniels, Jean de la Harpe, Aubrey du Toit, Malcolm Dyani, Denis Goldberg, Michael Green, Harry Gwala, John Harding, Themba Hlatswayo, Dr. Seddick Isaacs, Ahmed Kathrada, S’thembele (Mike) Khala, Ntemi Khame, Phambili Ka Ntloko, Mkatali Loliwe, Father Gerard Lorriman, Mzwabantu Donald (Ace) Lumkwana, Saki Macazoma, Penuell Maduna, Mac Maharaj, Mandla Makwetu, James Mange, Andrew Mapheto, M. J. Maqungo, Petros (Shoes) Mashigo, Amos Masondo, Velaphi (Thomas) Masuku, Luhamile Mate, Morontshi Matsobane, Vumile Gladstone (Rharha) Matthews, Lombard Mbatha, Vusumzi Mcongo, Kwedi Mkalipi, Thami Mkhwanazi, Johnson Mlambo, Fezile Mlanda, Reverend Stanley Mogoba, Silas Mogotsi, Nkosi Patrick Molala, Eric Molobi, Murphy Morobe, Dikgang Moseneke, Kgalema Motlanthe, Peter Mthembu, Curnick Ndlovu, Soto Ndukwana, Pandelani Nefolovhodwe, Eric Ngeleza, James Ngqondela, Pumlani Ngqungwana, Hector Ntshanyana, Colbert Nyobe, Dullah Omar, Samual Peter, Jeff Radebe, Simon Ramogale, Martin “Magalies” Ramokgadi, Dr. Jan Roux, Albie Sachs, Jacob Seatlholo, Judy Sexwale, Sipho Shabalala, Mark Shinners, Joe Shithlibane, Walter Sisulu, Moses Sithebe, Lizo Gladwell Sitoto, Jacob Skundla, Freddie Songwingi, Richard Stengel, Raymond Suttner, Helen Suzman, Zifozonke Tshikila, Menziwa Esau Tsholoba, Naledi Tsiki, Denmark Tungwane, Sonny Venkatrathnam, Klaus von Lieres, Trevor Wentzel, Willie Willemse, Thomas Winslow, Jabulane Zakwe, and Jacob Zuma. In addition, I thank those xiii

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Acknowledgments

people who wished to remain anonymous but shared their insights informally or off the record. To all those I interviewed, my most grateful thanks for your time and your personal account of national political history. I hope I have done justice to your perspectives and testimonies. To the former Robben Islanders, those men who made Robben Island “habitable,” I especially thank you for the privilege of spending time with you and learning from your painful experiences. I also pay tribute to your families, who suffered with you and shared the costs of conviction, as well as to all who suffer the injustices of incarceration. Since my interviewing them, former Islanders Natoo Babenia, Vronda Banda, Harry Gwala, Phambili Ka Ntloko, Andrew Mapheto, Lombard Mbatha, Hector Ntshanyana, Samual Peter, Martin “Magalies” Ramokgadi, Walter Sisulu, and Freddie Songwingi have passed away. I offer my respects to these men and their loved ones. I interviewed so many people who were extraordinarily generous with their time – often when facing great pressure and responsibility themselves – and so helpful in assisting me with my research that it is difﬁcult to single out particular individuals. Nevertheless, I would fail were I not to acknowledge, in particular, that Fikile Bam, Hennie Botha, Petros “Shoes” Mashigo, Johnson Mlambo, and, above all, Ahmed “Kathy” Kathrada not only allowed me to interview them but also consistently made themselves available for questions as my research and writing progressed. They further provided considerable assistance in facilitating the variety of tasks my study involved. I offer an additional thank-you to Kathy for spending so much time with me on Robben Island, for coming to speak in Akron, Ohio, and for keeping in touch with me from afar. Khehla Shubane was responsible for my initial awareness of Robben Island politics and how Islanders shaped South African resistance politics and has always been a very good friend to this project as well as to me. One of the truly noble dimensions of academia is that all scholars are all too aware that their ideas and research rely on the scholarship of others. I am especially aware of this legacy because this project was conceived, nurtured, challenged, shaped, and explored in numerous universities and by many academics and intellectuals who have fostered it in many ways. This book began a long time ago, in 1987, as my Honours thesis at the University of the Witwatersrand. There it beneﬁted from the guidance of the late David Webster, Tom Lodge, and, most especially, Peter Hudson, whom I was especially privileged to have as a teacher. Tom encouraged me to continue with this work, arranged for me to have institutional afﬁliation at Wits in 1994, and – unbeknown to me until much later – was an anonymous but most supportive reviewer of my manuscript for Cambridge University Press. I returned to my study of Robben Island in 1993 at the University of Texas at Austin. My dissertation chairs, Barbara Harlow and Julius Ihonvbere, will have my eternal gratitude for their constant motivation, encouragement, help, and guidance, and Barbara’s endless reading of drafts and continuing

Acknowledgments

xv

friendship. Barbara and Julius too epitomize the moral and activist commitment to using scholarship to serve the marginalized, the imprisoned, and the oppressed of the world. Julius helped provide me passage and protection through the sometimes difﬁcult waters of academia. Barbara, together with my mother, another Barbara, and Gail Gerhart never wavered in their determination that this book be published. No book could have more persistent midwives and friends than Barbara, Barbara, and Gail. I also offer my grateful thanks to Sheldon Ekland-Olson, Catherine Boone, Henry Dietz, and Camille Busette, who served on my dissertation committee. Camille also offered intellectual interventions and personal support at a critical point. In Barbara Harlow’s dissertation discussion group, I found many readers who provided critical feedback and comradeship; thanks go to David Alvarez, Nandi Bhatia, Aim´e Ellis, Zjaleh Hajibashi, Susan Harris, Mary Harvan, Salah Hassan, Rachel Jennings, Katie Kane, Joey Slaughter, Karen Steele, and Shoba Vasudevan. I also thank Mark Graber and Sheila Walker for supporting me at two very different stages of this research. My fellow student and colleague Tong-yi Huang encouraged me with his interest and motivated me to apply for a Ford Foundation grant with him. I thank Ford for this assistance. The University of Texas at Austin too provided employment and other ﬁnancial support, which made my study in Austin possible. I thank Andr´e Odendaal, variously of the Robben Island Museum and the Mayibuye Centre at the University of the Western Cape, for providing me with essential ﬁnancial support as well as encouragement. It was always a pleasure to spend time in the Mayibuye Centre, where the engrossing archival sources were matched by the warmth of those who ran the Centre, especially Bertie Fritz and Felicia Siebritz. Anthea Josias and the Mayibuye Centre have been very helpful and generous in sharing images from their collection and allowing me to reprint these. I also thank Eddie Daniels for giving me permission to use his diagram of Robben Island prison. In many ways and at various points I’ve beneﬁted from the help of and exchanges with many people at the Robben Island Museum, including Harriet Deacon, Ashley Forbes, Neo Lekgotla laga Ramoupi, and Juanita Pastor-Makhurane. Two extraordinary scholars and wonderful people who have offered me so much to facilitate the research and writing of this book are Gail Gerhart and Tom Karis. By any criteria, Gail Gerhart and Tom Karis set new standards in their remarkable generosity and in sharing their time, insights, and the unique sources they have collected. I cannot imagine having done my research, especially in 1994, without Gail’s guidance. No tribute is too great to Gail and Tom as scholars, friends, and mentors. The Department of Political Science at the University of Akron generously facilitated my attendance at numerous conferences in the United States and South Africa, where I had the opportunity to present portions of this work. David Louscher also enabled me to invite Ahmed “Kathy” Kathrada to speak

xvi

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in Akron and share his letters and the inspiring lessons of Robben Island and South Africa with a small corner of the Midwest. Bill Lyons and Chris Banks at Akron were always supportive of my work, and our friends in Akron and Cleveland as well as many of my colleagues and students made my three years there happy and fulﬁlling. In Johannesburg, I got to know Penny McKenzie through her expert assistance in this project, and found a friend and colleague who sustains and encourages me from near and far. Penny and Carin Favero have since put in thousands of hours of work readying the interview transcripts for donation to the Robben Island Museum so that they may be widely available as a scholarly and public resource. Carin also provided invaluable last-minute fact-ﬁnding assistance, in turn helped greatly by Mac Jerry Lesuﬁ, Thokozani Magwaza, and, especially Lefty Solwande. I extend my thanks to all. I thank Robben Island Museum for providing the funds to make this donation possible and Harriet Deacon and Andre Odendaal in particular for supporting this venture. This Barbara and John Buntman Robben Island Museum Memories Project Archive honors the unstinting support my parents have shown me and this project since its inception. In Austin, Sabine Wimmer translated from German, procured with the help of her very gracious father, General Siegbert Kreuter, a range of materials on Austrian prisoner-of-war interaction, and typed in hundreds of corrections to interview transcripts, as well as being a good friend. Transcripts and other materials were also typed by Oupa Makhalemele, Judy Paukett, and Kate and Nina Shand: thank you. Tanya Brown, Victoria Coleman, and Nate Bigelow, three University of Akron students, too provided valuable assistance, for which I am most appreciative. In a range of ways, and in many contexts, large and small, the following people helped me deﬁne elements of my work, present or publish work in progress, procure interviews, or make my research and writing easier: I thank Russell Ally, Lissa August, Mary Benson, Colin Bundy, Beth Goldblatt, David Jammy, Shaun Johnson, Robin Lee, Dick Levin, Hugh Lewin, Russell Martin, Deborah Matthews of the Alan Paton Center, Popo Molefe, Debra Patta, Rehana Razack of the Cape Archives Depot, Marcy Ribetti, Howard Sackstein, Claudia Schadeberg, Immanuel Suttner, Randolph Vigne, and all those from the Special Pensions Ofﬁce who facilitated my Eastern Cape trip – Trevor Wentzel, Sithembile, Luyanda ka Msumza, and Constance “Smallie” Maqungu. Special thanks are due to Jacques Moreillon, formerly of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Dr. Moreillon demonstrated his diplomatic skills by carefully balancing his enthusiastic support for this project in accordance with the traditional discretion the ICRC permits when answering my questions. I am very grateful to Russ Kubisiak in 1997 and Barr´e Klapper in 2002, both of whom worked under great pressure to help me

Acknowledgments

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include the diagrams of Robben Island in this book. Lewis Bateman has been a patient and gracious editor as I completed this book during a particularly tumultuous time of my life. Janis Bolster and Sara Black provided meticulous production and copy editing and much-appreciated ﬂexibility in my manuscript preparation. I thank Seth Kroop for a careful and thorough index. The demarcation between intellectual, personal, and spiritual growth and stimulation is, like most lines of division, rather arbitrary. My happiness at the University of Texas at Austin was in no small part due to my wonderful friends – Terri Davis, Barr´e Klapper, Azza Layton, and Amalia Pallares – who supported me through multiple trials and tribulations and made sure life’s pleasures were and are enjoyed. They have continued to bring joy and insight to my world and work. In Austin, I was also tremendously enriched and centered by Connie Deutsch’s wisdom, compassion, and guidance. I thank the publishers of some of my previously published articles for allowing me to reuse portions of these works. Parts of Chapter 6, “Debates and Disagreements,” appeared in Social Identities (http://www.tandf.co.uk) as “Categorical and Strategic Resistance and the Making of Political Prisoner Identity in Apartheid’s Robben Island Prison” (vol. 4, no. 3, 1998, pp. 417–40) and as two chapters – “Resistance on Robben Island 1963– 1976” and “How Best to Resist? Robben Island after 1976” – in The Island: A History of Robben Island, edited by Harriet Deacon and published by David Philip, Claremont, South Africa. If I have failed to acknowledge anybody else who has helped me, please accept my thanks for your help and my apologies for my omission. My brothers, Ari and Daniel, have long encouraged me in this project and provided great richness and love in my life, together with Laurice, Zach, and Rose. Our concern with political imprisonment, human rights, and using research for Tikkun Olam, repair and healing of the world, was part of what brought Manuel Orozco, my husband, and me together in Austin. Manuel has always believed in me and this book. I thank him for that and very much more, including frequently traveling to and within South Africa in the quest of yet another interview, being my teacher and my friend, helping me shape key ideas in this project, ﬁxing my computer, sharing this endeavor with me, and of course, not least, loving me. With this book behind me, my Spanish ˜ training lies ahead. Muchas gracias, mi companero. This book could neither have been researched nor written without the constant and unstinting support – personal, ethical, political, and ﬁnancial – of my parents, Johnny and Barbara Buntman. The values they taught me from the earliest age lie at the core of this project, whether it was my father’s oft-repeated aphorisms – “have the courage of your convictions” and “if you don’t ask, you don’t get” – or my mother’s insistence that I recognize and renounce racism and injustice from my earliest moments. They have, in similar

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and different ways, further provided day-to-day practical and material support in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Austin, Akron, and Washington, D.C. My mother made and wrote hundreds, perhaps thousands, of phone calls, e-mails, and faxes and accompanied me on numerous research and library trips and conferences to make this book possible. Moreover, my parents’ own diverse achievements are a constant source of inspiration. I dedicate this book, with love and thanks, to Manuel and my parents.

1 Introduction Prison as a Source of Politics

If they had spread us right around the country, things would be taking a different turn now. . . . They thought we were so much poison we had to be kept and contained in one bottle, and that worked wonders. . . . It was one of the biggest gifts we ever got, that both liberation movements could have had. I think the minute we were put together, our survival was on the cards, we had to survive. It was not by any means axiomatic to begin with, but with time it was clear that we were going to be victors, which I think we have emerged being.1

On the eve of Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as South Africa’s ﬁrst democratic president, a daily Johannesburg-area newspaper commemorated the event with the headline, “From Prisoner to President.”2 Two years later, in 1996, the pivotal place of prison in President Mandela’s own life, as well as in the country’s history more generally, was recognized by placing, in the parliamentary buildings, a full-size replica of Mandela’s Robben Island cell, where he lived for eighteen of his twenty-seven years in prison.3 Mandela and South Africa are not, however, unique in the role prison played in the political development of nation and individual; rather, they point to the role of prison in the political processes of many people and struggles. Imprisonment preceded national ofﬁce for leaders ranging from Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Cuba’s Fidel Castro in anticolonial struggles to Czechoslovakia’s Vaclev 1 2 3

Ernest Dikgang Moseneke, interview by author, tape recording, Pretoria, South Africa, 1987– 1988. “From Prisoner to President,” The Star (Johannesburg), 9 May 1994, 1. “Down Memory Lane,” The Star, 19 June 1996, 3; Pippa Green, “No Socks for Madiba,” Millenium Magazine, August–September 1996, 28. Signiﬁcantly, the reproduced cell did not have a bed or desk, which reﬂected the condition in which Mandela and other prisoners found the cells, rather than the small but not inconsequential improvements that occurred over the years. For example, like other prisoners, Mandela received a bed only thirteen or fourteen years after being placed in his cell in 1964 (author’s conversation with Ahmed Kathrada, 27 October 1996). The model cell did include photos of the “improved” cell as it would have been in 1982, when he was removed to the mainland Pollsmoor prison.

1

2

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

Havel and South Korea’s Kim Dae Jung in the post–Cold War era.4 Nkrumah, like Mandela, went into prison as a self-conscious and publicly recognized political dissident; in other cases, however, jail cells have facilitated the development of political consciousness, as in the example of Malcolm X.5 Despite the centrality of imprisonment in ordering the political history of South Africa and elsewhere, analyses of the place of political imprisonment in political structures and trajectories are rare. Incarceration resulting from challenging the status quo or balance of power is often recognized as a credential for political status or even ofﬁce. Aryeh Neier, for example, notes that “political prominence in the postcolonial period was hardly possible without a record of imprisonment during the struggle for independence.”6 There has, however, been little to record or assess whether and how imprisonment itself has shaped activists’ strategies, the nature of political movements, and articulations or theories of resistance or whether prisoners may have inﬂuenced how their captors (re)considered incarceration as state policy. These issues are the concern of this book. Political imprisonment plays a vital role in shaping resistance movements and their methods. The strategies and histories of political prisoners require investigation as a part of broader (national) resistance movements and as a contribution to theories of resistance. Patterns of prisoner resistance further 4

5

6

Mandela actually saw Algeria’s ﬁrst president, Ahmed Ben Bella, welcomed back from prison after he was released and before he became independent Algeria’s ﬁrst premier. Anthony Sampson, Mandela: The Authorized Biography (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers in conjunction with HarperCollins, 1999), 166. Sampson also pointed to other African prisonerpresidents; see 176 and 495. Michael Eric Dyson, Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Another U.S. example of the development of political consciousness in prison is George Jackson. See George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1990) and Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Bantam Books, 1990). Within South Africa, those who became politically aware in prison include people like Amina Desai, not known among the broader public. A human rights monitor who visited Desai in the early 1970s in South Africa’s Barberton prison commented that “prison makes people think politically who sometimes did not before.” Mrs. Desai had been convicted of destroying evidence after an activist boarder of hers was arrested and she destroyed his diary to avoid being implicated. She came into prison “‘non-political’ and even rather racist,” her visitor recalled, initially “complaining of having to share meals with a black woman,” in this case Dorothy Nyembe, a veteran opponent of apartheid. Over time, however, “Mrs. Desai was more ﬁery against apartheid than Dorothy!” Anonymous, letter to author, 10 January 1996. Aryeh Neier, “Conﬁning Dissent: The Political Prison,” in The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society, ed. Norval Morris and David J. Rothman (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 408. Neier argued that external resistance and protest movements are reducing the use of political imprisonment. Political imprisonment was effective “so long as the rest of the world went along with the tradition that what any state does within its own borders is not the proper concern of governments and citizens elsewhere.” He consequently predicted that political imprisonment is increasingly likely to be “an anachronistic mode of repression.” Ibid., 424.

Introduction

3

point to the need to rethink aspects of political processes and historiography. I support these claims by examining the maximum security prison on Robben Island – hereafter Robben Island – in South Africa, the place of Robben Island in South African politics, the implication of resistance on Robben Island for theories of resistance, and, ﬁnally, examples of political imprisonment beyond the Robben Island case. Robben Island has a long history as a site where outcasts and rebel opponents of various settler and colonial governments were abandoned and imprisoned.7 Under apartheid, however, Robben Island, often called the Island, was the prison in which most black male political prisoners who opposed the apartheid regime were incarcerated from 1962 to 1991. As such, it included inmates classiﬁed by apartheid as African, Indian, and “Coloured” and excluded white men and women of all races.8 The Island had the largest concentration of political prisoners over the longest period of time during apartheid rule. Symbolically, Robben Island became the jail most associated with apartheid’s incarceration of political prisoners. On a practical level, of the various sites of political incarceration, the prison played the greatest role in developing antiapartheid politics. By focusing on Robben Island, this work focuses on South African prisoners who were tried and convicted, rather than the tens of thousands who were detained without trial. (Detention without trial was an almost inevitable ﬁrst step before people were charged, sentenced, and imprisoned as convicted prisoners, although probably only the minority of detainees were ever charged with a legal offense.) For the purposes of semantic clarity, and in 7

8

The most recent histories of Robben Island were edited and written by Harriet Deacon. They are Harriet Deacon, ed., The Island: A History of Robben Island, 1488–1990 (Cape Town: David Philip and Mayibuye Books, 1996), and Harriet Deacon, “A History of the Medical Institutions on Robben Island” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1994). Other sources include, but are not limited to, Simon de Villiers, Robben Island: Out of Reach, Out of Mind; A History of Robben Island (Cape Town: Struik, 1971) and James W. Fish, Robben Island: The Home of the Leper (Kilmarnock, Scotland: John Ritchie 1924), but I have also found references to “Robben Island” as Robben Island: An Account of Thirty-Four Years’ Gospel Work Amongst Lepers of South Africa and D. Moyle, “An Early History of Lunacy in South Africa” (Honours Thesis, University of Cape Town, South Africa, 1987). As with most works dealing with South Africa, a clariﬁcation on racial terminology is necessary. Apartheid classiﬁed South Africans into four racial groups; whites, “Coloureds” (those of mixed race), Indians (sometimes referred to as Asians), and Africans (also called Natives, Bantus, Plurals, and Blacks at various times). Until the development of black consciousness philosophy and political organizations, those opposed to apartheid tended nevertheless to accept these divisions as facts of organizing. A crucial innovation of black consciousness was to argue that all the oppressed shared a common blackness, and were in that sense Black. I follow the black consciousness usage to term those people classiﬁed as Coloured, Indian, and African as black – note, however, the difference in capitalization – except where it is necessary to refer to people as whites, Coloureds, Indians, or Africans. All the terms remain fundamentally problematic both morally and intellectually, although inevitable for the foreseeable future.

4

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

accordance with what was common usage in South Africa, this book will term those detained without trial “detainees,” and those tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison, “(political) prisoners.” Robben Island is an important factor, albeit one largely neglected to date, in explaining key features of antiapartheid resistance in South Africa (and, moreover, certain characteristics of the transition to democracy and the early stages of democratic governance). This is not to claim that Robben Island, or prison politics in general, was more important than other, well-recognized aspects of the mobilization against white rule in South Africa. However, an understanding of resistance on Robben Island, as well as its impact on national politics, contributes to a new understanding of the political past, present, and future. Appreciation of the role of Robben Island resistance and politics is indispensable to explaining South African political processes. On Robben Island, traditions, ideologies, and practices of South African liberation politics were kept alive when they had been successfully repressed and essentially eviscerated within the country for over a decade. As their sentences ended, released prisoners reinserted these ideas and organizational cultures of established liberation movements back into new political processes; released prisoners functioned as underground missionaries connecting new converts to an old faith, including the exiled movements outside the country. The harsh divides of generational politics that so often caused gaps and rifts in South African movements were generally overcome by those on Robben Island to advance the goals of liberation. Waves of younger prisoners inspired men whose years in prison had slowly turned into decades; new prisoners brought the current realities of national politics to old masters who gave the resistance of the recent arrivals a history and, often, a different future. Together, many generations and strands in the liberation movements forged common goals for day-to-day living, learning when to disagree and when to agree on strategies and tactics of struggle in and beyond the prison walls. The lessons learned on Robben Island were successively and successfully implemented by the waves of released prisoners who invigorated resistance politics on the outside, with new and renewed leadership, fresh assessments of the way forward, and a depth of political understanding few on the outside had the time or opportunity to acquire. Robben Island’s impact resonated beyond antiapartheid opposition to the politics of negotiating a transition and creating and governing a democratic state. Prison life demanded constant negotiation with warders and other prison authorities. Prisoners thus developed a peculiar intimacy with the apartheid state. This familiarity with the enemy taught prisoners about the strengths and weaknesses of the regime they sought to destroy and prepared them for negotiating with it. Although some prisoners planned escape, the Robben Islanders realized that one kind of escape was to use the prison against itself – to survive as

Introduction

5

individuals and organizations but also to craft a society based on a social code of their creation, not the regime’s, to forge a new polity in and from the prison. The place of former Islanders in South African democratic politics, prominent in government and in the new economic and political elite, cannot be reduced to a reward for endurance and long service. In South African politics, political imprisonment, especially on Robben Island, provided a formal credential, a symbol of sacriﬁce. But of inﬁnitely greater importance, through their resistance, prisoners on Robben Island began to build a polity and even a nascent parliament in their prison long before a replica of a prison cell, even the president’s, could be placed in the parliament over which they came to preside. The copy of Nelson Mandela’s cell in the democratic parliament hints at how the practices and choices of political prisoners, especially on Robben Island, shaped the path from polities in prison to a prison cell in parliament. Overview This book examines prisoner resistance on Robben Island between 1962 and 1991. I show how Robben Island, designed as an institution of repression, was continually transformed by its political inmates into a site of resistance. The explanation for this transformation is that, where material conditions permit, resistance, when fully articulated and elaborated, is a constructive political act that attempts fundamentally to alter existing relationships of power, including through the elaboration of alternative political institutions and structures. This project focuses on four key concerns. The ﬁrst identiﬁes and reconstructs the processes through which Robben Island was transformed by prisoners from a brutal “hell-hole”9 to a “university” for activists and political leaders. The account of this transformation examines the post-1962 struggles of political prisoners on Robben Island and is the central empirical and historical focus here; it is covered in Chapters Three through Six. Chapter Three traces the conditions Robben Islanders faced when they ﬁrst arrived en masse in the early 1960s, and how these circumstances changed over time, mostly – if unevenly – for the better. Prisoner resistance is identiﬁed as the most important, although not the only, reason for improvements in the treatment of inmates. The prisoners sought more than the amelioration of conditions, however, and inmates articulated aspects of the foundation of a transformative politics by developing a complex of educational and sporting institutions and practices, as examined in Chapter Four. Chapter Five analyzes the reestablishment of the nation’s outlawed liberation organizations on Robben Island, and Chapter Six explores relations among and 9

Moses Dlamini, Hell-Hole, Robben Island, Prisoner No. 872/63: Reminiscences of a Political Prisoner (Nottingham, Great Britain: Spokesman, 1984).

6

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

within the various political organizations and the establishment of other structures, initiatives, and processes that crossed organizational lines. The patterns and relevance of social and political organization are inferred and analyzed. Second, I examine how resistance on Robben Island sheds light on political processes. The effect of prisoner resistance on South African politics is examined in six chapters. Chapters Three and Four identify how Islander resistance shaped the possibility and fact of a viable political community on Robben Island. Chapters Five and Six explore the effect of political incarceration on political conscientization, the relationships among different political organizations, prisoner struggles for organizational and ideological hegemony, and confrontations among different generations of inmates inside the prison. Chapter Seven studies aspects of the impact of Robben Island on antiapartheid politics within South Africa and to a lesser extent, the role of Robben Islanders in the post-1990 transition and the post-1994 democratic government. To date, historical and political analysis of relevant South African resistance is incomplete and ﬂawed because it has failed to examine the role Robben Island played both as an arena and aspect of resistance in itself, and in terms of released Islanders actively reinserting themselves into oppositional politics upon release. Important aspects of the antiapartheid struggle and the nature of the emerging postapartheid polity cannot be understood without reference to the place of Robben Island and the way the Islanders have shaped South African politics. Chapter Eight probes the state’s perception of and attitude toward Robben Island and political imprisonment. Evidence demonstrates that prisoner resistance, combined with reformist tendencies in the Prisons Service and increasing pressures on the regime, made political imprisonment both a site of state reform and an arena for the government to explore various reformist alternatives. The third concern is theoretical. Building on the previous chapters, key examples in the literature of resistance are discussed to show that the notion of resistance is inadequately speciﬁed or theorized. Chapters Six and Nine theorize resistance in two different ways. On the one hand, a distinction is drawn between what I term “categorical resistance” and “strategic resistance,” two logics of resistance offered by prisoners on Robben Island. These two forms of resistance can be crudely identiﬁed with an emphasis, respectively, on principle and on realpolitik as guiding the raison d’ˆetre of challenges to the state. On the other hand, but also continuing from and consistent with the arguments about categorical and strategic resistance, I argue that the notion of resistance must account not only for subjects who resist but also for subjects who consciously and intentionally remake the political environment. The men on Robben Island used resistance as a baseline for a more far-reaching project, namely fundamentally reshaping existing power relations within the prison and the society outside the prison. That is, I argue

Introduction

7

that resistance is the necessary ﬁrst step in creating space to rearticulate key relationships of power. As such, resistance is a beginning of a process and continuum that aims at more far-reaching resigniﬁcation10 or emancipation in the polity. Prisoner resistance in its most advanced elaborations attempted to alter relationships of power in the society beyond the prison walls by constructing a nascent political order on Robben Island itself, at least within the material constraints allowed by the realities of incarceration. To use the lexicon of Louis Althusser,11 the prisoners began to develop their own ideological state apparatuses as well as methods of sanction and discipline within the regime’s repressive state apparatus. Resistance, perhaps most often associated with a negative baseline refusal that is commonly or conventionally its minimum deﬁnition, is then a means to the end of resigniﬁcation, a positive act of remaking and reconstruing the dominant world.12 Fourth, the Robben Island experience invites a crucial question that applies well beyond the South African context: how did (and does) incarceration in political prisons affect liberation struggles, social movements, and the actors within them? In this regard, my project is less an intervention into an established academic discourse than an argument for the opening up of such an arena of research and analysis. This study suggests the need to analyze the politics of political prisons beyond Robben Island and the South African case. With the important disclaimer that “scholarly exhaustiveness is more unattainable than ever,”13 I note that, other than prison memoirs, literary critical examinations of prison writing, and analyses of Northern Ireland’s political imprisonment,14 no signiﬁcant literature examining prison resistance was identiﬁed. The ﬁnal, comparative chapter considers discussions of other prisons and national contexts that suggest that the Robben Island case study is applicable to or has comparable aspects with other countries, peoples, and struggles. This ﬁnal chapter outlines other examples 10

11 12

13 14

I borrow the term “resigniﬁcation” from Bonnie Honig, who used it in a talk on dilemmas and the dilemmatic at the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin in 1993. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). Cornel West, “Marxist Theory and the Speciﬁcity of Afro-American Oppression,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988). Sherry B. Ortner, “Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 1 (1995): 176. ˜ Aretxaga, “Dirty Protest: Symbolic Overdetermination and Gender in Northern See Begona Ireland Ethnic Violence,” Ethos 23, no. 2 (1995):123–149; Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Kieran McEvoy, Paramilitary Imprisonment in Northern Ireland: Resistance, Management, and Release (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

8

that conﬁrm the relevance of my argument beyond the Robben Island case study. Contributions This book makes at least three critical interventions in social and political “science.” First, the broad subject matter of the research and argument – prison politics – calls attention to a neglected aspect of political analysis. This work shows that processes within (political) prisons are relevant and, at times, critical to a range of concerns in the study of politics. These topics include the internal struggles of subordinate groups, the relations among resistant and dominant groups, the inﬂuence of (repressive) state strategies on the resistance of the opposition, the relationship among international and national civil society and pro-democracy groups, and the fact that events and patterns within prisons can and do shape political dynamics beyond the prison walls. A second contribution of this study of prison politics is to theories of resistance. This book promises to “theorize resistance,” but this term is in fact shorthand for a commitment to theorizing the continuum of resistance from survival and refusal to resigniﬁcation and reconstrual as a means and method toward emancipatory and transformative goals. In this understanding, in its most far-reaching articulations, we must also grapple with the problems of power, governance, and government if we are to understand resistance. That is, resistance raises concerns with “how to establish a system of order and order itself,” which, David Apter noted, “is, after all, what most of politics is about.”15 This work analyzes forms of resistance as well as the principles that underscore the paradox of a site of repression being used to undo the material and symbolic origin of the power of the repressive apparatus. Third, this book contributes to analyses of South African political processes by shedding light on both liberation movements and the state. Using new research and previously undocumented information, this project reveals the underground functioning of liberation movements within prison and demonstrates how the former prisoners used their political education in prison to inﬂuence anti- and post-apartheid politics. Although “societycentered,” this project also examines the state and offers both analytical insight and new information to show how state reform efforts became inextricably linked to and even deﬁned by political imprisonment under apartheid. Prison politics reveals a world heretofore largely hidden from view. The study of Robben Island examines and portrays a world of liberation politics, explores and conceptualizes the theory and practice of resistance, and shows how the Island profoundly shaped the nature and outcome of politics in South Africa. 15

David E. Apter, ed., The Legitimization of Violence (New York: New York University Press, 1997), vii.

Introduction

9

Methodology The main source of primary research material was the oral testimony of former Robben Island prisoners, members of the then government, and other relevant actors. Archival and other primary materials are also employed (see Appendix II), as is a large range of secondary materials, from autobiographies to theoretical analyses. Notwithstanding the wealth of information the sources used allow for, there are notable limitations in this, as any, methodology. As David William Cohen has noted, understandings of the world are produced by acts of commission and omission, by forgetting and remembering, and by repressing and highlighting events and emotions, interpretations and interests.16 Like other information, political history is produced by “the power to cover and veil knowledge from inspection, but also the power to restore it to practice.”17 The availability of knowledge is shaped by information offered, information denied, information pursued or not pursued, and the interpretation of these accounts. Two examples illustrate some of the tensions in this enterprise; the ﬁrst examines contradictory interpretations, and the second examines how research choices may shape knowledge production. Inconsistent, contradictory, and missing information provides a useful illustration of the difﬁculties in achieving accurate dating and periodization. Various sources reveal that Jimmy Kruger, as minister of prisons, visited Nelson Mandela in prison. What is less clear is when this visit occurred. Further, interpreting the political signiﬁcance of the visit is profoundly affected by when it happened. This problem is one of different and contradictory memories, as well as the absence of state archival information, which may have resolved the questions. In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela18 noted that in 1976 he received an “extraordinary visit” from Kruger. Two years later, in an interview in London, Mac Maharaj, a younger but senior member of the African National Congress (ANC) who had been in prison for twelve years in the single cells with Mandela and others, said that Kruger had visited Mandela but also met with a “deputation from the single cells which I led” in December 1973.19 This latter version is closer to that offered by a Mandela biographer, who noted that Kruger visited in December 1974 and then a month later.20 When this contradiction was mentioned to another senior ANC member in the single cells, Ahmed Kathrada, he was quite certain that both Maharaj and Mandela were wrong, and that Kruger had 16 17 18 19

20

David William Cohen, The Combing of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Ibid., 246. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994): 418. Mac Maharaj, in Nelson Mandela, The Struggle Is My Life: His Speeches & Writings, 1944– 1990, ed. Nelson Mandela and Mayibuye Books (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 1994), 254. Sampson, Mandela: The Authorized Biography, 241.

10

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

come in 1977 or later. His memory was based on remembering that black consciousness leader Saths Cooper, who had arrived on Robben Island in December 1976, had wanted to speak to Kruger, but the minister refused to meet with him.21 This version is, however, incompatible with Maharaj’s account because Maharaj left the prison in 1976.22 Different dating of Kruger’s visit affects an analysis of regime behavior. In 1973, despite some minor upsets on the labor front and in Southern African decolonization efforts, the apartheid state was secure and faced few challenges. In contrast, however, after 1976, the schoolchildren of Soweto and elsewhere had put apartheid into newspaper headlines and on televisions throughout the world, and the state was facing multiple challenges. A cabinet minister’s visit to prisoners in each of these contexts has different implications and invites different interpretations. State records, from prison bureaucrats to cabinet ministers, may clarify some of these historical questions. But there is also no guarantee that these records exist, at least in full, or that they contain the relevant or correct information. James Gregory noted, for example, that prisoners’ letters were sometimes thrown away and that he was told to destroy a 1984 fax explaining that, from then on, political prisoners were eligible for contact visits.23 Furthermore, there was probably a wholesale destruction of many state archives, both because the law allowed for this and because people have wanted to hide the apartheid past.24 There is, however, more information available in or from state archives than (former) apartheid ofﬁcials or politicians concede. An anonymous source who had obtained access to the ﬁles the Prisons Service kept on him found a huge volume of material – from copies of letters he had sent from Robben Island, to security evaluations, to smuggled 21 22

23 24

Ahmed Kathrada, conversation with author, 11 April 1996. Heidi Holland wrote that Kruger visited Robben Island to “hold talks with Mandela” in 1973 and 1978. In her popular history of the African National Congress, Holland described aspects of life within the prison, rather than the effect of the Island on resistance politics. Heidi Holland, The Struggle: A History of the African National Congress (New York: George Braziller, 1990), 176, 157–177. James Gregory with Bob Graham, Goodbye Bafana, Nelson Mandela: My Prisoner, My Friend (London: Headline Books, 1995), 127, 222. Regarding the “legal” destruction of documentation, my request to examine a particular document listed in the National Archives database was met with the reply that it “had been destroyed in accordance with the disposal authority no 23-B40 of 13 May 1986, as authorized by the Director of Archives” (M. George, Chief Intermediate Archives Depot, letter to author, 8 May 1996). More generally, in the wake of South Africa’s ﬁrst democratic elections, the issue of access to apartheid’s archives (as well as discussions of future archival policies), drew increasing attention from journalists, academics, politicians, and those investigating the apartheid past. See, for example, Justin Pearce, “Search for Missing Cabinet Papers,” Mail and Guardian (South Africa), 24–30 May 1996, 8; “State to Reveal ’76 Secrets,” The Star (Johannesburg), 20 September 1996, 6; and Adrian Hadland, “Evidence Points to ‘Wholesale Destruction’ of Apartheid Files,” Sunday Independent (South Africa), 6 October 1996, 1–2.

Introduction

11

documents that had been intercepted. Even where apartheid state actors did acknowledge the existence of documentation, however, they tended to believe it was limited in what insights it offered. For example, former apartheid ofﬁcials said that this book could not have been based only or primarily on state ﬁles on prisoners and their organizations (Barnard interview; Harding interview). In other words, the state’s understanding of the internal structures and debates of the political prisoners and their infrastructure was probably not especially deep or well developed. Informants and their testimony, and what is or is not available in archives, are not the only sources that shape the research ﬁndings and theoretical inferences. One research choice, made from the outset, that may have affected information shared was the decision to name sources unless they requested full or partial anonymity. There were a number of reasons for choosing to prefer acknowledged testimony. First, politics and history are not made up of inconsequential and amorphous masses, and the experiences, values, opinions, and contributions of individual human beings count. This recognition is not to proffer a “great man theory of history” or elevate individualism above social processes. Clearly, historical processes and social, organizational, economic, and political structures are extremely important in shaping politics. But the importance of structure should not mean ignoring, negating, or obliterating agency and agents – real live people, both well known and largely unknown – who populated the movements and prison cells. In the important theoretical move to challenge Cartesian subjectivity and self-deﬁning man, there is the danger of losing human agency. As Sherry Ortner noted, recognizing “the freely choosing individual” as “an ideological construct” nevertheless requires “retaining some sense of human agency, the capacity of social beings to interpret and morally evaluate their situation and to formulate projects and try to enact them.”25 Activists who opposed apartheid were perhaps more conscious than most other people of the structural forces that shaped their lives, and yet they used their very agency to countenance those structures in and out of prison. Second, the people who made the politics covered in this book are identiﬁable actors on the political stage (and also beyond it), at least in South Africa and in some instances internationally, especially in the obvious case of Nelson Mandela. Therefore, a range of parties, from the interviewees to contemporary political commentators to biographers and historians, are interested in the perspectives of individuals as well as the interplay of the various actors. Finally, even though scholars, like journalists, are obligated to protect sources, there is no need for paternalism regarding the rights of respondents to speak their minds openly. One of the aims of apartheid was to silence voices, to make people invisible behind prison walls. Almost all respondents 25

Ortner, “Resistance,” 185.

12

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

wanted to be identiﬁed with their accounts, and I take unashamed pleasure in thanking those who gave of their time to be interviewed by acknowledging them as shapers of a political struggle and order. Interview respondents deﬁned aspects of the account by omitting some information or not answering certain questions, raising particular topics, or identifying themselves with certain views. One research omission was, however, my own and was deliberate. It occasionally emerged, usually implicitly, that certain people in prison may have been looked down upon politically, and perhaps personally too, for “breaking” under torture when they were detained before their trials.26 It is impossible to gauge whether the loss of status was generalized throughout the prison communities, conﬁned within the person’s organization, or shared by isolated individuals. Irrespective of how important or unimportant this phenomenon was, I made a conscious choice not to pursue research into this arena.27 Silences in the historical record do not simply “derive from the selectivities and impositions of archives or from systems of preservation”28 or from the problems of memory or differential experience. Gaps and silences in accounts of the past also reﬂect strategies inherent in the nature of the political process. For example, any attempt to reconstruct the role of Robben Island in underground politics will at best be partial and fragmented, for the nature of underground organizing meant activists and liberation movements needed 26

27

28

For many people, there is a considerable sense of embarrassment or shame at having cracked under torture. Natoo Babenia’s discussion is a good example of the pressures of detention and torture and the effect it had on him as well as on his relationship with other activists. Despite the fact that Babenia wrote that “[i]t is only now that I look back [on the period of my detention and trial] with pride,” when I interviewed him, he felt he “must clarify certain things you may be hesitant to ask” and went on to explain how George Peake, a fellow political prisoner, had reassured him that mistakes he had made in detention were irrelevant now that he was in prison. Natoo Babenia, interview by author, tape recording, Durban, South Africa, 19 June 1994; Natoo Babenia with Iain Edwards, Memoirs of a Saboteur: Reﬂections of My Political Activity in India and South Africa (Bellville, South Africa: Mayibuye Books, 1995), 90–96, 112 (quote above), 131–132. It is my own strongly held belief that people cannot be held responsible for what they say in the context of torture (whether physical or mental), or, at absolute minimum, it is not for outsiders to implicitly judge those who did “break” by pursuing questions of who did implicate themselves or others under torture, let alone make public how that may have led to their ostracism or downgrading in their organizations, including in prison. In any event, at least one Robben Islander with whom this issue was discussed, but who wanted to remain anonymous, was extremely skeptical about the existence of a hierarchy of those who did and did not speak when tortured. He said that “everyone cracked” because, at least in the post-1976 period when he was detained, those that did not crack were tortured to death, which everyone knew. Death in detention was a reality about which all activists knew. It was, arguably, unreasonable for liberation movements not to expect that torture would be an effective way of making activists and cadres divulge information. Cohen, Combing of History, 247.

Introduction

13

to hide and obscure their involvement. Furthermore, as Murphy Morobe noted: The difﬁculty for history as well is the fact that some people have died with their part of the story. . . . Some people in the process . . . became disillusioned, and they have gone away with part of the story. Some people have in fact become crippled, and some people have actually become state witness and have turned and joined the system. . . . And each one of those has a part of this whole story, . . . which gets told and distorted, and straightened out, etc. So that’s why in fact writing this part of the history, in my view in an ongoing challenge, is a continuing process.29 29

Murphy Morobe, interview by author, Johannesburg, 17 November and 1 December, 1994.

2 Politics and Prison A Background

The tragedy of Africa, in racial and political terms, [has been] concentrated in the southern tip of the continent – in South Africa, Namibia, and, in a special sense, Robben Island.1

This chapter locates prisoner resistance on Robben Island in the context of apartheid political history, including resistance to racial rule. It shows how the dynamic of repression and resistance shaped who was sent to Robben Island. The role of imprisonment in racial rule is also examined, including the introduction of widespread political incarceration and how the state controlled its carceral system by prohibiting knowledge about prison life and monitoring political prisoners. No understanding of political resistance and change in South Africa would be complete without reference to the crucial role international pressures played in interacting with and reinforcing local demands for change. This topic is addressed in the last section of this chapter. Political Context Apartheid and Resistance: 1948 to the Early 1960s Race-based discrimination, oppression, and exploitation began in what is now South Africa with the arrival of Europeans. In 1948, when the National Party (NP) came to power with the policy of apartheid,2 a more 1 2

Oliver Tambo cited by Deacon, The Island, 5. Donald Akenson explained: “[T]the term ‘apartheid’ became part of the vocabulary of Afrikaner thought in the 1940s. Dan O’Meara ﬁnds its ﬁrst ofﬁcial usage in the Afrikaner economic movement in May 1943 in an editorial about economic segregation. In September 1943 the word was used in a speech by D. F. Malan . . . [who became], in 1948, prime minister of South Africa. Irving Hexham ﬁnds that ‘apartheid’ was used as early as 1914 by Dopper [the most conservative sector of the Dutch Reform Church] theologians within the context of arguments for preserving the unique Dopper way of life. Whatever the precise date of its introduction as a term, apartheid in practice was the completion of a process that gradually

14

Politics and Prison

15

comprehensive commitment to racism began. Apartheid promised “the comprehensive separation of all the volkere [ethnic nations] of South Africa into their own national units.”3 Over the decades that followed, the white South African minority achieved the economic, political, and social dispossession of the black majority through a range of laws and ofﬁcial government actions, in concert with a proﬁt-hungry economy and acts of repression and terror, both legal and illegal. Until the mid 1970s, and with the notable exception of the immediate post–Sharpeville period, whites generally enjoyed an improved economy and standard of living under apartheid and NP rule. NP hegemony among whites ﬂourished until the 1980s, when the white population, which was never monolithic, became increasingly divided, a division that led to an eventual decline in NP support.4 A constant brake on the success of apartheid, and, indeed, a key reason for its being altered and modiﬁed in different ways over the years, was black resistance. Resistance to white intrusion and rule is as old as conquest and domination.5 Modern resistance has its roots in the African National Congress, founded in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress, which became increasingly militant from the late 1940s and particularly during the 1950s. Opposition was met with ever greater repression on the part of the government. In 1959, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) split from the ANC. The PAC too was an African nationalist organization, but in contrast to the ANC’s emphasis on alliances across racial lines, the PAC stressed the need for Africans to identify ﬁrst and foremost as Africans and to organize against their oppression as Africans.6 Both organizations, and indeed the country, were to reevaluate fundamentally the nature of South African politics and the resistance strategies that were called for when, on 21 March 1960, in

3 4 5

6

and inexorably had occurred in Afrikaner society.” Donald Harman Akenson, God’s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel and Ulster (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 203. Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990), 149. James Barber and John Barratt, South Africa’s Foreign Policy: The Search for Status and Security, 1945–1988 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 8–10. Challenges to colonizing settlers and white rule by black South Africans ranged from actions such as refusing to work or ignoring the laws of property, to military challenges to settler incursions, to establishing political organizations to challenge or otherwise rebel against the status quo. The latter two categories include, for example, the wars of the nineteenth century where the Xhosa tried to protect their territories and the Zulus challenged the Afrikaners and the British, and the 1902 formation of the African Political Organizations by Cape Coloureds, and the 1906 rebellion by Chief Bambatha and his followers in opposition to a poll tax in Natal. Tom Lodge and Bill Nasson, All, Here, and Now: Black Politics in South Africa in the 1980s, (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 1991), 382. Gail M. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkley: University of California Press, 1978), 173–200. Some people in the PAC, especially some of the leaders, believed that the race or color of a person was irrelevant to whether they were African, but, in practice, such an understanding was the exception rather than the rule.

16

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

Sharpeville, police fatally shot, mostly in the back, sixty-nine people who were protesting the pass laws that limited African residential and employment rights. Sharpeville was a turning point in South African history. In the wake of the massacre, the government banned the ANC and PAC; in turn, these resistance movements adopted armed struggle. Organized oppositional violence soon began. In the wake of Sharpeville, the ANC and PAC “produced insurgent offshoots. These were both dedicated to revolutionary transformation of society, and both were prepared to employ violent measures to attain this.”7 The two organizations were Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the ANC’s military wing, and Poqo, “which was inspired by the PAC.”8 The relationship between Poqo and the PAC was complex. Tom Lodge noted that Poqo members variously directly identiﬁed with and represented a departure from the PAC.9 On the Island, Poqo and the PAC were treated as one group within the prisoner community and by the state. The differences within the PAC and the further distinctions between the PAC and Poqo were, no doubt, relevant to the divisions within the PAC on Robben Island. On the part of the state, the early sixties saw a rapid increase in repressive legislation designed to suppress most opposition to apartheid, including the newly banned organizations and almost all protest. The laws and their violators produced a new phenomenon in South Africa: political prisoners en masse. Hundreds of these prisoners were black men who were sent to Robben Island. By the mid 1960s, the National Party government had, for the short term, quelled much of the dissent, both violent and nonviolent. This state repression ushered in a period of relative political quiescence until the student uprisings of 1976. There was, of course, resistance, including important strikes and labor unrest by workers in Durban in the early 1970s, and the growth and increasing inﬂuence of the predominantly student-oriented black consciousness ideology and movement.10 Furthermore, the reestablishment of 7 8 9 10

Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983), 2. Poqo is “a shortened version of the Xhosa name for PAC, UmAfrika Poqo, or ‘Africans alone’, i.e., no Europeans.” Gerhart, Black Power, 225. See also Lodge, Black Politics, 241. Lodge, Black Politics, 241. Black Consciousness is in essence the realization by the black man of the need to rally together with his brothers around the cause of their oppression – the blackness of their skin – and to operate as a group in order to rid themselves of the shackles that bind them to perennial servitude. . . . [Black Consciousness] seeks to infuse the black community with a new-found pride in themselves, their efforts, their value systems, their culture, their religion and their outlook to life. The interrelationship between the consciousness of the self and the emancipatory programme is of paramount importance. Blacks no longer seek to reform the system. . . . Blacks are out to completely transform the system. Steve Biko cited in Mosibudi Mangena, On Your Own: Evolution of Black Consciousness in South Africa/Azania (Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1989), 154.

Politics and Prison

17

the banned organizations in exile, and especially the ANC, meant that South Africa would become an increasing focus of world attention. Renewed resistance and international pressure proved invaluable for the prisoners on the Island, for absence of scrutiny boded badly for prison conditions. Within the country, levels of fear were extraordinarily high due to the intensiﬁed police and informer presence and the threat of police action by a state determined to crush opposition. One implication of the state’s determination to prevent dissent was that released prisoners were banished, banned, and harassed. Banishment and other repressive measures limited, but did not necessarily stop, the continued activism of former prisoners. Prosecuting and Persecuting Government Enemies From the 1960s onward, political prisoners were held and charged under existing laws, such as treason, and new security legislation. First, detention without trial became a critical government weapon in the state’s legalrepressive arsenal. Individual rights to due process of law were disregarded in the name of protecting South Africa from communism. In 1963, the NP “passed a law permitting the police to detain anyone for questioning for up to 90 days without charge. In 1965 this was extended to 180 days and later to an indeﬁnite period.”11 Second, the Suppression of Communism Act was extended, making it illegal to be a member or ofﬁce bearer of either the ANC or PAC or to participate in or promote the activities of either organization.12 Third, in May 1962, a new law created “the political offence of sabotage with a ﬁve year minimum sentence and a maximum penalty of death. The bill [and later law] also provided for bannings and house arrest.”13 As Catherine Albertyn noted, “the sabotage law became a crucial weapon in the State’s campaign against political opposition and the underground organisations.”14 This sabotage law did not, however, adequately provide for the state’s repressive purposes. Fourth, the Terrorism Act became law in 1967, although it was made retroactive to 1962. Albertyn explained that the Act introduced powers of indeﬁnite detention without trial and further reﬁnements of the drastic criminal procedure. It was a major weapon against political dissent and [saw] the censure of terrorism targeted at a wide range of political action, assisted by a legal deﬁnition which was so wide that by 1976, it was used to censure and criminalise most forms of opposition to the apartheid state, even nonviolent political ideas and activity.15 11

12 13 14 15

Thomas G. Karis and Gail M. Gerhart, From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882–1990, Vol. 5, Nadir and Resurgence, 1964–1979 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 16. Catherine Hester Albertyn, “A Critical Analysis of Political Trials in South Africa, 1948– 1988” (Ph.D. diss., Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, 1991), 264. Ibid., 211–212. Ibid., 213. Ibid., 280. Footnote from orginal deleted.

18

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

In addition to creating and using an ever-expanding array of “security” legislation, the state used the ordinary common law to prosecute people breaking the law for political reasons. Thus, people were prosecuted for theft, arson, malicious damage to property, and even murder, especially in the late 1970s and through the 1980s. A then-senior government prosecutor, Klaus Von Lieres, for example, said that he had preferred to “prosecute under the common law rather than . . . under the statutory law.16 Because nobody can really make propaganda against the common laws whilst you can make effective propaganda against the statutory [law].”17 South African’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission conﬁrmed the longargued claim that the apartheid government also used extensive extralegal methods against its opposition. Torture, in some cases to the point of death, of those detained without trial was the most widespread of these practices. Torture and murder in police cells was followed in time by “dozens of political assassinations in the 1970s and 1980s, the organization of kidnappings, vigilante violence, ‘contra’ warfare by the Zulu Inkatha movement in the 1980s, and the secret campaign of ‘dirty tricks’ waged over three decades against apartheid’s critics inside and outside South Africa.”18 Robben Island in the 1960s and Early 1970s By 1963 and 1964, hundreds of men from around the country had been sent to the Island. They were imprisoned for furthering the aims of the now-banned ANC and PAC, engaging in organized acts of violence and sabotage against apartheid, and, in many cases, for planning armed opposition to apartheid. In some cases, like that of the Yu Chi Chan Club19 and the National Liberation Front (NLF),20 four men were each sentenced 16 17 18 19

20

Von Lieres claimed, however, that it was his initiative rather than a government instruction that made him choose to use common law whenever possible. Klaus von Lieres, interview by author, tape recording. Johannesburg, 27 April 1996. Karis and Gerhart, From Protest to Challenge, 14. Karis and Gerhart described the Yu Chi Chan Club as “primarily a discussion group with a Trotskyist orientation in the Western Cape.” Ibid., 25. One of its founding members, Fikile Bam, noted that they “chose the name Yu Chi Chan . . . [because] it was the Chinese name for guerrilla warfare which Mao Tse-tung used. At the trial . . . they . . . made us out to be a Chinese wing of Communists. We were not any of that.” Bam cited in Robben Island: Our University in Lodge and Nasson, All, Here, and Now, 307. The NLF was composed of members of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM). The NEUM would not consider armed struggle and expelled Neville Alexander, one of the chief protagonists of that option. Although Alexander claimed that they were known on Robben Island as the NLF, many Robben Islanders do refer to this group as “Unity Movement.” Bam said that the NLF/Unity Movement grouping did not organize as a political movement on the Island. Neville Alexander, interview with author, tape recording, Cape Town, 18 April and 26 October 1994; Fikile Bam, interview with author, tape recording, Johannesburg, 22 September 1994.

Politics and Prison

19

to ten years imprisonment for merely discussing and reading about armed struggle.21 The most famous trial of the period was the Rivonia Trial,22 where many senior ANC leaders were prosecuted. It began in late 1963 and ended on 12 June 1964. Senior and less senior ANC members – Nelson Mandela, the leader and founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe; Walter Sisulu; Govan Mbeki; Raymond Mhlaba; Ahmed Kathrada; Andrew Mlangeni; Elias Motsoaledi; and Dennis Goldberg – were all sentenced to life imprisonment. With the exception of Denis Goldberg, who was white and imprisoned in, variously, the Pretoria Local and Central Prisons, other Rivonia trialists were sent to Robben Island and housed in the single (or leadership) cells. From 1963 and 1964, large numbers of political prisoners joined the smaller nonpolitical and political prisoner population already on the Island. There were “well over 1,000 political prisoners”23 in the early years. Initially, most of the men were members and supporters of the PAC and Poqo. In time, more and more ANC members and supporters arrived, including those who had begun to be active in Umkhonto we Sizwe. Babenia noted that “[w]hen we arrived [in March 1964] there were only eleven ANC chaps on the Island.24 We brought the number to ﬁfty-one. Within six months of our arrival there would have been well over eight hundred of us ANC.”25 Over time, the numbers ﬁrst evened out and later there were more ANC than PAC members.26 As well as the PAC and ANC prisoners who together formed the overwhelming majority in the prison, initially there were also nonpolitical prisoners and there are always prisoners from other political organizations. Eddie Daniels, convicted for his involvement in the African Resistance Movement (ARM), understood himself and was widely considered by other inmates to be the Island’s sole representative of the Liberal Party. (In fact, ARM was disowned by the Liberal Party for its recourse to 21 22 23

24

25 26

Bam, interview; Alexander, interview; and Neville Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 1964– 1974 (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1994), vii. See, for example, Joel Joffe, The Rivonia Story (Bellville, South Africa: Mayibuye Books, 1995). Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 40. See also Indres Naidoo and Albie Sachs, Island in Chains: Ten Years on Robben Island by Prisoner 885/63 (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1982), 72. Prisoner estimates on the number of inmates vary, both in total number and in terms of the breakdown of organizational afﬁliation. For example, Indres Naidoo remembered that, when he got there in December 1963, “the island had over 1,000 political prisoners. Of the 1,000 only about 35 were ANC. The rest were PAC. By 1965 their number had been reduced to less than 500. Ours had increased to over 1,000.” Moses Dlamini, who arrived around the same time as Naidoo, too remembered that the ANC had about thirty political prisoners by the end of 1963. Indres Naidoo, interview by Victoria Butler, tape recording, Lusaka, February 1988, in Karis-Gerhart Collection; Dlamini, Hell-Hole, 28. Babenia, Memoirs of a Saboteur, 132. Naidoo and Sachs, Island in Chains, 228–229.

20

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

guerilla tactics.)27 The National Liberation Front (or Yu Chi Chan Club) with its Unity Movement origins had seven men on the Island. In 1974, Mosibudi Mangena was the ﬁrst black consciousness person to arrive on the prison, though many more black consciousness adherents were later sent to the Island, especially in the wake of the 1976 uprising. Before 1976, however, the population of political prisoners declined. In 1974, for example, the population of the political prison was 399 inmates.28 This decrease reﬂects the decline in organized resistance in South Africa after 1963 and until the early 1970s. Arrests from the 1976 rebellion swelled the numbers of political prisoners as did the capture of guerrilla insurgents, members of the underground, and participants in the continuing waves of rebellion over the 1980s. By the late 1980s, the state often diverted political prisoners away from Robben Island to other prisons, as well as charged people under criminal rather than “security” or political laws, which resulted in a prison population around 200 people. (The post–2 February 1990 releases are examined in Chapter Three.) The Renewal of Resistance in the 1970s Most opposition to apartheid had been crushed in the early 1960s by “the suppression of the nationalist movements and the imprisonment, banning or exile of an entire generation of politicians and trade unionists.”29 By the late 1960s, however, black consciousness organizations were developing on black university campuses.30 In 1973, there was a wave of strikes in the industrial port city of Durban. At the same time, two factors that buttressed apartheid were undermined: the 1970s began to present some 27 28

29 30

Karis and Gerhart, From Protest to Challenge, 21–24; anonymous reviewer’s comments to Cambridge University Press concerning an earlier version of this manuscript. South Africa, Hansards to the House of Assembly, vol. 52 (1974), col. 6296. A few years earlier, in a smuggled letter written between December 1970 and January 1971, Ahmed Kathrada had estimated that there were just under 400 political prisoners on the Island. His breakdown is as follows: “(a) General cells – political prisoners ±300; (b) Single cells ±30; (c) SWA [South West African] guerillas ±40; (d) ANC guerillas ±12; (e) Non politicals ±400.” Ahmed Kathrada to Sylvia Neame, Robben Island, between 11 December 1970 and 9 January 1971, Letters from Robben Island: A Selection of Ahmed Kathrada’s Prison Correspondence, 1964–1989, ed. Robert D. Vassen. (East Lansing, Mich., and Cape Town: Michigan State University Press and Mayibuye Books in Association with Robben Island Museum, 1999), 46. Lodge, Black Politics, 321. The most prestigious of these universities was Fort Hare, “a private university which since 1916 had drawn African students from every part of the country and as far north as Uganda.” Under apartheid, Fort Hare was run by the government and only allowed to admit Xhosaspeakers. In line with this ethnic separatism, the regime also created four other ‘non-white’ universities: the University of the Western Cape for Coloureds; the University of DurbanWestville for Indians; the University of the North at Turﬂoop for Sotho, Tswana, Venda, Pedi, and Shangaan speakers; and the University of Zululand at Ngoye for Zulus. Karis and Gerhart, From Protest to Challenge, 91.

Politics and Prison

21

problems for the South African economy, and in 1975 Mozambique gained its independence from Portugal. The coup in Portugal in April 1974 that “brought within reach a transition of power in Mozambique”31 proved to be especially important, at least in the short term, for much of the leadership of the black consciousness South African Students’ Organization (SASO). SASO (and its black consciousness ally, the Black People’s Convention [BPC]) organized a rally to honor FRELIMO (the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique). The government banned this event, and nine SASO and BPC leaders – Saths Cooper, Zithulele Cindi, Mosioua “Terror” Lekota, Aubrey Mokoape, Strini Moodley, Muntu Myeza, Pandelani Nefolovhodwe, Nkwenkwe Nkomo, and Kaborane Sedibe – were subsequently charged, convicted, and sent to Robben Island. Before their imprisonment, these men and, more important, the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) they represented had begun to have a signiﬁcant inﬂuence on black South African politics, especially among younger, more educated, and urban black people. Certainly, the rhetoric and some of the substance of psychological and self-liberation that black consciousness had as its core message, along with its more nascent messages of socialism, were inﬂuential in the Soweto uprising and subsequent protests.32 On 16 June 1976, about 15,000 schoolchildren in Soweto left their schools to march down the township streets to protest being taught certain subjects in Afrikaans.33 They met apartheid’s bullets. At least for the youth, the protest ended the paralyzing fear caused by apartheid repression. Months of sympathetic protest action around South Africa followed, as did the response of continued police brutality.34 The uprising also produced prisoners, many of whom were sent to Robben Island. These young men tended to identify with black consciousness ideas and sometimes with black consciousness 31 32

33

34

Anthony Marx, Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 56. Lodge, Black Politics, 330–334. Lodge reviewed much of the academic debate as to the relative inﬂuence or role of black consciousness in the uprisings. My own research, while not speciﬁcally concerned with this question, does suggest a signiﬁcant inﬂuence of black consciousness ideology. The march was conceived of and organized by a regional subgroup – called the “Action Committee” – of the high school students’ organization, the South African Students’ Movement (SASM). Lodge, Black Politics, 328; Gail Gerhart, letter to author, 13 January 1977. The magnitude of the protest and the response to it is signiﬁcant: “[b]efore they were quelled by continuing repression, protests had been staged in townships throughout South Africa, and a quarter of a million students had boycotted classes, leaving one thousand dead and twenty-one thousand prosecuted for related offenses by September 1977.” Marx, Lessons of Struggle, 69. Furthermore, many people left the country in the wake of the rebellion: “[t]he uprising was succeeded by the exodus of thousands of young men and women to Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana and many of these were to provide Umkonto [sic] with a new army of . . . saboteurs.” Lodge, Black Politics, 339.

22

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

organizations.35 Therefore, when these young people arrived on Robben Island, they usually arrived associating themselves with the BCM. (The thousands of youth who ﬂed apartheid and went into exile also tended to adopt the BCM badge, although many of them joined the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe.) Resistance and Reform After 1976 Unlike the 1960s, when mass exile and imprisonment led to the nadir of the antiapartheid struggle, the repression of the late 1970s did not destroy the resurgence of organized resistance. At a local level, throughout South Africa’s townships, from the late 1970s, hundreds of black community groups organized around basic material “bread-and-butter” issues, as well as demographic sectors such as “youth” and “women.”36 Broader township-based regional organizations were also developed, such as the Soweto Civic Association and the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organization,37 both in 1979. Another group that emerged in 1979 was the Congress of South African Students (COSAS), which organized black school students.38 Importantly, COSAS directly associated itself with the Congress or Charterist (after the ANC’s Freedom Charter) legacy of the ANC and its allies.39 The BCM and black consciousness philosophy had deﬁned much of the resistance in the 1970s. In the 1980s, by contrast, most oppositional groups belonged to or identiﬁed with the Congress tradition, which was represented by the United Democratic Front (UDF), the broad-based umbrella organization established in 1983 and, increasingly, by the ANC. Although the ANC remained banned, it became ever more visible over the decade. The shift from a black consciousness to a Charterist tradition was neither

35

36 37 38 39

Gail Gerhart argued that the school students were deeply impressed by the SASO students “who had put political commitment above the promotion of their own careers” when actively confronting the authorities in protests and university boycotts in 1972. “One consequence by the end of 1972 was an upsurge in political consciousness among high school students, leading to the formation of a welter of political youth organizations across the country. The most notable of these, and the ones which were to provide the organizational impetus behind the township youth uprisings of 1976, were the South African Students’ Movement (SASM), formed in Soweto high schools, and the National Youth Organisation (NAYO), a federation of youth groups in Natal, the Transvaal, and the eastern and western Cape.” Gerhart, Black Power, 297. More speciﬁcally, SASM “was formed in 1972 as a school-based counterpart to SASO.” Shaun Johnson, “‘The Soldiers of Luthuli:’ Youth in the Politics of Resistance in South Africa,” in South Africa: No Turning Back, ed. Shaun Johnson (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 100. Steven Mufson, Fighting Years: Black Resistance and the Struggle for a New South Africa (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 27. Khehla Shubane, “Soweto,” in Lodge and Nasson, All, Here, and Now, 262; Mufson, My Fighting Years, 28–29. See Chapter Seven. Khehla Shubane, “Soweto,” in Lodge and Nasson, All, Here, and Now, 262.

Politics and Prison

23

complete nor without conﬂict. The change in the dominant ideology in resistance politics had, in part, resulted in and from struggles over ideological afﬁliation on Robben Island, and the bitterness in prison was greatly magniﬁed outside, in political and community life. But the greater battle was against the apartheid state, which vacillated between reform and repression over the decade. Increased international pressure, expanding black resistance, and an increasingly vulnerable economy led the South Africa state to look to reform in the late 1970s. Apartheid created at least two structural contradictions.40 First, economically, low black wages limited expansion of the consumer market, and low black skills (because of apartheid education policy) led to a shortage of skilled labor. Second, black deprivation induced alienation and rebellion. When the state responded with repression, international pressure increased, including by limiting South African access to international markets, which in turn worsened the economic contradiction. From the mid and late 1970s, important sectors of the Afrikaner elite realized that “signiﬁcant aspects of apartheid needed to be altered or even jettisoned.”41 Change was signaled by the Report of a Parliamentary Committee on the Constitution in 1977. This report recommended extending parliamentary representation to Indians and Coloureds and appointing two commissions. The Wiehahn Commission was to reform industrial relations, including the introduction of black trade union rights, and the Riekert Commission was to examine reform of inﬂux control and the attendant movement of black people between the homelands and urban areas. These changes began under Prime Minister B. J. Vorster who continued to pledge allegiance to the principles of apartheid. When P. W. Botha became prime minister after Vorster’s resignation in 1978, there was a “signiﬁcant strengthening of the reformist thrust.”42 “It was Botha,” Robert Price noted, “who made domestic reform the centerpiece of government rhetoric, and who deﬁned the government’s purpose as adaptation and change. In contrast to his predecessor, he proclaimed that his government intended to move away from apartheid.”43 “Reform” meant white domination was being reconﬁgured, not coming to an end. The initial implementation of these reforms in the 1980s created enough of a political opening to make new spaces for political organizing and, eventually, to redirect black protest to attempted insurrection.44 The UDF was formed to oppose the government’s plans to create segregated and junior 40 41 42 43 44

Robert M. Price, The Apartheid State in Crisis: Political Transformation in South Africa, 1975– 1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 79. Ibid., 81. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 190–191.

24

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

level parliamentary representation for Indians and Coloureds that nevertheless excluded the African majority. Although it was beyond their “wildest dreams”45 that the UDF would reshape South African politics, the formation of the UDF, as Tom Lodge noted, “was a turning point in this shift in the balance of power between the South African government and the black opposition.” He continued: The UDF inspired an insurrectionary movement that was without precedent in its geographical spread, in its combative militancy, in the burden it imposed upon government resources, and in the degree to which it internationalized hostility toward apartheid. The movement that the UDF headed was profoundly popular, infused “from below” by the beliefs and emotions of “ordinary people.” In contrast to earlier phases of black opposition, a class-conscious ideology was the essential motivating force among a large number of rank-and-ﬁle activists. In this sense, it was a much more radical movement than any that had preceded it.46

The 1980s: Insurrectionary Politics and a Defensive State Insurrection gripped South Africa between 1984 and 1986. Before it was quelled by repression that included the imposition of two states of emergency, this insurrectionary period succeeded in creating and developing alternative structures of governance within the black community, developments that signaled the long-term impossibility of white rule. As Price argued: When the people’s courts, street committees, and NECC [National Education Crisis Committee] were taking on the functions of governance, more was involved than simply the emergence of an alternative state in the formal sense. A new system of domination was being forged. It contained elements of utilitarian and coercive compliance, and with the legitimacy bestowed on the ANC, an important element of normative compliance as well.47

The success of black opposition in putting the regime on the defensive, undermining its reform program, and decimating any vestiges of international legitimacy it once had, did not in itself lead to the collapse of minority rule. On the contrary, in the context of a recession, the expansion of sanctions, and growing economic crisis, together with the dire political straits the state found itself in, the state reasserted repression rather than reform as its dominant modus operandi from at least 1986 to 1989. Resistance continued, however, although in a more subdued, less consistent manner. For example, in June 1988, three million workers conducted a three-day, countrywide strike to protest the effective banning of most antiapartheid organizations 45

46 47

Azhar Cachalia cited in Wilhemina Maria Johanna van Kessel, “‘Beyond Our Wildest Dreams’: The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa” (Ph.D. diss., Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden, 1995), 2. Lodge and Nasson, All, Here, and Now, 29. Price, The Apartheid State, 215.

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and new, antilabor legislation,48 and in February 1989 about 800 detainees began a coordinated, nationwide hunger strike that effectively forced the government to release them.49 Within the state, the replacement of President P. W. Botha with F. W. de Klerk, a known conservative, in September 1989 was initially seen as signaling the continuation of the regime’s emphasis on repression. Instead, it marked the ascendence of, in Price’s term, the internationalist-reformers, who recognized both the need for negotiation and the need to include the ANC in those negotiations.50 De Klerk showed signs of greater openness when he permitted a protest march and released some of the country’s most long-standing political prisoners later that year. On 2 February 1990, he announced the changes that were to initiate a new phase in South African history and four years later lead to the establishment of a democracy: he unbanned banned organizations, including the ANC, its ally the South African Communist Party (SACP), and the PAC, and declared the imminent release of Nelson Mandela. After a four-year transition in which, among other important events and processes, a democratic constitution and election were negotiated, South Africans inaugurated their new democracy with elections on 27 April 1994. Two weeks later Nelson Mandela was inaugurated: the world’s most famous political prisoner had become president. From Pass Laws to Political Imprisonment Even before apartheid, imprisonment in South Africa was shaped by racism and capitalism. Imprisonment was racialized through, for instance, laws that regulated the movements of workers51 and the 1911 Prisons and 48 49

50

51

Lodge and Nasson, All, Here, and Now, 392. “According to the HRC [Human Rights Commission] about 790 people held under emergency regulations had embarked on hunger strikes (including some who had been on a hunger strike more than once) between 21 February and 27 March 1989.” South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), Race Relations Survey (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1991), 167. Price, The Apartheid State, 276. In Price’s periodization, the state or sections of it did not contemplate or recognize the need to negotiate with the ANC (and other legitimate representatives of the black majority) until the late 1980s. National Intelligence Service head, Ni¨el Barnard, located this change from as early as 1984. Implicitly, Kobie Coetsee made this shift in the active prenegotiations with Nelson Mandela that began in 1986. Ni¨el Barnard, interview with author, tape recording, Pretoria, 23 November and 2 December 1994; and H. J. (Kobie) Coetsee, interview with author, tape recording, Cape Town and Pretoria, 11 November and 13 December 1994. The Africa Watch Prison Project identiﬁed pass laws as having being “introduced for Africans in the 1870s . . . especially to regulate the labor force in the diamond and gold mines.” Pass laws have their origin in even earlier times, however. The British colonial government in the early 1800s developed regulations forbidding the native Khoikhoi, who had been dispossessed of their land and most of their cattle, from being unemployed and instructing them to carry passes. This state of enforced work, irrespective of the conditions of “employment,”

26

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

Reformatories Act, which codiﬁed penal racial segregation.52 Apartheid increased the use of imprisonment in at least three ways. First, pass laws were extended with the associated attempt to limit black urbanization, which “criminalized a vast number of otherwise law-abiding citizens.”53 Pass law violations were the most important, but not the only, way black South Africans were made criminals for normal life activity. Second, other laws, such as those detailing curfews or controlling black liquor production and consumption, also provided a continuous source of prisoners. Third, especially from the 1960s, political opponents of apartheid became a new group within the prison system. The 1959 Prisons Act54 shaped political and other imprisonment by hiding prison conditions as well as by setting improved minimum standards, at least in theory. On the one hand, the Prisons Act prohibited or drastically restricted external monitoring or media coverage of prisons.55 Closing prisons to outside eyes was a key factor contributing the often appalling conditions in South African prisons. Indeed, one of the great contributions of political prisoners and their advocates (including former political prisoners), was exposing the conditions within prisons, both for political and nonpolitical prisoners. In the assessment of Hugh Lewin, a white political prisoner incarcerated variously in the Pretoria Local and Pretoria Central prisons, the publication of three in-depth articles about prison conditions by former political prisoner Harold Strachan in the Rand Daily Mail in 1965 led to enormous improvements in prison conditions. The Strachan articles . . . revolutionized the entire South African prison service, breaking open for the ﬁrst time what had in fact become a secret society, subject to no sanctions beyond itself. The Prisons Act of 1950 [sic] had effectively banned the publication of anything to do with prisons, and nobody had dared to challenge this until the Rand Daily Mail with the Strachan articles. . . . Everything related to prison reform in South Africa is post-Strachan.56

On the other hand, the 1959 law was framed to include the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, and although these were not initially (and are now still not always or fully) adhered to, they did

52 53 54 55

56

was challenged by missionary pressure, which led to Ordinance 50 of 1828, which released the Khoikhoi from having to carry passes. Africa Watch, Prison Conditions in South Africa (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1994), x; Sparks, The Mind of South Africa, 83–84. Africa Watch, Prison Conditions, ix–x. Ibid., x. The Prisons Act was amended numerous times and renamed the Correctional Services Act in 1991. The Prisons Service was renamed the Department of Correctional Services in 1990. “Section 44(1)(f) of the Prisons Act . . . made it an offence to publish anything about conditions in prison without taking reasonable steps to verify with the prison authorities that the facts were correct. Obviously it was very difﬁcult to verify facts detrimental to the prisons.” Helen Suzman, In No Uncertain Terms (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1993), 138. Hugh Lewin, Bandiet: Seven Years in a South African Prison (London: Heinemann, 1974), 96; see also note 30 in Chapter Three.

Politics and Prison

27

provide a minimum standard of decency that internal reformers or prisoners or external activists could push to be put into effect; that is, for policy to be made practice. (An important exception to the more enlightened possibilities of the law was that the Prisons Act furthered racial segregation. Legal apartheid in prisons came to an end in 1990.) In formal institutional terms, the Prisons Service was concerned with and responsible for political prisoners.57 The Prisons Service at times fell under the ambit of its own ministry of prisons, and at times it was under various other ministers, including justice and prisons. Within the Prisons Service, a Security Section linked to the Security Police was established in the early or mid 1960s by Brigadier Aucamp.58 In practice, the Security Section had the ﬁnal say on aspects of the incarceration of political prisoners, such as their right to study. Copies of political prisoners’ correspondence, or notes or recordings from prisoner meetings with visitors, were sent to this section. The notion of a Security Section was in some senses consistent with government claims that it had prisoners who were risks to its security rather than political prisoners.59 In 1966, in the Commissioner of Prisons Report, the state conceded that there may be one exception to the label of political prisoner; later, the denial that political prisoners existed admitted no exception.60 Apparently there is an impression in certain circles that in recent times “political” detainees are in custody in South African prisons. To clear up this misapprehension, it is considered necessary to mention that with the possible exception of one,61 the category of prisoners apparently so referred to, consists of persons tried in open court, convicted and sentenced for offences against public security. For the purposes of detention and treatment, such persons consequently fall under the respective group of ordinary sentenced prisoners to which they have been classiﬁed.62 57

58 59

60 61

62

Barnard, interview; Hennie Botha, interview with author, written notes, Hout Bay and Cape Town, 31 October 1994, 3 November 1994, and 24 May 1996; Willie Willemse, interview with author, tape recording, Cape Town, 26 October 1994. Botha, interview. Hennie Botha, a senior member of the Prisons Service until his retirement, pointed out that, government rhetoric notwithstanding, the Security Section referred to security and the state, which was political. Consequently, there was no need for a Security Section with apartheid’s demise. Botha, interview. Most of the former apartheid state respondents tended to refer to “security” rather than “political” prisoners. Presumably he is referring here to PAC leader Robert Sobukwe, who remained incarcerated in a house on Robben Island after the completion of a prison sentence, under an act of parliament speciﬁcally designed for this purpose and called the “Sobukwe clause.” See Benjamin Pogrund, Sobukwe and Apartheid (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1990), 184– 186. Commissioner of Prisons (Republic of South Africa), Prisons Department Report 1963–1966, 1967, 12.

28

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

The International Context The apartheid regime had long faced an international environment that viewed it with hostility or ambivalence. Both the Soviet and Chinese blocs had sided with, respectively, the ANC and PAC and had more generally positioned themselves as antiimperialist supporters of African (and other Third World countries’) aspirations for independence. Even though independent African countries always opposed apartheid, at particular points certain African countries actively demonstrated their support of the struggle against apartheid by hosting the ANC or the PAC as political and guerrilla movements in exile. These countries included Tanzania, Zambia, Angola, Mozambique, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, and Botswana. Mozambique and Angola paid a particularly high price for supporting the liberation movements, including cross-border raids into their own territories. The major industrial capitalist powers of the West formally condemned apartheid as racist but, at the same time, valued South Africa as an anticommunist ally that espoused Western values. Over time, however, the growing resistance and repression inside South Africa and the lobbying successes of antiapartheid organizations abroad – including by the exiled liberation movements – put Western governments in a position where criticism of and sanctions against the apartheid regime came to overwhelm Cold War imperatives of friendliness, even with the coming to power of conservative premiers in Britain, the United States, and Germany in the 1980s.63 The ambivalent criticism of the South African regime by major Western powers did not mean that they were not an important force of international pressure. Human rights, including the fact of political imprisonment, were a particular target. First, as mentioned, Western governments increasingly put greater pressures on Pretoria. As Chris Landsberg noted: The 1980s saw a sharp rise in international hostility to and pressure on apartheid; its major feature was increasing distance between the Western powers and the South African government. . . . The chief change of the 1980s, however, was a shift by most of the country’s major trading partners towards increased economic, military and cultural isolation of the government. While contact between these countries and Pretoria never ceased entirely, their chief priority during this period was to place a measure of distance between themselves and South Africa’s rulers.64

Second, even if governments as a whole did not act against apartheid, individual legislators, prominent personalities, and organizations of civil society 63

64

Price, The Apartheid State; Barber and Barratt, South Africa’s Foreign Policy; Peter J. Schraeder, United States Foreign Policy Toward Africa: Incrementalism, Crisis and Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Chris Landsberg, “Isolation, Permanent Neutrality, Non-alignment or Internationalism: Towards a Post-Apartheid Foreign Policy Orientation,” Centre for Policy Studies [Johannesburg] – Policy Issues and Actors: International Relations Series 7, no. 1 (1994): 1.

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29

in Western democracies could and did act to oppose white minority rule in South Africa.65 Two examples from the United States illustrate this point. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan deﬁned U.S. policy toward South Africa, and the Southern African region, as one of “constructive engagement,” an idea developed by Chester Crocker, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs under Reagan. Crocker argued that U.S. support for the South African government’s anti-Marxism must not prevent genuine U.S. opposition to racial rule. The United States had to encourage the reforms initiated by P. W. Botha without supporting the ANC or even necessarily legal antiapartheid organizations. From the perspective of antiapartheid critics, it was a policy of “all carrot and no stick.”66 To provide an alternative to constructive engagement and demonstrate meaningful American opposition to apartheid, Senator Edward Kennedy visited South Africa in 1985 as a guest of Bishop Desmond Tutu, who had recently won the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his antiapartheid efforts. Beyond such symbolism, civil society groups were simultaneously promoting sanctions and disinvestment by businesses, universities, and local and state governments, as well as the federal government. The American Committee on Africa (ACOA) was founded in 1953 and played an active role in opposing apartheid from its early years onward. TransAfrica, created in 1977 and led by Randall Robinson, was “perhaps the most signiﬁcant organizational development in the anti-apartheid movement during this period.”67 The development of grassroots antiapartheid initiatives was, however, not limited to the work of one or two groups, nor was it exclusive to the United States. Indeed, the British-based Anti-Apartheid Movement had existed since 1960 and, together with other antiapartheid initiatives around the world, did much to undermine the South African government’s propaganda and support those who opposed apartheid.68 (The British movement could not, however, counter Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s conservative approach to South Africa, or, presumably, the public opinion that supported her.) 65

66 67

68

Donald R. Culverson, “The Politics of the Anti-apartheid Movement in the United States, 1969–1986,” Political Science Quarterly 111, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 127–150; Schraeder, United States Foreign Policy Toward Africa. Barber and Barratt, South Africa’s Foreign Policy, 278. Culverson, “Politics of the Anti-apartheid Movement,” 141. Commenting on Robinson’s role, Senator Lowell Weicker argued that “[i]t was not a Congressman, a Senator or a President, who brought the matter of South Africa to the attention of the American people. It was a citizen, Randall Robinson.” Quoted in Barber and Barratt, South Africa’s Foreign Policy, 307. Barber and Barratt, South Africa’s Foreign Policy, 79, 159–160, 165. See also Kader Asmal and Louise Asmal, “Anti-Apartheid Movements in Western Europe: With Special Reference to Their Role in Support of United Nations Action against Apartheid,” in E. S. Reddy ed., The Struggle for Liberation in South Africa and International Solidarity: A Selection of Papers Published by the United Nations Centre against Apartheid (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1992), 307–330.

30

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

Third, among Western democracies, some countries were very much more active in their criticism of South Africa than others. Comparing the direct foreign policy on South Africa by the United States, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, and Sweden from January 1977 to December 1988, Koos van Wyk and Sarah Radloff found signiﬁcant differences in the various approaches to Pretoria.69 They found that the United States and Britain had cooperative relationships with South Africa and that Canada, Sweden, and The Netherlands had mixed relationships with South Africa, with criticism of the apartheid regime predominating. Furthermore, undermining apartheid did not occur only through criticism, diplomatic challenge, sanctions, divestment, and disinvestment, but also in the ﬁnancial support by governments and movements to the ANC and other opponents of apartheid. The Soviet bloc and China had, respectively, long supported the ANC and PAC.70 African countries, freed from white and colonial powers, also tended to give signiﬁcant support to the ANC and PAC. But Scandinavian countries also gave aid to the ANC,71 and the international community – whether as governments, international organizations, or international business – provided diplomatic, ﬁnancial, and other technical support to black and other antiapartheid forces in South Africa, especially as a result of the 1984 to 1986 uprisings.72 Fourth, a range of nongovernmental and other international organizations focused on challenging both apartheid in general and the speciﬁc abuses of human rights in South Africa. These ranged from the efforts of the United Nations, with its Special Committee on Apartheid, to the Organization of African Unity, which “succeeded in keeping apartheid high on the international agenda by constant criticism and diplomatic pressure,”73 to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which paid particular attention to prisoners and detainees, to numerous religious, especially Christian, groups. Furthermore, the international community or speciﬁc bodies within it drew attention to South Africa and world opposition to apartheid, for example, by awarding the Nobel Peace Prize ﬁrst to the then ANC president, Chief Albert Luthuli, in 1960 and later to Bishop Tutu. Finally, international media played a profound part in making individuals, organizations, and countries throughout the world aware of the abuses 69

70 71 72 73

Their methodology was to translate behavior into numerical values, where a “positive affectual score represents a country’s net cooperative behaviour and a negative affectual score indicates net conﬂictual behaviour.” They assigned the above mentioned countries the following scores: United States, 34.46; Britain, 18.17; Sweden, −1.20; Canada, −1.50; and The Netherlands, −2.29. Koos van Wyk and Sarah Radloff, “South Africa’s Dyadic Foreign Policy Behaviour: Patterns of Symmetry and Reciprocity,” Politikon 19, no. 1 (1992), 95, 92. Barber and Barratt, South Africa’s Foreign Policy, 76. Ibid., 227. Price, The Apartheid State, 233–236. Barber and Barratt, South Africa’s Foreign Policy, 84.

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apartheid entailed. A primary task of international antiapartheid groups was to educate the general public about apartheid.74 Although these groups gathered and disseminated information about oppression in South Africa, the mass media was able, ultimately, to reach larger audiences, often with more dramatic images. (Inevitably, the greater breadth of coverage meant issues were often simpliﬁed, and even distorted.) Rob Nixon provided a powerful description of the interconnections between resistance and repression in South Africa, mass media accounts of this dialectic of opposition and oppression, and the way U.S. civil society groups mobilized against apartheid using the power of the media. Nixon wrote: Between 1984 and . . . 1987, the camera assumed a sudden prominence in U.S.-South African relations. The months of October and November 1984 thrust apartheid to the forefront of the American media’s preoccupations as Bishop Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize and then, within weeks, the ﬁrst of what became nationwide uprisings erupted in the Vaal Triangle. Over the next twenty-odd months, American coverage of apartheid rose to new levels as TV brought incriminating images of state violence into American homes with almost daily regularity. Organized public protest in the U.S.A. mounted across campuses, outside the South African Embassy, and in Congress, aided by the ascending visibility of Jesse Jackson, Randall Robinson, TransAfrica, Tutu, and Allan Boesak. Panicked, the Botha regime accused foreign journalists, particularly those in charge of the cameras, of fomenting or deliberately staging unrest.75

International pressure was critical to inﬂuencing the apartheid state, including its treatment of political prisoners on Robben Island (and elsewhere). This is not to say that international pressure was the most important source of, or only reason for, changes by the South African government. On the contrary, my reading of South African political history and my analysis of Robben Island resistance identiﬁes the internal rebellion of South Africans, including political prisoners in the case of Robben Island and other prisons, as the primary reason for changes in regime policy and practice. Nelson Mandela noted that we recognized the importance of some of the leaders of the liberation movement going abroad to mobilise international opinion behind the liberation movement. Nevertheless, international support was merely subordinate to what we were doing inside the country during the most difﬁcult times. . . . [I]nternational opinion would not have been mobilised if there was no vigorous and effective resistance movement inside the country.76 74 75 76

Asmal and Asmal, “Anti-Apartheid Movements in Western Europe,” 310. Rob Nixon, Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 82. Mandela quoted in Cameron Duodu, “Mandela: Abacha’s Sitting on a Volcano and I’m Going to Explode It,” Sunday Independent (South Africa), 26 November 1995: 4.

32

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

Speciﬁcally, Price argued that since 1975, South Africa was involved in a “trialectic” of change in which the “interaction of three elements – growing domestic opposition to racial rule, efforts of the state to preserve white minority control, and international pressure – gave rise to a process of debilitating economic crisis and intensifying political conﬂict that place[d] immense pressure on the South African state.”77 One source of domestic opposition was Robben Island. It is to the Island struggles that I now turn. 77

Price, The Apartheid State, 6–7.

3 Resistance for Survival

Robben Island was the laboratory of a major political experiment. Here a major test of the political ﬁbre of the oppressed was to be conducted. . . . All the ingredients of a laboratory experiment were there: the constant conditions and the variable conditions – the latter divided into dependent and independent variables. The main constant condition was the prison population itself, of course. The independent variable as the name implies changed independently of the constant. They were manipulated by the experimenter – the prison authorities. In the early days there were the ‘carry on’1 inductions, the inadequate food and clothes. The variables were both independent and physical. The ‘carry ons’ stopped and there was some improvement in the quantity of food and the quality of clothes. Later a new set of variables was introduced: withdrawal of study privileges on ﬂimsy excuses, vindictive censorship of letters. . . . It was psychological.2 I want to say that whilst we are going to talk about the human rights violations it would be unfair to the men I was with on that Island to portray them as just simple victims who passively accepted human rights violations. I can safely say for most of us who were there it was the continuation of the struggle. I can also say that a great deal of the penal reforms that took place in this country were as a result of the sacriﬁces of the men who were at Robben Island.3

Hell-Hole and Island in Chains: these book titles by former Islanders highlight the reality that prisoners confronted upon their arrival to Robben Island in the 1960s.4 Similarly, the front cover of Zwelonke’s book, Robben Island, pictures a black man hanging upside down, with the words “Robben Island” 1 2 3

4

“Carry-ons” were mass beatings of prisoners by warders. Michael Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid (London: Kliptown Books, 1987), 203. Amos Masondo, Testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Special Hearings: Prisons, 21 July 1997, TRC Case no. JB 04630. Online at http://www.truth.org.za/special/ prison/masondo.htm Accessed on 2 December 2001. Dlamini, Hell-Hole; Naidoo and Sachs, Island in Chains.

33

34

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

emblazoned in white paint across his back.5 The photo evokes torture or the branding common to slavery and concentration camps. The texts of these books, Brutus’s6 prison poetry, which recalls days “brilliant with the threat of death,” and the testimonies of countless former prisoners, all portray Robben Island as a world of chains and torture, of attempts to enslave and destroy. And yet this is not Robben Island’s only legacy or image; Robben Island also has a reputation as the “University of Struggle” and as a beacon of resistance. The key to connecting these disparate images lies in prisoner resistance. Prisoners, with the help of supporters beyond the jail walls, challenged, over time, the conditions that made Robben Island a hell-hole, working to secure, ﬁrst, their physical survival, then their mental endurance, and, ultimately, the victory of their struggle. This chapter begins with an overview of the conditions of prisoner life from the early 1960s until 1991, when the last political prisoners were released or removed from Robben Island. The most signiﬁcant changes in prison conditions occurred before the 1980s, especially before the mid-1970s; consequently, much of the focus of this chapter rests on this period.7 Initial conditions in the prison are examined in some detail, as are prisoner struggles for survival which demanded that these untenable circumstances be improved. Explanations are provided to examine how and why conditions, and in turn the possibility of long-term survival, were challenged and ameliorated. An argument about the nature of resistance on Robben Island frames the account of this and the following four chapters. Resisting the basic conditions of life in prison in most of the 1960s, as well as in the early 1970s, was a necessary precursor to any more far-reaching resistance, such as using one’s imprisonment to acquire an academic qualiﬁcation or developing structures that created, organized, and gave meaning to the prisoner community. In turn, these various forms of resistance, which worked to protect the health of the social body as well as of the minds and bodies of the individual prisoners, helped prisoners develop transformational strategies that sought not

5 6 7

D. M. Zwelonke, Robben Island (London: Heinemann, 1973). Dennis Brutus, A Simple Lust: Collected Poems of South African Jail and Exile Including Letters to Martha (London: Heinemann, 1973), 59. The emphasis on the pre-1976 period, at least as far as conditions are concerned, is also a product of the emphasis on former prisoners’ published accounts and their oral testimony. Except for political debates or struggles within or among prisoner organizations, interview respondents tended to paint a much richer and more detailed account of prison life before the mid 1970s. Kgalema Motlanthe commented that it would likely be (future) novels about Robben Island prison that would fully convey life as it was really lived in that prison. He emphasized that the “rich side of life at Robben Island” included the light moments, the social life, the discussions of family life, and how Islanders lived life beyond formal organizational infrastructures. Kgalema Motlanthe, interview with author, tape recording, Johannesburg, 5 and 7 December 1994.

Resistance for Survival

35

only to resist apartheid in and outside the prison but also to fundamentally transform South African politics. Overview of Prison Conditions: 1963–1991 Robben Island became an apartheid political prison in 1962.8 In this year, the ﬁrst political prisoners, overwhelmingly if not exclusively PAC supporters, joined the nonpolitical prisoners already on the Island. The South African Prisons Service took ofﬁcial control of the Island on 1 April 1961,9 and nonpolitical prisoners were probably there from 1961.10 The ﬁrst prisoners who were on the Island from 1962 “really had it tough.”11 This observation is largely supported by the accounts of Nelson Mandela, who was one of the ﬁrst political prisoners on Robben Island, and who spent two weeks there before the Rivonia Trial.12 His long-time cell mate, Michael Dingake, wrote that “[i]n those days . . . the conditions were mixed. Bad and not so bad.”13 One of the main reasons things were “bad” was that two notorious members of the Prisons Service, the Kleynhans brothers, worked in the prison and terrorized the inmates. At least in 1962, however, there were several Coloured warders who mitigated some of the hardships and abuse. By 1963, these Coloured warders had been removed. From then on, all warders and prison department personnel were white, and all the prisoners were black men. Neville Alexander, who was on the Island from 1964 to 1974, argued that this led to Robben Island having a “peculiar status,” where state policy sought to heighten racial prejudice and abuse of prisoners, and prevent sympathetic “nonwhite” warders from helping political prisoners. RIP [i.e., Robben Island Prison] must be the only prison in the country where in spite of a[n] . . . exclusively . . . Black prison population, the staff is exclusively White. This undisguised recourse to the racial prejudice of the Whites as a reinforcement of the 8 9 10

11 12

13

Little information exists as to the conditions before 1963. South Africa Prisons Service, “Robben Island Prison,” pamphlet/mimeo, 8. Joe Shithlibane, then a nonpolitical prisoner, remembered being imprisoned on Robben Island from 1960, however. In his book, Daniels noted that political prisoners were on Robben Island from 1960, although in subsequent correspondence he noted that these were short-term political prisoners, serving three- to six-month sentences in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre. Joe Shithlibane, interview with author, tape recording, Dawn Park, 20 November 1994; Eddie Daniels, There and Back: Robben Island, 1964–1979 (Bellville, South Africa: Mayibuye Books, 1998); Eddie Daniels, e-mail to author, 29 November 2001. Zwelonke, Robben Island, 14. This ﬁrst incarceration on Robben Island was prior to his subsequent life sentence. He had received a ﬁve-year sentence for inciting African workers and leaving the country illegally. Ahmed Kathrada, interview with author, Johannesburg and Cape Town, 18 July and 31 October 1994; Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 296–304. Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid, 217.

36

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

maximum security measures . . . is one of the major factors in the hardships suffered by prisoners at RIP.14

Indeed, prisoner after prisoner identiﬁed the warders as one of the most important reasons for the appalling conditions and brutality of the early years.15 Many prisoners further explained that criminal or nonpolitical prisoners were also used to brutalize and terrorize the political prisoners, although accounts differ as to their importance. Moses Dlamini suggested the criminals were critical to the terror of the early years.16 They were hardened criminals and members of vicious and notorious gangs, who had been “hand-picked by the enemy from the most notorious maximum [security] prisons of South Africa to come and demoralise and humiliate us with the assistance of the uncouth, uncivilised, raw Boer warders so that we would never again dare to challenge the system of apartheid colonialism.”17 When they left, there was, for example, “a blossoming of cultural activities throughout all the cells in the island.”18 In Dlamini’s account, the hardened gang members19 were removed from the Island in 1965. The early years, from 1962 or 1963 until approximately 1966, were harsh for the political prisoners. The crucial turning point in the gradual improvement of conditions was a mass hunger strike in about 1966 by almost the entire prisoner population of over a thousand men. Slowly brutality decreased, food improved, and cultural, academic, and political activities were organized by the prisoners. There was a regression in conditions in the early 1970s, with the arrival of a new commanding ofﬁcer, Colonel Badenhorst, when a reign of terror was reestablished.20 After Badenhorst left the Island in 1972, conditions once again slowly began to improve. In 14 15

16 17 18 19

20

Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 11–12. The overall impression about warders in the 1960s and 1970s is that of brutal men who slavishly followed racist mores, without regard to the humanity of their charges. According to Patti Waldmeir, however, Mandela noted that “the moment we arrived at Robben Island, a debate started among Afrikaner warders, some saying, let’s treat these people harshly so they respect white supremacy, others saying, their side will ultimately win, we must treat them in such a way that when they win, it should not be a government of retribution.” Patti Waldmeir, Anatomy of a Miracle: The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the New South Africa (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 17. Dlamini, Hell-Hole. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 170. Other criminal prisoners remained, or were brought to the Island prison, however. Dlamini noted that “[W]hen they [the hardened criminals and gang members] realised that . . . the date of their departure [from Robben Island] was getting nearer, the gang warfare began again. While they were at each other’s throats, a draft of short term criminal convicts arrived. It was obvious they had come to replace them.” Dlamini, Hell-Hole, 164. Kathrada, interview; Martin (Magalies) Ramokgadi, interview with author, tape recording, Alexander and Johannesburg, 1 and 2 February 1988. Note that Indres Naidoo does not

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37

summary, Alexander explains the overall pattern of regression and improvements from 1962 to 1974 as follows: At RIP itself the years 1962–1966 were years of hell. . . . From 1967 onwards, any objective observer would have to admit that major improvements . . . were made. . . . Thus the general picture that emerges is one of extreme harshness and physical pressure on prisoners from 1962 until December 1966 with peak of inhumanity and brutality in 1962–1963 and again from August 1966 onwards. . . . Then from 1967 until 1970 inclusive there followed a period of relatively civilized treatment and a much more relaxed atmosphere. 1971–1972 saw a relapse with the harshest treatment concentrated in the ﬁrst nine months of 1971. From 1973 (April) onwards all overt physical pressures were eliminated, treatment became relatively humane again but . . . other problems were manufactured by ofﬁcialdom in order to harass the political prisoners.21

Prison conditions were a product of the interaction between state policy and prisoner struggles for improved treatment and conditions. The state could and did worsen or improve conditions as it saw ﬁt. Progress in ameliorating conditions was not linear; rather it had a “zig-zag” quality, which destabilized prisoners’ lives.22 Many prisoners cite not only Badenhorst’s removal but his replacement by a new commanding ofﬁcer, Willie Willemse, a reformer in the Prisons Service, as a reason for signiﬁcant improvements in prison standards. Hot water was provided in 1973, although to punish prisoners, it was cut off at times.23 In September 1975, Ahmed Kathrada noted some of the little improvements in prison life: This year, for the ﬁrst time in 12 years, we’ve been provided with hot showers; twice we have eaten guavas; Isu has been promoted to “A” group, which enabled him to buy some chocolates, coffee, sugar, cocoa, etc., each month; small things all, but they make a big difference.24

By 1978, conditions in the prison had largely improved, and this trend continued into the next decade, albeit unevenly. A new head of the prison, Captain John Harding, came to the prison in November 1977, bringing with him what was, for the most part, a more relaxed attitude to his charges.25 Hard labor in the quarries was brought to an end in 1977.26 In 1978, the

21 22 23 24 25 26

mention Badenhorst, and instead implies a slow, gradual improvement up until the end of his sentence in 1973. Naidoo and Sachs, Island in Chains. Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 13–14. Ibid., 13. Sampson, Mandela: The Authorized Biography, 228. Ahmed Kathrada to Raman Chiba, 20 September 1975, Letters from Robben Island, 71. Former prisoner interpretations of Harding’s behavior and approach do differ substantially. Mandela wrote of the end of manual (quarry) labor in early 1977. This followed “the second year of a go-slow strike at the quarry, demanding a complete end to all manual labor.” Mandela argued that older inmates in the single-cell section B were also released

38

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

authorities began to pipe canned and censored radio news to the inmates.27 But changes were uneven: Ahmed Kathrada wrote in Easter 1978 that he had lost study privileges as punishment for working on Mandela’s autobiography; that only ﬁrst-degree relatives could visit, making Kathrada ineligible for visitors; and that prisoners were “no longer allowed to receive anything – books, records, sports equipment, musical instruments – from outside.”28 In 1980, one of the most hard-fought prisoner struggles was won when A classiﬁcation prisoners, those with the highest level of privileges, were allowed to read newspapers (although these were often censored – once again, the zigzag nature of prison reform). Increased news and media were made available when television was introduced in December 1986.29 Also in 1986, about ten years after prisoners were allowed to sleep on beds rather than the concrete ﬂoors, sheets were introduced.30 By the late 1980s, prisoner struggles led to inmates being allowed to rent videos, and by 1990 or 1991 telephones were installed for their use. The uneven nature of improvements is indicated by two examples from this post-1976 period. First, post–high school studies were banned in 1977, and that ban was rescinded only in 1981.31 Second, Harding was succeeded by a Major Badenhorst in 1981,32 who “attempted to apply the prison regulations rigidly, unlike his predecessor, Major John Harding.”33 Opposition to Badenhorst led to a hunger strike in 1981, which was successful in changing the attitude of Badenhorst and achieving certain other demands, such as better food and more time for visits (from thirty to forty-ﬁve minutes), as well as the right of prisoners to have their children visit them and an increase in the

27 28 29 30 31

32 33

from hard labor because the authorities were anxious “to deal with these young lions,” that is, the youth of the 1976 uprising. Cindi, who arrived in December 1976, noted that their ﬁrst act of resistance was to oppose having to work in the quarry, which seems to have occurred within the ﬁrst nine months of their arrival. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 424; Zithulele Cindi, interview by Gail Gerhart, tape recording, Johannesburg, 5 July 1989, in Karis-Gerhart Collection. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 434; Kathrada to Dasoo Iyer, Easter 1978, Letters from Robben Island, 89. Kathrada to Dasoo Iyer, Easter 1978, Letters from Robben Island, 89. Thami Mkhwanazi, “Flush Toilets for the Other Prisoners. But Not for Us,” Weekly Mail (South Africa), 4–10 September 1987, 17. Thami Mkhwanazi, “My Years on the Island,” Weekly Mail (South Africa), 14–20 August 1987, 15. Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid, 181, 183. Former Robben Islander Sibusiso Ndebele recalled that “the Nationalist Party said to us that people have been burning schools, we [political prisoners] cannot now start going to school [in prison]. So they just banned . . . post matric studies.” Sibusiso Ndebele, interview by Tom Karis, tape-recording, Durban, 15 December 1989, in Karis-Gerhart Collection. Mkhwanazi, “My Years on the Island,” 16. This Badenhorst was not the same person who headed the prison in the early 1970s. Thami Mkhwanazi, “Hunger Strike on the Island,” Weekly Mail (South Africa), 4– 10 September 1987, 16.

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39

number of letters that could be written and received.34 There were numerous hunger strikes during the 1980s, some of which were widely supported by the majority of prisoners; others had only the support of smaller groups. For example, James Mange mentioned embarking on hunger strikes a number of times, often with the support of PAC and black-consciousness-afﬁliated Islanders, because he was more deﬁant than many of his fellow ANC prisoners.35 Denmark Tungwane recalled a hunger strike in 1987 that received support from the vast majority of prisoners.36 There were also a series of hunger strikes associated with the release process after the 2 February 1990. The Prison and Its Population Prison life on Robben Island was shaped in part by the layout of the prison. Much of the political prison was built by prisoners in the early 1960s. It was modiﬁed over the years, especially with the inﬂux of prisoners following the 1976 uprising (see diagrams in Appendix I). For this reason, section names are not always consistent over time. For example, in the early sixties, C section was one of the cell blocks in the general section,37 but later on C section referred to a different section, namely single cells used to isolate recent arrivals or prisoners being punished. There was a consistent division between the single cell and the general sections of Robben Island. The single cells were, as the name suggests, individual cells for one prisoner. A few prisoners were housed in this single-cell section, often identiﬁed, with some accuracy, as the “leadership section.” The composition of the single cells changed over time. At various points, the population included, among others, the ANC’s Rivonia group (Nelson Mandela, Elias Motsoaledi, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, Andrew Mlangeni, and Raymond Mhlaba); the PAC’s John Nyati Pokela and Zephania Mothopeng; the NLF’s Fikile Bam and Neville Alexander; Eddie Daniels of the Liberal Party; Sonny Venkatrathnam and Kader Hassim of African People’s Democratic Union of South Africa (APDUSA); and activists imprisoned in the late 1970s and 1980s, like Saths Cooper of the BCM, and Naledi Tsiki and Tokyo Sexwale of the ANC. There were other men, widely considered as leaders, who were in the general cells rather than in this single-cell section. They include Harry Gwala (in his ﬁrst term and the beginning of his second term of imprisonment), Johnson Mlambo, George Mbele, Kgalema Motlanthe, 34 35 36

37

Ibid. James Mange, interview with author, tape recording, Sharonlee, 2 August 1994. Denmark Tungwane, interview with author, tape recording, Cape Town, 3 November 1994. The occurrence of hunger strikes in the 1980s was also mentioned in interviews (conducted by the author) with Lassie Chiwayo, Kgalema Motlanthe, Petros “Shoes” Mashigo, Vronda Banda, and Judy (Moon) Sexwale. See, for example, Zwelonke, Robben Island, 12.

40

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

and Jeff Radebe.38 Although Andimba Toivo ja Toivo was in the single-cell section, the Namibians were for the most part housed in a separate portion of the general section.39 The majority of prisoners were housed in the general sections. The general sections cells were designed in an H-block shape, with four “communal” or dormitory-type subcells in each larger cell block. Kwedi Mkalipi pointed out that treatment was worse in the general cells than in the single cells.40 Being in one’s own cell had advantages, such as the ability to study in privacy, but the loneliness was a distinct disadvantage. The men in single cells were locked in their cells for much longer hours and had far less (legal) contact with their fellow prisoners than the men in the general sections. Mkalipi recalled: You were more lonely in the single cells, . . . in particular on weekends. They will lock you up on Saturday at 11 o’clock, give you breakfast at nine, lunch at 10 o’clock and at 11 o’clock [in the morning], supper! . . . You are going to be locked then . . . until the following nine o’ clock on Sunday! [Then at 11:00 am] you are locked again and they open for you tomorrow morning.41

Another disadvantage was that, before the mid 1970s, single-cell prisoners had very little access to sporting facilities, besides table tennis and teniquoit.42 In addition to the general sections and single-cell sections, there was an isolation or punishment section, as well as a hospital, kitchen, and administrative section. The different sections were designed to separate the prisoners and prevent their communication, especially as far as contact between the single cells and the rest of the prison was concerned. Nonetheless, the prisoners soon found methods to circumvent the divisions and consequently facilitated communication. The methods of contact were, however, often slow and interrupted because of the illicit methods that had to be used. One common method was 38

39

40 41 42

Of course, the state deﬁned who was to be in this single-cell or leadership section, which also included people who were clearly not considered leaders by the prisoners and/or the regime. The role the state had in deﬁning and creating leadership is itself a matter for debate and evaluation. It is ultimately a speculative question that cannot be answered satisfactorily. Nevertheless, the evidence seems to suggest that, although the state reinforced the leadership status of some people, like Mandela, the prisoners and their organizations inside and outside the prison were decisive in determining and/or training those prisoners considered as “leaders.” The incarceration of the Namibians is not considered in this work. But see, for example, the memoir of Helao Shityuwete, a Namibian who was incarcerated on Robben Island. Helao Shityuwete, Never Follow the Wolf: The Autobiography of a Namibian Freedom Fighter (London: Kliptown Books, 1990). Kwedi Mkalipi, interview by author, tape recording, Cape Town, 17 May 1996. Ibid. Daniels, There and Back, 158.

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to wrap messages in plastic and put them in the drums of food that went through to the kitchen, which served the entire prison.43 Prison life was also shaped by an extensive committee structure developed by the prisoners. These committees regulated nonorganizational as well as intra- and interorganizational relationships and activities that made up the better part of prison life. Like life outside the prison, there were also differences – occasionally the basis of division – along lines of ethnicity, region, or, especially after 1976, generation. The state presumably intended to exploit some of these divisions, although it apparently did not succeed in doing so.44 Fikile Bam noted, for example, that at one point he was put in a cell where he believed the authorities had deliberately mixed Pedi-speaking men from the Northern Transvaal who were predominantly ANC supporters, with Xhosa-speaking men from the opposite side of the country who were predominantly PAC supporters, in order to precipitate ﬁghts and tension. It was a deliberate policy of . . . the prison authorities that as long as . . . we were ﬁghting amongst each other, their task was much easier of breaking us. And sometimes it did happen. But as a matter of fact it wasn’t that regular that it happened. In this particular section, the relationships were just wonderful and I made friends with both groups. And you know, in fact, [we] spent a lot of time learning each others’ languages, and [we] didn’t care much about [our] differences.45

Indeed, although Dlamini and others identiﬁed the state’s use of criminal prisoners to undermine the political prisoners as partially successful, most prisoners felt the criminal prisoners were removed, above all, because the political prisoners had begun to neutralize, politicize, and even recruit them into the political organizations. Joe Shithlibane was one inmate who 43 44

45

Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 367; see also 366–368 on other methods; Curnick Ndlovu, interview by author, tape recording, KwaMashu, 18 June 1994. Research suggests ethnic and racial divisions were not a major problem or even usually an overt facet of prison life on Robben Island. Nevertheless, there are indications of both subtle and more overt ethnic or racial tensions between prisoners at points. Indres Naidoo alluded to and Natoo Babenia recalled anti-Indian comments made by some members of the PAC; Mandela noted that the all-Xhosa composition of the ANC’s High Organ was a source of controversy (although the shared ethnicity was a historical coincidence); and Naledi Tsiki, who is African, recalled challenging Ebrahim Ismael Ebrahim, who is Indian, about Tsiki and others’ perception that Ebrahim did not discuss issues with African comrades. Tsiki further pointed out that ideological and intellectual differences between prisoners could be further affected by race, noting the tensions between ANC leaders Billy Nair, who is Indian, and Lawrence Phokanuka, who is African, as an example. Malcolm Dyani of the PAC remembered that ethnicity and race seldom were an issue for the prisoners with the notable exception of many Zulu prisoners, who placed their Zulu identity above their African identity, even if they were in the PAC. Naidoo, Island in Chains, 228; Natoo Babenia, interview with author together with Fezile Mlauda, Durban, 19 June 1994; Mandela Long Walk to Freedom, 386; Naledi Tsiki, interview by author, tape recording, Johannesburg, 7 and 25 May 1996; Malcolm Dyani, interview by author, Cape Town, 20, 21, and 23 May 1994. Bam, interview.

42

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

was “converted” to politics from criminality.46 Neville Alexander added that the state also realized that the nonpolitical prisoners helped the political prisoners to obtain contraband newspapers and news, given that newspapers and radios were prohibited for the political prisoners.47 Releases and the Prison After February 1990 The second of February 1990 redirected South African history. On that day, President F. W. de Klerk legalized banned organizations and announced that Nelson Mandela and certain other political prisoners were to be released. Mandela was freed on 11 February. De Klerk’s speech initiated the negotiation process that would take South Africa beyond apartheid, into a nascent democracy, over the next four and a half years. It was, of course, good news for the prisoners on Robben Island, and the announcement had a liberalizing effect on the prison. For most of the prisoners, however, there was nothing immediate about their release. Indeed, political prisoner releases were the subject of protracted negotiations for more than two years after the announcement. For Tom Winslow, a human rights advocate who worked in support of Robben Islanders in prison and upon their release, the period following 2 February was marked by enormous stress for prisoners, whose fates were uncertain. That whole [release] process, I think, was designed deliberately to destabilize the individuals involved, to use political prisoners as pawns in the negotiating process. It was used by the government as a lever against what the ANC was doing; it was a very, very cruel thing to do. . . . [P]eople were released without any notice. They tended to be released when there were major overseas initiatives. . . . We begged and pleaded with the authorities, the prisoners begged and pleaded with the authorities, their families begged and pleaded with the authorities – please give them advanced warning. They refused to do it. They refused to give a timetable, they refused to give them the exact time or place. They needed a draw card. On an individual, emotional level it caused tremendous stress and strain on people. Some people say it was probably the most stressful times in the Island’s history. Just that sheer uncertainty of knowing the hour and the day when you would come out and not letting families know was incredibly painful for people.48

The prisoners hastened their own release with a series of protests and hunger strikes. In February, soon after de Klerk’s speech, 143 prisoners on Robben Island went on a hunger strike to demand “the immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners.”49 The next month protesters outside prisons marched for the release of political prisoners. These actions had little immediate effect. In May, however, the government and the ANC 46 47 48 49

Shithlibane, interview. Alexander, interview. Thomas Winslow, interview with author, tape recording, Cape Town, 4 November 1994. SAIRR, Race Relations Survey 1990, 168.

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signed the Groote Schuur Minute to begin facilitating political prisoner releases. In June 1990, when Nelson Mandela was on a world tour, a number of Islanders were released, but the majority remained imprisoned. In August, ﬁfteen more political prisoners were released in terms of the Pretoria Minute of 6 August 1990, another negotiated agreement. Under this accord, political prisoners were to be released by 30 April 1991. The Pretoria Minute demanded that prisoners sign an agreement requesting indemnity before they were released.50 This requirement caused considerable disagreement among the prisoners on Robben Island, as many people felt they should not have to ask the government for pardons (and, in fact, it should be the government asking them for indemnity). The PAC and the Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO), the latter being a legal black consciousness organization inside South Africa, were not party to the Pretoria Minute, or, indeed, to most of South Africa’s transitional negotiations from 1990 to 1994. Penuell Maduna, who negotiated for the release of political prisoners for the ANC, said he and the ANC also worked to secure the release of PAC and BCM prisoners.51 AZAPO’s president, Pandelani Nefolovhodwe, himself a former Robben Island prisoner, rejected the indemnity provision, called for the unconditional release of all political prisoners, and further rejected the deﬁnition of political prisoners as outlined in the Pretoria Minute.52 Vusumzi Mcongo, a BCM prisoner on the Island at the time, emphasized that all BCM members on Robben Island refused to sign indemnity forms and all were released unconditionally.53 Although the PAC ultimately entered negotiations in 1993 and then participated in negotiating the release of its political prisoners, PAC prisoners on Robben Island refused to sign the indemnity agreement. Nevertheless, all PAC prisoners on Robben Island were released by April or May 1991.54 Because the ANC negotiated the Pretoria Minute with the National Party government, ANC prisoners on Robben Island were in a more difﬁcult position. An ANC legal team attempted to persuade all the men to sign the indemnity; however, it was unsuccessful, in part because it tried to get prisoners to sign before the ANC on Robben Island had been able to discuss the matter fully. Some prisoners, in support of the ANC leadership negotiating with the government outside the prison, signed the indemnity forms, and expected to be released by 30 April 1991. The ANC continued to try to persuade the Robben Islanders to sign the indemnity, which they did following a 50

51 52 53 54

Nevertheless, ANC prisoner Lassie Chiwayo, who became an ANC senator after the 1994 elections, was in the ﬁrst group that was released after the Pretoria Minute, although he and others had not signed an indemnity agreement. Penuell Maduna, interview with author, tape recording, Pretoria, 27 May 1996. SAIRR, Race Relations Survey 1992, 22. Vusumzi Mcongo, interview with author together with Luhamile Mate, tape recording, Port Elizabeth, 10 May 1996. Johnson Mlambo, conversation with author, Dalpark, South Africa, 4 May 1996.

44

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

visit from Nelson Mandela in late April. Although there were some releases by 30 April, all political prisoners had not been released, including some of those who had signed the indemnity. The majority of prisoners therefore decided to embark on another hunger strike to pressure the government to release them. In May 1991, most prisoners were released after a lengthy hunger strike.55 Although all the political prisoners were removed from Robben Island, some were transferred to other mainland prisons.56 First Stages of Struggle – Overcoming Brutal Conditions Systematic Racism and Brutality Overt and covert racism deﬁned much of prison life. As noted, all the prisoners were black, and all the warders were white. Food and clothing was provided on a racially differentiated basis, and racial slurs were the hallmark of daily life in the early years.57 Apartheid “logic” had ensured that prisoners of different races ate different food. Supposedly, this was to cater to traditional or cultural norms of the different races. However, “culture” had nothing to do with the diet, which was based on racial discrimination. Whites were fed four ounces of mealie (or corn) meal or mealie rice per day, while Coloureds/Asians were given fourteen ounces and Africans received twelve ounces. When it came to meat or ﬁsh, whites received seven ounces daily, and Coloureds/Asians and Africans were fed six and ﬁve ounces, respectively – but only four times a week.58 The racially discriminatory diet apparently failed to create divisions between the prisoners; Robben Island’s community was “politically conscious 55 56 57

58

Anonymous, interview. SAIRR, Race Relations Survey 1992, xi. The discriminatory nature of food is discussed below. Regarding the racially discriminatory provision of clothing, Alexander summarizes the situation as follows: “Until approximately 1970 there was rigid discrimination in regard to the clothing worn by prisoners according to their ofﬁcial racial classiﬁcation. Coloureds and Indians were given long pants, shoes and socks, besides a shirt, a jacket, and a jersey (in winter), whereas African prisoners were until that year given neither shoes nor socks, and were forced to wear short pants throughout the year. . . . African prisoners were given sandals even in winter, but a very large percentage had to go barefoot most of the year. . . . Whereas Coloureds and Indians were given black hats, which served a useful purpose . . . Africans were given a most inadequate cap. . . . Finally, however, almost all discrimination was swept away in the course of 1970.” Aside from the racially discriminatory nature of clothing, clothing was inadequate by any deﬁnition and was often ﬁlthy dirty. Lombard Mbatha and Martin Ramokgadi both described how they were given clothes that were far too small, but that the clothes soon ﬁtted when they were doing hard labor and eating far less than they needed. Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 38; Lombard Mbatha, interview with author, tape recording, Johannesburg, December 1987– February 1988; Ramokgadi, interview. Race Relations Survey 1970, cited by Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid, 205–206.

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and enlightened” and it therefore only had “irritation value.”59 Nevertheless, the prisoners opposed the discriminatory diets because of the racism they involved. In the single cells, there were enough non-African inmates for the better food given to Coloureds and Indians to be fairly divided among all, although this practice violated prison rules. Such redistribution was not, however, possible in the general sections where Africans were a large majority.60 Racism aside, food was always a source of complaint on Robben Island.61 The insufﬁcient quantity and poor quality were an almost universal grievance. Food also had the potential for being a ﬁercely contested weapon. From the prisoners’ perspective, refusing food during hunger strikes was perhaps their most powerful weapon.62 From the state’s point of view, until 1973, warders would punish prisoners by withdrawing their meal “tickets,” thus forcing them to starve for a day. The cry of “drie maale” or “three meals” was a regular but arbitrary edict imposed if rules were allegedly broken. Prison regulations allowed a prisoner who acknowledged culpability for a minor infraction to be deprived of between one and three meals (all on one day) by any ofﬁcer with at least the rank of chief warder.63 In theory, if the prisoner did not plead guilty, he would then be charged in a prison court or higher. In practice, however, “it was physically risky for almost all prisoners in 1962/4 not to ‘accept’ meal-stops.”64 The regulations were often abused by the authorities, and there were many occasions “where head-warders, and even ordinary warders . . . had prisoners locked up without food for a day (and even longer) without so much as referring the matter to the head of the Prison.”65 In time, political prisoners were able to assert their rights sufﬁciently to challenge meal-stops. Such contestations invariably meant hiring lawyers. Many prisoners were not, however, in a ﬁnancial position to afford legal representation, especially for such cases as were usually considered trivial. It is difﬁcult, and perhaps even inappropriate, to make a distinction between overt and explicit examples of racism, as described earlier, and the 59 60 61

62

63 64 65

Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 36–37. Kathrada, interview. Dingake is the exception to this perspective. He argued that after the preparation of food improved, food was no longer a point of protest except as regards racially discriminatory diets. Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid, 211. In contrast to most former prisoners, Mandela argued that hunger strikes are a problematic form of resistance or protest because they demanded that the outside world know about them, they were passive, and they punished the prisoners, not the authorities. He noted, however, that he always supported decisions to go on hunger strikes once they had been agreed upon. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 369. Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 68. Ibid., 69. Ibid. Alexander noted further that: “In the early sixties there used to be at least forty to ﬁfty prisoners serving meal-stops every Sunday, and in really bad periods there were many more.”

46

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

pervasive racial hatred that informed the brutality and inhumanity of the way the prison was run more generally. (Furthermore, racism, and more speciﬁcally apartheid, obviously caused the Robben Islanders to be imprisoned in the ﬁrst place.) Indeed, during the early and mid 1960s, with some repetition in the early 1970s under Badenhorst, brutality and attempts to humiliate and undermine the prisoners were pervasive features of Island life. Three examples will underscore these systematic attempts to brutalize and humiliate prisoners. First, prisoners were invariably initiated into the harsh realities their imprisonment would bring on their journeys to Robben Island and in their initial treatment in the prison. Detention without trial – with the psychological torture that accompanied the indeterminacy and loss of rights inherent in detention, and the physical torture, which was a ritual aspect of most interrogations – was a particularly cruel rite of passage that usually began the route to political imprisonment. Once convicted, political prisoners were often sent to other prisons before being sent to Robben Island. Leeukop Prison (between Johannesburg and Pretoria) was commonly the ﬁrst jail newly convicted prisoners were sent to, and it was also often the prison they were sent to prior to their release. Indres Naidoo’s experience in Leeukop was typical: beatings, racist taunting, public strip-searches replete with rectal “examinations,” inadequate food and clothing, and prisoner complaints generally ignored.66 The journey from Leeukop to Cape Town was about one thousand miles of road travel in prison vans. Prisoners were usually chained together for the journey, often without sufﬁcient food, water, or clothing. Toilet facilities were commonly inadequate or nonexistent: It was blazing hot. Sweat poured down our bodies. As the van carried us on endlessly comrades found that they needed to have a piss, and we appealed to the warders to stop somewhere, but they would not listen to us. Eventually, some prisoners made their way to the back and tried to piss through a gap under the van’s door; that turned out to be all right when the van was travelling uphill, but the minute it started moving downhill all the piss would pour in and we would ﬁnd ourselves sitting in it. . . . After sunset we could not even see one another. By this time the van was a real inferno, stinking of sweat mixed with the shit and with the wet piss all over the ﬂoor and seeping into our clothing.67

Equally traumatic for many prisoners was the ocean journey from Cape Town to Robben Island. Zwelonke’s experience was emblematic: “The jerking and swerving, the rolling and pitching of the boat made our intestines rise up in the cavity of our stomachs, leaving a vacuum in their place. We 66 67

Naidoo and Sachs, Island in Chains, 37–57. Ibid., 58–59.

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felt like vomiting, but no one was sick. This was the ﬁrst time I sailed in a ship, and saw the sea.”68 Once they arrived on Robben Island, the ﬁrst few hours or days were a period of initiation, either to prison in general or Robben Island in particular. Colbert Nyobo explained that when his comrade, Mkatali Loliwe, arrived on the Island, he and the rest of his “draft” – the term used by prisoners to describe the group of prisoners with whom they were transferred to the prison – were loaded onto the back of a truck, still in handcuffs and leg manacles, and then off-loaded at the prison by the truck driver who simply tipped them from the truck onto the ground. Nyobo continued: “They were beaten while they were off-loaded and they couldn’t understand the language because it was Afrikaans.”69 The rules of South African prison bureaucracy dictated that prisoners being moved from one prison to another had to send their prison uniforms back to the prison of origin as soon as they arrived at their new destination. This requirement often led to prisoners being stripped upon coming to the Island. Ngqondela continued to describe a common initiation ritual that prisoners encountered on their arrival: “When we came in to Robben Island we were told ‘take off your clothes.’ Cold as it is. Then, you must go straight to the shower, there is no hot water.” Apparently, at times the injunction to return uniforms to their place of origin even applied within the prison. Thus, when Kwedi Mkalipi was moved from the general section to the single cells, he was stripped and thrown into his new prison home completely naked.70 Erving Goffman identiﬁed these and other initiation rituals as the systematic “mortiﬁcation” of individuals through stripping away the aspects of their identity and self that are based in the outside, or “home world.”71 Mortiﬁcation is an inevitable ﬁrst step in entering “total institutions”: “a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life.”72 The ﬁrst task of initiation into total institutions is for the authorities to emphasize the distinction between the world inside and outside, particularly by preventing inmates from assuming any self-control or self-deﬁnition of their roles in the world. Admission procedures themselves – being ﬁngerprinted, searched, stripped, or made to change clothing, for example – program the new members of the 68 69

70 71 72

Zwelonke, Robben Island, 10. Colbert Nyobo, interview with author together with Mkatali Loliwe and Zifozonke Tshikila, tape recording, Bisho, 13 May 1996. James Ngqondela and his fellow prisoners also experienced this same phenomenon of being tipped out the back of the truck. James Ngqondela, interview with author, tape recording, Port Elizabeth, 10 May 1996. Mkalipi, interview. Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, 1961), 14. Ibid., xiii.

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total institution to “be fed into the administrative machinery of the establishment.”73 Being forced to strip for a shower, to change uniforms, or for a body search symbolized the world being lost and the world being entered into, the dispossession of property and the ability to manage one’s body and appearance – “being stripped of one’s identity kit” – and the loss of privacy endemic to most total institutions, and certainly Robben Island.74 The loss of privacy easily stretched into and yet was also distinct from another critical aspect of mortiﬁcation, namely “contamination,” in particular, interpersonal contamination. Goffman pointed out that the model for interpersonal contamination is sexual molestation and more particularly rape, as epitomized in the tauza (discussed later) and public rectal examinations, but searches of people’s clothes, possessions, and cells too are agents of contamination. Probably the most egregious instance of contamination was in the early 1960s when two prisoners, Johnson Mlambo and Mninizo Mnyakama, were buried in sand to their necks and then urinated upon by warders.75 Mortiﬁcation and contamination did not stop with the improvements in prison conditions (although their content changed in part). Searching people’s cells and possessions and censoring their letters and access to news remained a feature of the authorities’ power and control throughout the three decades of political imprisonment. Furthermore, the toilet facilities in the single cells, which relied on bucket toilets, reinforced contamination at the most literal level. Thami Mkhwanazi, on Robben Island in the 1980s, constantly demanded that the authorities provide tall buckets. He explained the consequences of the short bucket toilets that were given to everyone in the single cells: “On several occasions you ﬁnd your private parts, your penis and your testicles, are submerged in a pool of excrement. It’s dirty. Why [couldn’t] they provide a little taller bucket?”76 (In practice, prisoners over time learned to extend their distance from the bucket toilet seat with their hands, especially on weekends when the long periods of being locked up would prevent them using the ﬂush toilets located outside the cells.) 73

74

75

76

Ibid., 16. Note that Goffman wrote that “the new arrival allows himself to be shaped and coded into an object that can be fed into the administrative machinery of the establishment” [emphasis added]. The extent to which the Robben Island prisoners did and did not allow themselves to be mortiﬁed and otherwise pulled into and deﬁned by the prison rules will be examined throughout this book. Ibid., 20. One of the things that most shocked or moved me when I visited Robben Island was the almost complete lack of privacy in the bathroom and toilet facilities, at least in the single cells. It is one thing to read and hear “the loss of privacy,” it is another to experience a visceral reaction to an institution that allows virtually no protection or concealing of the self. Dlamini, Hell-Hole, 26; Naidoo and Sachs, Island in Chains, 83; Zwelonke, Robben Island, 14; Johnson Mlambo, interview with author, tape recording, Johannesburg, 8 and 18 July 1994; Ramokgadi, interview. Thami Mkhwanazi, interview with author, tape recording, Johannesburg, December 1987– February 1988.

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The use of bucket toilets raises the specter not just of physical degradation and contamination, but also of an indirect form of sexual abuse. In the 1960s, prisoners were frequently and forcibly nude for various searches and warders would make comments about the prisoners’ genitalia. Mkhwanazi reports that an obsession with black men having enormous penises continued into the eighties when he was in prison and warders could be heard to say to each other “O God, die waarheid, dis ’n donkie piel probleem! [Oh God, it’s the truth, a problem of donkey penises].” The continued use of bucket toilets and crude references by the warders to the prisoners’ genitalia is consistent with the long-standing link between racism and white fear of black sexuality. As Cornel West commented: “White supremacist ideology is based ﬁrst and foremost on the degradation of black bodies in order to control them. . . . White fear of black sexuality is a basic ingredient of white racism.”77 Second, in the 1960s, a daily feature of prison life was the tauza, in which prisoners had to strip and, once naked, jump around to dislodge any concealed object. Prisoners had to end the “dance” by bending over to expose thier rectum to the warders. Ofﬁcials claimed the tauza was meant to prevent prisoners from smuggling objects on, or in, the body. (Indeed, the nonpolitical prisoners proved incredibly adept at smuggling, including within the body’s oriﬁces. Dennis Brutus, for example, wrote of knives that “suddenly ﬂash – produced perhaps from some disciplined anus.”)78 In practice, however, the tauza was not only consistent with the sexualized mortiﬁcation noted earlier but also a rite of humiliation on its own terms. Ernest Dikgang Moseneke recalled that “few things can be as degrading” as the tauza; it was “harrowing” every time it was experienced. The deep offense was magniﬁed because he was a young man who had to witness older men perform the tauza despite “being a product of the conservatism you would ﬁnd in African society,” where older people were accorded great respect. Furthermore, the tauza “process” “would be done by the warders who would be manning us. . . . Somehow they seemed to have enjoyed it. They seemed so totally depraved that they could live with this comfortably and ﬁnd nothing wrong with it.”79 Third, the most brutal aspect of day-to-day life was the hard labor the prisoners performed, and the abuse associated with it, especially in the early years.80 Decades later, Andrew Masondo noted that Robben Island’s “serious 77 78 79 80

Cornel West, “Marxist Theory and the Speciﬁcity of Afro-American Oppression,” 85, 86. Brutus, “Letters to Martha,” A Simple Lust, 55. Moseneke, interview. In the 1990s, much of the public focus on the difﬁcult and dangerous conditions of hard labor the prisoners on Robben Island faced was directed to the lime quarry, as this is where Nelson Mandela and the single-cell prisoners labored. The damage to Nelson Mandela’s eyes after years of working at the quarry without eye protection (see, for example, Sunday Times, 17 July 1994) was perhaps the most common example. Johnson Mlambo commented,

50

Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

human rights violations” occurred during “working hours.”81 Most prisoners would quarry lime or stone, chop wood, crush stone, repair or make roads with a pick and shovel, or drag seaweed from the beaches and the sea.82 A very few political prisoners were allowed more productive and less physically draining jobs like working in the hospital, kitchen, or ofﬁces. Until the early 1970s, however, most of these jobs were left for the criminal prisoners. Natoo Babenia’s autobiography provides an emblematic account of hard labor.83 Soon after arriving on Robben Island in 1964, Babenia was sent to the quarry as part of the “quarryspan.” Before prisoners could actually work in the quarry, a dyke had to be built. Rubble had to be dumped into the sea to make a wall, and wheelbarrows “with spindly, creaky iron wheels” were used to cart this gravel.

81 82 83

however, that he and fellow prisoner Jacob Zuma of the ANC agreed at a reunion of former political prisoners that the worst abuses took place in the stone quarries. In concentrating on the lime rather than the stone quarries, the press was ignoring “where the torture really was” on Robben Island. Johnson Mlambo, conversation with author, Dalpark, South Africa, 4 May 1996. Amos Masondo, written statement to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Special Hearings: Prisons, 21 July 1997, TRC Case no. JB 04630. Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 30. In a similar vein, Dennis Brutus’s “Robben Island Sequence” recounts the injuries sustained while prisoners collected seaweed, or were given some other work in the sea, in poetry: neonbright orange vermilion on the chopped broken slate that gravelled the path and yard bright orange was the red blood freshly spilt where the prisoners had passed; and bright red pinkbright red and light the blood on the light sand by the sea . . . where the bright blade-edges of the rocks jutted like chisels from the squatting rocks . . . on the sharp pale whitening edges our blood showed light and pink, our gashed soles winced from the ﬁne barely felt slashes, that lacerated afterwards: the bloody ﬂow thinned to thin pink strings dangling as we hobbled through the wet clinging sands or we discovered surprised in some quiet backwater pool the thick ﬂow of blood uncoiling from a skein to thick dark red strands. Dennis Brutus, “Robben Island Sequence,” Stubborn Hope: Selected Poems of South Africa and a Wider World (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978), 58–59.

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We had to push the barrows through the line of the [notorious] Kleynhans warders. As we moved along each of them would let ﬂy with the baton. At the end of the journey was a small incline where Karnakemp waited for us. . . . Baton ﬂying around he would scream “Ek’s nie jou Sir nie, ek is jou Baas!” [I am not your Sir, I am your Master!] . . . Once you passed Karnakemp we had to tip the stones into the sea and go back for more. The Big Fives [prison gang] would be waiting. Come slowly and they would leave their spades and beat us. Or they would overload the wheelbarrow so you could hardly push it. Shits like Teeman and Meintjies would then run to Jan or Piet Kleynhans and say “Baas! Baas! Daai kafﬁrtjie wil nie werk nie!” [Master! Master! Those little kafﬁrs don’t want to work.] Piet and Jan will then sit on the wheelbarrow and ask us to push. If we tried and the wheelbarrow fell from our grip they would fall on us with their batons shouting “Julle wil ons seer maak! Julle wil ons dood maak!” [You want to hurt us! You want to kill us!] We’d then get our cards taken away for [a] three meal stop. As time went the warders got us to push faster. Inevitably you would push the wheel into the ankles of the comrade in front. Karnakemp, the sadist liked to see this.84

Support for and the Beginning of Sustained Resistance Against, or in contrast to, the images of Robben Island as hell-hole that are supported by the accounts in the previous section, Robben Island is also known as a “university.” There is good reason for this; many and perhaps most of its political prisoners used their incarceration to attempt to advance the personal and political development of individuals and organizations. (This transformation is discussed later.) How was this beneﬁcial use of the prison possible? There was very little space for personal or political growth under the conditions described previously. This is not to say that there was no political life and academic study in these early years. Harry Gwala, for example, recalled that “political education did not depend on the harshness of the authorities. It was a matter of do or die. It was underground work. We were subjected to underground work before we went to prison. Prison was a continuation of that, so we had no problem with the restriction imposed on us [in prison].”85 For most other people, however, survival and therefore winning an improvement in conditions was a necessary ﬁrst step to the Island being turned into a university. “In the ﬁrst instance,” Jacob Zuma noted, “we had to struggle to correct . . . the prison conditions which were appalling.”86 Natoo Babenia recalled that he and his comrades were so traumatized upon arriving on Robben Island that they never spoke much, and it would take many of them years to ﬁnd their bearings.87 Dikgang Moseneke similarly 84 85

86 87

Babenia, Memoirs of a Saboteur, 129–130. Harry Gwala, interview by author, tape recording, Pietermaritzburg, 20 June 1994. Gwala’s argument for continuity may in part reﬂect his arriving on Robben Island in mid 1965, thus arriving after the majority of prisoners – who arrived in 1963 and 1964 – had arrived in prison, and had experienced some of the worst abuses of the 1960s. Jacob Zuma, interview with author, tape recording, Durban, 20 June 1994. Babenia, Memoirs of a Saboteur, 131.

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remembered that “there was no time then to focus acutely on political matters; strategies were directed at dealing with these conditions, and therefore were strategies of survival, and which inevitably would bring greater cohesion between both the ANC and the PAC.”88 Furthermore, there had to be sufﬁcient changes in conditions so that, however minor and partial these improvements might be, they opened some sort of a gap for large-scale and effective prisoner resistance. The main reason for improvements in conditions was the resistance of the political prisoners, although ex-prisoners, allies, and human rights groups played vital facilitating roles. Numerous reasons for improvements are given by former prisoners, former apartheid prison ofﬁcials, and others. First, Dlamini and others identiﬁed the removal of the violent criminal gangs who worked with the warders to victimize the prisoners as a critical precondition to the prisoners’ capacity to struggle for change. Ntshanyana pointed out that “the hardened criminals would assault us,” and the prisoners were eventually able to stop these attacks by ﬁghting back. According to Ntshanyana, some criminal prisoners worked to rape (or perhaps seduce) the young political inmates.89 Colbert Nyobo was one Islander who successfully fought back. In one incident, Nyobo placed stones in a dishcloth, which was then effectively used as a weapon against the criminals. [T]hat campaign was very successful because they requested to be removed from us. . . . We were ﬁghting to protect our young people [from sodomy]. . . . We had boys of 16, 17, 18 – now we would not allow these hardened criminals to think that they have girlfriends here amongst us. In fact we are opposed to such things.90

Second, Dlamini argued that the removal of criminal gangsters facilitated the ﬁrst major hunger strike in 1966, which marked the beginnings of mass resistance by prisoners, and led to a turning point in conditions on Robben Island. Once the Big Five prison gang fell from power, so did the prison ofﬁcials who supported them, changing power relations in prison and soon leading to the removal of most criminals. In turn, a cultural rejuvenation began, and new prison ofﬁcials aceded to certain prisoner demands. Then, ﬁnally, after an abortive hunger strike by a few younger prisoners in April 1965, another one was held a year later. After the failure of the last hunger strike by PAC comrades in April 1965, we analysed our mistakes and prepared for another one. There had been mass mobilization since then, preparing all the comrades in all the cells for the need for a hunger strike in order to bring about far reaching reforms in the whole prison machinery. It was necessary mostly because about half of the political prisoners were doing ﬁve years 88 89 90

Moseneke, interview. In an interview, Bam put forward an argument similar to those of Zuma, Babenia, and Moseneke. Hector Ntshanyana, interview with author, tape recording, Bisho, 13 May 1996. Ibid.

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and less, and when the long-term prisoners remained, they would all have to carry the burden. We had to help our comrades before being released. . . . The aim of the hunger strike was to improve ﬁrst, the food situation, then the clothing and shoes, followed by the working conditions, the punishment at work for having failed to satisfy a certain quota, the treatment by warders, tauza and many other grievances which we had often raised with the prison authorities since 1963 to no avail.91

Although accounts of the background to that ﬁrst major hunger strike vary, there is wide agreement among former Islanders that there was a major hunger strike around 1965 or 1966, and this protest action had signiﬁcant positive effects on the prisoners.92 Third, released prisoners highlighted the plight of their still-incarcerated comrades. This task was very important because South African law effectively banned exposure or public discussion of life within prisons. Both the then-contemporary Prisons and Police Acts prohibited the publication of “false” or unveriﬁed information about prisons “on the pain of severe penalty.”93 This apparently fair requirement worked to censor information because “it was very difﬁcult to verify facts detrimental to the prisons.”94 It therefore became incumbent on prisoners, especially former prisoners communicating in or to an international context, to expose prison conditions. Many of the prison sentences, especially those of Poqo members, were comparatively short. When their terms ended in 1965 or 1966, certain released prisoners began exposing the conditions on the Island. There has been very little said about those who left the Island during that time [the 1960s] who were mandated to go and speak to institutions like the United Nations, Amnesty International, Red Cross, to make representations, explain the reality of the situation on the Island. . . . It has to be known that today [the late 1980s] the Island is what it is . . . as a result of bitter struggle on the part of those who were there.95

Dennis Brutus testiﬁed in 1967 or 1968 about prison conditions before the United Nations Special Committee on Apartheid, and there were subsequent hearings in London.96 Furthermore, his testimony was used in various publications, including those of the International Defense and Aid Fund. The need to expose conditions was an ongoing imperative. Alexander’s Robben Island Dossier 1964–1974 was originally written secretly to publicize the plight of 91 92

93 94 95 96

Dlamini, Hell-Hole, 181. Naidoo’s account also demonstrated the importance of taking advantage of the gaps that presented themselves; thus, the hunger strike was possible only once “The chains [were] loosened.” Naidoo and Sachs, Island in Chains, 162. Dirk van Zyl Smit, Criminology and Criminal Justice: Inaugural Lecture (Cape Town: University of Cape Town) 30 March 1983, New Series No. 83, 12. Suzman, In No Uncertain Terms, 138. Nkosi Patrick Molala, interview with author, tape recording, Johannesburg, December 1987–February 1988. Dennis Brutus, letter to author, 10 March 1988.

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Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid

the prisoners. Alexander noted: “It was an unspoken injunction understood by all prisoners who were released from the island that one of the most important contributions they could make to the well-being of those they left behind was to let in the light of public scrutiny on the goings-on in that prison.”97 Closely related to this point, a fourth factor was that international attention was increasingly marshaled to focus on conditions on Robben Island. Harry Gwala98 argued that the international attention that had been focused on the Rivonia trial of Mandela and other ANC leaders was transferred to Robben Island after the defendants were sent to prison. Similarly, Mandela recalled: While the Rivonia Trial still resonated in people’s minds, the government was eager to show the international community that we were being treated properly. There were stories in the press about the inhuman conditions on the island, about how we were being assaulted and tortured. These allegations embarrassed the government, and to combat them they brought in a string of [conservative] outsiders meant to rebut these critical stories.99

Ahmed Kathrada, also a Rivonia trialist, disagreed, however, that the attention on Rivonia helped to improve conditions on the Island. He pointed out that although prisoners in the single-cell isolation section were not physically assaulted, beatings, violence, and abuse continued in the general sections where the vast majority of political prisoners were the victims of this unrelenting brutality.100 In an assessment somewhere between Mandela and Gwala’s on the one hand and Kathrada’s on the other, Neville Alexander recalled that the arrival of the Rivonia men increased the concern of the authorities because the Rivonia prisoners needed to consult with their lawyers for some time after the trial. After this period lapsed, however, the state blocked most contact with outsiders, except for allowing a few international visitors they selected or deemed appropriate.101 Another important dimension of international attention and pressure was that of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The ﬁrst ICRC visit to Robben Island occurred in 1964. It is possible that this visit and its outcomes made the government increasingly aware of the potential for international concern and pressure. The ICRC challenged general maltreatment on Robben Island. In interviews, Loliwe, Mkalipi, Mlambo, Ndlovu, Ntshanyana, Ramokgadi, Tshikila, Tshwete, and Nyobo, all 97 98 99 100 101

Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, vii. Gwala, interview. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 346. Kathrada, interview. According to Sisulu, occasionally single-cell prisoners were also assaulted. Daniels also noted assaults on those in the single cells. Daniels, There and Back, 152. Alexander, interview.

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former Islanders, credited the ICRC with helping to improve conditions in the prison.102 Fifth, in June and July 1965, the liberal Rand Daily Mail published a series of articles on prison conditions in South Africa. These were based on the testimony of Robert Harold Strachan following his own prison experiences. Of the Robben Islanders interviewed, only Kathrada mentioned the importance of the Strachan exposures.103 That Robben Islanders generally do not mention the inﬂuence of the Strachan and the Rand Daily Mail exposures in changing conditions on the Island may be explained by the denial of newspapers to the prisoners, and the fact that the changes were gradual, so individual inmates may not have perceived any connection.104 Sixth, Helen Suzman, a liberal member of parliament, is widely credited with her work to end ill treatment of the political prisoners. Alexander wrote: She is the one member of the South African Parliament whose name is inextricably linked with the only systematic attempt to get international standards implemented in the prisons in general and on Robben Island in particular. Her staunch insistence on the application of . . . humane provisions . . . became quite literally a bridge of survival and of sanity over which most of us could walk out of imprisonment without having been too deeply scarred and disﬁgured.105

Similarly, Gwala explained his understanding as to why conditions changed and emphasized, on the one hand, “the struggle waged by the prisoners themselves” and, on the other hand, “the visit[s], in particular by Mrs. Helen Suzman.”106 Seventh, the legal system and other strategies were used to challenge prison conditions. In 1968, a number of ANC and PAC prisoners went on a work goslow, thereby not fulﬁlling their work quota. When charged, the prisoners 102 103

104

105 106

The ICRC is discussed further in Chapter Eight. Dingake learned of the Strachan case after his arrest, and Alexander’s periodization is consistent with the inﬂuence of Strachan. Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid, 100; Alexander, Robben Island Dossier. Hugh Lewin agreed with this interpretation and added that Robben Island was probably the last prison to beneﬁt from improvements, especially in the 1960s. Hugh Lewin, conversation with author, Johannesburg, 27 May 1996. Regarding state perceptions of the importance of Strachan, most of the members of the state interviewed were too young to have been in the Prisons Service at that point in time, or they said they did not know of any effect of Strachan. Hennie Botha, however, who was involved in personnel issues for the Service for much of his career, noted that before 1965 or 1966 the Prisons Service accepted for employment whomever they could get, whereas thereafter the department became far more selective. Neville Alexander, “The View from Robben Island,” Values Alive: A Tribute to Helen Suzman, ed. Robin Lee (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1990), 64. Gwala, interview. Other interview respondents that identiﬁed Suzman’s positive role include Maqungo, Mlambo, Ndlovu, and Ramokgadi. Chapters 8 and 9 of Suzman’s memoir, In No Uncertain Terms, recount her visits to prisons, including Robben Island.

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engaged lawyers, winning the case because the prison regulations did not provide for a quota system. This example indicates the use of two (successful) resistance strategies in addition to using the legal system, namely labor action and the employment of organized collective action. A few years later, in 1973, Sonny Venkatrathnam and Kader Hassim also used the courts when they challenged the right of warders arbitrarily to withdraw a day’s meal and put people in solitary conﬁnement without a hearing. They also insisted that study and recreational activities were rights. The prison authorities asserted that these were privileges.107 While the prisoners’ lawyers were successful in persuading the court that prisoners had the right to a hearing and to contest charges and punishments, the Supreme Court upheld the rights/privileges distinction. Venkatrathnam explained that the protest was sparked when he was deprived of three meals by a warder after he waved hello to a fellow prisoner in his section.108 This incident alone did not arouse his anger; instead, the lack of books or a library, which was “intolerable if you were accustomed to being a reading type of person,” and the very tense environment incited him; warders hated the prisoners, having been told they were terrorists. The fact that prisoners had to apply for permission to make a complaint, and then only on a Sunday during inspection, further aggravated the tension and deprivation. Venkatrathnam and other prisoners in their section therefore decided to write a petition. Paper was denied to them, so they used brown cement bags.109 In addition, they decided not to request permission to make these complaints and demands. We wrote this two page petition to the ofﬁcer in command on Robben Island, addressing a whole lot of things. About the right to have a handbook [i.e., the prison regulations]. We said we had rights and obligations. And we wanted the right to study, we wanted an interesting prison library. We wanted recreation time. [We] complained about the food, the attitude of warders. We said we needed the right to legal representation. There must not be this arbitrary punishment. Even if it is an administrative [procedure], we still needed legal representation.110

107

108 109

110

The separation of rights and privileges is closely linked to the classiﬁcation system. The prison authorities would classify prisoners according to their behavior, and consequently reward or punish them by giving or withdrawing privileges like the opportunity to study, or in later years, buy food and newspapers. The classiﬁcation system was always criticized by the political prisoners, but it was primarily in the post-1976 period where it became an important focus of debate in the community. These discussions are examined in the next chapter. Sonny Venkatrathnam, interview with author, tape recording, Durban and Westville, 17 and 21 June 1994. Brown cement bags had been the major source of paper for literacy classes, probably as well as for other needs, throughout the 1960s. This use of cement bags is mentioned frequently in both interviews and books on the period. Venkatrathnam, interview.

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The petition was handed over to the authorities on Sunday morning, and on Monday, in consequence, Venkatrathnam and Hassim were put into solitary conﬁnement. Solitary conﬁnement on Robben Island was a pretty grim affair. [The cell] . . . was no bigger than the toilet . . . and [it was] damp, dark, cold. No [ﬂush] toilet, just a squat hole there for you and a little water. That is all. You get about ﬁfteen minutes to go and have a wash in the morning and that’s it. Otherwise you spend almost 24 hours in that cell alone.111

They had begun to despair of the situation improving until they were able to smuggle out letters to their lawyers, explaining their predicament. The lawyers in turn knew they had no legal right to intervene on their own accord, so they arranged that the wives of the two men bring urgent court applications. The intervention of the women enabled the lawyers to come to take proper instructions from the men. Venkatrathnam concluded: Basically we won. Ninety-nine percent of our application came through. . . . I think life on Robben Island changed dramatically and permanently since that day. Not only for ourselves, but I think for the whole population of Robben Island. Because since that day no prisoner was arbitrarily sentenced to three meals [or] solitary conﬁnement. Every time they had to charge a prisoner for anything they had to formerly serve him with a charge sheet. . . . [For the ﬁrst time now] they gave us the prison regulations.112

Venkatrathnam emphasized that this right of access to the prison regulations was one of the biggest victories. In his perspective, their application to the Supreme Court made a tremendous contribution to changing “the power relationships between prisoners and warders.”113 He also considered it a challenge to the prevailing means of struggling for improvements in the prison. They had heard “through the grapevine that Nelson [Mandela] . . . felt that we did the wrong thing” in launching the application, and that his preferred strategy was negotiation. Alexander, however, credits the application and subsequent judgment as making a signiﬁcant contribution to improving life in prison.114 Like most events in prison, Venkatrahnam and Hassim’s use of petitions, family members, lawyers, the courts, and breaking rules by using them against arbitrary treatment revealed the conditions prisoners faced, the approaches that could be taken to their situation, and the consequences and implications of resistance. This protest also illustrated an important theme running through the Island’s history, namely that external attention on the prison was often critical to the success of prisoners’ struggles. In this case, a smuggled letter to a lawyer was the turning point. Often hunger strikes were 111 112 113 114

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 57, 67, 112 fn31.

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timed speciﬁcally to ensure that visitors would learn of them so that outside publicity would be organized. Resistance and the Redeﬁnition of Basic Limits to State Power The prisoners pushed for and then used the improved conditions, which slowly but surely changed crucial aspects of Island life. Suzman pointed out that prisoner efforts “should be emphasized. The fact that they were strong, and they were united, and they were organized and they were informed – that was important.”115 Former prison ofﬁcials echoed this assessment. The advancements were meaningful beyond survival, however. Successful challenges to the brutal treatment of the 1960s and early 1970s enabled more far-reaching and transformative prisoner resistance. Improved conditions and rights could not be taken for granted and required ongoing resistance to prevent regression to previously low standards. These ﬁrst struggles were acts of resistance that sought to change prison life conditions fundamentally. This quest by the Robben Islanders to improve the appalling material circumstances of their lives was a critical precondition for their being able to do more than “merely” survive prison. The political prisoners sought not just to protect themselves but also to do so in such a way as to contest aspects of the power relations inside the prison. The political prisoners’ resistance was part of a larger political agenda that saw improved conditions as a means to an end and not only an end in themselves. Moreover, at a higher “level” of resistance, political prisoners used their incarceration to challenge the broader power relations of apartheid South Africa.116 Hunger strikes and legal action continued to be critical weapons for prisoner resistance, as was the use of those outside prison who could and did call for improvements in conditions as well as the release of prisoners. There were many other related strategies of resistance that the prisoners employed over the three decades under examination. Some of these methods demanded a certain level of improvement. For example, Saki Macozoma pointed out that prisoners could turn the prison rules against warders and make them 115 116

Helen Suzman, interview with author, tape recording, Johannesburg, December 1987– February 1988. Most criminal prisoners shared elements of the political inmates approach to self-protection, but not their far-reaching challenge to power. The nonpolitical prisoners too sought to survive prison and then improve the conditions of their existence. As former Islanders recount, the nonpolitical prisoners smuggled food, worked with the warders, or joined gangs to provide protection or ﬁnd ways to improve the material circumstances of their lives. All these actions, insofar as they attempted to withstand, oppose, or circumvent state action, represented a form of resistance. Nonpolitical prisoners did not, however, attempt to challenge power relations fundamentally within the prison, let alone in the broader society.

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follow by-laws to the letter, an often tedious and bureaucratic procedure that warders wanted to avoid.117 Negotiation with authorities was a constant aspect of prison life, although it was more viable when relationships between the authorities and their charges were less strained. In addition, some prisoners avoided negotiation on principle (which is discussed further in the analysis of categorical and strategic resistance; see Chapter Six). Resistance was both secret and open. Secret resistance could be an action like that of the prisoners who replied to a warder’s insult “Koelie, jou ma se moer” [Coolie, your mother’s cunt] with the Gujarati phrase “Tari Ben-ni bosadi” [Your sister’s cunt]”118 or the smuggling of position papers on the armed struggle and socialism within the prison underground. Open resistance might be a demand like Venkatrathnam’s petition, or the earlier 22 April 1969 letter from Mandela to the minister of justice on behalf of many of the singlecell prisoners calling for their release in light of earlier precedents involving Afrikaner nationalist political prisoners.119 Resistance included maintaining morale when imprisonment was meant to crush the spirits of individuals and their organizations, defying the logic of “Bantu education” to become well educated, and developing organizations and activists the government had outlawed and jailed. Two important provisos are, however, necessary. First, it is critical to recognize that improvements were not linear, and that prisoners constantly had to resist regression in their treatment and to maintain the struggle for improvements. The reality of retreat was highlighted by the Badenhorst regime in the early 1970s and two incidents in 1977 when dogs were set upon prisoners at the quarry (the prisoners subsequently sued the state) and the single cells were raided one night and prisoners ill treated. Walter Sisulu recalled this “unhappy incident”: Many prisoners were beaten. They stripped me and told me to put my hands against the wall. I was worried because I had ﬂu. I thought their plan may be that I become ill and eventually die. I felt angry and bitter, it was one of the horrible invasions of our privacy. But my position was better than a man like Toivo ja Toivo. He fought back after a beating and his cell was full of blood.120

The potential and actual loss of rights and “privileges” was therefore a constant factor in Island life, requiring ongoing struggles by the prisoners. Second, the different dimensions of resistance – overcoming basic material deprivations and ending physical abuse, struggling for education and a 117 118 119 120

Sakumze (Saki) Macozoma, interview with author, tape recording, Johannesburg, December 1987–February 1988. Babenia, Memoirs of a Saboteur, 139. Mandela and Mayibuye, Nelson Mandela, The Struggle Is My Life. ¨ Walter Sisulu, quoted in Jurgen Schadeberg, Voices from Robben Island (South Africa: Ravan Press, 1994), 27.

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sporting and cultural life, and organizing politically – all interrelate and are not necessarily sequential. For example, the success of prisoner resistance in the ﬁrst major hunger strike speaks to the importance of political strategies to forge cross-organizational unity or at least cooperation to ensure the success of the strike. From very early on, prisoners sought to enrich their world.

4 Resistance Beyond Survival

[T]he cream of the struggle of South Africa was – is from political prisoners from Robben Island. . . . [The Island] changed my way of life. . . . I’ve grown politically, I’ve grown in all spheres. . . . It gives you time to listen to this person. . . . It gives you patience for that person, and that thing is very rare. . . . In all spheres. Even we were able to study even the warders. Their behaviour, we were able to study them. It’s like when Pavlov put a dog there for conditioning you know? You know, we were out of that situation.1

Once survival became more secure, prisoners had to sustain themselves mentally and culturally, as a community of prisoners and as political organizations. Crucial to resisting the state’s attempt to destroy them mentally, the Islanders began and extended their cultural, academic, and sporting efforts. Before our enemy had been physical cruelty, now it was boredom, isolation, the psychological decay of an endlessly unproductive and conﬁned existence; so the [mini-Olympic] Games were an important way of getting ourselves mobilized, using our inner resources to smash the routine and monotonous futility of prison life.2

This chapter examines the role of education, culture, and sport as vital instances of resistance. These forms of resistance accept, at least temporarily, the inevitability of incarceration, whereas planning and executing escape attempts are forms of resistance that seek to transcend imprisonment. The viability and implications of escape are therefore also examined. Finally, the chapter concludes by highlighting a much-neglected subject of political resistance, namely the long-term effects of incarceration on (former) 1 2

Mcongo, interview. Naidoo and Sachs, Island in Chains, 248.

61

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prisoners and their families, costs that the prison life-world can at most mitigate, but not prevent. Robben Island’s Life World Academic Education Political prisoners on the Island developed and sought to live by a code of conduct. This code called for prisoners to maintain their commitment to a changed society, to ensure noncollaboration with the authorities, and to ﬁnd and make positive things from one’s imprisonment.3 The demand for self-improvement, and using one’s time on Robben Island as usefully as possible, was seen in the value placed on academic education. As Babenia noted, “if you do not watch out prison can put your brain to death.”4 Academic education was facilitated by enrolling in the University of South Africa (UNISA), a correspondence-based institution, or in other schools based on long-distance learning.5 Scholastic study was valued in terms of three criteria. First, it was important in maintaining morale. Moseneke, who graduated from Robben Island with a matric6 and bachelor of arts in political science and English, commented that “many people have emerged to survive Robben Island largely because of their studying. It is one single thing that really keeps you together.”7 Without study privilege many of the prisoners would have atrophied intellectually and bouts of demoralisation might have superseded the general buoyancy of the community. Studies to a large extent played some diversionary role. It is true the majority of prisoners did not enjoy the formal privilege of study while they were in gaol for a number of reasons, the principal one being lack of funds. Informally, no prisoner who had an interest in learning failed to beneﬁt from the intellectual atmosphere that prevailed. The privileged students took risks, ‘abused’ their study privilege to help their less privileged fellow inmates.8

Second, academic education contributed to the community as a whole. Islanders sought to increase educational standards of all prisoners, and formal and informal education was conducted across organizational lines. One of the key areas of this effort was the attempt to ensure that no man who 3 4

5 6 7 8

Moseneke, interview. Babenia, Memoirs of a Saboteur, 167. Babenia’s comment is reminiscent of the statement by Antonio Gramsci’s prosecutor that “we must prevent this brain from functioning for 20 years” (cited in Barbara Harlow, Barred: Women, Writing and Political Detention (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1992). See especially Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid, 171–184. Matric is South Africa’s national high school qualiﬁcation, equivalent to a high school diploma in the United States, and probably lies between the British “O” and “A” levels qualiﬁcation. Moseneke, interview. Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid, 183–184.

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came to the Island illiterate left the Island unable to read and write. Mbatha, Moseneke, and Babenia all refer to highly successful literacy campaigns held on the Island in the 1960s.9 In a matter of three to four years we had actually wiped out illiteracy on Robben Island. Completely. Everyone could read and write, at least in his mother tongue. As we moved on, we issued little wonderful certiﬁcates for every step that he would have passed, the heading always being “The University of Robben Island.”10

Aside from literacy classes, there were also classes at different educational levels on a range of subjects from history to biology. These classes were often held in the quarry as prisoners worked.11 One counterperspective to the widespread account of the importance of education is that of Saths Cooper. Cooper, who arrived on Robben Island in late 1976, argued that illiteracy on Robben Island was a serious problem, and it was “only in the mid-70s that serious literacy [education] began to happen.” He also contested the “great idyllic picture of what a great intellectual” environment existed in the prison. The competing political groups tended to avoid ideological debate, which clearly undermined the “university” image and ideal (see Chapter Five).12 Third, academic education was also seen as the basis of a sound political education. In recalling the political theory classes that he and Steven Dlamini started on the Island, Harry Gwala explained that the people who were illiterate could not understand the abstract concepts they were teaching and using “so we organized . . . literacy education.”13 Given that most political, sporting, and recreational documents were written in English,14 academic education needed to provide a training in English language skills. Yet another instrumental use of academic education was that many of the materials required for political education required university enrollment.15 In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the possibility of a negotiated settlement began to emerge, Naledi Tsiki used his university training in political science, acquired in prison, to explain different constitutional models of democracy to his fellow prisoners to prepare them for the changing political terrain outside prison.16 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16

Mbatha, interview; Moseneke, interview; and Babenia, Memoirs of a Saboteur, 170. Moseneke, interview. See, for example, “Robben Island: Our University” in Lodge and Nasson, All, Here, and Now: Black Politics in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 1991), 3. Saths Cooper, interview by author, tape recording, Johannesburg, 25 November 1994. Cooper, interview. Gwala, interview. Subsequent to my research in the Mayibuye Centre’s Robben Island archives, the Centre acquired documents written in Xhosa that are concerned with Island culture in the 1960s. Petros (“Shoes”) Mashigo, interview by author, tape recording and notes, Johannesburg, 24 August and 27 November 1994. Tsiki, interview.

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Constraints on Academic Education The issue of academic study highlights an important point: although there was an undoubted and enormous improvement in conditions on Robben Island over the years, it remained a prison.17 Rules and regulations regarding prisoners’ access to education improved and regressed in an array of ways over time. The inmates were continuously vulnerable to their jailers’ edicts and controls. That the form of psychological torture did not work as expected does not imply that it did not work at all. The fact that I underline it so much, means that I am still smarting under its effects. The common characteristic of torture whether physical or psychological is that it is painful to every sensitive victim. The psychological pain is more painful for, having to do with human dignity, it lingers in memory long after the physical pain has gone and as long as it has not found equitable redress.18

When political prisoners began arriving on Robben Island in the early 1960s the ofﬁcial Prisons Service policy encouraged prisoner study.19 Many prisoners began to study, although it was very difﬁcult to do so because of bureaucratic stumbling blocks, poor educational backgrounds, lack of funds, disadvantageous physical and emotional conditions of prison, and the greater challenges of studying as a correspondence student. If one could cope with or overcome these constraints, study was possible. Prior to the 1960s, and the widespread emergence of political prisoners, South African prisoners seldom wanted to study. By the end of the 1960s, the prison authorities either wanted to cut down on their bureaucratic load (censorship and other “necessities” of organizing study) or resented the boosts to morale study privileges gave the prisoners. Perhaps, too, they were concerned with the fact that their political inmates were much better educated than the warders, something many former prisoners asserted. Thus, four factors and occurrences limited studies. First, ﬁnances were an inherent obstacle to education for many prisoners. Only a minority of prisoners’ families could afford to pay for an Islander’s studies. Even when families wanted to support the inmates’ education, family members were often harassed. Lizo Gladwell Sitoto noted that the police would “threaten the person who wants to send you money, [asking] ‘Why are you interested in him? . . . Are you working in an underground structure?’”20 Family members 17 18 19

20

Suzman, interview. Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid, 203. Malcolm Dyani (interview) argued that the authorities began allowing studies on Robben Island when Dikgang Moseneke’s father put pressure on them to allow his young son to study. He further recalled that a prisoner named Jerry Leeu worked in the study ofﬁce from 1964. Lizo Gladwell Sitoto, interview with author together with Ntemi Khame, Mandla Makiweta, and Freddie Songwingi, tape recording, Kwa Nobuhle, 11 May 1996.

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would then often be too intimidated to give monetary aid to their relative in prison. Besides from familial support, institutional assistance was available at times, invariably to be withdrawn at some point. Prior to 1968 or 1969, prisoners who studied through UNISA were allowed to pay only half of the regular fees. Dingake noted that prisoners did not know if this was due to UNISA’s concern or to a Prisons Service subsidy. In either case, this “much appreciated subsidy” was cut.21 Financial assistance from the International Defense and Aid Fund (IDAF) was legally available until March 1966, when the organization was “declared illegal.”22 Over time, however, IDAF was able to funnel money surreptitiously through the families of Islanders.23 The National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) also provided funding to political prisoners for their education before it was prohibited from doing so. In addition, religious and human rights activists and organizations gave ﬁnancial assistance at points, especially in the 1980s. Second, at different points, certain levels of education were excluded from permissible forms of study, or individuals were denied the right to study as punishment for particular infractions. For instance, in 1969, study beyond the bachelor’s level was stopped. Whoever was doing a post-bachelor’s degree at the time was given until February 1970 to ﬁnish, irrespective of when he was supposed to complete the degree. As noted, post–high school studies were banned from 1977 to 1981.24 Mandela, Sisulu, and Kathrada were deprived of their study rights for a few years after their involvement in writing Mandela’s autobiography was discovered.25 Third, at times there were restrictions on what prisoners could study, such as prohibitions on history, law, and political science. Fikile Bam, for example, who was in his ﬁnal year of his law degree before going to prison in 1964, was not allowed to study law even to complete his degree. (An exception was made for Nelson Mandela only because he had been imprisoned earlier and had already been given permission to study law.)26 Finally, censorship and restricted use of the library facilities became “a punitive weapon in the hands of the ofﬁcials,” which was used to a greater and lesser extent over time.27 At various times the authorities banned or excluded books, including prescribed books used for academic study.

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid, 175. Karis and Gerhart, From Protest to Challenge, 63. Personal communication between Barbara Buntman and Horst Kleinschmidt, Johannesburg, 2 December 1999. Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid, 181, 183. Kathrada, interview. Bam, interview. Suzman in South Africa, Hansard to the House of Assembly 1974: 52, 6295.

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Sport and Recreation The prisoners were acutely aware of the need to protect their physical and mental health.28 Sport was a key means of doing so. Steve Tshwete, who organized sport on the Island and became South Africa’s ﬁrst minister of sport and recreation in a democratic government, noted that “sport was very important on the Island. It relieved the tension and anxiety about family, about home and about survival in prison itself.”29 Furthermore, although there was some division on political lines, when sport ﬁrst became authorized in 1967, in general sport was a means of uniting people irrespective of ideology or afﬁliation. Tshwete recalled that sport and especially rugby were used in the 1960s to end the hostility between the ANC and PAC; “to forge unity amongst the prisoners so that we could confront the prison authorities as one voice and not as different political entities.”30 Kgalema Motlanthe, a former ANC prisoner, who became a powerful union and ANC leader in the decades after his release, too identiﬁed sport as means of diffusing tensions between organizations in the late 1970s and through the 1980s. Sport was but one instance, albeit an important one, where prisoners developed and articulated a shared set of mores and rules to govern life on the Island. Sport was also one of the areas in which people learned or shared organizational skills, and in which collective norms were established and put into practice. The extensive documentation of the sports (and other recreation) committees is indeed remarkable.31 Over time a complex network of sports organizations evolved, with detailed constitutions governing the rules and organization of sport. For example, the following excerpt from the “Robben Island Political Prisoners Recreational and Cultural Committee,” thereafter referred to as the “Recreational Committee,” suggests the formality, careful thought, and extensive work that went into the Constitution. Section nine (of a sixteen-sectioned constitution) deals with the Misconduct and Protest Committee. It notes: 9. misconduct and protest committee (mpc) (a) To settle disputes arising within the Assoc[iation], there shall be set up a MPC of ﬁve (5) members elected at the Special General meeting for 1 year of ofﬁce; 7 (a) [which deals with meetings of the various levels of the association] shall apply mutatis mutandis. . . . 28 29 30 31

Also see Cheryl Roberts, Sport in Chains (Cape Town: Township Publishing Co-operative, 1994). Tshwete cited in Schadeberg, Voices from Robben Island, 38. Steve Tshwete, interview with Rachidi Molapo, tape recording, 25 November 1994, Cape Town, in Mayibuye Centre Archives. The Robben Island Archives 1966–1991, The Mayibuye Centre for History and Culture in South Africa, University of the Western Cape. Hereafter the documents from the collection are noted by “Mayibuye” and their box and ﬁle number, for example, Mayibuye 1.3.

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(c) All matters of ‘misconduct and protest’ nature shall only be discussed by the MPC. Reports of misconduct and/or protest shall be submitted in writing to the secretary of the Assoc[iation] who shall forward it to the MPC. (d) When a member(s) of the MPC is/are a party to the matter under jurisdiction, such member shall recuse himself. . . . (e) When the presence of the members of the MPC is considered by the MPC to be prejudicial to the interest of one of the parties concerned, such member(s) shall duly recuse himself.32

Similarly, most of the minutes dealing with sports club matters are meticulous, whether the issues are apparently mundane or serious. It was not just the structure of the sports and recreation committees that was formal; the discourse in which the administration of sporting affairs took place was also decorous and proper. If the prison authorities did not accord them the respect they deserved, the prisoners would at least respect each other and ensure that sporting passions did not overwhelm decent behavior. Thus, minutes and correspondence almost always referred to a community member as “Mr.” The following minutes of 6 February 1972 of the Ixhalanga Rugby Football Club are emblematic. Informal Executive Meeting – 6th February, 1972 Venue: Behind Cell “E3” and “C1” Time: “Exercise time in the Morning.” The Chairman declared the meeting open. The Executive was more [sic] concerned about the consequences of the friendly match staged by Egala RFC and our club. The unsportsmanlike and ungentlemanly conduct showed by some of our players was discussed. The names of Messrs A. Suze and Pole were mentioned. Mr. A. Suze left the ﬁeld in the midst of the play without informing his captain. All the members of the Executive deprecate such unbecoming behavior [sic], saying it was lowering the dignity of the Club. They felt a stern action should be taken against Mr. Suze’s conduct in the ﬁeld. Mr. Pole enlightened the Executive about the incident of his with Mr. Henge outside the ﬁeld, where it was alleged that there was an exchange of words nearly accompanied by shots [sic]. He realised the mistake he committed and apologised. The Executive further discussed an incident which resulted to [sic] injury of Mr Matsiliza who was playing a Full Back. They felt that a strongly worded letter should be addressed to Gqala R. F. C enlightening them about the disappointment our Club found itself in because they never expected such rough play in the ﬁeld. But on second thought they felt that they should await for a letter of apology from Gqala. The captain Mr Ndibi called, gave a report about the match [sic]. He was also greatly concerned about Messrs Suze and Pole’s conduct in the ﬁeld. He said he found them on certain occasions addressing the referee without his knowledge. Mr Suze called because he wanted to have an interview with the Executive. He told the Executive that he had come to a decision that he was no longer to play but to remain just as a member of the Club. The reason was that he found Rugby

32

Mayibuye 1.1.

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not suitable for his liking. He time and again quarrelled and that was something he did not like. He mentioned his quarrel with Mr Masuku in the cell. The Executive found it could not discuss the matter but only to take it to the Council. The chairman declared the meeting closed.33

The records of the sporting and recreation committees are one of the few ways one can have access to community self-perception of life on the Island at the time. Unlike interviews or prison memoirs, these records were produced on the Island in the course of daily life, for the use of the prisoners themselves, not an outside audience. Within this context, one of the most interesting and important things that emerges in the documentation is the concern with the vulnerability of the community – either in itself or in terms of the state of sport. Thus the chairman of the Makana Football Association (MFA) of the time, John M. Ramoshaba, raised various issues of concern to the MFA Annual General Meeting in his report of 28 May 1974. (1) The mental, moral, spiritual stability of the inmates is not regarded or seen by others as depending on strong and healthy bodies, and good relations between persons and groups. (2) The will to play is dead in many of the inmates. (3) Soccer is being dealt a blow because many soccerites [sic] and fans either live in the past of the Island soccer or a future of soccer far removed into the future away from the Island. The present as far as they are concerned is either of no account or nonexistent. (4) Any organized group performs better and more harmoniously, if the procedural aspect of its affairs is strictly adhered to. Random and loose handling of affairs can never be a blessing. (5) Discipline has plainly become painful to others. Thus any irregularities in behavior displayed by any member of any football club on the ﬁeld of play or off it or any disregard to apply discipline by any responsible body connected with soccer, manifests in all starkness the unmerciful blows dealt such a healthy, attractive and beloved game: “soccer.”34

What comes across in the hundreds of sports club minutes and letters is the fragility of the community – how easily tempers ﬂared, how important sport (and other recreation, including cultural activities) was to maintaining morale and relieving tension, and yet how difﬁcult it often was to maintain sporting standards, both in the administration and games themselves. Despite the difﬁculties and the lulls, the inherent insecurity and tension of life in prison, the prisoners sought to create lightness and distractions from their harsh world. In addition to rigorously organized sporting organizations, there were board games and card games, old men learning tennis, and young men playing musical instruments. Nelson Mandela reminisced that “in addition to the concerts, we held a chess and draughts (or checkers) 33 34

Mayibuye 1.2. Mayibuye 17.1.

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tournament, and also played board games and bridge. Every year, I competed in the draughts competition, and some years, I won the grand prize, which was usually a candy bar.”35 Natoo Babenia remembered playing board games before recreation was legal, so he and others made Scrabble boards out of thin cardboard and chess pieces out of corks.36 These contraband items would be conﬁscated in raids, only to be made again. Many of these diversions were only possible at the more relaxed points in the prison’s history, when state repression or prisoner struggles for ideological hegemony did not tear at the delicate fabric of the prisoner life world. But even in the more bleak and difﬁcult moments, people sought cultural or intellectual stimulation and found it. In 1977, when scholar Tom Karis visited former Islander P. S. Fadana in the Transkei where he had been banished after an eight-year sentence on Robben Island that ended in 1971, Karis saw, proudly displayed on Fadana’s wall, a certiﬁcate awarding him and a fellow prisoner ﬁrst prize in Robben Island’s 1967 ballroom dancing contest.37 Babenia recalls staging plays “right from the very beginning.”38 Humor too was a powerful coping mechanism, as was gleaning whatever one could learn about the world outside. Judy Sexwale, a frequent visitor to Robben Island from the late 1980s, explained that Peter Paul Ngwena – “a man-about-town, very suave” – taught his fellow prisoners about video machines and the right aftershave, with the result that “they’d all struggle now to be buying that, and that’s what I’d have to do: buy underwear, buy aftershave, buy this, buy teddybears for girlfriends. . . . Because it was very important for them to get these things.”39 This lighter side of life became more possible after 1976, and especially at points in the 1980s, when, for example, a number of bands and musical groups ﬂourished.40 Former Islanders often speak of the positive things gained from their years on the Island: the community that was forged, the lessons learned, and the personal and organizational growth experienced. Bam, for example, said he did not regret his imprisonment and Brutus wrote, “it is not all terror / and deprivation, / you know; / one comes to welcome the closer contact and understanding one achieves with one’s fellow men, / fellows, compeers.”41 Especially after the early 1960s and other particularly bad periods, such as in the Badenhorst years, the non-Islander may be misled into understating the enormous difﬁculty and importance of keeping or maintaining any 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Mandela and Mayibuye Books, The Struggle Is My Life, 396. Babenia, Memoirs of a Saboteur, 170. Tom Karis’s notes accompanying his interview with P. S. Fadana, interview with Tom Karis, Engcobo, Transkei, 2 October 1977, in Karis-Gerhart collection. Babenia, Memoirs of a Saboteur, 167. Judy Sexwale, interview with author, tape recording, Johannesburg, 30 August 1994. Ibid; Schadeberg, Voices from Robben Island, 62–63. “Robben Island: Our University” in Lodge and Nasson, All, Here and Now, 300; Brutus, A Simple Lust, 60.

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semblance of normality in one’s psyche and soul. The determination with which prisoners forged and fought for meaning in their lives in prison was a remarkable act of resistance, a refusal to let the state destroy their minds, bodies, or spirits. The world of sport and cultural life on Robben Island cannot be separated from other spheres of prison life. This is particularly clear in the organizational training provided in the recreation arena. Michael Kahla, in his chairman’s annual report of the Prisoners Record Club of 30 August 1974, wrote of the challenge that faced him, especially after the rest of his committee resigned: Gentlemen . . . On our assumption of ofﬁce we were faced forthwith with the task of having to organise and overhaul this club – to endeavour to serve you to the best of our ability – to satisfy that diversity of tastes in this most abstract of all the arts – music. To show that this is no mean task we were ﬂooded with a barrage of complaints, suggestions and requests. We welcomed all these, and interpreted them as a sign of life – the beginning of an education in Music.42

The annual report that followed outlined the tasks, difﬁculties, and challenges that developed from disagreement among the prisoners as to the process for choosing and playing records, to the warders’ obstruction of their procedures, to protecting and enlarging the record collection. Whatever the pressures Mr. Kahla (and his team) were under, he apparently felt he had gained more than he lost in his community service. He ended his report with the following comment: “Finally, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to you all for having conferred this ofﬁce upon me. You have given me a schooling in administration, patience and understanding that no formal school could have given. I thank you all.”43 Indeed, this is the general impression one has in reading these documents: that the recreation and sporting committees were an invaluable tool for teaching new organizational skills or honing old ones. As such, they contributed to the quality of life within prison, the preparation for life outside prison, and the advancement of individuals and their organizations.44 42

43 44

Mayibuye 44.1; Murphy Morobe, interview by author, Johannesburg, 17 November and 1 December, 1994 noted that “my love for classical music developed on Robben Island,” while Denmark Tungwane (interview) and Andrew Mapheto studied music theory on Robben Island in the 1980s. Mayibuye 44.1. Using prison to gain and hone skills was not only relevant in the general sections, where the sport, cultural, and recreaction committees and activities ﬂourished most, in large part due to their greater numbers of inmates. These activities were also important in the single cells. For instance, Mandela and Maharaj both emphasized learning Afrikaans, including through poetry, and Mandela’s biographer commented that a letter of complaint about prison conditions by Mandela to the authorities read “like an ofﬁcial report from the head

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Escape Sport, movies, and other diversions from politics and the harshness of prison life could be a partial mental escape from the oppressive reality of imprisonment. This psychological retreat raises the issue of a more fundamental and material challenge to both the terror and the boredom of prison life, namely escape. Nelson Mandela, who always “contemplated escape,” pointed out that “escape serves a double purpose: it liberates a freedom ﬁghter from jail so that he can continue to ﬁght, but offers a tremendous psychological boost to the struggle and a great publicity blow against the enemy.”45 In other words, escape is a powerful form of resistance. It is perhaps surprising, then, that considerations of escape do not feature prominently in either the memoirs or testimonies of Robben Island prisoners.46 The ﬁrst and most obvious reason for this omission is that it was all but impossible to escape successfully from Robben Island.47 The prisoners knew of the failed escape of one of the Island’s ﬁrst political prisoners, Makana,48 the Xhosa leader and warrior, for whom Robben Island is often termed “Makana Island.”49 Mandela wrote: I ﬁrst heard about the island as a child. Robben Island is well known among the Xhosas after Makanna (also known as Nxele), the six foot six inch commander of the Xhosa army in the Fourth Xhosa War, was banished there by the British after leading ten thousand warriors against Grahamstown in 1819. He tried to escape from Robben Island by boat, but drowned before reaching shore.50

Robben Island was a maximum security prison from which it would be difﬁcult to escape. Assuming one got out of the prison, however, the real challenge of escape lay in getting to the mainland. The Island is eighteen miles off the coast of Cape Town;51 the water is icy cold, and the currents are treacherous. Therefore, for the most part, prisoners did not consider escape a viable proposition.52

45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52

of a department.” Waldmeir, Anatomy of a Miracle, 16; Sampson, Mandela: The Authorized Biography, 222. Mandela and Mayibuye Books, The Struggle Is My Life, 281. A notable exception is Daniels, There and Back. Successful escapes had been achieved in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries (Nigel Penn, “Robben Island 1488–1805,” in Deacon, The Island, 20, 22, 41). The spelling of Makana differs in different sources. Deacon, The Island, 42, uses Makhanda, and Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 297, uses Makanna. Makana is probably the most common spelling. See, for example Zwelonke, Robben Island, 13; Mosiuoa Patrick Lekota, Prison Letters to a Daughter (Pretoria: Taurus, 1991), 31; Sexwale, “Island of the Damned,” in Schadeberg, Voices from Robben Island; and Schadeberg, Voices from Robben Island, 7. See, for example, Zwelonke, Robben Island, 13. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 297. Ibid. Kathrada, interview; Morontshi Matsobane, interview with author, Johannesburg, 6 and 7 May 1996; Trevor Wentzel, interview with author, tape recording, Cape Town, 6 November 1994.

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There were exceptions, however, and some prisoners developed serious schemes for escape. Mac Maharaj considered a number of “practical” escape plans.53 Eddie Daniels conceived of an especially elaborate escape plan, which included an Umkhonto we Sizwe helicopter airlift of Mandela and others from the single-cell section.54 Seddick Isaacs shared the common prisoner opinion that escape was only possible from the mainland; therefore, he considered a plan in which the water supply on Robben Island would be poisoned so everyone would be sent off the Island.55 Jeff Masemola, widely regarded as a master craftsperson, made keys for the locks of the single cells. Ahmed Kathrada argued that this key was not intended for escape but rather to hide contraband in an unused cell. He noted, however, that Maharaj remembered escape as the purpose of the keys.56 Certainly, preventing escape was the ﬁrst priority of the state and prison authorities.57 Planning to escape from prison raises serious questions for the politics of resistance, exempliﬁed in Tim Jenkin’s account of a successful escape from a South African prison, Escape from Pretoria.58 One message of the book is that when escape is the primary concern of prisoners, it limits their ability to engage seriously in constructing an alternate life, including considerations of theories and practices of (other forms of) resistance. In other words, planning and executing an escape may become all-consuming. Indeed, for his fellow prisoner Denis Goldberg, “Tim was the guy who made it possible. . . . Set his mind on it, that was all he was interested in, and he solved remarkable technical problems.”59 If prisoners have a good chance of a successful escape, this form of prisoner resistance is strategic and desirable, because it allows the prisoner to resume activism, in exile or through underground work. The problem with making escape a central theme of surviving prison is that, if escape is not a viable option, prisoners may fail to develop the complex strategies and practices of resistance that sustain individuals and organizations, as prisoners were able to do on Robben Island. As Petros Mashigo commented, “we never thought of escaping . . . we thought we should rather improve ourselves.”60 Not all prisoners would accept this portrayal of escape as a potential double-edged sword. Seddick Isaacs persuasively argued that one may develop as full a life in prison as incarceration allows and still develop and 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 414. Daniels, There and Back. Seddick Isaacs, interview by author, Cape Town, 15 May 1996. Kathrada, interview. Botha, interview. Tim Jenkin, Escape from Pretoria (London: Kliptown Books, 1987). Denis Goldberg, interview by author, tape recording, London, 3 March 1995, for Liberty Life Foundation, emphasis added. Mashigo, interview.

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contemplate options for escape.61 Isaacs is well positioned to make this claim: while on Robben Island he was extremely active academically as both a student and a teacher and was one of the key individuals who created the complex sporting committee infrastructure. In fact, Isaacs, who received his Ph.D. after his imprisonment and in the mid 1990s led a research department at one of South Africa’s ﬁnest teaching hospitals, taught himself about sport from books when he realized sport was an essential mechanism to decrease the pervasive stress of prison life. He furthermore paid dearly for an escape attempt from Pollsmoor prison; on Robben Island, he was stripped and severely caned, resulting in permanent scars. The Costs of Conviction Seddick Isaacs’s scars are tangible evidence of the price he paid for his principles and his incarceration. Indeed, all prisoners – and their families and others close to them – bear enormous and grave consequences for their convictions, their beliefs, and their imprisonment for those values. In identifying Robben Island not simply as a site of oppression and persecution but also as a site of a multidimensional resistance, one should not lose sight of either the repression and oppression or the pain and the torment, both physical and psychological. Imprisonment is spiritually, mentally, and physically traumatic for people, and all the more so when conditions are especially harsh. The overwhelming majority of the hurtful consequences of imprisonment were inﬂicted by the regime. As we dashed around ‘Zed’ gasps to me “Natoo, they are going to kill us!” I had tears in my eyes and was limping with only one sandal. Riot, just behind me, was also crying. It was such a quick glimpse into tragedy and three comrades honest sharing of emotions, but next moment we heard Piet [Kleynhans, the warder] shouting “Wat doen daai twee koelies daar?” [What are those two coolies doing over there?] Quickly we took up our wheelbarrows and went our separate lonely ways.62

Yet, prisoners could and did cause each other mental pain and anguish in the ideological and power struggles that at times raged on Robben Island. While the substance of these debates and disagreements are the subject of the following two chapters, it is also important to acknowledge their effects. These political wrangles were very rarely accompanied by physical attacks and could not and should not begin to be compared to the abuses of power by the state. Not least, they were not based on maintaining an illegitimate state, and the point of internal battles for hegemony was presumably not to destroy fellow prisoners but to shape the struggle in particular ways. Nevertheless, they affected the nature of life on Robben Island and had 61 62

Isaacs, interview. Babenia, Memoirs of a Saboteur, 130.

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personal and political ramiﬁcations for individuals and organizations upon release. Malcolm Dyani of the PAC (who became a member of parliament in 1994) recalled, for example, that as he and BCM leader Mosibudi Mangena were preparing to leave Robben Island, Terror Lekota, a BCM leader who had left his organization for the ANC, and been subject to verbal and physical attacks as a consequence, said to them that “we must tell people on the outside how terrible things are, and how terribly the prisoners of different organizations were treating each other.”63 Dyani knew that the comment was primarily aimed at Mangena, and he also knew that Terror would not want either man to make internal disputes on Robben Island a public matter, and that neither he nor Mangena would do that. The point was rather that Lekota was expressing his pain and outrage at the costs he and others were paying in a battle for ideological hegemony. In this vein, Themba Hlatswayo noted that recruitment of prisoners “was a nightmare.” Some of the people who went through that nightmare were traumatized: “They became real victims in the sense that some didn’t recover.”64 Naledi Tsiki spoke passionately about the results of certain disputes within the ANC on the Island: “The tension was very high. Pain was evident. People couldn’t [even] say hello [to each other].” Tsiki cautioned that inter- or intraorganizational conﬂicts need, however, to be put into context, as an inevitable consequence of both imprisonment and political passions. The history of struggles on the Island cannot be [and are not] different from other histories in the world. The strength of the ANC was that it survived in spite of all the factions . . . in spite of all the pain and the ﬁghting. [However,] it was sometimes very painful, sometimes very frustrating.65

Furthermore, the ability of the prisoners to develop and sustain an environment that cultivated individuals, organizations, and a broader prisoner community was stronger and more signiﬁcant than the damage inﬂicted in internal struggles. Tsiki commented further: “People emerged from the Island with some scars but they still emerged. And that they were able to continue was very important.”66 Tom Winslow, a human rights activist who worked in the church-run Cowley House, a temporary home for family members visiting Robben Islanders, and who helped former prisoners reintegrate into society, underscored this point. Even though there were “a number of people who had very, very bad experiences” with the internal politics of the Island, “for the most part the organization within the prison was what sustained people.”67 The greatest abuses remained those of the state. 63 64 65 66 67

Dyani, interview. Themba Hlatswayo, interview by author, tape recording, Johannesburg and Kibler Park, 7 May and 2 June 1996. Tsiki, interview. Ibid. Winslow, interview.

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Pervasive violence by the authorities was for many years a fact of Island life and thereafter a constant threat and an occasional reality. This violence and other realities of imprisonment and the particular inequities of political incarceration in apartheid prisons had grave consequences for people. Prisoner resistance may have mitigated some of the long-term and even permanent psychic scars, but it could not prevent or eliminate these. Although countless categories of damage could probably be identiﬁed, only three will be discussed here: direct harassment of ex-prisoners, direct psychological harm to ex-prisoners, and the often devastating effects of imprisonment on the families of prisoners. Political prisoners who completed their sentences were until the early 1980s, restricted, banned, and banished. Thereafter such treatment was more occasional and sporadic. Banishment inevitably entailed being sent to live in a remote part of the country, often distant from where people had lived before their imprisonment and usually where obtaining employment was a difﬁcult, and sometimes impossible, prospect. A 1978 report by Amnesty International noted that it has become regular practice to send political prisoners to speciﬁed “resettlement areas” when they are released from prison, regardless of where they lived before. Thus, many political prisoners released after serving long sentences on Robben Island have been sent to either Ilingi or Dimbaza in the eastern Cape. There, they have no opportunity of obtaining paid employment and have no chance of starting a new life. They are kept under surveillance and constantly harassed by the police.68

Banning restricted people in a variety of ways, partially a result of the differences in particular banning orders. Invariably, banning orders included house arrest, although Amnesty International noted that, in 1977, certain of the new banning orders issued by the government were written so as to banish people.69 Those who were banned lost basic freedoms of movement, expression, and association. The lost rights of association usually extended to social and even familial interaction. A key aim of banning and banishment was to prevent the growth and sustenance of antiapartheid organizations, ideas, and information. Banned people were sometimes allowed to work and sometimes not, but most or all political prisoners discovered that the security police would actively attempt to prevent them from acquiring or keeping their jobs, especially if the police believed the former prisoner could politically inﬂuence others. Lizo Gladwell Sitoto explained that, after leaving Robben Island, he was employed by Volkswagen, but he was ﬁred after two weeks because the security police told Volkswagen he should not be employed as he would incite 68 69

Amnesty International, Political Imprisonment in South Africa: An Amnesty International Report (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1978), 36. Ibid.

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workers against the company.70 Sitoto commented that the longest he was able to work after his release was for nearly two years for a peace committee, which itself was a product of South Africa’s moves toward democracy. Mandla Makwetu too recounted losing one job after another due to his past imprisonment and subsequent banning: I was employed by Ellerines [a chain of furniture stores] as the credit controller systems manager, for about three months. [My employers] knew I was under a banning order. They said I was to go and attend a seminar, for about a week in Johannesburg, so I had to make an application through the magistrate because I was on a banning order. I was not supposed to leave the magisterial district. . . . So I made an application to attend this seminar – It was turned down! Ellerines said, “Well, if you can’t attend this seminar, then we can’t keep you here, right? We shall have to pay you off.” [Then I worked for another company. After that,] the third one, it was a lawyer. . . . He was a Nationalist [Party] lawyer – he didn’t know about myself [i.e., my imprisonment and banning]. When he employed me he asked me “but why [were] you not employed [before]?” I said “My father was a rich man, he had some shops”, and so forth – I told him a lot of lies. He got information after that [about my imprisonment on Robben Island]. . . . After a month he gave me my full salary and said, “Thank you very much, I can’t keep you here.”71

(Sitoto and Makwetu pointed out that, ironically, former Robben Islanders were often initially preferred by employers because they were well-disciplined workers.) Even if people were not banned or banished, they were frequently “endorsed out” of urban areas; that is, they were not allowed to work and live in particular places, which was a de facto, if not a de jure, form of political banishment.72 Whether formally restricted by ministerial edict or not, most or all former political prisoners were subject to surveillance and harassment.73 This persecution frequently included subsequent detentions and even new charges and trials, often with a new term of imprisonment. These new jailings were especially common in the post-1976 period and in the 1980s, as ex-Islanders

70 71 72 73

Sitoto, interview. Mandla Makwetu, interview with author together with Ntemi Khame, Lizo Gladwell Sitoto, and Freddie Songwingi, tape recording, KwaNobuhle, 11 May 1996. Govan Mbeki, Sunset at Midday Latshon’ilang’emini! (Braamfontein, South Africa: Nolwazi Educational Publishers, 1996), 17. A version of the research inquiry of this book was initially begun in South Africa in 1987 and 1988. It was brought to a premature conclusion, however, precisely because of the harassment of former political prisoners. For example, Martin Ramokgadi faced no ofﬁcial restrictions after his second term on Robben Island; nevertheless, he and his family were regularly subject to surveillance, including a recent security police raid of their home in the middle of the night. Following my interview with Ramokgadi, the security police came to my home to ask why I had been speaking to a “known communist.” Other interview respondents in 1987 and 1988 explained to me that security police had asked, in interrogation sessions, what political mandates former Islanders had been given before their release.

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became important actors in the revival of antiapartheid opposition (see Chapter Seven). Even worse than detention, a number of former political prisoners were killed by the regime. These included Grifﬁths Mxenge (and, later, his wife) who was gunned down on police instructions;74 Peter Nchabaleng, whom the state had recently but unsuccessfully tried for treason and was then killed in police custody; and Joe Gqabi, an ANC operative who was assassinated in exile. While these three men were former Robben Islanders, other ex-political prisoners were also killed by the apartheid regime, including Dulcie September, an ANC diplomatic representative in exile, and Matthew Goniwe, a charismatic United Democratic Front leader.75 As well as being harassed, former political prisoners had to contend with the psychological scars of their imprisonment. Grappling with the past was and is made all the more difﬁcult because South Africa lacks a culture where addressing past trauma is acceptable; in Mac Maharaj’s words, “the problem is that in society as it exists there is no culture that I should look at myself.”76 The national focus on Mandela’s remarkable lack of bitterness and the more general lack of introspection by South Africa about its past and the meaning of the past means that the “victims” and “heroes” of the struggle are not given the chance to be themselves. Maharaj elaborated: “You are not prepared to give us the space just to be. I need to be just what I am, warts and all. Neither to show pity, nor to make me a hero.” The strains of past imprisonment tend to be well hidden. Over time in the course of my research, more and more people would mention that “so-andso” had become an alcoholic after his release. Generally, vulnerability was shared slowly and cautiously; one former Islander shared his own history of a “drinking problem” long after a formal interview, once a personal relationship had been established. He, for one, had long since stopped abusing alcohol and dismissed the need for therapeutic intervention, saying that there were more urgent problems and others with greater needs. Barbara Hogan, herself a former political prisoner, reported, in contrast, that many former political prisoners were asking for therapy, having learned of its beneﬁts when psychologists helped former detainees in the 1980s.77 Undoubtedly 74

75

76

77

Sparks, The Mind of South Africa, 264 fn 20, noted: “In October 1989 a former policeman, Butana Almond Nofomela, who had been sentenced to death and was awaiting execution in Pretoria Central Prison, made a sworn statement to human rights lawyers claiming he had been part of a hit squad that killed Grifﬁths Mxenge on police instructions.” Bam (interview) commented that he was lucky to be deported from South Africa to the Transkei because of the risk of assassination in South Africa. He noted that lots of people who had been on the Island were assassinated for things that he believed they knew nothing about, especially concerning the underground. Sathyandrandranath (Mac) Maharaj, interview with author, tape recording, Cape Town, 27 October 1994. Raymond Suttner’s memoir, In Apartheid’s Prison: Notes and Letters of Struggle (Melbourne and Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Ocean Press and University of Natal Press, 2001), too explores and reveals the human “costs of conviction.” Barbara Hogan, conversation with author, Cape Town, 18 May 1996.

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one of the advantages of psychological intervention, itself usually in the form of group therapy and often in informal settings,78 would be sharing long-hidden psychological scars. In a rare moment of self-revelation, Nelson Mandela told a child who asked why he wore informal clothes and colorful, loose shirts that “you must remember I was in jail for 27 years. Now that I am free, I want to feel freedom and therefore I wear my shirts.”79 The conversation with Mac Maharaj about the costs of his conviction resulted from an almost casual comment of his that if most ANC politicians were forced to take vacations or stop working really hard all the time, they would be lining up at the doors of psychiatrists and psychologists. It is worth quoting Maharaj at length: How can I talk about this by extrapolating from my own experience, when it is not easy to talk about it? Prison is an extreme form of an abnormal life and in Robben Island it was worse in the sense that I was in a group [in the single cells] that was in solitary conﬁnement. I was there when I was 29, till 41. So, literally, I lost my thirties. And there are lots of pluses that I have spoken about, but it is also the age at which I certainly felt I was at the peak of my intellectual and active capacities. I know that I had hit a period of approximately two years where I was completely listless, very selfpitying, seized with – perhaps the only word that can describe it is – a state of mental ennui – and in a single cell. Somehow one managed to pull oneself out of it. But I can imagine how others would break under that. Your intellectual capacity is at its premium, and there you are unable to really stretch it. Your capacity to do work, whether it be physical or mental work or any work, is denied. You are at the prime of your physical life. You are totally deprived. Now, I can’t imagine any circumstance in life which would be as frustrating for the individual. It’s an almost comprehensive frustration. . . . Insofar as the political struggle is concerned, okay, you are there with a conviction, . . . you [believe you] are on the side of justice and that what you stand for will triumph. But we are talking about 1964 to 1976 and, from outside, if you looked at South Africa, you can’t say that anybody was of sane mind if they said that the struggle was going to triumph. So, I believe that taking that comprehensive nature of the blockage of all space for you to express yourself in any way meant that every level of frustration was condensed and if we have come out of it looking [like] very normal human beings, beneath that normality I cannot believe that there isn’t a level of suppression or repression. It’s not something that I have been aware of, it’s something that is dawning on me. . . . I remember prison as a good experience. I think I have unconsciously learnt to [distill] from that experience all the good aspects, distill them and hang on to them, which is good for me and is good for [others’ perception of me]. But at the same time that very process means that in a certain way I don’t want to confront [reality]. I don’t want to even speak [of it]; I think it’s the ﬁrst time I am referring to almost two years of ennui, of really grappling with myself and in a state of self-pity which I wouldn’t want to reveal to my fellow comrades in prison because I didn’t want to 78 79

Winslow, interview. SAPA, “Mandela Receives Hero’s Welcome from Foreign Children,” 27 September 1996.

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be a burden on them. Or, if you put it in sexist language, I didn’t want them to make me feel that I was not a man in myself. I didn’t want to tell my former wife because I didn’t want to worry her and if I worried her about it then I knew that she could do nothing about it. . . . And the normality that we display today should not mislead us into realizing that if we ever consign fellow human beings to those conditions then we would have to have some post traumatic [reactions].80

This vulnerability, as well as that displayed in the sporting documents or Nelson Mandela’s unusually unguarded comment about freedom, makes it clear that the political sacriﬁces also had profound personal, individual, and human costs, effects, and implications. Aside from psychological consequences, many former prisoners were left with other health problems as a result of their incarceration. Perhaps the most commonly mentioned, but potentially deadly, ailment mentioned is high blood pressure (as well as tension more generally), no doubt a consequence of the stresses of imprisonment but also of the poor nutrition in prison.81 In addition, many former prisoners report problems with their own or other’s eyesight.82 Prisoner’s families and family relationships were also a casualty of political imprisonment. Malcolm Dyani commented that all prisoners experienced a problem relating to their families upon release: “Even today, after more than ﬁfteen years, I don’t feel at home even when I’m talking with my mother, the same way I used to before I went to prison. I can feel this thing. There is some difference.”83 Marriage was a frequent casualty of imprisonment; both Dyani and Fikile Bam commented that they were glad not to have been married while they were in prison because the married men suffered far more than they did.84 On the occasion of Walter and Albertina Sisulu’s ﬁftieth wedding anniversary in 1994, Tokyo Sexwale, former Robben Islander and then charismatic premier of the Gauteng Province, gave a speech in which he celebrated the marriage of these luminaries of the struggle in no small part because their love survived prison, while “many of us lost our marriages in prison.” Noting that the ending of Nelson Mandela’s marriage was “no secret,” he added, “I am one of those whose ﬁrst marriage broke up in prison. . . . It is time that these things must be spoken of.”85 Many prisoners did not have visits from their families. Probably the most important reason families did not visit was ﬁnancial – people simply could not afford the long journey to Cape Town and the time away from work and 80 81 82 83 84 85

Maharaj, interview. Cooper, interview; Khame, interview; Macozoma, interview; Motlanthe, interview; Ndlovu, interview. Khame, interview; Mcongo, interview; Ngqondela, interview; Naidoo, Island in Chains, 138. Dyani, interview. Dyani, interview; Bam, interview. I attended this anniversary party and scribbled Sexwale’s comments as he spoke.

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families. Over time, organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross, International Defense and Aid, and the South African Council of Churches provided funding and/or other assistance for families to visit, but even then some family members could not leave children alone, were estranged from the prisoner, or were scared of police harassment. (Mandla Makwetu, for example, said the consequences of the Island did not end with release; he was married with two children when he was arrested – the youngest was six months old – but police pressure made his wife run away. When he came, out his family were scared of him because of state harassment.)86 Visits were an enormous sacriﬁce for the family member. June Mlangeni, the wife of Rivonia trialist Andew Mlangeni, described the ﬁrst decade of her husband’s imprisonment and her visits to him: It was difﬁcult those ﬁrst ten years . . . being a mother of four young children. . . . I wasn’t working, I had to pay rent. But I knew why he was on the Island. . . . When the permit came to visit Andrew, I borrowed money for a third class ticket to Cape Town. The train took two nights and I arrived at seven in the morning. I walked from the station to the harbour, which is a long way, got onto the boat, and arrived at Robben Island. There were a lot of police. . . . There were many other families and everyone was shouting at one another over the noise . . . sometimes I couldn’t hear what he said. We were only given thirty minutes. He looked terrible, in short pants, a canvas jacket, with sandals . . . and the weather was cold. I didn’t want to show him how hurt I was. On my second visit I missed the boat. Our train was delayed because of an accident on the line and when I arrived at the docks the boat had already left. I roamed Cape Town’s streets looking for help. I saw a church and met a priest who went with me to the docks to get an afternoon visit. They still refused.87

A full assessment of the damage incarceration caused to families is, of course, beyond the scope of this study. It is, however, certainly a critical aspect of the history of both apartheid and resistance in South Africa. We can fairly say that apartheid itself radically undermined the structure and possibility of African family life, and these processes were greatly worsened by political imprisonment. Absent family members, often breadwinners, reduced families’ chances of adequate health care, education, or housing, and the state actively exacerbated the trauma of imprisonment by harassing family members not in prison. Like the prisoners themselves, however, many families resisted and took up the banner of their jailed parent, spouse, or sibling.88 86 87 88

Makwetu, interview. Mlangeni in Schadeberg, Voices from Robben Island, 25. On Winnie Mandela’s visits to Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, see Winnie Mandela, Part of My Soul Went with Him (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984), 132, 161–164. For a study on how women were affected by the political imprisonment of male family members, see Hylton White, In the Shadow of the Island: Women’s Experience of their Kinsmen’s Political Imprisonment in Cape Town, 1987–1991 (Pretoria: Human Sciences Resource Council, 1994).

5 Prisoner Politics and Organization on Robben Island

Now what does it mean when we refer to Robben Island as a site of struggle? I think quite simply that there were three main areas of contestation on Robben Island. The ﬁrst one was the attempt on our part to survive physically, intellectually and politically. Survival is the ﬁrst leit motif. The second was the whole issue of education, culture and recreation; and the third was what I would call planning or preparation for the future. Perhaps one should even go beyond that and talk about nation building and the preparation for life in a post-apartheid liberated South Africa.1

Resistance to ensure one’s survival and create as meaningful a life as possible were ends in themselves and preconditions for continuing and strengthening antiapartheid politics. How Robben Islanders maintained and developed antiapartheid politics in prison is the concern of this and the following chapter. Imprisoning political activists was intended not only to silence and intimidate individual political actors but also to completely extinguish their political movements and organizations, most of which were already banned. Therefore, resistance meant keeping the liberation movements alive in prison with a view to furthering their work both on Robben Island and upon the release of prisoners. Perhaps paradoxically, the survival and growth of individual organizations required at least a minimum level of cooperation between and among rival organizations. Both inter- and intraorganizational life assumed a social order structured in accordance with particular norms and institutional arrangements. These imperatives of daily life are examined in the ﬁnal section of this chapter, which lays the basis for Chapter Nine’s analysis of how prisoners resigniﬁed and appropriated signiﬁcant aspect of the authorities’ power to order life in prison. Prisoners used this power in productive ways 1

Neville Alexander, “Robben Island: A Site of Struggle,” in Robben Island: The Politics of Rock and Sand, eds. Nigel Penn, Harriet Deacon, and Neville Alexander (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, Department of Adult Education and Extra-Moral Studies, 1992) 69–70.

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to further their ﬁght against apartheid and even to implement some of their alternatives to the racist status quo. Foundations of Prisoner Politics The Political Prisoner Community The vast majority of the ﬁrst political prisoners who came to Robben Island in the early 1960s were members of the Pan Africanist Congress or its armed wing, Poqo. When Indres Naidoo of the African National Congress arrived on Robben Island in late 1963 there were about thirty ANC and about 1,000 PAC prisoners.2 He remembered that by the late 1960s or early 1970s the ANC greatly outnumbered the PAC. Johnson Mlambo of the PAC recalled that by about 1965 PAC prisoners were no longer in the majority, and the ANC composed a majority of the prison population by the early or mid 1970s.3 In the pre-1976 period, aside from the ANC and the PAC, the two dominant groups on the Island, there were also other groups. The ﬁrst of these was the National Liberation Front, which had originated from the Non-European Unity Movement and was composed of a small group of prisoners who were on the Island between 1964 and 1974. They did not organize internally as a political grouping.4 Neither did the African People’s Democratic Union of South Africa, also connected to the Unity Movement, which too had a small group of members on the Island between about 1971 and 1978. Eddie Daniels was the lone member of the Liberal Party. According to Mac Maharaj, Daniels retained his Liberal Party afﬁliation on Robben Island despite a de facto identiﬁcation with the ANC so that the ANC would have an organizational ally in the single cells, where Daniels was imprisoned.5 The ANC, the PAC, and the BCM all opposed white minority rule and sought to free black South Africans from apartheid’s racism, repression, and denial of democracy. The organizations differed ideologically in two main areas. First, they had varying understandings of the relationship between white domination and capitalist exploitation, which in turn affected the strategies and goals of antiapartheid struggle. Different answers shaped the more or less dominant role of the (black) working class in overthrowing racial rule and determined whether the political order being sought would be capitalist or socialist. Second, liberation politics was divided on the question of the 2 3 4 5

Naidoo and Sachs, Island in Chains, 228. Mlambo, interview. Bam, interview. Mac Maharaj, conversation with author, Cape Town, 8 November 1994. South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) guerrillas from Namibia are not covered in this book. It is relevant to note, however, that SWAPO’s Andimba Toivo ja Toivo was aligned with the ANC in the single cells.

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role and place of nonblacks (or, in the case of early incarnations of the PAC, non-Africans) in opposing apartheid and in a post-apartheid polity. All three movements had – and have – a range of answers to these questions within their histories, membership, and programs. None of the movements were or are ideologically monolithic, but the following general tendencies may be summarized. At least since the 1950s, the ANC emphasized alliance politics wherein the organization and/or its allies were composed of a broad spectrum of ideologies and all “racial groups.” The ANC was and is nonracial in its approach, in as much as whites, Indians, and Coloureds had a role in opposing apartheid and would be (and are) equal citizens in a post-apartheid political system. The ANC was, however, more divided on the question of capitalism. The ANC’s most sophisticated theoretical analysis of the relationship of race and class in South Africa was developed within the South African Communist Party, a close ally of the ANC. In this analysis, apartheid South Africa was a special form of colonial society, which demanded that racial (or “national”) oppression had to be overcome before class exploitation. In practice, this formulation meant that the ANC and its alliance partners were ﬁrst and foremost committed to ending apartheid. The ANC as a whole did not identify its end goal as socialism, and indeed the organization was and is divided between “nationalist” members who emphasize as primary racial liberation and equality and “communist” members for whom socialism, or at least radical economic redistribution, is a primary goal together with ending racial inequity. In debates about the post-apartheid future, “democracy” was identiﬁed as the goal of all, but the content and form of that democracy was often unspeciﬁed. In general, nationalists tended to have a greater appreciation for Western liberal democracy, whereas the communists were skeptical of the egalitarian substance of that constitutional form. The PAC split from the ANC in opposition to what they saw as the domination of whites, communists, and Indians in the older organization. (Communists and whites were often seen as synonymous.) In the place of what the ANC then called multiracialism (as opposed to its later claim to “nonracialism”) the more sophisticated Pan Africanist arguments asserted that one must identify primarily as an African to ﬁght for the liberation of Africans, and that it was to Africa that one owed one’s primary loyalty. In this version, race was not the basis of deﬁning who was an African. In practice, however, PAC followers were (and are) often drawn to the organization by perceiving it to be antiwhite. Because of the PAC’s opposition to the SACP, initially the PAC was hostile to Marxist theorizing. Economic inequality in South Africa, combined with the PAC’s emphasis on returning the land to the African people, soon meant that socialist ideas gained increasing acceptance within the PAC. Nevertheless, as is the case with the ANC, the attitudes of the PAC’s members toward socialism exist along a spectrum of opinion.

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There are signiﬁcant similarities between the PAC and the ideology of black consciousness, not the least because black consciousness understanding, as its name implies, originally centered around a concern with race as primary in structuring the South African social formation. In particular, black consciousness philosophy and activism sought to redress what they saw as internalized racism experienced by black South Africans who devalued their blackness, instead desiring to emulate white culture. Practically, this valorization of black people and their capabilities demanded separatist political organizing. Some in the BCM believed whites could challenge the status quo by confronting white racism, not by working with or leading black resistance efforts. Others, in contrast, negated the relevance of any white oppositional activity. In many ways, black consciousness (BC) is an example of resigniﬁcation, the practice of giving new interpretation or meaning to some aspect of social reality so that relations of power are renegotiated. One of the central insights of this BC ideology was that thinking about oneself and the world differently – the idea of self-liberation – could contribute to acting differently in the world, including developing a political mentality, awareness, and concomitant organizational infrastructure to promote social change. There are, of course, limits to reconceptualizing self or society as well as having a changed perspective mold processes and structures. Partly in confronting those limits, black consciousness adherents increasingly, although not universally, came to argue that class and economic factors too were relevant to black exploitation and liberation, and so black consciousness ideologues came more and more to integrate anticapitalist or prosocialist theory or rhetoric into their political arguments and strategies. The height of the inﬂuence of black consciousness thinking was in the student uprising of 1976, at which point racial self-liberation was a critical impetus behind the national rebellion. In political terms, when the 1976 uprisings occurred, Robben Island was a fairly stable community. The ANC and the PAC were the dominant groups, and there were also a few members of APDUSA and the ﬁrst arrivals from the BCM. It was, for the most part, also an aging population; a statistical analysis of the attitude of soccer players in the prison investigated, among other things, “Age distribution and youthfulness of [soccer] clubs.” The results of this survey indicated that soccer on the Island faced a “decline of ﬁtness and the increasing chronicity of injuries.”6 No doubt there was also a certain degree of resignation and depression among prisoners as long sentences took their toll and the apparent political lull did little to encourage them. Certainly, this was the impression of the youth who began arriving from the mid 1970s, and it is also borne out in the sporting documents.

6

Mayibuye 17.1, Memo of 14 April 1974.

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In the same memo, other problems facing the Island sporting community were that the present clubs have played one another . . . so frequently that it can be predicted to a high level of accuracy which clubs will win and which tactics will be used or attempted. . . . [Furthermore, t]he effects of imprisonment are becoming noticeable. . . . [In addition, a] more mature outlook towards sport has been attained. We do not now feel the need to prove ourselves narcissistically in our sport any more.7

Notwithstanding this documentation, most respondents emphasized the strength, resilience, and the vitality of the prisoner community in this as in most other periods. Although the prisoners on Robben Island were not to know about the 16 June uprisings until August, the arrival of the “children of ’76” made an impact that shook the prison to its core.8 These new prisoners were, for the most part, different from the existing population in at least two respects: ﬁrst, they were mostly much younger, and, second, they largely identiﬁed with or were members of black consciousness groupings. Both differences caused conﬂict, so that much of the 1977 to 1980 period was characterized by intense disagreements, at times including physical ﬁghts, over questions of ideology, recruitment, leadership, and appropriate strategies to deal with the authorities. Elements of conﬂict, disagreement, and dissent continued after 1980, but for the most part the conﬂict ended with a high level of convergence over the new or renewed rules governing the prisoner society. By the early 1980s, the ANC had reestablished its dominance on the Island. The ANC further increased its numerical majority over the decade as new ANC guerillas or sympathetic activists were jailed. The ANC’s strength appears not to have been undermined by the state’s removal of Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Raymond Mhlaba, and Andrew Mlangeni from the Island to Pollsmoor Prison on 31 March 1982,9 or the “early” releases of Govan Mbeki and Harry Gwala in, respectively, 1987 and 1988. Indeed, the ANC’s underground structures in prison appeared to have become much more sophisticated by the late 1980s.10 The Underground in Prison The authorities actively opposed prisoner organizing. The ANC and PAC were banned organizations, and membership in these movements or furthering their aims was a criminal offense punishable by law – indeed, advancing the goals of illegal organizations was a reason for the imprisonment of 7 8 9 10

Ibid. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 420–421. Kathrada was removed from Robben Island to Pollsmoar later, on 21 October 1982. Vronda Banda, interview with author, tape recording, Johannesburg, 5 September 1994; Mashigo, interview; Motlanthe, interview.

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many Robben Islanders. Smuggling news and messages, organizing political meetings, using study materials to write political communications, allowing nonstudents to read the books sent to bona ﬁde students, and reading or transcribing books that were either banned by the prison authorities or in South Africa generally all violated the prison rules and therefore had to be kept as secret as possible. Natoo Babenia recalled that “if the warders found you meeting in big groups, which was very difﬁcult anyway during those early years, the warders would accuse you of having a political meeting. You lose three meals.”11 The loss of three meals was not just a relic of the 1960s. Vusumzi Mcongo recalled that the same punishment or being put on a spare diet was used throughout his over twelve years of imprisonment beginning in the late 1970s.12 Long-term punishments for political activity were also used. Curnick Ndlovu noted that communication between sections and especially with leadership in the single cells was essential, but dangerous.13 People would be “victimized in such a way that if they catch you with any document then your studies are going to be taken away for the whole year. . . . They would even cancel when your exam papers are there.”14 Aside from being monitored by the warders, the political prisoners were watched by some of the common-law prisoners in the 1960s, as well as informers from within the political community.15 The security police also monitored the prison, through – as in the example of Mac Maharaj – going through his letters and listening to his visits to attempt to identify secret messages.16 Even when the prison authorities turned a blind eye to some of the prisoner politics, they did not give tacit consent to political activity in general and would still, for example, raid cells to conﬁscate political and other contraband. Denmark Tungwane was on Robben Island in the late 1980s and noted that the raids were very destructive for political education and training “because it takes time to collect that material . . . it’s not easy to get the materials.” Like many prisoners, he did not underestimate the capacity of the prison authorities; “it was a well planned strategy on their side” to undermine or end activities they knew were taking place. Moreover, he argued that there was often a conscious timing in the raids – they would not necessarily raid cells often, but they would “ambush us when we are not expecting it” and time raids during disputes or hunger strikes.17 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

Babenia, Memoirs of a Saboteur, 132. Mcongo, interview. Ndlovu, interview. Ibid. Bam, interview; Ndlovu; interview; Ntshanyana, interview. See, for example, The Weekly Mail and Guardian, 29 July to 4 August 1994. Copies of the security police ﬁles on Mac Maharaj referred to here are now lodged with the Mayibuye Centre for History and Culture in South Africa, University of Western Cape. The issue of the authorities monitoring Robben Island is discussed in greater detail in Chapter Six. Tungwane, interview.

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Interorganizational Relationships One of the achievements of the men imprisoned on Robben Island was, with some notable exceptions, a high degree of cross-organizational solidarity and unity in terms of their attitude toward the authorities. In addition, respectful relationships and at times good friendships developed between prisoners of opposing liberation groups. Furthermore, Islanders carved out areas of shared community life, from celebrating each others’ birthdays to cleaning cells and playing sport together (discussed earlier). Notwithstanding the periods of interorganizational peace and cooperation, there were sharp disagreements among, as well as within, these organizations especially at particular points, notably between the ANC and the PAC in the early and mid 1960s, and the among the PAC, ANC, and BCM in the late 1970s. (The latter are explored in considerable detail later.) Assessments of the extent and degree of conﬂict that existed between organizations depends on the perceptions of individual respondents. Most political prisoners realized, however, that the enemy was the state, embodied in the prison authorities, and that tensions between and among prisoners needed to be resolved or managed to a point where the prisoners could challenge the state in a united front. Cordial and cooperative interorganizational relationships were necessary for at least two reasons. First, prisoner resistance to ensure basic conditions of life in prison, from adequate food to sporting facilities, required that prisoners present as united a front as possible to the authorities. At minimum, division within the ranks of prisoners would limit the legitimacy of a protest or demand. Unity was always a particular imperative in protest action like a hunger strike. More dangerously, the state could use splits and divergence among the prisoners in divide-and-rule strategies.18 Unity was also important when prisoners had to deal with outside visitors like the International Committee of the Red Cross or Helen Suzman who would often request meetings with a designated prisoner representative. Second, prisoners needed internal mechanisms to communicate among the various organizations so as to ensure that problems between or among the organizations could be resolved, or even prevented in the ﬁrst place. The struggle for prisoners to relate to and deal with the state as a community demanded that prisoners establish their 18

Indeed, insofar as there were inter- or intraorganizational tensions, bringing these to the attention of the state could well have proved very dangerous. Mark Shinners (interview) was a PAC member who was on Robben Island from 1963 to 1973. He was later tried in the 1978–1979 Bethal trial only to be reconvicted and sent back to Robben Island. He said that the security police used discussions of tensions within the PAC in Naidoo and Sachs’s Island in Chains as a basis of their interrogation. Mark Shinners, interview with author, tape recording, Johannesburg, 12 September 1994. Naledi Tsiki (interview) speculated that the state’s move of Mandela and other senior ANC leaders in 1982 may have been timed to exacerbate strong tensions that the ANC on Robben Island was experiencing at the time.

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right to be seen and dealt with as a collective. The need for organizations to have functioning working relationships meant a number of institutional and noninstitutional mechanisms were established to permit communication, cooperation, and conﬂict resolution. I examine each of these in turn, as well as the intermittent breakdown of cooperation and communication across ideological and organizational lines. The Struggle for a Collective Voice From the outset, cross-organizational solidarity was necessary because the state denied prisoners the right to express their interests, whether complaints or requests, in a collective voice. Johnson Mlambo commented that the authorities tried to destroy the “cohesive communal way of life or community” the prisoners created; “they tried to individualize us. And of course, we had to battle hard to maintain this oneness. . . . The authorities wanted us to live as individuals. Not as an organized group.”19 Mlambo argued that the authorities initially recognized the prisoner’s right to a collective voice when the ICRC met with the prisoners’ chosen representatives. Later the prison ofﬁcials allowed spokespersons from the sports and recreation committees to act as liaisons between the administration and the prisoners. In time, prisoners won the right to nominate their own members to prepare food or take on other jobs over which the community sought control. The paradox on Robben Island was that prisoners had to struggle as a collective in order to win the right to be identiﬁed as a group. Arguably, to resist effectively, the incursions of the state also demanded establishing a common identity across organizational lines to constitute and maintain a community. Because the prisoners belonged to distinct groups with separate and particular visions for an alternative to apartheid, community identity needed constant reinforcement and reimagining. Interorganizational Communication Communication among organizations occurred on both formal and informal lines, with both continuity and changes in the almost thirty years under examination. At times Nelson Mandela spoke on behalf of prisoners. Helen Suzman noted that, on her ﬁrst visit to Robben Island, Mandela had been chosen to represent the prisoners in the single cells, despite their different afﬁliations.20 As Suzman walked into the single-cell section, “Neville Alexander said ‘Don’t waste time speaking to us, go to the end and speak to Mandela’, which I did.”21 Nevertheless, he was by no means the only 19 20 21

Mlambo, interview. Suzman, interview. In her autobiography, Suzman gave the same account, except she remembered Eddie Daniels as being the person who directed her to Mandela on behalf of all of the single-cell section prisoners.

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prisoner representative, and Pandelani Nefolovhodwe of the BCM said that Mandela was at times criticized for not consulting with his fellow prisoners before speaking to the prison authorities or visitors to the political prisoner community.22 The interorganizational relationships in the single cells could be formal. Fikile Bam spoke of being “particularly ﬂattered when I was chosen as the ﬁrst chairman of the Prisoners’ Committee in our section at a time when the groups [political organizations] were really difﬁcult to deal with.”23 In time, that committee evolved into Ulundi, a formal committee to which each organization in the single cells had a representative, that is, the ANC, the PAC, the Liberal Party (represented by Eddie Daniels), SWAPO (represented by Toivo ja Toivo), the NLF/NEUM group, and later APDUSA. According to Sonny Venkatrathnam of APDUSA, Nelson Mandela chaired this committee for many years and, as such, represented the community to visitors like the ICRC and Helen Suzman. Then Venkatrathnam and recently arrived black consciousness members were removed to the single cells and formed a “kind of alliance,” allowing Venkatrathnam to become chairperson of Ulundi:24 And I said “What, is Nelson [Mandela] going to serve under me?” . . . There was a lot of power . . . in the sense that you were the spokesperson. You had to meet with the prison department and the visitors. . . . And a number of things happened during this time because of this change. The ANC were getting jittery about their position there.25

Ahmed Kathrada of the ANC rejected this interpretation, and argued that the ANC gave other organizations the right to chair Ulundi “of its own free will.”26 Daniels was elected chair of Ulundi around 1977, despite opposition. In this case, PAC, APDUSA, and BCM representatives could not accept Daniels as their representative, and so, when the ICRC visited the prisoners, representation was made by two groups; Daniels spoke on behalf of the ANC, Liberal Party, and SWAPO, and there was a separate representative for the other three organizations. (Daniels recalled the ICRC being angry with the prisoners because it wasted their time to speak to two groups unnecessarily.)27 Ulundi did not last long after most of the ANC’s senior 22 23 24 25

26 27

Pandelani Nefolovhodwe, interview with author, tape recording, Johannesburg, 13 September 1994. Bam, in Lodge and Nasson, All, Here, and Now, 309. Venkatrathnam, interview. Ahmed Kathrada (interview) added that Ulundi would not usually deal with interorganizational tensions, which would be dealt with more directly. In contrast, Neville Alexander (interview) said that Ulundi or formal interorganizational organizations were used more for problems of interaction between the organizations and less for everyday matters. Letter from Kathrada to Gail Gerhart, 6 April 1996. Eddie Daniels, interview with author, tape recording, Somerset West, 18 May 1996.

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leadership was transferred from the Island in 1982. James Mange dismissed its function as asking the authorities for extra drafts or checkers boards.28 More importantly, he argued that Ulundi had sometimes misrepresented the prisoners for whom it was speaking. A series of committees functioned alongside Ulundi and ultimately replaced it. These “substitute” committees further served the prison as a whole and not only the single cells. Mange said that each section came to have its own interorganizational committee, and, in addition, the Sports and Recreation Committee and the Red Cross or Geneva Committee came to fulﬁll important community functions. Although many former prisoners identiﬁed the sporting committees as outside the political arena, Denmark Tungwane pointed out their political functions: “One would say that was the only legitimate structure in prison which was recognized by the authorities. So through that structure people were able to demand a lot of things and a lot of things would come through that structure. For instance, the whole battle for televisions on the Island came through that structure.”29 While the Red Cross or Geneva Committee and the Sports and Recreation Committee served the whole prison in the 1980s, the general sections also had structures and arrangements to facilitate interorganizational communications in the sixties and seventies. The ANC’s Disciplinary Committee in the general cells liaised with representatives of other organizations.30 Hector Ntshanyana remembered that an educational council was established in the general sections in the 1960s, and became particularly active toward the end of that decade.31 This was also the period when cultural and sporting expression began to ﬂourish on the Island. Good relationships among organizations were often maintained by avoiding political discussion. Furthermore, one of the ways ideological antagonism was reduced was to avoid discussions that would bring up political differences. People would generally shy away from exploring ideological questions with those of another group, and maintain an assumption of tolerance for all perspectives. Most of the people on the Island, and in the single cells at least, don’t enter into ideological debates. I would not openly stand and start criticizing, running down the ANC. I know you are with the ANC, and we accept one another’s position on the basis that you are not going to change me, and I am not going to change you. But other issues we will debate, and if part of our logical standpoints don’t convert we will argue and discuss, and we will not allow intolerance. . . . We could talk to anybody as equals.32 28 29 30 31 32

Mange, interview. Tungwane, interview. Gwala, interview. Ntshanyana, interview. Venkatrathnam, interview.

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There were, however, exceptions to the rule of not engaging in ideological debate. For Dikgang Moseneke of the PAC, in the early 1960s debate between the ANC and the PAC was neither fair nor possible because the PAC so overwhelmed the ANC.33 Consistent with the desire to avoid conﬂict, especially physical attacks, the ANC’s Martin Ramokgadi similarly points out when the PAC in the 1960s had a political symposium in which the ANC was viliﬁed,34 the ANC chose silence because they feared being beaten up. Indeed, Ntshanyana argued that in the 1960s, while it was still a minority grouping, the ANC was not very open about its politics.35 Greater openness began from the late 1960s. Both Moseneke and Malcolm Dyani, also of the PAC, recall vibrant and valuable debates and exchanges of ideas between the two organizations in the ﬁrst half of the 1970s, an era of particularly good relations for both liberation movements.36 No doubt much of the discussion was concerned to advance “meaningful and . . . instructive debates,”37 but some of the interchanges portrayed less lofty agendas. Ramokgadi recollected convincing some PAC youths that the PAC was set up by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).38 Ramokgadi knew “it was not true, of course,” but the purpose of the story was achieved – the youth realigned with the ANC. And Dyani recalled creeping up on Lawrence Phokanuka, an ANC theorist with a reputation for superb debating skills and intimidating his opponents, and giving him enough of a fright to upset him into giving up the afternoon’s discussion.39 In the late 1970s, ideological exchanges were passionate and ﬁerce, at times to the point of violence and certainly to the point of testing the fragility of the prisoner cohesion. When these ideological differences and the associated battles over recruitment were brought to a negotiated conclusion in the early 1980s, the realization of the damage caused by the conﬂicts was part of the reason prisoners agreed not to disclose the details of the conﬂicts to those outside the prison. Vusumzi Mcongo, a BCM activist, pointed out that the interorganizational violence outside the prison in the mid 1980s created tensions on the Island.40 On the mainland, conﬂict between the Congressoriented United Democratic Front and the Black Consciousness Azanian 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40

Moseneke, interview. Ramokgadi, interview. Ntshanyana, interview. Moseneke, interview; Dyani, interview. Moseneke, interview. Ramokgadi, interview. Tom Karis, letter to author, 22 July 1997, noted that one probable reason for this allegation was that PAC leader, Patrick Leballo, was employed by the U.S. information agency in Johannesburg and was able to use its ofﬁce equipment for its political work. Karis further believes the CIA was pro-PAC, although he cannot document this suspicion. Dyani, interview. Mcongo, interview.

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People’s Organization deteriorated into violent and sometimes fatal clashes. For prisoners daily performing a living experiment in mutual tolerance, this was a shocking experience, all the more shocking for the needless loss of black life. Although prisoners of different organizations were united in a shared abhorrence of the hatred and violence outside, Mcongo recalled that the external conﬂict introduced a new tension: [Prisoners] used to freely make jokes about [each other’s organizations] – let me cite an example. . . . “Your organisation does not have a military wing!” and you’d say “No man, we are the giant intellectuals of politics in this country.” Now those things – those kinds of jokes directed towards people, were in use you see? Now those jokes came to an end. The tension had arrived between us now, so anything could happen. . . . What we did was encouraged one another not to fall in that trap where we ﬁght against one another – let the enemy be on the advantage. We should not allow that situation.41

Tolerance was a much-emphasized theme in Island life. Many former Robben Islanders underscored that one of the Island’s greatest legacies was to stress the importance of prisoners respecting the different opinions of others, whether within or across organizational differences. Sometimes tolerance was built through engaging in contrary ideas, and at other times it was built through avoiding them, but in both respects Robben Island emerged as providing a signiﬁcant contribution to a culture of mutual respect in South African politics. The tolerance was in part enabled by, in Sonny Venkatrathnam’s view, the fact that “we could talk to anybody openly as equals.” Closely related to this equality was an emphasis on camaraderie and friendship, irrespective of people’s implied and stated criticism of certain political practices or positions. Personal friendship, solidarity, and mutual care did not have to be affected by ideological positions; despite Venkatrathnam’s opposition to the ANC’s control, “my closest associates in the single cells were ANC people.”42 One thing I experienced on Robben Island was the spirit of camaraderie, [a] tremendous spirit of camaraderie. This is one of the greatest things about Robben Island that I still think of fondly, is that when you are depressed, people will realize it quickly and come and try and knock you out of this feeling. If you are ill they will hang around you, even clean you. . . . We could talk to anybody as equals. That was the other great thing [on the Island]. Whether it was Nelson or any of the young chaps, there was no position [of inequality] in the single cells at least. Everybody was treated equally. Even in terms of work – you know we organized our own work schedule – if it is this group’s turn to wash the toilets [from] Nelson to the youngest guys, will join in and help do it. The point is there was always absolute equality in terms of where prison life was concerned. In terms of organization it was another matter. In the organization was leadership . . . but as prisoners it was absolute. . . . I have never 41 42

Ibid. Venkatrathnam, interview.

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experienced such camaraderie [as I did on the Island] in all my life, and you cannot possibly get it outside prison.43

Whatever the formal status of organizational relationships, personal friendships often blossomed between members of different movements. News and Political Education Interorganizational differences notwithstanding, political education was a shared concern across the Island’s political spectrum. Indeed, academic education was considered important, but political education often lies at the heart of ex-Islander reﬂections on their incarceration and of the broad prisoner and public identiﬁcation of the Island as “university.” Thami Mkhwanazi, for example, wrote that “I had ﬁrst heard the Island described as the University of Revolutionary Politics by a security policeman during my interrogation. He said I had been caught because I was an amateur – and soon I would be sent to ‘the university.’”44 Political education was understood broadly to include news analysis, seminars, research, debate, and discussion about politics. The precise structure of political education varied from time to time, from section to section, and according to organizational afﬁliation. In general, however, the education committee of an organization decided upon the content and implementation of political education. Jacob Zuma provided an example of his own experience, explaining that he was one of a number of Durban-based activists whose political education before imprisonment was based on discussions of labor theory, which they continued in prison: About ﬁve of us who had attended those political discussions here [in Durban] found ourselves on Robben Island . . . and felt we needed to have some political discussions among ourselves [on the Island] to revise what we used to discuss [before prison]. We . . . began . . . political lectures for everybody during lunch time, which was an hour, we used that [time] to revise and discuss if there were news items. . . . So when we were joined by particularly comrade Stephen Dlamini, who was our leader, [and] Harry Gwala . . . [who] was actually our political instructor outside . . . we started having discussions with them everyday at lunch time and we were gradually joined by other people, whoever was interested. Revising political lectures or discussions that we’d had over the weekend, analyzing news items, discussing about labor theory in particular and enriching our knowledge, that became in fact the nucleus of the culture on Robben Island, the culture of political education.45

From the PAC perspective, Mlambo noted that there were many things we also learnt. Some of us were totally inexperienced and we learnt a little more from some of our leaders. . . . Uncle Zeph [Mothopeng], who 43 44 45

Ibid. Mkhwanazi, “My Years on the Island,” 16. Zuma, interview.

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was the second president of the PAC after Sobukwe, . . . was always bombarded with questions. ‘What were we going to do with the Europeans when we were free?’ That question was a perennial one.46

Mlambo’s identiﬁcation of Mothopeng points to an important source of information in political education, namely the leadership of organizations. Political writings of people such as Walter Sisulu, Billy Nair, and Govan Mbeki47 were circulated in the prison to be used by the inmate community. Leaders were also able to provide information that was otherwise unavailable. Sisulu was able to provide “a walking history of the organization.”48 A critical component of political education was the need to follow national and international news. Until the late 1970s, however, this was entirely forbidden, and even when radio and later newspapers and television became legal, news was still censored and therefore less than what the prisoners sought. Thus, a fundamental aspect of political prisoner resistance became the struggle to obtain news. Formal representation was continually made to the prison authorities and visitors like the ICRC and Helen Suzman for the right of prisoners to read newspapers. On a day-to-day basis, the real struggle was actually obtaining news through an array of illicit means.49 At times the struggle for news was a source of competition and even antagonism among the liberation movements, but more often organizations cooperated to share news. The Question of PAC–ANC Unity Because unity implies hegemony, it is perhaps a siren call for every group, movement, or people. Certainly, summons to unity have been a staple feature of many strands of anticolonial and post-independence African politics. The quest for the ANC and PAC to unite was an especially poignant one, given that the PAC split from the older Congress Movement only a year before unprecedented state repression drove both organizations underground and many of their leaders into jail together. Being imprisoned on Robben Island offered both organizations the hope, perhaps a chimera, of again uniting. There were at least three initiatives to heal the rupture between the two liberation movements. The ﬁrst two occurred in the 1960s in the single cells. In the ﬁrst, Fikile Bam, who had grown up in a strongly ANC environment 46

47 48 49

Mlambo, interview. According to Mlambo, Mothopeng’s answer was to say: “That is a negative type of question you are asking. Ask what we are going to do for the African. That is the question you should be asking. . . . Sobukwe actually put it that in the new Africa there would be no reason why a predominantly black electorate cannot even have a white person representing them in Parliament because color will be of no consequence.” See Govan Mbeki, Learning from Robben Island: The Prison Writings of Govan Mbeki (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 1991). Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid, 214. See, for example, Naidoo and Sachs, Island in Chains, 132; Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid, 193–195.

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but who had later joined the Unity Movement and the NLF, was asked by Nelson Mandela to “be instrumental in forming a Patriotic Front” to facilitate unity talks between the PAC and the ANC on the Island. But the initiative never occurred. In Bam’s understanding, communists and Indians in the ANC “seemed to read the Patriotic Front [as] the blacks in the struggle . . . getting together and they would be pushed out in the process.”50 A second initiative, probably by Mandela, actually led to talks between the PAC and the ANC. According to the ANC’s Ahmed Kathrada, the talks proceeded well when the ANC spoke to the PAC’s Clarence Makwetu, but when he left prison, the talks came to an end because the next senior PAC person to be sent to the single cells, John Nyati Pokela, opposed the talks, following which they collapsed.51 In contrast, the PAC’s Dyani recalled earlier, far more fruitful talks between Mandela and the PAC’s Selby Ngendane, although Ngendane was known as an arch enemy of the ANC.52 The two of them wrote a letter to the general section, sending a copy to both ANC and PAC members and promising to send the letter to the organizations in exile. The letter’s introduction was based on the preamble from the Republic of Mali’s constitution, which spoke of the need for unity, especially of the African people. (Mali, along with Ghana and Guinea, had agreed in the early 1960s to form the ﬁrst nucleus of a United States of Africa.) This letter went on to identify a dire need to unite the PAC and ANC into one organization. Although Ngendane accepted the letter, Dyani commented that “if you knew the two people you could make out that the letter was penned more by Mandela.” For example, Dyani identiﬁed Mandela’s inﬂuence in a comment stating that the presence of whites and communists in the ANC was not enough of a reason to prevent unity. Apparently nothing further happened with this initiative.53 The BCM, which made black unity an article of faith, made a third attempt at reuniting the PAC and ANC. They believed their political role involved uniting the two older liberation movements, both in exile and prison. They tried to achieve this mission when they came to the Island in the mid 1970s. As it turned out, both movements were far more interested in, and far more successful at, recruiting supporters of the BCM to their own organizations. In any case, the goal of unity may not have been realistic. As Amos Masondo, a leader ﬁrst in the BCM and later in the ANC, observed on arriving on 50 51 52 53

Bam, interview. Kathrada, interview. Dyani, interview. One may speculate that because this unity attempt occurred before Pokela’s arrival in the single cells it was possibly Pokela who prevented the talks proceeding. Similarly, it is possible that had Mothopeng been kept in the single cells of Robben Island for a longer period during his ﬁrst Island imprisonment, talks may have been better facilitated. Marx, Lessons of the Struggle, 231, noted that Mothopeng had “retained unofﬁcial friendly relations with ANC veterans dating back to the 1940s and to their long imprisonment together on Robben Island.”

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Robben Island in late 1976, there was a “deep wound” between the two liberation movements, although their interrelations were well managed. They were on speaking terms and would talk about unity, “but it was clear for someone like myself that [unity] was a non-issue.”54 The arrival of the youth of 1976 would demonstrate, however, that differing perspectives on strategies and tactics were not only or necessarily a function of organizational afﬁliation. The Liberation Movements and Political Organizations on Robben Island The ANC on Robben Island Until the 1980s, the most senior structure of the ANC on Robben Island was the High Organ, which had two subcommittees – syllabus and communications.55 The High Organ was initially composed of the four prisoners who had been members of the ANC National Executive Committee at the time 54 55

Amos Masondo, interview with author, tape recording, Johannesburg, 14 December 1994. Document on Conﬂict within the ANC on Robben Island, 1. This document, part of the Mayibuye Centre’s collection, does not have a title, date, or author; I have chosen to refer to it as the “Document on Conﬂict within the ANC on Robben Island.” Its origins and status are somewhat controversial; Ahmed Kathrada pointed out that it was not an “ofﬁcial” document and contains “several vital inaccuracies” (Letter to Tom Karis, 2 September 1995, cited in Karis and Gerhart, From Protest to Challenge, 57 fn 37), and Govan Mbeki argued that the memorandum is wrong to characterize differences between himself and Mandela as a power struggle (Letter to Tom Karis, 4 September 1995, cited in Karis and Gerhart, From Protest to Challenge, 57 fn 37). In a post-1997 conversation with me, Kathrada further identiﬁed the document as from an anti-Mandela perspective. While Kathrada and Mbeki have attempted to clarify what this document is not, it has been more difﬁcult to clarify what its status was or is. I was ﬁrst made aware of the document’s existence in April 1994, by Andre Odendaal, then the director of the Mayibuye Centre. He told me that the document had been found, apparently accidentally, by a “progressive journalist” in the papers of Dr. Yusuf Dadoo, the late vice-chairman of the ANC’s Revolutionary Council and SACP chairman. Odendaal wanted my opinion as to whether the contents were accurate, on condition that, given the forthcoming national – and ﬁrst – democratic elections, I did not divulge the contents with their potentially damaging revelations. I told him that my research to date did conﬁrm the document’s broad ﬁndings, though I did not yet have as detailed a picture as the document provided. Soon after the elections, Odendaal made public the content of the document in his paper “Robben Island – Bridgehead for Democracy.” If memory serves me correctly, Odendaal and I surmised that the document was a compilation of various reports delivered to Dadoo and/or the ANC in exile from former Islanders, rather than a document originating on Robben Island itself. Odendaal (“Robben Island – Bridgehead for Democracy.” Lecture and paper presented at the Mayibuye Centre Winter School, University of the Western Cape, South Africa, 1994, 8), however, wrote that the memorandum “was sent from Robben Island to the movement in exile.” Because the document is not dated, it is difﬁcult to guess from whom the various report may have been culled (or how information was reported or interpreted).

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the ANC was banned – namely Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Raymond Mhlaba, and Govan Mbeki. From time to time, they co-opted an individual onto the committee, such as Ahmed Kathrada.56 According to the Document on Conﬂict within the ANC on Robben Island, in 1972, following signiﬁcant unresolved conﬂict within the High Organ (discussed later), the High Organ was replaced by an entirely new membership. A year later, the original members – Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki, and Mhlaba – suggested “a plan for a rotation system in the High Organ as a device to train other Congress Movement men in leadership and administration techniques.”57 This plan was adopted, leading to a second (new) High Organ in 1973 to 1974, and a third in 1974 to 1975. Subsequently, the original four High Organ members again resumed their control of the High Organ. In 1982, most of the original High Organ members were removed from Robben Island, leaving only Govan Mbeki. By this stage, Harry Gwala, who was also a senior ANC member, was in the single cells; he joined Mbeki and others, including Wilton Mkwayi, in constituting the High Organ.58 The communications committee was led by Kathrada with the help of various ANC people at different points in time, depending on who was imprisoned. These people included Joe Gqabi, Mac Maharaj, Andrew Masondo, Lalloo Chiba, Theo Cholo, and Michael Dingake. At the time that Kathrada was removed from Robben Island and transferred to Pollsmoor Prison, he was running the communications committee with Tokyo Sexwale and Theo Cholo. (Kathrada surmised that Sexwale replaced him as head of the committee upon his transfer.)59 Within the general sections of the prison, the ANC organized around the Disciplinary Committee (DC) from the early 1960s. Babenia recalls: “Right from the beginning we had what was called a Disciplinary Committee. Until the ANC leadership arrived the DC was the top ANC body on the Island. They were appointed by a senior ANC comrade. In the early days there were ﬁve on the DC. Curnick [Ndlovu], Billy [Nair], Phillip Matthews, [Andrew] Masondo and Jeremiah Francis. Always one non-African.”60 The role of the

56

57 58 59 60

Kathrada, interview. Mandela alluded to the fact that the ﬁfth member of the High Organ would be a non-Xhosa person because, by “coincidence rather than design,” these four men were all Xhosa, which gave some people “the mistaken impression that we were a Xhosa organization.” Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 386. Noting that “our memories have begun to differ” Kathrada (Letter to Gail Gerhart, 6 April 1996) instead pointed out that he did not “recall that the reason for the rotating 5th member was because Mandela felt uneasy about the criticism about Xhosa domination. [For example,] M. D. Naidoo was co-opted immediately on his arrival because he occupied a senior Executive position in the Congress movement, equivalent to that of the other four.” Document on Conﬂict within the ANC on Robben Island, 3. Motlanthe, interview. Ahmed Kathrada, e-mail to author, 1 Feburary 2002; Sampson, Mandela, 213. Babenia, Memoirs of a Saboteur, 132.

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DC was to monitor and mediate the potential and actual tensions among the men, on an inter- and intraorganizational basis. The DC would meet regularly and discuss various things amongst themselves. Like the conditions, the attitude of the PAC towards us and, say, food. And, very importantly, if something happened in one of the cells, like if two chaps fought, it would go to the DC. The DC would resolve the issue and reprimand the fellows. Times were hard and people would easily lose their tempers. Often over the most small, inconsequential matters. But it did not seem like that at the time.61

In addition to the DC, a News Committee collected and disseminated news and some political education, an Education Committee promoted academic education, and a Political Committee provided political lectures and access to some political literature.62 By the mid 1960s, these structures were enlarged. A new position, the public relations ofﬁcer, was instituted, and group leaders were chosen for each of the four sections of a prison cell. Below this were smaller organizational cells63 of (about) four people per group.64 In turn, each cell would have a leader who would liaise with other cell leaders in a group, and the group leader would interact with other group leaders, itself forming a committee.65 There were also organizational cells among the single-cell prisoners.66 In the early or mid 1980s, the ANC on Robben Island was restructured. The High Organ was replaced by a comparable but different structure. Two slightly different accounts of ANC structures have been provided. In Naledi Tsiki’s recollection, changes occurred in the mid 1980s; after a “famous ﬁght,” the then High Organ was replaced by an ANC governing body that included, among others, himself, Tokyo Sexwale, Billy Nair, and, later, Harry Gwala. The composition of the governing body – or Central Organ (CO) – could and did change at times. For example, Tsiki was removed from this executive committee following an ideological argument with Govan Mbeki 61 62 63

64 65 66

Ibid. Babenia, interview. Vocabulary is difﬁcult here, because “cell” can of course mean more than one thing. I have therefore tried to distinguish between a cell as a physical space within the prison and a cell as a unit of a political organization. Babenia, Memoirs of a Saboteur, 132. Gwala, interview. Kathrada, interview. Speciﬁc details of organizational structure are not always completely clear or consistent. There are a number of possible reasons for this, including the following: (1) structures were not especially precise, and it would be wrong to assume they were – Ndlovu (interview) said that the ANC “wasn’t a structure as such”; (2) structures changed over time and interviewees generalize for the experience throughout their term of incarceration, rather than identifying exact organizational deﬁnitions; (3) organizational structures differed in the various sections, even within the general section; (4) former Islanders still consider these secret; and (5) certain prisoners did not know the exact structures of the liberation movements inside prison.

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and Harry Gwala. (The CO or governing body continued to be referred to as the High Organ or “HQ” by some right through the 1980s.) Petros Mashigo recalls a new Congress structure being implemented around 1982 or 1983 (following a hunger strike) in response to complaints by members of the general section.67 This new structure was much tighter and more concerned with protecting its underground nature. To maintain the secret nature of the political infrastructure, participation in its various constituent parts was decided on a more top-down basis than previously. Furthermore, because the prison authorities had begun to segregate prisoners on the basis of their classiﬁcation in about 1982, the ANC became increasingly concerned with ensuring good communication between its constituent parts. In the new ANC structure, the previous High Organ was replaced with the Central Organ. Beneath the CO lay two Coordinating Committees (CC); one for the single-cell sections, sections A and B, and one for the general cell sections, sections D, E, F, and G (the kitchen and hospital were included in G section). In turn, each section had a section committee (SC). (Vronda Banda provided an almost identical account to that of Mashigo.)68 At every level of this vertical structure, there would be a political panel (PP), which would be the recipient of communication from different levels of the organization and the various sections of the prison. (Members of the PP were not known to the prison community as a whole; only the contact person to a PP would know to whom a particular communication should be given in order that it would reach the PP.) For example, a communique might be passed from the public relations ofﬁcer (PRO), a person publicly identiﬁed both within an organization and to other organizations, to the room or cell leader, a secret position known only to the PRO. The room leader would in turn pass on the message or statement to the SC, which would have its own PP. This communication could then be passed on further up the structure, to the PP at each level. In this underground structure, information could be shared, issues debated, and questions discussed in a conﬁdential manner. There were numerous other committees and responsibilities within the ANC structures. For example, there was a political education department, which was headed by Jeff Radebe when he was on the Island in the 1980s.69 Debates and Divisions Within the ANC Divisions within the ANC, as with any political organization, occurred for a variety of reasons, including clashes between personalities and tension between leadership and mass membership, at times exacerbated by the 67 68 69

Mashigo, interview. Banda, interview. “Thabo Mbeki’s ﬁrst cabinet,” Daily Mail and Guardian, Online at http://www.mg.co.za/mg/ za/news/99jun/cabinet/radebe.html. Accessed on 27 February 2002.

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limitations prison imposed on communication. Natoo Babenia argued that the ANC structures on the Island could and sometimes did allow for democracy, but at other times leadership would try to dictate to the general membership through “top down telephones. Sometimes we would talk back to the leadership and tell them they are talking nonsense. Or it could work the other way around.”70 James Mange commented that leadership should have been collective but wasn’t.71 In contrast, most former Islanders in the ANC speak with pride, and at times veneration, concerning the political and personal contribution their leaders, variously identiﬁed, made on the Island. (Indeed, this appreciation also tended to be true of members of the PAC. Some BCM members pointed out, however, that their organization had no leaders, or that all its members were leaders.) The most enduring and all-encompassing tension in the ANC was that between “nationalists” and “communists.” This antagonism partly reﬂected ideological differences regarding the status of the working class in resistance politics, and partly reﬂected alignments with particular people on Robben Island, especially Nelson Mandela representing the nationalists and Govan Mbeki and/or Harry Gwala representing the communists. (Being considered a communist and nationalist did not necessarily relate to whether one was or was not a member of the SACP.)72 The Mandela–Mbeki conﬂict was an important part of a critical conﬂict that developed in the late 1960s until 1975 over the question of whether it was acceptable for the ANC to support strategic participation in apartheid structures. Nelson Mandela (with Sisulu) wanted debate with an open mind 70 71 72

Babenia, Memoirs of a Saboteur, 160. Mange, interview. Both Kathrada (interview) and Tsiki (interview). Indeed, the question of the SACP points to conﬂicts regarding the status of the ANC’s Congress Movement allies, including the SACP, in relation to the ANC on Robben Island. In the 1960s, Harry Gwala had organized classes on Robben Island from which he had intended to recruit people to the SACP. These were seen as divisive in that they excluded some people, and were stopped. Instead, the ANC included Marxism as an item in its political education syllabi (Kathrada, interview). The SACP was not the only cause for contention. At the time of mass imprisonments in the early 1960s, the ANC allowed only Africans to join it, although it worked closely with organizations that organized whites, Coloureds, and Indians. This racial limitation was altered in the ANC’s two major consultative conferences in exile. In the 1969 Morogoro conference in Tanzania, the ANC opened membership to supporters of all races in exile, while retaining membership of its National Executive Committee for Africans. Then, in the 1985 Kabwe conference in Zambia, the ANC allowed its members in exile to serve on the organization’s executive without regard to race (Karis and Gerhart, From Protest to Challenge, 36). In contrast, all non-Africans aligned with the Congress Movement were automatically considered part of the ANC once on Robben Island. Kathrada (interview) noted that, on the Island, Mbeki, Elias Motsoaledi, Andrew Masondo, and Joe Gqabi said that the ANC “constitution does not allow non-Africans to be members of the ANC.” He identiﬁed this as an “opportunistic” way to challenge Mandela and those who sided with him, as well as to reduce the numbers of Mandela’s supporters by excluding Indians and Coloureds.

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to participation. Mbeki (with Mhlaba), in contrast, militantly opposed any reconsideration of the 1962 Lobatsi conference resolution that called for a boycott of apartheid institutions. Soon, further acrimony ensued, concerning communication between the ANC on Robben Island and in exile, and Mandela’s status as the de facto leader of the ANC in the prison. A parallel debate concerned the armed struggle as a tactic, with Mandela possibly questioning its strategic wisdom.73 The debates dragged on for years, leading to “gossip cells and mud-slinging camps,” “at times reaching extreme tension and bitterness.”74 Various measures were undertaken including new membership on the High Organ and criticism of the men at the heart of the conﬂict. The long period of crisis, from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s, was eventually resolved with the reinstatement of Mandela, Mbeki, Sisulu, and Mhlaba onto the High Organ, and a reafﬁrmation of Mandela’s leadership. Resolution was only partial. For one, Kaizer Matanzima, chosen by the apartheid government as leader of Transkei, wanted to visit Mandela on Robben Island. Mandela and some of ANC leaders agreed to the request, but the ANC in the general sections, as well as members of the other organizations, fundamentally opposed this meeting, which therefore did not take place. More signiﬁcantly, differences were exacerbated and refocused by Harry Gwala’s return to Robben Island in the late seventies. Initially, Gwala’s impact was greater than that of the Rivonia men because he was ﬁrst placed in section E of the general sections with the youth of 1976 and captured ANC guerrillas. Naledi Tsiki was one of those young ANC cadres, and he remembers that section E, by virtue of being led by Gwala, was seen as the bastion of socialist politics: “It was the most like the Soviet Republic in South Africa.”75 Gwala openly opposed the ANC leadership in the single cells – he rejected Mandela’s nationalism and his failure to embrace socialism as the aim of the struggle – and was ambivalent in identifying Mbeki as an ally. In part, they had very different styles; Gwala was direct in his condemnation of his opponents as, for example, bourgeois, he actively and openly tried to change organizational agendas, and he isolated opponents, whereas Mbeki was subtle and less personal in his political challenges. Gwala tried overtly to transform the ANC, whereas Mbeki was subtle in molding the organization. (Furthermore, Martin Ramokgadi identiﬁed Gwala as pro-Chinese and Mbeki as Marxist, which may be consistent with Kathrada’s acknowledgment of Sino-Soviet disagreements. Although Gwala supported Stalin’s socialism, that was from an earlier period.)76 73 74 75 76

Alexander, interview; Anonymous, interview; Odendaal, “Robben Island-Bridgehead for Democracy,” 8. Document on Conﬂict within the ANC on Robben Island, 2, 1. Tsiki, interview. Ramokgadi, interview; Kathrada, interview.

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Gwala fostered hostility toward the older leadership, with the partial exception of Mbeki. This antagonism grew when Mandela wrote a document identifying the ANC’s goal as that of a bourgeois (or nonracial and democratic) revolution rather than the socialist revolution that Gwala, Mbeki, and many of the young, militant newcomers sought.77 By this point Gwala, Tsiki and many of the other recent arrivals had been moved to A section, a newer single-cell section adjacent to the more established B section where Mandela and others were housed. Tsiki suggested the ideological impasse over the ANC goals be resolved by meeting with the older section B leaders. He secured permission for this meeting from the somewhat unorthodox prison-head of the time, Captain John Harding, only to discover Gwala was ﬁercely opposed to meeting with the more senior ANC leaders. Tsiki read Gwala’s reluctance as a lack of conﬁdence in his own arguments, which made Tsiki question Gwala’s leadership if not his ideas. After angry and divisive discussions, enough younger men agreed to meet the older Rivonia men for the meeting to proceed. The interaction began Tsiki’s appreciation of much of the style and substance of Mandela’s leadership; he was impressed too that Mandela and his supporters had faced their young critics.78 Fierce debate over the nature of the ANC’s struggle raged on Robben Island at least over much of the 1980s – and, indeed, in the antiapartheid movement in South Africa itself. But controversies were hardly unique. Disagreement was a staple of life for people devoted to critiquing and changing the world. Perhaps more important than the fact or content of these disputes was their role in the ANC’s prison society. James Mange, for one, was skeptical about honesty in political discussions, which he characterized as close-minded and ﬁlled with intrigue: “We have already had our caucus in the corner. We have inﬁltrated that group. They [the opposing faction] have inﬁltrated that group.”79 While acknowledging that some discussions were simply polemical, Denmark Tungwane argued that others involved real political issues, with personal as well as political costs.80 Fezile Mlanda, however, believed that the disagreements the ANC faced contributed to its strength: “We’ve always been open to debate, discussion. We’ll thrash it out, any issue, until we come to some sort of a consensus. . . . One could easily say. . . . it has been those tensions [that] have made us what we are now.”81 The PAC on Robben Island While conﬂict in the ANC on Robben Island at times determined who held political positions in the organization’s prison administration, it apparently 77 78 79 80 81

Tsiki, interview. Ibid. Mange, interview. Tungwane, interview. Mlanda and Babenia, interview.

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did not affect the structures of the organization. In contrast, at least during the 1960s and 1970s, the PAC’s administrative arrangement was signiﬁcantly shaped by the organization’s internal disputes. According to Johnson Mlambo, the PAC did not really have a structure on Robben Island in the early 1960s.82 Malcolm Dyani recalls that the ﬁrst national executive member of the PAC to arrive on the Island, Zephania Mothopeng, was soon moved to the single cells and could have little inﬂuence on the PAC’s development at that point.83 The second national executive member to come to the Island, Selby Ngendane, quickly established a Disciplinary Committee for the PAC in 1964 as its central (prison) administration. Ngendane believed that the regime intended to demoralize political prisoners, and, more dangerously, corrupt political activists into a violent criminal subculture. The cardinal disciplinary principle of the DC was therefore to uphold the highest standards of behavior and not to succumb to criminal mores endemic in conventional prison life. Ngendane and the DC aroused antagonism because Ngendane was a “stern disciplinarian,”84 and because he displaced the authority of regional PAC leaders. The regional executive leaders were junior to the PAC’s national executive but had developed a critical role in running the still-infant organization, in the wake of the PAC’s banning. Ngendane’s authority was contested, but he argued that the PAC constitutional provision for its president to have dictatorial powers during an emergency was delegated to members of the national executive, in this case himself.85 In contrast, the regional chairmen believed that they should each lead the men of their area. Ngendane’s interpretation of the PAC constitution initially prevailed, but many grassroots PAC members identiﬁed primarily with their regional leaders. 82 83

84 85

Mlambo, interview. Dyani, interview. Although Mlambo’s (interview) view is largely consistent with Dyani about the limited inﬂuence it was possible for Mothopeng to have, and further points out that Mothopeng was transferred from Robben Island in 1965, Mlambo argues that Mothopeng was able to begin a process of uniting the regional leaderships, even if he couldn’t end it. Dyani, interview. More speciﬁcally, Ngendane and his supporters pointed out that denigrating the status of national leadership would have implied that even the president of the PAC, Robert Sobukwe, would not have had authority over the regional chairmen. This charge was a very powerful one, for Sobukwe was revered in a way few leaders, political or religious, can even imagine. Imprisoned on Robben Island from 1963 to 1969, all alone in a house under constant guard under the “Sobukwe clause,” which essentially extended an earlier prison term into indeﬁnite solitary conﬁnement and preventative detention, Sobukwe loomed large on Robben Island in a symbolic or even spiritual sense (on Sobukwe’s years on Robben Island, see Pogrund, Sobukwe, 184–304). Most prisoners report that any communication with him was completely impossible. In contrast, Dyani (interview) argued that, on very rare occasions, the PAC on Robben Island was able to receive smuggled messages from Sobukwe, although he was completely secluded on another part of the Island.

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Less than a year after it was formed, the PAC’s DC split. While Ngendane continued to insist on his executive powers, supported by some PAC members, he was nevertheless deposed. Those who sought regional organization formed a new, leaderless structure called the Catering Committee based on representation by area.86 Not all PAC members supported the Catering Committee, however. Ngendane’s supporters included others from the Eastern Cape’s border region, as well as certain other regions including the Witwatersrand region and Langa in the Cape.87 Both the DC and the Catering Committee ran as parallel and antagonistic PAC administrations on the Island. The conﬂict was heightened by two factors. First, Ngendane had alienated many skilled potential sympathizers by his high-handed and arrogant style. Second, many Catering Committee supporters were young men who believed in military struggle; they applied the rationale for violence to harass Ngendane’s supporters physically. Pro-DC men, often the minority in cells of Catering Committee supporters, were assaulted during the night and forced to denounce Ngendane, arriving for hard labor in the quarry covered with bruises. This behavior went on through much of 1965 until Catering Committee leaders were beaten up when they found themselves in the minority in a cell mainly of PAC men from the border region. This turn of events prompted young border-area men to exchange cells with older DC supporters, preparing for a mass reprisal. When the Catering Committee leaders saw what lay before them, Dyani recalled, they agreed the assaults had to stop, which they did. In 1967, another national executive leader, John Nyati Pokela, arrived in the prison and was initially sent to the general sections. He set out to heal the rift in the PAC, dismantling both the DC and the Catering Committee. Dyani remembered that, in their place, Pokela created a large, uniﬁed administration, called the secretariat, with himself as chairperson. Pokela chose ﬁve representatives from the former DC, ﬁve from the Catering Committee, and ﬁve others.88 In contrast, Mlambo remembered this committee being called, variously, the administrative committee and the coordinating committee, and that it had ﬁve members. In addition, PAC members within prison cells would have a representative who was the link between their cell and the members in other cells.89 Whether it was called the secretariat, the administrative committee, or the coordinating committee, its leaders were appointed rather than elected because “we cannot elect people democratically because 86 87 88 89

According to Dyani (interview), there was no signiﬁcance to the name “Catering Committee.” Dyani, interview. Ibid. Mlambo, interview.

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we are divided spiritually.”90 Pokela was able to bridge the rift in large part “because he commanded respect of all.”91 After uniting his organization, Pokela was taken to the single cells where he continued to chair the secretariat, maintaining communication with the PAC in the general sections on an almost daily basis.92 (Indeed, Dyani recalls that the PAC’s communication strategies became so sophisticated that the other organizations came to depend on working with them so that they could communicate with their leadership.) The leaders’ personalities and styles affected the possibility of achieving organizational unity. Dyani characterized Ngendane as “ﬁery and dynamic,” a “very, very powerful speaker . . . [who] was very conscious of political education for members of an organization.” He was, however, dogmatic and intellectually arrogant. In contrast, Mothopeng and Pokela were seen as fatherly ﬁgures and teachers, although Dyani characterizes Mothopeng as “emotional.” Pokela’s approach was that of a teacher or politician:93 “We got united truly [through and by Pokela], and he gave us a philosophy, and said we must use it not only within PAC, but with all people and organizations of the oppressed, like the ANC and whatever organizations that are 90 91 92 93

Dyani, interview. Ibid. Ibid; Mlambo, interview. Dyani is not alone in providing rich portraits of many of the personalities, especially the political leaders, on Robben Island. Harry Gwala is often described in very similar ways to Selby Ngendane, a point which I mentioned to Dyani, who agreed, although he said he had not thought of it before. Mothopeng’s qualities as a father-ﬁgure and teacher are mentioned often, but perhaps Walter Sisulu is most often identiﬁed for being like a father to many Robben Islanders, as well as being recognized more generally as especially conciliatory and compassionate. The youth critique of the older generation notwithstanding, older leaders – including and perhaps especially Nelson Mandela – were looked to as sources of wisdom and support for both personal and political crises. Moreover, the Rivonia men in particular were sources of deep inspiration, as Khehla Shubane (letter to author, n.d. approximately September 1995) noted: A group of people in the leadership of the ANC were critical in giving the Island the identity it had. Whatever else might have been thought or said about Mandela, Kathrada, Sisulu, etc. they were, in the prison context[,] exceptional men. Even in the egalitarian assumptions of prison these men represented a determination without equal in any organisation and this put them apart. What many people have remarked about namely that they are without rancour after a substantial time spent in prison is something that was remarkable in prison. I personally believe the lack of hatred among former inmates towards their captors is something which was learnt from these men. The very way in which they conducted themselves in prison engendered respect even from their adversaries. Having remained in prison for an extended period they still inspired a number of generations of Robben [I]sland prisoners. This side of their role is often overshadowed by the constant reference to their frailty.

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there.” Pokela taught that the PAC “must always emphasize the points on which we agree, [rather] than those on which we disagree in dealing with opposing organizations.” Dyani characterized his leader’s “mentality of looking at ourselves as a family,” including the emphasis on conﬂict resolution within the “family,” as a “gift.”94 Renewed peace within the PAC allowed political education within the organization to ﬂourish. The PAC had established a political desk in the 1960s which was responsible for political education in the organization.95 Over the ﬁrst years of the seventies, Dyani, Mlambo, and others in the PAC began to smuggle and transcribe books, educating themselves as well as other members of the PAC, especially the peasants from rural areas who had little, if any, formal or political education. Dyani remembered that both ANC and BCM members were impressed with the degree of political sophistication many of these men were able to acquire and pointed out that “it was not a mystery; it was just because we had all the time” to educate them – discussions would take place at work and in the cells.96 Dyani argued that this period of intellectual development eventually undermined the peace within the PAC because some of the educated members of the PAC, especially Nelson Nqumane and Ike Mutumunye,97 felt threatened by the political education efforts of Mlambo, Dyani, Mark Shinners, and others. These opponents challenged the educational initiatives by renewing the old Catering Committee–DC divisions over regionalism, by asserting that the Marxist texts studied in these discussions violated the PAC’s opposition to Marxism and communism, and by opposing the fact that some of the discussions had become joint discussions with the ANC. (These two points concerning Marxism and regionalism may well be related, given that Mlambo argued that it was Pokela who brought a serious discussion about socialism to the PAC on Robben Island, and it was also Pokela who told regional leaders that his authority, as a national executive member, was greater than theirs.)98 A commission was appointed to determine whether the charge of communism was valid, and although it found the charges unsubstantiated, Dyani and his colleagues were expelled from the PAC. This expulsion occurred in 1975, which meant that when the ’76 youth began arriving on the Island, the PAC was divided. This division affected their ability to interact with – and ultimately, impress and even recruit – the new arrivals. Although this rift was healed following Dyani’s successful challenge of Lawrence Phokanuka, the ANC Marxist theorist, in a public debate that cleared his (and others’) name 94 95 96 97 98

Dyani, interview. Ntshanyana, interview. Dyani, interview. The spelling of these men’s names is unconﬁrmed. Mlambo, interview.

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from being associated with communism, the timing of the rift had negatively affected the new prisoners’ perception of the PAC. This poor image was worsened, Dyani argued, by the ANC’s pointing out that splits within the PAC were endemic to the organization both on the Island and in exile.99 By the late 1970s, Pokela (and Dyani) had been released, and Mothopeng was returned to the prison with a new life sentence. The PAC structure was unchanged: Mothopeng was the universally recognized PAC leader at the top of the organization in the single cells; under him was the secretariat in the general sections where Mlambo, until his release in 1983, was the de facto general secretary.100 Although under Pokela people were appointed to serve on the secretariat, at least by the late 1970s or early 1980s, PAC members would be elected to this structure, which meant that potentially there would be regular changes in its composition as the prison population changed and different people were elected. Depending on how many PAC people there were in a section, up to ﬁve PAC members per section could be elected to the secretariat. In addition to the secretariat, each section had a Disciplinary Committee. Hlatswayo identiﬁed one of the PAC’s advantages as having, in prison, the original preamble, constitution, and the disciplinary code from the PAC’s founding in 1959, which forbade gossiping or undermining fellow members of the organization.101 Debates and Divisions Within the PAC In addition to the conﬂicts over the structure, political education, and, at times, membership of the PAC, the PAC also dealt with other disputes on Robben Island. Two emblematic examples are identiﬁed. The ﬁrst concerned smuggling food, an issue of considerable concern in the 1960s. A widely accepted aspect of the political prisoners’ stated and unstated code of conduct was that prisoners should not beneﬁt at the expense of comrades or organizational unity. Nevertheless, certain political prisoners worked with criminal prisoners to smuggle food, leading to less food for the whole political community. This practice of stealing food not only led to divisions but also thwarted PAC and ANC unity against the authorities. As the ANC’s Natoo Babenia commented: “Us politicos felt that smuggling was bad. For when you smuggled, or as others would have it, stole from the kitchen, you were taking food away from your comrades.”102 The problem of smuggling appeared to be greater among certain PAC followers (and the nonpolitical prisoners) and therefore had to be tackled by that organization. This internal 99 100 101 102

Dyani, interview. Hlatswayo, interview. Ibid. Babenia, Memoirs of a Saboteur, 141.

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PAC challenge was to cost Johnson Mlambo his eye, when he took smuggled food away from Joseph Khoza.103 Mlambo elaborates: In 1967 . . . we took this particular stand within the PAC that we are going to try and stop people receiving special treatment and the like. Because they are humiliating us, and it is in our interests to stop this. . . . In the process of trying to stop . . . that, we discovered someone had received some special dish and we were trying to take it away and dump that food in the toilet. Whilst we were struggling to get that dish away from him, he, together with a few who went along with that, actually put . . . his ﬁnger into my eye socket and that is how I lost my eye.104

The problem and practice of smuggling food only really ended, however, in the mid 1970s when the political prisoners ﬁnally won their struggle to have political prisoners rather than criminals prepare their food. While the dispute over smuggling concerned the question of how best to survive prison and therefore how best to resist, the PAC, like other organizations, was also often absorbed by ideological issues. Perhaps the two issues of greatest concern were the status of whites (and, to a lesser extent, nonAfricans) in the PAC and a liberated South Africa, and the role of socialism in the PAC. Most former Islanders from the PAC argue that the PAC’s leadership, in particular Zeph Mothopeng, had profoundly and deeply inﬂuenced PAC members to recognize that the PAC’s notion of an African was not one based on race but on an essential and primary loyalty to Africa, and that the PAC believed that the human race was the only “race.” Furthermore, over time, PAC members came to learn that certain whites, Indians, and Coloureds had joined the PAC in exile. The issue of socialism or Marxism had a more active and enduring force. Mention has already been made of Dyani’s claim that he and other PAC members who taught themselves and others about Marxist theory were temporarily expelled from the organization. By the time Hlatswayo came to Robben Island about four or ﬁve years later, the tide appeared to have turned.105 Now the PAC mainstream accepted certain socialist tenets, and Hlatswayo felt that the challenge within the PAC was coming from a small group of “workerists”106 who wanted the PAC to teach Marxist theory only, whereas Hlatswayo argued socialism needed to be integrated with African nationalism. Furthermore, he believed that the disagreement was as much about these more educated men wanting a higher status as it was about the issues purportedly at stake. In any event, because of good structures of communication, the conﬂicts were quickly resolved, and other differences that arose in time were easily managed. This 103 104 105 106

Naidoo and Sachs, Island in Chains, 89; Anonymous, interview. Mlambo, interview. Hlatswayo, interview. William Cobbett and Robin Cohen, eds. Popular Struggles in South Africa. (London: James Currey, 1988), 15, explained workerists as “those pushing solely for a worker-led and worker-based” struggle.

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resolution was also enabled by the PAC’s commitment to democratic centralism, which meant that an idea could begin with one person, but as long as he had convinced others of the correctness of argument, the organization could embrace the idea.107 The BCM on Robben Island When black consciousness supporters began arriving on Robben Island from 1974, they came as members of a wide array of black consciousness groups; including SASO, the Black People’s Convention (BPC), SASM, National Youth Organization (NAYO), and, in later years, the South African Youth Revolutionary Council (SAYRCO). All these groups identiﬁed as members of a BCM, however, and as such established the BCM as a new political grouping on the Island. The most important structure in the BCM’s Island administration was the Central Committee.108 Within the cells, when there were enough BCM people, “a committee would be formed to take charge of BCM affairs and membership.”109 An executive committee (in Matsobane’s terms) was made up of representatives from each section. Although Mcongo refers to the Chairman’s Committee, constituted by the chairmen of each cell’s BCM members, they appear to be the same unit. The BCM’s structures on Robben Island stayed the same, although some of the functions people were assigned to perform, within or outside the BCM, would change over time. One function was that of ambassadors who were in charge of communication. Ambassadors would include the organization’s representatives who worked in the kitchen. As was true for the other organizations, secrecy concerning the chain of command was maintained in case the authorities caught a courier or message.110 In its ﬁrst few years on Robben Island, especially between 1977 and 1980, the BCM dealt with many internal problems that were in some ways similar to those that had beset the PAC. Both organizations confronted severe state repression and imprisonment as very new and, in many ways, not yet well-established groups or movements. Although the black consciousness groupings had been emerging since the late 1960s, they were a disparate group uniﬁed by an ideology rather than by one national organization. One of the ﬁrst black consciousness groups that came to the Island – the men from the SASO-BPC Nine trial – included national leaders within the nascent BCM. They were also, however, relatively young and inexperienced (at least compared to people like Mandela, Mbeki, or Mothopeng) and lacked the legitimacy of having been elected by their national organizations. In addition, 107 108 109 110

Hlatswayo, interview. Matsobane, interview; Mcongo, interview. (Matsobane pointed out that it was similar to the BCM structure outside prison.) Matsobane, interview. Mcongo, interview.

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the BCM adherents that followed them into the prison, as well as the BCM members already in prison, had their own sense of worth and achievement and would not automatically accept the indeﬁnite leadership of the SASO–BPC Nine men. Furthermore, in the intense ideological and recruitment battles that soon began raging on the Island, BCM members were being exposed to new ideas, new leaders, and new approaches. In addition to the range of groups that made up the BCM and the potential and actual power and ideological struggles that took place, many people who came onto Robben Island ostensibly under a BCM banner were not, in fact, necessarily politicized or aligned with black consciousness thinking or organizations. The relative structural weakness of the BCM was a key contributor to the recruitment struggles (discussed in Chapter Six) that took place. Debates and Divisions Within the BCM It is difﬁcult to separate the issue of recruitment from other conﬂicts and debates in the BCM; nonetheless, the two major and overlapping issues of dissension that faced the BCM in prison were the questions of leadership and socialism. The most senior BCM members on Robben Island, namely, Mosibudi Mangena and Pandelani Nefolovhodwe, one of the SASO–BPC Nine, explained that the executives of SASO and the BPC became the black consciousness leadership inside the prison.111 These leaders not only developed a rigorous program of political education and transmitted it to the members but also encouraged the BCM members to elect a four- to ﬁveperson section-based executive committee. These initiatives were meant to educate members and ensure that they were not docile followers. For someone like Soto Ndukwana – then a younger BCM member who, together with Saki Macozoma and Amos Masondo, did challenge the older SASO-BPC Nine leaders – these slightly older men were more rigid and protective of their authority.112 The three younger men were engaged in rethinking aspects of the BCM’s ideology and also attempted to take advantage of a rotating leadership scheme in the organization to have greater inﬂuence. When it came their turn to assume the leadership position, however, the SASO–BPC men refused to leave their positions. Ndukwana recollected that the leadership actively opposed their questioning, and he was suspended from the BCM: “The suspension was for creating confusion within the organization and for creating an alternative administration.”113 Macozoma, Masondo, and another critic, Stone Sizani, were also expelled.114 111 112 113 114

Nefolovhodwe, interview; Mangena, On Your Own, 105. Sotomela Ndukwana, interview with author, tape recording, Johannesburg, 29 November 1994; Macozoma and Masondo, interviews. Ndukwana, interview. Macozoma, interview.

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In addition to questioning the behavior of the leadership, Ndukwana, Macozoma, Masondo, and others began to interrogate some of the categories used in black consciousness thought. Masondo explained he and others began to ask whether the primary place of race and consciousness in BCM thinking were adequate tools of analysis to explain the South African reality and guide the struggle against oppression. They concluded that they were not; at minimum, Marxist ideas and an understanding of class, and not simply race, were necessary supplements to black consciousness philosophy. While some of the BCM leaders like Strini Moodley and Nefolovhodwe were more ﬂexible in their thinking about such issues, others, like Saths Cooper, were more conservative and rejected the younger men’s propositions.115 During the 1980s, Morontshi Matsobane explained that the low moments in the BCM’s functioning were associated with the diminishing number of BCM cadres. Most BCM members had relatively shorter sentences, and there were few new BCM prisoners over time. Pointing out that naturally no one in the BCM wanted there to be more political prisoners, Matsobane explained that it was nevertheless difﬁcult to be a small organization.116 Presumably the difﬁculties of size also highlighted the relative weakness of the BCM outside in South Africa and in exile. On the other hand, one of the high points for the organization in prison was when BCM guerrillas arrived on the Island. Although the BCM was accepted as an organization, the two other liberation movements tended to treat the members as politicians, not revolutionaries or soldiers. However, the arrival of men like Khotso Seatlholo of SAYRCO, who had been convicted of revolutionary activity, improved their status and, no doubt, their sense of contribution to the struggle. 115 116

Masondo, interview. Matsobane, interview.

6 Debates and Disagreements

It would have been unrealistic to put a number of people of any political organization together and expect those people never to quarrel.1

All resistance, whether it was directed at improving the food or reestablishing banned organizations, raised questions about the most effective means of opposition and its consequences. Perspectives on the most appropriate courses of action were inﬂuenced both by generational and organizational politics. Both factors shaped two debates: ofﬁcial classiﬁcation of the prisoners on the one hand and inmate behavior toward warders on the other. More than shaping debates in prison, organizations wanted to shape external politics, including by recruiting fellow inmates to one’s own movement. This competition introduced heightened levels of conﬂict into the Island community, which threatened community cohesion, and thus resistance itself.

How Best to Resist? The tensions and conﬂicts on Robben Island in the 1960s and between 1977 and 1980 or 1981 had both similar and different causes in the two different time periods. In both cases, signiﬁcant aspects of the tensions arose out of a struggle for ideological and organizational dominance. When prisoners were sent to Robben Island in the 1960s, the PAC’s split from the ANC was still a recent event, and emotions and passions were often still raw. More importantly, however, prisoners needed to work out ways of living together. They also had to identify common ground in the strategies and tactics of challenging the authorities in prison. For example, in Indres Naidoo’s account of the ﬁrst major and successful hunger strike in the prison, he claimed that PAC national executive member Selby Ngendane led a small faction of prisoners 1

Mkalipi, interview.

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who would not join the strike because it was “‘engineered, planned and dominated by the Communists.’”2 Some PAC members like Stanley Mogoba have argued that Naidoo is often unfair and inaccurate in his treatment of the PAC;3 however, the more important point is that there are always going to be some people who disagree with the ethical or strategic value of a particular course of action. Probably at no point in Robben Island history were the debates on the correct way to oppose the state sharper than in the late 1970s. During that period, particular standpoints concerning the appropriate understanding and methods of resistance were informed not only by organizational background but, and more importantly, by generational attitudes and prior political experiences.4 As such, competing logics about appropriate resistance strategies tended to be the divergent understandings of two generations of political activists. By the mid 1970s, the older men who had, for the most part, been in the prison since the 1960s seemed to have had their attitude to resistance within prison shaped by three predominant factors. First, they had experienced extreme brutality at the hands of an uninhibited state, and they measured their current conditions and attitudes against their past experiences. In that sense, they recognized the enormous improvements they had won in prison conditions and may have measured progress more from what had been than what standards ought to prevail. Second, there was probably at least some sense of resignation to the status quo; while no prisoner celebrates the imprisonment of a comrade, the relatively few new prisoners that came into the prison in the late 1960s and early 1970s no doubt had a depressing effect, as it tended to conﬁrm the picture of the struggle at a standstill. Disappointment at the political lull was probably not helped by the aging of men who were beginning their second decade of imprisonment from 1972 or 1973. This reality of a collective or common depression, lull, or frustration is supported by the comments in the sporting records, cited in Chapter Four, although often dismissed by respondents. Third, and arguably of great importance, these men had come to have a very pragmatic understanding of resistance. They had come to believe that if one is to withstand and, more importantly, make productive use of imprisonment, one could not expend one’s energies on constant ﬁghts with the authorities (or indeed, among prisoners). One had to strive continuously for basic rights and privileges; beyond that, one had to continue the antiapartheid struggle in prison by developing organizations and the members that composed them. 2 3 4

Naidoo and Sachs, Island in Chains, 168. Stanley Mogoba, interview with author, tape recording, Johannesburg, July 1990. These clearly had implications for resistance outside the prison, an issue that is beyond the scope of this work.

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This attitude of pragmatic resistance is exempliﬁed in the following comment by Nelson Mandela: We soon became aware that in terms of our daily lives . . . an ordinary warder, not a sergeant, could be more important to us than the Commissioner of Prisons or even the Minister of Justice. If you went to the Commissioner of Prisons or the Minister and said, ‘Sir, it’s very cold, I want four blankets’, he would look at the regulations and say, ‘You can only have three blankets . . . more would be a violation of the regulations . . .’. If you went to a warder in your section and said ‘Look, I want an extra blanket’, and if you treated him with respect, he’d just go to the storeroom, give you an extra blanket, and that’s the end of it.5

This approach asserts then that not all times were appropriate for making a public or principled stand or launching a protest. If one wanted to achieve results, one might take a pragmatic route, which could and did include being polite to the enemy. Indeed, Mandela acknowledged the efﬁcacy of this approach when he recounts a lesson he learned when prisoner grievances were ignored because he publicly challenged the authority of a prison ofﬁcial. He argued that “the best way to effect change on Robben Island was to attempt to inﬂuence ofﬁcials privately rather than publicly. I was sometimes condemned for appearing to be too accommodating to prison ofﬁcials, but I was willing to accept the criticism in exchange for the improvement.”6 While Mandela is the best known exemplar of this perspective, and was perhaps the most extreme, he was certainly not alone. When Harry Gwala, usually considered one of the ANC’s most hardline and uncompromising representatives, was asked whether the youth were right in their criticism of the older leadership as too conciliatory, he replied that the new young prisoners were very inexperienced; they were very militant in prison he argued, which was not surprising because it was their militant actions that had led them to prison. “But,” he continued, “[we] always distinguished between when to embark on mass action and when to talk. Whereas at times young people’s actions bordered on anarchy.”7 From the perspective of the PAC, Ntshanyana and Mlambo, who had been on Robben Island since the early 1960s, too often considered the younger prisoners too hasty and aggressive.8 In contrast, the young men and often boys of the 1976 generation tended proudly to deﬁne themselves as militants who would resist everywhere and always. This militancy and deliberate deﬁance was a result of several factors. 5 6

7 8

Mandela, in Schadeberg, Voices from Robben Island, 17, 19. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 364–365. In many ways, this comment is a metaphor for both Mandela’s initiation of negotiations with the South African government and the advantage the state took of engaging prisoners in private conversation when they could not speak to the banned ANC itself, in terms of the public rules the National Party had established. Gwala, interview. Ntshanyana, interview; Mlambo, interview.

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First, they too had experienced the severities of apartheid. They had come of age in the overcrowded homes, schools, and townships that racism and apartheid created, at a time when the already poor standard of living showed signs of decline, with rising inﬂation and declining employment.9 On top of this, they experienced brutal repression in response to their 1976 and 1977 rebellion: tear-gassing, beatings, shootings, detention without trial, torture in jail, and unjust trials. They tended to feel that little could be lost and much might be won with a militant expression of anger and pain. Second, the youth of the 1970s were often appalled at the silence and acquiescence of their parents, their teachers, and the older generation, who had been subdued into silent submission. In an anguished editorial, Aggrey Klaaste, editor of the black newspaper Weekend World, berated the parents of the Soweto youth, “‘Singa, magwala’ (we are cowards).”10 Third, black consciousness ideology had provided an antidote to the older generation’s meekness: “The militant proselytising of Biko and his colleagues imbued in their younger counterparts in SASM a sense of rebellion and self-assertion – the beginnings of a generational consciousness.”11 Steve Biko and colleagues who shared his vision were concerned about resocializing the younger generation so that they would take responsibility for their actions whatever the situation they found themselves in, and not to wait for others to take the initiative. If the white apartheid regime wanted mute compliance and resignation, they would be the opposite: militant, vocal, and angry. “At least among urban youth,” Anthony Marx notes, “the days of bowing and scraping were long gone, with the positive self-identity consistent with BC [black consciousness] expressed as an angry desire to tear down rather than build up.”12 These were the boys and men who were to arrive on Robben Island and violently clash with the authorities and, in turn, come into conﬂict with the older generation, who often had very different notions of appropriate strategies and tactics. In addition to broad trends, particular factors or experiences shaped the outlook of the youth who came of age in the 1970s. One example is the SASO–BPC Nine and their trial, which ran from August 1975 to December 1976. The defendants used the public nature of the hearings to their advantage, turning the court into a stage to instruct the public about black consciousness and politics as well as to challenge the authorities. Leading by example, the Cooper defendants set out to make the most of the political theater of the courtroom. They maintained their combative stance throughout the trial, managing also to convert the courtroom into a forum for mature political instruction. In May 1976 when the defense subpoenaed Biko as a witness and he 9 10 11 12

See, for example, Marx, Lessons of Struggle, 61–63. Cited by Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945, 334. Shaun Johnson, “‘The Soldiers of Luthuli,’” 100. Marx, Lessons of Struggle, 61.

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testiﬁed for ﬁve days with all his customary persuasiveness, the court and the public through the press were audience to an open seminar on the history, aims and principles of black consciousness . . . uncompromising in its moral assertiveness.13

In this trial, and in an array of national confrontations, the young 1970s generation of activists distinguished themselves by confronting or defying the government, thus making an impact upon and impressing a wide popular audience. These younger men were therefore often deeply disappointed with the behavior of the older men they met in prison, whom they saw as compliant rather than deﬁant. Zithulele Cindi, one of the SASO–BPC Nine, commented bitterly: We were the ﬁrst of the younger generation on the Island.14 . . . [We were t]hen followed by an avalanche of the post-June ’76 people. . . . But it was partly a disappointing experience. People never lived up to our expectations. Remember we were charged partly for eulogizing them, calling them our leaders . . . saying our leaders were on Robben Island. But you meet them and they don’t match expectations. . . . We came with our vibrant militancy and our outright deﬁance. . . . We got there and we found these people who we look up to as our leaders . . . sheepishly [cringing]. . . . [When] we went through the corridor . . . they literally turned their back on us and faced the wall. Now that’s a practice that is being enforced in these prisons. . . . There’s a prison command that you face the wall. So they would always turn and face the wall. But this was not what we had expected – the black man we had always eulogized now turning his back on us. . . . So we then had to embark on a deﬁance now of the warders. We would say hey, black style [clenched ﬁst up] and they’d say “keep quiet.” And we’d say there’s nothing wrong in greeting . . . this is our form of greeting. . . . So they accepted that. We scored a victory. Then we moved it a step further. . . . [The point of it was] to restore their dignity.15

In turn, the older men tended to feel that the new activists and prisoners did not understand the enormous improvements in conditions they had achieved, and the tremendous costs associated with those changes. Nor did they believe that deﬁance for the sake of deﬁance was always the wisest strategy. Johnson Mlambo of the PAC recalls that by and large all the people that came in after ’76 felt that the old organizations [the PAC and ANC] were more or less dead and that they are everything. Even when we advised them how to handle the prison authorities etc., they felt that, well, some of our advice was uncalled for. And some of the things we predicted actually happened. . . . Here is the group of people now coming in, and they . . . mix with other people of the Black Consciousness Movement but there is no-one . . . enlightening them because of their, you know, over-assertiveness. . . . They were a younger generation who perhaps felt that “why is this like this, why is this like that,” and who did not want to give credit to what had gone on before. What we were, where we were, 13 14 15

Karis and Gerhart, From Protest to Challenge, 146. From Mangena’s account, they were the third BCM grouping to arrive on Robben Island. Cindi, interview.

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[was] because of so many struggles. . . . They were to some extent also a little reckless as far as the militancy [was concerned]. . . . [But that is] always to be expected from young people.16

The generational conﬂict was in many ways epitomized in the disagreements over classiﬁcation. A standard feature of South African prisons was the classiﬁcation of prisoners into four categories – A being the highest, and D the lowest17 – to reward good behavior with certain privileges and punish bad behavior with the retraction of those privileges. Thus, A group prisoners were, for example, allowed to buy food and, when legalized in 1980, buy and read newspapers. These beneﬁts were denied to prisoners of lower classiﬁcations. One’s classiﬁcation also determined one’s right to study, the number of letters one could send and receive, and the number and length of visits (and, later, whether these would be contact visits or not). Political prisoners had always challenged classiﬁcation, arguing that political prisoners should not be classiﬁed; “We are all prisoners. Why should there be differentiation? If there’s to be a privilege we [should] all get it.”18 They furthermore opposed the fact that political prisoners would initially be classiﬁed at the lowest D rung, although criminals would begin their terms classiﬁed at B level.19 Although the older Robben Islanders had opposed classiﬁcation, they accepted it as a necessary evil. Ahmed Kathrada commented: We never took a decision that we are going to refuse classiﬁcation. Our demand was always that all political prisoners should be treated as A groups. There should be no discrimination among political prisoners, because the rational for promotion was your so-called behavior, and we said it’s an insulting thing to tell us how to behave. . . . So we never used to . . . ask . . . to be classiﬁed . . . but we said we won’t refuse if we appear before the [classiﬁcation] board. PAC was the same, you see, PAC never refused classiﬁcation. . . . Neville Alexander . . . [of the Unity Movement] resisted for a while, but he eventually became A group.20

In contrast, however, the black consciousness leadership rejected classiﬁcation (although Mangena seems to have accepted the necessity or wisdom of tolerating classiﬁcation).21 In practice, this rejection entailed not fulﬁlling 16 17

18 19 20 21

Mlambo, interview. Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid, 192, wrote: “In 1980 political prisoners on Robben Island who were in Group One were accorded the privilege of buying newspapers.” This phrasing suggests that at some point in the late 1970s or early 1980s the classiﬁcation system changed from an A-B-C-D basis to three numbered groups, where group one was the highest and group three was the lowest. This is not, however, reﬂected in the interviews, as Islanders continue to talk about their classiﬁcations as A, D, and so on. Cindi, interview. Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 76–80; Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 347–348; Macozoma, interview. Kathrada, interview. Mangena, On Your Own, 97.

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behavioral requirements the state set as an incentive for improved classiﬁcation, or claiming not to accept or use the regime’s “promotions.” In part the black consciousness men too rejected classiﬁcation because it was “prison apartheid” that assumed that the state had the right to judge political prisoners. They resented the authorities’ attempts to manipulate their behavior by using the carrot and stick of classiﬁcation to reward and punish prisoners. In addition, the black consciousness adherents, at least from the arrival of the SASO–BPC Nine, saw classiﬁcation as creating a hierarchy among prisoners that would lend itself to divide-and-rule tactics, as well as other negative behavior. In particular, once the ANC (and to a lessor extent, the PAC) began recruiting, or at least discussing politics with, the new young prisoners, BCM members argued that classiﬁcation became a means of bribery. In effect, black consciousness opponents of both classiﬁcation and recruitment by the other organizations accused the older men with their A privileges of seducing vulnerable young activists into their organizations, or at least perspectives, with food. For this younger generation, this use of food was a complete violation of behavior appropriate to political prisoners. Black consciousness leader Pandelani Nefolovhodwe elaborated: All cadres belonging to our organization went in being classiﬁed D and went out being D. We saw in the classiﬁcation process of the South African prison authorities, that disorder, and that bribery and that which will destroy the spirit of comrades. So we formulated a policy, as the Black Consciousness Movement . . . that we are not going to be classiﬁed. That as I get in, I’ll go out as I am. (I think some of our cadres were then classiﬁed later, when there were very few [black consciousness members], when we had all gone out, I think there were about 20 or less than that, then there was no longer any question of us [i.e., the different organizations] clashing.) [Earlier, however,] . . . we were many and you could have imagined that one of us become A, enjoy certain privileges, and the rest of the people are not A. It causes a lot of friction. [Those who had accepted A classiﬁcation before the SASO Nine arrived were allowed to keep it.] [The authorities] sometimes used to offer [classiﬁcation]: “we think you are behaving very well and we would want you to be a B.” We say “No, keep it. I’m alright where I am. I eat your food free, I don’t need to buy biscuits.”22

Nefolovhodwe argued that even if organizational abuses were excluded, accepting what in prison were luxuries opened up the potential for coming to depend on these, which the state can then use against one. This pragmatic asceticism was not unique to the BCM. Another member of the younger generation who embraced militancy as key to his political identity was the ANC’s James Mange, who constantly fought the seductive lures of the state and his organization. [When] I got [to Robben Island] I had been graded C whereas everybody started [with being graded D], and instead of going up I went down. [Laughs.] I went the 22

Nefolovhodwe, interview.

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other way down. I stayed a D grade I think from ’81 to 1990. You know the privileges that goes with that and so on. And each time there would be pressure from friends and families and so on, because I couldn’t get contact visits and they tried talking me around to changing. In the ﬁrst place I shouldn’t have been here [in prison] – [the] circumstances that brought me here are war. . . . As far as I’m concerned I’m still on enemy territory. And in order to preserve my sanity, my strengths, I’ll have to learn to do without. Prison can become very frustrating if you learn not to do without. That stick that always lands above your head, you can write ﬁve letters, you can have seven visits or whatever, contact visits, that sort of straight-jackets you. . . . I had dreadlocks this long, you know [indicates]. And prison regulations doesn’t have room for that. But that was one of my weapons. Because that said to me victory all the time. . . . I can’t exchange my will-power for the small nothings that you are offering.23

There is certainly sound political sense in the argument that classiﬁcation is not only offensive but also a clever divide-and-rule strategy that the state could use to manipulate to the detriment of antiapartheid struggles. Furthermore, the privileges of higher classiﬁcation could potentially lead to the prison being a little less harsh and even more “liberal,” but liberalization of the prison is also often recognized as something that can lead to problems for organizational coherence. Petros Mashigo (interview), an ANC member, noted that often inmate support for hunger strikes (intended to improve conditions or challenge the state in some way) would be divided along the lines of classiﬁcation. Those with higher classiﬁcations and therefore more privileges would oppose embarking on hunger strikes, and those with lower classiﬁcations and a harsher existence would support the strike strategy. This privilege-based division lends signiﬁcant support to Mange’s contention that “in a resistance movement it is only rebelling that keeps you brave,”24 and that access to privileges in prison might blunt the resistant and deﬁant edge of prisoners. The absence of an all-powerful enemy can further lead to apathy or (greater) divisions in the ranks, and political organizations may have less to offer members when there is the competition of movies, television, and a relatively undisciplined life. Saki Macozoma reminded one that “there is another pole to prison life, where people spend all day talking about movies they have seen and women they have known – and manufacture the stories in any case. The counter-attractions increased with the liberalization of the prison, when there were more movies, sport, and so on.”25 23 24 25

Mange, interview, emphasis added. Ibid. Macozoma, interview. Denis Goldberg (interview), who served most of his sentence in Pretoria Central Prison, similarly commented: “I will say that as the conditions began to improve, so the tensions would arise in our community. There was less a need to face a common enemy every minute of the day. The community also changed because we were of a particular generation initially.”

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There were, however, a number of problems with the principled anticlassiﬁcation argument, at least from the perspective of resolving complex issues faced by the majority of prisoners on Robben Island. First, even though renouncing privileges that might slightly mitigate the hardships of prison life was difﬁcult for everyone, it was also true that those who had very long and life sentences would be hurt the most by the strategy. The SASO–BPC Nine were given ﬁve- and six-year sentences, and most of the 1976 militants were given similar sentence lengths.26 In contrast, however, many of the older generation, the incoming guerrillas as well as some of the 1976 generation had much longer sentences. For men dealing with long-term imprisonment, the loss of beneﬁts and rights would not easily be compensated for by the relative gains of strategic asceticism.27 For example, the more prisoners were able to have support from families via letters or visits, the more they were likely to cope with their sentences.28 Second, practical problems began to emerge with the ban on improved levels of classiﬁcation. For example, Ahmed Kathrada was critical of what he saw as black consciousness’ hypocrisy of denouncing classiﬁcation but accepting its beneﬁts: A number of black consciousness chaps came . . . with the idea . . . they shouldn’t accept classiﬁcation. So what these black consciousness chaps did is they used to work with this PAC chap who was in the Tuck Shop, and he used to wangle his books, so they used to order food. [And when the authorities allowed newspapers but said] 26

27

28

A former Robben Islander (anonymous interview) who was incarcerated for ﬁve years for recruiting soldiers for Umkhonto we Sizwe said the older men would emphasize that ﬁve years was a short sentence; indeed, they would say that one could barely receive all the necessary political education in that time. He therefore only realized well after his release that a ﬁveyear prison sentence really is a long sentence, perhaps all the more so for a young person, barely out of his teens. Similarly, Sibusiso Ndebele (interview), who too was on Robben Island, said that a seven-year sentence is not considered a long sentence for South Africa. James Mange (interview), a member of the ANC who often differed with the leadership, and who was sentenced to twenty years, was probably the most insistent on rejecting classiﬁcation as inimical to the demands of being a political prisoner. He ultimately accepted A classiﬁcation when it was offered with no strings attached. Former prisoners do not necessarily explicitly make the argument that those with longer sentences would have been most hurt by the loss of privileges. It does, however, seem clear that the losses of beneﬁts would be greatest for them. Michael Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid, 159–160, who had a ﬁfteen-year sentence and who only had three visits during that time wrote: “Letters are a prisoner’s lifeline, not only letters, visits and other channels of communication, photos.” Nelson Mandela explained that he asked his wife Winnie Mandela to forgo her protest against carrying a pass so that she would be allowed to visit him. He wrote that “I thought it more important that we see each other than to resist the petty machinations of the authorities, and Winnie consented to carry a pass. I missed her enormously and needed the reassurance of seeing her, and we also had vital family matters to discuss.” Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 370. One might well imagine that Mandela, or others in a similar position, may have taken a different approach if they were faced with a “short” sentence, rather than a life sentence.

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newspapers are only for A groups, so they used to read all our newspapers. . . . So it was all a sham, this thing of boycotting classiﬁcation.29

Finding ways around classiﬁcation is not necessarily denied by those who opposed it. Saths Cooper did not accept classiﬁcation, he said, but “I got classiﬁed unknown to me, and then discovered I was B group, so I said why should I deny myself writing all these letters . . . and I wrote the letters.” That did not, he continued, lead to tension because the thing that was most problematic was the A group status, because that allowed you food stuffs and you see it was also an elitist thing because most prisoners came from very humble backgrounds, no money whatsoever, so it caused all those types of tensions.30 . . . There was a time when I beneﬁtted from getting bought food stuff without being classiﬁed [chuckle] because the guy who was in charge of the shop would just write it as, you see I think he had a stock . . . to account for the amount rather than the items, so he would give me the stuff.31

What for Cooper was a clever manipulation of the system was for Kathrada a lack of honesty in the way one carried out the strategies of struggle. The point is not to judge the perspective of either man, who in any case represents many others who shared the same opinions, but rather to illustrate that the strategy of avoiding classiﬁcation could too be vulnerable to problems of principle and practice as was the direct use of classiﬁcation. Certainly, in the rumor mill that is prison,32 and the very tense environment between and among the generations, organizations, and factions that deﬁned Robben Island in the late 1970s and early 1980s, these competing approaches to dealing with the state (in this case in the form of classiﬁcation) did not resolve the conﬂict. (Kgalema Motlanthe argued that the contradictions between black consciousness leaders denouncing classiﬁcation and then reaping the beneﬁts of classiﬁcation provided one reason for one-time black consciousness supporters to leave that organization.)33 Third, and most important to the argument of this book, rejecting classiﬁcation ignored an achievement and fundamental insight of the older generation. In this understanding, prisoner struggles to ameliorate conditions 29 30

31 32 33

Kathrada, interview. The question of money raises another hornet’s nest in the history of recruitment. Some of the ANC’s opponents have accused it of selectively supplying funds (through external funders) to some of its prison members but not others and of using the promise of ﬁnancial support as a weapon in recruitment (Mange, interview; Zithulele Cindi, interview by Gail Gerhart in Karis and Gerhart, From Protest to Challenge, 485). Furthermore, as I am trying to make clear in this broader point, the accusations of abuse of ﬁnances could and did go in more than one direction. Kgalema Motlanthe (interview) argued that in the “Black Consciousness Movement the SASO groups came with funds, and had access to funds because they had Shun Chetty, one lawyer, who was working for them almost full time.” Cooper, interview. Motlanthe, interview. Ibid.

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provided material improvements that helped people survive their incarceration and also were used by the prisoners to create new gaps and contradictions within which to continue the struggle. In other words, improving conditions was not just an end in itself; improved conditions and increased privileges and rights were used to further the struggle. One obvious example of this concerns academic studies. The constant struggle for academic studies fulﬁlled several critical goals. On an individual level within the prison, it helped keep people mentally alert and increased the worth of their day-today lives. In addition, it could provide people with a means to make a living upon release. For the collective, political ends of the various organizations, not only did academic study allow people the intellectual sophistication to master complex ideological arguments, but it also provided a steady stream of books that were critical to political education in the prison. (Because this use of books was outlawed, prisoners would transcribe whole books so that the handwritten copies would provide a library after the student had to return them.34 Smuggled or illegal books would also be transcribed where these could be obtained.) The utility of privileges for political ends was not only seen in study rights. A second example is that prisoners used contact visits to smuggle in contraband, in one case money to bribe a warder to buy a shortwave radio, which was critical for communication.35 A third instance was that a photograph was used to smuggle codes from the ANC on Robben Island to the ANC in exile, to facilitate communication. Prisoners kept looking for ways in which they could clandestinely maintain contact with the ANC in exile. [Aside from the importance of being informed about events beyond the prison for psychological well-being], we could debrief prisoners about problems they had encountered inﬁltrating the country or trying to carry on the struggle in South Africa. . . . That information would be passed to the leadership in Lusaka. Prisoners’ letters had to deal strictly with family business. Consequently the codes were built around everyday words like events and relatives.36

In these examples, the uses of privileges provide critical examples of resistance to incarceration and the political conditions that sustained that imprisonment. In this context then, resistance is seen as a constructive political act that aims to challenge the status quo not only by opposition, but by creation and imaginative use of material conditions. Another, and very important, example of the appropriate means to resist apartheid within the prison concerns the warders (as alluded to in the earlier quotation from Mandela). Once again, the older generation claimed 34 35 36

A few examples of these transcriptions can be found in the Mayibuye Center archives at the University of the Western Cape. Banda, interview. Personal communication between Mac Maharaj and Barbara Buntman, Johannesburg, 26 March 2003.

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the beneﬁts of “taming” the warders, usually irrespective of their organizational afﬁliation. Mandela’s view that “the most important person in any prisoner’s life is . . . the warder in one’s section” is based on the understanding that a nonconﬂictual and even cordial relationship with the warders could have an enormous impact on the prisoners’ day-to-day existence.37 Mlambo recounted that the humanity of prisoners could change the perspective of the warders who “had been conditioned to treat you as animals, but, by and large, with the march of time, some of them start to see the human being in you.”38 Alexander too recalled this lesson learned on the Island: Perhaps the greatest irony of all was that eventually we became the teachers, literally, of some of these warders . . . The authorities quickly realized that this meant that they couldn’t keep any set of warders for too long because the danger of fraternisation was obviously very great. . . . I want to underline the role of people like Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu in particular [in teaching us how to deal with the authorities]. . . . While we were terribly impetuous and would have run ourselves suicidally against the prison walls . . . [t]hey realized that if we adopted a particularly humane, digniﬁed, friendly attitude (short, of course, in collaborating in our own indignity) that eventually we would break through.39

The older generation sought to persuade the younger men that the best interests of antiapartheid resistance within and without the prison demanded a strategic approach. In Mandela’s elaboration of the value of working with or at least neutralizing the warders, one achievement could be to open these state functionaries to the wisdom of the ANC’s position. (Indeed, a number of respondents refer to “taming,” neutralizing, or even converting the warders.) But, arguably more important in the bigger picture, Mandela also points out that “sympathetic warders facilitated one of our most vital tasks on Robben Island: communication. We regarded it as our duty to stay in touch with our men in F and G, which is where the general prisoners were kept. As politicians, we were just as intent on fortifying our organization in prison as we had been outside.”40 If one of the highest forms of resistance is to continue (and even to further) one’s political organization and political struggle within, or as a result of, prison, this kind of resistance was crucial. Gradually, many of the younger generation came to embrace the perspective of the older men. For some, this change of view was achieved by joining the older liberation movements, most notably the ANC, though the PAC also had new recruits from the Island. As this chapter has argued, however, organizational identity and afﬁliation was not the only or even necessarily most important means to embrace a more far-reaching vision of 37 38 39 40

Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 365. Mlambo, interview. Alexander, “Robben Island: A Site of Struggle,” 77–78. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 366, emphasis added.

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resistance. Saths Cooper made the following comment on Terror Lekota’s suspension from the BCM (to which Cooper was party). What Lekota was saying, Cooper argued, was that “Shouldn’t we look at what the ANC guys are saying in terms of our principled position, we objecting to many of these practices? Maybe they have explanations for some of these things and maybe . . . because they come from a different time they’re accepting classiﬁcation. We’re rejecting it – shouldn’t we actually ﬁnd out?” And because of that heavy idealist militant youth orientation, everyone said “No, we can’t do it”.41

After release from prison, Cooper held leadership positions in the black consciousness AZAPO, before adopting a position of independent nonafﬁliation. Mike Xego came into Robben Island as a black consciousness adherent, but joined the ANC on Robben Island. He recalled that our perception of the old comrades [was] that they were too compromising with the warders. We would punch the warders. If warders touched us, we would quickly punch back. There were daily skirmishes. . . . Gradually Madiba [Mandela] and the others were told to tame us. It was not the regime but the ANC that cracked us. One by one, the ANC underground on Robben Island worked on us – on individuals – talking with us and smuggling notes to us.42

The learning process was not, however, all one way.43 For one, the ’76 generation pushed the boundaries the state had imposed on political prisoner life back further. Hard labor in the quarries came to an end, and somewhat more constructive occupations such as carpentry and sewing began to be available. Around this time, the state was under great pressure to give into such demands, both from the militant younger prisoners and heightened external monitoring. Eddie Daniels acknowledged the value of BCM militance when he noted that the BCM prisoners “fought the authorities physically when the authorities tried to persecute them. This resistance on their part caused the authorities to be more careful in their approach to us, which in turn, 41 42 43

Cooper, interview, emphasis added. Mike Xego, interview with Tom Karis, tape recording, Port Elizabeth, 8 October 1993, in Karis-Gerhart Collection. Notwithstanding the black youth rebellion of the 1970s, the extent to which convergence between generations was biased toward the older men may reﬂect the legacy of African culture in which older people traditionally receive high levels of respect and authority. As is discussed later in the section on homosexuality, there is a “gerontocratic” principle of African social organization in which society is “organised on principles of seniority” (T. Dunbar Moodie with Vivienne Ndatshe and British Sibuyi, “Migrancy and Male Sexuality on the South African Gold Mines,” Journal of Southern African Studies 14, no. 2 [January 1988], 236). Indeed, respect for political leadership often appears to be inﬂuenced by a cultural honor for “fathers” as much as an ideological or historical esteem for “leaders.” But, as noted later, the convergence was not all one way; the older men learned a great deal from their younger counterparts and were happy to acknowledge this legacy.

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contributed to the easing of the tensions and strains in our environment.”44 In addition, at least in the ANC, the youth, including the increasing numbers of captured guerrillas, appeared to have developed a more sophisticated underground organizational structure for their prison organization. Moreover, the younger generation played a critical role in revitalizing prison life; they were a reminder that the struggle had continued, and that one’s imprisonment was not in vain. They also were an invaluable source of news and contemporary culture, on an island that had been deliberately, if not entirely successfully, cut off from the world for over a decade. With the arrival of hundreds of young men, sport again ﬂourished, not the least because there were now some professional soccer players.45 Finally, the youth exposed the older men to new thinking and forced them to reconsider their attitudes on many crucial points, from the idea that black people encompassed all the oppressed – African, Indian, and Coloured46 – an enduring legacy of the black consciousness philosophy, to the sense of alienation and anger that young, disenfranchised South Africans experienced. The importance of the alienation of black South African youth is most poignantly captured in Nelson Mandela’s account of the lesson he learned from Strini Moodley after the single-cell prisoners had watched a documentary about the Hell’s Angels, which “depicted the Hell’s Angels as reckless, violent, and antisocial, and the police as decent, upstanding, and trustworthy.”47 In the ensuing discussion, almost all the prisoners criticized the bikers for their lawlessness, until Moodley pointed out the similarities between the rebellion against authority of the Soweto youth of 1976 and the Hell’s Angels. [Strini] reproached us for being elderly middle-class intellectuals who identiﬁed with the movie’s right wing authorities instead of with the bikers. . . . [T]he larger question that concerned me was whether we had, as Strini suggested, become stuck in a mindset that was no longer revolutionary. We had been in prison for more than ﬁfteen years; I had been in prison for nearly eighteen. The world that we left was long gone. . . . Prison is a still point in a turning world, and it is very easy to stay in the same place in prison while the world moves on.48

The mutual beneﬁt of the generational mix is illustrated by two comments made by Kgalema Motlanthe. On the one hand, he commented that the “most enriching lesson that I picked up throughout my [ten-year] stay on the Island in prison” was in learning to accept, and help others accept, that although an enthusiastic young activist might ﬁnd a way to make time for ﬁve political discussions or classes a day, there are “elderly people who would want to take part in political education classes . . . twice [or] 44 45 46 47 48

Daniels, There and Back, 188. Mlambo, interview. Cindi, interview. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 436. Ibid., 437.

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a maximum of three times a week, and not more than that.” An (older) person’s inability to absorb the same material did not make him any less competent. This was an important lesson, and it was further incumbent on Motlanthe to ensure others did not label someone as falling within a political tendency because he could not “quote any of the works” that “young, literate, enthusiastic people” could quote. On the other hand, Motlanthe noted, “I think that one of the things that sustains the older comrades . . . was the fact that there was always an intake of new people and they could see their efforts, those of political education, transforming people, and those people actually leaving prison to go out and actually contribute in the struggle.”49 One of the achievements of the men on Robben Island, young and old, was that most of them did not “stay in the same place in prison as the world moved on.” Among the reasons for this was the process of conﬂict and convergence among organizations and, perhaps more importantly, generations, described in this chapter. Underlying this process is a debate over the appropriate understanding of resistance within Robben Island. Two different theories and philosophies of resistance emerged in the tactical debates over how best to resist, namely categorical and strategic resistance. Generational Conﬂict and Strategic and Categorical Resistance The two generations who met and interacted on Robben Island had conﬂicts of understanding as to the nature of antiapartheid struggle and the response it demanded within the prison walls. The arrival of the ’76 generation reignited debates over how to ﬁght apartheid in the prison with a new intensity to those debates. The different approaches were exacerbated and complicated by interorganizational differences, particularly with the emergence of the BCM as a signiﬁcant force in liberation politics in the 1970s. The resolution of the intergenerational conﬂict (and to a lesser extent their organizational conﬂict) involved the identiﬁcation of appropriate strategies to resolve the nature and forms of resistance. Against an apartheid state that wanted pliant and servile black people who knew their place, and against parents who seemed to accept that role, the black (urban) youth of South Africa rose up to say, clearly and deﬁantly, “No!” The emphasis on rebellion and self-assertion created a generation that largely deﬁned itself in opposition to anything that suggested the authority of the apartheid state. Going to apartheid prisons, Robben Island included, was a journey into the very heart of the regime, which would now be confronted in a far more intimate, far more controlling, far more total way than any challenge apartheid represented on the “outside.” Youth 49

Motlanthe, interview.

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anger and militancy – “our vibrant militancy and our outright deﬁance”50 – confronted the prison hierarchy, which personiﬁed the white regime; this resistance made all the more sense in the face of provocative warders and other prison authorities.51 The prisoners were after all called “klipgooiers” for a reason (“klipgooier” means stone-thrower in Afrikaans). They were determined to match every action of their enemy, and their enemy’s very existence, with militant resistance. Resistance was their raison d’ˆetre as young, angry, black, and proud political prisoners. Believing resistance was required at every turn is what I term “categorical resistance” – resistance as the articulation of political principle. Categorical resistance was not exclusive to youth or black consciousness adherents. Thami Mkhwanazi of the ANC, who was convicted of recruiting youths for military training, presented himself as privileging categorical resistance (and indeed others corroborate his ongoing deﬁance). He wrote that he and PAC lifer Jeff Masemola “were bound by the principle of telling the prison authorities where to get off.”52 Similarly, he described Toivo ja Toivo, the South West African People’s Organization leader, as “militant and hostile to members of the Prisons Service. He refused to appear before the institutional board for classiﬁcation, thereby denying himself any chance of upgrading so he could buy food or subscribe to newspapers.”53 James Mange, who was mentioned earlier, rejected both the PAC and the BCM as viable movements or philosophies for him to embrace and, despite his fraught relationship with the ANC on the Island, was for a long time a high proﬁle ﬁgure of that organization. For Mange, his own political identity, and indeed those of other revolutionaries and militants, demanded confrontations with the authorities as a matter of principle. Moreover, the sense of purpose needed to live as a prisoner of war on enemy terrain demanded no compromises to personal or organizational indulgences. In that sense, his dreadlocks performed some of the function of an ascetic’s hair shirt. His long hair would be a constant reinforcement of the vocal and ever-present demands of categorical resistance. 50 51

52 53

Cindi, interview. The generation of prisoners that arrived in the wake of the 1976 uprisings appears to have had to deal with especially provocative warders and authorities. An important example is that dogs were set upon prisoners in the quarry on 20 January 1977, when warders apparently believed that the prisoners were avoiding work. The prisoners made a complaint of assault to the head of the prison, but most refused to make statements without consulting with their legal representatives. In order to do so, a court application was made, and the judgement directed “the Commissioner of Prisons to permit applicants to consult with their attorney and if necessary counsel in connection with alleged assaults upon them and allow applicants’ legal representatives to take full instructions from applicants as to any actions that they may desire to institute arising out of the said alleged assaults.” Cooper and Others v Minister of Prisons 1977 [4] SOUTH AFRICA 166 [C] Cape Provincial Division, 168. Thami Mkhwanazi, “My Years on Robben Island,” Weekly Mail (South Africa), 21–27 August 1987, 19. Ibid., 18.

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Ironically, the state was not the only source of opposition to the deﬁnitionally deﬁant prisoners. (Indeed, state opposition largely reinforced categorical resistance because such opposition was deﬁned in terms of, and against, the state and its representatives.) The other source of challenge to the younger men was their fellow political prisoners, albeit mostly from a different generation. The dissonance between the groups was originally put down to generational (and organizational) differences. A generational difference implies that individuals and groups have a set of perceptions and experiences associated with the different time periods or historical spaces in which they were born and of which they are a part. Different generations have different collective experiences and world views that shape their identities. Historical forces shaped political strategies: the youth who rebelled in 1976 were born into an environment virtually devoid of any political resistance, to parents who apparently silently acquiesced in their subordination. Their response to that resignation to the status quo was to do and be the opposite, that is, to be militant and deﬁant and overt in their resistance. This determination was strengthened by their personal experience of repression and the suppression of their protests. In contrast, the older generation of Islanders had seen their protests, both vocal and violent, of the 1950s and early 1960s, crushed and had further gone on to experience the limits to automatic protests in prison in the 1960s and early 1970s. In this context, resistance had to be very strategic; it had ﬁrst to guarantee the conditions of physical and mental survival and, second, to use the prison to achieve far-reaching political change, through such actions as maintaining banned organizations in prison to further train prisoners to act in the organizations’ interests upon their release. That is, what the younger men did not immediately see was that the political identity of the older generation was one in which resistance was present, but with a different meaning and status. For the youth, resistance was their moral and practical core of their identity as political prisoners. For the older generation, resistance was more a strategy than a principle; resistance was a means and not necessarily an end. Thus what I term “strategic resistance” was aimed not only at oppositional acts to protect and preserve physical, moral, and political integrity but to contribute to and indeed shape the process of fundamental political change in the polity as a whole. These categories of strategic and categorical resistance do not suggest the militant youth did not also aspire to fundamental social change or that the older men were unconcerned with the principles of their struggle. The point is that, in the categorical resistance approach, a person or organization is often deﬂected from the end of remaking the polity by perpetual deﬁance. The opposite is also true: strategic resistance often builds upon or otherwise requires militant and overt opposition. As it was elaborated on Robben Island, strategic resistance resonated with the philosophy of pragmatism, which rather than evoke, in David Goldberg’s words, “unprincipled

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instrumentalism” directs one “towards establishing in theory and in practice the contingent social circumstances and relations of cooperative power that would at speciﬁc space-times best facilitate human ﬂourishing and selfdevelopment.”54 Strategic resistance required that prisoners expend time and energy developing themselves and their organizations to affect and have an impact upon the political terrain both within and beyond the prison. This injunction certainly did not imply ignoring the jailing state, which was impossible. Moreover, the very facts of political organization and education on the Island violated prison rules and were, by deﬁnition, acts of deﬁance against the regime. What strategic resistance did demand, or at least this was the interpretation of its practitioners, was that prisoners attempt to create a trucelike situation with the authorities in order to create the space for organizational development within and beyond the prison. Enhancing the liberation movements demanded knowledgable and disciplined members of organizations who could, upon release, rejuvenate, support, or redirect external antiapartheid struggles. This was what a good graduate of Robben Island was meant to do, and South Africa’s political history has been shaped by many of these “alumni.” Strategic resistance does not deny the place or importance of categorical resistance. Older prisoners (at least in the ANC and perhaps beyond) were, for example, “encouraged by [the] . . . radicalism” of captured Umkhonto we Sizwe soldiers who were sent to Robben Island in the early 1970s.55 The youth of ’76 had a similar rejuvenating effect on the prison. Furthermore, proponents of categorical resistance are correct to point out that resistance may be undermined when prisoners come to rely on privileges. Signiﬁcantly, as noted, prisoners with higher classiﬁcations were less likely to support hunger strikes than those with lower classiﬁcations. Often, however, the different imperatives of categorical resistance and strategic resistance were incompatible. For example, at times the state would raid cells and seize contraband political material in a hunger strike, thus endangering the broader goals of political education and communication. This contradiction may have been unavoidable; an immediate and militant public protest in a hunger strike could be a priority even if longer-term resistance was undermined. The reverse is also true. The recognition of these inevitable and difﬁcult choices, neither “right” or “wrong,” and the attempt to try to balance them, in many respects captures the generational convergence achieved by political prisoners on Robben Island. It also underscores the importance of the speciﬁc material conditions shaping understandings of resistance. 54 55

David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 215. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 404.

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The Relationship Between Generational and Organizational Conﬂict Generational and organizational conﬂict are each separate phenomena. Arguably, although former Islanders tend to explain conﬂict in terms of ideology and movements, age grouping and generational consciousness is also an important explanation for events and processes on Robben Island (especially after 1976). There is, however, also a signiﬁcant intersection between the organizational and generational factors. First, the BCM was largely an expression of a younger generation. Black consciousness was developed by university students at a time when the older liberation movements appeared to be dormant if not dead. It represented the perspectives of a new, young generation, as well as a political philosophy of liberation. Second, on Robben Island, the BCM was often not taken seriously as a political organization by the older men in the more established movements precisely because it was an organization composed of youth. This lack of respect for the BCM is to some extent captured by Mangena’s description of the letter-writing process with older, non-BC inmates (cited later). Cindi similarly commented that they would treat us as youth. We would always correct them and say look, we may be young in age, but our organization is on a par with your organization. It’s not a youth organization. It’s a political organization. So it must be accorded the same status. There’s no youth political organization as it were. It’s just one political organization. But there would be resistance. And naturally, people always wanted us to be submerged under them.56

Third, there was a signiﬁcant overlap between the political identity of the youth and the BCM, on the one hand, and the older men and the ANC and PAC, on the other hand. The youth, as a grouping with a generational consciousness, and the BCM, as a grouping with an ideological consciousness, shared a political identity that demanded militant deﬁance as a matter of course. Indeed, they identiﬁed such deﬁance as core to their political identity, which demanded publicly challenging the regime’s authority at all times. The generational consciousness of the older men was intertwined with their experiential base of being long-term political prisoners and with developing a curiously and ironically intimate understanding of the behavior of their enemy in the prison. The older men’s perspective tended to cut across ideological and factional lines so that a consensus existed that one’s resistance – critical to the prisoner’s political identity – demanded a careful strategic approach. When political identity assumes strategic resistance, resistance may be less visible, but not necessarily less effective. Recruitment Recruitment on Robben Island was not a new phenomenon. As long as there were people uncommitted to an organization, or wavering in their allegiance 56

Cindi, interview.

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to the organization with which they were aligned, competitive political organizations would seek to enlist them in their movement and ideology. Around 1968, for instance, a group of people framed by police in the Eastern Cape were sent to the Island, and they were “organized or recruited by one side or the other.”57 Criminal prisoners had also been recruited in the 1960s. But with the political community largely stable in the years before 1976, there was little need to recruit. Mature political leaders recognized that recruitment would have a destabilizing effect on the political community, and they would only want to risk that for good reason. But the waves of new black consciousness prisoners did provide “good reason.” First, the Soweto and 1976 uprising were the most signiﬁcant political event in resistance politics in over a decade. An organization that ignored them did so at the risk of its continued existence. Second, the men who had spent so many long years in prison did not want to see black consciousness ideology articulated as a third rival movement on the South African liberation organization stage. Third, when afﬁliations were unclear, recruitment was seen as necessary to ensure that every inmate was under a political discipline. Any prisoner not subject to organizational discipline was susceptible to co-option by “the system,” both in the prison and on release.58 Fourth, and probably of most importance, the inmates on Robben Island had always regarded it as their duty to produce capable activists who would eventually go back into their communities. The youth of ’76 represented the future of the movements and the liberation struggle. These were the prospective activists, leaders, and soldiers, and so their recruitment was a necessity. Recruitment was, of course, a starting point to the critical process of training activists; teaching them organizational histories, ideologies, and strategies; and preparing them for their political obligations and mandates upon release. The new arrivals from the Soweto uprising made older prisoners aware “that you had a political force that could fall either way.”59 Most of the ’76 youth who came to Robben Island had some identiﬁcation or afﬁliation with black consciousness organizations. Even if they did not, they probably would have been aware of some of the rhetoric and ideas generated by black consciousness ideologues and groupings. At another level, however, this political identiﬁcation with black consciousness was often not very strong. Many of the people who participated in the uprisings were not then very politically conscious. Petros Mashigo, for example, joined the 16 June march because he found it difﬁcult to learn Afrikaans.60 Other people were caught up in the crowds or in anger at a speciﬁc event. Islanders often refer to a “tsotsi” (juvenile delinquent, gangster, or gang member) 57 58 59 60

Moseneke, interview. Macozoma, interview. Ibid. Mashigo, interview.

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element who had joined the rebellion (or had been unlucky to be at the wrong place at the wrong time), later to be imprisoned on Robben Island.61 Tenuous links to political organizations and ideologies tended to be further undermined in the context of a competition for membership by other political groupings in prisons with long histories and signiﬁcant political experience. This advantage of training and background was especially true of the ANC, which has historically emerged as both South Africa’s and Robben Island’s best organized liberation organization. Members of the PAC argue that they intended to respect the BCM’s right to organize and exist on the Island and did not intend to begin recruiting the new prisoners.62 These intentions did not, however, prevent or withstand an aggressive recruiting drive by the ANC. Therefore, in response to the ANC’s campaign, the PAC too began to recruit people.63 Many of the black consciousness and ANC prisoners argue that the PAC assumed a natural alliance existed between themselves and the new black consciousness supporters because of the similarity of their political philosophies. Therefore the PAC’s approach to recruitment could be more low key because the PAC believed the natural afﬁnities between the two organizations would inevitably bring the black consciousness groupings into the PAC.64 Others argued that the PAC and BCM entered into a formal alliance.65 “Rharha” Matthews of the BCM recalled that “we admired every member of the PAC” and “we were working hand in hand” with them.66 The ANC, on the other hand, appeared to want to recruit or at least actively engage the new prisoners from the outset. Kathrada, a senior member of the ANC, claimed, however, that, “as an organization, we had decided, especially in our [the single-cell or leadership] section, not to go

61

62 63 64 65

66

Mangena recalled his conversation with Darkie, who might be described as a politicized tsotsi, but who was probably representative to some degree or another of many less politicized men who ended up in prison. Darkie made his living as a thief and rationalized his choice in political terms: “‘I will repossess money and other things from these rich settlers [whites] which I will then share with my family and others in the black community’” (Mangena, On Your Own, 102). When the uprisings began, Darkie related that “‘some of my friends concentrated on hijacking delivery goods such as ﬂour, mielie-meal [cornmeal], cooking oil, liquor and so on in the townships’” (Mangena, On Your Own, 104). Although he did not originally become involved in either the protests and demonstrations or the hijackings, he felt compelled to protest when he saw soldiers randomly shooting at children. His protests earned him a bullet in his stomach and a charge of public violence, which brought him to Robben Island (Mangena, On Your Own, 101–105). Dyani, interview; Mlambo, interview; Ntshanyana, interview. Dyani, interview; Mlambo, interview. Macozoma, interview; Mlambo, interview; Molala, interview; Motlanthe, interview. Vumile Gladstone (Rharha) Matthews, interview by author, tape recording, Bisho, 14 May 1996; Velaphi (Thomas) Masuku, interview by author, tape recording, Johannesburg, December 1987–February 1988; Ramokgadi, interview. Matthews, interview.

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out of our way to recruit.” Gwala, another prominent and powerful leader, pointed out that the ANC leadership did not encourage recruitment.67 At the same time, there is no evidence that the leadership tried to discourage or stop recruitment until the ANC had won over most of the black consciousness newcomers, and until the risks of continued recruitment threatened to undermine the very fabric of prison life. While Molobi believed the decision to recruit was one taken right at the top of the organization, and it was a decision that made sense for the “building of a strong organization,”68 Masondo doubted the senior ANC people would have given a clear instruction to recruit people because then they “would implicate them[selves] in the tensions that would arise. . . . But they may have said very clearly – ‘engage the young people who are arriving; engage them, tell them what we stand for.’”69 Macozoma further argued that once the recruiting process had begun and its toll was beginning to show, the ANC would not agree to suspend recruitment that would have left them in a weak situation.70 Prisoners widely perceived, in the words of black consciousness leader ` Nkosi Molala, that “the ANC ma[de] no bones about its position vis-a-vis the Black Consciousness Movement,” that is, its desire to recruit the new inmates.71 In Dyani’s perspective, Lawrence Phokanuka was one of those in the ANC who immediately and unashamedly began recruiting the new arrivals.72 Dyani speculates that whether Mandela and some or all of the senior ANC leadership opposed or encouraged the recruiting campaign was probably irrelevant to Phokanuka, as he was one of the few prisoners there who did not have respect for Mandela; he was closer to Mbeki and Gwala. Phokanuka was successful as a recruiter; Stone Sizani attributes his move to the ANC to Phokanuka’s lectures.73 Phokanuka was an intellectual master to many, including Dan Montsitsi and Naledi Tsiki. Black consciousness adherents were kept very busy by the recruitment efforts. And whoever was recruited to the ANC was then sent back to the other black consciousness people to try to persuade them to join the ANC. Tsiki identiﬁed himself as having initiated recruitment of black consciousness adherents, especially of those men who were particularly impressive to him like Macozoma, Masondo, and another BCM member, Owen Stuurman.74 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Kathrada, interview; Gwala, interview. Eric Molobi, interview by author, tape recording, Johannesburg, 30 May 1996. Masondo, interview. Macozoma, interview. Molala, interview. Dyani, interview. Stone Sizani, interview by Gail Gerhart together with Mkhuseli Jack, Port Elizabeth, 14 July 1989, in Karis-Gerhart collection. Tsiki, interview.

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Overt recruitment methods notwithstanding, the ANC had long made it a practice to write to new arrivals. The organization would welcome them and usually engage in political interchange. Mangena recalled that [l]ike many other prisoners, I had a pen pal in another section. This was one of the ways in which we kept in touch as prisoners in different sections who were not supposed to communicate with one another. The clandestine “postal system” would deliver the letters we wrote to each other every now and then. More often than not, the notes we exchanged involved comments and debates on political and ideological issues. Because many of us in the BCM were generally younger, most older people in the older components of the liberation movement imagined we ought to be targets of their political education exercises. Thus, whenever one or the other of them had an opportunity to correspond with one or another of us, he would almost invariably launch himself into ideological questions.75

Kathrada argued that these notes were ofﬁcial notes of welcome, not recruitment attempts. Furthermore, he pointd out that not just senior ANC members would write these letters to new prisoners – it was a widespread practice in the prison by all groupings.76 When Thami Mkhwanazi arrived in the Island, he was not known to be an established ANC cadre, and he was sent letters by PAC people. These letters slandered the ANC and Mkhwanazi turned them over to his organization.77 At times, direct or personal ideological engagement between longstanding ANC and PAC prisoners and the new black consciousness arrivals was often difﬁcult, as most of the ’76 arrivals were placed in a new section of the prison, section E. It was also called the klipgooier (and later the terrorism) section because many of its inmates were young militants who were charged for throwing stones at police, or some similar act of public violence. Being in section E effectively meant that they were cut off from the other prisoners, as it was an almost exclusively black consciousness section. That changed when Harry Gwala and those charged with him, as well as other ANC members like Naledi Tsiki and Tokyo Sexwale, were placed in section E, and new tensions and recruitment began.78 Almost from the outset, prisoners ostensibly aligned with the BCM joined the ANC. While the BCM was angry and presumably frustrated by this development, a far more damaging loss was that of Terror Lekota, one of the SASO–BPC Nine. Lekota had been corresponding with Nelson Mandela and speaking to other ANC members; he decided to leave the BCM in late 1977 75 76 77 78

Mangena, On Your Own, 86. Kathrada, interview. Thami Mkhwanazi, “My Years on the Island,” Weekly Mail (South Africa), 28 August– 3 September 1987, 15; Mkhwanazi, interview. Babenia and Mlanda, interview; Macozoma, interview; Tsiki, interview.

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and join the ANC. Soon after he left the BCM,79 another BCM leader, Muntu Myeza, together with other black consciousness members, led an attack on Lekota. One of the BC leaders struck Lekota with a garden fork. Tsiki asserted that although it is generally believed that Lekota was attacked because he left the BCM, in fact the attack was because he continued to recruit; he and Tsiki were, in particular, discussing ANC policy with the BCM’s contact person, Owen Stuurman, whom they thought would leave the organization.80 In turn, Joe Shithlibane81 recalled that he and fellow ANC members beat up the men who assaulted Lekota and they were therefore charged by the authorities. Mandela82 said that “in the interests of harmony, we advised Terror not to lodge a complaint.” Molobi argued that the attack on Lekota was “a culmination of events. There had been meetings and . . . scufﬂes between the ANC and the PAC [over the question of recruitment] before that.”83 The attack on Lekota is signiﬁcant in large part because he was a black consciousness leader and his moving organizations made it easier for others to do the same, especially those who held higher positions in the BCM. (As mentioned, many of the new BCM–aligned prisoners had joined the ANC before this attack.)84 A second incident of assault occurred when “some ANC guys were beaten up” because of ANC recruitment efforts, “and the ANC guys laid charges.”85 Dyani was told of a third major physical clash between those who joined the ANC and those who joined the PAC after he was released in December 1978.86 79 80 81 82 83 84

85

86

Cooper (interview) argued that Lekota had been suspended from the Black Consciousness Movement in late 1977. Tsiki, interview. Shithlibane, interview. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 423. Molobi, interview. Cooper, interview. There are at least three ironies in this garden-fork incident. First, Patrick (Terror) Lekota (interview by Tom Karis, Pinetown, December 1989, in Karis-Gerhart collection) recalled that the attack occurred just after he had been persuading a black consciousness colleague that the right to democratic choice must include the right of recruitment. Second, Motlanthe (interview) argued that Muntu Myeza was supposed to move to the ANC with Terror but “chickened out.” Third, the man that actually struck Terror later apologized and joined the ANC. There were numerous incidents where physical ﬁghting was involved, but this appears to have been a particularly important one. Assuming that they are the same incidents, Mandela noted that the ANC men were charged by the authorities, while Cooper noted that the ANC men charged their black consciousness counterparts. Stone Sizani (interview) spoke of a “faction ﬁght – BCM people ﬁghting ANC people” that resulted from BCM and PAC accusations that the head of the prison, Colonel Harding, was supporting recruitment for the ANC rather than the other two organizations. He dated this ﬁght, which appears to be the same one Mandela and Cooper refer to, as occurring on 19 February 1979. Dyani, interview.

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The outbreak of physical violence was shocking to the prisoners. Whatever tensions existed in the prison, the inmates saw themselves as a community, where physical clashes were rare and violated prisoner norms and the code of conduct. Molobi argued that “we lived as a community in that place . . . even during the bad times.”87 Furthermore, the violence was indicative of the broader and deeper strains that were taking their toll in interand intraorganizational struggles for hegemony in the prison. The pressure had caused the collapse of some youths who had to be taken to hospital.88 Tsiki recalled Andrew Mapheto hiding under a table to study mathematics at a time where a strong argument was made that prisoners should boycott Bantu education in solidarity with the national school boycotts.89 Dyani too told of how this boycott issue placed him in an emotional quandary – after struggling for years to obtain ﬁnancing to study on Robben Island, he now felt too guilty to acquit himself properly in exams.90 In addition, what was seen as especially egregious about the attack on Lekota in particular was that it was premeditated.91 Political prisoners always tried to control their anger and actively avoided the behavior of criminal gangs for whom violence and premeditated attacks were a way of life. While one person punching another in an outburst of anger was understandable if “antisocial,” planned violence on a fellow foe of the regime was not. In the period between 1977 and 1980, there was also an attack on a prison ofﬁcial; the head of the prison, Major John Harding, was stabbed by various prisoners: Vusumzi Mcongo,92 Zuku Camagu, Mncedisi Siswana, Tamsanqa Jeffrey Klaas, Khumbelele Mnikina, and Fezile Mvula.93 The men were charged and, after a long legal case including an appeal, they were acquitted. Nevertheless, they had still spent very long periods in the punishment cells in the isolation section and had to deal with the possibility of new or extended sentences. Some people were moved from Robben Island as a result of the stabbing.94 Consistent with earlier debates regarding classiﬁcation and the treatment of warders, prisoners were not unanimously supportive of those who used violent resistance against the prison head. Harding was a controversial ﬁgure among prisoners. Many saw him as the most enlightened state actor to come to the prison and someone who was genuinely responsive to many prisoner concerns. Ntshanyana of the PAC, for example, claimed that Harding 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94

Molobi, interview. Ibid. Tsiki, interview. Dyani, interview. Tsiki, interview. Southern African spells this ﬁrst name as Umsumzi. In an interview Vusumzi Mcongo conﬁrmed that he was one of the accused; presumably Vusumzi is the correct spelling. Southern African July–August 1979 in Karis-Gerhart collection. Vusumzi Mcongo, interview by author, tape recording, Port Elizabeth, 10 May 1996.

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brought the practice of prisoners informing on one another to an end because he would call in the accused prisoner to face his accuser.95 But many other prisoners saw him as extremely manipulative. Dullah Omar, the minister of justice in 1994 but a lawyer to many Robben Island prisoners from the 1960s onward, supported a reading of Harding as a different kind of prison ofﬁcial to most of his peers. Omar commented that he was a thinking person. He . . . tried to implement a theory of his own. And I think broadly his approach was to win people over, co-opt them for his own purposes, you know. Eventually dislodge people from their political loyalties and become compliant in prison and when they leave prison, after prison. My impression was that the ANC people who exploited that were aware of his strategies, but were at the same time prepared to play along and gain whatever concessions they could.96

Some felt, however, that not only was there little to be gained from Harding’s approach, but that he actively assisted the ANC in its recruitment efforts. In particular, many in the BCM and some in the PAC believed he put ANC members in cells together with BCM members so that the black consciousness men could be recruited. Mcongo has even stronger criticism, recalling that when he ﬁrst arrived on the Island Harding told him and other black consciousness supporters that there were only two organizations on the Island, the ANC and the PAC, and they needed to join one of them, not remain in the BCM.97 Harding denied recruiting for any organization,98 but this disclaimer would be unlikely to persuade those who believed their jailer was partisan in the prisoner struggles for hegemony. Some BCM people saw the attack on Harding as resulting from the more general conﬂict on the Island rather than recruitment alone.99 For those who opposed Harding, what added insult to injury was that, they believed, some people in the ANC, and perhaps also in the PAC, were thought to have told the authorities who had been involved in the stabbing.100 Remarking on those who did not support the attack on Harding, Mcongo commented that some organizations “were very sympathetic towards white people.”101 High levels of conﬂict and especially physical confrontation were always dangerous to the political prisoner community, as prisoner unity was one of the political community’s most signiﬁcant weapons against the state. Violence and conﬂict seriously undermined this unity and sense of community. Cooper argued that recruitment ended when the ANC leadership approached the BCM leadership calling for a speedy resolution to the crisis now that the 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

Ntshanyana, interview. Dullah Omar, interview with author, tape recording, Cape Town, 8 November 1994. Mcongo, interview. John Harding, interview with author, tape recording, Westville, 18 December 1994. Matthews, interview. Mcongo, interview. Ibid.

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state had become involved.102 The arrival of the Bethal trialists is also often cited as a turning point in the conﬂict. The Bethal trial was a lengthy trial, mainly of PAC members but also of BCM men, that lasted from 1978 to 1979, following a particularly long and brutal period of torture and interrogation for the trialists, even by South Africa’s apartheid standards. The trial was signiﬁcant for Robben Island in that it included a number of men who had already served terms on the Island and the charges against them included furthering the aims of the PAC in that prison. The PAC and BCM trialists had developed a mutual solidarity during the trial. In addition, many of them, especially the PAC leader Zeph Mothopeng, had been working across ideological and organizational divisions in the pre- and post-1976 political context. Furthermore, when the Bethal trialists arrived on the Island, they were brought in with three student leaders: Murphy Morobe, Dan Montsitsi, and Seth Mazibuko. While all three were ostensibly members and leaders of the black consciousness organization, Morobe had joined the ANC underground a few years before. Morobe surmised that Montsitsi also had ANC connections, while Mazibuko remained clearly aligned with the BCM. There was mutual respect among both the student leaders and the Bethal trialists regarding their array of ideological and organizational afﬁliations; these men had worked externally in a cooperative and nonpartisan climate.103 When the Bethal and student group arrived on Robben Island, the three organizations quickly began intensive communications intended to recruit this large group of men. Instead, however, they all agreed not to have any communication with any of the organizations – and therefore not to ofﬁcially identify with a particular organization – until the movements agreed to approach people in a digniﬁed and respectful manner. Morobe pointed out that he and the others knew where their allegiances lay but were disturbed by the intensity and nastiness of the recruiting efforts by all organizations. They were disturbed not by the fact of recruitment, but by “the way in which it was being done. . . . It tended to undermine your integrity as an individual. It tended to compromise your . . . ability to deal with the situation.”104 The new prisoners expected a different reception by their fellow inmates. Morobe delayed ofﬁcially aligning with the ANC, lest “our open association with the ANC should be used as . . . a way of increasing antagonism with other organizations. . . . In fact it was after that that things really began to calm down.”105 Two other factors played into the resolution of the recruitment-based conﬂict; the negative consequences of the state’s knowledge of and involvement in intraprisoner conﬂict and the emergence of the ANC as the dominant 102 103 104 105

Cooper, interview. Morobe, interview. Ibid. Ibid.

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group. By 1980, new pacts had been established among the organizations, agreeing to mutually acceptable protocols regarding recruitment and the prevention of new conﬂict. Speciﬁcally, it was agreed that a reception committee would be established to welcome all new prisoners, give new arrivals an opportunity to declare an organizational identiﬁcation, and, if they did not, then give all the organizations an equal opportunity to approach them. By the time the agreement and reception committee were established, the ANC was the largest organization on the Island, in part due to the arrival of captured Umkhonto we Sizwe guerrillas, and in part due to the success of its recruitment campaigns. (It is important to make clear that the PAC too recruited a few people and the BCM retained a signiﬁcant minority of those who had initially come to prison under their banner.) The ANC’s recruitment successes demand assessment. Inevitably, explanations for the ANC’s achievement depend on the perspective of whether respondents’ organizations had gained or lost in the recruiting process. BCM members were the most critical of the ANC’s, and, to a lesser extent, the PAC’s methods. The most serious accusation leveled against the ANC and the PAC was that their members seduced or bribed young and naive or ill-disciplined cadres into their organizations. Most commonly, BCM members argued that established prisoners had been “enticing people with those niceties”; that is, offered purchased food, a privilege of A classiﬁcation, to youth not used to the harsh environment of prison.106 This food was seen as symbol and substance of one organization’s availability to offer greater support and comfort than another. More ominously, the ANC was also accused of offering potential recruits ﬁnancial aid for family visits and studies as well as positions in the organization.107 There were other explanations for the ANC’s strong record of recruitment. These reasons included the status of Mandela and the historical weight of the ANC’s long existence; the persuasive ideas of the ANC, especially on Robben Island where Mandela’s status and the historical weight of the ANC’s long existence was one reason. A second was the persuasive ideas of the ANC, especially on Robben Island where people had time to think about the nature of the South African struggle and realized the inadequacy of the theoretical ideas underpinning black consciousness.108 A third reason was the ANC’s organizational strength of the ANC on and off the Island and its well-developed program of political education. The explanation offered most often, and by members of a range of organizations, was the fact that 106 107 108

Luhamile Mate, interview with author together with Vusumzi Mcongo, tape recording, Port Elizabeth, 10 May 1996; see also Nefolovhodwe, interview. Mcongo, interview. James Mange (interview) of the ANC also accused the ANC of using funds for visits and studies to control its members and prevent dissent. Macozoma, interview.

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the ANC had a strong and active guerrilla force in the Umkhonto we Sizwe. Mkhwanazi argued that successful guerrilla attacks boosted the “morale of political prisoners; it soothes their rufﬂed spirits, it consoles them – this is a continuation of where they left off.”109 It is necessary to evaluate these various claims critically. Macozoma believed that bribery through the use of A classiﬁcation privileges was probably practiced at times by the ANC and the PAC as a whole, but more often it was a practice of factions within those organizations.110 More importantly, using such a crass method of recruitment could result in very ﬁckle new members, easily swayed by a better offer by other political groups in the future. In addition, inducements of temporary material improvements were hardly good building blocks for a banned organization or guerilla army facing a ruthless state. These counterpoints were raised with some of those who have made accusations of bribery. Mcongo and Mate of the BCM replied that the ANC had, in fact, lost some of the recruits who were brought into the organization on such superﬁcial bases, and others would have liked to leave but were embarrassed to appear like political chameleons.111 Nefolovhodwe, on the other hand, accepted that such bribery may not, of itself, have been sufﬁcient to keep people in organizations, but believed it was enough to bring people in at an initial level from which period they could be persuaded to stay and be loyal based on other mechanisms such as political education.112 More serious is the claim that the ANC used the need for ﬁnancial support for visits and study to recruit (and police) their members. Aside from lack of empirical veriﬁcation (at least at this point), the main problem with this claim is logistical. First, the ANC would have had to have relatively efﬁcient mechanisms for passing on messages to funders, or liaisons to funders, outside prison. Given the difﬁculties of secret communication between Robben Island and the outside world, especially the antiapartheid world, this would be extremely difﬁcult and, at times, impossible. Second, ﬁnancing studies required very complex ﬁnancial arrangements that were subject to a plethora of laws and rules governing the money that would beneﬁt prisoners. Moreover, there were strict mechanisms controlling how these funds could be used and administered. Therefore, for the ANC to be targeting money to speciﬁc prisoners and their families would probably have implied that the ANC and apartheid state were cooperating in some way to enable these ﬁnancial exchanges, which is a very unlikely possibility. Therefore, unless this is a misreading of the mechanisms the ANC might have used, the claim of ﬁnancial bribery also seems implausible. Furthermore, the same problem of 109 110 111 112

Mkhwanazi, interview. Macozoma, interview. Mate and Mcongo, interview. Nefolovhodwe, interview.

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bribing people with large amounts of money arises as when bribing people with biscuits or cookies from the prison store: people who have been bought once can presumably be bought again. Finally, as far as bribery is concerned, it is also probably implausible that the ANC could have offered many recruits high positions in the prison administration given that the large organization meant a higher degree of competition for leadership positions. In addition, the ANC clearly used the principle of seniority in the organization outside as well as inside prison to command certain positions of authority. Indeed, ANC people are more likely to argue that black consciousness people were sometimes reluctant to leave the BCM as this often meant losing leadership positions. While these black consciousness (and sometimes PAC) explanations for recruitment are to some extent unsatisfactory, so are some of the explanations offered by the ANC for its success. For a start, the claim that the ideology of the ANC brought people into its organization needs questioning on at least three counts. First, many of those who came onto Robben Island with little or no political understanding may have been persuaded less by the strength of the ANC’s analysis of South Africa’s political economy, and more by the fact that they had never been exposed to alternative explanations. Second, while many political prisoners were extremely thoughtful people who had rebelled against the status quo in large part due to their intellectual assessment of the injustice of their society, there were also many who had, through passion or accident, landed in the struggle with little concern for ideological subtleties and, instead, harbored considerable anger about the oppression and exploitation that was their lot in life. Third, especially in the context of the appeal of black consciousness philosophy in the 1970s, the ANC’s commitment to nonracialism was, for many who only knew whites as brutal and oppressive, a distinctly unattractive aspect of its ideology. (On the other hand, nonracialism drew some young black people into the ANC: Denmark Tungwane, for example, spoke of how the trial of Barbara Hogan, a young white ANC operative, had jolted him into political action.)113 Furthermore, the ANC worked hard and successfully to build a case for nonracialism. Ideas could be important points of attraction, however. The idea that had a great deal of importance for many people was the emphasis on class and the Marxist ideas that the ANC offered. The value of ideas arguably became increasingly appreciated over time, as the ANC was able to emphasize the links between political education and political activism upon release. The ANC’s strength on the Island and its historical endurance, including the symbolic power of leaders like Mandela, contributed to winning people into the organization but also to keeping them there. Although some Islanders like Soto Ndukwana were distinctly unimpressed by the quality of 113

Tungwane, interview.

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the organization and its education programs,114 and BCM and PAC members often saw their own movements on the Island as superior, Khehla Shubane of the ANC summed up the assessment of many when he wrote: The ANC might not only have been the biggest group in prison, it might have been the best organised. It might have been far more purposeful in its approach to a number of issues which are important to prisoners, it could possibly have offered more to members than any other group in prison. In my view for example, within the limits of prison and available expertise it offered the best possibilities for political training available in prison. For reasons to do with how long the organisation had been in existence the likelihood of the organisation [being] part of the history of families for one or more generation is higher. Some people who came to prison having been arrested and convicted for activities related to the student uprisings [came] to discover that a member of their family in the past was part of the ANC, the issue of which organisation to join [also] became as emotional issue.115

Finally, the lure of Umkhonto we Sizwe was undoubtedly an enormous draw for many. Although most released prisoners were encouraged not to go into exile to join the guerrilla struggle, and were instead primarily being trained on the Island to work in legal and underground structures in South Africa, the ANC’s armed struggle represented for many the greatest threat to the white regime that held them captive. Certainly, for black youth and many older people outside prison, it was Umkhonto we Sizwe that, more than any other resistance actor or action, represented black power, resistance to apartheid, and the possibility of overthrowing the regime. On the Island, however, it was rule through consent and hegemony far more than coercion that deﬁned the prison world the Islanders created and sustained. Conﬂict and the Nature of the Robben Island Community The portrayal of Robben Island as a site of resistance, a place where the Hobbesian struggle for survival was overcome, and as a location where a community was forged, has been challenged by some critics, including former political prisoners, as idealized. For Saths Cooper, videos, memoirs, and other popular cultural expressions of life on Robben Island are “romanticized”: “What I am objecting to is this idyllic picture of [Robben Island as a] great university, [where there was a] sharing of experiences.”116 In particular, the realities of the recruitment struggles challenge narratives of Robben Island that emphasize mutual respect, conﬂict avoidance, and a strong rejection of physical violence as a means of dispute resolution. Cooper, who was on Robben Island between December 1976 and the early 1980s, offers this bleak diagnosis: “When the sordidness of prison behaviour is examined there 114 115 116

Ndukwana, interview. Khehla Shubane of the ANC (Letter to author, n.d., approximately September 1995). Cooper, interview.

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is little difference between common law and political prisoners generally. Where the former are often organized into deadly rival gangs, the latter are organised into often warring political groupings.”117 Murphy Morobe both accepted and refuted Cooper’s argument that political prisoners were little better than warring prison gangs. Given what was happening at that point in time [in the late 1970s when conﬂict was at its height] it would have been difﬁcult to ﬁnd a difference. What was different between what the criminals were doing as members of the 26s [a criminal gang] . . . and [what] the politicals are doing? The actions were the same, but the reasons, the motives behind it were different. . . . [Arguably], our ideas are much more morally acceptable reasons to actually get into a ﬁght.118

Morobe argued that although Cooper was not entirely wrong – “there’s no situation which is total harmony you know” – Cooper’s analysis did not fairly reﬂect the overall picture on the Island. Violence was the exception not the rule; the “preponderant majority” were ﬁghting against “gangsterish type of behavior.” Morobe added that “if you look at it purely in terms of the . . . various conﬂagrations that took place there, and you get overwhelmed by these, you then will not see the difference between Robben Island and what was happening [in criminal prisons]. But if you look at it in its totality . . . you will see it very differently.”119 In a similar vein, Naledi Tsiki, who emphasized how intense political arguments could become on Robben Island (he spoke mostly about those within his own organization, the ANC), nevertheless believed Cooper’s account was an exaggeration. In Tsiki’s opinion, physical violence between political prisoners was rare and was a consequence of anger in the heat of the moment, rather than a calculated environment of terror as was the case with criminal gangs.120 Kgalema Motlanthe completely rejected Cooper’s claim, noting that unlike criminal gangs, “political organizations were never established to ﬁght each other. They were primarily established to . . . turn adversity or disadvantage into an advantage.”121 For Motlanthe, political organizations had 117

118 119 120 121

Saths Cooper, “The Psychological Impact of Political Imprisonment and the Role of the Psychologist,” in Psychology and Apartheid, eds. Lionel J. Nicholas and Saths Cooper (Johannesburg, Durban, Cape Town: Vision/Madiba, 1990), 141. Cooper, “The Psychological Impact of Political Imprisonment,” 141, qualiﬁed this somewhat in the paragraph in which these comments are made. He noted: “Imprisonment can bring out the best or the worst in human beings; there hardly seems to be a middle ground! . . . However, the sense of camaraderie and political commitment can never be overwhelmed by self-serving individualism which characterises common-law prisoners.” Morobe, interview. Morobe emphasized that he had not read the article, and was relying on my explanation. Morobe, interview. Tsiki, interview. Motlanthe, interview.

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a transformative function both in developing prisoners on the Island via political education and in furthering the struggle upon release, informed by the insights of the organizations in prison. While some former Robben Islanders may understate the reality of physical conﬂict, the overriding emphasis of most ex-prisoners is to recall and portray the Island as an environment where tensions and conﬂict were minimized at most or all opportunities. As James Fearon and David Laitin explain about interethnic cooperation, the mechanisms for preventing or resolving conﬂict involve “internal policing,” where groups sanction their own members for a violation of another group.122 This tactic is, for instance, a good description of the older prisoners’ pressure on the younger prisoners to avoid conﬂict with the authorities. Furthermore, notwithstanding many Islander’s tactical embrace of violence to challenge apartheid, the prisoners used six strategies for conﬂict resolution – identiﬁed by Bruce Bonta – that are common to peaceful societies.123 The ﬁrst, self-restraint, is consistent with practices on Robben Island that emphasized self-discipline and prevention of conﬂict. Second, prisoners commonly employed negotiation to deal with conﬂict.124 Third, separation or “walking away from the dispute” is a common feature of peaceful societies, and was frequently employed on Robben Island, including in a preemptive fashion.125 This latter usage was the reason prisoners would commonly avoid ideological debates across organizational divisions. Fourth, like many peaceful societies and mainstream emphases on conﬂict resolution, Robben Islanders used the intervention of involved others to resolve disputes. This use of third parties is illustrated in the sporting committees and in divisions within both the ANC and the PAC. Fifth, as in many peaceful societies, and indeed, many traditional African societies, meetings were a core strategy on Robben Island to prevent, reduce, and resolve conﬂict. Finally, Bonta identiﬁes humor as a good way to reduce tension and end disputes. Robben Islanders did not discuss humor in this context, but many did mention that prison life did had its amusing moments. These perspectives suggest that although romantic and idealized constructions of Island life need critical scrutiny, so too does overemphasis on the conﬂictual and violent features of Robben Island’s community. It is true that

122 123 124

125

James Fearon and David Laitin, “Explaining Interethnic Cooperation,” American Political Science Review 90, no. 4 (1996), 728. Bruce D. Bonta, “Conﬂict Resolution Among Peaceful Societies: The Culture of Peacefulness,” Journal of Peace Research 33, no. 4 (1996), 403–421. Bonta believed negotiation may encourage confrontation, but recognized that negotiation is widely considered to be a useful strategy of dealing with conﬂict, at least in the West. Bonta, “Conﬂict Resolution Among Peaceful Societies,” 407.

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the prison experience has been romanticized by some, but it is equally true that it is former Islanders who are often insistent on the positive things they were able to achieve for themselves, their organizations, and the struggle. Further, that people remember the positive experiences they were able to derive does not mean they do not simultaneously recall the pain, loss, anger, and abuse associated with their imprisonment.

7 Inﬂuencing South African Politics

Robben Island was like Oxford or Cambridge to the British. . . . I think that the ruling class in this country miscalculated. And they often said it. They said the Portuguese did not put them together. If they scattered us about all over the country they would be no single concentration but here they concentrated us on one spot with the cream of the leadership there. So, Robben Island was bound to be a big core in South Africa. Going to Robben Island was like going to University. . . . The harsh treatment on Robben Island produced leaders tempered in that ﬁre of struggle and it produced very capable theoreticians who would argue their case and could map up [strategies for the struggle]. Some of the premiers are from Robben Island . . . Tokyo Sexwale . . . Raymond Mhlaba, and some of them are in the House of Assembly. Robben Island did produce part of the leadership of this country.1 [Robben Island] has been a sort of graduate school for revolutionaries, where raw youths who have rallied school boycotts have discussed technique with elderly founders of the armed struggle. . . . In the late 1970s and early 1980s, many Robben Island prisoners began to return to the mainland after ﬁnishing their sentences. Such released prisoners formed a peculiar sort of alumni association, schooled in concrete cells and taught by tenured faculty of lifetime maximum-security prisoners.2

In resisting, prisoners sought to remake and reconstruct the polity. This reshaping of the political environment was, in signiﬁcant part, facilitated through released prisoners bringing the Robben Island legacy outside prison into South African resistance politics. This inheritance included activists training in prison, banned organizations functioning behind the jail walls, and released prisoners receiving mandates when leaving prison. There were of course limits to Robben Islander inﬂuence, especially before the late 1970s 1 2

Gwala, interview. Mufson, Fighting Years, 65.

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when the state had fewer opponents to monitor and was therefore more effective in its “policing.” Even then, as well as in the 1980s, Robben Island inﬂuenced public opinion as a symbol of resistance. The Island was, however, more than a symbol; through former prisoners, it materially shaped South African resistance politics. This inﬂuence was in part through subterranean organizing and stimulating political awareness, but Islanders also molded and shifted the political landscape in relatively overt ways. This chapter will examine the place and role of Robben Island in South African politics, primarily by examining the impact of ex-Islanders following their release.3 The Robben Island Legacy At least three processes on Robben Island itself were critical to the inﬂuence of the prison on South African politics. These mechanisms were the development and training of individual activists; the advance of political organizations, especially through the maintenance of the banned liberation movements in prison; and the implicit and explicit mandates that prisoners were given upon their release. First, the prison was critical in shaping and enhancing individuals in terms of their educational, political, organizational, and administrative skills and understanding. Most former prisoners emphasized their political education in prison, but many other facets of Robben Island life also signiﬁcantly contributed to the growth of people and movements. For example, the sophisticated and complex society and culture that the prisoners developed taught people about administration, dealing with those one disagreed with, mutual support, and overt political and organizational development. When Jacob Zuma was asked whether it was axiomatic that leaders emerged out of Robben Island, because it was leaders who had gone into the Island prison, he was quick to disagree, and in so doing provided what might be described as a curriculum vitae of his own years in prison: If I take my own example, when I went to Robben Island I was an ordinary young cadre. . . . I hadn’t been a commander before, I hadn’t been anything. I began to work in the smallest unit in the ANC [on the Island], as a member of the group and I was changed from one group to the other. I then at one point became identiﬁed to collect news for the cell, because we had a system where collectively we collect news and come and disseminate the news. . . . You would keep [the news] in your head because we were not allowed to write down anything. . . . At one time I was appointed a group leader, which was different than me serving as a group member. . . . Once you are a group leader you actually attend cell leadership meetings of all the groups. 3

The role of Robben Island in South African politics may be explored from a number of perspectives. For example, one could examine the different images of Robben Island that emerged in popular culture or the assumptions that were made by various South African groups (at various times) about what it meant to be on Robben Island.

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In other words you are now at the cell leadership collective grouping. At another point I was . . . the public relations person, in the cell who then linked up with the unknown person. . . . At times we’d be asked to prepare a lecture. . . . By the time I left Robben Island I was the chairman of the political committee that was responsible for disseminating political lectures throughout the prison.4

In agreement with Zuma’s argument about how leadership training and status were a product of the Island experience, Hector Ntshanyana of the PAC pointed out that Johnson Mlambo became a leader by educating himself on Robben Island; he had not come to the Island as a leader.5 The utility of prison training for political life on the outside was often self-conscious. Steve Tshwete, for example, has spoken of the role of culture and sport on Robben Island in terms of the need to “build . . . a personality . . . that is going to be relevant to the advancement of our struggle when we leave prison.”6 In addition to educating people for activism after release, consideration was paid to other facets of life that could inﬂuence a former prisoner’s political impact. For example, prisoners realized that there were certain parts of the country where an adult male who was not circumcised would not have been considered a man and therefore would not have had the credibility to be a political organizer. Therefore, although circumcision on the Island was primarily conducted in accordance with African and speciﬁcally Xhosa traditions, there was also a political as well as the chief cultural motivation for certain men to be circumcised.7 It is arguably difﬁcult to separate out rationales for circumcision, as circumcision is a rite of passage that in this case admitted males to multiple communities, including the political community of adult men. Johnson Mgabela was an uKwaluka, the person who performed circumcisions. Ten years after arriving on the Island, he resumed providing this surgical service, ultimately circumcising 361 men (including one warder).8 He explained the rationale of his work: [T]he purpose of circumcision is to help us to subject ourselves to others. If a boy is not circumcised, he will not report to his seniors . . . he can’t act like a grown up, he won’t accept discipline. . . . [I]n jail there is only one committee that can discipline the people and that is our own [prisoners’] committee. There is no way in which Parliament or the government can stop our own customs.9

Second, political prisoners cultivated their organizations and, of enormous importance to South African political development, used 4 5 6 7 8 9

Zuma, interview. Ntshanyana, interview. Tshwete, interview. Motlanthe, interview. Johnson Mgabela, interview by Jan K. Coetzee, Plain Tales from Robben Island (Pretoria: Van Schaik Publishers, 2000), 47–49. Mgabela in Coetzee, Plain Tales, 50–51.

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Robben Island as the South African center for the constant and active maturation of the banned liberation movements. Organizational growth was largely facilitated by the protracted periods of time prisoners had to consider past strategies and tactics and reevaluate their organization’s thinking and practices. Newer members of organizations were able to learn their organization’s and country’s history – a learning experience that was usually difﬁcult or impossible before imprisonment because they had no time and few sources of information, especially reading materials. Closely related to the role the Islanders played in maintaining and developing organizations was their role in keeping the otherwise banned organizations alive inside the country, albeit mostly behind prison walls. For nearly thirty years, the only place in South Africa where the ANC and PAC were able to meet, organize, keep intact, and, indeed, enhance their mission was on Robben Island. Jeff Radebe was a senior member of the exiled ANC when he was captured inside South Africa in the mid 1980s while working underground. He commented that Robben Island “was the only place in South Africa that we were meeting as ANC comrades, and we were discussing the politics in a very serious manner. . . . It became clear to me why people . . . when they went out of Robben Island, they were contributing so constructively in the liberation struggle.”10 On the Island, the liberation movements were organized as the ANC11 and as the PAC, as well as APDUSA and the BCM, and they discussed ideology and policy, educated their membership, cultivated leadership, and recruited members. Although exiles would, unbeknown to them, have to wait until the 1990s to return to the country, most prisoners had ﬁnite sentences and could reinsert themselves politically into South Africa at the end of their prison terms. In saying this, however, one should not understate or underestimate the enormity of repression that former Islanders faced on release, and the incredible odds that worked against their continued political activism. But in fact many former Islanders did continue work inside the country, although often in secret. Third, released prisoners were given wide-ranging guidelines and occasionally explicit mandates regarding what political activity they should pursue upon release. Especially in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a clear recognition on Robben Island that there were enormous constraints on continued political involvement after release, especially in the underground, and therefore mandates were often deﬁned broadly. Harry Gwala pointed out that mandates would not involve speciﬁc instructions in case released prisoners fell into police hands or became informers.12 Nevertheless, Mac 10 11

12

Jeff Radebe, interview with author, tape recording, Cape Town, 21 October 1994. Kathrada (interview) at one point said the ANC was organized as the Congress Movement, but both he and other respondents otherwise referred to the ANC existing and functioning as an organization on Robben Island. Gwala, interview.

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Maharaj argued that Gwala had given two or three people in the general cells a mandate to join Inkatha when they were released in order to subvert this conservative Zulu group from within.13 This claim was consistent with Ahmed Kathrada’s observation that the heated debates as to whether the ANC should support involvement in Bantustans and other collaborationist structures emerged over the question of “whether people going out of prison should work in the Bantustan organizations.”14 Although Kathrada could not recall whether the ANC’s Hennie Ferus had received an organizational mandate to participate in the (Coloured) Labour Party upon his release, Maharaj noted that Ferus, in line with his support of Mandela and Walter Sisulu, considered himself to have this mandate. Beyond the Bantustan question, both Nkosi Molala of the BCM and the ANC’s Saki Macozoma15 noted that mandates would depend on the political training of the individual person being released. Within each organization, news analysis, political debates, and education broadly inﬂuenced what forms of activism were most necessary. Speciﬁc individuals might be given more detailed instructions. Macozoma said that someone who was particularly politically astute might have been told to work in unions on the politically delicate issue of trying to persuade unions to ally themselves with political organizations rather than exclusively concentrating on shop ﬂoor issues.16 Someone who was less sophisticated, and therefore perhaps unable to shift contemporary political interests and ideologies, might have been told to go into community organizations, which usually operated in a less controversial and contested political space. Mandates would depend not only on the strengths and weaknesses of individuals but also on where organizations saw themselves as vulnerable or strong in their struggle.17 Sometimes very specialized messages were passed or mandates given to departing prisoners. For example, Trevor Wentzel, whose conviction was overturned on appeal in the mid 1980s, left the Island with instructions to tell the UDF leadership that an individual who had been damaged psychologically needed to be situated in particular ways within the antiapartheid struggle.18 Maharaj recalled that when he was released from prison in 1976 he was given the 13 14 15

16 17 18

Sathyandrandranath (Mac) Maharaj, conversation with author, Cape Town, 8 November 1994. Kathrada, interview. Molala, interview; Macozoma, interview. At the time of the interviews with Macozoma in late 1987 and early 1988, Macozoma was not publicly identiﬁed with either the ANC (which was banned) or, more realistically from a legal standpoint, other groups most closely allied to the ANC’s Congress tradition. He publicly identiﬁed with the ANC when it was unbanned in 1990. Macozoma, interview. Babenia and Mlanda, interview. Wentzel, interview.

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ANC’s ﬁrst explicit mandate, which was to leave the country.19 This instruction was unusual, however; although many former political prisoners were forced to go into exile, generally leaving the country was not encouraged.20 One near-universal mandate for all released prisoners, especially in the 1960s, was to work for improved conditions within the prison from outside. This brieﬁng was especially important for those who went into exile (see Chapter Three). The most widely mentioned explicit mandate of the late 1970s and the 1980s (and/or most commonly discussed area of involvement following release) regarded the trade union movement, a theme that is examined separately later.

Limits to the Inﬂuence of Robben Island Despite the effectiveness and impact of Robben Islanders in antiapartheid resistance, there were distinct limits to activities former political prisoners could undertake. Especially during the 1960s and most of the 1970s, but to some extent until the early 1990s, all former political prisoners were greatly circumscribed in their postrelease political activities. This limitation was especially true for illegal underground work, but it was also true for legal political activity. Chapter Three examined many of the reasons for these constraints, including banishment, banning, poverty, and constant security police surveillance. Certainly prior to the Soweto uprising in 1976, and to some extent before the political reforms and resurgence of resistance politics in the 1980s, political fear was pervasive and a very oppressive environment gripped (at least black) South Africa. Although the Eastern Cape, in general, and Port Elizabeth, in particular, had a reputation for being at the heart of antiapartheid resistance, Macozoma recalled the area’s political quiescence: This may surprise many of you here as it goes against popular myth [but] . . . [t]he Port Elizabeth I grew up in the late sixties and early seventies was very apathetic politically. Port Elizabeth’s townships had suffered so much from the repression of the early sixties that people would not even speak about the struggles of that period, [although] in fact people from this area constituted a majority on the Island.21 19 20

21

Maharaj, conversation with author, Cape Town, November 8, 1994. Babenia and Mlanda, interview. Maharaj would have received his mandate prior to the Soweto uprising, that is, at a time where the Islanders would have perceived the struggle as still dormant. Presumably then, the ANC leadership felt that Maharaj could achieve more in exile. Perhaps too there were concerns about his safety inside South Africa. Furthermore, it is likely that Maharaj was leaving with extensive reports from the organization in prison to the organization in exile. He smuggled out a draft of Mandela’s autobiography as well as various other prisoner writings when he left prison, and these documents were then to be smuggled out of the country. Saki Macozoma, “Notes of a Native Son,” Monitor: The Journal of the Human Rights Trust, Port Elizabeth, special issue, 1988, 56, emphasis added.

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Fikile Bam believes that most ex-Islanders continued to be politically active after their release, but this involvement needed to be very subtle and discreet – values and attributes which were taught on Robben Island – because it was very difﬁcult to be active “when you know you are being watched.” In Bam’s experience, the security police considered all former political prisoners to be operative in the underground: [E]very time there was something going on in the Transkei[,] . . . they just rounded up everyone who had been on the Island. Put them into detention, ﬁrst in ’75, on the eve of [Transkei’s]independence, . . . and subsequent to that every other time there is some movement, for instance students at a place called Lady Frere went on strike and had pamphlets, and they said “It’s got to be one of those guys that comes from the Island” [and they would] round us all up.22

Most of these repressive activities delayed or inhibited political involvement; however, at times government action had the opposite effect from what was intended. For example, Eric Molobi pointed out that in banishing activists and ex-political prisoners to remote parts of rural South Africa, the apartheid regime created “different political centers” all over the country.23 (He also noted that where former Robben Islanders were prominent, they were the primary and ﬁrst point of contact for those in the underground.) A second means by which repression was used to the advantage of the liberation movements was when former Robben Islanders were detained with (mainly younger) activists, which allowed them to educate new groupings of militants. This phenomenon is discussed later. A third way in which Robben Island undermined the regime’s goals was that it emerged as a symbol of resistance that inspired new generations of political resisters. Robben Island as a Beacon in the Struggle Although Robben Island and other prisons were intended as warnings of the consequences of rebellion, many South Africans saw the Island as a symbol of black resistance against apartheid. Naledi Tsiki, for instance, recalled that for him, Tokyo Sexwale, and other friends, their ﬁrst source of political awareness and their initial focus on politics centered on Robben Island: “That was the ﬁrst light that we saw. That was the ﬁrst beam that began to give us direction.”24 He explained that “we grew up in the ’70s. . . . And we began to read, or to even hear whispers, and the whispers were Nelson Mandela, the man on Robben Island. What is Robben Island? Robben Island is a jail where they keep people who don’t like to be pushed around by white 22 23

24

Bam, interview. Molobi, interview. The effect of Robben Islanders in these different centers is taken up later in the subsection entitled “Rejuvenating Organizations.” This topic demands far greater research by scholars. Tsiki, interview.

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people.” Fezile Mlanda also pointed to the symbolism of Robben Island, often centered on Nelson Mandela who personiﬁed the Island’s message of resistance, as being critical to explaining how Robben Island has inﬂuenced South African politics. Furthermore, historically Robben Island was known as “the place where people who are opposing whatever government, from colonial days, were always kept.”25 Ahmed Kathrada, who became the head of the Robben Island Museum Council in the 1990s, noted that: Robben Island became and still remains a symbol of the resistance. . . . You had the sporadic guerrilla attacks . . . on which peoples attention would be focused for a brief while, . . . or when people were sentenced to death as a result [of these attacks]. But with Robben Island it was a permanent thing, here were the well-known ﬁgures like Mandela, Sisulu . . . who became completely identiﬁed with the resistance struggle. . . . Robben Island, just by the leadership being incarcerated there, became a symbol around which people campaigned, united, forgot political differences.26

Robben Island was a symbol of resistance to apartheid “not only in South Africa but throughout the world,” Kathrada argued. Indeed, this point is supported by the various apartheid government ofﬁcials who sought to challenge that symbolism by removing Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners from the Island prison, a topic discussed in Chapter Eight. The Subterranean Inﬂuence of Former Robben Islanders Rejuvenating Organizations Arguably more important than the symbolic power of Robben Island, however, was the role former Islanders played in rejuvenating and strengthening antiapartheid politics primarily in South Africa but also in exile. Robben Islanders were able to link and connect political traditions and communities from different time periods, regions, legal and illegal struggles, and exile and internal politics to create and emphasize continuities in South African resistance traditions. Political prisoners who were incarcerated in the 1960s were released in a steady stream as their sentences ended, so that from the late sixties, and more particularly over the 1970s, more and more former prisoners were potentially available to feed into, stimulate, encourage, and direct the (re)emerging political activity. The former Islanders were seldom visible beacons of the continuation of politics, especially before the early 1980s. They nevertheless found ways to be reference points for the youth who took over much of the struggle in the 1970s. Islanders interviewed for this book who had been inﬂuenced by ex-Robben Island inmates include Banda, Tsiki, Morobe, Masondo, and Tungwane. (Importantly, Tungwane pointed out that he may have 25 26

Babenia and Mlanda, interview. Kathrada, interview.

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worked with more former Islanders than he realized, but the nature of underground politics required knowing as little as possible about those with whom one worked.)27 Jacob Zuma, with the help of Harry Gwala and others, reinvigorated the Natal ANC underground.28 Released Robben Islander Mac Maharaj played a major role in linking Natal activists, especially Indians, with the ANC and SACP, helping to create “one of the ANC’s ‘more important underground units.’ ”29 Similarly, Martin “Magalies” Ramokgadi ran the greater Johannesburg ANC underground in the mid 1970s, along with people like Joe Gqabi who did much to recruit the militant youth of the 1970s into Umkhonto we Sizwe and the ANC. Indeed, Gqabi emerged as perhaps the most important former Islander when it came to supporting youth leaders of the 1976 Soweto rebellion, reestablishing the ANC underground, setting the stage for the UDF’s establishment, and emphasizing strategic rather than categorical30 approaches of the ANC tradition.31 But Gqabi was not alone. Steve Tshwete played a critical role in the Eastern Cape in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including in the formation of the UDF. (He later went into exile and assumed a prominent position in the ANC.) Nor were these reactivation roles of Islanders conﬁned to the major centers of the country; Peter Nchabaleng ﬁrst organized the ANC underground and then the UDF in the Northern Transvaal, and there are countless accounts of people who continued various forms of legal or underground political work in the Eastern Cape. James Ngqondela rejoined the underground after a ten-year sentence on the Island, completed in 1973. Ten years later, he was rearrested, but in the meantime not only did he apply the discipline and political education he had learned in prison to furthering the underground struggle but he also used his car to ferry people or arms in support of the armed struggle.32 After M. J. Maqungo was released, he became involved in underground rather than legal politics, where he worked with other former Robben Islanders and directed youth to military training in the ANC. He added that Robben Islanders were especially important in Eastern Cape 27 28 29

30 31

32

Tungwane, interview. Zuma, interview. Jeremy Seekings, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983– 1991 (Cape Town, Oxford, and Athens, Ohio: David Philip Publishers, James Currey, and Ohio University Press, 2000), 32. See Chapter Six for an extended discussion of strategic and categorical resistance. See Seekings, The UDF, chapter 2 and especially pages 31–36, and Karis and Gerhart, From Protest to Challenge, 159, 181–182. Note that my ﬁndings conﬁrm the argument of Brooks and Brickhill, which identiﬁed links between student movement leaders and the ANC. Likewise, although neither Seekings nor Karis and Gerhart make this point explicit, the argument can be deduced from their evidence. See Alan Brooks and Jeremy Brickhill, Whirlwind Before the Storm: The Origins and Development of the Uprising in Soweto and the Rest of South Africa from June to December 1976 (London: International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, 1980), 162. Ngqondela, interview.

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politics because there were so many former political prisoners in that region.33 Before being captured, most of Jeff Radebe’s work in the underground had been with former Islanders.34 The PAC too relied on its former Islanders to maintain or rejuvenate their organizations and the spirit and practice of resistance. Simon Ramogale, a PAC member imprisoned on the Island in the 1960s, described helping young black consciousness members in the early 1970s.35 Walter Sifozonke Tshikila, who had previously been on the Island in the PAC for six years, was found guilty in 1977 in Grahamstown of being a PAC member, inciting people to leave the country for military training, and giving lectures on the PAC; he was sentenced to another thirteen years in prison.36 In the intervening years Tshikila worked with both youth and older cadres, in and out of South Africa.37 In the 1980s, Malcolm Dyani decided that it was important to build up the PAC within South Africa and to provide political education about the PAC, and so worked with people like Khoisan X (then Benny Alexander) who later would have leading positions within the PAC.38 Former Robben Islanders are among the prominent members of democratic South Africa’s black consciousness organizations, especially in the Azanian People’s Organization and in unions associated with the National Council of Trade Unions. Vusumzi Mcongo noted that the Port Elizabeth branch of AZAPO was started in 1983 by Robben Islanders and others. There is, however, an apparent contradiction in the assessments of the older or earlier generation of Robben Islanders regarding their inﬂuence on the BCM, before BCM members began to be sent to Robben Island in the mid 1970s, and the appraisals of this latter group. Most contemporary BCM activists, such as Pandelani Nefolovhodwe of AZAPO, noted that Robben Islanders had little or no contact with or inﬂuence upon them before their own imprisonment. Nefolovhodwe, for instance, attributed this absence of inﬂuence to the repressive environment of the time that led former political prisoners to be banished and isolated.39 Non-BCM proponents, however, often identify former Islanders as having been in contact with BCM members before their own imprisonments. Masondo and Ramogale are two such examples (cited previously), as is Themba Hlatswayo of the PAC who argued that between his two imprisonments, Zephania Mothopeng was inﬂuential in the formation 33 34

35 36 37 38 39

M. J. Maqungo, interview by author, tape recording, Bisho, 14 May 1996. Radebe, interview. On the role of former Robben Islanders in establishing “embryonic underground structures,” see Govan Mbeki, Sunset at Midday Latshon’ilang’emini! (Braamfontein, South Africa: Nolwazi Educational Publishers,1996), 38. Simon Ramogale, interview with author, tape recording, Johannesburg, 24 July 1994. SAIRR, Race Relations Survey 1978, 139. Zifozonke Tshikila, interview with author together with Mkatali Loliwe and Colbert Nyobe, tape recording. Bisho, 13 May 1996. Dyani, interview. Nefolovhodwe, interview.

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of SASO, having been approached by some of its founders. Mothopeng “indicated to them that there is very little they could do above-board and not be persecuted. So obviously they had to come up with something that would be more closely linked with activities that are more like developing the communities.”40 Mothopeng therefore worked with many BCM members through his involvement in the Wilgespruit Fellowship Centre. Mlambo similarly noted that Mothopeng worked extensively with black consciousness people between his prison sentences, which was one of the reasons for the closeness between the PAC and the BCM on the Island.41 Perhaps the most powerful evidence currently available about the role of former prisoners in creating, nurturing, and strengthening antiapartheid politics derives from examining the activities of the signiﬁcant numbers of Robben Islanders who served a second sentence in that prison, having continued their underground work upon their release. Indeed, not only is that the case with the predominantly PAC Bethal trial of 1978–1979, but the four former Robben Islanders – Zephania Mothopeng, Mark Shinners, Hamilton Keke, and John Ganya – were also charged with furthering the PAC while on the Island in the 1960s and early 1970s! Regarding Mothopeng, Lodge wrote: Mothopeng was arrested again in August 1976 and endured, at the age of sixtysix, sixteen months of solitary conﬁnement. A lengthy trial [known as the Bethal trial] subsequently revealed his almost single-handed efforts to resurrect the PAC as a political force in South Africa. Setting up a coordinating committee in Johannesburg, Mothopeng was able to bring within its ambit a string of youth and other associations that had been formed in the wake of the black consciousness movement. He made contact with the PAC in Swaziland and set up a recruitment program. In 1978 he was sentenced to ﬁfteen years under the Terrorism Act.42

Two major ANC trials also reﬂected the results of the Robben Islanders’ political activity. One was known as the Joe Gqabi or Pretoria 12 trial, and while Gqabi and codefendant Nchabaleng were both acquitted (and later killed), Martin Ramokgadi, a fellow Island veteran, was sent back for a second term. The other major trial took place in Pietermaritzburg. Harry Gwala and Msomi Matthews Meyiwa were again convicted and returned to Robben Island. There were other, smaller trials of Robben Islanders who had been caught continuing the struggle. This included the trial of Joseph Mati, of whom the trial judge commented that “you were the kingpin who played a key role here in the East[ern] Cape.”43 Frequently, it was the former fellow Island prisoners of those on trial who were forced to give evidence, though many refused. Soto Ndukwana noted that he went to a former 40 41 42 43

Hlatswayo, interview. Mlambo, interview. Lodge, All, Here, and Now, 193. Daily Dispatch 8–9 November 1977 in Karis-Gerhart collection.

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Robben Islander for help with underground activities, and this man then gave evidence at his trial.44 In Mati’s case, in contrast, four former Islanders called to testify against him refused to do so and were therefore each sentenced to six months in prison.45 Robben Island and the Exile Organizations Robben Island also contributed to the liberation movements in exile, especially in the case of the PAC, which had been more successful in dealing with internal divisions on the Island than in exile. On Robben Island, the PAC united or at least found common cause among its membership. (Indeed, after being unbanned, many of the PAC’s leaders were Robben Island veterans and graduates.) Robben Islanders were critical to rejuvenating the organization in exile. Johnson Mlambo was mandated by Zephania Mothopeng to go into exile to help John Nyati Pokela repair the divisions in the exile wing of the PAC.46 Lodge noted that [d]uring the 1970s the PAC had virtually fallen apart due to conﬂict among its leaders. In 1980 John Pokela, one of the PAC’s founders, was released after being imprisoned for twenty years on Robben Island. . . . [I]n 1981 he was elected president of the exiled PAC. . . . During the early 1980s, Pokela managed to bring back into the fold some of the dissident factions that had been alienated by the erratic behavior of previous leaders. . . . Pokela died in June 1985, and his mantle was assumed by another long-term Robben Islander, Johnson Mlambo. In 1989 . . . Mlambo retained the executive functions of chairperson, and another recently released veteran, . . . Zephania Mothopeng, became PAC president. After Mlambo became PAC president in 1985, the APLA [Azanian People’s Liberation Army] began to launch guerrilla operations.47

In principle, the ANC on Robben Island argued that “prisoners could not lead the organization from prison” and therefore the organization on the Island could not make policy decisions.48 In fact, the prisoners in the ANC did debate policy issues in a way that could and did inﬂuence the direction of the organization. At times, they were asked by the exile movement for their opinion on particular issues. According to Gail Gerhart, the late Joe Slovo, a senior ANC and SACP leader in exile, recalled that the exiled organization asked if the Island leadership supported opening the ANC to non-Africans, a decision that the organization did take in its 1969 Morogoro conference.49 A beleaguered Oliver Tambo, the ANC president, wrote in code to Mandela, his old friend and colleague, in 1975, to report on splits and challenges in exile and to reassure the Islanders of the value 44 45 46 47 48 49

Ndukwana, interview. Daily Dispatch, 5 November 1977, in Karis-Gerhart collection. Mlambo, interview. Lodge, All, Here, and Now, 191, 193. Gwala, interview. Gail Gerhart, telephone conversation with author, 21 July 1994.

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of their sacriﬁce.50 Govan Mbeki noted that the ANC’s Politico-military Strategic Commission, briefed to rethink the organization’s strategies in the late 1970s, consulted the Robben Island leadership “through special emissaries.”51 At Slovo’s funeral in January 1995, Tokyo Sexwale recalled that Slovo, who had been his commander, sent messages to Sexwale and other prisoners on the Island.52 Kathrada noted that most interaction between prisoners and the exiled ANC took place in the context of considering negotiations.53 For example, Mandela commented that the initial participation of Ni¨el Barnard, the head of the National Intelligence Service, in Mandela’s secret talks with the apartheid government meant he needed to apprise his organization in exile of his activities.54 Perhaps the major limitation on the direct contribution of Robben Island to exile politics was the extraordinary difﬁculty involved in communicating. Messages could, however, occasionally be taken in or out through coded letters and hidden writing. (Greater communication was also possible over time.) Visitors were both a potential means of communication and a source of inﬂuence. Gwala, for example, noted that Robben Island also exercised a lot of silent inﬂuence because when there were visitors, for example, Winnie Mandela would visit Nelson and then discuss matters. And if you said “Nelson saw it this way,” it would tend to be the law. Because his name was venerated. That’s how Robben Island exercised inﬂuence. Consciously and unconsciously in the minds of many people in the country.55

Perhaps more important than formal communications between the exile movements and Robben Island was the signiﬁcance that the prison had in bringing together the different strands of the liberation struggle: exile and guerrilla forces, underground activists operating within South Africa, and militants involved in legal forms of struggle. When Murphy Morobe was asked whether Robben Island had inﬂuenced South African politics, he answered in the afﬁrmative by explaining how Robben Island became the conduit to spread the “toyi-toyi,” a morale-boosting dance from the Umkhonto we Sizwe camps in exile, into South Africa. The captured guerrillas brought the part ﬁtness routine, part war dance to the Island, and in turn taught it to activists from across South Africa: At that point in ’82, it’s not only us who have been released from the Island in the PWV [Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging region; now the Gauteng Province], there were also [people being released who were] from the Eastern Cape, . . . those 50 51 52 53 54 55

Sampson, Mandela: The Authorized Biography, 267. Mbeki, Sunset at Midday, 42. Letter to author from Penny McKenzie, January 1995. Kathrada, interview. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 465. Gwala, interview. See also Kathrada in Sampson, Mandela: The Authorized Biography, 256.

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who had ﬁve year sentences from 1977, they were being released in 1982. So we had the toyi-toyi literally hitting the landscape almost at the same time, you know. So, and what I’m trying to give an indication of is the relationship where you have the unintended consequences and perhaps unanticipated consequences of the actions of many of the group, which eventually end . . . with a result which sees the translation of the transposition of an art form, or a struggle form, from across the boundaries into prison, from prison into the townships. And you can’t think of the UDF, for example, without the toyi-toyi, you can’t think of ungovernability of the township politics without the toyi-toyi.56

The toyi-toyi then, became a symbol of the rejoining of the disparate elements of the struggle, at least for the ANC, on Robben Island. But the PAC and BCM too beneﬁted from the meeting of those who had been in exile and those who were active in national politics. In turn, imprisonment was used to consolidate a shared and synthesized understanding of organizational histories and the future trajectories and strategies antiapartheid politics needed to take. Politicizing in Detention Cells If the toyi-toyi was both a symbol of and an impetus to the widespread protests and insurrection of the 1980s, the state response was, in signiﬁcant part, to detain of tens of thousands of people through the 1980s, especially from 1985. These mass sweeps included both experienced former political prisoners and new, usually young, activists. The ex-prisoners used these opportunities to replicate the Robben Island model of turning prison cells into seminar rooms for political education.57 Molobi elaborated on his experiences: They put us all in prison. Now we had these youngsters who’d never been to prison. Now we brought in habits of prison to detention. And this is discipline while you are prison, and political discussions. All the time! So we had a captive audience. . . . They kept us for more that twenty-two months in detention for nothing. So we drilled it into the youngsters about meeting, organize, mobilize people in the sectors where they ﬁnd themselves. And these youngsters left [and it created a ripple effect].58

In a study of the life stories of political activists involved in the turbulent 1980s, Coetzee and Wood noted that all their subjects were detained at some point.59 These activists reported that they were educated by their fellow 56 57 58 59

Morobe, interview. Of course, the 1980s was not the ﬁrst time the state had used mass detention, nor the ﬁrst time politicizing had occurred within detention cells. See, for example, Seekings, The UDF, 35. Molobi, interview. Jan K. Coetzee and G. T. Wood, “Local Odyssey in Search of a New Space for Freedom: Biographical Accounts of the Political Struggle in the Eastern Cape (South Africa) in the 1980s.” South African Journal of Sociology 26, no. 1 (1995). For another account of political

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detainees in the prison cells. An unamed respondent cited by Coetzee and Wood recalled: So they also then became teachers to us who had not had that opportunity to be on Robben Island. So they led discussions. They gave us the lectures. They taught us, and then there were open sessions for us to debate issues, and to challenge some issues with the little we had from outside, what we learnt in the townships. So I would say, they were the people that one could say were the political gurus in the prison.60

Aside from supporting Molobi’s assertion about the role of Robben Islanders in the detention cells, this activist’s comments also point to the enormous esteem in which Robben Island and its “graduates” were held, and the activist’s modest, even self-deprecating sense of his (only males are cited) own political understanding relative to those who had been on the Island. Coetzee and Wood’s respondents also reported attitudes and practices similar to those cultivated on Robben Island were developing in the detention cells, including an emphasis on the need to attempt to control and channel the tremendous anger detainees felt or to become more tolerant of divergent opinions. As on the Island, not all experiences were positive. One subject was victimized while in detention because a former Robben Islander who was detained with him accused him of being an informer. The frustration of this apparently unfair and unfounded accusation was compounded because the former Islander “provided some inspiration to the other detainees.”61 Indeed, Nkosi Molala has pointed out that, like this Islander who accused the young detainee of being an informer, some former Robben Islanders took advantage of the Island’s status and have done a disservice to that prison community and the struggle.62 Perhaps more than any other people, prisoners know the costs of gossip, intolerance, and ostracism. Detention was also often a site of recruitment to political organizations. Although Molobi noted that induction in the mid 1980s was more to the Congress movement and less to the ANC per se, Trevor Wentzel observed that his detention in 1980 led to his being recruited to the ANC by former Robben Islander Hennie Ferus.63 Ferus and Achmed Cassim, who had also been on Robben Island, turned Victor Verster prison into something of a university.

60 61 62 63

and communal life in detention cells, see Mzwanele Mayekiso, Township Politics: Civic Struggles for a New South Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1996), 112–118. Coetzee and Wood, “Local Odyssey,” 7. Ibid., 8. Molala, interview. Molobi, interview and Wentzel, interview.

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Shifting the Political Landscape Generations Robben Island played an important role in facilitating cross-generational communication between the different age-sets of activists who were thrown into prison over the years. Relationships could at times be tense, especially in the post–1976 period, but generally the prisoners worked to understand each other and build their organizations from the perspective of different generations. This meant, inter alia, that former prisoners leaving the Island to resume activism would be able to carry the knowledge and insights of multiple periods of struggle. In this vein, Mlambo reported that when he returned to Robben Island in 1979, Mothopeng said, “‘You see my sons, in 1960 I went to jail with your leaders, and in 1963 I came here to Robben Island with you. And now, in 1979, I have come back with my grandsons. It shows you that element of continuity.’”64 Prior to his murder, Steve Biko saw the 1976 uprising and the subsequent state repression as something which “has been a very useful weapon in merging the young and old. Before then there was a difference in the outlooks of the old generation and the younger generation.”65 His observation involved astute analysis and excellent foresight, for both much of South Africa’s recent political history and the much narrower history of Robben Island. The importance of generational differences and convergence on Robben Island continued over time, as the following two examples from the mid and late 1980s illustrate. In about 1985, Motlanthe was removed from Robben Island for a few months and sent to Caledon and Pollsmoor prisons. In Caledon prison, he encountered youth who identiﬁed with the ANC (as they had come from UDF) but who were affected by the “wild element of violence” engulﬁng political conﬂict in the country at that time. When they were all brought back to the Island, “we then joined other groups that came from exile and some comrades from the University of the Western Cape, and then we generally stabilized the group in the mainstream structures of the Island.”66 In 1988, ANC member Lassie Chiwayo was sent to Robben Island at age twenty-two, after harrowing experiences in the hands of the state, including physical torture and the attempt to blackmail him after his father’s death, itself a result of his detention. Furthermore, “there was apparently an attempt by prison ofﬁcials to break us [in Witbank and Bethal prisons]; they did not think that being in prison was enough of a punishment.”67 This retributive approach resulted in his and his fellow prisoners’ adopting “very serious 64 65 66 67

Mlambo, interview. Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (London: Heinemann, 1984), 146. Motlanthe, interview. Lazarus Chiwayo, interview by author, tape recording, Cape Town, 4 November 1994.

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antagonistic attitudes against whites. . . . All that we knew was that any person that is white, especially prison warders, deserved [to be] assault[ed].” This anger and bitterness was to be fundamentally challenged on Robben Island: “But with the sort of leaders we found on Robben Island we were, to a very large extent, transformed. I would say we were completely transformed, but completely different, new attitudes.”68 Chiwayo also mentioned that he was shocked by the “very healthy relations” among the different organizations on the Island, which was in sharp contrast to the attitude outside prison where other organizations were considered the enemy that had to be suppressed. Presumably, the existing inmates were consistently challenged and invigorated by the continued inﬂux of (young) prisoners, who in turn were able to bring some of the outside world into the prison. The convergence that was achieved, however, was often more difﬁcult to carry on outside the prison, where political conditions did not allow for time-consuming discussions and careful political education campaigns. Chiwayo, who was elected as an ANC senator in the 1994 government, said that the transformation of his and others’ political attitudes on Robben Island was so dramatic that upon release we found it very difﬁcult to relate to our peers. I still ﬁnd it difﬁcult to relate to my peers now. Most of them do not understand because the manner that one behaves in is the same manner [as] . . . Madiba [Mandela] and any of the elder leaders of the ANC. . . . Young people in general . . . have this tendency that they are impatient and they don’t give serious and deep thought [to] what they do.69

A Return to Congress Tradition Hegemony Robben Islanders were very important in redirecting the ideological hegemony of antiapartheid resistance away from the black consciousness tradition dominant in the 1970s and toward the older ANC or Congress tradition in the 1980s. A key and deﬁning element of that tradition was the Freedom Charter, a document that was drawn up in 1955 by the ANC and its allies, which privileged nonracialism by its opening pronouncement “that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.” The document implicitly endorsed a mixed economy with socialist and capitalist elements. The adoption of a charterist – following Freedom Charter – position by former black consciousness supporters on Robben Island is often identiﬁed as an important factor in the reestablishment of the Congress tradition as hegemonic in the South African liberation struggle. One of the most important political ﬁnishing-schools was Robben Island prison. Young Black Consciousness and pro-PAC militants arrived there to be confronted by the older prisoners, dominated by Nelson Mandela and his generation of 68 69

Ibid. Ibid.

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activists. . . . Robben Island prison played a substantial role in forming a new generation of ANC members.70

Although the move of BC activists to the Congress or charterist position was important, on Robben Island, in exile, and in South Africa more broadly, the change in the identiﬁcation of individuals was part of a broader process of altering the political terrain, of which the most signiﬁcant aspect was creating organizations and alliances in the Congress mold. Once again, Robben Islanders played a critical role in this development. One benchmark organization in this process was the Congress of South African Students, which signaled a (re)newed allegiance to the charterist tradition by using the label “Congress.” As Khehla Shubane noted: A[n] . . . important COSAS contribution to resistance in Soweto [and elsewhere in South Africa] was its role in reviving the charterist tradition. By embracing the Freedom Charter, the basic policy document of the African National Congress (ANC), COSAS reintroduced the ANC ideology into a nationwide organization. Until this point in the 1970s, resistance politics had been dominated by the black consciousness philosophy, which had found an organizational base with the formation of AZAPO in 1978.71

According to Govan Mbeki, it was a Robben Islander, Joe Gqabi, who was behind the formation of this organization and its ideological and organizational commitments: “While based in Botswana, Gqabi engineered the formation of COSAS and later the takeover of the Azanian Students’ Organization (AZASO).”72 Steven Mufson pointed to another way in which COSAS had its origins in prison, namely that when he was detained in 1977, Murphy Morobe, then a leader in the Soweto Student Representative Council, told a fellow detainee to start a new school student group upon release. That student group was COSAS.73 (In contrast, Seekings argued that former detainees lead the establishment of COSAS in June 1979. Moreover, while Gqabi may have supported the idea of COSAS, he cited a claim that Gqabi was angry at the reference to “Congress” in the organization’s name, given its ANC connotations.)74 The formation of COSAS and the takeover of AZASO were but an indication of the hundreds of grassroots organizations that emerged in the 1980s. Furthermore, the majority of these groups aligned themselves, sooner or later, with the Congress tradition, primarily through the banner of the UDF. The UDF was the charterist umbrella or front organization that deﬁned much of the eighties politics of protest and insurrection. 70 71 72 73 74

Stephen Ellis and Tsepo Sechaba, Comrades Against Apartheid: The ANC and the South African Communist Party in Exile (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 86–87. Shubane, “Soweto,” in Lodge and Nasson, All, Here, and Now, 262–263. Mbeki, Sunset at Midday, 45. Mufson, Fighting Years, 33. Seekings, The UDF, 35–36.

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Robben Island was critical to the formation and development of the UDF in at least two respects.75 In the ﬁrst place is the role Robben Islanders still in prison had in conceptualizing the UDF as a political project for released prisoners to execute. Former Robben Islanders do not agree, however, whether and to what extent the ANC on Robben Island consciously planned or designed the UDF as a mandate for released ANC prisoners. In the opinion of some former Islanders, the UDF was initiated in prison: Banda called the UDF “an idea from Robben Island,” Mlanda remarked that “the whole UDF was Robben Island programmed,” and Molobi noted that the formation of the UDF was inﬂuenced by Robben Island.76 Molobi added that he and other Robben Islanders wrote the speech of the UDF patron, Allan Boesak, for the launch of the UDF. On the other hand, others suggest the UDF was neither conceptualized nor planned in prison.77 The answer to this question is probably a matter less of fact than of perception. As Gwala noted, the UDF was consistent with the broad, alliance-type political strategy of the Congress movement dating back to the Congress of the People and the Freedom Charter in the 1950s.78 Furthermore, there were debates on the Island about broad or popular fronts in other parts of the world, and whether South Africa could follow these examples.79 It is reasonable to suggest that much of the thinking and tactics involved in the UDF emerged out of discussions on Robben Island, without there being a carefully thoughtout plan in which the UDF was conceived. Although Motlanthe argued that it was an exaggeration to say that the UDF was conceptualized on Robben Island, he also suggested that around 1980 “there was a document written on . . . organization, the whole question of organizing street committees and so forth. Forming fronts was covered in that document, and in fact the UDF as the UDF was really a manifestation” of the kinds of arguments made in that document. This document80 “was really seen as provision for the young leadership that was leaving prison at that time, and I must say most of them, they’d actually tried to put what they’d learnt into practice.” Furthermore, in establishing the UDF and its constituent organizations, “the UDF actually helped . . . bring back to surface” ANC supporters who had been “lying low and yes, most of them would have been Robben Islanders as well.”81 75 76 77 78 79 80

81

For a broader discussion of the origins and formation of the UDF, see Seekings, The UDF. Banda, interview; Babenia and Mlanda, interview; Molobi, interview. Gwala, interview; Kathrada, interview. Gwala, interview. Molobi, interview. This document, or parts of it, may well be made up of or include Govan Mbeki’s Learning From Robben Island pieces “The Rise and Growth of Afrikaner Capital II: The Resultant Socio-Politico-Economic Effects,” “Good Organisation: The Key to Success,” “Good Organization: Carrying the Organisation to the Bantustans,” and “Notes on Leaﬂetting and Pamphleteering.” Motlanthe, interview.

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The second way in which Robben Island contributed to shaping the UDF is a matter of public record. A large, perhaps even disproportionate, number of Robben Islanders came to be active in, mold, and lead the UDF itself, as well as other organizations that were members, supporters, and allies of the Front. (There were also non-Robben Island former political prisoners active in the UDF, including Matthew Goniwe, Jeremy Cronin, and Raymond Suttner.) At the top layer of national leadership, still imprisoned Robben Islanders were among the UDF’s twenty patrons.82 Christmas Tinto, an Islander, was one of the original UDF National Executive Committee members.83 Henry Fazzie and Edgar Ngoyi joined the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Association (PEBCO) in 1984, soon after their release from the Island.84 Steve Tshwete became president of the UDF’s border region of the Transkei and Ciskei.85 Stone Sizane was one of PEBCO’s organizers after his Island term ended.86 In the opposite side of the country, Peter Nchabaleng, who had served a ten-year sentence on Robben Island in the 1960s and was unsuccessfully retried in the mid-1970s (although his son was convicted), became president of the UDF in the Northern Transvaal in 1986, before being killed that year by the police.87 Terror Lekota was the Front’s original publicity secretary.88 Many Robben Islanders originally assumed very modest and behind-thescenes positions, but eventually rose to national prominence in the UDF and its afﬁliates. These included Murphy Morobe who had become the UDF’s acting publicity secretary and the main spokesman by the late 1980s, in part due to the waves of detentions and trials that had removed many other layers of the UDF’s leadership, and in part due to his own skills and political acumen. By luck and coincidence, the sentences of at least two generations of former Robben Islanders began to end around the same time, between the late 1970s and the early 1980s. These men were critical to revitalizing the UDF and its member and allied organizations. These included church groups, unions (discussed later), and civic and community organizations. In a paper on civic associations, Mark Swilling noted the gradual release from the early 1970s onwards of a generation of ‘Robben Islanders’ and ‘prison graduates’. These were veterans of the deﬁance campaigns of the 1950s, armed struggle of the 1960s and 1970s and Black-Consciousness-led student struggles of the 1970s. They brought with them a national network of leaders who shared a common experience, language, ideology and organisational strategy. 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

Lodge and Nasson, All, Here, and Now, 52. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 70. Mufson, Fighting Years, 206. Lodge and Nasson, All, Here, and Now, 82. Ibid., 122–123. Ibid., 203.

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Hardly ever written about, this multi-generational network acted as a kind of ideological and organisational ‘glue’ for local and national struggles in the 1980s.89

Unions and Politics One persistent frustration for many in the UDF and others who wanted to promote the Congress tradition was the reluctance of many unions to identify consistently or actively with the UDF and political movements. There were two reasons that made an alliance with the unions a primary goal of the UDF. On the one hand, the socialist-oriented perspective of many in the UDF valorized the role of the working classes; moreover, “[m]ost supporters of the Freedom Charter acknowledged that the workers were the leading force in the struggle.”90 On the other hand, ideology aside, organized black workers had the greatest potential and actual economic power within black South Africa. As Eddie Webster noted, “the organization of the unions, their large membership, the daily access to their members and their location in strategic sectors of the economy, had by 1984 given the union movement greater capacity to mobilise power than any other organization publicly active in South Africa.”91 For both of these reasons, building black unions (which were ofﬁcially recognized by the regime in 1979) and then winning their support was a primary imperative for all liberation groups. The power and importance of unions were not lost on Robben Islanders. When interviewees were asked about mandates they or others were given prior to their release, the most explicitly identiﬁed mandate was either to promote trade unionism per se, or to shift the unions from an emphasis on shop ﬂoor issues to include political demands with the basic material demands.92 Most unions were initially concerned with strengthening themselves with respect to improving their members’ economic bargaining power within the workplace. Over time, a concern with addressing broader political issues emerged, but unions still did not necessarily agree with political groups when it came to the relative emphasis on political versus economic issues, nor did they want to lose any of their power to other groups. By 1983, the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) had accepted the need for unions to work with community organizations but still ﬁercely resisted unions being involved in politics not under their control.93 Thomas Masuku 89 90 91

92 93

Mark Swilling, “Civic Associations in South Africa,” photocopied unpublished paper, 4 December 1993, 5. Lodge and Nasson, All, Here, and Now, 24. Eddie Webster, “The Rise of Social-Movement Unionism: The Two Faces of the Black Trade Union Movement in South Africa,” in State, Resistance and Change in South Africa, eds. Philip Frankel, Noam Pines, and Mark Swilling (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 184. See, for example, Banda, Motlanthe, Babenia and Mlanda, Masondo, Masuku, Macozoma, and Tsiki interviews. Webster, “The Rise of Social Movement Unionism,” 185.

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argued that Robben Islanders were able to “inﬁltrate FOSATU, and work side by side with them, and change it.”94 The place and role of the unions and their relationship to politics led to ﬁerce debates on and off Robben Island. Naledi Tsiki recalled that a document, written on the Island, argued that all unions and union organizers who were not aligned with Congress-movement political groups were the enemy. Tsiki noted that he and others adamantly rejected this approach, saying that no one who organized workers could be seen as the enemy. It was, instead, incumbent on ex-political prisoners to acknowledge the good that unions were doing while working with them to shift them toward a more active political position and one aligned with the UDF and other Congress traditions. Tsiki emphasized that winning prison debates like these was critical because what was taught on the Island would inform what people would do when released, “and we wanted people to go into those structures.”95 Mbeki pointed to a “secondary debate” as to “whether trade unions should form distinct political parties.” He argued that Robben Island played a decisive role in resolving this debate: “Trade unionists who favoured this course and who arrived on Robben Island to serve short sentences there were quickly disabused of the idea during discussions in political study groups.”96 Motlanthe, who came in the late 1990s to head South Africa’s most powerful trade union, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), recalled that although he joined the union movement after his release, he was not specifically mandated to do so; he was, instead, responding to the general imperatives that emerged on Robben Island.97 (By the time of his release in 1987, NUM had aligned itself with the UDF and other allied antiapartheid groups.) Earlier in the 1980s, for Morobe, “it was very clear that . . . one has to go into the unions, because we identiﬁed the union movement, the working class, the proletariat, as the vanguard, and that’s where we had to throw our weight.”98 The emphasis on unionization was neither new to South African politics nor to Robben Island. Indeed, there is reason to believe that Robben Islanders played formative, albeit behind-the-scenes role in the seventies renewal of the labor movement. In the early 1970s, conditions were favourable for a trade union revival, [and] SACTU [the ANC-aligned South African Congress of Trade Unions] members who had not left the country reemerged. Hundreds of ANC activists who had been imprisoned on Robben Island for terms of up to ﬁve years from 1964 were released by the end of the decade.

94 95 96 97 98

Masuku, interview. Tsiki, interview. Mbeki, Sunset at Midday, 17. Motlanthe, interview. Morobe, interview.

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They immediately began to form trade unions in the areas to which they had been endorsed out.99

Glenn Adler provided a case study of the role of a few former Robben Islanders in reinvigorating trade union activism.100 His account points to the very subterranean ways in which Robben Islanders invariably had to act, and therefore why it is extremely difﬁcult to develop a composite picture of the role of ex-political prisoners in South African politics. In his study of unionization at Volkswagen’s plant in Uitenhage in the Eastern Cape, Adler identiﬁed former Robben Islanders as critical, though invariably publicly invisible ﬁgures, behind the development of the plant’s trade union. Vuyo Kwinana, an ANC member from an ANC family, had been on Robben Island for two and a half years in the 1960s.101 He began working at Volkswagen in 1972. By the time he joined the workforce, a group of former ANC, PAC, and union activists had begun clandestine discussions, and this “secret network” decided to “take over the [recently-introduced workers’] Liaison Committee as a ﬁrst step towards developing a union.”102 (Echoing the role of sport on Robben Island, the work of this network was enhanced by good relationships between Coloured and African workers and leaders that were forged, in part, in community rugby groups.) Like most black workers, Kwinana experienced discrimination when he joined Volkswagen. He shared his experiences of prejudice, as well as those of the other workers, with comrades in his ANC cell in order to discuss an appropriate course of action. His organization told him to work towards replacing the Liaison Committee with a trade union: Through workers like Kwinana the cells inﬂuenced the Liaison Committee members to “motivate them what direction to take, what strategy to apply”. . . . These individuals almost never became shop stewards or ofﬁce-bearers of the union, but instead kept a low proﬁle as ordinary workers on the ﬂoor, from where they could quietly exert their inﬂuence by discussing issues with other workers.103

Another central ﬁgure and former Robben Islander in the clandestine system was Themba Dyassi, who was also a member of Kwinana’s cell. He too avoided taking a leadership role in the union, preferring to remain a worker and therefore see and experience the reality of workplace life. He interacted with his ANC cell both in and out of the factory context. Members of the cell would also socialize with fellow workers, especially Coloureds, in order 99 100

101 102 103

Mbeki, Sunset at Midday, 17. Glenn Adler, “Of Shop Floors and Rugby Fields: The Social Basis of Auto Worker Solidarity,” paper presented at the Institute for Advanced Social Research, University of the Witwatersand, Johannesburg, No. 366, 19 September, 1994. In his paper, Adler only identiﬁes Kwinana as a former political prisoner. On further enquiry, Adler explained that Kwinana was a former Robben Islander. Adler, “Of Shop Floors and Rugby Fields,” 7. Ibid., 8–9.

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to win their allegiance. Over time, the various open and hidden forms of organizing paid off, culminating in Volkswagen’s recognizing the workers’ union, the United Automobile Workers Union (UAW), in 1977, two years before the Wiehahn labor law reforms made African unions legal. The UAW worked hand in hand with the Coloured union, the National Union of Motor Assembly and Rubber Workers of South Africa (NUMARWOSA), to create successfully a then-unprecedented nonracial union of automobile workers. Liberation movement concern with becoming involved in or inﬂuencing trade unions was by no means conﬁned to the ANC. Released BCM Islanders who became active in unions included S’thembele Khala, Phambili ka Ntloko, and Pandelani Nefolovhodwe. The PAC’s Themba Hlatswayo became a union organizer upon his release in the late 1980s. PAC and BCM members and supporters often worked closely together in worker organization. For example, in the late 1980s the PAC developed an informal association with the National Council of Trade Unions (NACTU), which had a principled commitment to exclusive black leadership.104 In addition to direct union involvement, Islanders could be and were active in politics emphasizing working class concerns. Neville Alexander, for example, was a founder and leader of the Workers’ Organization for Socialist Action, established in 1991.105 The KwaZulu-Natal Conﬂict The last decade of apartheid was marked by growing nonracial and interethnic alliances to defeat minority rule. However, since the mid 1980s, political and intraethnic violence in KwaZulu-Natal between the conservative forces of Inkatha, who were backed by the apartheid regime, and supporters of the UDF and ANC, led to the death of thousands of people. Once F. W. de Klerk unbanned the ANC and set the course for a negotiated transition, Jeff Radebe, who was from Natal, decided that he and fellow Islanders from KwaZulu-Natal needed to reassess ANC tactics for the region and to emphasize negotiation and pluralism as the appropriate responses to the violence. Over approximately two months, these Islanders engaged in intense discussions, writing over six hundred pages of analysis on the KwaZulu-Natal conﬂict, to analyze the crisis and to determine an approach for the ANC. In turn, a brief summary statement “of where we think Natal should be going” was written and sent out with released Robben Islanders.106 This report was made public at the ANC’s Southern Natal conference in 1990. A newspaper report at the time said of the conference and summary document that “[t]he heritage of Robben Island strongly inﬂuenced the African National Congress Southern Natal regional conference. . . . Not only were half of those elected 104 105 106

Marx, Lessons of Struggle, 230. Ibid., 231. Radebe, interview.

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to the executive former inmates jailed for political offenses but the current inmates also had a voice in the conference – a document, apparently smuggled out of prison, was read on their behalf.”107 Radebe argued that the intervention of the Robben Islanders had crucial consequences. So we wanted to ensure that the fundamental strategy and tactic of the ANC, of the liberation of the most oppressed, is the order of the day, and that also undemocratic practices that also categorize the politics in Natal, they come to an end. . . . We could allow a situation where the organization drifts apart, because of the ideological differences, you see. So that was our main objective. And also we were concerned about the intense violence in Natal. In fact, one of the things that we contributed that was to change the mind set, particularly of our own people in Natal, supporters of the ANC and the UDF, mind set that said you cannot have talks with Inkatha. . . . I remember at the ﬁrst regional conference of the ANC in Natal, people . . . were dreaming of talking with Inkatha. So we had to convince our people because they trusted us, when we came up with these issues openly, they trusted us. . . . So at that conference in fact we managed to tell our people that there is no way forward if we cannot talk to Inkatha, and in January 29 the following year, Mandela signed a Peace Accord with Buthelezi.108

What Radebe and others from Robben Island were emphasizing was the necessity of a negotiated solution to the KwaZulu-Natal conﬂict: “The only way out is negotiations and peace with Inkatha. That was the bottom line.”109 Negotiations were by then a ﬁnely honed strategy of Robben Islanders, one that was critical to the years of transition to democratic rule. Negotiation The negotiating experience of South African trade unionists is well and correctly recognized as a vital attribute that helped the ANC and its allies bring about South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994. What is not acknowledged, however, was that another strand of the liberation movement, former political prisoners, had also spent many years ﬁne-tuning their negotiating skills, often under more difﬁcult circumstances where they had far less bargaining power. As Walter Sisulu noted, “negotiation itself was a process which started from [prison].”110 Robben Islanders developed a legacy of negotiating with the authorities in the name of the smooth running of the prison, but to the advantage of the prisoners. For example, by 1988, most of the older-generation leadership in B section had been replaced by the arrivals of the late 1970s and early 1980s, many of whom were Umkhonto we Sizwe cadres. In turn, A section had come to be used for new arrivals. 107 108 109 110

“The Island Graduates Dominate Natal ANC,” The Weekly Mail (South Africa), 23 November 1990, 16. Radebe, interview. Radebe, interview. Sisulu cited in Sampson, Mandela: The Authorized Biography, 217.

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Because communication between sections was always a sought-after goal, the B-section Recreation Committee attempted to persuade the authorities that the sections should be allowed to mix for recreational and sporting purposes. The committee based its arguments on practical grounds, including the fact that new prisoners had a difﬁcult time adjusting to prison and singlecells, which caused problems for warders who then needed to deal with the resulting tensions. As their bargaining tool, the established prisoners offered to play an orientation function. These are the minutes of the negotiations as they appear in the “Book Of Occurrences, Recreation Committee.” B-SECTION RECREATION COMMITTEE meeting with w/o van der mescht august 30 1988 present[:] authorities: w/o van der Mescht delegates: W. Mkwayi, M. Sexwale, J. Legoabe Proceedings (1) B-RC [Recreation Committee] Request that their section should be allowed to mix with A-Sec and form one team for sporting purposes and video/ﬁlms viewing. motivations (a) Both Sections (A:B) are already playing AGAINST one another. (b) Due to ‘Manpower’ shortages particularly in B games such as Soccer, Rugby and other outdoor games cannot be played. Mixing A + B will alleviate this shortage. (c) A consists of new arrivals to this Island. Problems of adjustment in warderprisoner relationships which normally occur due to tensions are likely to be avoided as B-sec. old inmates can have a positive inﬂuence on A-sec. (d) Viewing videos/ﬁlms together will assist in cost reduction measures by the GRC [General Recreation Committee] as TV screens and projectors are to run lesser under the mixing scheme. (e) The GRC is also faced with the problem of having to purchase new sporting equipment, ofﬁces and footwear . . . for A-section. This duplication can be avoided when A + B are allowed to play together.111

Negotiations had long been a key strategy of resistance on Robben Island. As Motlanthe pointed out, “measurable negotiations” were the means by which prisoners worked to improve their conditions, whether it was in discussions with the ICRC, a prison warder, the prison head, or prison commissioner.112 Negotiations were essential to run the extensive sporting system, to win improvements in the food, including for a nonracial diet, and negotiations were used together with other strategies of resistance like hunger strikes for prisoners to achieve their demands. Motlanthe noted that a “hunger strike is 111 112

Mayibuye 41.1. Motlanthe, interview.

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a double edged sword, and therefore if you embark on a hunger strike your demands must really be available so that you can deal with [the authorities] almost immediately . . . so you can ﬁnd a solution soon enough.”113 This senior trade-unionist conﬁrmed that his imprisonment on Robben Island was a time where he and others received, in Radebe’s words, “some training in negotiations.”114 These negotiation skills were also used by released Robben Islanders in their political activity in the 1980s. As resistance strategies became more threatening to the white status quo, increased numbers of whites, from municipal ofﬁcials to businesspeople, began to negotiate with trade unions, civics, and education groups. Robben Islanders were among the members and leaders of these groups from which negotiated solutions to various crises emerged over the decade, as reﬂected in the following anecdote offered by Steven Mufson: In big cities, the civics usually included old-time ANC activists. Half the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Association’s executive was made up of people who had served in Umkhonto we Sizwe in the early 1960s and had been released after long prison sentences. “I don’t have to go to Lusaka to talk to the ANC,” joked Tony Gilson of the Port Elizabeth Chamber of Commerce, “I can talk to them here.”115

Chapter Eight further details the role of prison negotiations, in particular those between Nelson Mandela and the apartheid regime.116 Unsung Heroes and the New Elite Robben Islanders were among the thousands of “unsung heroes”117 in antiapartheid politics and are among the “unsung heroes” and ordinary people living life in and contributing to democratic rule. But Robben Islanders were and are also among the country’s most prominent and inﬂuential political and, increasingly, economic and civic actors. In the 1980s, for example, Robben Islanders were among the most important leaders both in the UDF and its afﬁliates and in AZAPO and the independent left National Forum grouping. They were and are trade union leaders in ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions and the black consciousness-aligned National Council of Trade Unions and their afﬁliates. 113 114 115 116

117

Ibid. Radebe, interview. Mufson, Fighting Years, 251. Vronda Banda (interview) argued that Govan Mbeki who wrote a document “on the broadening theater of the South African Revolution is the one . . . [who] actually masterminded the whole process to the negotiations.” This claim is probably not consistent with what is known about Mandela’s push for negotiations, on the one hand, and the different strategic approaches Mbeki and Mandela tended to have regarding dealing with the regime, on the other hand. Tungwane, interview.

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Robben Islanders were and are elected representatives and appointed ofﬁcials and administrators in all levels of government. At the highest levels of government, in the ﬁrst and second democratic national administrations (1994 to 1999 and 1999 onward), former Islanders were president (Nelson Mandela) and executive deputy president (Jacob Zuma), respectively. Robben Islanders (and other former political prisoners) play both prominent and behind-the-scenes roles at every level of government and across the political spectrum. They were, are, and are likely to continue to be cabinet ministers, members of parliament, MECs of provincial governments, members of provincial legislatures, city council members, and chairpersons of government commissions. The ANC has the largest numbers of former Islanders in political positions, who have been or are found in an array of political groupings. As of 2002, for example, AZAPO’s three top leadership positions – National President (Mosibudi Mangena), National Deputy President (Pandelani Nefolovhodwe), and National Chairperson (Nkosi Molala) – were all former Islanders. Joe Seremane, on Robben Island from 1963 to 1969, was elected the Democratic Party’s (DP) Federal Chairperson in March 2000 and became the founding chairperson of the Democratic Alliance (the DP’s alliance with the New National Party, the NP’s successor). Likewise, Stanely Mogoba who headed the PAC from 1996 into the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century too was a former Islander. In the national Cabinet, Robben Islanders were among the new and continuing cabinet ministers. Patrick “Terror” Lekota, minister of defense, was new to a cabinet post in 1999, but Jeff Radebe and Steve Tshwete were both in their second terms as cabinet ministers (although heading different ministries). Perhaps even more striking than the role of former Robben Islanders in politics is their increasing role in the economy, including at the highest echelons of money and power. Islanders such as Saki Macozoma and Mac Maharaj left representative and electoral politics in the 1990s and took on leadership roles in the corporate sector. Moss Ngoasheng was a senior economic advisor to Thabo Mbeki, ﬁrst when Mbeki was deputy president and then when he was president, and then left government to devote himself to business, including his (and Saki Macozoma’s) company, Saﬁka Holdings. Many other Robben Islanders had earlier beginnings to their ﬁnancial ascent, not necessarily ﬁrst passing through government positions. These include – at various points in time in an often rapidly changing context – Soto Ndukwana, ﬁrst in South African Breweries and later in the Makana Trust; Eric Molobi of Kagiso Trust; Wiseman Nkuhlu, chairman of World Wide Africa Investments and the Development Bank of South Africa; and Dikgang Moseneke, chairman of the state-owned telecommunications company Telkom, deputy executive chairman of Corporate Africa, and chairman of the investment group D. L. J. Pleiade, before accepting a judicial position.118 Of course, not 118

“A Who’s Who of Black Movers and Shakers,” Sunday Times, 6 October, 1996, 2.

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all the experiences of former Islanders in business have been success stories. In the 1997, Mzi Khumalo, who spent twelve years on Robben Island, became the joint head of the black-owned African Mining Group. At the time, a newspaper noted that this action would “see black companies take control of a company which has the largest gold ore reserves in the world and is regarded as one of Africa’s most attractive mining groups.”119 However, between 1997 and 2002, Khumalo faced one problem after another in his business ventures, although as 2002 began, at least one ﬁnancial commentator saw the possibility of a brighter future ahead.120 Former Islanders were and are also active in leadership positions in religious associations, nongovernmental groups, and human rights organizations. Before 1990, these civil society groups played key roles in the challenge to apartheid and, since then, have key roles in working to consolidate democracy in South Africa. For example, in 1996, Njongonkulu Ndungane, a former Robben Islander (imprisoned from 1963 to 1966), was enthroned as a new Anglican Archbishop. Ndungane epitomizes a democratic ethos that challenges governmental wrongdoing, including challenging President Thabo Mbeki and his government’s reluctance to address adequately the HIV/AIDS epidemic sweeping South Africa. He accused Mbeki and the government of “withholding truth [about the causes and treatment of HIV/AIDS] and maintaining the silence of denial,” which he characterized as a sin.121 While some former Islanders are exclusively or primarily involved in professions or engagement in civil society, many others contribute both to civil society and other aspects of the polity or economy. Furthermore, many Islanders work in governmental or quasi-governmental positions (from the judiciary to agencies in the government executive) promoting social change, justice, and antipoverty efforts, for example. Indeed, as the 1990s wore on and the twenty-ﬁrst century began, Robben Islanders played active roles in politics, the economy, civil society, governance, and other sectors, invariably taking the lessons from Robben Island to other spheres of South African life. 119 120

121

“African Mining Group to Take Control of JCI in R2, 9 Billion Deal,” Sunday Independent (South Africa), 23 February 1997, 3. “Mawenzi Resources is led by controversial businessman Mzi Khumalo. Khumalo was chief of JCI Limited, Anglo American’s ﬁrst major black empowerment initiative that went sadly wrong. He was then embroiled in a failed attempt to take over niche bank Durban-based NRB Holdings. Mawenzi, Khumalo’s latest business venture, has also struggled to ﬁnd its feet. . . . There’s been a clean-up of Mawenzi’s directorate and [share prices had risen].” David Mckay, “Has Mzi Fixed Mawenzi?” Moneyweb (Johannesburg), 9 January 2002. Online at: http://allafrica.com/stories/200201090191.html. Accessed on 27 February 2002. SAPA, “Denial of Aids Drugs a Sin,” NEWS24.COM, 25 January 2002. Online at: http://www.news24.co.za/News24/Health/0,1113,2-14 1135756,00.html. Accessed 27 February 2002.

Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu in the prison yard on Robben Island in 1966. Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Mayibuye Archives

Watchtower and wall, Robben Island Maximum Security Prison. Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Mayibuye Archives 175

Eddie Daniels’s sketch of the prison as part of his proposed escape plan. Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Mayibuye Archives and Eddie Daniels

176

Eight Rivonia Treason Trialists. Left to right, top row: Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba. Left to right, bottom row: Andrew Mlangeni, Elias Motsoaledi, Ahmed Kathrada, Denis Goldberg. Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Mayibuye Archives

177

Prisoners breaking stones in the courtyard of Robben Island prison in 1960s. Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Mayibuye Archives

178

Draft Constitution of the Robben Island Political Prisoners’ Recreational and Cultural Committee. (Probably late 1960s or early 1970s.) Photo courtesy of UWCRobben Island Mayibuye Archives

179

1973 Amateur Athletics Programme, Hand Soccer Section. Photo courtesy of UWCRobben Island Mayibuye Archives

180

1972 Constitution of the [Prisoners’] Island Rugby Board. Photo courtesy of UWCRobben Island Mayibuye Archives

Organizational Chart of the Sport and Recreation Unit. (Probably late 1960s or early 1970s.) Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Mayibuye Archives 181

Simon Dladla (ANC), showering in the B section showers. The bathroom facilities were run down and afforded little or no privacy. (Dladla died of cancer in December 2001.) Photo taken approximately 1990. Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives and Tokyo and Judy Sexwale. Source: Peter-Paul Ngwenya 182

Left to right: Anthony Dupreeze, Suzman Mokoena, Lucky Selegoe, and Nicklo Pedro (all ANC) in a Political Education class in the general sections. The uniforms had been issued in the early years of political imprisonment (the 1960s or 1970s) for use in winter. 1991. Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives and Tokyo and Judy Sexwale. Source: Peter-Paul Ngwenya

183

Left to right: Barry Pule (ANC), Enoch Mabuto Zulu (PAC), Mandla Maseko (ANC), and Simon Dladla (ANC). Prisoners in B section watching TV, typically 8 p.m. news or Saturday afternoon soccer matches. 1990. Photo by Peter-Paul Ngwenya. Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives and Tokyo and Judy Sexwale. Source: Peter-Paul Ngwenya

Thekiso Mogoerane, in the hospital section of Robben Island prison. In addition to its medical importance, the hospital section allowed prisoners relative freedom and access to B section, so it was important for communication among the different sections of the prison. Approximately 1990. Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives and Tokyo and Judy Sexwale. Source: Peter-Paul Ngwenya 184

Jerome Maake (ANC), knitting and listening to the radio in the general sections. Maake was imprisoned on Robben Island twice. Knitting was considered a way of both passing time and learning skills or trades. The radio reﬂects the relatively open environment of the time. 1991. Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives and Tokyo and Judy Sexwale. Source: Peter-Paul Ngwenya, with comments by author

185

Peter-Paul Ngwenya, section B, cell 20. Ngwenya is wearing prison-issue pajamas. Under his bed are boxes for a few personal possessions and a bucket for use as a “toilet” at night. 1990. Photo by Tokyo Sexwale. Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives and Tokyo and Judy Sexwale. Source: Peter-Paul Ngwenya

186

Johannes Shabangu (ANC), studying. 1990 or 1991, following Nelson Mandela’s release. Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives and Tokyo and Judy Sexwale. Source: Peter-Paul Ngwenya

187

Barry Pule (ANC), eating supper and showing a photo of his wife, Dinah, whom he married on Robben Island in 1989. B section. Photo by Peter-Paul Ngwenya, approximately 1990. Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives and Tokyo and Judy Sexwale. Source: Peter-Paul Ngwenya

188

Curtis Hlanza (ANC), rehearsing for a prisoner band. Approximately 1990. Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives and Tokyo and Judy Sexwale. Source: Peter-Paul Ngwenya 189

Peter-Paul Ngwenya, at the entrance of B section, serving food that had been made in and brought from the main kitchen. Food pots similar to those seen in the photo were a common means of smuggling messages (which were rolled in plastic to protect them). 1990. Photo by Tokyo Sexwale. Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives and Tokyo and Judy Sexwale. Source: Peter-Paul Ngwenya

190

Left to right: Johannes “Ka” Shabangu (ANC) and Vusi “Mhlaba” Sindane (ANC), walking in a “taxi” alongside the hospital section between D and F sections. “Taxis” involved prisoners talking about sensitive issues while walking, in order not to be overheard. 1990. Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives and Tokyo and Judy Sexwale. Source: Peter-Paul Ngwenya 191

Johannes Shabangu, pictured with the prison fencing and watch tower in the background. Approximately 1990. Photo courtesy of UWC-Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives and Tokyo and Judy Sexwale. Source: Peter-Paul Ngwenya 192

8 Political Imprisonment and the State

A lot of initiatives and new ideas in the history in my experience of the past ﬁfteen years in this country, would . . . originate from civil servants, yes. There are a lot of absolutely intellectually brilliant people in civil service. Don’t be inﬂuenced by what you see, when you’re buying stamps or have to pay your electricity bill. There are a lot of brilliant, brilliant people in civil service. . . . In my experience, the civil servants have played an absolutely fundamental role in this whole process [of political change] in the last ten years to ﬁfteen years.1 The government thought it could kill off dissent by exiling political opponents to Robben Island; instead, it merely succeeded in consolidating the opposition. But perhaps Pretoria gained, perversely, in the end, for generations of young hotheads got a sobering political education at what was known as “the University of Robben Island.” Those who entered the prison hating whites – probably a majority – emerged hating the system which whites had built, but not the race itself.2

From the 1960s to May 1991, prisoner resistance, backed by support and pressure from those outside the prison, succeeded in winning improvements in prison conditions. This chapter identiﬁes the pressures upon the state emanating from Robben Island and supporters of political prisoners as well as the state’s responses to those threats and inﬂuences, including the state’s reactions to political organization on and from Robben Island. Political imprisonment was a key element in the way the bureaucracy (and the state more broadly) was transformed by antiapartheid opposition. The state used political imprisonment to demonstrate some of its reformist claims. For example, certain prison conditions improved, and the regime experimented with offers of conditional release. Furthermore, by interacting with and studying 1 2

Barnard, interview. Waldmeir, Anatomy of a Miracle, 15–16.

193

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political prisoners, and ultimately negotiating with an imprisoned Nelson Mandela, reformist state elements used political imprisonment as a critical space to explore alternatives within and to apartheid. How prisoner resistance, as well as other factors, shaped the object of prisoner pressure – the state – is an important question in this book, and an essential element in “probing further the institutional recesses of the state” to understand how apartheid worked, and how its eventual demise may be explained.3 The apartheid state’s vulnerability to pressures concerning the fact and conditions of political imprisonment, as well as the divisions and alliances that formed within the stare regarding political prisoners, challenges the once conventional view that the apartheid state was “internally consistent, uniﬁed, and effective, and dominant over society.”4 The need to (re)examine the inner workings of the state is epitomized by Theda Skocpol’s call to “bring the state back in”5 (although one need not necessarily agree with the high degree of state autonomy this literature argues for).6 There 3

4

5 6

Deborah Posel, The Making of Apartheid, 1948–1961: Conﬂict and Compromise (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 271. The analysis of the state is not, and does not pretend to be, equal in breadth or depth to the analysis of the resistance of the political prisoners themselves. There are two reason for this. The ﬁrst is methodological, namely that the necessary archival materials to complete such an analysis had, at the time of research, yet to be made available to the professional researcher or more general public. The second is practical; as Aletta Norval noted (Deconstructing Apartheid Discourse, London and New York: Verso, 1996, 9): “It is . . . impossible to offer any detailed account of both the dominant and resistance discourses within the conﬁnes of a single text.” Stanley B. Greenberg, Legitimating the Illegitimate: State, Markets, and Resistance in South Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), xvi. See Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschmeyer and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Mehran Kamrava, Understanding Comparative Politics: A Framework for Analysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 20; Yvonne Muthien, State and Resistance in South Africa, 1939–1965 (Aldershot, England: Avebury, 1994), 6. See Kamrava, Understanding Comparative Politics, 17–22, for a useful overview of the statecentered literature. Arguably, the apartheid state differed substantially from the more general form of African states. Not only was the apartheid state run by a settler class, but it also had greater degrees of development, capacity, and control over its population than most of its African counterparts. In addition, South Africa was less of a dependent state than most others on the continent. For a distinction between South Africa’s “racial authoritarianism” and Latin American authoritarianism, see Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, The Negotiated Revolution: Society and Politics in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1993), 16. In the 1990s and subsequently, however, as South Africa and growing numbers of African states have engaged in attempts to become increasingly democratic and improve their economies, many of the questions and theories that pertain to African states have become relevant for South Africa. For example, Ali Mazrui’s “test” of whether states can perform six essential functions applies as much to South Africa as it does to Nigeria or Ghana or Kenya. Ali Mazrui, “The African States as a Political Refugee,” in African Conﬂict Resolution: The U.S. Role in Peacemaking, eds. David R. Smock and Chester A. Crocker (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute for Peace, 1995), 9–26.

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is a corresponding and expanding literature on the micro-dynamics of the apartheid state, particularly in the work of Stanley Greenberg, Deborah Posel, and Yvonne Muthien, who examined the internal dynamics of the white minority regime and its attempt to control black labor and residential patterns through inﬂux control.7 Moreover, these three authors (but especially Muthien) recognized the dialectical play between the state’s will and society’s response and paid attention to the way resistance to apartheid’s edicts shaped the state’s options and strategies. This chapter has ﬁve arguments. First, Prisons Service reform beginning in the 1950s created an ethos of professionalism, in part translated into a practice of professionalism, that led to both improvements and tensions in the administration of political imprisonment. Second, national and international attention to political prisoners on Robben Island (and other South African prisons) was critical to government initiatives to improve prison conditions. (Over time this attention further increased the inﬂuence of state ofﬁcials whose work dealt with political imprisonment.) Third, improving conditions of political imprisonment and later reforming apartheid brought together a few key personalities in the civil service and government who provided mutual support for reformist initiatives. Fourth, in practice, although the government condemned speaking to the enemy, state communication with incarcerated political leaders allowed for secret and private dialogue, itself the basis of bargaining and negotiation. Finally, the state eventually recognized its limited power in preventing political prisoners from shaping the South African political context. Professionalism and Prison Administration The Vengeful 1960s and 1970s To understand changes in the attitudes and policies of the Prisons Service, one needs to begin by assessing state behavior at its initial worst. An important question in understanding state policy regarding Robben Island concerns the approach to Robben Islanders (and other political prisoners) held by various elements of the state. The prisoners on Robben Island believed their treatment, especially the brutality and cruelty meted out to them in the 1960s and early 1970s, was a deliberate act of retribution by the vengeful and racist state. Neville Alexander elaborated: The main lines of policy relating to [Robben Island Prison] are determined not by the civil servants of the Department of Prisons but by the political authorities themselves. In practice, this means that the Security Branch decides on all major issues of how the political prisoners are to be treated. Brigadier Aucamp, who for many years 7

Greenberg, Legitimating the Illegitmate; Posel, The Making of Apartheid; and Muthien, State and Resistance in South Africa.

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(until 1973) was the pivotal Department ofﬁcial concerned with political prisoners, in so many words told Nelson Mandela on two separate occasions that major questions are decided by the Minister himself and that the police are involved in all shifts of policy and in any question which the prison authorities consider to be controversial even if it would normally be handled departmentally. . . . [T]here is no doubt that until 1965 in its intention, and until 1967 in practice, South Africa’s penology was largely retributive.8

Deliberate intent to make the lives of prisoners as unpleasant as possible is certainly consistent with what is known publicly about both Aucamp and Hendrik van den Bergh. Prisoners regularly described Aucamp’s hatefulness;9 in the succinct words of S’thembele Khala, Aucamp was for political prisoners what “Mengele, the Nazi, was for the Jews.”10 The Nazi allusion is not inappropriate for van den Bergh either, who befriended Vorster when they were interned together for pro-Nazi activities.11 But personal attitudes do not necessarily or always explain state policy. (A state’s tolerance of the prejudices of its senior ofﬁcials, especially when these are displayed in ofﬁcial behavior, can, however, reﬂect state policy.) Prison ofﬁcials, from sadistic junior warders to Aucamp, who was in charge of all political prisoners, had a large degree of latitude in their behavior toward inmates. Aucamp apparently acted without consulting his minister. For example, Hugh Lewin negotiated with Aucamp the right to brieﬂy remain in South Africa after he was released from prison. Lewin wrote: “I thought it signiﬁcant that he, Aucamp, brigadier in the Prisons Service, should clearly have such authority, authority in effect to tell the Minister of Justice what was what.”12 The power and apparent autonomy of Prisons Service functionaries may reﬂect the disinterest of senior government members in the fate of political prisoners. Alternatively, these may be read as directives and mandates from the upper echelons of government, especially given Aucamp’s political brief within the department. While prisoners tend to see the latter – an intentional policy of malice – informing their treatment, this method of operating was denied by those interviewed who worked within and for the apartheid state. However, James Gregory, who came to Robben Island as a warder and censor in late 1966, supported the prisoners’ viewpoint that cruel treatment was deliberate: “What the people in charge told 8

9 10 11 12

Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 12. Two points should be made regarding this comment: ﬁrst, the dates Alexander gives are consistent with the comment made later about Strachan, and second, Alexander is not limiting this claim of a policy of retribution to political prisoners but is describing it as regards all prisoners. Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid, 146, 173–175; Naidoo and Sachs, Island in Chains, 144–145; Lewin, Bandiet, 14, 227. S’thembele (Mike) Khala, interview with author, tape recording, Johannesburg, December 1987–February 1988. Barber and Barratt, South Africa’s Foreign Policy, 116. Lewin, Bandiet, 226.

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me was that it would be my job to demoralize the blacks, especially him [Nelson Mandela], reduce them to nothing.”13 Moreover, certain ICRC information supports the prisoners’ constant claim that prison ofﬁcials told the inmates that the poor conditions – dull and hard work smashing stones in the quarries, no news, poor food, and constant impediments to study – were deliberate government attempts to maintain or cause low prisoner morale.14 Indeed, a systematic comparison between the conditions political and criminal prisoners faced revealed that the politicals were consistently treated worse than other prisoners.15 General Willie Willemse, who joined the Prisons Service in 1956 and rose to become the Commissioner of Prisons in 1983, said that South Africa accepted the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for Treatment of Prisoners in principle even in the 1960s, but that execution of policy could have been inﬂuenced by “frame of mind.”16 Similarly, Major John Harding, who served on Robben Island from 1977 to 1982, speculated that brutality was not departmental policy because “even at that time it was not our policy to assault or ill-treat prisoners.” Instead, he suggested that the use of force and authority was part of South African political culture. The Prisons Service (as well as other institutions) “thought we could do everything with force,” warders were recruited for “bulk [rather] than brain,” and whites considered political prisoners their enemies.17 Harding did, however, accept that it was probably correct, as prisoners constantly asserted, that violent criminal prisoners, especially those in gangs, were intentionally used to punish political prisoners.18 He believed, however, that this type of abuse violating regulations would have been limited, when complaints came to the attention of ministers or senior department staff.19 While in the longer term the

13

14

15

16 17

18 19

Gregory, Goodbye Bafana, 6. One wonders if Gregory is being sensationalist in his claim that warders were instructed to single out Mandela for bad treatment. Most prisoner accounts point out that the prisoners in the general sections were treated far worse than those in the leadership sections. See, for example, Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 26. ICRC reports are only written for the governments whose prisons the ICRC is examining. They are not intended for publication, and the ICRC strictly protects their privacy. Therefore only partial and limited information regarding the ICRC has been gathered in the course of research. The proverbial reply from the government authorities, including the minister, to the ICRC regarding the various criticisms made of the regime was either to deny claims or say the criticisms or ICRC suggestions for improvements would be studied. Willemse, interview. Harding, interview. Similarly Henk Bruyn (interview with author, tape recording, Cape Town, 27 October 1994), who was brieﬂy a warder on Robben Island in 1971, said that he never got the impression warders were motivated to give the prisoners a hard time; rather there “may have been a general feeling amongst white staff” against black political prisoners. See, for example, Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 355; Dlamini, Hell-Hole, 26, 37, and throughout. Harding, interview.

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authorities were responsive to prisoner complaints, this was not true for much of the 1960s and early 1970s. Harding’s admission that there could have been deliberate retributive actions against political prisoners (in this case, via violent criminal gangs), but that in the longer run the state would have opposed such actions as against policy, brings us to the heart of the problem in trying to understand state policy of this period. In the absence of state archives, only contradictory evidence can be pointed to. On the one hand, it is difﬁcult to document a high-level state interest in the prisoners before the late 1970s or early 1980s. There is the insistence or perception of members of the then Prisons Service that their department, as part of the relatively “apolitical” civil service, was the only organ of the state that regulated imprisonment, with limited inﬂuence from the Security Section. Furthermore, there is Barnard’s belief that the state paid insufﬁcient attention to the politics on Robben Island, or at least underrated its political importance before the 1980s. Finally, the record of improvements on Robben Island suggests Harding is not wrong to believe that abuses by Prisons Service functionaries were often challenged by those higher up, especially if there was the threat of public exposure.20 For instance, when Willemse was sent in December 1971 to Robben Island as the commanding ofﬁcer, he was told to bring a more enlightened approach. He attributed this instruction to the inﬂuence of the then commissioner of prisons, General J. C. Steyn,21 who in turn was instructed to make changes by the minister in charge of the Prisons Service. Willemse recalled that the minister got the impression that the political scene in South Africa and internationally had to be reckoned with by government, and as an extension by the head of department of that time. And I think with prisoners themselves . . . being politically alert, they must also have brought about certain amount of pressure either directly or by other channels – there’s so many channels that they could utilize even though they were under strict conditions of incarceration.22 20 21

22

See, for example, Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 356–359; Suzman, In No Uncertain Terms, 153–154. Neville Alexander (Robben Island Dossier, 13) wrote that when “General J. C. Steyn was appointed Commissioner of Prisons . . . in December 1963, many newspapers and individuals expected a radical change for the better to ensue in light of the reputation for ‘enlightenment’ enjoyed by this polished but ineffectual diplomat. Some changes did take place . . . but . . . the objective sociological and political factors have proved to be stronger.” Nelson Mandela had assessments similar to those of Alexander, and argued that “General Steyn oppressed us by omission rather than commission. He basically turned a blind eye to what was happening on the island. His habitual absence emboldened the more brutal prison ofﬁcials and gave them carte blanche to do what they wanted.” Mandela’s comment that “General Steyn oppressed us by omission rather than commission” is consistent with the view that awful conditions on Robben Island were more a consequence of neglect than punitive intent by the upper echelons of the regime. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 346. Willemse, interview.

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Willemse’s assertion suggests an interest in Robben Island in the upper echelons of government, at least at times. In contrast, Harding was adamant that when he was sent to head Robben Island in 1977 by Willemse and General Jan Roux, another senior reformist member of the Prisons Service, only Willemse and Roux emphasized the need for better treatment of the prisoners; there was “deﬁnitely no inﬂuence from government.”23 The ICRC and the prisoners themselves widely regarded Willemse as a reformist, who brought signiﬁcant improvements to the prison.24 ICRC information supports the assessment that signiﬁcant improvements began occurring in the wake of Badenhorst’s departure and Willemse’s arrival to the Island. However, the Red Cross’s experience also points to the incredibly slow pace at which change was made and the remarkable recalcitrance on the part of the most senior authorities to respond to calls for change. For instance, in 1973 the minister of justice agreed to consider the suggestion of members of the international community that prisoners be allowed to listen to news broadcasts on the state radio network. It was only, however, in 1978 that the authorities allowed prisoners to listen to “their own radio news service, which consisted of a daily canned summary of the news read over the prison’s intercom system.”25 And it was only in 1980 and under a new minister, Louis le Grange, and renewed national and international pressure, that the state agreed to allow the prisoners newspapers (discussed later). On the other hand then, there is the prisoners’ perception of intentional malice, epitomized here by Alexander’s record of Aucamp’s claim that decisions about prisoner treatment were made at the highest level of government.26 The belief that senior members of the regime took a personal interest in making their imprisonment as awful as possible is bolstered by 23 24

25 26

Harding, interview. Willemse was “trying to do his best to maintain a purely professional relationship with inmates under his care. He has solved many problems.” Jacques Moreillon, Dominique Dufour, Nicholas de Rougemont, and Dr Andreas Vischer, ICRC Report on Interview with Commissioner of Prisons, 5 June 1974. Cited by Sampson, Mandela: The Authorized Biography, 226; Cooper, interview; Gwala, interview; Ntshanyana, interview; Ngqondela, interview; Ramokgadi, interview. Note that Cooper came to Robben Island after Willemse had left but knew of Willemse’s role in encouraging Harding’s reformism. Cooper argued that by improving conditions for the prisoners, Willemse may have known tensions among the prisoners could increase. In identifying Willemse as an agent of someone who improved conditions on Robben Island, Ngqondela was speaking for himself and was prompted by one or both of his fellow interviewees, Jacob Skundla and Samual Peter, for whom he was translating. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 434. Lewin’s experience with Aucamp’s power to make decisions that would normally be made by the minister is not necessarily inconsistent with Alexander’s claim, although it may be. If both Alexander and Lewin are correct, the minister – probably Vorster – may have shared his perspective with Aucamp and trusted him to carry out that policy.

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the difﬁculty prisoners had in getting the authorities to listen and respond to their protests, especially initially. Mandela recalled that in the 1960s, for example, “we were having great difﬁculty making our complaints heard. The remoteness of the prison made the authorities feel they could ignore us with impunity. They believed that if they turned a deaf ear to us, we would give up in frustration and the people on the outside would forget about us.”27 Similarly, Sonny Venkatrathnam’s attempts to reach his counsel were denied until a smuggled message reached his lawyer.28 The state’s continuing concern with and recognition of the power of prisoners is also suggested by its continued surveillance of prisoners, strictly censored information about imprisonment, and banning and/or banishing prisoners to remote rural areas upon release. Prisons Service Reform From the early 1960s to the departure of political prisoners in 1991, Robben Island arguably moved from being the worst to “best” prison in the South Africa, at least as far as black people were concerned. While the prison was never pleasant, by the 1980s it was no longer the “hell-hole” that Dlamini and others had described in the 1960s.29 Indeed, while Helen Suzman was “appalled” at conditions on Robben Island in 1967, by 1979 she preferred that, in the absence of parole, nine juveniles should remain incarcerated in the Island rather than be transferred to other prisons.30 Propelled in part by political prisoner resistance, internal reform within the Prisons Service had, by the late 1970s, begun to culminate in improvements to the prison and the lives of its inmates. The legitimacy of the South African prisons system as a whole was undermined by political imprisonment. In addition to the arguments I provide, Dirk van Zyl Smit reviewed challenges to the Prisons Service over time, including some from political prisoners, most notably the role of the ICRC, the publication of Afrikaans political prisoner Breyten Breytenbach’s True Confessions in 1984, and various judicial challenges made by political prisoners.31 Criticisms of the prison system intensiﬁed in the 1980s and

27 28 29 30 31

Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 364. Venkatrathnam, interview. Dlamini, Hell-Hole. Helen Suzman, In No Uncertain Terms, 152; South Africa, Hansards to the House of Assembly, 1979, vol. 82, col. 776. Dirk van Zyl Smit, South African Prison Law and Practice (Durban, South Africa: Butterworths, 1992). Van Zyl Smit interpreted most of the decisions that emerged from the political prisoners’ litigation as having negative consequences for prisoner rights. While his legal analysis of the loss or downgrading of rights is no doubt correct, within the prisons, political prisoners appeared to think that they gained more than they lost in their use of the judicial system. See, for example, the comments of Venkatrathnam in Chapter Three.

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increasingly focused on nonpolitical prisons and prisoners, in part through a well-publicized trial and scandal regarding the abuse of (nonpolitical) prisoners at Barberton prison, but also through persistent criticisms of pass laws and the use of prison labor. A judicial commission had itself pointed out that pass laws were a reason for the overcrowding of prisons, although passlaw offenders were not criminals according to conventional understanding. In language supporting the claims of the state informants discussed later, van Zyl Smit noted: “When the pass laws were ﬁnally abolished in 1986 a further factor inhibiting the normalization of the prison system was removed.”32 Professionalization and the Prisons Service The 1959 Prisons Act as well as a more general professionalization of the Prisons Service in the 1950s was instituted under the then director of prisons, Victor Verster. Verster instituted a number of reforms, from the cultivation of in-house expertise as people rose through the service (organized on a military basis) to the demand that prison staff be properly trained and have appropriate academic qualiﬁcations. Botha similarly argued that, over time, the Prisons Service had more university graduates than any other department in the public service. According to Willemse, this process of improving the preparation and background of personnel reached its peak in the mid 1970s. At that time, “we as a department had more matriculants [high school graduates] per a hundred or per a thousand than any other state department.”33 This development was part of an extensive state process to improve the education and job opportunities for Afrikaners. As Price elaborated: Involving in its essence the imposition of direct apartheid government control over virtually every aspect of black life, apartheid required the elaboration and expansion of the state bureaucracy. In this way a policy designed to control and repress the black majority became a means for the socioeconomic deliverance of the Afrikaner minority. The implementation of apartheid, along with the introduction of state capitalism, meant the creation of tens of thousands of new jobs in the public sector; jobs that were ﬁlled by Afrikaners. Thus by 1970, approximately 50 percent of all economically active Afrikaners were employed by the public and semipublic sector (in contrast to 17 percent of English-speakers), and 80 percent of all such jobs were occupied by Afrikaners. A community that had, in the ﬁrst half of the century, been increasingly marginalized and proletarianized, was transformed in two decades into a bureaucratic middle class.34

Improving the standards of the Prisons Service personnel was part of a broader process of “professionalization” in the department, a term used by Botha, but also implied by Willemse and Harding. General Hennie Botha, 32 33 34

Van Zyl Smit, South African Prison Law, 39, emphasis added. Willemse, interview. Price, The Apartheid State in Crisis, 25.

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involved in staff recruitment for the Prisons Service from the 1960s, claimed professionalization required improving the standard and training of warders so that they would work as neutral professionals serving their (prisoner) clients rather than as violent racists with an axe to grind. Most Prisons Service members who were interviewed were at pains to stress that the department consistently emphasized improved warder education and demeanor as both a goal and achievement of the Prisons Service. Willemse described this professional ethic as follows, and used the analogy of a medical professional to make his point: The department, although it still segregated prisoners on racial lines in different institutions, . . . [had] a very strong emphasis [that] prisoners have to be dealt with in terms of spirit of the [Prisons] Act which is the spirit of the international standard, which asks of staff to be professional, to regard prisoners as clients [the] same [way] as the nursing sister would be regarding its patient, and not to ask what your politics are, what your religion is, what your ethnicity is, but to deal with them as human beings and apply policy. That was the demand that the government was placing.35

Prisoners consistently commented that the standard of warder education was improved because the state was embarrassed that the white warders were much less educated than many, and perhaps most, of their black charges. The representatives of the state interviewed for this project dismissed this claim and argued that the warders improved over time as the Prisons Service standards for personnel improved over time.36 Lending credence to the assertion that the Prisons Service consistently sought to improve warder standards was the observation of a Pretoria Central and Local political prisoner, Denis Goldberg. Commenting on a what was then a new young warder in the 1960s who had been trained in “a new school of penology,” Goldberg – who was in prison for twenty-two years – noted that [i]t takes twenty years, in my estimation, for a new policy to work through. . . . The prison command decided that the old, harsh Victorian style regime didn’t make for an easy life for the warders in prison. There needed to be an attempt to build respect, . . . a self-discipline in the prisoner and that’s what we [political prisoners] encourage. . . . It’s not going to always work. This is what the young warders would be taught and, bear in mind, they go there straight from school. So they come on the job and the old sergeant says, “All these new-fangled ideas.” But after a few

35

36

Willemse, interview. Bruyn (interview) similarly commented that “the ﬁrst time you meet a doctor, you will just wait and see how his attitude is and vice versa. But at the end of the day he will perform a heart transplant if it’s necessary, but he will do it humanely. In the prison environment, you [the warder or Prisons Service member] get acquainted with people [prisoners], you start realizing this . . . is not a bad fellow . . . especially people like Mr. Mandela and the others.” Botha, interview; Alexander (Robben Island Dossier, 25–28) pointed to some improvements in the attitudes of the warders and prison personnel more generally in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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years there’s a kind of dialectic bent towards this new direction, where there are new sergeants who partly apply the new policy and partly there is still control from above. But, eventually, the new ideas work. It can take twenty years.37

Botha suggested, however, that the consciousness regarding qualiﬁcations may have been at the expense of an emphasis on teaching warders they could and should have a humanitarian as well as a disciplinarian attitude toward their changes. For Botha, the good intentions of the department to improve the standards of warder conduct “were not [always] successfully carried though to the rock face.” In part, this uneven improvement in warder behavior was because of the warders’ youth; they had yet to grow up and learn sensitivity and compassion.38 The development of the discourse and practice of professionalism was partly a result of challenges by political prisoners and other antiapartheid and human rights forces in and out of South Africa. This pressure combined with the desire of those working for the department to be seen as professional, even neutral civil servants rather than as servants of apartheid oppression. The differential treatment of political prisoners (especially as the government denied that there was such a category) became particularly incompatible with being a professional civil servant. Thus, on top of professionalization came the demand for normalization, namely the end to the differentiation between the treatment in prison of political and criminal prisoners.39 (Coetsee broadened normalization to include the “beginning of the end” of political imprisonment, at least as far as Nelson Mandela and senior ANC leaders were concerned.) Warders and State Intent Not only did Islanders believe the warders were educated to decrease the gap between them and the prisoners, they believed that warders were allowed to work on Robben Island for only short periods of about two or three years to prevent prisoners making their jailers less hostile or even more sympathetic toward them. (Gregory quoted political prisoner Hennie Ferus saying that he had never heard of warders volunteering to work on the Island, asking Gregory: “Have you not heard how bad it is for the warders as well as the prisoners?”)40 The former state ofﬁcials consistently argued that warders and other Prisons Service ofﬁcials disliked working on Robben Island because they were cut off from the mainland.41 As former warder (and later liaison 37 38 39 40 41

Goldberg, interview. Botha, interview. Ibid. Gregory, Goodbye Bafana, 99. Bruyn, interview; Michael Green, interview with author, tape recording, Cape Town, 3 November 1994; Harding, interview.

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ofﬁcer for the Correctional Services in the Western Cape), Lieutenant Mike Green, noted that [when one was] on Robben Island . . . as a warder you’re almost also a prisoner. Because you can’t after work go to Cape Town, there’s no boat. You knock off after the last boat has left. And likewise in the morning you couldn’t have gone over earlier and slept in Cape Town because the ﬁrst boat that leaves Cape Town in the morning is at half past eight, it gets into the Island at nine. You’ve got to start work at seven. . . . You had to work every second weekend. . . . You might think its something very petty but it gets to you after a while.42

It is possible that prisoners were correct about the state deliberately moving warders, and there was also frequent turnover in warders because they disliked working on Robben Island. The state certainly recognized the possibility of warders siding with the prisoners, which is why they removed black warders in 1962.43 (Indeed, Nelson Mandela noted that food and tobacco were smuggled to him by a Coloured warder when Mandela was on Robben Island in 1962.) It is unlikely, however, that they seriously considered the possibility of the white, predominantly Afrikaans-speaking warders as helping the prisoners out. The white civil service was generally extremely loyal to and supportive of the NP, and, if it rebelled, tended to move to the far right of the political spectrum, which was even more hostile to black people and their struggle for liberation.44 Furthermore, whites in general were assumed to support the status quo. Harding was doubtful that the average warder was inﬂuenced by the prisoners, although he recognized that some of the B section prisoners could be more inﬂuential. Botha said that he did not know of conscious efforts to prevent warders from being inﬂuenced by the prisoners. There was an acceptance that warders would be inﬂuenced, but not unduly. Consistent with his concern with professionalization, Botha emphasized the importance of warders being professional, especially, for example, if they were provoked, and that a “special sensitivity” was required after 1976.45 But the prisoners were probably not entirely wrong to see that, at least at times, the authorities would deliberately move a warder, especially if he showed signs of empathy to the prisoners. Warders were occasionally used by the prisoners to pass on information or smuggle certain contraband. For example, Vronda Banda explained that prisoners obtained a shortwave radio 42 43

44 45

Green, interview. Bruyn, interview; Botha, interview. While Botha afﬁrmed that no black staff member – a broader category than that of warder – was allowed to work on Robben Island, he said that it did not necessarily imply the state’s lack of trust, but more recognition that the person and his family would be under too great a pressure. Marina Ottaway, South Africa: The Struggle for a New Order (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institute, 1993), 31. Botha, interview.

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by bribing a warder. (The prisoners had told the authorities they needed to give the money – supplied by antiapartheid organizations – to a visiting family member. Once the family member had the money, he or she would then smuggle it back to the prisoner. In turn, the prisoner bribed a warder to bring them a shortwave radio.)46 A warder also worked with Judy Sexwale.47 Similarly, the reluctance of certain former political prisoners, such as Ahmed Kathrada and Raymond Suttner to discuss methods of smuggling48 suggests the possibility that the ANC had spies in the Prisons Service, or at least people sympathetic to the plight of individual prisoners, or the prisoners more generally. From the perspective of prisoners, there were at times odd changes in personnel when prisoners believed it no coincidence that a decent or more humane warder was suddenly removed from the prison. The former prisoners tended to be astute observers of their jailers. The protected and expanded employment opportunities apartheid offered were exacerbated in the Prisons Service; as Neville Alexander pointed out, “in most cases only the least ambitious, least qualiﬁed, virtually unemployable types take employment in the prisons. . . . [In] South Africa . . . the majority of white warders would normally ﬁnd great difﬁculty in obtaining employment elsewhere.”49 Indres Naidoo noted that the warders often came from deprived circumstances, or from environments where other family members worked for the Prisons Service so that they were socialized into the culture of working in prisons from the outset. This almost inevitably meant that the racism of white South African society was exacerbated. A large number of warders seem to have grown up in orphanages and to have received little education. . . . [When they were recruited] they were told, off the record, that being a warder would give them a chance to keep the kafﬁr in his place. That, unfortunately, for us, was completely true. Then there was another group of warders whose fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts and grandfathers had all been in the prison service; they just went on locking people up from generation to generation, children of warders in control of children of prisoners; we had seen the next generation being prepared for our children.50 46 47 48

49 50

Banda, interview. Sexwale, interview. Raymond Suttner (interview with author, tape recording, Cape Town, 27 October, 1 and 2 November 1994) had been incarcerated in Pretoria Central and Local prisons from the mid 1970s for seven and a half years. In 1986, he was detained without trial under the State of Emergency and spent eighteen months in solitary conﬁnement. When asked how he smuggled the letters, he replied, “that I’ll save for in case I ever get detained again. You know we had a way of smuggling them out. I don’t think I’ll be detained again, but I want to think before I tell secrets like that.” Suttner publicly revealed how he smuggled the letters in his 2001 prison memoir, Inside Apartheid’s Prison, 139. Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 15. Naidoo and Sachs, Island in Chains, 116.

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Indeed, the son of James Gregory, who described himself as Mandela’s warder, too became a prison warder.51 Members of the Prisons Service interviewed for this project had parents employed in the Service include Hennie Botha, Aubrey du Toit, and Willie Willemse. (John Harding grew up living near a prison.) None of the respondents conformed to the “lumpen proletariat” stereotype often described by the former prisoners, but the interviewees all had risen to middle- or upper-level managerial positions over time. (The high caliber of the interviewees is also consistent with what Naidoo and Alexander, quoted earlier, wrote about the 1960s, and Botha and Bruyn have pointed out that the major improvements in personnel were only strongly identiﬁable from the mid 1970s and later.) General Bruyn emphasized the sacriﬁces he had made to rise through the ranks of the Prison Service from a low-ranking warder to become the Commissioner of Correctional Services; he and others including Aubrey du Toit, John Harding, and Hennie Botha, like many of their charges on Robben Island, had completed university degrees via correspondence with the University of South Africa.52 The prisoners believed strongly that the more educated the warders were the more likely they were to be open-minded, less racist, and less violent, and often prisoners would help warders with their studies.53 Aubrey du Toit credited a prisoner with advising him to leave the prison service and join the Afrikaans-run insurance company Sanlam.54 Du Toit took this advice and appeared to be successful in this career choice. The Security Section Robben Island’s administration was not, however, purely a product of the Prisons Service, professional or otherwise. The apparently bureaucratic Prisons Service was linked to the intelligence community (and overtly political interests), by the Security Section of the department.55 Prisons Service personnel monitored visits and correspondence by, for example, taking notes of prisoners’ meetings with visitors and copying letters, which would then be forwarded to the Security Section (and in turn the intelligence community) 51 52

53

54 55

Gregory, Goodbye Bafana, 284. Bruyn, interview. Harding (interview) admitted that when he and prisoners were doing the same subjects at UNISA and he knew they had done better in exams that he had, he would sometimes pretend his results were better than they actually were! Isaacs, interview; Aubrey du Toit, interview with author, tape recording, Bellville, 2 November 1994; Naidoo and Sachs, Island in Chains, 241–242; Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 24. Du Toit, interview. Botha, interview. In principle, the Security Section was meant to deal with any security interest, and therefore in theory to be as concerned with the escape of a criminal as a political prisoner. In practice, this section was concerned with intelligence and political prisoners, euphemistically referred to as security prisoners from around the mid 1960s.

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in Pretoria.56 State ofﬁcials interviewed were very conﬁdent that they were able to both monitor legal prisoner contacts and intercept smuggled communications between prisoners and from the prisoners to those outside Robben Island. Harding said he was always aware of messages going in and out of the prison, including to Oliver Tambo, then ANC president in exile. He added that he had also taped conversations of human rights lawyer, Dullah Omar (who became minister of justice in 1994), consulting with a client, which were of course forwarded to the Security Police.57 Among the intelligence agencies, the Security Police were most concerned with and relevant to Robben Island and political prisoners.58 Dr. Ni¨el Barnard, head of the National Intelligence Service (NIS) since 1979, said that there was no surveillance of Robben Island, but, if there was, 1994 was “the wrong time to discuss [it] at length and in depth.”59 Bruyn agreed that NIS had no detailed interest in Robben Island, at least not as far as individual prisoners were concerned. The NIS did, however, maintain ﬁles on the prisoners. Coetsee commented: “My association with National Intelligence . . . gave me an access to the prisoners . . . on Robben Island because they kept a complete proﬁle on everybody.”60 Furthermore, when Mac Maharaj made public the ﬁles the NIS had maintained about him, they suggested an extraordinarily high level of state interest in his prison activities. (He was released in 1976.) Security Police interest did not mean their actual presence on the Island; indeed, Bruyn said that “we never allowed the Security Police access to our prisons.”61 Botha similarly resented but accepted the oversight of the security world; “I rebelled against interference, but I didn’t question it. It was there.”62 At times there was, however, a symbiotic relationship between the prisons and security authorities, as in the 56 57 58

59 60 61 62

Botha, interview; Bruyn, interview; Green, interview; Harding, interview; Willemse, interview. Harding, interview. The greater importance of the security police (relative to the NIS) is consistent with Mark Shaw’s argument that the security police were most important under Vorster and that the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) enjoyed supremacy under Botha. Shaw cautioned that the importance of DMI did not mean that the NIS was irrelevant. On the contrary, as the latter part of this chapter argues, NIS was critical in the negotiations between Mandela and the regime while Mandela was in prison. Shaw explained that “NIS was the successor to Van den Bergh’s BOSS. But its change of name also signaled a change of role: during the 1980s it was said to have been restricted to gathering strategic intelligence needed for political decision making. It also had less inﬂuence than military or police intelligence, since it lacked the capacity to act on its information and was regarded to be more of a ‘think tank.’” Mark Shaw, “The Changing Role of the South African Intelligence Community,” paper presented to the Institute for Advanced Social Research, University of the Witwatersand, No. 375, 27 March 1995, 2. Barnard, interview. Coetsee, interview. Bruyn, interview. Botha, interview.

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case of allocation of prisoners to particular parts of the prison. The Prisons Service personnel on Robben Island made the assignments to general or single cells, for example, but on the basis of Security Police ﬁles on the men.63 A key question is how much the state knew about the political activities of prisoners and their organizations, and what it did with this information. The state respondents do not necessarily agree on how much the state did know. Willemse believed that they had a good idea of the underground organizations the prisoners had developed on the Island. Harding similarly felt the prison personnel were so good at monitoring licit and illicit communication that they knew of almost everything except the conversations the prisoners held on the rugby ﬁeld, presumably held there intentionally to prevent the authorities from listening in.64 Nevertheless, Harding doubted that the state had a great understanding of the political ramiﬁcations of organizational structures on Robben Island: Until the eighties it was a question of “you put all these terrorists on Robben Island and you keep them there out of society”. But . . . during the . . . late seventies, early eighties, we realized that now prisoners are really being trained. . . . I think that in the beginning the government really just wanted these people isolated, but later on they did come to realize that the training was taking place on Robben Island, people were being prepared for a future government.65

Harding also argued that by the time the Security Police recognized the importance of Robben Island in resistance politics, they were ﬁghting a losing battle against a national popular uprising and did not have the time to delve into the details of Island politics beyond taped or copied messages. This lack of time or resources did not mean that the security police were ignorant as to the broad fact of political training on Robben Island. As noted in Chapter Five, Robben Islander Thami Mkhwanazi was told by a security policeman interrogating him in the late 1970s that he had been caught because he was an amateur, but soon would be sent to Robben Island, or “the University of Revolutionary Politics.”66 Indeed, the Security Police were apparently increasingly interested in Robben Islanders and other political prisoners. On his release from Pretoria Central Prison in 1983, political prisoner David Rabkin reported that there was growing interest in political prisoners by the security police at that time.67 Furthermore, by the mid 1980s, not only did the long-standing practice of monitoring Robben Islanders continue, but former Islanders who were now detainees undergoing interrogation by the 63 64 65 66 67

Bruyn, interview; Harding, interview Willemse, interview; Harding, interview. Harding, interview. Barnard too was skeptical about the level of government interest in Robben Island before the late 1970s. Mkhwanazi, “My Years on the Island,” 16. SAIRR, 1984, 541.

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Security Police were being questioned about what mandate they had received while on the Island. While the Security Police were apparently concerned with Robben Island in order to ﬁght the existing rebellion against apartheid, especially after 1976 and in the mid 1980s, the NIS and other sections of the state appeared to be looking at Robben Island as a venue for the state to rethink aspects of its policy and practice. This development is discussed later in the section entitled “Dialogue and Negotiation To Exit the Prison.” Before then, it is important to identify another pressure forcing the state’s hand, namely the national and international focus on Robben Island, and other political prisons. National and International Focus on Political Prisoners There has been a national and international, internal and external, focus on South Africa at least since 1948 when apartheid was adopted. As Rob Nixon noted: No other post–World War II struggle for decolonization has been so fully globalized; no other has magnetized so many people across such various national divides, or imbued them with such a resilient sense of common cause. An abiding irony [is that] an ideology dedicated to the sundering of communities set in motion vast transnational processes of incorporation – the divestment campaign, and the boycotts of culture, sport, trade, oil, and military hardware. Shared opposition to apartheid played, moreover, an indispensable role in binding unstable international organizations like the United Nations, the Organization of African Unity, and the Non-Aligned Movement; at times it almost served as their raison d’etre.68

The pressure on the apartheid state and its policies always increased at the heights of black protest or state repression, and regarding particular issues, such as political imprisonment, which involves both resistance and repression.69 Even in the 1960s, negative portrayals of the state could arouse damage repair and damage control actions by the regime, such as the “instant” improvements to prison conditions that would occur before a prison visit of Helen Suzman or the International Committee of the Red Cross.70 In the wake of the Soweto uprising, the state faced greater local and international pressure, and had more need than ever to be able to function in the international economy.71 68 69

70 71

Nixon, Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood, 1–2. See Asmal and Asmal, “Anti-Apartheid Movements in Western Europe,” in Reddy, The Struggle for Liberation in South Africa and International Solidarity, 310. Detention without trial and the torture and death of detainees was probably even more important in inviting international outrage (see, for example, Schraeder, United States Foreign Policy Toward Africa, 218, on the international effect of the death of Steve Biko). Suzman, In No Uncertain Terms, 139; Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 357–358. Price, The Apartheid State in Crisis, 232–233 and elsewhere.

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One of the few points of criticism the state could control, if not silence, was the national and international pressure that resulted from condemnation of the conditions of political prisoners. An example of this feature is that in 1978 the minister of justice, Jimmy Kruger, wanted to publish portions of an ICRC report that showed the government in good light. The Red Cross refused, saying if the reports were to be published, then they must be published in their entirety.72 In this case, the partial versus complete publication was critical because the overall report was very critical of the government, but Kruger wanted to publicize one area where conditions for detainees had improved. To eliminate or at least reduce political imprisonment as a source of criticism, the state sought increasingly to diffuse this source of reproach by improving conditions on Robben Island (and other political prisons). This was done in two ways. First, the government encouraged a more sensitive and professional Prisons Service. Second, the regime acceded to certain political prisoner demands, in particular by making some attempt to play down the reality of political imprisonment by claiming to “normalize” conditions by equalizing the rights and restrictions between criminal and political prisoners. Furthermore, the state attempted to prosecute political actions as criminal actions and then to jail the defendants in criminal prisons; additionally, they began to disperse political prisoners to nonpolitical prisons. Prisoners and their allies knew that the state was vulnerable to national and international criticism of the treatment of prisoners, among other human rights challenges. Nelson Mandela commented: “Avoiding international condemnation was the authorities’ principal goal.”73 The prisoners and those who sought to help them used this Achilles heel of the state effectively. After her ﬁrst visit to Robben Island, Helen Suzman contacted the then minister of justice, Piet Pelser, to ask him to remove an abusive warder who had a swastika tattooed on his hand. The exchange between Suzman and Pelser is revealing and points to the persuasive power national and international exposure had for the apartheid regime. ‘There is a man in charge of those prisoners who shouldn’t be a prison warder at all, but under no circumstances should he be in charge of those political prisoners on the island. This man professes to be a Nazi, has a swastika tattooed on the back of his hand, and is giving them a very hard time indeed. What’s more, I’m going to raise this in Parliament under your Vote. . . .’ ‘That’s dynamite, Helen. You musn’t do that.’ ‘I know it’s dynamite. It will be headline news all over the world. You had better do something about that warder.’74

Suzman’s ploy was effective; within two weeks the man was removed. 72 73 74

Anonymous, interview. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 358. Suzman, In No Uncertain Terms, 153–154.

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Over the almost three decades of political imprisonment on Robben Island, the international actor that most consistently pressured the South African government to improve prison conditions was the International Committee of the Red Cross. The ICRC began its visits in 1964 with a delegation led by a Mr. Hoffman, a conservative man who was so uncritical of the prison that the regime published his report. The next ICRC visitor was a Mr. Senn, and he was also sympathetic to the state’s perspective, having been “acclimatized . . . to racism” by years of living in Rhodesia.75 Nevertheless, he did call for certain improvements, which were made by the regime. Over time, the ICRC representatives were increasingly supportive of prisoners’ rights and worked persistently to achieve improved conditions in South Africa’s prisons. Mandela noted: “In later years, the International Red Cross sent more liberal men who wholeheartedly fought for improvements. The organization also played a critical role in an area that was less obvious but no less important to us. They often provided money to wives and relatives who could not otherwise have been able to visit us on the island.”76 Moreover, reﬂecting the neglect of the state toward the prisoners, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, the ICRC paid for prisoners to receive fruit, milk, records, or sporting equipment to supplement their diet and improve their quality of life. The role of the ICRC was widely recognized and acclaimed by prisoners across the board.77 The state often, and perhaps usually, argued that international forces were not important to government policy and practice.78 Undermining this assertion, it is signiﬁcant that it was the Department of Foreign Affairs – rather than the Prisons Service – that felt the need in 1967 to publish a document entitled Prison Administration in South Africa. Similarly, the members of the apartheid state associated with Robben Island and interviewed for this 75 76 77 78

Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 359. Ibid. Alexander, Robben Island Dossier. There are numerous examples of the state ﬂouting international opinion. Within the Prisons Service, Brigadier Aucamp said he didn’t care what the international community thought of him (Lewin, Bandiet, 14). In 1967, the government told the United States, its friend and ally, that when U.S. Navy ships docked in South Africa, American sailors would have to obey the country’s apartheid laws (Schraeder, United States Foreign Policy Toward Africa, 205). In the mid 1980s, relations between South Africa and the international community, including traditional allies of South Africa, were so bad that a “British minister, Malcolm Rifkind, commented that Pretoria seemed ‘almost suicidally determined to alienate even those who wish the best for that country’” (Barber and Barratt, South Africa’s Foreign Policy, 320). Then President P. W. Botha destroyed at least two major and unique opportunities for establishing international goodwill, namely in his 1985 internationally televised “Rubicon” speech, which offered no changes to government policy, and in the regime’s decision to launch cross-border raids during the 1986 visit of the Commonwealth’s Eminent Persons Group (see, for example, Barber and Barratt, South Africa’s Foreign Policy, 320–334).

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project were very clear that international opinion was important in shaping government attitudes toward Robben Island, both in general terms and on particular issues. This concern is most strongly illustrated by the comments of the then NIS head, Dr. Ni¨el Barnard. He recounted that, no matter what diplomatic breakthroughs had been achieved by him or others with respect to the (secret) visit of a foreign visitor, inevitably, when on top of the landmark Table Mountain, the visitor’s ﬁrst reaction would be to look for Robben Island, easily visible from the mountaintop. Visitors saw the Island as “a symbol of a place where political opponents of the government [have] . . . been kept in prison,” rather than the “beautiful place” by which Barnard felt it should be associated. We [at NIS] took a lot of people from Africa and from all over the world – because our service in the NIS had much more contact on the international level than foreign affairs could have dreamt of – . . . and I took some of them . . . up Table Mountain . . . personally. And it was incredibly interesting to see the moment they are on the top of Table Mountain they would situate them in such a way that when photos are being taken Robben Island would be in the background. And those of them who would have been open with me would say, “Well, I’ll take this photo to wherever and say there is the famous Robben Island, I’ve been photographed with the Island in the background!” . . . You could’ve imagined then, we then . . . [w]ould start discussing . . . this bloody Robben Island – you must understand that this is not the right way [to conduct diplomacy].79

The authorities felt themselves constrained by the eyes of the international and national communities, especially in later years. Yes, we were under pressure: parliamentary debates, representations made by lawyers, etcetera, also the growing possibility that we could be taken to the Supreme Court and the question of whether you really succeed if you have the right advocate and the right arguments against the department in the Supreme Court. And then of course, [the] . . . International Committee of the Red Cross, they also put pressure on the department. . . . And [there was] . . . a political pressure brought down by the prisoners on Robben Island, pressurizing certain political lobbies of which Mrs. Suzman [was one]. And I give her credit for that, a lot of changes that took place in the Correctional Service, or the Prison Service at that time, can be ascribed to what she’s been doing. Especially the time that I was down here [in the Parliamentary Ofﬁce].80

Barnard claimed that, by the 1980s, the government was in too much “strategic turmoil” to worry about the minute details of the effects of policy, and that the government did not speciﬁcally calculate the costs or gains that would result from particular actions, such as the decision to allow political prisoners to read newspapers in 1980.81 For whatever reason, he may have 79 80 81

Barnard, interview. Bruyn, interview. South Africa, Hansards to the House of Assembly, 1980, vol. 86, col. 6129.

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underestimated the importance of at least this decision, which he said “would never have been discussed outside Correctional Services – government just doesn’t work that way.”82 In contrast, General Bruyn recalled the following from the time when he worked in the Parliamentary ofﬁce of the Minister of Prisons: I remember that Mr. Louis le Grange . . . one day calling us in and telling us that he ﬁnds it unacceptable that the prisoners out there are not even allowed to read newspapers. And we said well, it is a problem, and we concede to that, but that was still instructions that we had, and that we’ve been working on that line. And that was just before a Parliamentary debate, where [of course we knew] Mrs. Suzman’s . . . going to attack Louis le Grange in the debate, on the premise that prisoners cannot have access to newspapers. . . . So Louis le Grange, and I remember it very well, he said: “Well, what newspapers should we go for?” And he said, “The Star. . . .” They [the prisoners] even wanted that newspaper to be selected. . . . Mrs. Suzman would take kindly to that . . . and when the debate came up, he announced that he was going to give newspapers to the inmates.83

The decision to provide political prisoners with newspapers in 1980 is an especially important one, for a number of reasons. First, political prisoners had long pointed out that while the state denied their status as political prisoners, it did not provide them with the same rights and privileges as criminal prisoners, including the rights to newspapers. By acceding to this demand, the state was seriously engaging in what Hennie Botha of the Prisons Service called “normalization.” Second, the call for political prisoners to receive newspapers also represented accepting the “gentle persuasive pressure” of the ICRC, which had been consistent in calling for prisoners to receive newspapers (and other rights and “privileges”) in their almost two decades of prison visits.84 Third, providing political prisoners with newspapers involved, at minimum, an acknowledgment of the fact that prisoners were getting the news illegally anyway. As Willie Willemse noted, the prisoners were being fed information . . . this is ﬁltered information. So, it is not as if they are now in a position to get a proper perspective of how the world is

82 83

84

Barnard, interview. Bruyn, interview. The general sensitivity about national and international pressure does not, however, mean that the state necessarily took actions concerning Robben Island in direct correspondence with particular inﬂuences or events. In contrast, ICRC documents underscore how painfully slow improvements and progress were. One (probably rare) case when the government did act directly in response to a pressure was in 1974: “Dockworkers in Alabama and the American Mineworkers Union refused to unload ships carrying South Africa coal, on the grounds that it was mined under conditions of indentured servitude. In response the South African government abolished the penal provisions of the Masters and Servants Act, which had been part of its law for 120 years” (Price, The Apartheid State in Crisis, 122). Botha, interview.

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functioning outside, economically, and all the rest. And, since that time I was an advocate for the whole issue of letting prisoners free access to television, radio, [and newspapers], and of course it didn’t then it didn’t happen overnight.85

It is also perhaps possible that the state knew that, in the medium to long term, they would be dealing with the prisoners in the external resistance politics of South Africa. Or, perhaps, for those with true vision, there was the recognition that the state would sooner or later have to negotiate with prisoners (in or out of prison), and that the more informed they were, the better off the state would be. Given the group of reformists who coalesced around political prisoners, the latter interpretation is not necessarily fanciful, as is discussed in the next section. But strategies of reform and acceding to popular demands do not necessarily imply that states simultaneously exclude repression. At the same time as Robben Islanders began to be allowed newspapers (which themselves were restricted to those with A group privileges, and which were inevitably censored), the state attempted to decrease the power of and focus on political prisoners by, as noted, trying political defendants under criminal and sending convicted prisoners to other prisons. Coetsee explained that “after we decided to normalize things, and normalize Robben Island, we also decided to remove some [of the political prisoners] to Victor Verster [prison], and we removed some to the prison near Caledon.”86 Coetsee’s role in the normalization process ironically took place on Robben Island, in a strategic discussion that was the initial meeting of key personalities around whom the role of political imprisonment in various reformist state strategies coalesced. Key Personalities In the opening pages of Allister Sparks’s riveting account of the negotiations in prison between Nelson Mandela and the apartheid state and then during the democratic transition, there is a 1989 photo of Nelson Mandela (who was therefore still a prisoner) in his ﬁrst meeting with then President P. W. Botha.87 Flanking Mandela and Botha were two senior civil servants, Dr. Ni¨el Barnard, chief of the National Intelligence Service, and General Johan “Willie” Willemse, the commissioner of prisons, and one senior politician, Hendrik Jacobus “Kobie” Coetsee, minister of justice, police, and prisons. The photo is a dramatic symbol of the coming together of key reformers who had an important inﬂuence on the role

85 86 87

Willemse, interview. Coetsee, interview. These two points are discussed in greater detail later. Allister Sparks, Tomorrow Is Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa’s Negotiated Revolution (Johannesburg: Struik Book Distributors, 1994).

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political imprisonment played in South Africa’s political developments of the 1980s. Willemse, who recognized the need for a more-professional, bettereducated, and less-partisan department of prisons, represented reformist elements in the Prisons Service. He worked with like-minded people, epitomized by Hennie Botha, to elevate the education and standard of the warders and to improve conditions on Robben Island – to some extent through his own role as the Island’s commanding ofﬁcer between 1972 and 1974, but also, and perhaps more importantly, through the appointment of John Harding to run the prison in the late 1970s. The cause of the Prisons Service reformers was advanced by the resignation of NP prime minister B. J. Vorster in 1978 and the associated decline in fortunes of Hendrik van den Bergh. Soon after P. W. Botha replaced Vorster, he made Coetsee his minister of justice and prisons, with the speciﬁc instruction to Coetsee to address the fact that “the prisons have . . . up to now been under a veil, you must clear this up and get them out of the limelight.” Coetsee concentrated on prisons then because Botha was unhappy about the negative publicity the government received about its treatment of prisoners.88 Coetsee identiﬁed a starting point in his reformist goals in the previously mentioned 1981 initiative where, as minister of justice, police, and prisons, he convened a meeting held on Robben Island. At this meeting, he and allies in the Prisons Service planned a normalization process regarding Robben Island and political imprisonment. This normalization process would begin with the removal of Nelson Mandela and other key political allies from the Island to a mainland prison. “It was round about December ’80, the beginning of ’81,” Coetsee recalled, “that I called for a think-tank, a session on Robben Island and that involved General Willemse, General Otto [then commissioner of prisons], Fanie van der Merwe, he was then Deputy Director General of Justice, and we spent a couple of days together on Robben Island. And the outcome [was that] Mr. Mandela and others were removed from Robben Island to Pollsmoor . . . and that’s when the normalization process started.”89 Coetsee asserted that the goal of the move was to begin Mandela’s and certain senior ANC political prisoners’ “reintegration into society. . . . It was very difﬁcult to interact with them. . . . There was an atmosphere on Robben Island that [was] not conducive for any progress in the direction of normalization.”90 For one, Coetsee had long insisted that he did not want to meet with Mandela in prison or a prison environment. He added that “our assessment of the situation was that we have to expose the leadership more 88 89 90

Coetsee, interview. Note that Coetsee uses the term “normalization” with a different meaning, and more overtly political context, than Botha. Coetsee, interview.

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and more to South Africa. We argued that things have changed. This can only be done if they have complete access to the media, complete access to information. And you can do so on the strength of a small group.”91 One of the members of this “small group” was Ni¨el Barnard who played a key role in negotiations with Mandela prior to his release and subsequently in South Africa’s transition to democracy. Despite the fact that Barnard attributed to “intelligence agencies” the greatest responsibility for putting South Africa on the road to a new political order, he, like Willemse, tended to downplay his own roles in reformist circles. Indeed, Barnard captured the difﬁculty of identifying civil servants as change agents when he said that “a civil servant cannot be seen to [be] . . . more important [or] more inﬂuential [than] politicians. . . . If you choose the road of a public server you cannot be a public ﬁgure . . . that’s [for] the politicians.”92 Barnard was chosen by Coetsee who was quick to insist that this was no coincidence; the cooperation between reformers in different parts of the civil service and reformist politicians was planned and deliberate. I brought Dr. Barnard into the National Intelligence from Bloemfontein, my hometown, where I came to know him as a student leader. I would say that it’s fortunate at the time there were these leaders, open-minded thinkers. . . . And yes, in a sense it was more than a coincidence . . . I made Otto the Commissioner. . . . General Otto had this weird way of anticipating people’s reactions, he was very clever and he could read the Prison Service generals. And I would share what was going to happen, and he juggled them. So when it happens they weren’t in a position to be stumbling blocks. So there was this juggling of positions, before we announced a change of policy and before we put it into practice, he hand-picked the people, I didn’t know them, he did. So a lot of credit should be given to him, and Willemse too . . . [Otto] was succeeded by Willemse. Now I must say that I had P. W. Botha’s cooperation.93

Exchange, Dialogue, and (Pre)negotiation This section examines talks the state held with the prisoners, directly or indirectly, in the three decades of imprisonment that are the focus of this work. The reason why Nelson Mandela was usually, although not always, the focus of state exchange, dialogue, and negotiation with the prisoners is explained. The section continues to outline the nature of talks and interaction the state and others had with the prisoners in the 1960s and 1970s. The nature and process involved in Mandela’s talks with the state in the 1980s, primarily when Mandela was in Pollsmoor and Victor Verster prisons, is then examined. Finally, some brief comments are made about political prisoners 91 92 93

Ibid. Barnard, interview. Coetsee, interview.

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other than Mandela, as well as the regime’s self-imposed limits to using the prison as a site of dialogue and negotiation. Agitators and Revolutionaries: The Focus on Mandela Inevitably, Nelson Mandela was the focus of state contact. On the one hand, this attention reﬂected Mandela’s status as a leader, a founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe, and the powerful impression he made as a person, whether his incarcerated peers, state actors, or the few foreign and national visitors he received. Mandela had given the primary statement from the dock in the Rivonia trial, which solidiﬁed his status as perhaps the most important of ANC leaders and spokespersons. Moreover, Mandela quickly came to embody and symbolize the injustice of South African political imprisonment in the national and international contexts. Within Robben Island, Mandela was soon identiﬁed as a spokesperson for the prisoners and the leader of the ANC.94 On the other hand, Mandela’s leadership and status was also perversely heightened by one of the most enduring features of NP thinking and propaganda, namely that most criticism of the regime resulted from the “agitation” of a few. Foreign Minister Pik Botha declared South Africa’s problems were due to “agitators of violence” and “supporters of Marxist doctrine.”95 John Vorster, the prime minister at the time of the Soweto uprising, similarly argued that the youth rebellion was the work of the inﬂuence of “certain organizations and people” who instigated discontent.96 Indeed, identifying and targeting so-called ringleaders within resistance politics was a tactic the state had used in the 1950s.97 The state more often than not saw a revolutionary communist or white (especially Jewish), Indian, or Coloured hand behind opposition to the state.98 94 95 96 97 98

Suzman, In No Uncertain Terms, 152. Quoted in Barber and Barratt, South Africa’s Foreign Policy, 321. Ibid., 206. Mufson, Fighting Years, 114; see also 114–115. At the same time the South African government was secretly negotiating with Nelson Mandela in jail, it continued to decry negotiations with popular organizations and leaders who were militantly challenging apartheid. Negotiations were often prevented or hampered by the belief that activists organizations were manipulated by others. The state did, however, negotiate with some of its opponents. Steven Mufson (Fighting Years, 249–250) elaborated on both negotiations and the obstacles they faced: “Just as the South African government refused to recognize the ANC as representative of black South Africans, local ofﬁcials often tried to circumvent the civic associations that represent the black townships. Just as the South African government accused the ANC of being controlled by Moscow, white town clerks often accused civic associations of being instigated from other parts of the country. . . . [In the town of George, t]he white town clerk, however, refused to recognize the civic association [of George’s ‘squalid township,’ Lawaaikamp]. He believed white liberals were behind the group. He called the association ‘political inspired.’”

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There were at least two consequences of the emphasis on the disproportionate inﬂuence of a few leaders, considered troublemakers, over the masses. One was the tendency of the regime to try to end or contain opposition by preventing leaders from having contact with their organizational base. On Robben Island, this obsession with agitation and leadership explained the state’s persistence in keeping leaders, perceived and actual – including a disproportionately high numbers of so-called Coloured and Indian prisoners – in the segregated single-cell B section, an unofﬁcial leadership section. As Mandela noted, “[t]he authorities were concerned we might ‘infect’ the other prisoners with our political views.”99 Similarly, Harding explained that “in ’82, when we transferred the leaders, Mandela and the other leaders to Pollsmoor, it was then a government decision that these guys have got so much inﬂuence on the others, that we must now get rid of them and isolate them from the others.” But, pointing to men like Naledi Tsiki and Tokyo Sexwale, Harding noted that “it was far too late to do that, far too late. . . . They missed out quite a few [leaders]; they left a lot behind.”100 This failure to recognize other, usually younger, leaders was a second consequence of the emphasis on leadership. Because they believed their own myths, the state tended to ignore other prisoners whom they did not consider leaders, rather than, for example, identifying a range of younger men who may have shared similar perspectives to or attributes with Mandela. Interchanges and Visitors: The 1960s and 1970s When outsiders came to Robben Island, they mostly dealt with Mandela. There were some but not many visitors in the 1960s and early 1970s. The ICRC and Helen Suzman were the most regular visitors, and, at least in the single cells, they met with Mandela or whoever was the then chair of Ulundi, the interorganizational committee of prisoners in the single cells. Members of the judiciary, who were entitled to visit prisons whenever they wanted, were potentially invaluable allies in the ﬁght to improve prison conditions. Few judges, however, took advantage of this opportunity. Although in Alexander’s assessment the ﬁrst visits of judges to Robben Island did not have tangible effects, judicial visits from the early seventies, especially by Judge Jan Steyn, did have positive results.101 Alexander and Mandela 99 100 101

Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 336. Harding, interview. Dirk Van Zyl Smit, “Contextualizing Criminology in Contemporary South Africa,” in Towards Justice? Crime and State Control in South Africa, eds. Desiree Hanson and Dirk van Zyl Smit (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1990), 6–7, noted: “Using his chairmanship of the National Institute for Crime Prevention and the Rehabilitation of Offenders (NICRO) as a base, Steyn soon became involved in a wide range of reforms designed to reassert liberal and humanitarian values in the sphere of criminal justice.” Judge Steyn left the bench to head the Urban Foundation, a private sector foundation established by a coalition of business interests in the wake of the 1976 uprising. In that capacity, he at times arranged

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identiﬁed different but equally positive consequences of the visit of Steyn and his associates, Justices Theron and Corbett. For Alexander, a direct consequence of the visit was that it stopped prisoner’s being arbitrarily demoted from one classiﬁcation to another.102 Mandela explained that the visit led to the loosening of the commanding ofﬁcer, Colonel Piet Badenhorst’s, harsh reign, and then to his removal three months later.103 The then commissioner of prisons, General Steyn, did not come to the prison often, although the prisoners asked him to because his visits were “preceded by a slight relaxation of tension and persecution.”104 In general, most visitors to Robben Island in the 1960s and early 1970s were sympathetic to the perspective of the regime rather than to the prisoners. One important exception to this pattern of pro-government visitors is probably the visit of Denis Healey, British Labour Party member of Parliament, who visited Mandela in 1970. (Mandela does not, however, mention this visit in his autobiography.)105 At least as early as December 1973, but perhaps a few years later, in 1976 or 1977,106 the minister of prisons, Jimmy Kruger, came to see Mandela on the Island. Kruger was the most senior member of the government to visit the prison. In Mandela’s recollection, Kruger came to try to negotiate Mandela’s release contingent upon his recognizing the independence of Transkei and going to live there. Mandela refused, after reminding Kruger about the minister’s failure to reply to a 1969 letter from the prisoners as well as lecturing him about the ANC’s history. 107 Nevertheless, Kruger returned

102 103 104

105

106 107

for the employment of former Robben Islanders in the Foundation. Moreover, he tried unsuccessfully to secure the release of Eddie Daniels, the sole Liberal Party member of Robben Island, who was the only person among his co-accused, the others of whom were white, who served his entire sentence (conversation with Robin Lee, former Chief Executive Ofﬁcer of the Urban Foundation, Johannesburg 1994; See also Daniels, There and Back). Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 89. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 402. Alexander, Robben Island Dossier, 87. This slight improvement in conditions may lend support to the case for reading a less malicious view of state intent. In contrast, Steyn’s failure to visit may undercut this reading. Healy is interpreted as supportive of Mandela for three reasons. First, the Labour Party tended to support the ANC, or at least antiapartheid sentiments. Second, the ANC’s Sechaba interviewed Healy about the visit. And third, when Healy was interviewed by Sechaba, he appeared admiring of and sympathetic to Mandela. At least two questions are raised by Healy’s visit: why did the government allow Healy to meet Mandela and why does Mandela not mention the visit in his autobiography? See “Interview with Denis Healy, British Labour M.P.,” excerpted from Sechaba, January 1971, in Sheridan Johns and R. Hunt Davis, Jr., eds., Mandela, Tambo, and the African National Congress: The Struggle Against Apartheid 1948–1990: A Documentary Survey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 163–164. See explanation for dating discrepancies in the methodology section of Chapter One. “Release Us or Treat us as Political Prisoners,” Letter from Nelson Mandela on behalf of himself and various other prisoners to the minister of justice, 22 April 1969, reprinted in Johns and Davis, Mandela, Tambo, and the African National Congress, 145–149.

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the next month to try again to persuade Mandela to accept his proposal.108 Mac Maharaj recalled a more complex interchange: We had discussions with him [Kruger]; we sent deputations to see him and to make representations on our conditions. He saw Nelson and the deputation from the single cells which I led. When we compared notes and reported back to our comrades, one of the things that intrigued us was why Kruger had chosen to come, and as we examined the interviews it became clear. On the face of it he conducted the discussions in his typical fashion which seems to endear him to his white laager electorate – he came at us like a bulldog. But in working out his objectives we thought it possible that he had come there on a kite-ﬂying mission to ﬁnd out whether there was scope amongst us political prisoners and the leading people – without betraying his hand – that possibly the regime could ﬁnd a negotiating base on the basis that separate development would be an accepted principle. He went back without gaining anything – our answers quite clearly proved that we cannot compromise on separate development.109

As of November 1976, Maharaj argued that Mandela had not had a formal offer regarding a conditional release involving recognition of Transkeian independence. While Maharaj and Mandela provide different accounts of Kruger’s visit, the end result was the same, namely refusing the minister’s overtures. A few years later, Transkei’s prime minister, K. D. Matanzima, who was also Mandela’s nephew, asked to see Mandela himself, presumably to make the same offer as had Kruger.110 Although Mandela was open to this meeting if not the offer, his fellow prisoners, especially those in the general sections as well as from other organizations, were adamantly against this encounter and so Mandela declined to meet Matanzima.111 The state had so much invested in the possible endorsement Mandela’s agreement might have, and even in Matanzima’s meeting with Mandela, that the authorities agreed to allow prisoner representatives from throughout the prison to meet and discuss the issue. This move was unprecedented and indicated that the state recognized the potential power of the prisoners and especially Mandela. The state had also allowed a group of Thembu chiefs to meet with Mandela, given that Mandela had been brought up to be a counselor to the king of the Thembu people, and, more importantly, because the “government promoted the power of traditional leaders as a counterpoint to the ANC.”112 108 109 110 111 112

Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 418–420. Maharaj in Johns and Davis, Mandela, Tambo, and the African National Congress, 154– 155. The date of Matanzima’s request to visit was variably remembered as 1977 (Cooper, interview), 1978 or 1979 (Kathrada, interview), and 1981 (Harding, interview). Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 442; Gwala, interview; Cooper, interview; Kathrada, interview. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 441.

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Conversations with “Other” Prisoners Although, as noted, visits by the state or outsiders usually focused on Mandela and his politics, an important exception to this general practice was that by General Jan Roux. Roux was the deputy commissioner of prisons and took a personal interest in meeting with and speaking to a broad range of prisoners on Robben Island. Cooper recalled that Roux would, for example, come to the cells late at night, perhaps after a dinner of wine and crayﬁsh, and would meet with individual prisoners, some of whom were half asleep, to question them, especially about their political views.113 Roux had a doctorate in psychology, and was apparently interested in the political ideas and psychological makeup of the prisoners.114 Ahmed Kathrada’s ﬁrst experience of and with Roux is revealing. At least to the knowledge of the prisoners, General Roux’s ﬁrst visit to Robben Island was in 1975, or just before then. Prisoners knew something was happening when, beginning with Jeff Masemola, one by one each prisoner in the single cells was called in by the prison administration. They were being summoned to meet Roux, although they were not aware of this at the time; prisoners did not immediately return to the single cells after their “visits.” Eventually it was Kathrada’s turn, and he was introduced to Roux who was accompanied by other important people in the prisons department. Roux asked whether he had any complaints; Kathrada replied that he had many grievances. When Roux asked him to elaborate, Kathrada said he was not prepared to tell this grouping because he did not know who they were and therefore there was no reason for him to identify his concerns. (Subsequently, Kathrada learned that Mandela had responded in an almost identical fashion.) Sometime after this experience, Kathrada was summoned before a prison psychiatrist who had been brought to the prison on Roux’s instruction (which apparently offended the prison doctors who felt their medical authority was being undermined). The psychiatrist was sent to evaluate Kathrada because Roux wanted to know what was “wrong” with Kathrada given his refusal to discuss his complaints.115 Roux was also widely credited by Prisons Service personnel for being a reformist who wanted to institute change and improvements in the 113 114

115

Cooper, interview. Author’s conversations with Khehla Shubane, Johannesburg, 1994 and 1996. The fairly sinister impression political prisoners on Robben Island had of Roux is supported, albeit in a different arena, by Dirk van Zyl Smit (South African Prison Law, 37), who argued that Roux was responsible for introducing or making respectable the idea of “psychopathy” when the concept “was in relative decline abroad.” Van Zyl Smit noted that the very idea of psychopathy was challenged by critics, as was “the allocation of resources to staff intensive units for psychopaths. Moreover, it had been suggested that intensive treatment of this kind constitutes an unjustiﬁed onslaught on the personal integrity of the prisoner who is classiﬁed as a psychopath.” Author’s conversation with Kathrada, Johannesburg, 1996.

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prison system. Brigadier John Harding said it was Roux and Willemse who were responsible for sending him to Robben Island to “try and stop all the . . . petty assaults and wrong-doings that were going on there.”116 According to Harding, Roux wanted to end the ICRC’s bases for criticism; moreover, Roux recognized as valid many of the criticisms prisoners had about the small-minded or vindictive bureaucracy that made their lives difﬁcult. When interviewed, Roux understated the meetings he conducted on Robben Island, insisting that they were merely inquiries into prisoners’ requests and complaints. When pushed, he acknowledged that the conversations could have come to deal with political issues, but only if the prisoners wanted to discuss politics, as, he said, was the case with Nelson Mandela. But he emphasized that he was not supposed to have political discussions with prisoners, and that the only psychological intervention made was to send a psychologist, Koos Fourie, to the Island to help prisoners. When the prisoners protested the presence of Fourie, he was withdrawn.117 The one arena in which Roux both acknowledged and ampliﬁed his inﬂuence concerned his role in prison reforms. Roux took credit for making signiﬁcant improvements while he was deputy commissioner of prisons, although in turn he credited the then commissioner of prisons, General du Preez, with being the ﬁrst commissioner to acknowledge that the political prisoners were, indeed, “political” rather than “criminal.” Despite Roux’s downplaying of his own role – except in the issue of improved conditions – there is reason to believe that he had a deep interest in trying to understand the internal dynamics of the prison. Harding, for example, was quite emphatic that Roux was interested in the life-world of the prisoners. And Ni¨el Barnard spoke of “research” that Roux was doing about the Island, although he was quick to insist that this was “speculation.” Roux did interview Mandela at length, following which, in 1980, he wrote a report to the minister of prisons.118 Former Island prisoners saw signiﬁcance not only in Roux’s role on the Island but also in his job soon after leaving the Prisons Service when he became the director-general of President P. W. Botha’s ofﬁce in 1982. Roux, however, insisted that he had absolutely nothing to do with prisons once he left the department. Roux’s visits were important because they provide an example of a senior ofﬁcial who realized or believed that the government needed to understand the politics of all political prisoners, and not just Mandela’s political opinions. His interest was, however, apparently challenged and disliked by prisoners who rejected his manipulative behavior. Moreover, he had a broad strategic vision that recognized that the regime’s pettiness toward political prisoners was tactically short-sighted. That he took a most senior and 116 117 118

Harding, interview. Jan Roux, interview with author, tape recording, Pretoria, 3 May 1996. Sampson, Mandela: The Authorized Biography, 298.

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“political” position in P. W. Botha’s ofﬁce after leaving the Prisons Service also suggests that Botha saw the importance of prisons in the broad state apparatus – a point conﬁrmed by Coetsee – and identiﬁed Roux as a reformist who could support Botha’s own reform efforts. Negotiating the End of Apartheid from Mandela’s Prison Cell On his release from prison in 1989, Walter Sisulu revealed to the public that the South African government had begun discreet discussions with Mandela on Robben Island before he was transferred to Pollsmoor prison.119 Presumably this contact included, among other conversations, Mandela meeting Kruger’s successor, Louis le Grange120 and the head of the security police, General Johan Coetsee, who also met with Mandela on Robben Island.121 In 1985, Nelson Mandela began more formal “talks about talks” with Kobie Coetsee, the minister of justice, who also had ministerial responsibility for prisons. One of the points that emerged in considering Mandela’s move from Robben Island and the talks he had with the state was that the regime did not have a grand strategy in mind either when he was moved or, later, when those talks began. The halting nature of Mandela’s prison talks sets the stage to examine why Mandela and his four comrades were moved from Robben Island to Pollsmoor in the ﬁrst place. I provide four explanations. First, the regime increasingly recognized that apartheid as it then existed was untenable in the long term. Therefore they began exploring alternatives to the status quo. Moving Mandela was not part of a long-term strategy but rather a maneuver to gain time and increase the options open to the regime.122 Second, the regime – or at least elements within it – had some understanding of internal divisions within the ANC and wished to separate Mandela, a “nationalist” and relative “moderate” from the regime’s perspective, from Govan Mbeki and others the state considered “communists” and “radicals.” The state did not necessarily know exactly what it sought to achieve in this move, but, 119 120 121 122

New York Times, 19 October 1989, in Johns and Davis, Mandela, Tambo, and the African National Congress, 160. Daniels in Johns and Davis, Mandela, Tambo, and the African National Congress, 157. Harding, interview. The decision to move and ultimately negotiate with Mandela illustrates two issues germane to the literature on transitions to democratic rule. On the one hand, Mandela’s prison negotiations took much of the 1980s, which points to the potentially long-term nature of the “liberalizing” process that precedes transition. (In the case of South Africa, in the 1980s liberalization was in any event increasingly overwhelmed by repression.) On the other hand, the negotiations with Mandela present a ﬁne case study of how “soft-liners” or “moderates” may develop strategies to empower themselves relative to the “hard-liners.” See, for example, Adam Przeworski, “Some Problems in the Study of the Transition to Democracy,” Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives, eds. Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Lawrence Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 47–63.

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at minimum, divide-and-rule tactics usually helped the regime have control over its opponents. There was always the hope that, freed from the eyes and pressures of his Robben Island constituency, Mandela might feel freer to agree to some form of power sharing that might be acceptable to the regime. Third, they hoped moving Mandela would reduce the power of Robben Island, at least symbolically, and perhaps in terms of its functioning as an internal wing of the ANC and as a university of struggle. Finally, moving Mandela and some of his comrades was part of a broader strategy of trying to disperse political prisoners and reduce their capacity to organize within prison and command external support as political prisoners. Moving Mandela and the Path from Talks to Negotiation. In 1982 Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni, and, a few months after the others, Ahmed Kathrada were moved from Robben Island to Pollsmoor prison near Cape Town. The move was the beginning of a process that led to Mandela’s talks and negotiations with the apartheid regime in the last years of his imprisonment. These talks, and Mandela’s subsequent release, were a critical aspect of opening the way to South Africa’s transition to democracy. In 1985, three years after their removal from Robben Island, Mandela was separated from his four comrades – Sisulu, Mhlaba, Mlangeni, and Kathrada – and imprisoned in a different section of Pollsmoor prison. Then in late 1988, he was moved again, this time to a house on the grounds of Victor Verster prison. One cannot simply read the end result of the secret prison negotiations, namely President F. W. de Klerk’s announcement of negotiations to end apartheid, as the reason that Mandela and the other prisoners were removed in the ﬁrst place. Indeed, according to Mandela, he initiated the talks in 1985 by writing to the minister of justice, Kobie Coetsee, “pressing him for a meeting to discuss talks between the ANC and the government.”123 Furthermore, it took the government over three years to initiate dialogue with Mandela when Coetsee visited the ANC leader in hospital, where he was being treated for an enlarged prostate gland. Even then Mandela commented that “for the most part we simply made pleasantries” in that meeting.124 Although the state had now initiated a new level of contact with Mandela, one of the ways they began to develop a better understanding of Mandela and the ANC’s position was via a series of visitors whom they allowed Mandela to meet with in the mid 1980s. These included, in 1985, Lord Nicholas Bethell of the British House of Lords; Samuel Dash, chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee who had come to South Africa for the International League of Human Rights; and American journalists John Lofton 123 124

Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 456; Sparks, Tomorrow Is Another Country, 24. Coetsee, by contrast, said he initiated contact with Mandela (Coetsee, interview). Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 456.

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and Cal Thomas. In 1986, Mandela was visited by the Commonwealth’s Eminent Persons Group (EPG). Bethell and Dash were largely sympathetic to Mandela and his cause, while Lofton and Thomas took a more conservative view, perhaps reﬂecting Ronald Reagan’s reelection and the renewed Cold War climate in the United States. The EPG was mandated to gather views from across the spectrum, so although its mission clearly arose from the perspective of ending apartheid, by deﬁnition it gave the regime an opportunity to compare and contrast the positions of a wide range of groups. The mid 1980s, speciﬁcally 1985, were momentous not only for Mandela and Coetsee’s own initial contact, or for the number and range of visitors who sought out Mandela, but also because the regime made a new attempt to “resolve” Mandela’s imprisonment, which was a source of constant national and international pressure on the regime. In early 1985, state president P. W. Botha offered Mandela (as well as other political prisoners) his release if he renounced the use of violence.125 Mandela’s rejection of this offer of conditional release, read by his daughter Zindzi Mandela at a rally in Soweto in February of that year, underscored both Mandela’s enormous popularity and the need for the state to address apartheid per se, rather than trying to make internal modiﬁcations to the essential system of white supremacy. After Coetsee’s visit to Mandela in hospital, over six months passed without a follow-up meeting, despite the failure of Botha’s offer of conditional release, the violent undermining of the EPG mission, and the worsening political violence in South Africa. It was again Mandela who sought out a meeting with the regime in mid 1986. Revealing the tight links between the reformists in the Prisons Service and their politician counterparts in the government as discussed previously, Mandela wrote to General Willemse, the commissioner of prisons, and asked to see him “on a matter of national importance.”126 Willemse met with Mandela who told him that he needed to see Coetsee to discuss the issue of talks between the government and the ANC. Presumably Coetsee and Willemse had anticipated this request because Willemse immediately phoned Coetsee who agreed to meet Mandela immediately at the minister’s home. Yet again, Mandela felt that he needed to initiate contact with Coetsee after this meeting, as months passed without any follow-up from Coetsee. The one positive indication the world’s most 125

126

One of the prisoners who did accept the offer of conditional release was Denis Goldberg (interview). He made it clear, however, that there were extensive behind-the-scenes negotiations to discuss his release that involved the apartheid regime, progressive friends in South Africa, the International Defense and Aid Fund which, Goldberg argued, implied ANC involvement, and various international governments. Goldberg’s experience therefore underscores the argument of this chapter that prison and prisoners were key elements in the regime’s attempt to resolve the political quagmire apartheid came to represent. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 461.

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famous political prisoner did receive was that he was taken on trips in and around Cape Town; a sign that “the government was preparing me for a different kind of existence.”127 It was only in 1987 that Mandela and Coetsee ﬁnally resumed their contact in a series of private meetings. Later that year Coetsee proposed to Mandela that he meet with a committee of senior ofﬁcials. Coetsee would head the committee, which would be made up of Willemse, Fanie van der Merwe, the director-general of the Prisons Service, and Barnard. (The presence of Willemse and van der Merwe again reﬂects the relationship of key reformist personalities, including actors in the civil service ostensibly uninvolved in the nation’s most pressing political issue.) The presence of Barnard, the head of the NIS whose job it was to undermine the ANC, concerned Mandela. He therefore consulted with his four comrades from whom he had been separated within the Pollsmoor prison complex, and arranged for Oliver Tambo, the president of the ANC to be aware that he was speaking to the government about a meeting between the ANC and the regime. This preparation laid the groundwork for Mandela to meet with Coetsee’s committee over 1988. Regular encounters followed until the meetings were interrupted by Mandela becoming ill, in part a consequence of the persistently damp cell within which Mandela was incarcerated. Health problems also delayed a promised meeting between himself and P. W. Botha, the state president. Later Mandela did meet Botha, but by that stage the president had himself become ill and would soon resign from government. When Botha was replaced by F. W. de Klerk, Mandela met him a few months later. In the meantime, the “secret negotiating committee” continued to meet and was expanded to include Gerrit Viljoen, the minister of constitutional development. Mandela was also increasingly allowed to meet with a wide range of political actors and maintain contact with the ANC in Lusaka. It was only a matter of time before Mandela’s release. Playing for Time: Alternatives Within – and to – Apartheid. F. W. de Klerk’s 1990 announcement that Mandela would be released and South Africa’s future would be open to real negotiations was almost completely unexpected, especially in the breadth of the opening that was created. Earlier reform initiatives indicated the state’s recognition that change was necessary. These reforms were, however, attempts to maintain the white supremacy that lay at the core of apartheid even if aspects of apartheid’s practices and principles were altered over time. Moving Mandela and his four comrades exempliﬁed attempts by the state to ﬁnd and develop alternatives within the existing status quo. By the point the secret negotiating committee was set up and running, elements within 127

Ibid., 463.

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the state were exploring options to apartheid itself, even if they had not yet committed themselves, or their party, to deﬁnitive, public steps in that direction. At the time, few people outside realized the depth of the state’s crises or recognized that both bureaucrats and politicians had begun to question radically the order they had inherited and continued to recreate. In retrospect, the state was increasingly vulnerable during the last decade of apartheid and was searching for and creating tactics to manage the crises. Interviews with members of the 1980s South African regime revealed a state under profound pressure. Captain John Harding explained that the security police were simply too overwhelmed to have the time or resources to monitor the political prisoners on Robben Island. Instead, they relied on any intelligence work that the prisons authorities could provide: The security police . . . were so busy, I don’t think they really had much time to get involved with what was going on the Island. . . . When I was there [1977–1982], these guys were ﬁghting a losing battle out there. So we knew long before . . . anything was made public that we were ﬁghting a losing battle and that is why I think the government of the day and people started realizing we’re going to have to start negotiating many years before it came. . . . I don’t think they had much time to get involved with what was going on on the Island other than what we fed them of what we picked up through messages or tape recordings – they didn’t have much time to get involved.128

The South African regime confronted “strategic turmoil” in the 1980s.129 The crisis made state actors look toward Robben Island in the quest for legitimate negotiating partners. As Ni¨el Barnard notes: The issue of political prisoners only became relevant . . . from the beginning of the eighties [when] it became quite obvious that, in the long run, only a political settlement will be the answer to this kind of problem. . . . The moment that started obviously the question arises, who are you going to talk to and who are the people who have to be involved? It was only at that time when serious consideration was then being given obviously to the real leadership on the Island.130

The multiple pressures that the state faced led to it pursuing a number of paths simultaneously, including opening up new doors that might lead to 128

129 130

Harding, interview. Similarly, Klaus von Lieres (interview), the former attorney-general for the Witwatersrand, gave a detailed account of the complete inadequacy of the justice and policing administration to deal with either criminal or political challenges to South African society and the state. Stanley Greenberg, Legitimating the Illegitimate, 22, chronicled the decay of the labor control bureaucracy in the 1980s, writing that “there is no semblance of the coherent and effective state suggested in the earlier literature. . . . The bureaucracy itself is uneven in practice: it is underﬁnanced and understaffed; its tribal labor bureaucracies in the African rural areas have disintegrated; its urban control machinery has proved erratic. . . . Political struggles reverberate inside the state.” Barnard, interview. Ibid.

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fresh paths over time. Moving Mandela was one of the paths the state was exploring.131 Mandela’s imprisonment put political incarceration at the center of state attempts to ﬁnd alternatives to the untenable status quo it had created for itself. Whatever the state’s initial intent, by the late 1980s it was involved in extensive exchange, dialogue, and prenegotiations with Mandela, as the ANC’s representative. In so doing, the state used the privacy and protection of political imprisonment to speak to a representative of the ANC, having painted itself into a corner by preventing state representatives from any public contact with the ANC. As Barnard pointed out, the reality of the state efforts were often ad hoc and developed for the needs of the time: “I think research people and academic people have this wonderful idea about government, that one has twenty-four hours a day sitting and plotting big strategies and so on. The harsh reality is unfortunately [different; it] never happened that way in practical reality.”132 Divide and Rule: Mandela “Freed” from the Robben Island Constituency. A ` critical question to ask in attempting to understand state behavior vis-a-vis political prisoners and strategic vision in the 1980s is less “why was Mandela moved?”133 and more “why were the Rivonia trialists separated in the 1982 move?” With the exception of Mlangeni, all the Rivonia trialists had been ANC leaders before their incarceration, and all but Mlangeni were ANC leaders on Robben Island. And yet, when Mandela was moved, the state left, of the Rivonia men, Elias Motsoaledi and Govan Mbeki on the Island, where Mbeki was a very important ANC leader. (Initially Ahmed Kathrada was also left on Robben Island, although he was later moved to Pollsmoor to join Mandela, Sisulu, Mhlaba and Mlangeni.) According to General Willemse, some men were moved from the Island to begin a progressive release process and to better address the health needs of these men of advancing age on the mainland Pollsmoor prison. These are not very cogent explanations, however. Wanting to begin releases in a progressive way would surely have included, at minimum, all the Rivonia men. In any event, Mbeki was released 131

132 133

Apparently more sinister alternatives were also discussed, at least by some sections of the state. The South African Defense Force allegedly developed a “covert chemical weapons programme in the 1980s and early 1990s, which was directed at individual activists. According to reports about the programme, there were discussions about poisoning President Mandela when he was in prison on Robben Island and later in Pollsmoor. . . . South Africa Council of Churches Secretary-General Frank Chikane was, according to those involved in the programme, targeted for poisoning. Chikane only barely survived severe organophosphate poisoning in 1989” (“Military Could Have Told So Much of the Past,” Southern African Report 14 (43) 25 October 1996, 5–6. Barnard, interview. Nevertheless, Naledi Tsiki (interview) pointed out that the actual timing of the move may have been a signiﬁcant attempt to foster division within the ANC ranks, insofar as the ANC was then experiencing signiﬁcant tensions, largely around political positions Mandela had taken (see Chapter Four).

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from prison before the others, in late 1987. Age and ill-health are also not plausible explanations, as Mbeki and another ANC leader, Harry Gwala, were, respectively, older and sicker than any of the men who were taken to Pollsmoor. Instead, the most likely reason for the state leaving Mbeki on Robben Island is that the regime was well aware, at least in broad outlines, of the ideological differences that lay between Mandela (and Sisulu), on the one hand, and Mbeki – and to some extent, Harry Gwala – on the other hand. Moreover, Mbeki was identiﬁed as a “communist” and Mandela as a “nationalist”; if the regime had to contemplate negotiating with the enemy, it was not yet ready to consider bargaining with a communist, the ultimate foe.134 In response to the hypothesis that the regime was taking advantage of a preexisting tension in the ANC, Barnard replied: It’s really an extremely sensitive matter. . . . I’m not going to answer your question direct[ly], but I don’t think your hypotheses are too far off the mark, . . . it’s quite logical it seems to me that you’ve done some very good research. . . . You must bear in mind the time when it took place, it was a time when Communism was still a potent force. . . . The fact that at the time there would have been the view that we should ﬁnd an accommodation not with the Communist wing within the ANC but with the Nationalist wing. . . . I don’t think it should be strange in any way at that time. . . . But, Govan Mbeki staying on the Island and bringing the others to the mainland, so to speak, obviously also would have the intention of creating the space for the Nationalist people to become involved more and more in negotiation politics. That would be the more balanced way of putting it.135

A very senior member of the then government added a different dimension to the state’s thinking regarding the separation of Mandela and Mbeki, speaking on condition of anonymity. Although Govan Mbeki was seen as a political purist and a “scientiﬁc” Marxist, he was not seen as a hardliner. (Harry Gwala, on the other hand, was seen as a “troublemaker” by the authorities. They could not consider moving him because he was so suspicious of everybody; “he was suspicious of his own shadow.”) For this informant, the state believed Mbeki was too old to play a critical strategic role, but they saw promise in his son, Thabo, a senior leader of the ANC in exile. Given that they saw a “tool of hope” in Thabo (and perhaps Govan) Mbeki, they felt it important to bolster the Mbeki image, especially as “most of the leaders moved from Robben Island were of blue blood, and Govan Mbeki was not.” (The respondent was not certain whether the message about the Mbeki 134

135

The seriousness with which the apartheid regime took its anticommunism should not be underestimated. It is entirely plausible that the announcement of 2 February 1990 would not have occurred had it not been for the imminent demise of the Soviet Union, and, with it, both the ANC’s loss of Soviet ﬁnancial support and a most serious blow to the legitimacy of socialism. Barnard, interview.

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“worthiness” was effective.) Moreover, the anonymous informant suggested that a 1983 meeting in the United States between Pieter de Lange, the head of the secret Afrikaner organization, the Broederbond, and Thabo Mbeki was not only not a coincidence but rather a carefully orchestrated aspect of a masterplan of strategic change.136 As mentioned previously, Harding’s opinion was that Mandela and his comrades were removed from Robben Island to prevent their inﬂuencing the other prisoners. Although Coetsee denied this,137 it is not an entirely implausible motivation, as it is consistent with both reducing the inﬂuence of Robben Island and decentralizing political imprisonment, both of which are discussed later. Another potential or actual reason for moving Mandela was to ensure conﬁdentiality in any discussions. There were few secrets on the Island, and Mandela needed space if he wanted to speak to the regime without having to seek approval from the large prisoner community that was his most immediate constituency. Mandela’s insistence on consultation would hamper state communication with their prisoner.138 No doubt among the various strategic scenarios the state envisaged was that Mandela would eventually make some sort of a deal with the government; perhaps break ranks with the communists and develop a nationalist coalition.139 Such a hope was at best a naive misreading of Mandela, for whom loyalty is a paramount virtue. But Mandela was prepared to take some initial steps without consulting his comrades or organization, which did help the initial process of negotiations. Symbol and Substance: Reducing the Power of the Island. According to Ni¨el Barnard, one of the primary reasons for moving Mandela was to “demystify” the status of Robben Island. Over the nearly two decades Mandela was jailed on Robben Island, the Island had come to be associated with him, as Barnard knew from taking foreign visitors to Table Mountain. Indeed, moving Mandela to Pollsmoor did little to alter public perceptions; most people continued to think the ANC leader remained in the Island prison. But the state had come to realize that Robben Island was a substantive as well as a symbolic liability. Coetsee noted that, unwittingly, the state’s process of political imprisonment on Robben Island had the effect of assisting “the revolutionary movements – the real effect was actually to build them and especially the leadership of Robben Island.”140 The state had not noticed the way prisoner’s were using their incarceration to their advantage until 136 137 138 139 140

On the de Lange–Mbeki meeting, see Sparks, Tomorrow Is Another Country, 73–74. Ibid., 23. Willemse, interview. See also Sparks, Tomorrow Is Another Country, 71. Coetsee, interview.

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the 1980s,141 by which time Coetsee had begun to decentralize political incarceration. Barnard argued that the concentration of political prisoners on the Island probably sobered and balanced the prisoners, opening them to the array of strategic approaches to resolving South Africa’s problems. Had the leaders been put “in ten different places . . . so that they would not been able to communicate with each other . . . I’m absolutely sure that would have created a lot of suspicion or mistrust between them,” which would have undermined the negotiation process.142 Barnard did not, however, claim this as a conscious state strategy. Political Imprisonment Decentralized. While Barnard considered the centralization of political prisoners a good thing, Coetsee began to decentralize political imprisonment in the 1980s. He explained that the reason why I started to decentralize . . . was actually to try and get the more volatile ones [prisoners] concentrated elsewhere in order to make Robben Island manageable. . . . And we achieved that. And it wasn’t in order to be aggressive . . . it was a by-product which we had in mind and we achieved that. So peace came to Robben Island and the moment the heat started to subside, the anger on Robben Island also started to improve . . . the decentralization policy in a sense . . . was to diffuse a layer of leadership just under Mr. Mandela and his colleagues. They were very aggressive; they were making life difﬁcult for all. And some of them were moved elsewhere.143

The decision to decentralize political imprisonment was part of the managerial process of “normalization” that was decided upon in the meeting on Robben Island between Coetsee and other senior members of the prison administration in the early 1980s. Decentralization was also facilitated by “depoliticizing” political imprisonment. Increasingly, over the 1980s, instead of being charged under statutory law which deﬁned “security” or “political” offenses, political defendants were charged under the common law.144 While von Lieres denied that he chose to prosecute people under common rather than more politicized statutory law under orders from or the inﬂuence of government ofﬁcials, there was a general (if inconsistent) national trend away from political charges and trials in the 1980s. One of the ways in which this 141 142 143

144

Barnard, interview. Ibid. Coetsee, interview. Certain political prisoners had earlier been removed from Robben Island in the 1960s, including Zephania Mothopeng who was transferred from the Island to Stofberg prison in the Orange Free State (Mlambo, interview). Some black male political prisoners in the 1960s were never sent to Robben Island; Morontshi Matsobane (interview) remembered visiting his older brother Mike, who had been charged with PAC activities in the 1960s, in the Groenpunt prison, which was also in the Orange Free State. Von Lieres, interview.

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apparent state strategy is seen is in the difference between the ANC’s and the government’s numbers for political prisoner releases in the post-1990 period. The state identiﬁed fewer than one thousand political prisoners while the ANC identiﬁed over three thousand political prisoners whose releases needed to be negotiated.145 Penuell Maduna, who was one of the ANC’s primary negotiators for the release of political prisoners, pointed out that by 1990 only the minority of political prisoners were on Robben Island, the rest were scattered in prisons around the country. He noted, however, that this diffusion of prisoners cannot all be explained by deliberate state policy, as Robben Island prison was simply not big enough to hold the vast numbers of political prisoners who had been incarcerated over the 1980s.146 Dialogue and Negotiation to Exit the Prison Bargaining and negotiation helped to facilitate the prisoner’s exit from prison in both literal and metaphoric senses. On a literal level, prisoners were key actors in their own release process. Their prison struggles over the years, and the use of Robben Island to shape the context and nature of the South African struggle, had helped to create the conditions for release. This prisoner involvement is especially important in the individual case of Nelson Mandela. More speciﬁcally, the prisoners inﬂuenced the national negotiation processes regarding prisoner releases by using protest mechanisms such as hunger strikes to increase the leverage of the ANC (which was effectively negotiating for all political prisoner releases, irrespective of organization)147 in its bargaining with the state. Mandela used a different kind of leverage when he refused to be released in Johannesburg and insisted on walking free from Victor Verster prison in the Cape. (Choosing his site of release was a compromise in a bargaining process with de Klerk; Mandela had also wanted to be released a week later so that the mass democratic movement could have adequate warning. He was not able to achieve this demand.) Recognizing the power of prisoners not to be released, Barnard had earlier insisted that the SACP be unbanned along with the ANC, less Mandela refuse to be released until it was legalized.148 On a more abstract level, the contact between prisoners and individual state actors allowed for a certain (re)negotiation of relationships within the prison, and to some extent within the country. Over the years, senior politicians had not been the only ones who interacted with and learned from the prisoners. The upper echelons of the Prisons Service, and others who 145 146 147 148

Timothy D. Sisk, Democratization in South Africa: The Elusive Social Contract (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 103. Maduna, interview. Ibid. Barnard, interview.

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came into contact with the political prisoners, especially the leadership of the ANC, were often impressed and affected by the experience. Paradoxically, prison allowed for a certain intimacy of contact between the jailed and their jailors. In a particularly signiﬁcant letter – signiﬁcant because it was smuggled and therefore not intended for the eyes of prison censors – Ahmed Kathrada wrote: Our (i.e. single cells) relationship with warders has been quite cordial and with some decidedly warm. . . . [I]ronically, it is in jail that we have the closest fraternization between the opponents and supporters of apartheid; we have eaten of their food, and they ours; they have blown the same musical instruments that have been “soiled” by black lips; they have discussed most intimate matters and sought advice; a blind man ` ete will ﬁnd it hard to believe it is between a prisoner and a listening in to a tˆete-a-tˆ warder. . . . But of course there are the verkramptes [Editor’s translation: “conservative and rigid followers of apartheid”] and the rabid racialists as well. What a job we will have to rehabilitate them.149

For some people that relationship could never been anything but antagonistic, but for others stereotypes were broken down, especially from the side of the regime. One example of a new perspective, in this case more of a “political” than a “personal” revelation, was an experience offered by Major Harding: I saw that a cabinet [member] and the chief of police and security were actually acknowledging Mandela. They were . . . listening to him. And I realized, hey, there are things that I’m not aware of that are taking place in this country – that we are not aware of – that the government is actually negotiating. And one thing Jimmy Kruger said to [Mandela] was, when you renounce violence we are prepared to look at talking to you. And I could read between the lines that, in the days of Jimmy Kruger already, they were actually looking for an excuse to negotiate with Mandela. . . . I could see that our government was already looking for an excuse to negotiate with them – that was quite clear to me. And when I saw that I said to myself, hell if they’re doing it, who am I not to do the same thing? And I realized then and I realized after Rhodesia got independence, I realized that South Africa would be next. And I knew that, that this day was coming. I expected it much sooner than when it did happen. And I could already see how they were preparing the leaders and I could determine then already who would be the next leaders of our country. Tokyo Sexwale I could see, it was written all over his face, he would become a minister one day, I could see it.150

One should not, however, romanticize this experience. The state’s emphasis on leadership, its fear of “agitation,” the persistent racism of apartheid, and the profoundly unequal power distribution in prisons obviously lessened the extent to which prison was an environment conducive to challenging racist stereotypes and power relations, and building an alternative order. 149 150

Ahmed Kathrada to Sylvia Neame, Robben Island, between 11 December 1970 and 9 January 1971, Letters from Robben Island, 47–48. Harding, interview.

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The remarkable point is the extent to which so much dialogue, bargaining, and negotiation was possible. The Catch-Twenty-Twos of Repression The chapter has thus far pointed out that the state did not realize until the late 1970s or even well into the 1980s that political prisoners were, in general, taking advantage of their imprisonment to develop as activists and organizations. The question therefore arises as to the state’s response. Any reaction was slowed down by the general ignorance of the state concerning the realities of prisoner struggles on the Island and the lack of coordination among various government departments. For example, in 1979, men charged in the Bethal trial included former Robben Islanders who had, in this trial, been charged and convicted of furthering the aims of the PAC while on Robben Island. Despite having been found guilty of, among a number of offenses, promoting an illegal organization within a prison, the men were returned to the same prison. Even more amazingly, of those members of the previous government interviewed for this study, not one of the members of the Prisons Service in particular, or apartheid government more generally, had any knowledge of this case. One can presumably explain the contradictory state behavior in the Bethal trial and subsequent imprisonment in light of the increasing sense of crisis the regime was experiencing. In general, the state found itself quite limited regarding the range of options it could use to deal with political prisoners, given a number of constraints. The ﬁrst constraint was that the state feared mixing political and criminal prisoners, because political prisoners would often “convert” nonpolitical prisoners to their causes and organization, or at least conscientize them to be aware of broader political issues. Second, decentralization of political prisoners made it harder for the state to attempt to respond to national and international pressures regarding treatment of political prisoners. This difﬁculty was more generally a consequence of limited state resources, especially as the state found itself under greater pressure. Thirdly, the prisoners had, over time, demonstrated that they had bargaining power and knew how to use it, and so the state had to weigh up the relative merits and demerits of dividing and diffusing its opponents. Ultimately, the political prisoners expanded the state’s political options. When he rejected the government’s offer of conditional release in 1985, Nelson Mandela wrote that “[o]nly free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.”151 In fact, negotiation over prison conditions as well as apartheid and broad facts of South African political life were both means and ends of prisoner resistance. Moreover, this chapter shows that the state as much as the prisoners came to rely on negotiation with their charges. 151

Mandela in Johns and Davis, Mandela, Tambo, and the African National Congress, 215.

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While this chapter has concentrated on negotiating national political issues, in reality much of the day-to-day substance and conditions of political life were negotiated on an ongoing basis between prisoners and the regime, especially as conditions improved. Indeed, bargaining, talks, and negotiations about conditions of imprisonment was a critical aspect of the pressures on the Prisons Service to “professionalize” and “normalize” their treatment of political prisoners. Eddie Daniels captured the dual nature of negotiations in the following comment made soon after his release: THE GOVERNMENT TALKS ABOUT NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE ANC Negotiations have been going on a long time. Jimmy Kruger came to see Nelson on the island. Le Grange came to see Nelson on the island. Brigadier Aucamp was actually a political appointment by the government as a go-between the ANC and Pretoria. When we used to face the Prison Board, they would often ask us political questions, and the ANC made the point that we are not prepared to discuss political matters with them. Under the leadership of Mandela, we said, “Send your political representatives to us, and we will talk to them. We will only discuss prison matters with you.”152

Behind the apartheid regime’s steel facade lay reformers, politicians, and other senior civil servants who worked to reduce attention on apartheid imprisonment and assisted in facilitating secret talks between the regime and prisoners, especially Mandela. 152

Daniels in Johns and Davis, Mandela, Tambo, and the African National Congress, 157.

9 Theorizing Islander Resistance

Emancipation is a matter of critique and construction, of which resistance represents the ﬁrst step and transformation, in the sense of structural change, the second. Resistance and emancipation are interdependent, with the proviso that not every form of resistance opens the way to emancipation and some block it. What sets emancipation as a concept apart from resistance is the proactive, transformative element. Foucault’s understandings of power breaks with traditional political theory in showing that ‘power’s function is not merely prohibitive and repressive but productive, positive, educative’ (Cocks, 1989: 51). Similarly, emancipation is not simply about saying no, reacting, refusing, resisting, but also and primarily about social creativity, introducing new values and aims, new forms of cooperation and action.1 A ﬁghting underground is a veritable state in miniature.2

Resistance on Robben Island is meaningful not only in its own right but also in the context of fundamental concerns of theorizing political organization and political change. This chapter begins by explaining the norms and sanctions that undergirded a disciplinary order that was implicit in the Island polity and society. This proto-governance is critical insofar as it moves resistance from refusal to creation and claims back the right of making laws or rules and controlling society from the state to the inmates. This determination to create one’s own political community was built on foundations resembling constitutional government insofar as individuals gave up some of their own rights and powers to representative government in return for agreement to stated and unstated norms, particularly as expressed in codes of conduct. Such a project recalls the political theories of the social contract 1 2

Jan Nederveen Pieterse, ed., Emancipations, Modern and Postmodern (London: Sage Publications, 1992), 13. Citing J. Cocks, The Oppositional Imagination (London: Routledge, 1989). Quotation from the Israeli guerilla group, Irgun, noted by Nelson Mandela in evidence admitted in the Rivonia trial. Cited by Sampson, Mandela: The Authorized Biography, 189.

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theorists, and the relevance of Robben Island to their work. Creating social contracts, implicit and explicit, underscores the far-reaching resistance undertaken by the Island inmates. The extent to which (emblematic) literatures of resistance can or cannot account for their resistance for power is examined next, before I offer my own typology of resistance that applies at least to Robben Island but also beyond it in certain instances (see Chapter Ten). The chapter concludes by showing how three binary oppositions that continue to inhibit the theorizing and understanding of resistance are undermined in the Robben Island case. These are the oppositions between the private or hidden and the public, consent and coercion especially in their institutional expression, and, ﬁnally, the opposition between power and resistance. It is the critique of this third binary relation that lies at the heart of my argument about resistance in this chapter and book, namely that effective, far-reaching, and transformative resistance needs to engage with power and seek to become a form of power itself. Norms and Institutions of Rule When Amos Masondo arrived on Robben Island, Harry Gwala told Masondo and the other prisoners that “you don’t allow the warder to impose discipline on you, but you impose discipline among yourselves as a group.”3 Gwala lived out this example in his daily prison routine; rising early to exercise, wash, and tidy his bedding. To the extent possible, Gwala epitomized what was at once the source of the prisoner’s power in prison and its end: control over one’s individual and collective destiny, subject to the material conditions one confronted. The complex society that developed on Robben Island was shaped by the realities the state imposed on imprisoned men. But it was also molded by the prisoners’ control over each other, above all within organizations, but also among them. Thus, Mandela commented, “The inmates seemed to be running the prison, not the authorities.”4 Based on this understanding, resistance includes actions and practices designed to dilute, circumvent, or eliminate the imposition of unwelcome power. Resistance includes choosing to subject oneself to a disciplinary regime of one’s choice – one’s self or one’s organization – rather than accept the disciplinary edicts of the state. The disciplinary regime the prisoners developed was a strict and complex set of sociopolitical and economic mores that sought to maximize their resistance and control. In broad terms, most of these norms and rules were encapsulated in the prisoners’ code of conduct. This code was the basis on which the Robben Island prisoner community organized their lives in prison. It was a politically motivated guide to social and political behavior. It was a crucial aspect of 3 4

Masondo interview. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 393.

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resistance because it replaced prison authority with prisoner and organizational discipline wherever possible and actively used the prison to attempt to further long-term political ends. The code of conduct rested on the principle that any action must advance the cause of struggle.5 For this reason, the implications of the code would differ at particular points or in different contexts. For example, stealing was prohibited but an exception would be made for the theft of newspapers. The content of the code of conduct was subject to new meanings or elaboration depending on a number of variables such as external events, the Prisons Service policy and practice, the actions of particular warders and other prison ofﬁcials, and the balance of power between and among different political organizations on Robben Island. Steve Tshwete provided an example of changing needs in discussing sport and organizational differences. Soccer was initially established on an organizational basis, which increased rather than decreased tense relations between the ANC and the PAC. Therefore, when rugby was introduced to the Island, “the constitution . . . stipulated that nobody will be free to leave the club allocated to him for any reason,” so that people would not join rugby clubs based on political divisions.6 Once, however, the tensions died down and sport was a source of unity, that particular stipulation was relaxed. Mkhwanazi explained that the “prisoners’ codes of conduct were unwritten – but they governed every aspect of prison life, from how prisoners related to each other to how we dealt with prison authorities. They were taught painstakingly to each new person and a transgression would lead to disciplining by a special prisoners’ panel in one’s own camp.”7 Although the code of conduct was established on an organizational basis, all organizations shared two principles. First, actions were to be taken in the best interests of advancing the struggle, which could differ depending on the organizational ideology. Second, prisoners had to act as a community, irrespective of ideological differences, when it came to confronting the state or its representatives. Patrick Nkosi Molala emphasized that it is very, very crucial for people to understand that we may have existed on the Island as people belonging to different organizations, and we may have had our tiffs, our conﬂicts, our battles, but when it came to the authorities, when it came to the warders and all those things, we were completely supportive. And we would always act as one, we have always acted as one.8

Islanders vary in explaining the code of conduct, although understandings overlap and differences reﬂect emphases, not fundamental conﬂicts. Dikgang 5 6 7 8

Mkhwanazi, interview. Tshwete, interview. Mkhwanazi, “My Years on the Island,” 15. Molala, interview.

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Moseneke identiﬁed the three aspects of the political code of conduct as maintaining one’s commitment to a changed society; exercising noncollaboration, especially with prison authorities; and retaining all the positive things from one’s imprisonment, which was a demand for self-improvement, mainly through joint prisoner projects.9 Kgalema Motlanthe’s understanding of the code of conduct were based on the advice of Joe Gqabi, a former Islander, who had told Motlanthe to avoid two things in prison; gossip and “special arrangements.”10 Norms and rules that guided the prison experience emphasized mutual support and the needs of the community as a whole. For example, if one had the money or classiﬁcation to buy food, it should be shared in a collective pool, called golgos by the ANC,11 and when one was released from prison, musical instruments and books acquired on the Island should be left for others. The demands of the code extended to more abstract concerns, such as the need to help people maintain morale and hope. Islanders helped each other through personal crises ranging from post-torture trauma to coping with family crises from afar. As in any social order, the prisoners recognized that community rules needed more than the goodwill or even shared values of their participants to maintain “law and order.” A critical part of prisoner life and resistance was therefore the sanctions that organizations could and did apply to enforce the disciplinary social contract they had developed. Two of the most severe forms of disciplinary punishment were expulsion from one’s organization and isolation or ostracism. As a matter of policy and practice, people who were isolated were excluded from all organizational activities, utterly ignored by members of their organization, and, potentially, completely ignored by other Islanders in other organizations. Ostracism extended isolation and was a greater punishment: the sentence of ostracism was publicized beyond as well as within one’s own organization, and other groupings were asked to cooperate in isolating someone. Isolation would only be used under extreme circumstances, such as assault of or informing on a fellow prisoner.12 People were usually ostracized or isolated for a speciﬁc period of time and this sentence would end assuming “good behavior” was observed.13 Ostracism was especially harsh on the individual. Moses Dlamini recounted the story of Enock Mathibela who was ostracized for betraying and renouncing the political community.14 Mathibela was an old trade unionist who inadvertently attended a meeting where methods to make bombs were discussed. Upon encountering the harsh conditions on Robben Island in 1964 at the 9 10 11 12 13 14

Moseneke, interview. Motlanthe, interview. Ntshanyana (interview) pointed out that although the PAC did not use the term “golgos” because of its Soviet origins, they too shared food with one another. Hlatswayo, interview; Ntshanyana, interview. Ntshanyana, interview. Dlamini, Hell-Hole, 140.

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beginning of his ﬁve-year sentence, Mathibela wrote to the relevant minister asking for a pardon and pointing out that he was never a member of the African National Congress. The minister agreed to consider a pardon only after Mathibela completed his sentence, but in the meantime the other political prisoners learned of the letter and ostracized him. He was taunted and mocked for a minor physical deformity by the warders and was criticized and ostracized by his fellow inmates which made him “the loneliest and most hated man on Robben Island.”15 A less drastic but, nevertheless, stringent measure was (temporary) suspension from the organization, and subsequent observation by mandated members of the organization during that suspension period. Other punishments involved being denied common food or having to clean the toilets and bathrooms for a certain period of time. In addition to formal sanctions such as these, tensions in prison life caused people to be ignored more informally by certain individuals or groups, which was a very painful experience. An important method of punishment (but also of attack or criticism) was, in the terms of James Scott, “slander, gossip, [and] character assassination.”16 These actions could be much more than “symbolic sanctions”; (serious) accusations about a person or faction could fundamentally undermine their place in prison society. Naledi Tsiki recalled, for example, being castigated as “Mandela’s boy” at a time when Mandela had taken controversial ideological stances within the ANC’s prison community.17 The power and danger of gossip is why Joe Gqabi had warned Motlanthe that it was hazardous. The jeopardies of “slander” were highlighted by the writer(s) of the Document on Conﬂict in the ANC when they strongly criticized the ANC’s High Organ, noting that “[t]he usual disciplinary code of conﬁning differences within was broken when individual High Organ men vied with each other and broadcast their mutual recriminations to their own adherents in a vicious slander campaign.”18 Perhaps the most signiﬁcant example of the use of character assassination as a disciplinary mechanism concerns naming people as homosexuals. As is discussed later, homosexuality was almost universally condemned on Robben Island, although it was acknowledged that a few political prisoners 15

16 17 18

Ibid., 142. Mathibela’s treatment was not unique: part of the reason Jock Strachan had been convicted for writing the 1965 exposes of prison life was because the regime had been able to procure the false testimony of a white political prisoner, Raymond Thoms. Primarily as a consequence of this betrayal, but also as a result of other actions that undermined the political prisoner community, his fellow political prisoners responded by “sending him to Coventry.” Denis Goldberg, interview; see also Lewin, Bandiet, 89–92, and Suttner, Inside Apartheid’s Prison, 65. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 25. Tsiki, interview. Document on Conﬂict in the ANC n.d., 2.

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had broken the prisoner code on same-sex relations. Only those who had breached a greater political norm like shifting allegiances outside or against the liberation movements were, however, identiﬁed by name as practicing homosexuals. There were important limits to the disciplinary regime prisoners could impose; Babenia commented that “we can’t force anyone to attend [lectures].”19 Antagonizing comrades, even deviant comrades, could lead them to become politically neutral, join a competing organization, or, the worstcase scenario, become informers and work with the state. Macozoma commented: “Isolating people is a very drastic action. It is taken when that person particularly acts against the interests of the entire community. It is difﬁcult to effect, but it is also an effective weapon that is not used easily. . . . There is always the problem that you can isolate the person and the other groups can come and grab that person.”20 In addition, state and inter- and intraorganizational challenges could be mounted if disciplinary mechanisms became too harsh. Perhaps the strongest limit to abusive behavior by organizations, groups, or individuals meting out discipline was that of them wanting to preserve the moral high ground. Both as a community and as individual organizations, Robben Islanders were and remain enormously concerned with their image and public perception. The dignity of “the struggle” in general and of speciﬁc people and organizations within it depends on certain histories, understandings, and representations of the Island and its inmates. Despite some important lapses and exceptions, research suggests this goal was achieved: the men and the organizations who were forced to live on Robben Island did create a social order that was consistent with many or most of their goals and intentions. Homosexuality One aspect of social control that warrants more detailed discussion is the question of sexuality and, in particular, homosexuality, which was explicitly prohibited in the code of conduct. Much of the fear of and aversion to homosexuality stems from the experiences Robben Islanders had in the 1960s when criminal prisoners in gangs used the threat and reality of forced sodomy or rape to terrorize prisoners, often with the speciﬁc knowledge or cooperation of the warders.21 Dlamini recounted that the leader of the Big Sixes, which 19 20 21

Babenia, interview. Macozoma, interview. An important aspect of Achmat’s critique of conventional understanding and portrayals of prison homosexuality is his emphasis on the complex social structure and ethical worldview of prison gangs, particularly the “28 Gang” or “Ninevites” considered in his essay. Following Achmat’s (“‘Apostles of Civilised Vice’: ‘Immoral Practices’ and ‘Unnatural Vice’ in South African Prisons and Compounds, 1890–1920,” Social Dynamics 19, no. 2 [1993], 95) night of passion with a de facto cell boss in Pollsmoor Prison, the 28s protected him. Furthermore,

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opposed the prison system, was gang-raped in order that he submit to the prison authorities and their aids, the Big Fives.22 Political prisoners were also, although apparently more occasionally, victims of rape: Dlamini stated as much when he noted the rape of “the same convicts who raped a number of our comrades.”23 This statement also appears to conﬁrm that Dlamini’s earlier allusion to the “humiliation” of political prisoners implied rape or sexual assault.24 Islander opposition to homosexuality because it was a criminal practice is unsatisfactory for at least two reasons. First, it implies a failure to distinguish the possibility of consensual homosexual sex from rape; both are subsumed under the category of “sodomy.” Presumably those who conﬂated male rape with homosexuality would not have argued all heterosexual sex is rape because some men rape some women. Second, as Zackie Achmat noted (in another context), blaming criminals “for the emergence of homosexual practices in prison” accepts the notion that homosexuality reﬂects “deviant desires” and accuses the regime for creating this “deviance.”25 For many Islanders, underlying the abhorrence of homosexuality was a belief in the superiority of men, or at least of male sexuality, and of very deﬁned social and sexual roles for men and women. Men who were penetrated (anally or between the thighs) were the passive partner and were called wives or wyﬁes (Afrikaans for a female animal).26 As Moodie pointed out, this understanding of “proper ‘wifely’ sexual behaviour was essentially passive, at least receptive rather than intrusive”; the “female” partner was “certainly subordinate, both socially and sexually.”27 Furthermore, given that many and perhaps most of the homosexual relationships were intergenerational with the older man taking the male role, homosexuality in South African prisons and mines also reproduced the “gerontocratic” principle of African social organization, in which principles of seniority” formed

22 23 24 25 26 27

“[t]hey viciously opposed any form of collaboration with the ‘die boere [the Afrikaners or authorities],’ but it was their rules and laws that made the prison function as an institution.” As the word “viciously” implies, however, the 28s were brutal in “dealing with their enemies.” Some former Robben Islanders too recognized that some or all prison gangs were based upon social orders, including a moral-political stance. Dlamini, Hell-Hole, 38, for example, recalled the arrival of the Big Six gang to Robben Island: “They had turned everything upside down where they had come from: stabbing warders and the criminal convicts of the Big Fives [who collaborated with the authorities]. Their salute was the Victory Sign of Churchill (the one of the Big Fives was the Nazi salute of Adolf Hitler) and their main enemies were the warders, the Big Fives and prison conditions.” Dlamini, Hell-Hole, 111. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 26; see also Ntshanyana, interview. Achmat, “‘Apostles of Civilised Vice,’” 97. Dlamini, Hell-Hole, 23. Moodie, “Migrancy,” 235.

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the basis of social organization.28 In reproducing gender and generational power relations outside the prison into homosexual relationships within the prison, traditional African patriarchy was reproduced, albeit in a modiﬁed form.29 African and Christian prohibitions on homosexuality are other reasons former Islanders provide to explain the taboo on same-sex romantic or sexual liaisons. Christian opposition to homosexuality needs little veriﬁcation (at least in this context), but the claim that African cultures rejected homosexuality is more problematic. Mark Gevisser asserted that “homosexuality was accommodated in many pre-colonial African societies” and Dunbar Moodie pointed to a sexual practice called metsha (in Xhosa) and hlobongo (in Zulu) in which intercourse, occurring through penetration between the thighs, was widely accepted in a number of African groups for adolescents of the opposite sex before marriage, and possibly between adolescents and adult males.30 Moreover, an adaptation of this practice of hlobongo or metsha and/or the emergence of a different discourse of homosexuality had become a new tradition among mineworkers since at least the beginning of the century.31 Indeed, this last point was made to Dlamini when he learned, with horror, that two political prisoners of peasant origin who had worked on the mines were engaged in “sodomy.” When a fellow political prisoner accused one of the “guilty parties” of violating tradition, the offender replied that “‘in the mines and hostels it has now become tradition . . . times have changed.’”32 This man’s partner or wyﬁe told his accusers that there was nothing wrong in what they had done. He said that it was not the ﬁrst time they did it. He had been having an affair with his ‘husband’ for the last ﬁve years while working in the mines in Johannesburg. He further said that they were not the only ones who had done it in the mines; there were many who he knew who were now here in the island. And he mentioned names. He later added that they did not do it like the criminal convicts; in the mines it is done in the thighs.33 28 29

30 31 32 33

Ibid., 236. Achmat wanted, instead, to understate the continuities between the past and the new homosexual practices. He (“‘Apostles of Civilised Vice,’” 104) wrote: “Moodie’s interpretation reduces sex for money to a social relation of the old system which fails to acknowledge that bukhontxana [homosexuality] cannot simply be read from its continuity with the precapitalist economy. It has to be interpreted by the use of the male body as a site of pleasure in the ﬁrst instance.” While Achmat is no doubt correct to value these sexual relations in terms of an appreciation of homosexual pleasure in itself, I do not think he successfully refuted Moodie’s evidence or argument that these sexual relations were new manifestations of older power relations, including with respect to roles allocated to males and females, and young and old people. Mark Gevisser, “Mugabe’s Mantra.” The Nation, 18 September 1995, 261; Moodie, “Migrancy.” Moodie, “Migrancy,” 230–2; Achmat, “‘Apostels of Civilised Vice,’” 101. Dlamini, Hell-Hole,132. Ibid.,131.

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Upon discovering this couple, other political prisoners – also peasants – assaulted these men so viciously that they were nearly killed. Thereafter, the cell committee separated the two men into separate cells, interviewed them, and met to discuss an appropriate punishment: Many comrades felt that they should be ostracised and later we told them of their punishment. Nobody would communicate with them for a period of two months. They would also be required to clean the cells in which they were staying daily for a month. The wyﬁe took his sentence in silence but the ‘husband’ pointed out that they had already been assaulted and that was punishment enough. . . . There was nothing we could do, we told them, we had to maintain strict discipline among ourselves.34

Purportedly political reasons were often given for opposing homosexuality. Prisoners feared homosexuality would cause jealousies and division, and thus harm the struggle. That is, personal loyalties based on sexual intimacy would detract from organizational demands35 and meaningful political education.36 Macozoma said that because homosexuality was a crossorganizational phenomenon, some feared the homosexuals would form a clique of their own.37 Indeed, it was primarily for these reasons, in “the best interests of the struggle,” that Terror Lekota defended his and other ANCaligned comrades’ condemnation of homosexuality as awaiting trial prisoners in Pretoria prison: “This was a security matter for us, not just a matter of idle debate. Those of us who were returning to jail for the second time knew that security police had used complicity in this [homosexuality], drug abuse and other things to compromise and/or demoralise freedom-ﬁghters.”38 Interview respondents also pointed out that when the few homosexuals among the political prisoners were caught violating the taboo against homosexual sex, these men would be disciplined by their organization. There were occasional attempts among prisoners to challenge the taboo on homosexuality. Kathrada recalled that a young medical student who was imprisoned in the single cells in the early 1970s wrote a position paper explaining why homosexuality occurred “and that one should not . . . just condemn it outright.”39 Some in the ANC, including Mandela, “appreciated” the paper, without necessarily accepting homosexuality. In hindsight, Kathrada added that, as the ANC, “we may have had some very backward views on some things, but we grew up that way.”40 Another Robben Islander, imprisoned in the late 1980s, attempted to raise the issue of same-sex love 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Ibid., 132. Mkhwanazi, interview; Moseneke, interview. Mkhwanazi, interview. Macozoma, interview. “Why I Took a Stand Against Homosexuality.” Sunday Independent (South Africa), 24 March 1996, 12. Kathrada, interview. Ibid.

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by choosing Kiss of the Spiderwoman as the video prisoners were entitled to see. This endeavor to open debate came to naught when the other political prisoners refused to watch the rest of the movie once its homosexual content became apparent.41 As the movie was ignored or boycotted, so too were the few people who had been caught engaged in homosexual sex; suspension and ostracism were common punishments for those who broke the code of conduct in their sexual expression. One of South Africa’s few openly gay antiapartheid opponents was Simon Nkoli, who was detained and then held without bail for three years while he was charged in the famous 1980s Delmas treason trial. Reﬂecting on his imprisonment there, he pointed out that because he never hid his sexual orientation, “I was exposed as ‘one of those’ and left to suffer from severe depression, loneliness and isolation.”42 Presumably, similarly honest or exposed homosexuals on Robben Island received like-minded treatment. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that homosexual activity was not necessarily used against people, at least outside prison, unless they had also violated some other spoken or unspoken taboos. Therefore, although the names of those who had (allegedly) broken the taboo on same-sex intercourse were assiduously avoided in interviews, this silence was regularly broken with regard to naming two people who had since left the ANC; one to join the National Party, and the other to join Inkatha. The man who joined Inkatha became an important member of their illegal paramilitary force that persecuted the UDF and ANC in KwaZulu-Natal. In this context, he was identiﬁed as a having engaged in homosexual sex years before in prison, as was the case with the man who joined the NP. The threat or reality of exposing homosexual behavior therefore exists outside as well as inside the prison as a disciplinary mechanism to control or condemn “undisciplined” behavior. In short, political prisoners sought to “neutralise the subversive and destabilising effects of sex in the . . . prisons . . . and, through this, to ‘normalise’ sexual activity, ﬁx cultural identity, and center monogamous, heterosexual relations.”43 The ban on homosexuality was accompanied by a more generalized silence or puritanism on the subject of sexuality. Mkhwanazi said that masturbation 41

42 43

Anonymous, conversation. Subsequent to this conversation, I had read a similar account of the same incident, presumably by the same informant, although using a pseudonym in this source. In addition, yet another informant, whom the author names Jabulani Mbandla, argued that the Robben Island leadership’s resistance to homosexuality was “understandable . . . on account of the low morality of most gays. They use drugs, are always drunk: ‘F and F, fun and fuck’. That behaviour disgusts people.” Bart Luirink, Mofﬁes: Gay Life in Southern Africa (Claremont, South Africa: Ink. Inc, an Imprint of David Philip, 2000), 35–39. The quote is from p. 37. “Sex Between Men in Prison is a Fact: I Was There and I Knew About it.” Sunday Independent (South Africa), 17 March 1996, 11. Achmat, “‘Apostles of Civilized Vice,’” 108.

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was also taboo.44 Gwala told prisoners not to read the risqu´e and somewhat salacious back page of the Sunday Times newspaper.45 Cooper recalled fellow prisoners claiming that “they did not have an erection for they don’t know how long.”46 He believed that there was a lot of denial by prisoners and their organizations about sexuality and normal human desires: “The younger prisoners were perhaps more in touch with their sexuality but . . . anybody who jacked off, anybody who attempted masturbation, was looked upon as queer. Whereas perhaps it would have been best under the circumstances.”47 An important reason for this refusal to deal with sexuality (except to police it) was, arguably, the hyperpolitical nature of Robben Island society, in which the political realm was valorized above, and sometimes even against, the personal sphere. Politics on the Island was understood as that source from which all else emanated, including moral and ethical values. In this context, personal needs, including in the sexual realm, were subsumed below more important political imperatives. Thus Cooper commented cynically that the reason for the silence around sexual issues was that “we are political beings, not sexual beings.”48 Political Realities Versus Political Thought? From “State of Nature” to “Social Contract” Underscoring the disciplinary regime established by prisoners was an understanding of the basis of legitimate governance and reciprocal obligations that bound the “citizen” prisoners and “government” they created. The code of conduct, as well as the unstated and stated norms and regulations implicit in every facet of prisoner life, from sports to sexuality to political education, offered both an ethos and the practical rules and regulations to create and maintain a society and polity in prison. This prison world was, like Benedict Anderson’s nations, an “imagined community.”49 Its value system 44 45 46 47 48 49

Mkhwanazi, interview. Sampson, Mandela: The Authorized Biography, 297. Cooper, interview. Ibid. Ibid. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London and New York: Verso, 1991). At least three of Anderson’s (Imagined Communities, 6–7) four components of what makes an imagined community – not all members actually know each other; that the community be limited; and the community is considered as a community – clearly apply to the Robben Island case. The fourth, that the community imagine itself as sovereign, highlights two issues. On the one hand, at least as regards the state, the Robben Islander’s sought sovereignty as an escape from an intrusive state, always knowing any sovereignty was limited. Within the organizations, the ANC had made a conscious decision that the organization in prison could not make policy decisions but had to be guided by the movement in exile, also a limit on sovereignty. In practice, at times all organizations made decisions that assumed at least a degree of sovereignty

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and practical elaboration is less a mirror of the projections of the Marxists and African nationalists that the prisoners revered, however, and more an experiment, albeit an unintended test, of the theoretical imagination of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.50 Whatever the differences among these three masters of modern Western thought, their theories share two features: a mythical point of origin in human existence or the state of nature, and agreements to regulate human interaction or the social contract. Robben Island as experienced by prisoners who arrived in the sixties was akin to a Hobbesian state of nature; life as deﬁned by the state threatened to be “nasty, brutish and short.”51 For Rousseau, rivalry and competition deﬁned political relations in society. Robben Island in the 1960s invoked Rousseau’s understandings, at least in terms of the competition between political movements – and, to a lesser extent, political actors. The prisoners had no common power to restrain the state or the criminals who worked with them, and the ofﬁcial prison “law” and “law enforcement” violated a fundamental principle of justice (or the law of nature), namely the right of the prisoners to self-defense. In this context, the prisoners came together in a social contract to protect themselves against the violence of the state, and the dangers of individual prisoner action, like smuggling food, that could endanger all the other political prisoners.52 Therefore prisoners, as individuals and organizations, agreed – as is consistent with Hobbes – to come together as a political community to provide mutual protection through uniﬁed responses to the state and a set of laws that would both create and maintain the community. Any loss of liberty that individuals or organizations might suffer in agreeing to form a political community was well worth the protection provided by, ﬁrst, the uniﬁed response the community could offer the regime as the source of all danger, and

50

51 52

from exiled or external wings. On the other hand, sovereignty was the most sought after and tangible goal animating the society Robben Islanders constructed. The prisoners were placed in an Hobbesian state of nature and developed a social contract with the goal of ` self-determination or sovereignty vis-a-vis the state. There are signiﬁcant disjunctures in the application of these theorists to the Robben Island case. For one, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau examine society (or presociety) unregulated by a state; a state arises in response to the needs of the emerging polity and the limits of the state of nature. In contrast, of course, the state was the omnipresent evil from which the prisoners were trying to “escape” by creating their own social contract and society. Furthermore, a key question that underlay the political imagery of these three philosophers was the question of property, which is of minimal concern on the Island. Nevertheless, Locke understood property to include life, and Hobbes in particular was concerned with the protection of life. I argue the applicability of these three contract theorists to conceptualizing the Robben Island experience far outweighs any the lack of a “pure ﬁt” of their theories. Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1988 [1651] ), 65. The link between violence (and its potential) and food are not a coincidence. As Anne Norton, Reﬂections of Political Identity (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 179, pointed out, whether food is associated with desire or power as in the work of Freud, or responding to scarcity, the need to eat shapes political development.

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second, a shared set of mores to rule the community and maintain harmony and social order among the prisoners. This order of (prisoner) laws, peace, and toleration would continually seek to strengthen the social contract and the polity it created to maximize defensive, and more occasionally offen` sive, action vis-a-vis the greatest threat they faced: the apartheid state. The implicit contract was also, however, in the image of Rousseau, concerned to promote the general will and the common good, epitomized in both mutual protection and sharing of resources like food and newspapers. The nature of political authority in the social contract had elements of the understandings of Rousseau, Locke, and Hobbes. On the one hand, consistent with Locke and Rousseau, political power derived from all the prisoners who made up the society. All prisoners entered into the contract as equals; they did, however, implicate and bind future generations, which was a cause of tension in subsequent years, especially the post–1976 period. The polity was to be governed by representatives whose rule making and power could be challenged and revoked. Indeed leaders were removed at particular points in time, both on an inter- and intraorganizational basis. On the other hand, political power at times could be Hobbesian and absolute. In large part, absolute power derived from the power of leadership and the dictates of secrecy caused by organizing in underground structures. The social mores and political understandings of the prisoner community were not always understanding or accepting of those, like Enock Mathibela, who departed from or rejected political prisoner authority. On balance, however, there were more democratic than authoritarian tendencies in the employment of political power, and each person gave his power and rights to the general will or community on the largely correct assumption that, to the extent possible, individuals would be protected by the collective, as a whole and by leadership (or political representatives) in particular. Within the social contract creating, and created for, the community as a whole, the three largest organizations – the ANC, PAC, and BCM – also had their own social contracts, binding the members of the group to rules, regulations, and ideologies of the movement. The social contracts of organizations also bound the members and movements to the broader social contract that created the community. The political prisoner community as a whole then had to regulate relationships among its internal subunits, the organizations, and its external nemesis, the state. Recognizing the signiﬁcant extent to which the community and polity on Robben Island parallels the mythical accounts of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau is important for at least four reasons. First, unlike the creation of most modern states, the Robben Island “experiment” actually has a clear period of origin, the early sixties. At this time, there was an identiﬁable process during which both organizations and the community consolidated itself through mutual agreements and understandings, understood here as the social contract.

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Second, in the classical texts, there is nothing outside the state of nature and social contract. That, of course, is unrealistic; every civilization, community, and group operates in a context that shapes and affects the possibility of its political order. On Robben Island, the most important external element shaping the community was the state. There were other outside actors, however, from national and international antiapartheid support and pressure groups to family members. All these external actors are accounted for in the formation and maintenance of the community and its standards. Third, the relations between the Robben Island community and both the outside and inside forces suggest both analogies from and lessons for international relations. That is, the struggle for the community’s identity and sovereignty is constantly negotiated in a context of internal and external pressures, something with which Locke’s, Hobbes’s, and Rousseau’s freestanding states did not have to contend. Sovereignty was the goal of the prisoners and their community. Their limited and short-term goal was freedom from the incursions of the state while in prison; their long-term and larger goal was their sovereignty to be freed from prison and the apartheid social order so that they could enjoy freedom and self-determination within, and as part of, the broader community of the nation. Both within and outside the prison, these goals required resistance against the prevailing social order. Finally, the accounts of the move from state of nature to social contract in the classical texts fail to consider that the community’s composition and circumstances of existence may change and that this modiﬁcation affects the real workings of the social contract. On Robben Island, the contract is tested with changing behavior by the state, the rise and fall in the numerical and organizational strength of the movements, the emergence and disappearance of liberation groups, and breaks in aspects of the contract, from physical violence to recruiting. Unlike classical theory then, the social contract and very notion of community is tested, challenged, and altered in the course of historical and political time. Resistance and Power The code of conduct and other disciplinary practices were not only a social contract in an imagined community but were an expression of power as an imposition of “law and order” and a manifestation of resistance. Power and resistance are central to the study of politics; if power were not challenged in some way, politics would be static and historical. Studies of resistance seek to explain political change, change in individual subjectivity, and collective attitudes, that is, the relationship between structure and consciousness. Therefore the literature on resistance is concerned to explain how and why people do and do not resist the power that is exerted over them, and what effect that has on ideas and the distribution of power.

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Prisoner opposition on Robben Island suggests that existing theories of resistance are limited. One tendency in theoretical accounts of resistance is to consider subjects as “always already resistant,” as exempliﬁed in the work of James Scott.53 Although Scott makes an invaluable contribution to the study of resistance, his eagerness to deny the possibility of people consenting to domination means that he fails to recognize hegemony when it stares him in the face. Thus, in Weapons of the Weak, his desire to show that peasants always resist blinds him to seeing the hegemonic role of Islam. In Scott’s study, the peasants’ demand for social support is rooted in their acceptance of Islamic norms that sanction inequality. That is, the peasants are complying with rather than resisting the hegemonic discourse of Islam. In contrast to Scott’s idea of perpetual resistance, Barrington Moore rejects the idea that “there is some indomitable spirit of revolt in all human beings.”54 He therefore examines apolitical subjects who become politicized or resistant. Resistance and protest can be achieved through a consciousness of injustice and an organized reaction to it. Historically, however, sustained and successful opposition and resistance to the status quo have required the articulation and development of ideologies and organizations of protest. As Charles van Onselen commented (regarding workers), “ideologies and organisations should be viewed essentially as the high watermarks of protest.”55 The men on Robben Island had, however, in most cases, already deﬁned themselves as “political” subjects with coherent ideologies and developed political organizations. To merely note that they resist fails to capture the spectrum of deﬁant actions they undertook and the range of perspectives concerning opposition and resistance that they developed. Prisoners challenged the prison status quo not only because of poor treatment or the fact of their imprisonment, but also with the goal of using the prison as a laboratory for micro-experiments in creating the social order they sought and as a training school to develop social change agents to revolutionize the world outside and beyond the prison. Islanders sought to change the very agenda of the state,56 while confronting “everyday forms of power.”57 Although there were multiple 53 54 55

56

57

Scott, Weapons of the Weak; James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990). Barrington Moore, Jr., Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1978), 459. Charles van Onselen, Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia 1900–1933 (London: Pluto Press, 1976), 227. Van Onselen makes this statement with respect to workers in his study of mine workers in Rhodesia’s labor-coercive economy. In contrast, Foucault identiﬁed criminal prisoners as playing into the hands of the state to the extent that delinquency was “controlled illegality.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 279. Ortner, “Resistance,” 175.

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“everyday forms of resistance” on Robben Island,58 the political prisoners did not simply react against the near omnipresent power of the prison and state in the sense of perpetual resistance that Scott suggested. Rather, political prisoners at once consciously analyzed state power to undermine it and saw their ends in appropriating the state. In this context, Michel Foucault’s focus on the ways systems act upon subjects underscores the importance of structures impinging on the subjective and the material constraints within which prisoners (political or nonpolitical) have to operate. Marxists and others have long emphasized the importance of material conditions in inﬂuencing the possibility of political struggles. Although structures shape subjects, people respond to and may resist impositions of power; that is, in Foucault’s well-known aphorism “where there is power, there is resistance.” Structures affect the nature of that resistance in key ways, however. Robben Island prisoners provide a case study of this dialectic between the power of the potentially (and sometimes actually) totalizing environment of the prison (representative of the apartheid state) and the challenge to that authority by the prisoners who reshape the nature of the state’s domination. One critical aspect of that inmate opposition recalls Foucault’s emphasis on knowledge as power. Islanders consciously saw their acquisition of knowledge as a form of power to challenge both the prison and the broader apartheid status quo. The prisoners emphasized political and academic education on Robben Island as a building block in the theory and practice of resistance. This recognition recalls Ioan Davies who noted that Michel Foucault’s conception that to have knowledge is to have power, and therefore that the apprehension of knowledge and making connections between different knowledge sites is the basis of any viable politics. What ‘knowledge’ means, and how the connections might be made in order to create any strategy for action, is the salient point of any political philosophy.59

One problem with much of the writing on resistance, epitomized here by Moore, Scott, and Foucault, is that it examines subjects who resist, rather than subjects who remake. Indeed, this recognition of the ability of resistance to remake is a core theoretical insight in the analysis of Robben Island. Resistance, at least on Robben Island, is less a moment than a continuum and is less a point than a process. Prisoner activism on Robben Island was a continuum where resistance as refusal was the baseline, and resigniﬁcation, reconstrual,60 and emancipation61 were the object of prisoner life. Resigniﬁcation is the practice and understanding of giving a new and different 58 59 60 61

Ibid; Scott, Weapons of the Weak. Ioan Davies, Writers in Prison (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 162. West, “Marxist Theory,” 24. Pieterse, Emancipations, 1992.

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meaning and purpose to material realities, actions, and ideas. An example of resistance as resigniﬁcation or reconstrual is the act of prisoners collecting and distributing news, when radios, newspapers, and other sources of news were outlawed by the authorities. Finding out news and information about the outside was, at minimum, a refusal of submission to the edicts of the authorities. More importantly, however, obtaining news is a positive step toward challenging the “inside-outside” divide that prison creates; prisoners gathered news to try to maintain a connection to and understanding of the outside world. This news collection activity was combined with the development of strong inter- and intraorganizational structures to obtain, distribute, discuss, and analyze the news, with a view to integrating political analysis with political training for released prisoners to be more informed and effective activists. This practice is resistance with an alternative, emancipatory vision of social change, and epitomizes what Cornel West meant in the reconstrual of “structural constraints” into “conjunctural opportunities.”62 Likewise, Barbara Harlow referred to “counterstrategies” employed by prisoners, who not only reject or oppose repression but also attempt to ﬁnd strategic alternatives to its operations and effects.63 Moreover, in the structures and institutions that were developed by prisoners to continue politics and run their society, including through news gathering and news analysis, one sees an incipient social order developing in the very repressive apparatus that was meant to destroy it. Resigniﬁcation applies both to the prison and the broader society; it suggests that resistance, a negative baseline refusal, is a means to the end of resigniﬁcation, a positive act of remaking and reconstruing the dominant world. The assertion that resistance is a means to an emancipatory end should not be misconstrued to suggest that the continuum represents a linear narrative of progression. On the contrary, there are constant structural limits to the shape, form, and methods of projects. Furthermore, resistance as a means to resigniﬁcation is a complex movement, which may entail, inter alia, strategic acquiescence: the recognition that limited compliance may expand the scope for other strategies of resistance.64 This question of strategic acquiescence underscores the debate between strategic and categorical resistance discussed in Chapter Six. Another frequent problem with writing on resistance is the writers’ failure to consider the internal politics of the resisters, which Sherry Ortner calls the problem of “sanitizing politics.”65 In part, this neglect of the internal tensions 62 63 64

65

West, “Marxist Theory,” 24. Harlow, Barred, 5. See Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), for a ﬁne analysis of simultaneous resistance and acquiescence. Ortner, “Resistance,” 176.

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within resistant groups is a consequence of the emphasis on the struggles of the oppressed against the dominant group. Challenging dominators may “simply” be the politics of refusal, where visible compliance masks secret frustration, as is often the case with Scott’s “hidden transcripts.” Refusal or complaint may enable personal empowerment, at least psychologically and perhaps materially; at times noncompliance may lead to structural change; at other times, it may be utterly heroic. In general, however, to be transformative, resistance must be organized and intentional and propose (or envision) alternatives, as well as oppose the status quo. To achieve this fundamental change demands recognizing the internal politics of the (potentially and actually) resistant, as well as exploring the struggles within oppositional groups. These may be based on, for instance, ideology,66 organization, personality, strategy, gender, region, or class. Without pointing to internal debates and dynamics among Robben Island prisoners, one ends up with a political analysis that is at best a romantic account of surviving and overcoming. One cannot, however, actually explain how people did survive without examining the material realities of prisoner life in conjunction with debates over which practices and ideas would best allow prisoners to transform aspects of the world they were forced to inhabit. Moreover, the questions concerning the preferred methods to challenge the state within prison were intimately tied to questions concerning the best ways to reshape the world beyond (in geography and time) the prison walls. Resistances and Their Material Context An inchoate theory of resistance has structured the historical and analytic account of life and politics on Robben Island, as well as its effects on South African politics and the apartheid regime. This implicit theory argues that resistance for the survival of the individual and group was a necessary precondition for more far-reaching forms of resistance, namely the creation and preservation of community and political life through academic and political education, sport, culture, and political activism inside and, ultimately, outside the prison. Cross-cutting these stages of resistance was the development of institutions and norms of rule and social organization; that is, in its ultimate elaboration on Robben Island, resistance evolved from prisoners refusing state incursions and intentions to the inmate creation and appropriation of institutions, methods, and mores of governance. As far as possible, prisoners sought to run the prison according to their own principles, not the ideas or values of the regime. Resistance then, was a point of departure in a ﬁnal goal of remaking ﬁrst the prison and then mainland South Africa. Resistance and remaking always operated and were limited by material referents; the prison walls and state policy shaped that which was to be 66

See, for example, Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa, and Marx, Lessons of Struggle.

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resisted and the constraints on any rebellion or recasting of power relations. Conversely, prisoner refusal, resigniﬁcation, and assumption of power constantly altered state policy and action, and therefore the ends and means that structured prisoner endeavors. While material conditions do not determine resistance, they do shape, affect, and limit both operations of power and opposition. As Scott noted: “The parameters of resistance are also set, in part, by the institutions of repression.”67 There is, however, a dialectical operation between power and resistance; it is the case not only that “where there is power there is resistance” but also that resistance shapes power as power shapes resistance. Chapter Eight demonstrated how the resistance of prisoners and their allies shaped Prisons Service and apartheid regime policy toward political prisoners. This section dissects or deconstructs the multiple meanings of resistance as elaborated on Robben Island by the prisoners over the almost thirty years analyzed in this book. This typology of resistances and the material conditions that informed these acts and strategies are identiﬁed as elements in a theory of resistance. These components are resistance as survival, resistance as dignity and self-consciousness, resistance as open challenge, resistance as reducing state power or defeating the ends of the oppressor or dominator, and resistance as the appropriation of power or at least the attempt to acquire power. While the classiﬁcation of resistance presented here is necessarily compartmentalized and placed in order of an apparently linear progression, in fact these different expressions of resistance, resigniﬁcation, and the appropriation of power are a process rather than a continuum with an interdependence between and among different forms and strategies of resistance. Furthermore, the same resistant action often ﬁts into more than one category in this typology. Resistance as Survival It is generally true that the harsher the conditions of physical and/or mental domination, the more importance survival assumes as a form of resistance. Furthermore, the more austere or torturous the conditions that subjugated people experience, the more likely that they will have few and perhaps no options or avenues for resistance. The person being tortured, if he or she has a choice at all, may have to choose between death or betrayal of himself or herself and others. There are times where either survival is not a possibility, or its costs would be too great in the torture or torment it would occasion. In these cases, to allow or invite death may itself be a form of resistance. Furthermore, memory and remembrance are often acts of resistance. One thinks of the ¨ book of recipes, poems, and a photograph that Mina Pachter wrote, assembled, and then sewed together by hand in the Nazi concentration camp of 67

Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 299.

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Thereseinstadt while she starved to death, dying of protein deﬁciency. She asked someone else to give her daughter the book. Some twenty-four years after the war, the book ﬁnally reached its destination. (It was published in 1996 as In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy of the Women of Terezin.) Although Thereseinstadt was a “model” concentration camp in which aspects of resis¨ tance resembled the cultural life of Robben Island – Pachter, an art historian, gave lectures along with other Jewish intellectuals; “children were educated; concerts and plays were performed” – the Nazis either funneled its inmates to death camps or let starvation or disease claim them in the camp.68 Thereseinstadt left few options for resistance except survival or ensuring that the dead, rather than their killers, had the ﬁnal word, if not the ﬁnal breath. The cookbook must be understood in this context: “Writing down these recipes was an act of deﬁance and resistance, a means of identiﬁcation in a dehumanized world. It was a life force in the face of death.”69 Conditions in which struggles for survival take place are seldom conducive to organized collective action. Scott examined “everyday forms of peasant resistance – the prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labor, food, taxes, rents, and interest from them.”70 Van Onselen, who chronicled the conditions of workers forced to work in the mines of Southern Rhodesia in the ﬁrst decades of this century, cautioned that “in tightly controlled situations” like mine compounds, one is unlikely to ﬁnd overt expressions of “worker consciousness or outright demonstration of African resistance.” Instead, hints of resistance are found “in the nooks and crannies” of daily working life.71 Once one looks for these everyday forms of resistance, one will recognize practices such as desertion, theft, loaﬁng, and not working at all as ways the coerced miners, like the slaves of the American South, resisted exploitation.72 Many of these forms of resistance were also practiced in Robben Island and other South African prisons by nonpolitical prisoners. As some workers in mines “were suspected of using “self-inﬂicted” injuries to avoid work,”73 so nonpolitical prisoners used self-mutilation to escape “the terrible working conditions and the cold weather that sent us quivering.”74 In both examples, these desperate attempts to survive and avoid exploitation were apparently practiced on a group as well as an individual basis. Moreover, they were effective in limiting abuse, at least in the short term, by mine owners and the 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Lore Dickstein, “Hell’s Own Cookbook,” Review of In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy From the Women of Terezin, ed. Cara De Silva, New York Times, 17 November 1996, 7. Ibid. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, xvi. Van Onselen, Chibaro, 239. On subtle forms of slave resistance see, for example, Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1976). Van Onselen, Chibaro, 242. Dlamini, Hell-Hole, 127.

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state.75 Dlamini wrote that in deciding to cut their tendons with razor blades, the gang members “resorted to the last clause in their constitution, which allowed them under such conditions to resort to self-destruction and escape the harsh treatment.”76 That the gang members had a constitution points to the fact that they may also have had more organized and far-reaching tactics and practices of resistance, and certainly that they self-consciously identiﬁed themselves as a collective. Likewise, van Onselen notes individual and collective action on the mines: “African workers did ﬁnd ways of ﬁghting back. These ways were indirect, even subterranean, but they were effective.”77 Although some people died on Robben Island or soon after as a result of their ill-treatment in the prison, prisoner struggles for survival on Robben Island were generally successful. They took both individual and collective forms. Most of the political prisoners recount engaging in collective or at least collaborative forms of resistance. An example of an individual using the help of others in his survival strategies was that of Martin Ramokgadi whose twisted intestines caused him to lose a hundred pounds in a few months of incarceration. Near death, and refused medical treatment, he was able to have a letter smuggled to his wife who wrote to the prison authorities threatening legal action unless her husband received medical treatment, which he then received.78 Dlamini recorded coaxing a very ill friend with his own food, removing oysters from rocks to eat some protein, and watching others eat grass and worms, helping each other avoid starvation: “We are involved in the struggle for survival so that we live to ﬁght on another day.”79 The ﬁrst hunger strikes on Robben Island were probably the most highly developed form of organized prisoner resistance to ensure survival. In collectively agreeing to adopt this most difﬁcult strategy of resistance, Robben Islanders were afﬁrming that the survival and indeed the very possibility of the body politic depended on the survival and strength of the individual body. As Jean Comaroff noted, “the effort to allay the debilitating effects of social disorder tends to involve exertions to treat and repair the physical body, and vice-versa; the body social and the body personal always exist in a mutually constitutive relationship.”80 The hunger strikes that sought to improve the conditions of hard labor, and improve food and access to medical treatment were critical to maintaining the literal and metaphoric survival of the social body that Robben Islanders had established. (Pointing 75

76 77 78 79 80

Parliamentary debates pointed out that criminals who mutilated themselves on Robben Island in 1962 were taken to the mainland for treatment, thus achieving their goal of leaving the severe conditions on Robben Island (see South Africa, Hansards to the House of Assembly 1963, 7, 6228). Dlamini, Hell-Hole, 127. van Onselen, Chibaro, 243. Ramokgadi, interview. Dlamini, Hell-Hole, 152. Comaroff, Body of Power, 8.

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to the cross-cutting and intersecting nature of both the forms and tactics of resistance, the hunger strike is also an example of resistance as an open challenge, as discussed later.) Resistance as Dignity and Self-Consciousness Two critical aspects of advanced and sustained forms of resistance are a consciousness of one’s oppression or exploitation and an ability for collective organization to challenge, wherever possible, abusive treatment and conditions. While the majority of Robben Islanders were clearly self-consciously political and resistant and were furthermore organized both in liberation movements and as a political prisoner community, material conditions, or even a sense of strategic behavior, did not always allow people to act on their anger and grievances and sense of injustice. Michael Dingake explained that no one who studied “escaped the petty harassment by study ofﬁcers . . . there was no stage at which the harassment ceased or abated. It was intertwined with study privilege. If you were privileged to study then you were fair game for constant pinpricks.”81 Therefore, although “concessions [were] wrung by digniﬁed resistance,” one could not always voice one’s anger and complaints.82 The psychological torture of imprisonment worked, even if prisoners were able to prevent it working as intended: “The fact that I underline it so much, means I am still smarting under its effects.”83 One of the ways prisoners did attempt to lessen their anger or sense of indignity was to complain silently, or mock their jailers behind their backs. This form of resistance is what Scott referred to as the hidden transcript, which “characterize[s] discourse that takes place ‘offstage,’ behind the direct observation by power holders. The hidden transcript is thus derivative in the sense that it consists of those offstage speeches, gestures, and practices that conﬁrm, contradict, or inﬂect what appears in the public transcript.”84 While prisoners might have had to be obedient or even submissive in public, this did not mean they were unquestioning or unopposed to what the authorities demanded of them. A classic example of public deference and private opposition developed in the early 1960s around the authorities’ insistence that prisoners call them 81 82 83 84

Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid, 177. Ibid., 228. Ibid., 203. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 4–5. Jean Comaroff (Body of Power, 196) too articulated a notion of the hidden transcript in all but the label or term. She wrote that “when expressions of dissent are prevented from attaining the level of open discourse, a subtle but systematic breach of authoritative cultural codes might make a statement of protest which, by virtue of being rooted in a shared cultural predicament and experience of dispossession, conveys an unambiguous message.” See also Robin Cohen, “Resistance and Hidden Forms of Consciousness Amongst African Workers,” Review of African Political Economy 7, no. 19 (1980), on hidden forms of resistance.

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“baas” (boss or master), a word that epitomizes white supremacy and black submission. For a political prisoner to call a warder “baas” signaled unmitigated terror at the consequences of refusal, resignation and abasement, or servility. Pointing to both the necessity and the shame of using the term “baas” in the early 1960s, Alexander commented that “there were some very sad stories and one doesn’t want to repeat people’s names . . . about people [who are] today very well known but who were forced out of fear of their own lives to say ‘baas’ to an ordinary warder and to others.”85 Kathrada and Alexander agreed that both their groupings, as well as, in Alexander’s words, other “principled, fearless” political prisoners, openly resisted by publicly refusing to call their jailers baas.86 These men and their comrades in the single cells were, however, protected from the worst abuses that the inmates in the general sections faced; their refusal had risks, but probably not that of a severe beating, possibly with a risk to their lives. For those for whom saying “baas” was a basic mechanism of survival, there were simultaneous ploys of resistance. Cooper argued that when he came to Robben Island in late 1976 there were “prisoners who said OB, meaning Ou [Old] Baas. . . . [Alternately,] many of the older prisoners, because they were forced to say baas in the early 60s reﬁned that to Meneer [Mister or Sir], so that you wouldn’t have to use the word baas.” Cooper also pointed to the continuing shame around this apparent need for submission: But if you speak to many of them there would be a denial on that. But the ones who were much more honest and up front about these things, and it’s not a blaming thing, it’s a thing that anybody can understand, that you were in the worst condition, almost in a chasm, and what do you do to survive? Different people have different coping strategies. So some of them . . . in order not to say baas “we decided let’s use the term ‘Meneer’ and it just developed.”87

Hector Ntshanyana recalled a strategy that he and others used to cope with the anguish of having to say “baas.” This tactic epitomized the idea of resistance as a hidden transcript: Philip Chilwane came with this idea: “Gentlemen, you know we don’t accept these people as our bosses. How are we going to stop them forcing us to say baas?” Then Chilwane came with the solution. He said “Look, when there’s a roll call, and your name’s called, say ‘Baas [very loudly] and ‘tard’ [not so loudly]. And tell yourself that you are not saying Baas! Say BAAS-tard. Ja, you must be careful that the second part of your Baas must not be heard.” So whenever your name is called, you say “Ja-BAAS-tard.”88 85 86 87 88

Alexander, interview. Kathrada, interview; Alexander, interview. Cooper, interview. Ntshanyana, interview.

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In this case, the hidden transcript was made public when a criminal prisoner reported his political peers to the authorities. Moreover, this now-public deﬁance shifted the authorities’ approach: Then one of the common-law prisoners, who was in the cell when we were discussing this thing, went and told the authorities that – “Baas, die mense sˆe nie baas vir julle nie, hulle sˆe bastard!” [These people are not calling you baas, they are calling you bastard.] One day we were called – all the spans were called in by the ofﬁcer in command, a certain Kellerman, and said “Look people, these people are really bosses, so there’s no need for you to say baas to them. From today on, you call him by his rank, if he has a rank. If he’s a Sergeant, call him Sergeant. If he’s an ordinary warder, call him by his surname, forget this baas thing.” When the BC people got to the Island, that thing of baas was no longer there. So it’s not true that the older people were subservient.89

The employment of the hidden transcript did not always lead to public disclosure as in the case of the prisoners who replied, in Gujarati, “Tari Ben-ni bosadi” [Your sister’s cunt] to a warder’s insult “Koelie, jou ma se moer” [Coolie, your mother’s cunt].90 It was also not just a product of the 1960s. Despite his openly confrontational style in many contexts, James Mange would alter the regulation way in which prison garments were to be stitched, thus secretly defying the rules.91 Although Ntshanyana suggested that the use of “bastard” rather than “baas” was both an organized effort and one that achieved a desired end in terms of altering the discourse and substance of power relations, more often the hidden transcript is an individual action or comment that is designed to ease the pain of oppression. As Mange commented, breaking the rules about how to sew prison garments was “a source of defying the prison regulations and making sure I get away with it. It kept me going.”92 Resistance in the form of the hidden transcript is a critical mechanism to keep the spirit of resistance alive among individuals and groups and is also vital to create or sustain human dignity in the face of constant attempts to humiliate the downtrodden and oppressed. The actions, comments, or rituals that compose the hidden transcript are not, however, of themselves, likely to lead to changes in the facts of domination. Indeed, in many contexts (Robben Island may not provide good examples of this phenomenon), complaints, gossip, and other elements in the hidden transcript may provide a sufﬁcient salve for a wounded spirit to prevent people from challenging abuse publicly or organizing collective protest. In that vein, Moore commented: “Even fantasies of liberation and revenge can help to preserve domination through dissipating collective energies in 89 90 91 92

Ibid. Babenia, Memoirs of a Saboteur, 139; see Chapter Three. Mange, interview. Ibid.

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relatively harmless rhetoric and ritual.”93 Where material conditions allow then, resistance is often more effective when organized and collective, often expressed in the form of an open challenge. Resistance as Open Challenge When Robben Islanders explained how they resisted the incursions and pressures of the state in prison, most of their replies fell into the category of the “open challenge.” These actions included strategies such as delegations to the authorities, legal action, go-slows,94 hunger strikes, and letters and petitions to the government or to outside organizations or family members to intercede on their behalf. These strategies included both individual and collective action, and some are more explicit about their public nature than others, or only “announce” themselves as public at a particular point. Go-slows, for example, are ambiguously public. They are not usually announced – often, part of the point is to feign compliance – but the practitioners of a go-slow normally wanted their sabotage of a process to be clear so that the state responded in certain ways. To the extent that go-slows or other strategies partly hide their true nature despite being in the public sphere, they conformed to what Scott deﬁned as the public transcript; “a shorthand way of describing the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate. . . . A public transcript [usually exists] in close conformity with how the dominant group would wish to have things appear.”95 Some strategies may begin in secret – a letter to lawyers or the United Nations – but are intended to ultimately emerge as an open challenge to the regime. Escape falls into a similar category: planning for the escape must be secret, but once it is accomplished it is mockingly brandished in the face of the authorities. Most of the open challenges are overt in the challenge the prisoners provide to the authorities. In that sense, they are not “public transcripts” but “public declarations” and “public refusals.”96 Most open challenges are exemplars of categorical resistance (see Chapter Six).97 Although resistance has practical goals, such as the improvement of conditions, deﬁance and protest action are also important as statements or public declarations of the continued refusal of prisoners to submit. The contrast between resistance as open challenge and resistance as hidden transcript is partly illuminated through the concern with categorical resistance, which 93 94 95 96 97

Moore, Injustice, 459n. In go-slows, prisoners would work slowly or retard the process of roll-call in order to delay the authorities accomplishing their work. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 2, 4. Ibid., 202–3. Pieterse (Emancipations, 12) noted that in his work on European social movements, Charles Tilly described “proactive” action as the assertion of group claims through public protest action. In this reading, Tilly’s proactive forms of action are comparable to the open challenge identiﬁed here, although open challenges may be individual or collective.

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demands open deﬁance of the dominant order. Although James Mange was one of the prisoners who exempliﬁed categorical resistance, his sewing prison clothing in secretly unacceptable ways cannot be compared to his dreadlocks; in the former case, his deﬁance was personal to “keep him going,” but in the latter case his dreadlocks served not only to fuel his own rebellion, but to mock the regime (and sometimes his fellow prisoners) with his protests. Resistance as Reducing State Power or Defeating the Oppressor’s End The forms and examples of resistance described thus far have been conventional examples of resistance insofar as they aim to stop or slow the state’s infringement of their rights (or, in the case of the hidden transcript, their effects) and, where possible, improve the status quo. These forms of resistance may be both individual and collective, and open and secret. They share in common a negative, baseline refusal of the ends and intent and actions of the state. In contrast, however, the core of resistance on Robben Island was concerned to slowly but surely whittle away state power. The method for diminishing regime power and control was to develop and maintain the very organizations, political understandings, and sense of community that incarceration was meant to destroy. If the state was determined to keep prisoners ignorant of the world around them, depriving them of crucial intellectual and political sustenance and forcing them to “stay in the same place in prison while the world move[d] on,”98 the prisoners were more determined to obtain news. Stealing newspapers and similar acts were more than strategies of refusal, they were active choices to create alternatives as well as defeat the state. As such, they were both defensive and offensive moves in a larger tactical vision. Obtaining news and newspapers was one important instance where prisoners defended their own sense of individual and collective purpose and used that deﬁance to plot new challenges to the regime. Closely related to the importance of news gathering was the core impulse to continue to run their banned organizations in prison, and to do everything possible to further these organizations’ aims. Organizing outside prison was more than a means to facilitate and expand protest, so organizing inside was a way of maintaining political identity and awareness. Building antiapartheid and therefore antistate organizations, using the Island to pass on the movements’ histories, and, especially, recruiting new prisoners and providing departing prisoners with mandates, was refusal and protest but it was also, and more importantly, a way to challenge the very foundations of state power. Forging and maintaining a notion of community was both a product of basic struggles against a malevolent regime and a bulwark against state onslaught. Despite exceptions, the community sustained its organizations 98

Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 437.

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and individual prisoners through the promise of collective action, rules, and policing mechanisms to maintain social order on the terms of the prisoners, as far as this was possible. Nevertheless, the disciplinary regime that the prisoners imposed on each other could exact a price from individuals and groups. Building organizations was a way to defeat the oppressor’s ends, but it could also, for example, pressure people into putting more emphasis on the political realm of their lives than they wanted. Notwithstanding these pressures, to a large extent, tolerance of an array of organizations and ideologies prevailed. People of different ethnicities, religion, and apartheid-deﬁned racial groups lived at least in mutual acceptance and often in mutual respect and intimate friendship. The community thus represented an afﬁrmation of the vision of the prisoners, and not their guards. A critical way to defeat the regime’s purpose was not to be cowed or destroyed by prison itself. While the damage of imprisonment could not be prevented, it could often be limited or curtailed. Moreover, proactive steps to make the most of one’s imprisonment could be taken, especially in the sphere of education. On Robben Island, knowledge was clearly seen as power; to become literate, to ﬁnish high school, to study for a degree were all highly valued as good for individual and community, inside and outside the prison. Importantly, knowledge and education were not seen as a zero-sum game, or as a weapon against others, but rather a source of advancement for all. Thus, prisoners could seek help with their academic education across the political spectrum, and those with expertise were encouraged to teach “classes” irrespective of their ideology and afﬁliation. Moreover, educating warders and prison ofﬁcials was seen as a move toward liberation rather than as the encouragement of more sophisticated techniques of domination. Aubrey du Toit, a former warder, credited Nelson Mandela for urging him to study academic Afrikaans; James April, an ANC prisoner, for painstakingly teaching him Shakespeare; and members of the BCM for encouraging him to leave the Prisons Service to work for the Afrikaans-owned insurance giant, Sanlam, advice that he subsequently took. Du Toit recalled the spirit of his prison teachers: I asked Kader Hassim, “What does ‘onus’ mean?” . . . He explained to me – he was a lawyer – the whole meaning of the word onus. . . . He won’t tell you it means responsibility. He will tell you the whole picture, the whole history and whatever of the word. . . . They always strive to give you the whole picture. It doesn’t matter what the question is. . . . I have to put more emphasis on the fact that they [would] . . . try to help you, especially with your studies and your self-esteem, and they’re not helping you as a prison warder, they’re helping you as a South African. And it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, or whether you are a warder or a . . . prisoner.99 99

Du Toit, interview.

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To some extent academic education was open; if a person had study rights, there was no need to conceal his intellectual activities. But other aspects of scholastic education were illegal in the prison world; a student could not share his paper or books with nonstudents, and at certain points it was difﬁcult or dangerous for prisoners to organize classes and lessons. Creating and maintaining community was also partly open; certainly the regime knew about and approved of the sports and recreational committees, and over time the authorities allowed more and more collective representation when they dealt with prisoners, as well as when the ICRC or others would want to meet with the Islanders. In general, however, resistance to reduce state power or defeat the oppressor’s end was secret. Similarly, resistance as the appropriation of power is itself a largely secret form of political action. Scott’s emphasis on the signiﬁcance of the “public declaration of the hidden transcript” as a moment that signiﬁes “political breakthroughs” or changes in power relations should not by deﬁnition mean the necessary privileging of public or open resistance as more important, or of greater value in resistance struggles.100 Both public and secret or underground struggles have an essential place in resistance strategy and tactics. As with categorical and strategic resistance, open and subterranean struggles also demanded each other even though at times the two approaches conﬂicted. There were times for each. However, the more offensive and transformative means of resistance on Robben Island tended to be understated and hidden, both from the regime, and, at times, for partisan concerns, from other organizations. The forms of resistance that sought to undermine state power, block or halt state intent, prevent its operations, and defeat its ends also tended to conform to principles and attributes of strategic resistance. Resistance as refusal – for survival, for dignity, for improved conditions through open challenge – was essential to ensure the possibility of physical and mental endurance, and, to some extent, these strategies interacted with those of strategic resistance. But strategic resistance was essential for offensive political planning, to appropriate the prison as a training ground and incubator of long-term political change. Resistance aimed at reducing state power or defeating the oppressor’s end demanded positive acts of construction and reconstruction to articulate and develop an alternative political order. Resistance as the Appropriation of Power (or Move Toward Appropriating Power) A conventional dictionary deﬁnition explains that to resist is “to withstand, strive against or oppose,” “to withstand the action or effect of,” “to refrain or abstain from,” and “to make a stand or make efforts in opposition.” This understanding is consistent with aspects of the previously mentioned categories 100

Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 202.

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of resistance, especially resistance as survival, dignity and self-consciousness, and open challenge. This deﬁnition of resistance is unable, however, to describe meaningfully or account for the empowering and transformative nature of prisoner behavior and institutions on Robben Island. This productive activity includes the idea of resistance as defeating the oppressor’s end and reducing state power but is elaborated, more importantly, in this section, which examines the extent to which prisoners sought to create and elaborate alternative ideas and institutions of power, control, and (self) rule. While resistance is shaped by material constraints, it is also shaped by psychology. That is why a concern with consciousness has always been at the heart of studies and practices of resistance, whether it is Marxism’s concern with working-class consciousness, the BCM’s concern with mental liberation of black people, or Gramsci’s emphasis on the overriding importance of consent in securing hegemony.101 A ﬁrst way in which resistance begins to appropriate power is by resigniﬁcation, in the sphere of consciousness or psychology. Resigniﬁcation suggests the power of thinking differently; not of denying or ignoring material circumstance, but of reading and interpreting the material in a way that empowers (or even encourages), rather than in a way that reinforces weakness or vulnerability. Comaroff has noted that “‘resistance’ is typically neither an all-or-nothing phenomenon nor an act in and of itself; it is frequently part and parcel of practices and subjective and collective reconstruction.”102 Resigniﬁcation is above all key to the process of “subjective and collective reconstruction.” For example, by material and geographical ﬁat, Robben Island lay at the margins of the antiapartheid struggle and South Africa itself – the regime presumably chose the prison for its geographical marginality, and marginal it could have remained. However, in large part because the prisoners interpreted or resigniﬁed their time in prison as central to the historical trajectory of the national liberation struggle, they strove to make the Island a university of politics; thus, they were able to transform its place in history and its meaning in space and even geography. Resigniﬁcation points to and employs the belief that a conception of self and the external environment profoundly inﬂuences one’s behavior in, and therefore relationship to, the world. Even though resigniﬁcation could not, in itself, substitute for or replace an array of struggles that had to be fought on Robben Island and elsewhere to challenge inequitable and unjust situations, it was an essential aspect of the resistance strategies, and victories, in the Island prison. One of Foucault’s important contributions to the study of power was to identify that power has productive as well as repressive functions. That is, power and its operations serve to constitute subjects and their notions of 101 102

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebook of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971). Comaroff, Body of Power, 195.

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truth and knowledge. Conversely, I argue resistance involves a range of operations to limit and stop the operations of power (in both the productive and repressive dimensions of power), but resistance too has productive possibilities: in order to oppose power, resistance must seek to appropriate and produce power. Foucault downplayed or rejected the study of power from the point of view of a central source of power, a sovereign or a state. He wrote that “rather than worry about the central spirit [the State or Hobbes’s Leviathan], I believe that we must attempt to study the myriad of bodies which are constituted as peripheral subjects as a result of the effects of power.”103 This study, however, compels an equal emphasis on examining the “central spirit[s],” the apartheid state and the institutions and norms of governance set up by the prisoners, insofar as state power, prisoner resistance, and prisoner appropriations of power through the construction of alternative institutions were all central to the mechanisms of disciplinary power. In particular, both the prisoners and the state incorporated mechanisms of power that Foucault identiﬁed with the model of sovereignty – “the physical existence of a sovereign” and a system of obligations – and the model of disciplinary power – “continuous and permanent systems of surveillance.”104 At the heart of prisoner resistance was the development of mechanisms to remove, to the extent that was possible in the prison governed by the regime, state control of the prisoners and introduce prisoner self-government instead, on both a community and organizational basis. This elaboration of resistance was then a means of organizing society; hence the importance of the implicit “social contract” explored earlier. As Amos Masondo pointed out, Robben Island became “a community of some kind. . . . You introduce certain rules and you live by certain broad principles.”105 Within this community, and its organizational subdivisions, there were important mechanisms of social control, from formal rules proscribing certain behaviors such as homosexuality to unofﬁcial moral requirements that people felt beholden too, such as participating in joint protest action, or not betraying a fellow prisoner to the authorities. The Islanders’ appropriation of mechanisms of control both preceded and mirrored the beginnings of similar processes of resistance as empowerment in South Africa in the 1980s. During the mid 1980s, insurrectionary politics began to replace the politics of rebellion and protest that had deﬁned much (although not all) of the resistance of the preceding decade. Richard Price’s analysis of the mid 1980s insurrection also speaks to the prisoners’ remaking of political power on Robben Island: Insurrection can be distinguished from rebellion in that it nulliﬁes state power in a portion of the state’s territory and inserts a new system of domination in its place. . . . 103 104 105

Michel Foucault, “Disciplinary Power and Subjection, in Power, ed. Steven Lukes (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 233, emphasis in original. Ibid., 239. Masondo, interview.

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[A] crucial element in the insurrectionary process [is] transformation. As social space is liberated, as the old system of domination is smashed in the insurrectionary convulsion, a new structure of domination begins to form in its place. A new system of authority arises where the old is destroyed.106

Coetzee and Wood similarly comment that activists in the 1980s “created a new world in opposition to an existing world.”107 On Robben Island, the material constraints of imprisonment – including the need for prisoners’ structures of governance to be secret and hidden, the “new system of authority” or “new world” that prisoners created – coexisted with or, at best, displaced, the regime’s coercive apparatus. A ﬁne example of the prisoners’ alternatives to the regime’s systems is illustrated in the case of new arrivals to the Island. Chapter Three elaborated upon the mortiﬁcation process inherent in the state’s initiation of the new prisoner. Even as conditions improved, arriving in prison was still a disorienting experience that stripped one of one’s identity through, for instance, being given a (new) prison number or a new prison uniform. The prisoners were not, however, content to let their peers and comrades feel the loss of the prior world and life without simultaneously bringing them into the new world created by the organizations and prisoner community. Therefore welcoming letters would be smuggled to a new prisoner in isolation, and the new prisoner’s sense of self afﬁrmed through references to his family, region, or trial. Established prisoners eased the new inmate into the community, as described by the prisoners, and into the prison, as described by the state. As Amos Masondo explained, [when] you arrive on the Island, . . . people do everything possible to keep you happy. . . . Because it’s the new people who need the support, rather than the old people. . . . You arrive, people will carry blankets for you. They give you a place where you should stay, they make sure you have your socks, your trousers, and so on, and if you don’t it is them who complain ﬁrst before you raise your complaint . . . You are accepted, you feel also that you are looking forward to . . . meeting people who in the name of the struggle have landed in this hell-hole, to discuss with them, to learn from their experiences and so on. . . . It is not a warder who intervenes on your behalf, it is the inmates who say, “No, you can’t live this way. You can’t do this and that, it compromises our own position.”108

This prisoner-led and deﬁned initiation of and orientation for new members of the community could also deteriorate into a more harrowing onslaught – usually psychological rather than physical – as occurred in the late 1970s when organizations competed for recruits from newly arrived prisoners (see Chapter Six). During that period, new arrivals were overwhelmed by competing claims for their allegiance. The claims often served to exacerbate 106 107 108

Price, The Apartheid State in Crisis, 191, 192. Coetzee and Wood, “Local Odyssey in Search of a New Space for Freedom,” 1. Masondo, interview.

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the process of disidentiﬁcation and disorientation because different organizations would seek the arrival’s afﬁliation on competing grounds. Because of the destructive impact of this recruiting process, it was ultimately stopped and replaced with a community-controlled reception committee that codiﬁed and institutionalized the Islanders’ alternative to the state’s system of initiation. The experience of new arrivals raises another feature of the prisoners’ appropriation of power in prison, namely the combination of rules and disciplinary mechanisms through which power operated. On the one hand, new prisoners would be informed about their organization’s and the community’s norms and rules. On the other hand, more subtle tests of ideology and attitude would take place through practices like requiring new prisoners to brief their organization on their assessment of political reality outside prison. While these reports served the practical function of making those inside prison aware of national and organizational trends or problems, they were also a classic instance of an initiation test and self-disciplinary mechanisms where new arrivals had to police their presentation of themselves and their opinions. Challenging Binaries and Dualities Much of the literature about resistance and power relies on employing and assuming binary oppositions to explain social phenomena. The Robben Island case study points to the limits of this dualistic thinking in at least three sets of ideas. First, the work of James Scott, particularly his Domination and the Arts of Resistance, exempliﬁes an understanding where the division between the private or hidden sphere of social life from the public sphere provides a critical marker for understanding resistance. In this reading, when resistance moves from the private realm of the hidden transcript to the public declaration, a “political breakthrough” challenging the dominant order is initiated. In contrast, however, the insights of strategic resistance and the practices of resistance as undermining or defeating domination and resistance as transforming power make it clear that some of the most far-reaching and effective resistance is that which is hidden or private. Proponents of strategic resistance sought to persuade their counterparts who emphasized categorical resistance that winning a verbal and public skirmish with a rude or racist warder could undermine the broader, hidden resistance efforts like political education or news gathering. Second, the Robben Island example challenges a pervasive opposition between consent and coercion in the literature theorizing power. The prisoners sought, with a large degree of success, to appropriate the prison, a repressive state apparatus (RSA),109 into a site of resistance from which to 109

Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).

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forge a legitimate and hegemonic movement. As such, prisoner politics and particularly the ANC’s Island structures established the basis of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) within the jail walls, which were later elaborated upon in both the antiapartheid struggle and the nascent organs of democratic rule. Prisoners on Robben Island self-consciously developed and cultivated the belief that their prison was a “university,” a training-ground for young leaders, a lecture podium for the most senior leaders of the antiapartheid struggle, a tolerant community in which pluralism respected all political movements, and a center of such profound and essential correctness that even warders and criminals could be converted to the “cause.” The point is not whether these images about the regime’s opponents were true or false. This book has demonstrated a high degree of accuracy in these claims, while pointing out limits to these images and establishing that many aspects of Island life have been highly romanticized. The point, rather, is that the prisoners, with the help of their allies outside the prison, were able to win the ideological struggle over what Robben Island came to mean in both antiapartheid politics and South Africa’s nascent democracy. Thus the ANC’s Political Panel in E section wrote a memo to all ANC members in January 1990 in which it noted that “Robben Island today occupies a respected place in our struggle. This is mainly the result of the high calibre of comrades produced here.”110 Moreover, Robben Island was the most important center within South Africa for spreading, developing, and reﬁning the ideologies and belief systems, as well as the norms, values, and practices of the banned South African liberation movements.111 That the Islanders also developed mechanisms of social control within prison suggests the simultaneous, if uneven, development of the seeds of RSAs for the resistance movements and the state they would, in time, take over. Importantly, however, the prisoners tended to stress the efﬁcacy of ideological and disciplinary mechanisms of power over repressive and coercive means in their organs and ideas of governance. Third, this book challenges the established opposition between power and resistance. Orthodoxies across a range of disciplines continue to examine power as that which is practiced over, and resistance as that which is practiced against. As Ortner noted, even while the opposition between domination and resistance has had its terms problematized in empirical and theoretical explorations of both power and protest, the binary opposition itself remains ﬁrmly in place.112 What this project has shown, however, is that, at particular 110 111

112

Mayibuye 79.2. Especially from the 1980s, the liberation movements were able to spread their ideologies within South Africa, but even then these usually had to be cloaked as the ideas of other movements. This practice is best seen in the United Democratic Front’s perpetuation of much of the ANC legacy. Ortner, “Resistance,” 174–5.

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points in historical development, resistance efforts and movements need to and do, or at least attempt to, appropriate power to remove or displace the dominant group whose existence or practices they are opposing. In this sense, the relationship between power and resistance is closer to a continuum than a relationship between opposites. The resistant ultimately seek to ﬁght power not with resistance, but with the power that resistance and resigniﬁcation has won them. A problem in conceptualizing this idea of resistance as the drive to appropriate, mold, and transform power is the lack of an adequate vocabulary. The word “resistance” is used in an array of literatures to encompass everything from prisoner (or peasant) gossip to prisoners (or peasants) reshaping aspects of the national political order through conscious and conscientious efforts. This conﬂation of a vast array of ideas and actions is neither politically nor intellectually helpful. We need, instead, a word that can express the idea of resistance as remaking and as empowering the relatively less powered. Resistance in this sense aspires to power and either approximates or appropriates power in this effort. It is not yet, however, fully power. This incompleteness of power is because power, as the other side of the mistaken binary, is contested and because acquiring and learning to use power is a process, and an uncertain and unstable process at that. Therefore, the concept of resistance as remaking or resignifying suggests a point at which resistance reaches into power by nails or hands; where the grip is tenuous and yet to be guaranteed, if at all. It is not a teleology in which power is guaranteed in a linear progression that begins with resistance as survival, developing through resistance as appropriation of power, to an end point where the once vanquished is now powerful victor (facing resistance from new subalterns). On the contrary, resistance offers no promise of overcoming. Pieterse counterposes “resistance” and “emancipation”: The common ground of resistance and emancipation is the concern with autonomy or self-deﬁnition (self-determination in an international context). The difference between resistance and emancipation seems to parallel in a general way the distinction between protest and transformation. Resistance is negative tout court; its politics are opaque, they must be decoded from context. Emancipation is negative in that it is a process of a group freeing itself from restriction. Emancipation is concerned with ‘freedom from’ rather than ‘freedom to’. It is proactive, but in an unﬁnished sense, as a negative commitment of transgression rather than a positive blueprint.113

Even though much of what Pieterse suggested accords with the arguments offered here, his notion of emancipation still fails to come to terms properly with power, and the need to exercise it. I argue that the transformational resistance or emancipation that emerged on Robben Island was concerned with freedom to develop a social order within and outside the prison. Moreover, 113

Pieterse, Emancipations, 13.

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the men on Robben Island realized the necessity for social arrangements to organize power and society itself. In contrast, Foucault’s refusal to elaborate or develop alternative theories and institutions of power – he commented, “that to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system”114 – in order to challenge existing domination, limits his own theory of resistance. Resistance is counter-power and therefore uses power against power for Foucault.115 His understanding could therefore contribute toward a theory of resistance as attempted, sometimes successful, appropriation of power. Foucault’s writings on power are concerned to expose and reject the disciplinary mechanisms and exclusionary consequences of the operations of power. As such, his own writing is an act of resistance against the operations of power insofar as knowledge of power reduces its power. Foucault understood resistance to be nonhierarchical – “resistance to the power that wishes to dominate it [includes] agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations, coalitions – anything that established horizontal conjunctions” – where power is hierarchical and uses “procedures of partitioning and verticality.” Foucault sought to endorse and encourage resistance everywhere but wanted to refuse the essential insight of the Robben Islanders, which is the need to ﬁght for, accept, embrace, and use techniques of power such as organizational hierarchies or the rule of law in the ﬁght against power. Indeed, Foucault’s afﬁrmation of transgression “is nothing less than the afﬁrmation of negation. [It is a] refusal to describe a new order, allied with an overarching desire for resistance.”116 To embrace power is to embrace a reality where “humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination.”117 Therefore, although Foucault recognized the potential of resistance itself to use and become power, he denied the need for structure or governance in human experience. In contrast, the men on Robben Island realized that resisting power meaningfully and effectively meant that one sooner or later needed to engage power itself. Like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, Robben Islanders recognized the need to give up some power – although, unlike Hobbes, never permanently – to a system of collective power to organize society in the name, and hopefully the reality, of the common struggle and the common good. One of the elements that distinguishes a discussion and analysis of resistance on Robben Island from many other studies and considerations 114 115 116 117

Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, cited in Brent L. Pickett, “Foucault and the Politics of Resistance,” Polity 28, no. 4 (1996), 453. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 219. Pickett, “Foucault and the Politics of Resistance,” 451. Foucault “Politics and the Study of Discourse” cited in Pickett, “Foucault and the Politics of Resistance,” 455.

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of resistance is that the prisoners on Robben Island came into prison, for the most part, as self-consciously political, and cultivated a hyper-political social order to oppose the state inside and outside the prison. The strength of their resistance came largely from a view where everything was seen in political terms. (This broad understanding of the political is different from the social contract theorists discussed at the outset, but the development of a social contract is compatible with an all-embracing view of politics.) Perhaps it was this political lens through which all aspects of life were examined that enabled the Robben Islanders to see that the success of their resistance would depend not only on their opposition and protest, for survival and change, through hidden and open strategies, but on their elaboration of a political and social order from which they could work to transform their prison and the political order that placed them there.

10 Beyond Robben Island: Comparisons and Conclusion

I had done well in gaol, if one can do well there. I was leaving Robben Island in one piece, unbroken in spirit and ﬂesh. Not only could I boast a PG (Prison Graduate), I could boast three academic degrees obtained through correspondence with the University of South Africa. During my 15 years, I had served our prison community through a variety of committees. I also served in all the underground structures of the ANC, from the committee responsible for drawing the organisation’s study programme to the highest committee entrusted with day-to-day administration and organisational discipline in the section. I had lived a full life in a ‘basement’ devoid of natural life.1 The prison discipline [of Irish political prisoners] of corporeal debasement had led to the redemptive immersion into the Gaelic language and Irish cultural history; domination had been resisted by new forms of sociation, communalism, and separatism. All these components were identiﬁed by the Blanketmen (by Bobby Sands in particular) as central to nation building beyond the prison. . . . Their resistance had provided the elementary forms for sociocultural emancipation beyond the prison.2

This concluding chapter assesses the implications of resistance on Robben Island in two different ways. First, I show that political prisoner resistance is not unique, including in the transformative senses identiﬁed on the Island. Using the same categories of resistance developed in Chapter Nine, I identify an array of political contexts and time periods, which exhibit political processes very similar to this book’s case study. Second, I bring the focus back to South Africa to examine the Island legacy beyond apartheid, into the twenty-ﬁrst century. 1 2

Dingake, My Fight Against Apartheid, 227. Feldman, Formations of Violence, 227; emphasis added.

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Comparisons Is Robben Island unique? This question raises the issue of political prisoner resistance in contexts other than Robben Island. States create political prisoners in their demarcation of what constitutes dangerous and/or illegal deﬁance and dissent. That does not mean all political inmates are guilty as accused or charged by the regime that incarcerates them, nor does it mean that a regime is always correct in who it considers or recognizes as political dissidents. Nevertheless, it is probably correct to ascribe to most political prisoners an oppositional or resistant consciousness prior to their imprisonment. (This awareness would obviously differ for diverse people.) Consequently, the primary question in examining political prisoner resistance is not “Is the injustice of the status quo recognized as such?” Instead, we must ask: “How do self-consciously political prisoners cope with prison and oppose the regime and the prison authorities?” In turn, resistance will be shaped and informed by material constraints. The importance of material imperatives in inﬂuencing forms of resistance invites a consideration of regime type. Typologies of regime power, and the organization they imply, matter for an overall assessment of likely limits and possibilities of resistance in regime prisons (among other sites of repression and struggle). In the totalizing world of Nazi concentration camps or Chinese labor camps, for example, resistance of even the most innocuous sort was often punished by death. In authoritarian regimes like apartheid South Africa, while there were totalitarian aspects of life, there were also spaces for protest, opposition, or resistance, or, even where these were forbidden, punishment was not usually a death sentence. Such subtle distinctions do not, of course, exonerate an authoritarian regime, but they do allow for better explanations of how and why protest, in and out the prisons, could and did occur. Distinguishing between and among regime types does not in itself determine the resistant acts that are possible. Britain, for example, is ostensibly a democracy, and yet the resistance of Irish political prisoners was often curtailed by highly authoritarian methods, such as relentless intimidation of inmates through constant strip searches including anal and vaginal examinations, even when the authorities know it is impossible for the prisoner to have smuggled anything since the prior strip search. On the other hand, the most repressive regimes are occasionally vulnerable to prisoner pressure: as is discussed later, the Chinese government was forced to return antiregime letters written by political dissident Wei Jingsheng before he left prison. Even in a totalitarian system, the intervention of outsiders often facilitates resistance. This phenomenon has been highlighted in Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List, which portrays the role a German industrialist played in saving Jews from Nazi death camps. Similarly, Rasma Karklins points out that a critical variable in the success of political prisoner protests in Soviet prison

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and labor camps was outside “solidarity and publicity.”3 In part, external monitoring gave Soviet ofﬁcials a vested interest in limiting reasons for prisoner protest because these ofﬁcials would be judged negatively when such protests came to light. Indeed, considering the South African case, this motivation explains why minister of justice and prisons, Kobie Coetsee, sought to prevent or minimize further court cases about Robben Island and political imprisonment during his tenure.4 Resistance and its possibilities then are informed by, but are not directly a product of, regime type. Although regime forms and prisoners’ responses to their captors differ, prisoners in an array of contexts resist; Robben Island is not unique. Political prisoner resistance under an array of governmental forms was and is widespread, including in its productive manifestations in which inmate resistance seeks to reduce state control and acquire power in order to transform or displace the regime. The ﬁve categories of resistance theorized in Chapter Nine are examined here as they apply to a number of national contexts at speciﬁc points in time. Emblematic examples are taken from China in the late 1960s and later in the 1990s, Somalia in the 1980s, Kenya between late 1977 and 1978, Romania in the 1950s, Northern Ireland in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Austria during the second World War, Israel and the Occupied Territories in the 1980s and 1990s, and Cuba in the early 1950s. These instances are instructive in portraying the diverse expressions of prisoner resistance that invite extensive political research and analysis. In pointing to these characteristics, my research underscores the need for political scientists to look behind the prison walls to understand politics inside prisons, and how those relations of power shape both speciﬁc polities and theories of power and resistance.5

3 4 5

Rasma Karklins, “The Organization of Power in Soviet Labour Camps,” Soviet Studies 41, no. 2 (1989), 291. Coetsee, interview. It is worth noting certain methodological limitations. Prisoner memoirs, the main source of secondary literature, tend to concentrate on describing resistance as survival and open challenge. The relatively few accounts of resistance for dignity, regime challenge, and transformation should not necessarily make the researcher think this absence implies they are less common and/or less important forms of resistance; rather, this paucity reﬂects the conditions of memoir production and the attitudes of the writer. Political prisoner memoirs are often personal accounts of political processes and individual accounts of collective struggles. Released ex-inmates may not write about the political activities within prison because that could hurt others still incarcerated or because the author may consider that readers will not be interested in such accounts. The “hidden transcripts” that have a key place in resistance as dignity and self-consciousness may be taken for granted by writers who assume prisoners complain about the authorities behind their backs. Alternatively, an author may consider it presumptuous to account for the resistance strategies of fellow inmates. Moreover, given that discourse in support of political prisoners often portrays inmates as helpless victims, some supporters or advocates of political prisoners may deem it unwise to present those in jail as political agents rather than as vulnerable subjects.

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Resistance for Survival Given the cruel and dangerous conditions for many and perhaps most political prisoners, the will and efforts taken by prisoners to survive cruel and life-threatening conditions looms large in autobiographical and biographical accounts, as well as the literatures of human rights groups and others. One account of survival, and also of its connection to resistance by remembering atrocities, is that of Han Wei-Tien who was, from 1967, conﬁned for two years to the bottom of a dry well by the Chinese authorities. He was left completely alone without toilet facilities, light, or anything with which to wash himself; his meager food was lowered to him in a basket by his jailers from the ground above. In assessing his situation Wei-Tien decided “I had only one piece of advice for myself: Manage to survive.”6 His primary survival strategy was to dig, with his hands, “rooms” and “passages” in this underground hole, to give himself activity, motivation, and exercise and to create a place for his – and previous prisoners’ – bodily waste. When he was ﬁnished constructing his “palace,” a few days of elation were followed by a deep and debilitating depression, exacerbated by having become blind after two years without light. The cumulative mental and physical toll including the inadequate food and lack of light led to Wei-Tien’s loss of consciousness, which in turn made the authorities retrieve him from the well and send him to hospital. (Upon partial recovery, he was returned to hard labor.) At times he wondered if surviving was a positive thing; however, in hindsight, he was pleased that he did survive, both for himself and to bear witness: But now I am sure it is good that I survived. If I had passed away, who would remain to tell of the Communists’ brutal treatment of the people they governed in the secretly blockaded area of Ching-hai? Who would know that they would turn a well into a cell and conﬁne a “stubborn anti-revolutionary” like me? [My book] is my story, my testament, and perhaps my revenge.7

Survival may be a result of individual action or collective endeavor. Mohamed Barood Ali, a political prisoner in Somalia in the 1980s under the dictatorship of Siad Barre, explained that the greatest difﬁculty prisoners had in avoiding starvation was during Ramadan, when inmates were given food only at sunset, to break the day’s fast, and at three in the morning, prior to beginning the daily fast. Hunger was a serious problem if one was not ready and waiting for food in the early hours of the morning, as then the soldiers would not give prisoners anything to eat. This denial meant that the next meal would be at the following sunset, effectively creating a twenty-four-hour fast. The prisoner’s solution was to assign “one person to 6 7

Pu Ning, Red in Tooth and Claw: Twenty-Six Years in Communist Chinese Prisons (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 10. Ibid., 18.

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stay awake each night. As soon as he heard the noise of the wheelbarrow he would wake up everybody.”8 Resistance as Dignity and Self-Consciousness Collective action and, indeed, any visible protest are frequently forbidden to political prisoners, on pain of punishment, deprivation, and sometimes death. In this context, secret protest – the “hidden transcript” – and asserting a sense of shared humanity, even belonging to a collective of resisters, are key forms of protest and usually indicate efforts to establish a political counterculture. There are many illustrations of hidden transcripts, including, in the same Somalian account, a written transcript of deﬁance. Ali recounts: We were even warned not to write anything on the walls. It is literally impossible to desist from scratching anything on prison walls in solitary conﬁnement because that is about the only way left to express oneself. . . . Every day during ‘lock-up’ time, three soldiers would enter the cell ordering the occupant to stand against a wall. They would meticulously check for scratches on the walls, ﬂoor and even on the ceiling. As soon as I arrived in my cell I checked for grafﬁti but there was none. . . . Only much later . . . I saw something. At ﬁrst I could not believe what I saw, but soon I was laughing so loudly that my friend started knocking on the door to warn me. At the bottom of the wall, where the soldiers could not possibly see was EGAL written in capital letters. This was the name of Somalia’s last civilian prime minister much later to be ‘president’ of the Somaliland Republic. He spent 7 years here. The most powerful man in the country had been reduced to writing his name on that corner of the cell to express his protest. I felt for him at the time. It must have felt great seeing soldiers checking for signs on the walls and failing every day. I imagined him chuckling under his breath.9

Secret writing, the need for a creative outlet, and a mental connection made with other political prisoners, all themes of Ali’s appreciation of the hidden transcript on the walls, are near universal features of political imprisonment. ˆ ı wa Thiong’o ignored his prison environment as best as possible Thus Ngugˆ to continue writing a novel on toilet paper. While he had earlier dismissed accounts of those who wrote on toilet paper, he now joined their imagined community: Toilet-paper: when in the sixties I ﬁrst read in Kwame Nkrumah’s autobiography, Ghana, how he used to hoard toilet-paper in his cell at James Fort Prison to write on, I thought it was romantic and a little unreal despite the photographic evidence reproduced in the book. Writing on toilet-paper? 8

9

Mohamed Barood Ali, “Inside Labaatan Jirow Secret Maximum Security Prison,” in The Cost of Dictatorship: The Somali Experience, ed. Jama Mohamed Ghalib (New York: Lilian Barber Press, 1995), 241. Ibid., 242.

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Now, I know: paper, any paper, is about the most precious article for a political prisoner, more so for one like me, who was in political detention because of his writing.10

A critical action to maintain sanity and, ideally, a sense of human community, is secret communication where open association is forbidden. (Where some forms of communication are permissible, secret communiqu´es are often reserved for overtly “political” communication that seeks to advance a form of resistance such as open challenge, decreasing state power, or developing community and transformational power. This distinction applies in the case of Robben Islanders and for the Irish Republicans, discussed later.) Lena Constante, a Romanian political prisoner who spent eight and a half years in prison in the 1950s, ﬁve of these in solitary conﬁnement, recounts that when she was transferred to the last prison in which she was to be incarcerated, the years of isolation came to a partial end when she was included in the women’s prison community by virtue of the Morse code prisoners used to communicate with each other and make “the walls speak.” This form of contact was illegal, as was Constante’s spoken or written communication, but prisoners managed it nonetheless. At times the “conversations” were political, as when she tried to nudge her friendly pro-Nazi neighbor from her political philosophy of hate. More often, the communication between the walls were for the purpose of creating and sustaining human community: “The walls of my cell no longer separated me from the world. On the contrary, I could see it all through to the end. I could always ﬁnd it in myself not only the desire but also the will to survive.”11 Likewise, Mohamed Barood Ali also communicated with fellow inmates via illicit wall tappings that helped to sustain the community of prisoners in solitary conﬁnement through their isolation and deprivation. From “Dirty Protest” to Hunger Strikes to the Death: From Resistance as Open Challenge to Resistance as Transformation A particularly unusual open challenge was that of the “dirty protest” by Irish Republicans in the late 1970s. This protest is interpreted as a classic example of categorical resistance. In prisoners’ recognition of the limitations to this protest, they embarked on the hunger strikes that led Bobby Sands and nine others to their death. Although the hunger strike was also an example of an “open challenge,” the logic behind it was to transform the nature of the Republican struggle outside the prison walls; thus, it is analyzed as an instance of would-be transformation, or resistance through the attempted appropriation of power. In the strategic thinking behind its transformational goals, this hunger strike was also a classic exemplar of strategic resistance. 10 11

ˆ ı wa Thiong’o, Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (Nairobi: East African Educational Ngugˆ Publishers, 1981), 5–6. Lena Constante, The Silent Escape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 246.

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Unlike Robben Islanders who were never given formal recognition of their political prisoner status, Irish political prisoners were effectively given such acceptance in 1972 in response to a hunger strike, when they were entitled to “special category” status.12 With special category status, they were allowed to wear their own clothes and associate and organize freely within the prison walls. A few years later, in 1976, these rights were withdrawn and the political prisoners were once again considered by the regime to be ordinary criminals. In response to this loss of rights, and the indignity of being called criminals, the Republican prisoners protested by refusing to wear the prison clothes, and instead wore their blankets. Allen Feldman argued that refusing to wear the prison uniforms was also a way for prisoners to resist the rituals of prison initiation and mortiﬁcation described by Goffman, and refuse to enter the “compulsory visibility” Foucault ascribed to the carceral experience.13 This protest was also, in the theoretical categories of this book, a prototypical example of categorical resistance: How we dealt with the isolation? You walked up and down the cell constantly thinking, “How do we get our status back? What are we going to do?” There was no answers coming but “Resist.” The attitude of the screws [warders/prison authorities] then became a personal thing. I’m not going to let them bastards see me walk out of that door with that “monkey suit” [the prison uniform] on. They were constantly at it for us to wear it.14

Unfortunately, the prisoners had not fully considered the full implications of this strategy of resistance. Therefore, they realized with some shock that outsiders did not know of their “blanketmen” protest or of the abuse they experienced because of it. Reﬂecting an incorporation of strategic resistance into this struggle otherwise deﬁned by categorical resistance, the prisoners agreed to put on the prison uniform to use their right to a monthly visit, in part to facilitate outsiders’ awareness of their protest. The prison authorities did not give in to the blanketmen’s protest and the prisoners’ demand for their special category status to be returned. Moreover, psychological and physical assaults on the prisoners increased, including the imposition of a new rule which forbade prisoners from wearing their blankets when they went to use the toilets outside their cells: “Everytime you left the cell you were stripped naked . . . there was a mirror set on a sponge and you were spread-eagled over the mirror naked and then kicked down over the mirror. If they suspected you were carrying something, they had a sixteen-inch medical forceps and they would given you an internal 12

13 14

Aretxaga, 123–149. Note that while this article is published in Ethos as noted, this author used a 1994 copy of a paper delivered by Aretxaga at the University of Texas at Austin for this book. The quotation comes from pages 4 through 5 of this mimeographed paper, which is in the author’s possession. Feldman, Formations of Violence, 157; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 187. Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) prisoner in Feldman, Formations of Violence, 158.

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examination.”15 In this context, prisoners would neither shower nor use the toilets and the dirty protest arose: prisoners defecated and urinated in the cells, spreading their bodily waste on the walls. By 1981, Feldman argued, the dirty protest had run its course, not least because it no longer affected the prison guards to the same extent.16 It was in this context that the prisoner’s looked to a hunger strike as an alternative method of protest. The hunger strike, however, was intended as more than a method of protest. Unlike the dirty protest, which was “defensive,”17 the hunger strike aimed at reshaping the Irish struggle outside the prison by elevating political organization in Irish Republican struggle to work in tandem with military struggle (though, Feldman argued, implicitly usurping military supremacy). This equality or supremacy of political organizing would be facilitated by enhancing the development of a sophisticated and well-mobilized political movement to tackle British rule. The hunger strike, and, implicitly, the martyrdom of those who took part in it, would unleash political energies and organizational efforts that would be essential to challenging British rule. In this effort, Sands and other prisoners drew on a number of resources that typiﬁed strategic and transformational resistance. One of these resources was to introduce the use of Gaelic as a language of struggle; it not only emphasized (separatist) cultural pride and facilitated prisoner unity, but it was also a source for secret communication among prisoners. Another means was to emphasize political education and debate in prison. Inmates in the Maze prison had a library of at least 1,600 books, most reﬂecting left-wing political thought and documenting the revolutions and struggles of other groups, including antiapartheid politics.18 Commenting on this library and its book collection, two critics of the IRA commented that “the thinking in the republican movement was more forward looking inside prison than out” and “it is likely that education work done in the Maze made a positive contribution to the peace process.”19 The origin of the hunger strike strategy lay in the realization that the political prisoners needed to be united and pulled together and, in turn, needed to assert the organizational and political nature of the Republican movement. Feldman argued that Sands in particular saw the center of the movement as the prisons, and he wanted those within the prisons to inﬂuence the public and potential support base outside; in other words, he wanted to

15 16 17 18 19

PIRA prisoner in Feldman, Formations of Violence, 169. Ibid., 227. PIRA prisoner in Feldman, Formations of Violence, 171. Christopher Walker, “IRA Library Offers Lesson in Terror,” The Times (London), 24 July 2000. Sent to author via e-mail from Lissa, August, 27 July 2000. Yvonne Murphy, Chief, Political Collection, Linen Hall Library (Belfast), and Robin Halward, director of the Northern Ireland Prison Service, quoted in Walker, “IRA Library Offers Lesson in Terror.”

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shape a political movement from his and his comrades’ prison cells.20 As explained by an Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) prisoner, “[w]e realized that the most potent weapon people had in war was organization, competent forward-moving organization. That’s what we’d all been about in the jails, and that message had to go out from the jails into the community.”21 Feldman further argued that, symbolically, because Sands and the other hunger strikers knew their demands, including that for a renewal of their political status, would not be met, the hunger strike was to the death and therefore part of the military struggle: “The logic of corpse symbolism in the political theater of the Hunger Strike was a continuation of the symbolic logic of paramilitary violence outside the prison, although in this case the template of the politically encoded corpse was to be enhanced by the truth claims of the ascetic formation of the body.”22 The efﬁcacy of the hunger strikes in achieving their goals was limited, but, unlike the dirty protest, the hunger strikes contained a strategic plan and transformational intent. A full investigation of the reasons for the limits to the success of the hunger strike is beyond the scope of this work. Nevertheless, two comparisons with the South African and Robben Island case studies may perhaps be fruitful. First, the British state was not subject to the same extent and duration of lost national and international legitimacy through the hunger strike as was the apartheid state in its treatment of political prisoners and detainees. It is possible that the prisoners underestimated the importance of a focus on Thatcher’s regime. One prisoner commented that with the blanket protest having dragged on and on, “The screws had become apathetic . . . just as surely as we did. . . . The Hunger strike came about as the only option.”23 It is, of course, a mistake to confuse the prison guards with the upper echelons of the state, which is partly why Robben Island prisoners tended to attempt to neutralize or befriend the warders even while their compatriots were waging a guerrilla war against the regime. Second, notwithstanding the status and recruiting advantages the military organizations provided for the liberation movements – especially the ANC – most former prisoners emphasize that political rather then military struggle was always privileged in South African resistance efforts. In contrast, however, military organization was the basis of prisoner organization in Irish prisons. Sands and others justiﬁed the hunger strikes in terms of their military role, but the Irish Republican Army (IRA) Army Council had not fully accepted the strategic and symbolic logic of the hunger strike. In this context, the hunger strike was an inadequate means to secure the political struggle. 20 21 22 23

Feldman, Formations of Violence, 227 and 241–242. INLA prisoner in Feldman, Formations of Violence, 222. Feldman, Formations of Violence, 236. INLA prisoner in Feldman, Formations of Violence, 229.

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Resistance as Reducing State Power or Defeating the Oppressor’s End Among other reasons, states imprison their opponents to prevent them from achieving their political goals. One group of prisoners who worked to defeat their captor’s aims were Austrian politicians who opposed German occupation of Austria prior to and during World War II. These men, whose views and allegiances encompassed a range of perspectives, but who shared in common a desire for Austrian unity and independence, were imprisoned together in Nazi concentration camps from the late 1930s to the end of the war. Nevertheless, they found common cause and often developed a mutual respect that was harder to cultivate in prewar party politics, which was frequently bitter and divisive. Furthermore, they used their internment to discuss and promote resistance to German occupation and lay the basis for postwar alliances. William Bluhm argued that postwar integration was not necessarily the consequence of ideological convergence between political groups who still often had profoundly different worldviews but rather the impact of the positive experiences of democracy for those that went into exile, or the negative experiences of war for those under Nazi rule.24 The particular experience of political prisoners who worked with fellow inmates, including those who had different political opinions, is known in postwar Austrian politics as the “Geist der Lagerstraße” or the spirit of the prison camp.25 The following account, idealized and romantic as it is, describes the imprisonment of conservative politician Leopold Figl, who became the ﬁrst postwar Chancellor in an elected Austrian government, in terms of the impact of solidarity between political prisoners of opposing groups: What Figl must endure in Dachau almost deﬁes description, but he also experiences something remarkably ﬁne: the most ideal kind of comradeship available. There is true solidarity, bridging all party differences. Left wing and right wing politicians forget their opposing points of view, get to know and understand each other better, and give mutual help and encouragement. At Dachau, and later at Mauthausen, the preliminary foundation is laid for the new Austria. Here, at the risk of death and surrounded by fanatical enemies, the belief in cooperative effort takes form. For here there is daily proof that people with different views can have respect for each other and are capable of overcoming the hardest fate if there is a sense of solidarity, and if they respect what they have in common, and disregard the differences of opinion.26

Signiﬁcantly, in the wake of the war when Figl’s conservative People’s Party won a large majority, he nevertheless asked the Socialists to join him in a 24 25 26

William T. Bluhm, Building an Austrian Nation: The Political Intergration of a Western State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973). ¨ Correspondence with author from Ulricke Langle, 5 May 1995. Suzanne Seltenreich, Leopold Figl – Austrian Patriot and Statesman (Vienna: Erwin MettenVerlag, 1963), 66.

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coalition government, partly out of practical political imperatives and partly in light of the spirit of cooperation that had been forged in the war.27 Palestinian prisoners too were often able to build solidarity and respect across partisan divisions. Former prisoner Sirhan Saleimeh recalled: “We, the veteran prisoners from different factions lived together in prison, and were able to fully coordinate our activities. We shared the same destiny and we knew each other well.”28 Perhaps ironically, it was harder to maintain that mutuality outside prison. Thus Saleimeh continued, lamenting that “now we have a hard time even looking at one another.” Indeed, Lisa Hajjar noted that although Palestinian prisoners organized socially and politically on divided factional lines in prison, many believe that factionalism in prison is reduced compared to the outside environment.29 Serge Schmemann has argued that Palestinian prisoners learned to appreciate two forms of democracy in Israeli prison cells: that of the prisoners who provided “representative politics through the strict internal democracy of the packed cells,” and that of the Israelis whose political system they “came to appreciate and even admire.”30 One of his informants, Ahmad el-Diek, a former political prisoner later on the Palestinian Legislative Council, argued that unlike Palestinians in exile, those who had been in prison had “seen different experiences of democracy. We have an idea of the Israeli experience. We elected leaders in prison.”31 Learning about and experiencing democracy was part of a broader educational process in prisons. Hajjar considered education to be the most important way prisons functioned in Palestinian political culture. Her informants emphasized the same point many Robben Islanders did about their incarceration, namely that many prisoners left prison with a better education than they had before their imprisonment. This pedagogy contributed to broadening political insight and tactical approaches: Rather than serving as a deterrent and a punitive framework for breaking the PLO’s [Palestine Liberation Organization] strongest cadres, Israel’s prisons were transformed into higher “academies,” as the inmates called them, for reﬂection and 27

28 29 30

31

Bluhm, Building an Austrian Nation, 69. Norway and Sweden have political histories with similar experiences of wartime incarceration affecting postwar politics and governance: “There is quite a large literature on how the common political prisoner experience of Norwegian and Danish political leaders, from opposing camps, melded together as prisoners in German concentration camps during . . . [World War II]. Like your Robben Islanders, the younger of these formed the core Norwegian/Danish political elites (highly accommodationist) for 20–25 years after the war” (Correspondence from John Higley to author, 6 April 1995). Sirhan Saleimeh cited in Ata Qaimri, “What Happened to the Dream? A Roundtable Discussion with Longtime Ex-Prisoners,” News from Within 11, no. 1 (January 1995), 5. Lisa Hajjar, “Authority, Resistance and the Law: A Study of the Israeli Military Court System in the Occupied Territories,” Ph.D. diss., The American University, Washington D.C., 1995. “Serge Schmemann, Arafat’s Heirs: What Have the Palestinians’ Younger Leaders Learned? Democracy. Where Did They Learn it? In Israeli Prisons. The Experience Made Them Tough, But Also Rational.” New York Times Magazine, 4 August 1996, 32. el-Diek, cited in Schmemann, “Arafat’s Heir,” 35.

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education, ideological and spiritual rehabilitation, and experiments with new political constructs. . . . Many prisoners studied Hebrew to “get to know the enemy better.” . . . Prisoners who had attended ofﬁcers’ courses in one of the Arab states gave lessons in topography and ﬁeldcraft, military tactics and history. The prisoners pored over the works of Marx, Mao, and Frantz Fanon, developing a new lexicon of strategy and learning the value of consensus over ideological purity.32

Resistance as the Appropriation of Power (or Move Toward Appropriating Power) Education was also an important aspect of the imprisonment of Cuban opponents of the Batista dictatorship who were imprisoned in the mid 1950s within an island prison on the Isle of Pines. There prisoners, including Fidel Castro, sought to appropriate the regime’s power through at least two mechanisms; the ﬁrst was to construct rules for prisoner self-governance, and the second was to attempt to shape a revolution outside prison. Prisoners organized their lives according to the political-economy and social life of prison society, much as Robben Islanders were to do a decade and two later. Different people were put in charge of purchasing and distributing the supplies prisoners were allowed to purchase. Various other permanent duties were assigned. Every person had to assist with cleaning up, which was carried out in pairs. Regulations were drawn up by prisoners to establish a constitution by which most aspects of prison life would be governed. The following are some of the principles by which prisoners agreed to hold their meetings: Article 1. Regular general assemblies will be held on the ﬁrst day of each month, beginning at 7:00 p.m., unless the ﬁrst falls on a Saturday, Sunday, or other holiday in which case the assembly will be held either the next Monday or the following day. Article 2. The group reading assigned for the day on which the regular assembly is to be held will be suspended. . . . ˜ Article 4. A special assembly may be held whenever seven or more companeros request it of the secretary in writing, explaining their reasons for doing so. . . . Article 8. Insulting expressions may not be used in the debate, and it is absolutely prohibited to justify mistakes by claiming that the critic would have made the same, a similar, or any other kind of mistake. . . . Article 10. The chairman is also invested with absolute power to conduct the assembly as he deems best to assure its success. Signed: Pedro Miret, Chairman ´ Israel Tapanes, Secretary33

Beyond organizing political society within prison as a means of assuming control, the prisoners, and in particular Fidel Castro, worked to undermine and to remove Batista. Castro was especially interested in facilitating the wide 32 33

Schiff and Ya’ari quoted in Hajjar, “Authority, Resistance and the Law,” 677. Mario Menc´ıa, The Fertile Prison: Fidel Castro in Batista’s Jails (Melbourne, Australia: Ocean Press, 1993), 32–33.

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distribution of media and information outside the prison, given that he saw propaganda as the critical foundation of a mass movement. Therefore, in an elaborate initiative, Castro reconstructed his speech from the dock and had it smuggled out of prison. In addition, he sent detailed instructions for its mass distribution. Not one for modesty, and perhaps indicating the authoritarian behavior that would later emerge, Castro identiﬁed his defense speech as “a pamphlet of decisive importance because of its ideological content and powerful accusations,” and he gave instructions that it should be “read with the greatest attention.”34 Aside from issuing instructions for activities outside prison, negotiations are another important mechanism by which prisoners attempt to assert and create their power, as well as to wrest power from their jailers. While prisoners are often pawns in the negotiation strategies of others, and prisoner releases become tied to the haggling of those outside the prison, prisoners too may have, create, or seize a gap in power to negotiate their releases, or conditions under which they will leave prison. An example of this tactic where prisoners appropriated state power was by Palestinian women prisoners who refused to accept an Israeli presidential pardon because not all the women with whom they were imprisoned would be set free. After a year and a half, the women all left prison together, achieving their objective.35 Tackling what is one of the world’s most repressive regimes, Chinese political prisoner Wei Jingsheng negotiated as a condition of his leaving prison that he had to have copies of his correspondence to the government’s leaders in which he harshly attacked them. Wei’s leverage was that the Chinese government hoped his release would help them win the Olympic Games for Beijing. While the release did not achieve Beijing’s goal that year, Wei got many of his letters back, including one to the late Deng Xiopeng in which Wei told the leader: “Your problem is that you have too much ambition, too little talent and you’re narrow minded.”36 The costs to Wei of persistent deﬁance are incalculable; he has been “so mistreated in prison that he had lost many of his teeth, . . . had been kept in isolation for so long that he had difﬁculty speaking during the annual visits from his family.”37 Moreover, since that release, Wei has again been sentenced to another fourteen-year sentence. Nevertheless, his letters, at least, will be freely circulated – although not in China. An Aside on Nonpolitical Imprisonment Robben Islanders often explained their own actions and choices in light of nonpolitical, common law, or criminal prisoner behavior – usually to 34 35 36 37

Castro cited in Mencia, Fertile Prison, 105. “West Bank Welcomes Ex-Prisoner As Heroine.” New York Times, 13 February 1997, A7. Wei quoted in “Letters of Chinese Dissident Are Deﬁant,” New York Times, 18 February 1996, 8. Ibid., 8.

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contrast their own endeavors with those of their criminal counterparts. And yet, as Dlamini and others have observed, there are certain features of criminal imprisonment that are similar to or at least resonate with concerns raised in my focus on political imprisonment.38 While this book has not been the place to identify or explore these issues, in concluding this work it is worthwhile to note some of these points of intersection in the hope that they may be taken up as concerns of both public policy and academic enquiry. As political prisoners on Robben Island and elsewhere have developed social, political, and economic orders in prison, so too have nonpolitical prisoners in diverse national contexts. At times, these are constructive, and prisoners have empowered themselves through collective organization to “positive” ends, such as education, legal self-training, or better contact with their families. At other times, however, these forms of prisoner social organization are violent and nihilistic. Van Zyl Smit’s comments on South African prison gangs resonates with the experience of prison gangs in the United States and elsewhere: [G]angs adopt a rigid structure which is a vicious parody of the quasi-military structure of the prison system itself. They have an immense hold over their members, who are not only dependent on them for services and beneﬁts but who are bound to them by the visible stigma of tattoos and the real dangers of indecent assault and even murder should they attempt to break from the gangs.39

Most prisons, at least in South Africa and the United States, foster violence among their inmates. Many people in the public at large may be quite content with this situation, believing that such “tough” conditions in prison are part of the punishment criminals should receive. Aside from displaying cruel attitudes, these approaches are inconsistent with all international and many national standards for imprisonment and are at best woefully shortsighted. Indeed, if Robben Island and other political prisons are schools or universities of politics, criminal prisons are often schools of crime. Therefore, for politicians and others to see the imprisonment of ever more people as a social panacea ignores the fact that, at some point, most prisoners are released. Insofar as prison has (further) dehumanized, criminalized, or brutalized inmates, society at large can expect to reap the consequences. In other words, as political imprisonment affects the world beyond prisons, so too does criminal incarceration, albeit in different ways. From Prison to Parliament: Robben Island’s Legacy Beyond Apartheid Robben Island was opened to the public on 1 January 1997. Since then the prison has been visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists and has 38 39

Dlamini, Hell- Hole. Van Zyl Smit, South African Prison Law, 48.

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become a required stop on the itineraries of foreign dignitaries, from then U.S. president Bill Clinton, to the king and queen of Sweden, to United Nations Secretary-General Koﬁ Annan. Visitors often wonder at the fact that Nelson Mandela – on whom the tours invariably focus – was able to come out of prison to lead South Africa to democratic rule despite his exceptionally long incarceration, worsened by the harshness of Robben Island prison. This question discounts, however, the extent to which political prisoners enabled both the struggle against apartheid and aspects of the transition from white minority rule since 1990.40 That is, the endurance of political activists and leaders in prison was despite incarceration only if one ignores the processes and practices of resistance prisoners developed ﬁrst to ensure their survival and then to work toward the victory of their cause. What, however, is the relationship between the politics of Robben Island and the politics of post-apartheid South Africa? Can one ﬁnd Robben Island’s legacy in South Africa’s political culture? Nelson Mandela is the ﬁrst person many would look to in pondering that question. One of the most common questions asked about South Africa is whether its democratic continuum will survive Nelson Mandela who retired in 1999. The Robben Island experience provides clear deductive value in this regard. Mandela was undoubtedly a pivotal ﬁgure on Robben Island, both as a symbol and as a leader. Perhaps his primary legacy is not, however, that he was indispensable to building a strong ANC and vibrant prisoner community in prison, but rather that his and the ANC’s emphasis on developing individuals and organizations meant that his organization and all prisoners were enabled by strong institutions 40

Two important points must be added. First, this claim for the enabling role of political imprisonment is not, of course, to justify apartheid or its policies of incarceration, nor to suggest that the liberation movements “needed” imprisonment of their members. Second, my contention that Mandela, Robben Island, and prisoner-oriented initiatives were key contexts from which negotiation impetuses and experiences emerged should not be read as a suggestion that these were the only or predominant sources of support for, or initiation of, negotiation. Indeed, a vast range of individuals, groups, meetings, and enterprises fostered negotiation. A very partial list of references to these multiple inﬂuences includes Adam and Moodley, Negotiated Revolution; Neville Alexander, Some Are More Equal Than Others. Essays on the Transition in South Africa (Cape Town: Buchu, 1993); Adrain Guelke, “The Impact of the End of the Cold War on the South African Transition,” Journal of Contemporary African Studies 14, no. 1 (1996), 87–100; Peris S. Jones, “From Nation-hood to Regionalism to the North West Province: ‘Bophuthatswananess’ and the Birth of the ‘New’ South Africa,” African Affairs 98 (1999), 509–534; Ian Liebenberg, The Long March: The Story of the Struggle for Liberation in South Africa (Pretoria: HAUM, 1994); Robin Lee and Lawrence Schlemmer eds., Transition to Democracy: Policy Perspectives 1991 (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1991); Mufson, Fighting Years; Price, The Apartheid State; Robert I. Rotberg, Ending Autocracy, Enabling Democracy: The Tribulations of Southern Africa (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2002); Seekings, The UDF; Sparks, Tomorrow Is Another Country; Ineke van Kessel, “Beyond Our Wildest Dreams”: The United Democratic Front and the Transformation of South Africa (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000); Waldmeir, Anatomy of a Miracle.

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that could outlast any one individual leader. To Mandela’s credit, throughout his imprisonment, neither the ANC nor the prisoner community depended upon his leadership alone. Most of the ANC’s senior ofﬁcials were kept apart from the majority of ANC members in the general cells. The ANC, like the other movements, was therefore tested as an organization to see to what extent it had produced layers of leadership and principles of organization that could sustain the movement in prison. Later, in 1982, Mandela and most of the Rivonia leadership were removed from Robben Island; nonetheless, the Island community and the ANC ﬂourished. These observations are not to disregard or put down the leadership of Mandela or others in the ANC or other groups. On the contrary, it is to the credit of individual leaders and organizational cultures to point out that the history of imprisonment suggests that none of South Africa’s liberation movements depended on one or a handful of commanders or mentors.41 Furthermore, Mandela epitomized two qualities, at once personal and political: a commitment to pragmatism and a personal dignity that allowed him to treat even his enemies cordially and with respect. Both in prison and since his release, the characteristics were critical to Mandela’s and much of South Africa’s approach to national reconciliation. Perhaps above all, Mandela’s legacy offers these qualities as a map or guideline for South Africa and other torn societies to emulate. Many observers of South African politics wonder, however, if the quest for renewal rather than revenge is possible among the majority of apartheid’s victims, especially those who were tortured, detained, and imprisoned: are they likely to follow the path of their Afrikaner predecessors, who, as victims of British colonialism, showed that they could be far more cruel and brutal than their own tormentors? Thus far, there is much about which the former victims have to be proud. South Africa has, in many respects, the world’s most liberal constitution that, among other provisions, prevents detention without trial and allows for free political activity. (It furthermore makes provision for equality irrespective of sexual preference, notwithstanding the prisoner attitudes to homosexuality discussed earlier.) The Truth and Reconciliation Commission revealed much about the human rights abuses and crimes of the past, unlike many countries where human rights abuses remain unveriﬁed or hidden. Furthermore, the ANC-led government has made a point of including and incorporating its opponents into government and governance. Indeed, while Joe Slovo may have written in 1992 about the need for the ANC to consider entering into a government of national unity, Nelson Mandela and his prison comrades had pioneered efforts in working across organizational lines. Prison examples abound: Mandela asked Fikile Bam of the National Liberation Front to head the ﬁrst prisoner’s committee, made overtures to the 41

Arguably, a similar point may be made about the antiapartheid organizations in exile, although to a lesser extent. This important topic is beyond the scope of this book, however.

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PAC to look into reuniﬁcation, and regularly briefed Eddie Daniels of the Liberal Party about ANC discussions. Mutual support and good working relationships did not all emanate from Mandela or the ANC. In a ﬁght for community solidarity, Johnson Mlambo lost his eye challenging food smuggling by a fellow PAC member. Hector Ntshanyana, who ran the prison store, juggled his books to allow those prisoners, especially in the BCM, with lower classiﬁcations to buy food or supplies. Upon release, Mac Maharaj left Robben Island with a mandate from John Nyati Pokela to help get the PAC leader safely into exile when he too completed his sentence. Pandelani Nefolovhodwe worked to bring various liberation organizations together to form a Patriotic Front during the transition to democracy. At the same time, South Africa faces threats to democratic rule, including in ways that echo the Robben Island experience. One is the persistent tendency of the ANC to silence, oust, or condemn its critics. Internal questioners are frequently expelled, ostracized, or lose their source of power. External criticism is also often viewed as unjustiﬁed and illegitimate by deﬁnition. The ANC often responds to detractors in ways that undermine democratic discourse and practices, such as when those who ask hard questions about government policy or practice are dismissed or condemned as racists. At other times, the ANC attempts to co-opt critics rather than promote pluralism or accept dissent. (This practice often claims to be or promote “inclusiveness.”) With the hindsight of the Robben Island experience, such drives to dominate evoke the history of the late 1970s recruitment struggles, which were only brought to a peaceful conclusion after the ANC’s supremacy was secured. This legacy is more ominous for it suggests that the quest for control may overwhelm democratic tendencies and work for the greater social good. Nevertheless, these dominating and antipluralist tendencies in the ANC tend to be far more common among those whose antiapartheid experience was shaped by exile rather than by Robben Island (as well as other political imprisonment and the internal mass democratic struggles). This phenomenon is well illustrated by the different styles of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s ﬁrst and second presidents. While Mandela has a stubborn streak and often puts party or personal loyalty above reason or fairness, he also consistently shows ﬂexibility and a willingness to learn from his own and others’ experiences and mistakes. In contrast, Mbeki tends to dogmatism and inﬂexibility, viewing critics in a democratic polis as dangerous enemies out to subvert the very mission of governance and the very right of his (and his party’s) rule. These tendencies reﬂect not just individual leadership styles but also aspects of the shaping cultures of sectors of the antiapartheid struggle, including on Robben Island and in exile. These attitudes and approaches are not limited to the country’s or party’s presidents either. Terror Lekota showed the same willingness to stand for principle when he risked his premiership of the Free State as he did when he risked his national and prison standing with the BCM while in prison. In both cases,

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he trusted that the popular will and democracy would vindicate his stands, which they did. More broadly, within the ANC leadership, former Robben Islanders tend to be among the most open to new ideas, challenges, and change. Among those challenges, one of the greatest difﬁculties the new democratic South Africa faces is widespread and violent crime. This concern bridges economic and racial cleavages across South Africa. Tragically, crime threatens once again to make the prison cell a peculiarly, if not uniquely, South African symbol. If the prison cell in parliament identiﬁed at the outset of this book was meant to celebrate the return of governance from prison to parliament, a national crime wave threatens to put prisons right back into the center of South Africa’s political order. Crime and imprisonment are direct consequences of apartheid and the social upheaval and economic deprivation it created, as well as the ﬂux inherent in transitions to democracy. Given their unique insights into prison life, one might hope that the vicious circles of criminal violence and imprisonment may be broken by a government whose membership includes many former prisoners. And yet, sadly, one of the costs of political compromise in 1994 was that the Correctional Services establishment initially remained in the hands of the “old order” with the inclusion of conservative (black) ethnic nationalists, especially at the highest levels. Although that grip of the old order lessened somewhat with time, even into South Africa’s second democratic administration, prison reform is at best limited and sporadic. Prisons often continue to be dangerous facilitators of crime. As prisoners, the Robben Islanders used strategic and, less often, categorical resistance to challenge the criminal subcultures they faced in the 1960s and, over the years, to neutralize or even win over the unsophisticated and racist prison warders. And yet, these insights about the capacity for human change and human dignity and the right to have a meaningful purpose in life have found little place in prison practice of South Africa in the twenty-ﬁrst century. While some in government recognize the multiple faceted causes and solutions to crime and violence, others – including in the ANC – have adopted crude anticrime and anticriminal approaches not dissimilar to the rhetoric and practices of the apartheid regime or right-wing anticrime rhetoric in other parts of the world.42 42

Examples of the literature that discussed the international and especially the U.S. trend toward politicians using crime as an electoral tool with dire consequences for numbers of people in prisons include the following: Katherine Beckett, “Political Preoccupation with Crime Leads, Not Follows, Public Opinion,” in Penal Reform in Overcrowded Times, ed. Michael Tonry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 40–4; Nils Christie, Crime Control As Industry: Towards Gulags, Western Style, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); Joseph Davey, The Politics of Prison Expansion (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998); Steve Donziger, ed., The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Globalisation and US Prison Growth,” Race and Class 40(2/3), 1998, 171–88; William T. Lyons and Stuart

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A more hopeful challenge to the legacy of the past is the attempt to provide some ﬁnancial help to the hundreds of former prisoners (and exiles), who, with their families and dependents, face poverty, ill health, and little hope for the future as a cost of their convictions. Both government and nongovernmental initiatives have been established to challenge apartheid’s “bequest” of destitute former activists. The government program was established under the Special Pensions Act of 1996. It provides for pensions to be paid to people who “made sacriﬁces or served the public interest in the cause of establishing a democratic constitutional order.”43 This law makes people who lost jobs and job possibilities because of being imprisoned, going into exile, or being disabled in association with the liberation movement eligible for pension payments. These pensions are at best modest by middle-class standards of either developed or developing world countries but could make a substantial difference to the lives of poor recipients and their families.44 Reconciliation demands, at minimum, that such a program, as well as nongovernmental counterparts, continue and succeed. Initially however, there were numerous problems with the terms and implementation of these special pensions. It took ﬁve years, from 1996 to 2001, for the bulk of the pensions to be processed and payments to begin. (By the end of 2000, only 11,917 of 29,766 applications that had been received were processed.45 By February 2002, the number processed had risen to 21,640, and an additional 1,473 late applications were received.)46 In addition to the slow pace at which the pensions were initially paid, other problems occurred; some but not all of which have been addressed by subsequent legislative amendments

43

44

45 46

Scheingold, “The Politics of Crime and Punishment,” in Criminal Justice 2000 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Justice, Ofﬁce of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice, 2000), 103–50; Marc Mauer, The Race to Incarcerate (New York: The New Press, 1999); Julian Roberts, Loretta Stalans, David Indermaur, and Mike Hough, Penal Populism and Public Opinion: Lessons from Five Countries, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Eric Schlosser, “The Prison Industrial Complex,” The Atlantic Monthly, December 1998; and Jonathan Simon, “Governing Through Crime,” in The Crime Conundrum: Essays On Criminal Justice, eds. George Fisher and Lawrence Friedman (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997), 171–190. SAPA, “Special Pensions Being Addressed – Ministry,” Daily Dispatch Online, 4 April 2001, Accessed 18 February 2002. Online at http://www.dispatch.co.za/2001/04/04/southafrica/ PARLY4.HTM. “The pensions start from R6000 a year for those between 35 and 50 years old by December 1, 1996, and move up to the highest category for recipients 65 years and older. This category would receive an annual payment of R24000 plus R1200 a year for each year over ﬁve years’ service to the struggle.” Ibid. As of January 2002, R11 equaled approximately U.S.$1. Therefore the minimum payment in U.S. dollars at that point was $545 per anum, and the maximum payment was $2,181 per anum with the possibility of an extra $109 per anum for each additional year of service. Ibid. Fax to Carin Favero from Thokozani Magwaza, CEO of the Special Pensions Administration, e-mailed to author, 27 February 2002.

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to the act. For example, Johnson Mlambo had been told that the pensions would be equivalent to those of former (apartheid) government ofﬁcials who had served commensurate years of employment. However, his twenty years in prison and his nine years in exile were reduced to a twenty-year period of service because the law was promulgated before he was sixty years old. Age is also a concern for much younger people, as those people who were thirty-ﬁve or less when the bill became law in 1996 were not eligible for the pensions. In addition, much of the ﬁnancial suffering people incurred was not recognized or compensated by the law. Mlambo noted that in the 1960s and 1970s, being detained or being related to a political prisoner could lose one a job and future employment prospects, even if one was not imprisoned oneself. Such people are not eligible for special pensions.47 Notwithstanding the initial problems with special pensions and their limited scope, the program has successfully extended essential ﬁnancial assistance to thousands of former political prisoners and exiles, many of whom are in desperate need of these resources. Moreover, this pensions program is also a symbolic recognition of those who suffered to build and create a new and more just society, including from prison. The legacies of Robben Island, including at a human level, remain – notwithstanding conﬂicts or impositions of disciplinary power – proud achievements by those who were meant to be crushed by imprisonment. For one, the bonds of camaraderie and genuine community emanating from Robben Island are quite startling to the outsider. In interviews, Islanders knew a lot about the fate of men who were imprisoned with them and often suggested that I interview men from other organizations. Returning from a conference on the future of Robben Island, on the ferry which once transported them as prisoners, Walter Sisulu in his eighties and Johnson Mlambo in his ﬁfties, who had, respectively, spent twenty-six and twenty years in prison, slipped away from the crowd to hold hands and speak quietly and intensely, perhaps of their common past and future. James Mange insisted in interviews that his criticisms about his old organization, the ANC, be on the record. When the interview was over and we were in a supermarket, I asked Mange how it was that I had met him at the ﬁftieth anniversary of Walter and Albertina Sisulu, given his criticisms of the ANC and his opposition to it in South Africa’s ﬁrst democratic elections. In his answer he spoke of the mutuality, the community, and the support he had experienced in his imprisonment and of the friendship that endured alongside the political differences. When I was invited by Ahmed Kathrada to visit Robben Island after nearly a year of interviewing its former inmates, the visceral impact of the prison’s gray concrete and institutional green paint – far worse than the image in black-and-white photos in which color can only be imagined – and 47

Conversation between Johnson Mlambo and Carin Favero, summarized and e-mailed by Favero to author 22 February 2002.

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the prison’s coldness, harshness, and complete lack of privacy were more shocking than many of the accounts of deprivation and cruelty I had heard. When I shared this impression with Petros “Shoes” Mashigo, as well as my incredulousness at Robben Islanders’ capacity to endure and overcome this bleak and oppressive environment, his reply was, “But you missed the people who made it habitable.”48 48

Mashigo, interview.

appendix i

Diagrams of Robben Island Prison

Robben Island Prison, from approximately 1964 to approximately 1976. Based on author’s research; produced by Russ Kubisiak and Barre´ Klapper. Not to scale. 293

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Appendix I

Robben Island Prison, from approximately 1977 to 1991. Based on author’s research; produced by Russ Kubisiak and Barre´ Klapper. Not to scale.

appendix ii

Methodological Notes on Oral and Archival Sources

The key source of primary research material for this work is interviews with former Robben Island prisoners, as well as a more limited selection of interviews with members of the then government and Prisons Service and various supporters of the political prisoners, including human rights activists. In total, ninety people were interviewed by myself directly for this project, mostly in individual interviews, although some were in group interviews. Interviews lasted between one and eight hours and were conducted over one to three sessions. Unless interview respondents requested otherwise, interviews were taped and then transcribed or summarized. Respondents were chosen to cover as broad a range of former prisoners as possible, in terms of organization, age, region, economic position, and former and current political role. Based on when they arrived at Robben Island, the organizational afﬁliations of the seventy-one former prisoners who were interviewed were as follows: one common law prisoner, one member of APDUSA, one member of the Liberal Party, twelve members of the BCM, seventeen members of the PAC, thirty-four members of the ANC, and three people whose afﬁliations were probably ANC although this is not known for certain. Given that the ANC was in the majority in the prison for most of the period between (approximately) 1970 and 1991, the greater number of ANC respondents is appropriate. (This combination was, nevertheless, partly coincidental given the number of ways interviewees were selected.) At the time of the interviews, the breakdown of political afﬁliations was as follows: one person appeared not to identify politically, at least ﬁve were overtly nonpartisan while considering themselves to be consciously “political” (and another four people probably fell into this classiﬁcation), one person joined the National Party, one person was in an independent left organization, six people actively identiﬁed with or belonged to the BCM or AZAPO, twelve people actively identiﬁed with or belonged to the PAC, and thirty-seven people actively identiﬁed with or belonged to the ANC. (The number of people identifying with the ANC reﬂects both organizational losses and gains in former Islander membership.) The political identiﬁcation of four people was uncertain, although probably ANC. Respondents were interviewed in and around Soweto, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, KwaMashu, Pietermaritzburg, Bisho, East London, KwaNobuhle, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, Belleville, and Mitchells Plain. (Appendix III, following, lists all interview respondents and provides brief biographical information about the 295

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interviewees.) In addition to my interviews, I was given access to relevant interviews conducted by Gail Gerhart and Tom Karis, or on their behalf, for the Karis-Gerhart collection, and interviews housed in the Mayibuye Centre conducted, primarily, by Hilda Bernstein. I conducted four additional interviews with former political prisoners and detainees for the Liberty Life Foundation. Interviewees were chosen by a number of methods, both random and targeted. Frequent use was made of “snowballing,” where one respondent suggested that I speak to another former prisoner or state ofﬁcial. I sought out certain interviewees following their public comments or writings, reference to them in other interviews or in the Mayibuye Centre archives, newspaper articles about them, or personal recommendations from a wide range of people, on both ad hoc and systematic bases. Especially in the ﬁnal stages of research, I wanted to interview people who conformed to certain demographic categories, for example, Black Consciousness and PAC members imprisoned on Robben Island in the late 1980s. I met certain respondents in social or political contexts, including at a conference on and about Robben Island. Finally, in the case of my Eastern Cape interviews, I was given the assistance of the government’s special pensions ofﬁce, which was then in the process of identifying all former political prisoners and exiles eligible for pensions based on the losses they suffered under apartheid. The national head of the special pensions ofﬁce, combined with the heads of the Bisho and Port Elizabeth regional ofﬁces and one staff member, facilitated a number of interviews for me with respondents of their own choosing, in accordance with broad guidelines I had set, such as wanting to interview people across the political spectrum. Throughout the interviewing process, I sought to interview the broadest range of respondents in terms of a wide range of demographic and political criteria and afﬁliation. As well as oral testimony, I consulted a rich repository of written material at the Mayibuye Centre Archives at the University of the Western Cape. The Robben Island archives contain two main sources of information: the records of the prisoner’s sporting and cultural activities within the Island prison from the late 1960s to 1991 when political prisoners left the Island, and the political education or “mrabulo” materials used by ANC prisoners, especially in the mid to late 1980s and early 1990s.1 Unlike oral accounts, which call on memory and ask respondents to assess the past, these handwritten materials, especially in the case of the sporting and cultural materials, capture day-to-day life in the prison in a way that no interview could recreate. For example, angry letters reﬂect the formality and dignity the prisoners imposed upon themselves as well as the extraordinary stress inherent in prison life. Minutes from committee meetings convey the exacting standards of behavior the prisoners expected from each other, and annual reports communicate the training in administration and organization the prisoners received from running their prison community. The materials provide a corrective to a romanticized view, frequently offered in interview and other contexts, which too often understates or even denies the extraordinary difﬁculty of prison life and prisoner resistance. Moreover, because most of these materials were products of the general sections of Robben Island in which the majority of prisoners were jailed, these documents help to counterbalance a frequent public emphasis on the Island that focuses on 1

See “Robben Island Retold or from the Apple Box Archives,” Staffrider 10, no. 3 (1992), 35–41.

Methodological Notes on Oral and Archival Sources

297

Nelson Mandela and other well-known leaders and public ﬁgures who were kept in the single-cell section. There are three main components to the political materials: syllabi and instructions for political education, handwritten copies of books and articles to which the prisoners were denied legal access, and original papers, speeches, and commentaries written by the prisoners. All were illicit, although by 1991 or even 1990 when the organizations these men belonged to had been unbanned and Nelson Mandela and other key political prisoners were released, the prison authorities mostly turned a blind eye to the political activities of prisoners, and the range of smuggled materials reﬂecting the political discussions, processes, and events outside the prison increased dramatically. The political materials give unique insight into the ANC’s program of education within the prison, and, in combination with interviews, are valuable in understanding the changing way the organization was structured in prison.2 Mention has already been made of the interviews conducted for the Karis-Gerhart Collection. This collection’s summary of most of the political trials from 1964 to 1990 was also utilized extensively. In contrast, at the time when the majority of research was conducted in 1994, the state archives were more illuminating for what they do not contain than what their repositories included. There were virtually no materials on prison in general and Robben Island in particular in either the Cape Provincial Archives or the National Archives. (The few sources that were there were consulted.) Indeed, in competing symbolic messages, it was, in January 1995, both poignant and frustrating to visit the former Roeland Street prison, which is now a division of the Cape Archives, and discover that ﬂags were at half-mast to mourn the death of Joe Slovo, long-time chief nemesis of the apartheid regime, and that the archives were still, metaphorically, a prison – this time for apartheid’s documents rather apartheid’s opponents.

2

Although beyond the scope of this book, these materials are an important aid to understanding ANC ideology and allow a comparison between the Congress’s ideology and education inside the prison, on the one hand, and in exile and, to a lesser extent, inside the country, on the other hand.

appendix iii

Capsule Biographies of Interview Respondents

Neville Alexander NLF/Former Unity Movement. On Robben Island from 1964 to 1974. Intellectual and educationalist; author of numerous books. Active in Workers’ Party at time of 1994 interview. In 2002, Director of the Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa at the University of Cape Town. Natoo Babenia and and Fezile Mlanda Both ANC. Babenia on Robben Island 1964 to 1982. Robben Island experiences discussed in his Memoirs of a Saboteur. At the time of the interview, worked for the Gandhi Library in Durban. Babenia died on 1 January 1999. Mlanda released from Robben Island in 1986 after a long sentence, apparently since the 1960s. At the time of the interview in 1994, lived in Mndanstane. As of 2002, he described his employment history as union and NGO work. Fikile Bam NLF/Former Unity Movement. On Robben Island from 1964 to 1974. Banished to Transkei after release. Practiced as a human rights lawyer in the Eastern Cape in the 1980s. As of 2002, Bam served as Judge-President of the Land Claims Court from 1995. Politically nonpartisan. Active in community affairs. Vronda Banda On Robben Island from 1982 to 1990 as ANC member. After release, joined the NP as an organizer, becoming deputy mayor of Soweto in the mid 1990s. Thereafter he resigned from the NP and again joined the ANC. In late March 1997, he was murdered. Some in the ANC alleged that he had been an ANC spy in the NP. Ni¨el Barnard NP. Head of the National Intelligence Services from 1979. Director-general of Constitutional Development at the time of the 1994 interview. Often considered as key 299

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to Nelson Mandela’s release and the opening up of the political process. As of 2002, director-general of the Western Cape Provincial Administration. Hennie Botha NP. Lifetime of employment in the Prisons Service, beginning as warder and advancing to the position of general. Was brieﬂy ofﬁcer commanding on Robben Island. Probably key to government policy changes regarding political prisoners in the 1980s. Retired in the 1990s. H. J. (Henk) Bruyn NP. Lifetime of employment in the Prisons Service, beginning as warder and advancing to the position of general. Brief experience as warder on Robben Island in the early 1970s. The ANC-led government retained Bruyn as commissioner of Correctional Services. He left Correctional Services in January 1997. As of 2002, Bruyn was chief executive ofﬁcer and a director of Command Holdings Limited, a company providing criminal justice and private security services in South Africa. Lazarus (Lassie) Chiwayo ANC. On Robben Island in late 1980s to early 1990s. Elected to the Senate in the 1994 elections as an ANC provincial representative, possibly the youngest senator at the time. Later involved in provincial politics in Mpumalanga, but in August 2001 returned to national legislative politics as an ANC MP. Hendrick Jacobus (Kobie) Coetsee NP. Government minister between 1980 and 1994. This ministerial tenure included prisons until 1992 and defense from 1993. Probably a key person to rethink government policy to political prisoners, and ultimately push President F. W. de Klerk to release Nelson Mandela and unban banned organizations. Elected as the president of the Senate following the 1994 elections, a position which he retained even when the NP left the government of national unity. Coetsee died in July 2000. Saths Cooper SASO/BC; now probably somewhere between BC and ANC. Psychologist and intellectual. In 1998, began a magazine targeted at Indians. Activities included professional engagement such as chairman in 2000 of the South African National Committee of the International Union of Psychological Science. Eddie Daniels LP when began ﬁfteen-year sentence on Robben Island in 1964. De facto identiﬁcation with ANC on Robben Island after time; joined the ANC when it was unbanned in the 1990s. Wrote a memoir, There and Back: Robben Island 1964–1979, of his life and imprisonment.

Capsule Biographies of Interview Respondents

301

Jean de la Harpe ANC. UDF, ANC, and human rights activist, who also visited prisoners on Robben Island and death row. Ran development NGO for some years. As of 2002, consultant to government, primarily on environmental and water policy. Aubrey du Toit Political allegiance conﬁdential. Warder on Robben Island in 1970s, before leaving to join the insurance company, Sanlam, on the advice of a political prisoner. As of 2002, he was still at Sanlam in a senior management position. Malcolm Mbonisi Zamekile Dyani PAC before, during, and after prison until 1999, then ANC. On Robben Island from 1963 to 1978. Developed the PAC underground politically after release and studied at the University of Cape Town. PAC MP from 1994 until 1999 when he joined the ANC and became an ANC MP. Denis Goldberg ANC. Only white person convicted in the Rivonia trial. Imprisoned for life. After twenty-two years in prison, in 1986 he accepted then President P. W. Botha’s conditional offer for release, which compelled him to renounce the use of violence to overthrow apartheid. Moved to England. After his release, campaigned actively for the ANC around the world. In 1995, created a development organization, Community HEART, in London, with a German counterpart established in 1996. Subsequently awarded honorary doctorates by the Glasgow Caledonian University and the Medical University of Southern Africa. Michael Green Political allegiance conﬁdential. Warder and administrator on Robben Island during 1980s. At the time of the 1994 interview, was liaison ofﬁcer for Correctional Services in the Western Cape. Left Pollsmoor Prison at the end of 2001 for medical reasons. Themba Harry Gwala ANC. On Robben Island twice; sentenced to eight years in 1964 and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1977 but released unconditionally in 1988. Was well known as a militant on questions of Marxism and dealing with the Zulu-nationalist Inkatha movement. Leadership somewhat challenged in 1990 but still held signiﬁcant power and respect in parts of KwaZulu-Natal before his death in June 1995. John Harding NP while running Robben Island; probably NP at time of interview. Head of Robben Island Prison from 1977 to 1982. Apparently more open-minded or, at least,

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sophisticated attitude to political prisoners (e.g., turning a blind eye to political organizing and education). In 1994, ofﬁcer commanding at Westville Prison in KwaZuluNatal. Left Correctional Services in March 1997. Began a ﬂooring business in 1998. Themba Hlatswayo PAC. On Robben Island from 1979 to 1987. Active in PAC. After prison, became the administrative secretary for the Media Workers Association of South Africa (MWASA). At the time of the 1996 interview, he was a marketing manager for Fedlife, an insurance company, and working on an MBA part-time. In 1998, returned to MWASA as general secretary, a position he still held as of 2002. Seddick Isaacs PAC before and during imprisonment; nonaligned at time of interview. On Robben Island from 1963 to 1977. Key sporting activist in prison. Despite several degrees, after release worked in jobs such as selling eggs and repairing stoves until 1981 when he began working at Groote Schuur Hospital. Then completed a M.Sc. and then a Ph.D. in medical biometrics. In 1999, became head of medical infomatics at Groote Schuur where he continued as of 2002 in addition to being president of the All-Africa Health Informatics Society. Phambili Ka Ntloko BC. On Robben Island late 1970s to early/mid 1980s. At time of interview in late 1980s, union organizer in BC-aligned unions. In 1990s, worked for or afﬁliated with the Human Sciences Research Council, served as a member of the Technical Committee on Labour Relations for the National Commission of Higher Education, and was active in the Church of God and Saints in Christ, South Africa. In particular, his ministry was in an organization which provided job creation and employment programs. Murdered in 2000. Ahmed Kathrada ANC. Life sentence at Rivonia trial. Transferred from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison in 1982 with other senior ANC members. Released 1989. From 1994 to 1999 served as an ANC MP and as an advisor to President Nelson Mandela. Also active in Ex-Political Prisoners Committee. As of 2002, he continued as Chairperson of the Robben Island Museum Council. Works on behalf of the Robben Island Museum (as well as other causes) in South Africa and internationally. A book of his prison letters, Letters from Robben Island: A Selection of Ahmed Kathrada’s Prison Correspondence 1964–1989 (edited by Robert Vassen), was published in 1999. S’thembele (Mike) Khala BC. On Robben Island late 1970s to early 1980s. After prison, became a union organizer. Elected general secretary of Media Workers’ Association of South Africa in 1987. In 1998, left MWASA to do TV production; in 1999, formed his own

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company, Zimele Broadcasting Services. (Zimele is Zulu for “stand on your own.”) He is also a director of PEO Productions, an independent company. Ntemi Khame, Mandla Makwetu, Lizo Gladwell Sitoto, and Freddie Songwingi Khame, ANC; others probably ANC. Khame on Robben Island 1981 to 1990; in 1996, still an active ANC supporter and working as a school caretaker. As of 2002, ill with cancer and retired. Makwetu imprisoned in 1960s. In 1996, apparently unemployed or retired. Sitoto on Robben Island from 1963 to 1978. After release, went into exile in Lesotho and then Zambia and Tanzania, before studying early child development on a scholarship in Sweden. As of 2002, involved in social work in the community, on projects ranging from security to pre–primary school education. Songwingi on Robben Island in the 1960s. At the time of the interview in 1996, apparently unemployed or retired. Died of natural causes soon after the interview, in about 1997. Mkatali Loliwe, Colbert Nyobe, and Zifozonke Tshikila PAC. Loliwe imprisoned 1965 to 1981, Nyobo imprisoned 1963 to 1983, Tshikila imprisoned 1963 to 1968 and 1977 to 1987. At the time of the 1996 interview, all three men were unemployed or retired. Father Gerard Lorriman Catholic priest sympathetic to the UDF/ANC who was a Chaplain on Robben Island. At time of the 1994 interview, parish priest at St Mary’s Catholic Church in Nyanga where he continued as of 2002. Mzwabantu Donald (Ace) Lumkwana BC at time of imprisonment in 1976. Released in 1981. As of 1996, political identiﬁcation unknown and unemployed. As of 2002, experienced health problems and continued to live in Ginsberg, near KingWilliamstown. Sakumzi Justice (Saki) Macozoma BC when arrived on Robben Island in 1977; nonaligned at release in 1982; later joined the ANC. Elected as an ANC MP in the 1994. Resigned to head the state-owned transportation company, Transnet. After leaving Transnet, increased his engagement in the corporate sector. Most prominently, he became the chief executive ofﬁcer of New Africa Investments Limited (NAIL) in 2001, in addition to positions on various corporate boards. In 2001, also appointed to head a government working group on higher education aimed at reducing the number of tertiary institutions in South Africa. Penuell Maduna ANC. A key member of the ANC negotiating team during South Africa’s transition to democracy. In particular, worked on securing the release of political prisoners.

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Deputy minister of home affairs from 1994 to 1996; minister of mineral and energy affairs from June 1996 to June 1999. As of 2002, minister of justice and member of the ANC’s National Executive Committee. Sathyandrandranath (Mac) Maharaj ANC. On Robben Island from 1964 to 1976. Popular ANC leader. Minister of transport from 1994 to 1999. Declined renomination to Parliament and joined FirstRand Bank. Appointed a director of FirstRand and FirstRand Bank Holdings Limited in 1999, where he remains as of 2002. In 2001, edited and published Reﬂections in Prison, a book of essays written by former Robben Islanders while imprisoned, and The Great Debate: Unity, Diversity and Race in South Africa, a widely distributed newspaper supplement that excerpted parts of the previously mentioned prison essays and combined them with commentary by an array of contemporary political actors. James Mange ANC when arrived on Robben Island and upon release, despite tensions with ANC in prison. Established his own political party, the Soccer Party, for the 1994 elections. Death sentence in late 1970s was commuted to twenty years in early 1980s, and then sent to Robben Island. Andrew Mapheto ANC. On Robben Island from late 1970s to 1990. After release worked as a ﬁnancial journalist and then in ﬁnance, futures, and investment. Killed in a car accident in 1995. M. J. Maqungo ANC. Imprisoned on Robben Island 1964 to 1970. School inspector at time of 1996 interview. As of 2002, was on the council of Robben Island Museum and chair of an ex-political prisoners organization. Petros (Shoes) Mashigo ANC. Death sentence in late 1970s commuted to life sentence in early 1980s, and then sent to Robben Island. As of 2002, working in a government department. Amos Masondo BC at time of imprisonment. Joined ANC while on Robben Island. On Robben Island late 1970s to 1981. Upon release and over the 1980s was a leader in civic, union, and UDF activities. Rose to senior ANC ranks in the 1990s. At time of the 1996 interview, member of executive committee for health in the Gauteng Province. Appointed executive mayor for Greater Johannesburg in December 2000.

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Velaphi (Thomas) Masuku ANC. On Robben Island late 1970s to mid 1980s. As of 2002, working in the armed forces. Luhamile Mate and Vusumzi Mcongo BC. Mate imprisoned on Robben Island 1977 to 1982. After release, worked as an organizer for eight years for the National Hotel, Liquor, Restaurant and Retail Workers’ Union, an independent trade union. In 1994, received diploma in industrial relations. In 1995, joined the Institute of Public Servants as a liaison ofﬁcer. In 1997, received a certiﬁcate in sales and marketing. In 1997, joined the South African Public Servants Association, also a trade union, as a recruiting ofﬁcer. Since promoted to litigation and case management ofﬁcer and began studying personel and training management. Mcongo on Robben Island from 1978 to 1990. Involved in community activism at the time of the 1996 interview, including working as an advice ofﬁcer for the Ubomi Advice and Relief Centre in Port Elizabeth for a time. Joined the Robben Island Museum as an information ofﬁcer in 1997 where he remained as of 2002. Morontshi Matsobane BC during imprisonment and after release. On Robben Island from 1979 to 1990. At time of 1996 interview, head of Johannesburg region Special Pensions ofﬁce. In 1997, joined the chief directorate of the (national) Pensions Administration where he served as director of schemes development and human resources in 1999. Vumile Gladstone (Rharha) Matthews BC. After release from prison, remained supportive of BC ideology but not politically active. Intermittently employed at the time of the interview. Lombard Mbatha ANC. On Robben Island from early 1960s, probably to early 1980s. Employed by an antiapartheid organization in the 1980s. Died since being interviewed. Kwedi Mkalipi PAC. Imprisoned on Robben Island from 1965 to 1985. As of 1996 interview, headed credit union NGO. Involved in future of Robben Island committee and ex-prisoner concerns. As of October 2000, was the chief executive of the National Co-operative Association of South Africa. Thami Mkhwanazi ANC. On Robben Island for three years of a seven-year sentence between 1980 and 1987. On his release, wrote a series of newspaper articles about life on Robben Island for the Weekly Mail.

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Johnson Mlambo PAC. On Robben Island from 1963 to 1983, then headed PAC in exile from 1985. Held various executive positions in the PAC over the 1990s and as of 2002. Stanley Mogoba PAC. On Robben Island in early 1960s. Methodist Bishop from 1987 to December 1996 when he was elected president of the PAC in which he remained as of 2002. Nkosi Patrick Molala BC. On Robben Island late 1970s to early 1980s. President of AZAPO at points, and still aligned to AZAPO. As of 2002, national chairperson of AZAPO. Eric Molobi BC when arrived on Robben Island; joined ANC soon thereafter. On Robben Island from 1975 to 1980. In 1990, became chief executive of the Kagiso Trust, a grantmaking organization. As of 2002, executive chair and a special board advisor to Kagiso. Variously served as chairman of the National Housing Forum and director and board member of various major corporations at different points. Maﬁson (Murphy) Morobe BC student leader with ANC sympathies in 1970s; aligned with ANC on Robben Island while there for three-year sentence in late 1970s and early 1980s. Became union organizer on release, and then senior leader of the ANC-aligned UDF. After a period in business in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was chosen in 1994 by the ANC government to head the national Financial and Fiscal Commission. Also participates in community activities such as being chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the South African National Park and the International Fundraising Consortium, a grant-making organization servicing the nongovernmental sector. Ernest Dikgang Moseneke PAC before, during, and after prison; later nonaligned, probably to participate in the election process as a neutral person. On Robben Island from 1963 to 1973, as one of the youngest prisoners. Received his matric and BA in prison. Later trained as an advocate. In mid 1990s, headed South Africa’s semiprivate telecommunications company, Telkom. Over the 1990s, he became increasingly involved in the corporate business sector in a number of capacities, in companies such as NAIL, Metlife, and the AMB. In 2001, left the private sector to accept an appointment as acting judge of the High Court. Kgalema Motlanthe ANC. On Robben Island from 1977 to 1987. At the time of the interview in 1994, general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, the country’s biggest union.

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As of 2002, secretary general of the African National Congress, one of the organization’s most senior and inﬂuential positions. Curnick Ndlovu ANC. On Robben Island from 1964 to 1982. After release from Robben Island became the national chairperson of the UDF. Elected to parliament in 1994 where he served until 1999 before retiring. Sotomela (Soto) Ndukwana BC on entering Robben Island; later ANC aligned. On Robben Island from 1977 to 1987. In 1994 at the time of the interview, a senior director at South African Breweries, a major South African conglomerate. As of 2000, CEO of Makana Investments and Sebenza Forwarding and Shipping Consultancy, which was owned by the Makana Trust. The Makana Trust was established to help poor former political prisoners and their families; Sebenza is a successful commercial venture launched by the Makana Trust. Pandelani Nefolovhodwe BC. On Robben Island from late 1976 to early 1980s. After prison, ﬁrst involved in the Azanian Council of Trade Unions. In 1986, elected as the Assistant General Secretary of the National Council of Trade Unions. Has a number of degrees and diplomas. In 1992, started the People’s Agricultural Development NGO to assist small-scale farmers, which was where he worked at the time of the 1994 interview. He also initiated the Eastern Gauteng Disabled People’s Association and consults on Managerial and Development Issues. Has remained very active in AZAPO; as of 2002, was the AZAPO’s national deputy president. Eric Ngeleza, Silas Mogotsi, Peter Mthembu, Moses Sithebe, and Jabulane Zakwe Probably all ANC. Various ages and sentences on Robben Island. As of 2002, Ngeleza unemployed, unconﬁrmed reports suggest Peter Mthembu may have passed away, and unconﬁrmed reports suggest Jabulane Zakwe may work for a security company. James Ngqondela, Samual Peter, and Jacob Skundla ANC. Ngqondela on Robben Island 1963 to 1973, and 1984 to around 1990. Imprisonment information on Peter and Skundla not provided. As of 1996, all apparently retired and/or unemployed. As of 2002, Ngqondela was self-employed, using his vehicle to transport children to school; Samual Peter had died. Pumlani Ngqungwana ANC. On Robben Island 1989 to 1991. For a year after his release, chief of personnel and training for Umkhonto we Sizwe in the Eastern Cape. At time of 1996 interview,

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and continuing as of 2002, sales representative for National Sorgum Breweries, later renamed United National Breweries. Hector Ntshanyana PAC. On Robben Island 1963 to 1985. Worked for government at the time of the 1996 interview. Died in 1998. Abdullah Mohamed (Dullah) Omar Originally Unity Movement; moved to UDF and later the ANC over the 1980s. A lawyer who defended human rights cases including those of political prisoners on Robben Island from the 1960s. Initially defended PAC cases in the early 1960s, later became Nelson Mandela’s personal lawyer. Minister of justice from 1994 to 1999. Minister of transport from 1999, where he remains as of 2002. Jeff Radebe ANC. Senior ANC military insurgent captured and tried in 1986 and sent to Robben Island. Made critical intervention in violent and controversial Natal politics, originally initiated from Robben Island. Minister of public works from 1994 to 1999. Minister of public enterprises from 1999, where he remains as of 2002. Also remains very active in ANC party politics and is a member of the central committee of the SACP. Simon Ramogale PAC. On Robben Island in 1960s. At time of interview in 1994, worked in marketing for South African Breweries. As of 2002, regional director in the Department of Welfare and Pensions in Gauteng Province. Martin (Magalies) Ramokgadi ANC. Twice on Robben Island; in early 1960s to early 1970s and from late 1970s to mid 1980s. Died of cancer in 1992. Jan Roux NP. Senior member of Prisons Service until the early 1980s. In the Prisons Service, Roux encouraged certain reforms for political prisoners but also, as a psychologist with a Ph.D., was apparently interested in developing psychological and political assessments of political prisoners. Between 1982 and 1984, secretary general of the ofﬁce of Prime Minister P. W. Botha and then director general of State President P. W. Botha’s ofﬁce. Between 1992 and 1996 ambassador to Austria. As of 2002, Roux worked for Efkon, a company involved in electronic payment systems. Albie Sachs ANC until his 1994 appointment at a Constitutional Court justice. Previously human rights lawyer who was also involved in various debates about culture and politics.

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Author of numerous books. While in exile, survived an assassination attempt that nearly killed him. Jacob Seatlholo ANC. Probably on Robben Island between 1978 and 1988 or 1990. As of the 1996 interview, worked for a community NGO to restore land rights. Judy Sexwale ANC. Paralegal involved in promoting human rights in the 1980s; became a oneperson social work service for men on Robben Island and their families. Subsequently married Tokyo Sexwale, who was on Robben Island from the late 1970s to 1991, and who was premier of Gauteng from 1994 to January 1998. Identiﬁed as a patron of Aidslink, an HIV/AIDS organization, in 2000. Sipho Shabalala PAC. On Robben Island in early 1960s. Later insurance salesman and at time of 1994 interview community relations representative for the South African Police in Kagiso. Mark Shinners PAC. Twice on Robben Island: from 1963 to 1973, and from 1979 to early 1990s. PAC executive member at time of 1994 interview. As of 2002, still active in the PAC where he held the transportation portfolio. Worked in a private ﬁrm as a commercial marketing consultant. Joe (Main Ou/Joe My Baby) Shithlibane Came to Robben Island as criminal prisoner in 1960 and “converted” to ANC in prison soon after. When released from Robben Island in 1979, joined the ANC’s military wing. Worked for ANC’s security department at time of the 1994 interview. As of 2002, worked for the South African National Defense Force. Walter Sisulu ANC. Life sentence at Rivonia trial. Transferred from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison in 1982 with other senior ANC members. Released in 1989. ANC deputy president until retirement in 1994. Richard Stengel U.S. journalist and writer who authored January Sun: One Day, Three Lives, A South African Town (1990) and collaborated in the writing of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography. In 1999, Stengel brieﬂy left journalism to work as senior adviser and chief speechwriter for U.S. presidential candidate Bill Bradley. He wrote You’re Too Kind : A Brief History of Flattery, published in 2000. As of 2002, managing editor of Time.com.

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Raymond Suttner ANC. White political prisoner in the 1970s and 1980s. Elected to parliament in 1994 and served as chairperson of the parliamentary standing committee on Foreign Affairs. From 1997 until 2002 Suttner was South African ambassador to Sweden. His prison memoirs, Inside Apartheid’s Prisons, were published in 2001. Joined the Centre for Policy Studies in 2001 as a visiting researcher where he remained in 2002. Helen Suzman Democratic Party (its precursors were the Progressive Reform Party and then the Progressive Federal Party). Well-known liberal opposition member of parliament from the 1960s to the 1980s, who campaigned on behalf of prisoners’ rights, especially political prisoners and those on Robben Island. Retired from parliament in 1989 but continued to be active in liberal civic and human rights causes. Her memoir, In No Uncertain Terms, was published in 1993. Menziwa Esau Tsholoba PAC. On Robben Island in early 1960s. As of 1994 interview, employed as a school principal. Naledi Tsiki ANC. On Robben Island from 1978 to 1990. After release, became a key ﬁgure in reestablishing the ANC as a legal political party. As of 1996, director of the Independent Development Trust (IDT), South Africa’s largest development agency. He left the IDT in 1998 but continued to work in community development funding. Became executive chairman of the Open Learning Group, a grass-roots distance learning institution, in 1998. Also chairman of the South African Millennium Trust, a consortium of governmental and business groups, which coordinated the country’s ofﬁcial millennium celebrations, most notably on Robben Island. Denmark Tungwane ANC. On Robben Island from 1986 to 1990 or 1991. At time of interview in 1994, worked for the Catholic Church’s justice program. As of 2002, deputy director of the Robben Island Museum. Sonny Venkatrathnam APDUSA at time of arrest and imprisonment. On Robben Island from 1972 to 1978. Post-apartheid political allegiance unknown. Political science lecturer in Natal at time of interview in 1994 and as of 2002. Klaus von Lieres und Wilkau Probably NP or conservative alternative, although claimed no party afﬁliation. Attorney general of the Witwatersrand Local Division since its inception in 1982 until his retirement in 1995. Previously worked for the Transvaal attorney general’s ofﬁce.

Capsule Biographies of Interview Respondents

311

Trevor Wentzel ANC. On Robben Island for one year in mid 1980s before being released following successful appeal of case. Head of Special Pensions ofﬁce in 1996, but later left this position. Johan “Willie” Willemse NP. Lifetime of employment in the Prisons Service, beginning as head of Prisons Service from 1983 to 1993. Brief working experience on Robben Island. Probably key to government policy changes regarding political prisoners in the 1980s. Retired as of the 1994 interview. Thomas Winslow American active in antiapartheid work, who assisted families of men on Robben Island in the late 1980s and spearheaded a campaign to help former political prisoners to reintegrate into society once mass releases began in 1990. At time of 1994 interview, ran a trauma center and was involved in grassroots work around the then proposed Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 1999, became the director of development at the Legal Resource Centre, a legal rights organization, where he remained as of 2002. Jacob Zuma ANC. On Robben Island from 1963 to 1973; went into exile in 1975. Elected as a member of the KwaZulu-Natal provincial legislature in April 1994 and soon after was appointed the minister of economic affairs and tourism for the province. In late 1994, elected a national chairperson of the ANC; elected deputy president of the ANC in 1997. Appointed executive deputy president of South Africa in June 1999, a position he continued to hold as of 2002.

Select Bibliography

Archival Collections Cape Archives Depot Karis-Gerhart Collection Mayibuye Centre Archives Government Documents Annual Reports of the Department of Prisons (Union of South Africa): 1928, 1930, 1931, 1937, 1945, 1950, 1953, 1954. Commissioner of Prisons Reports (Republic of South Africa): 1958–1962, 1963– 1966, 1966–1968, 1968–1969, 1969–1970, 1970–1971, 1976–1977, 1977– 1978, 1978–1979. Conditions for Prisoners’ Study: Prisons Service Memo. Department of Foreign Affairs. Prison Administration in South Africa. Pretoria: Government Printer, 1967. South Africa. Hansards to the House of Assembly, vols. 5–8 (1963), vols. 9–12 (1964), vol. 14 (1965), vol. 18 (1966), vols. 26–27 (1969), vol. 30 (1970), vol. 32 (1971), vol. 40 (1972), vol. 43 (1973), vol. 52 (1974), vols. 57–58 (1975); vols. 63–64 (1976), vol. 70 (1977), vols. 74 and 76 (1978), vols. 82–83 (1979), vols. 86–89 (1980), vol. 102 (1982), vols. 106 and 109 (1983), vols. 114 and 116 (1984), vol. (1985). South Africa. Hansards to the House of Delegates, vol. 2 (1985). South Africa Prisons Service. “Robben Island Prison.” pamphlet/mimeo. Interviews conducted by Fran Buntman Alexander, Neville Babenia, Natoo, and Fezile Mlanda Bam, Fikile Banda, Vronda Barnard, Ni¨el

Cape Town, 18 April and 26 October 1994 Durban, 19 June 1994 Johannesburg, 22 September 1994 Johannesburg, 5 September 1994 Pretoria, 23 November and 2 December 1994 313

314 Botha, Hennie Bruyn, H. J. (Henk) Chiwayo, Lazarus (Lassie) Coetsee, Hendrick Jacobus (Kobie) Cooper, Saths Daniels, Eddie de la Harpe, Jean du Toit, Aubrey Dyani, Malcolm Mbonisi Zamekile Goldberg, Denis Green, Michael Gwala, Themba Harry Harding, John Hlatswayo, Themba Isaacs, Seddick Ka Ntloko, Phambili Kathrada, Ahmed Khala, S’thembele (Mike) Khame, Ntemi, Mandla Makwetu, Lizo Gladwell Sitoto, and Freddie Songwingi Loliwe, Mkatali, Colbert Nyobe, and Zifozonke Tshikila Lorriman, Father Gerard Lumkwana, Mzwabantu Donald (Ace) Macozoma, Sakumze Justice (Saki) Maduna, Penuell Maharaj, Sathyandrandranath (Mac) Mange, James Mapheto, Andrew Maqungo, M. J. Mashigo, Petros (Shoes) Masondo, Amos Masuku, Velaphi (Thomas) Mate, Luhamile, and Vusumzi Mcongo Matsobane, Morontshi Matthews, Vumile Gladstone (Rharha)

Select Bibliography Hout Bay and Cape Town, 31 October 1994, 3 November 1994, 24 May 1996 Cape Town, 27 October 1994 Cape Town, 4 November 1994 Cape Town and Pretoria, 11 November and 13 December 1994 Johannesburg, 25 November 1994 Somerset West, 18 May 1996 Johannesburg, 10 July and 25 August 1994 Bellville, 2 November 1994 Cape Town, 20, 21, and 23 May 1994 London, 3 March 1995, Liberty Life Foundation Cape Town, 3 November 1994 Pietermaritzburg, 20 June 1994 Westville, 18 December 1994 Johannesburg and Kibler Park, 7 May and 2 June 1996 Cape Town, 15 May 1996 Johannesburg, December 1987– February 1988 Johannesburg and Cape Town, 18 July and 31 October 1994 Johannesburg, December 1987– February 1988 KwaNobuhle, 11 May 1996

Bisho, 13 May 1996 Nyanga, 31 October 1994 Ginsberg, 14 May 1996 Johannesburg, December 1987– February 1988 Pretoria, 27 May 1996 Cape Town, 27 October 1994 Sharonlee, 2 August 1994 Johannesburg, 9 July 1994 Bisho, 14 May 1996 Johannesburg, 24 August and 27 November 1994 Johannesburg, 14 December 1994 Johannesburg, December 1987– February 1988 Port Elizabeth, 10 May 1996 Johannesburg, 6 and 7 May 1996 Bisho, 14 May 1996

Select Bibliography Mbatha, Lombard Mkalipi, Kwedi Mkhwanazi, Thami Mlambo, Johnson Mogoba, Stanley Molala, Nkosi Patrick Molobi, Eric Morobe, Maﬁson (Murphy) Moseneke, Ernest Dikgang Motlanthe, Kgalema Ndlovu, Curnick Ndukwana, Sotomela (Soto) Nefolovhodwe, Pandelani Ngeleza, Eric with Silas Mogotsi, Peter Mthembu, Moses Sithebe, and Jabulane Zakwe Ngqondela, James, Samual Peter, and Jacob Skundla Ngqungwana, Pumlani Ntshanyana, Hector Omar, Abdullah Mohamed (Dullah) Radebe, Jeff Ramogale, Simon Ramokgadi, Martin (Magalies) Roux, Jan Sachs, Albie Seatlholo, Jacob Sexwale, Judy Shabalala, Sipho Shinners, Mark Shithlibane, Joe (Main Ou/Joe My Baby) Sisulu, Walter Stengel, Richard Suttner, Raymond

Suzman, Helen Tsholoba, Menziwa Esau

315 Johannesburg, December 1987– February 1988 Cape Town, 17 May 1996 Johannesburg, December 1987– February 1988 Johannesburg, 8 and 18 July 1994 Johannesburg, July 1990 Johannesburg, December 1987– February 1988 Johannesburg, 30 May 1996 Johannesburg, 17 November and 1 December 1994 Pretoria, December 1987–February 1988 Johannesburg, 5 and 7 December 1994 KwaMashu, 18 June 1994 Johannesburg, 29 November 1994 Johannesburg, 13 September 1994 Soweto, December 1987–February 1988 Port Elizabeth, 10 May 1996 Bisho, 13 May 1996 Bisho, 13 May 1996 Cape Town, 8 November 1994 Cape Town, 21 October 1994 Johannesburg, 24 July 1994 Alexander and Johannesburg, 1 and 2 February 1988 Pretoria, 3 May 1996 Cape Town, 23 and 24 October 1994, Liberty Life Foundation Alexander, 30 April 1996 Johannesburg, 30 August 1994 Katlehong, 21 July 1994 Johannesburg, 12 September 1994 Dawn Park, 20 November 1994 Johannesburg, 18 August 1994 Long Island, 9 August 1996 Cape Town, 27 October, 1 and 2 November 1994, Liberty Life Foundation Johannesburg, December 1987– February 1988 Mitchells Plain, 29 October 1994

316 Tsiki, Naledi Tungwane, Denmark Venkatrathnam, Sonny von Lieres und Wilkau, Klaus Wentzel, Trevor Willemse, Johan (Willie) Winslow, Thomas Zuma, Jacob

Select Bibliography Johannesburg, 7 and 25 May 1996 Cape Town, 3 November 1994 Durban and Westville, 17 and 21 June 1994 Johannesburg, 27 April 1996 Cape Town, 6 November 1994 Cape Town, 26 October 1994 Cape Town, 4 November 1994 Durban, 20 June 1994

Other Interviews Cindi, Zithulele Fadana, P. S. Jack, Mkhuseli, and Stone Sizani Lekota, Mosiuoa Patrick (Terror) Naidoo, Indres Ndebele, Sibusiso Tshwete, Steve Xego, Michael (with Ben Fihla and two others)

Johannesburg, 5 July 1989, Gail Gerhart in Karis-Gerhart Collection Engcobo, Transkei, 2 October 1977, Tom Karis in Karis-Gerhart Collection Port Elizabeth, 14 July 1989, Gail Gerhart in Karis-Gerhart Collection Pinetown, December 1989, Tom Karis in Karis-Gerhart Collection Lusaka, February 1988, Victoria Butler in Karis-Gerhart Collection Durban, 15 December 1989, Tom Karis in Karis-Gerhart Collection Cape Town, 25 November 1994, Rachidi Molapo in Mayibuye Centre Archives Port Elizabeth, 8 October 1993, Tom Karis in Karis-Gerhart Collection

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Robben Island Dossier, 1964–1974. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1994. “The View from Robben Island.” Values Alive: A Tribute to Helen Suzman, ed. Robin Lee, 63–68. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1990. Ali, Mohamed Barood. “Inside Labaatan Jirow Secret Maximum Security Prison.” In The Cost of Dictatorship: The Somali Experience, ed. Jama Mohamed Ghalib, 231–256. New York: Lilian Barber Press, 1995. Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Amnesty International. Political Imprisonment in South Africa: An Amnesty International Report. London: Amnesty International Publications, 1978. South Africa: Amnesty International Brieﬁng. London: Amnesty International Publications, March 1986. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Apter, David E., ed. The Legitimization of Violence. New York: New York University Press, 1997. ˜ “Dirty Protest: Symbolic Overdetermination and Gender in Aretxaga, Begona. Northern Ireland Ethnic Violence.” Ethos 23, no. 2 (1995): 123–149. Asmal, Kader, and Louise Asmal, “Anti-Apartheid Movements in Western Europe: With Special Reference to Their Role in Support of United Nations Action against Apartheid,” in The Struggle for Liberation in South Africa and International Solidarity: A Selection of Papers Published by the United Nations Centre against Apartheid, 307–330. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1992. Asmal, Kader, Louise Asmal, and Ronald Suresh Roberts. “Like the Germans, Apartheid’s Beneﬁciaries Must Face Their Complicity.” Sunday Independent (South Africa), 27 October 1996, Sunday Dispatches Section: 20. Babenia, Natoo, with Iain Edwards. Memoirs of a Saboteur: Reﬂections of My Political Activity in India and South Africa. Bellville, South Africa: Mayibuye Books, 1995. Barber, James, and John Barratt. South Africa’s Foreign Policy: The Search for Status and Security, 1945–1988. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like. London: Heinemann, 1984. Bluhm, William T. Building an Austrian Nation: The Political Integration of a Western State. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973. Bonta, Bruce D. “Conﬂict Resolution Among Peaceful Societies: The Culture of Peacefulness.” Journal of Peace Research 33, no. 4 (1996): 403–421. Breytenbach, Breyten. Mourior: Mirrornotes of a Novel. New York: Farrar, 1984. The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. Emmarentia, South Africa: Taurus, 1984. Brooks, Alan, and Jeremy Brickhill. Whirlwind Before the Storm: The Origins and Development of the Uprising in Soweto and the Rest of South Africa from June to December 1976. London: International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, 1980. Brutus, Dennis. A Simple Lust: Collected Poems of South African Jail and Exile Including Letters to Martha. London: Heinemann, 1973. Stubborn Hope: Selected Poems of South Africa and a Wider World. London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978. Carnoy, Martin. The State and Political Theory. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.

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Index

Abuse, 59 Achmat, Zackie, 241–243, 245 Adam, Heribet, 194 Adler, Glenn, 168 African National Congress (ANC), 9, 10, 15–19, 20, 22, 24–25, 41–43, 54, 77–78, 82, 85, 89, 114, 132, 139, 142, 149–150, 154, 173, 203, 217, 219–220, 235, 245, 268, 280, 286–289 and apartheid, 100–101 and armed struggle, 101 banning of, 16 Charterist or Congress hegemony, 162–166 Charterist or Congress ideology, 22 contact between Robben Island and exile, 157–158 debates and divisions within, 22–23, 74, 87, 99–102, 114, 116, 118–121, 124, 127, 132–135, 137, 139, 141, 143–144, 223, 228–230, 240, 288, 291 and democracy, 100 and dominance on Robben Island, 139 exile, 17, 151, 157–158, 207, 229, 288 ideology of, 82–83 international context of, 28, 30, 229 interorganizational conﬂict, 73–74, 85, 89–90 Kabwe conference, 100 and leadership, 94, 96–102, 105, 165, 227 separation of Rivonia men, 228 Lobatsi conference, 101 Morogoro conference, 100 “nationalists” and “communists,” 83, 100, 223, 229 negotiations, 43–44, 158, 169–170, 172, 217, 223–229, 232–233, 235 origin of, 15

post-1976, 16–17, 22 post-1994, 286–291 and race, 100 and recruitment, 132–133, 139 relations with BCM, 95 relations with PAC, 15, 41, 52, 66, 83, 87, 91, 94–96, 102, 105–107, 112, 238, 287–288 revival of, 153–155, 162 on Robben Island, 19, 39, 41–43, 52, 66, 82–85, 89–90, 92, 96–99, 105–106, 122–123, 125, 127, 129–130, 132–134, 139, 141–142, 147–149, 157–164, 167–170, 172–173, 182, 187–189, 191, 205, 215, 217, 224, 227–228, 230, 232, 239–240, 244, 246, 248, 262, 268 and socialism, 82–84, 95, 100, 141 see also Socialism in South Africa, 150 strength of, 142 subcommittees on Robben Island, 96–98, 100 underground, 85, 154, 156, 168–169, 272 undermining democracy, 288 African People’s Democratic Union of South Africa (APDUSA), 39, 82, 84, 89, 149 African Resistance Movement (ARM), 19 Agitators, 217–218 Akenson, Donald, 14–15 Albertyn, Catherine Hester, 17 Alcoholism, 77 Alexander, Benny, 155 Alexander, Neville, 18–19, 35–37, 42, 44–45, 50, 53–55, 57, 81, 88, 101, 117, 123, 169, 196–199, 202, 205–206, 218–219, 258, 299 Algeria, 2

329

Index

330 Ali, Mohamed Barood, 275–276 Althusser, Louis, 7, 267 American Committee on Africa (ACOA), 29 Amnesty International, 75 Anderson, Benedict, 246 Annan, Koﬁ, 286 Anti-apartheid movement, 29 Apartheid, 24, 27, 35, 38, 44–45, 52–53, 55, 62, 64–65, 77 deﬁnition, 3, 11, 14–15, 44 demise of, 27 domestic opposition to, 2, 10–11, 15, 18–20, 22–24, 32–35, 75, 77, 209–210 history of, 3, 10–11, 14–18, 20–23, 25–27, 35, 46, 75, 80 international opposition to, 17, 23–24, 28–32, 209–213 negotiations to end, 4, 25, 42, 223–224, 232–233 see also Negotiation Apartheid state, 10, 23 dilemmas posed by Robben Island, 3–4, 6, 8, 36, 58 limited options regarding political prisoners, 234 in strategic turmoil, 212, 227 April, James, 262 Apter, David E., 8 ˜ 7, 278 Aretxaga, Begona, Asmal, Kader, 29, 31, 209 Asmal, Louise, 29, 31, 209 Assassination, 18, 77 Aucamp, Brigadier, 27, 195–196, 211, 235 Austria, 274, 281 Authoritarian regimes, 273 Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA), 157 Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO), 43, 91–92, 124, 155, 163, 172–173 Azanian Students’ Organization (AZASO), 163 “Baas” (master or boss), 258–259 Babenia, Natoo, 12, 19, 41, 50–52, 59, 62–63, 69, 73, 86, 97–98, 100, 102, 107, 134, 150–151, 153, 164, 166, 241, 259, 299 Badenhorst, Colonel Piet, 36–37, 199, 219 Badenhorst, Major, 38 Bam, Fikile, 18–19, 41, 65, 77, 79, 82, 86, 89, 95, 152, 299 Banda, Vronda, 85, 99, 122, 153, 164, 166, 172, 204–205, 299 Bantustan organizations, 150 Barber, James, 15, 29–30, 196, 217

Barberton prison, 2, 201 Barnard, Ni¨el, 11, 25, 27, 158, 193, 198, 207–208, 212–214, 216, 222, 226–229, 231–232, 299–300 Barratt, John, 15, 29–30, 196, 217 Batista, Fulgencio, 283 Ben Bella, Ahmed, 2 Bethal trial, 138, 156, 234 Bethell, Lord Nicholas, 224 Big Fives, 51–52, 242 Big Sixes, 242 Biko, Steve, 16, 115, 161 Black consciousness (BC), 21–22, 84–85, 118 and resigniﬁcation, see Resigniﬁcation Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), 82, 89, 149, 155 debates and divisions within, 110–111 ideology of, 82, 84 inﬂuence on South African politics, 21 and leadership, 109–111 negotiations, 43 and race, 111 relations with ANC, 95 relations with PAC, 95 on Robben Island, 21–22, 109–110 and socialism, 110–111 see also Socialism subcommittees on Robben Island, 109 Black People’s Convention (BPC), 21, 109–110, 115–116, 118, 120, 134 Blanketmen, 278 Bluhm, William T., 281–282 Boesak, Allan, 164 Bonta, Bruce D., 144 Border region, 104, 165 Botha, Hennie, 27, 55, 72, 201–204, 206–207, 213, 215, 300 Botha, P. W., 23, 207, 211, 214–216, 222–223, 225–226 Botha, Pik, 217 Breytenbach, Breyten, 200 Brickhill, Jeremy, 154 Britain, 219, 279–280 Broederbond, 230 Brooks, Alan, 154 Brutus, Dennis, 34, 49–50, 53, 69 Bruyn, H. J. (Henk), 197, 202–204, 206–208, 212–213, 300 Bureau of State Security (BOSS), 207 Cachalia, Azhar, 24 Camagu, Zuku, 136 Capitalism, 25, 28, 82–84, 162, 201, 243 Carry-ons, 33

Index Cassim, Achmed, 160 Castro, Fidel, 1, 283–284 Censorship, 33, 38, 64–65 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 91 Central Organ (CO), 98–99 Chiba, Lalloo, 97 Chikane, Frank, 228 “Children of ’76,” 85 Chilwane, Philip, 258 China, 273–275, 284 Chiwayo, Lazarus (Lassie), 43, 161–162, 300 Cholo, Theo, 97 Cindi, Zithulele, 21, 37–38, 116–117, 121, 125–127, 130 Circumcision, 148 Ciskei, 165 Civil servants, 193, 216 Classiﬁcation, 99, 118 and advancing the struggle, 122 and bribery, 118 and ﬁnancial resources, 121 see also Generations; Prisoners Cledon prison, 161 Clinton, Bill, 286 Clothing, 44, 47, 53, 78 Cocks, J., 236 Code of conduct, 5, 62, 237–239 Coetsee, Hendrick Jacobus (Kobie), 25, 203, 207, 214–216, 223–226, 230–231, 274, 300 Coetzee, Jan K., 148, 159–160, 266 Coetsee, General Johan, 223 Cohen, David William, 9, 12 Cohen, Robin, 257 Cold War, 28 Collective action, 255 see also Individual versus collective action Comaroff, Jean, 252, 256–257, 264 Communication, 123, 134, 184, 190, 231, 277 secret, 275–277, 279 Communism, see Socialism Conﬂict resolution, 145, 170 Congress of South African Students (COSAS), 22, 163, 172 Constante, Lena, 277 Constitution, 23, 25, 63, 66, 83, 103, 107, 179, 181, 226, 236, 238, 256, 283, 287, 290 see also Code of conduct Cooper, Saths , 10, 21, 63, 79, 121, 124, 135, 138, 142–143, 199, 220–221, 246, 258, 300 Coordinating Committee (CC), 99 Corbett, Judge, 219

331 Correctional Services, 289 Cowley House, 74 Crime, 289 Criminal prisoners, see Imprisonment: nonpolitical Cronin, Jeremy, 165 Cuba, 1, 274, 283–284 Culture, 61 Culverson, Donald R., 29 Czechoslovakia, 1 Dachau, 281 Dadoo, Yusuf, 96 Dae Jung, Kim, 2 Daniels, Eddie, 35, 40, 54, 70, 72, 88–89, 125, 176, 219, 223, 235, 288, 300 Dash, Samuel, 224 Davies, Ioan, 251 de Klerk, F. W., 25, 42, 169, 224, 226 de la Harpe, Jean, 301 de Lange, Pieter, 230 Deacon, Harriet, 3 Debates and disagreements, 252–253, 279, 283 Democracy, 25, 63, 83, 100, 248, 282, 286, 288–290 transition to, 170, 223, 289 see also Apartheid: negotiations to end Democratic Party (DP), 173 Denmark, 282 Department of Foreign Affairs, 211 Department of Prisons, see Prisons Service de Rougemont, Nicholas, 199 Desai, Amina, 2 Detention, 3, 12, 17, 25, 46, 75–76, 208, 287, 291 and political activism, 159–160 Dialogue, see Negotiation Dickstein, Lore, 255 Dimbaza, 75 Dingake, Michael, 33, 35, 38, 44–45, 55, 61, 64–65, 94, 97, 117, 120, 196, 257, 272 Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI), 207 Dirty protest, 277, 279 Disciplinary Committee (DC), 90, 97–98, 103–104, 106 Discipline limits on prisoner sanctions, 241 organizational, 272 by prisoners’ community, 239 self, 237 Divide and rule, 87, 118–119, 224, 228 Dladla, Simon, 182, 184

332 Dlamini, Moses, 5, 19, 33, 36, 48, 53, 239–240, 242–244, 255–256, 285 Dlamini, Stephen, 93, 197, 200 du Toit, Aubrey, 206, 262, 301 Dufour, Dominique, 199 Duodu, Cameron, 31 Dupreese, Anthony, 183 Dyani, Malcolm Mbonisi Zamekile, 41, 64, 74, 79, 91, 95, 103–107, 132–133, 135–136, 155, 301 Dyassi, Themba, 168 Dyson, Michael Eric, 2 Eastern Cape, 75, 104, 131, 151, 154–155, 158–159, 168 Ebrahim, Ebrahim Ismael, 41 Education, 61 academic, 62–65, 136, 251, 262–263, 282 and boycott, 136 funding of, 64–65 literacy, 63 political, 63, 86, 93–94, 106, 183, 193, 251, 279, 282 restrictions on and rights to, 27, 33, 56, 64–65, 86 warders and Prisons Service personnel, 64, 201–203, 206 see also University of South Africa (UNISA) el-Diek, Ahmad, 282 Elite, 172 Ellis, Stephen, 163 Emancipation, 236, 251, 272 Eminent Persons Group (EPG), 211, 225 Employment, 75–76 England, see Britain Escape, 61, 71–73, 260 Exile, 157–159, 288 Fadana, P. S., 69, 69 Family, 57, 79, 211, 291 Fanon, Frantz, 283 Favero, Carin, 290–291 Fazzie, Henry, 165 Fearon, James, 144 Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU), 166–167 Feldman, Allen, 7, 272, 278–278, 280 Ferus, Hennie, 150, 160 Figl, Leopold, 281 Financial compensation to former political prisoners, 290–291 Fish, James W., 3 Food, 44–45, 53, 107–108, 211, 239, 249, 275, 288

Index Forced labor, 49–50 Foucault, Michel, 236, 250–251, 264–265, 270, 278 Fourie, Koos, 222 Francis, Jeremiah, 97 Freedom Charter, 162–164, 166 Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), 21 Gaelic, 272, 279 Gangs, 52, 197–198, 241–242, 285 Ganya, John, 156 “Geist der Lagerstraße,” 281 Gender and sex roles, 242 Generations, 112–118, 121, 123–128, 130, 161–162, 193 and African culture, 124 classiﬁcation of, 117–119, 121, 124 conﬂict among, 117–119, 121, 124, 130 relationship to organizational conﬂict, 130 generational politics, 112, 117–119, 121, 124, 161–162 and warders, 123–124 and mutual learning, 124 respect between, 49 Geneva Committee, 90 Genovese, Eugene D., 255 Gerhart, Gail, 15, 17–18, 20, 22, 38, 65, 89, 96, 100, 116, 121, 133, 154, 157, 253 Gevisser, Mark, 243 Ghana, 1, 95 Goffman, Erving, 47–48, 278 Goldberg, David, 128–129 Goldberg, Denis, 19, 72, 119, 177, 203, 225, 240, 301 Golgos, 239 Goniwe, Matthew, 77, 165 Go-slows, 260 Gossip, 239–240 Governance, 270 Gqabi, Joe, 77, 97, 100, 154, 156, 162, 239 Gqabi trial, 156 Gramsci, Antonio, 62, 264 Green, Michael, 203–204, 207, 301 Green, Pippa, 1 Greenberg, Stanley, 194–195, 227 Gregory, James, 10, 196, 203, 206 Groote Shuur Minute, 43 Guinea, 95 Gwala, Themba Harry, 51, 54–55, 63, 85, 90, 93, 97–98, 100–102, 105, 114, 133–134, 146, 149–150, 154, 156–158, 164, 199, 220, 229, 237, 301

Index Hadland, Adrian, 10 Hajjar, Lisa, 282–283 Halward, Robin, 279 Harding, John, 11, 37, 102, 136–137, 197–199, 201, 203, 206–208, 215, 218, 220, 222–223, 227, 233, 301–302 Harlow, Barbara, 252 Hassim, Kader, 56–57, 262 Havel, Vaclev, 1–2 Healey, Denis, 219 Health, 79 Hegemony, 250, 264 Hidden transcripts, 253, 257–259, 263, 274, 276 High Organ (HO), 96–99, 101 Higley, John, 282 Hlanza, Curtis, 189 Hlatswayo, Themba, 74, 107, 109, 155–156, 169, 239, 302 Hobbes, Thomas, 142, 247–249, 270 Hogan, Barbara, 77, 141 Holland, Heidi, 10 Homosexuality, 240–246, 265 as criminal and deviant, 242 exposure as discipline, 245 and generations, 242–243 Honig, Bonnie, 7 Human Rights Commission (HRC), 25 Hunger strike, 25, 36, 38–39, 42, 44–45, 52–53, 87, 112–113, 171–172, 232, 256, 260, 279–280 Ideological state apparatus (ISA), 7, 268 Ideology, see individual organizations Ilingi, 75 Imprisonment and apartheid, 25–28 banishment of prisoners, 17, 75–76 challenges to legitimacy of, 200, 212 comparative political, 7, 273–285 effects on families, 61–62, 73, 79–80 effects on prisoners, 61–62, 73–79 nonpolitical, 19, 36, 41, 52, 58, 143, 197, 201, 234, 255, 284–285 political, 5–7, 19, 36, 197, 234, 255, 285 decentralization of, 231–232, 234 development of, 147 recognition of, 70 state policy regarding, 195–209 state understanding of, 27 as victims versus agents, 274 politics of, 8 sentence length, 120 Individual versus collective action, 260, 274–275

333 Informers, 86, 137 Inkatha, 150, 169, 245 Insurrection, 24–25, 265–266 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), 30, 53–55, 80, 87–89, 94, 171, 197, 199, 200, 209–211, 213, 218, 222, 263 International Defense and Aid Fund (IDAF), 53, 65, 80 Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), 280 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 279–280 Isaacs, Seddick, 72–73, 206, 302 Islam, 250 Isolation, 239, 241 Israel, 274, 282, 284 Jack, Mkhuseli, 133 Jackson, George, 2 Jenkin, Tim, 72 Jingsheng, Wei, 274, 284 Joffe, Joel, 19 Johnson, Shaun, 115 Ka Ntloko, Phambili, 169, 302 Kahla, Michael, 70 Kamrava, Mehran, 194 Karis, Thomas G., 17–18, 20, 38, 65, 69, 91, 96, 100, 116, 121, 124, 135, 154 Karklins, Rasma, 273–274 Kathrada, Ahmed , 1, 9–10, 19–20, 35–38, 45, 54, 65, 71–72, 85, 89, 95–98, 100–101, 105, 117, 120–121, 133–134, 149–150, 153, 158, 164, 177, 220–221, 224, 233, 244, 258, 291, 302 Keke, Hamilton, 156 Kenya, 274 Khala, S’thembele (Mike), 169, 196, 302–303 Khame, Ntemi, 64, 76, 79, 303 Khoisan X, 155 Khoza, Joseph, 108 Khumalo, Mzi, 174 Klaas, Tamsanqa Jeffrey, 136 Kleinschmidt, Horst, 65 “Klipgooier,” 127, 134 Kruger, Jimmy, 9–10, 210, 219–220, 223, 235 KwaZulu-Natal, 15, 22, 154, 169–170, 245 KwaZulu-Natal conﬂict, 169–170, 245 Kwinana, Vuyo, 168 Labour Party (Britain), 219 Labour Party, 150 Laitin, David, 144 Landsberg, Chris, 28 ¨ Langle, Ulricke, 281

334 le Grange, Louis, 199, 223, 235 Leadership, 116, 153, 172, 215, 217–218, 228, 230, 247, 287 Leballo, Patrick, 91 Lee, Robin, 219 Legal action, 256, 260 Lekota, Patrick (Terror), 21, 74, 124, 134–135, 165, 173, 288 Lewin, Hugh, 26, 55, 196, 199, 211, 240 Liberal Party, 19, 82, 89, 219, 288 Liberation movements, 1–2, 7–8, 148 Locke, John, 247–249, 270 Lodge, Tom, 15–16, 20–21, 24–25, 63, 69, 115, 157, 165–166 Lofton, John, 224 Loliwe, Mkatali, 47, 54, 303 Lorriman, Father Gerard, 303 Luirink, Bart, 245 Lumkwana, Mzwabantu Donald (Ace), 303 Luthuli, Chief Albert, 30 Maake, Jerome, 185 Macozoma, Sakumze Justice (Saki), 59, 110–111, 117, 119, 131–134, 139–140, 150–151, 166, 173, 241, 244, 303 Maduna, Penuell, 43, 232, 303–304 Magwaza, Thokozani, 290 Maharaj, Sathyandrandranath (Mac) , 9–10, 70, 77–79, 82, 97, 122, 150–151, 154, 173, 207, 220, 288, 304 Makana, 71 Makana Football Association (MFA), 68 Makanna, see Makana Makhanda, see Makana Makwetu, Clarence, 95 Makwetu, Mandla, 64, 76, 80, 102, 303 Malan, D. F., 14 Malcolm X, 2 Mali, Republic of, 95 Mandates, 149–151, 164 Mandela, Nelson, 2, 9–10, 19, 25, 31, 35, 38, 41, 45, 49, 54, 59, 68, 70–72, 78, 80, 85, 88, 92, 95–97, 100–101, 105, 113–114, 117, 120, 122–123, 125, 129, 135, 152–153, 158, 162, 173, 175, 177, 197–200, 206, 209–210, 214–220, 225, 234, 236–237, 261, 286 compared to Thabo Mbeki, 288 conditional release, 219, 225 contact with Kobie Coetsee, 223–226 legacy of, 286–287 meetings with negotiating committee, 226 move from Robben Island, 223–226 and negotiations, 172, 223–226, 230, 234–235

Index release of, 232 as symbol, 217, 230 Mandela, Winnie, 80, 120, 158 Mandela, Zindzi, 225 Mange, James , 39, 90, 100, 102, 118–121, 139, 259, 261, 291, 304 Mangena, Mosibudi, 16, 20, 74, 110, 116–117, 132, 134, 173 Mao Tse-Tung, 283 Mapheto, Andrew, 70, 304 Maqungo, M. J., 55, 154–155, 304 Marx, Anthony, 21, 95, 115, 169, 253 Marx, Karl, 283 Marxism, see Socialism Maseko, Mandla, 184 Masemola, Jeff, 127, 221 Mashigo, Petros (Shoes), 63, 72, 85, 99, 131, 292, 304 Masondo, Amos, 33, 50, 95–97, 100, 110–111, 133, 153, 155, 166, 237, 265–266, 304 Masuku, Velaphi (Thomas) , 132, 166–167, 305 Matanzima, Kaizer, 101, 220 Mate, Luhamile, 139–140, 305 Mathibela, Enock, 239–240 Mati, Joseph, 156–157 Matric, 62 Matsobane, Morontshi, 71, 109, 111, 231, 305 Matthews, Philip, 97 Matthews, Vumile Gladstone (Rharha), 132, 137, 305 Mauthausen, 281 Maze prison, 279 Mazibuko, Seth, 138 Mazrui, Ali, 194 Mbatha, Lombard, 44, 63, 305 Mbeki, Govan, 19, 76, 85, 94, 96–98, 100–102, 155, 158, 163–164, 167–168, 172, 177, 223, 229 Mbeki, Thabo, 99, 173–174, 229–230, 288 Mbele, George, 39 McEvoy, Kieran, 7 McKay, David, 174 McKenzie, Penny, 158 Mcongo, Penuell, 43 Mcongo, Vusumzi, 43, 61, 79, 86, 91–92, 109, 136–137, 139–140, 155, 305 Memory, 9–10, 12 Menc´ıa, Mario, 283–284 Mengele, Joseph, 196 Methodology, 9–13, 68, 194, 274, 295–297 Meyiwa, Msomi Matthews, 156 Mgabela, Johnson, 148

Index Mhlaba, Raymond, 19, 85, 97, 101, 146, 177, 224 Ministry of Justice, 27 Ministry of Prisons, 27 Miret, Pedro, 283 Mkalipi, Kwedi, 40, 47, 54, 112, 305 Mkhwanazi, Thami, 38, 48, 93, 127, 134, 140, 208, 238, 244, 246, 305 Mkwayi, Milton, 97, 171 Mlambo, Johnson, 43, 48–50, 54–55, 82, 88, 94, 103–108, 114, 116–117, 123, 125, 132, 156–157, 161, 231, 288, 291, 306 Mlanda, Fezile, 41, 299 Mlangeni, Andrew, 19, 85, 177, 224 Mnikina, Khumbelele, 136 Mogoba, Stanley, 113, 173, 306 Mogoerane, Thekiso, 184 Mogotsi, Silas, 307 Mokoape, Aubrey, 21 Mokoena, Suzman, 183 Molala, Nkosi Patrick, 53, 132–133, 150, 160, 238, 306 Molobi, Eric, 133, 135–136, 152, 159–160, 164, 173, 306 Montsitsi, Dan, 133, 138 Moodie, T. Dunbar, 124, 242–243 Moodley, Kogila, 194 Moodley, Strini, 21, 111, 125 Moore, Barrington, 250–251, 259–260 Moreillon, Jacques, 199 Morobe, Maﬁson (Murphy), 13, 70, 138, 143, 153, 159, 162, 165, 167, 306 Mortiﬁcation, 47–49, 278 Moseneke, Ernest Dikgang, 1, 49, 51–52, 62–64, 91, 131, 173, 239, 244, 306 Mothopeng, Zephania, 93–95, 103–105, 107, 138, 155–157, 161, 231 Motlanthe, Kgalema, 34, 85, 97, 121, 126, 132, 135, 143, 148, 161, 164, 166–167, 171–172, 239, 306–307 Motsoaledi, Elias, 19, 100, 177 Mozambique, 21 Mthembu, Peter, 307 Mufson, Steven, 22, 146, 163, 165, 173, 217 Murphy, Yvonne, 279 Music, 70 Muthien, Yvonne, 194–195 Mutumunye, Ike, 106 Mvula, Fezile, 136 Mxenge, Grifﬁths, 77 Myeza, Muntu, 21, 135 Naidoo, Indres, 19, 33, 36–37, 41, 46, 53, 61, 79, 82, 87, 94, 108, 112–113, 205–206 Naidoo, M. D., 97

335 Nair, Billy, 41, 94, 97–98 Namibia, 14 Namibian prisoners, 40 Nasson, Bill, 15, 24–25, 63, 69, 165–166 Natal, see KwaZulu-Natal National Council of Trade Unions (NACTU), 155, 169, 172 National Education Crisis Committee (NECC), 24 National Forum, 172 National Institute for Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation of Offenders (NICRO), 218 National Intelligence Service (NIS), 158, 207, 209, 212, 226 National Liberation Front, 287 National Party (NP), 14–15, 17, 173, 204, 215, 217, 245 National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), 167 National Union of Motor Assembly and Rubber Workers of South Africa (NUMARWOSA), 169 National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), 65 National Youth Organization (NAYO), 22, 109 Nazi/Nazis, 196, 210, 254, 273, 277, 281 Nchabaleng, Peter, 77, 154, 156, 165 Ndatshe, Vivienne, 124 Ndebele, Sibusiso, 38, 120 Ndlovu, Curnick, 54–55, 86, 97, 307 Ndukwana, Sotomela (Soto), 110–111, 142, 156–157, 173, 307 Ndungane, Njongonkulu, 174 Neame, Sylvia, 233 Nefolovhodwe, Pandelani, 21, 43, 89, 110–111, 118, 140, 155, 173, 288, 307 Negotiation, 59, 158, 170–172, 195, 220, 223–224, 283 as resistance, 172 Neier, Aryeh, 2 News, 94, 199, 252 Newspaper, 38, 212–214, 261 Ngeleza, Eric, 307 Ngendane, Selby, 95, 103–105, 112 Ngoasheng, Moss, 173 Ngoyi, Edgar, 165 Ngqondela, James, 47, 79, 154, 199, 307 Ngqungwana, Pumlani, 307–308 Ngwenya, Peter-Paul, 186, 190 1976 uprisings, 16, 21, 84–85 Ninevites, 242 Ning, Pu, 275 Nixon, Rob, 31, 209

336 Nkoli, Simon, 245 Nkomo, Nkwenkwe, 21 Nkrumah, Kwame, 1, 276 Nkuhlu, Wiseman, 173 Non-Aligned Movement, 209 Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), 18, 82, 89 Nonracialism, 162 Normalization of prisons, 201, 203, 210, 213–215, 231, 235 Northern Ireland, 274, 277–280 Northern Transvaal, 41, 154, 165 Norton, Anne, 247 Norway, 282 Nqumane, Nelson, 106 Ntshanyana, Hector, 52, 54, 86, 90–91, 106, 114, 132, 137, 148, 199, 239, 242, 258–259, 288, 308 Nxele, see Makana Nyembe, Dorothy, 2 Nyobo, Colbert, 47, 52, 54, 303 Occupied Territories, 274 Odendaal, Andre, 96, 101 Omar, Abdulah (Dullah), 137, 207, 308 Organization of African Unity (OAU), 30, 209 Organizations, see Political organizations see also individual organizations Ortner, Sherry, 7, 11, 250–252, 269, 268 Ostracism, 239–240, 245 Ottaway, Marina, 204 Otto, General, 215–216 ¨ Pachter, Mina, 254 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 282 Palestinian prisoners, 282–285 Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), 89, 149, 155 banning of, 16 Catering Committee, 104 and communication, 105 and conﬂict resolution, 106 debates and divisions within, 103–109 and democracy, 104–105 Disciplinary Committee, 103–104, 107 ideology of, 82–84 and leadership, 103–109 negotiations, 43 origin of, 15, 83 and political education, 106 and race, 108 and recruitment, 132 relations with ANC, see African National Congress: relations with PAC relations with BCM, 95 revival of, 155–156

Index on Robben Island, 102–107 Robben Island leaders in exile, 157 and socialism, 106, 108 see also Socialism subcommittees on Robben Island, 104, 106 Pass Laws, 25, 195, 201 Patriotic Front, 95 Pearce, Justin, 10 Pedro, Nicklo, 183 Pelser, Piet, 210 Peter, Samual, 199, 307 Petitions, 260 Phokanuka, Lawrence, 41, 91, 106, 133 Pickett, Brent L., 270 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, 236, 251, 260, 269 Pogrund, Benjamin, 27 Pokela, John Nyati, 95, 104–107, 157, 288 Political imprisonment, see Imprisonment: political Political organizations conﬂict among, 73–74, 85, 87 cooperation among, 60, 81, 87, 162 development of, 147 formation of organizations on Robben Island, 163–166 inﬂuence of Robben Islanders’ on anti-apartheid organizations, 6 inﬂuence of Robben Islanders’ on exile organizations, 157–159 Political panel (PP), 99, 268 Political parties, see individual parties Political prisoners self-government, 265 see also Imprisonment: political Pollsmoor prison, 1, 73, 85, 97, 161, 215– 216, 218, 223–224, 226, 228–230, 241 Popular fronts, 164 Poqo, 16, 19, 53 Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organization (PEBCO), 22, 165, 172 Posel, Deborah, 194–195 Post-apartheid, 6, 8, 36 Power, 237, 249, 251, 254, 265, 268–270 see also Resistance Pragmatism, 128–129 Pretoria 12 trial, 156 Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging (PWV) region, 158 Price, Robert, 23–25, 28, 30, 32, 201, 209, 266 Prison conditions ex-prisoner activism to improve, 151 see also Robben Island: conditions of prison on

Index library, 279 rules, 86 as school of crime, 285 as source of politics, 279–280 Prisoners classiﬁcation of, 117–122 committee structure, 41 dispersal of political, 210 ﬁnancial support of, 211 legal representation of, 45, 54–57, 127 nonpolitical, see Imprisonment: nonpolitical numbers of, 82 political, see Imprisonment: political violence among, 52, 104, 142–145 Prisoners’ panel, 238 Prisons Act, 26, 53, 201 Prisons Service challenge to legitimacy by political imprisonment, 200 1960s–1970s, 195–200 reform of, 200–203 Professionalism, 195, 201–204, 235 Propaganda, 284 Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), 278–279 Przeworski, Adam, 223 Public relations ofﬁcer (PRO), 98–99 Public transcripts, 257, 260 Pule, Barry, 184, 188 Pule, Dinah, 188 Punishment, 53, 56, 64–65, 73, 86, 136, 239 meal-stops, 45 by prisoners’ community, 239–240, 244 Quarry, 37 Rabkin, David, 208 Racial terminology, 3 Radebe, Jeff, 40, 99, 149, 155, 169–170, 172–173, 308 Radloff, Sarah, 30 Ramogale, Simon, 155, 308 Ramokgadi, Martin (Magalies), 36, 44, 48, 54–55, 76, 91, 101, 132, 154, 156, 199, 256, 308 Ramoshaba, John M., 68 Rand Daily Mail, 26, 55 Rape, 49, 52, 241–242 Reagan, Ronald, 29, 225 Reception committee, 139 Reconciliation, 290 Recreation, 56, 61, 66–70, 171

337 Recruitment, 41, 74, 106–107, 110, 130–142 assessments of, 140–142 and bribery, 139–141 and inﬂuence on antiapartheid politics, 131 and physical conﬂict, 135–136 and resolution of conﬂict, 137–139 see also African National Congress (ANC); Black Consciousness Movement (BCM); Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) Red Cross, see International Committee of the Red Cross Red Cross Committee, see Geneva Committee Reform, 23–24, 193–195, 199, 214–215, 222–223, 226 Regime type, 273–274 Releases, 284 contested numbers of political prisoners, 231 of Mbeki and Gwala, 229 prisoners’ role in, 232 progressive release process, 228 see also Mandela, Nelson; Robben Island: releases from Repression, 15–17, 21, 24, 151–152 Repressive state apparatus (RSA), 8, 267–268 Republican movement, 279 Resigniﬁcation, 7, 84, 251–252, 264, 269 Resistance, 5–7, 24, 34–35 to apartheid, see Apartheid: domestic opposition to as the appropriation of power, 263–267, 283–284 attitudes to, 113 categorical resistance, 6, 126–130, 260–261, 263, 277–278 consent versus coercion, 237, 267 as death, 254, 277–280 deﬁnition and elaboration, 269–270 as dignity and self–consciousness, 257–260, 276–277 as disciplinary power, 265 and external intervention, 273–274 individual versus organized, 256 and material context, 253–267, 273 as memory, 254 as norm creation, 236 as open challenge, 260–261, 277–280 and organizations, 250 political versus military, 280 and power, 249, 251, 254, 269–270 power versus resistance, 237, 268–269 as productive, 265 as proto-governance, 236 and psychology, 264

338 Resistance (cont.) question of best practices, 112–126 as reducing state power, 261–263, 281–283 as remaking, 251 secret versus open, 114, 236–237, 255, 263, 267 as self-imposed discipline, 237 strategic, 6, 126–130, 263, 277–279 as survival, 34, 254–257, 274–276 as symbol, 34 tactics of, 59 theories of, 8 as transformation, 236, 274, 277–280 see also Writing, as resistance Rhodesia, 233 Riekert Commission, 23 Rifkind, Malcolm, 211 Rivonia Trial, 19, 54, 177, 236 Robben Island as community of prisoners, 238 conditions of prison on, 35–39, 44–51, 56, 64, 197, 222 conﬂict on, 142–145 see also Prisoners: violence among domestic pressure, 198–199 and exile, 157–159 as facilitating prisoner understanding of apartheid ofﬁcials, 233 as hell-hole, 5, 34, 51, 200, 266 image of, 268 as imagined community, 246 improving conditions of, 209–210 inﬂuence on antiapartheid politics, 6, 153 inﬂuence on South African politics post-1994, 286–281 initiation to, 266–267, 278 international context of, 53–54, 195, 198–199, 278 layout of, 39, 293–294 leadership cells, see single cells herein legacies of, 291 liberalization of, 119 in the media, 54 as museum and tourist site, 285–286 prison population of, 82 prisoner concern with image, 241 racial and ethnic tensions on, 41 racial segregation and discrimination on, 35, 44–46, 49 releases from, 39, 42–44, 193, 225, 228 see also Mandela, Nelson; Releases single cells and general cells on, 39–40, 54, 70, 99, 101, 171, 208, 258 as a site of negotiation, 235 struggle for hegemony on, 112

Index survival strategies, 256 as symbol, 147, 152–153, 212, 224, 230 travel to, 46–47 underground politics on, 12, 85, 99 see also ANC: underground; Underground as university, 5, 34, 51, 63, 93, 193, 200, 264, 268 vulnerability of prisoner community on, 68, 77–78 Roberts, Cheryl, 66 Robinson, Randall, 29 Romania, 274, 277 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 247–249, 270 Roux, Jan, 199, 221–222, 308 Sachs, Albie, 19, 36, 46, 61, 94, 108, 112–113, 205–206, 308–309 Saleimeh, Sirhan, 282 Sampson, Anthony, 2, 9, 37, 158, 170, 199, 222, 236, 246 Sands, Bobby, 272, 277, 279 SASO-BPC Nine, 109, 115–116 ¨ Schadeberg, Jurgen, 59, 69 Schindler’s List, 273 Schmemann, Serge, 282 Scott, James, 240, 250–251, 254–255, 257, 260, 263 Screws, see Warders Seatlholo, Jacob, 309 Seatlholo, Khotso, 111 Sechaba, Tsepo, 163 Section committee (SC), 99 Security Branch, see Security Police Security Police, 27, 86, 207–209, 227 Security Section, 27, 198, 206–209 Sedibe, Kaborane, 21 Seekings, Jeremy, 154, 159, 163–164 Selegoe, Lucky, 183 Self-mutilation, 255–256 Seltenreich, Suzanne, 281 September, Dulcie, 77 Seremane, Joe, 173 Sexual abuse, 49–50 Sexuality, 49, 52, 241–246 Sexwale, Judy, 69, 205, 309 Sexwale, Tokyo, 79, 97–98, 134, 146, 171, 218, 233 Shabalala, Sipho, 309 Shabangu, Johannes (Ka), 187, 191, 192 Sharpeville massacre, 15–16 Shaw, Mark, 207 Shinners, Mark, 87, 106, 156, 309 Shithlibane, Joe (Main Ou/Joe My Baby), 35, 42, 135, 309 Shityuwete, Helao, 40

Index Showers, 47 Shubane, Khehla, 22, 142, 163, 221 Sibuyi, British, 124 Sindane, Vusi (Mhlaba), 191 Sisk, Timothy D., 232 Sisulu, Albertina, 291 Sisulu, Walter, 19, 54, 59, 85, 94, 97, 100–101, 105, 123, 153, 170, 175, 177, 223–224, 291, 309 Siswana, Mncedisi, 136 Sithebe, Moses, 307 Sitoto, Lizo Gladwell, 64, 74, 76, 303 Sizani, Stone, 110, 133, 135, 165 Skundla, Jacob, 199, 307 Slander, 240 Slovo, Joe, 157–158, 287 Smuggling, 40 Sobukwe, Robert, 27, 94, 103 Sobukwe case, 27 Social contract, 236–237, 265 of individual organizations versus prisoner community, 248 theory, 246–249 Socialism, 17–18, 21, 28–29, 59, 76, 82–84, 95, 100–103, 106–108, 110–111, 113, 141, 162, 166, 217, 223, 229–230, 247, 251, 264, 275, 281 Sodomy, 52, 241, 243 Somalia, 274–276 Songwingi, Freddie, 64, 76, 303 South Africa, post-1994, 173, 286–291 South African Communist Party (SACP), 25, 83, 96, 100, 154, 157, 232 South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), 167 South African Council of Churches (SACC), 80 South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), 25, 42–44, 155, 208 South African Native National Congress, 15 South African Press Association (SAPA), 78, 174, 290 South African Students’ Movement (SASM), 21–22, 109, 115 South African Students’ Organization (SASO), 21–22, 109–110, 115–116, 118, 120, 121, 134, 156 South African Youth Revolutionary Council (SAYRCO), 109, 111 South Korea, 2 South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO), 82, 89 Soviet prison and labor camps, 273–274 Soweto, 10, 21–22, 115, 125, 131, 151, 154, 163, 225

339 Soweto Civic Association, 22 Soweto Students’ Representative Council, 163 Soweto uprising, 131, 151, 209, 217 Sparks, Allister, 15, 77, 214, 230 Special Pensions Act (1996), 290 Sport, 61, 66–70, 73, 84–85, 90, 171, 238 Sports and Recreaction Committee, 90 Stengel, Richard, 309 Steyn, General J. C., 198, 219 Steyn, Judge Jan, 218–219 Strachan, Robert Harold (Jock), 26, 55, 240 Strategic acquiescence, 252 Strip searches, 273, 278–279 Stuurman, Owen, 133, 135 Suppression of Communism Act, 17 Surveillance of prisoners, 86, 206–208 Suspension, 240, 245 Suttner, Raymond, 165, 205, 240, 310 Suzman, Helen, 26, 53, 55, 58, 64–65, 87–89, 94, 198, 200, 209–210, 212, 217–218, 310 Sweden, 282, 286 Swilling, Mark, 165–166 Tambo, Oliver, 14, 157, 207 ´ Tapanes, Israel, 283 Tauza, 49, 53 Taxi, 191 Terrorism Act, 17 Thatcher, Margaret, 29, 280 Thembu, 220 Therapy, 77–78 Thereseindstadt, 255 Theron, Judge, 219 Thomas, Cal, 225 Thoms, Raymond, 240 Tilly, Charles, 260 Tinto, Christmas, 165 Toivo ja Toivo, Andimba, 40, 59, 82, 89, 127 Tolerance, 90, 92, 268, 281 Torture, 12, 18, 161, 254 Total institutions, 47 Totalitarian regimes, 273 Toyi-toyi, 158–159 Trade unions, 151, 166–169 Traditional leaders, 220 TransAfrica, 29 Transkei, 165, 219 Truth and Reconciliation Commisssion (TRC), 18, 33, 287 Tshikila, Walter Zifozonke, 47, 54, 155, 303 Tsholoba, Menziwa Esau, 310

Index

340 Tshwete, Steve, 54, 66, 148, 154, 165, 173, 238 Tsiki, Naledi, 41, 63, 74, 87, 98, 100–102, 133–136, 143, 152–153, 166–167, 218, 228, 240, 310 Tungwane, Denmark, 39, 70, 86, 90, 102, 141, 153–154, 172, 310 Tutu, Bishop Desmond, 29–30 28 Gang, 242 2 February 1990, 25, 42 Ulundi, 89–90, 218 Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), 16, 19, 21–22, 72, 120, 129, 139–140, 142, 154, 158, 170, 172, 217 Underground, 152–157 see also ANC: underground; Robben Island: underground politics on United Automobile, Rubber and Allied Workers’ Union of South Africa (UAW), 169 United Democratic Front (UDF), 22–24, 77, 91–92, 150, 154, 159, 161, 163–167, 169–170, 172, 245, 286 and former political prisoners, 165 United Kingdom, see Britain United Nations, 53, 209 United Nations Special Committee on Apartheid, 30, 53 United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, 26–27, 197 United States of Africa, 95 Unity Movement, see Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) University of South Africa (UNISA), 62, 65, 206, 272 Urban Foundation, 218–219 van den Bergh, Hendrick, 196, 207, 215 van der Merwe, Fanie, 215, 226 van Onselen, Charles, 250, 255–256 van Wyk, Koos, 30 van Zyl Smit, Dirk, 53, 200–201, 218, 221, 285 Venkatrathnam, Sonny, 56–57, 89–90, 92–93, 200, 310 Verster, Victor, 201 Victor Verster prison, 160, 201, 214, 224, 232

Viljoen, Gerrit, 226 Vischer, Andreas, 199 Visitors, 54–55, 79–80, 89, 158, 211, 218–220, 224, 278 von Lieres und Wilkau, Klaus, 18, 227, 231, 310 Vorster, B. J., 23, 196, 207, 215 ˆ ı, 277 wa Thiong’o, Ngugˆ Waldmeir, Patti, 36, 193 Walker, Christopher, 279 Warders, 35–36, 114, 122–123, 127, 171, 196–197, 233, 258, 262, 278, 280 prisoner inﬂuence on, 204 as prisoners, 204 and smuggling, 204–205 socioeconomic background of, 204–205 and state intent, 203–206 Webster, Eddie, 166 Weicker, Lowell, 29 Wei-Tien, Han, 275 Wentzel, Trevor, 71, 150, 160, 310 West, Cornell, 7, 49, 251–252 Western Cape, 18, 20, 22, 66, 86, 96, 122, 161, 204 Wiehahn Commission, 23, 169 Wilgespruit Fellowship Centre, 156 Willemse, Johan (Willie), 27, 37, 197–199, 201–202, 206–208, 214–216, 223, 225–226, 230, 310 Winslow, Thomas, 42, 74, 78, 310 Wood, G. T., 159–160, 266 Work, 50, 53 Workerists, 108 World War II, 274, 281 Writing, as resistance, 276–277 Xego, Michael, 124 Xhosa, 97 Xiopeng, Deng, 284 Yu Chi Chan Club, 18 Zakwe, Jabulane, 307 Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) Zulu, Enoch Mabuto, 184 Zuma, Jacob, 50–52, 93, 147–148, 154, 173, 310 Zwelonke, D. M., 34–35, 45, 48, 71