Mandela remained calm, and Eddie Daniels was convinced that his authoritative presence saved him and others from many assaults.114 Mandela was determined to stand up to Badenhorst’s tyranny, and smuggled a message to friends outside to lobby for his dismissal. Soon afterward he led a delegation of prisoners to see Badenhorst, threatening strikes if their conditions were not improved. They found him surprisingly conciliatory. A month later, three judges arrived on the island with the Commissioner of Prisons. When they asked to see Mandela privately he boldly insisted that Badenhorst should be present, and then described the recent brutal beating of a prisoner. Badenhorst burst out: “If you talk about things you haven’t seen, you will get yourself into trouble.” Mandela calmly told the judges: “If he can threaten me here, in your presence, you can imagine what he does when you are not here.” The junior judge, Michael Corbett, protested sharply in Mandela’s hearing about Badenhorst’s behavior, to obvious effect.115 Thirty years later President Mandela reminded Corbett, by this time Chief Justice, of his intervention, and commented: “Such courage and independence were rare.”116 Three months after the judge’s visit Badenhorst was transferred, together with his brutal gang of warders. Before he left, Badenhorst told Mandela: “I just want to wish you people good luck.” Mandela was taken aback, but responded with his own good wishes. He felt fortified in his conviction that even apparently evil men could be changed: Badenhorst “behaved like a brute because he was rewarded for brutish behaviour.”117
Mandela was not the only prisoner to see the warders as the slaves of the system. “These people just somersaulted when they were given different orders,” said Neville Alexander; “real brutes became doves and angels of peace.”118 But Mandela went furthest in regarding warders with pity rather than hatred, and forgiving the worst excesses: even Kathrada could not go along with some of his tolerance. Mandela could see beyond the brutalities, to the insecurities and psychological deformities of the warders; and he was already seeing the prison as a microcosm of a future South Africa, where reconciliation would be essential to survival.
*Gregory’s book, published in 1995, included intimate accounts of Mandela’s family relationships which he had overheard. President Mandela, as he then was, decided not to apply for an injunction, but the Prison Department officially distanced itself from the book.
*In fact, the files of the Justice Department show no real evidence of Mandela ever having been a member of the Party: only a statement by Fred Carneson, the former manager of the Guardian, that he once attended a meeting of the Central Committee at which Mandela was present, and a statement by Piet Beyleveld (an unreliable ex-communist who became a state witness) that Mandela had once attended the SACP’s national conference.90
16
Steeled and Hardened
1971–1976
ROBBEN ISLAND soon acquired a reputation in the world outside as a “hell hole”—the title of a book by the PAC prisoner Moses Dlamini, who spent two years there until 1969.1 Yet by the seventies the conditions, though still grim, were not usually hellish. Robben Island, like the Bastille, or the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg,2 became a powerful symbol abroad of the tyranny of the South African regime; but the legend became more terrible than the reality.
The balance of power was beginning to change. In December 1971 a new head of prison, Colonel Willie Willemse, replaced the hated Badenhorst. Willemse, with his clipped moustache and gentlemanly style, had a more conciliatory brief. The Commissioner of Prisons, still General Steyn, had told him to adopt a more enlightened approach because (as Willemse understood it) the government had to reckon with the political scene at home and abroad. “I was told to change the atmosphere,” he said twenty-five years later. “I made myself accessible: it was better to deal with complaints in prison, not let them go further up. I told them we must be professional, like the medical profession.… I recognized they were political leaders. They weren’t sissies.”3 Willemse could suddenly switch from decency to harshness, but most of the prisoners respected him: as Neville Alexander said, “We all realized that he was a quality person.”4 The Red Cross visitors were soon convinced, as they told their headquarters in Geneva, that Willemse was “trying to do his best to maintain a purely professional relationship with the inmates under his care. He has solved many problems.”5
Willemse knew he could not control the prisoners without their cooperation, and particularly Mandela’s. Already, as Mandela described it, “The inmates, not the authorities, seemed to be running the prison.”6 They had virtually stopped working, as there were now fewer warders to supervise them: “We just go to the quarry and do nothing,” wrote Kathrada in 1971.7 Willemse appealed to Mandela to help to impose some discipline in the quarry, and Mandela persuaded his fellow prisoners to resume work, but at their own pace. Willemse established his own relationship with Mandela: he too had been brought up in the Transkei, and could talk about the beautiful countryside and Xhosa dishes; Mandela would greet him in Afrikaans and talk about Afrikaner history. “Mandela had a special stature,” Willemse recalled. “He was experienced in the politics of change. I never felt he was waiting for revenge. I never experienced bitterness among any of them, but Mandela played a role in persuading them.”8
The Red Cross in Geneva was now playing a discreet role in improving the prisoners’ conditions. In 1972 it appointed a new Delegate-General for Africa, Jacques Moreillon, who paid three visits to the island in three years. He carefully kept aloof from political lobbyists like Helen Suzman, but kept pressing for an end to the quarry work and more freedom to study (both of which were achieved) and access to news (which would not be granted until September 1980). In 1974 he argued with the Minister of Justice, Jimmy Kruger, that political prisoners should be treated as normal inmates unless there were imperative security reasons: any hardening of conditions would “contribute an additional punishment” to the judge’s sentence.
Moreillon’s critical but deadpan reports were summarized by the President of the Red Cross in Geneva, then sent to Pretoria. The government reacted very slowly: at one point, exasperated by its inaction, Moreillon was tempted to resort to the ultimate deterrent of stopping the Red Cross visits altogether, which would provoke international outrage. Mandela dissuaded him, with a piece of advice he would always remember: “The good you bring is less important than the bad you prevent.” Moreillon was struck by Mandela’s sense of superiority to his warders, and his special stature on the island: prisoners asked to shake Moreillon’s hand, because he had shaken Mandela’s. He was shocked to discover that a particularly cruel warder was censoring Winnie’s letters, deliberately distorting their meaning, as a kind of mental torture, but Mandela merely said: “I rather feel sorry for him: he’s the last specimen of an extinguishing species, and doesn’t know it.”9
By 1972—just before a Red Cross visit—the prisoners were each issued with two new sets of underwear. By 1973 there was hot water for washing and for showers, though it would sometimes be cut off as punishment. By 1975 the prisoners were even allowed to improvise a tennis court in the yard. Mandela was now classed as an “A” group prisoner, and was allowed three letters and two visits a month—but no “contact visits,” in which he could touch visitors, although he was officially entitled to them. On doctors’ orders he was also allowed a special bed, some milk and a special salt-free diet for his high blood pressure.10
After more pressure from the Red Cross, the prisoners were allowed spells of alternative work, away from the lime quarry. They were taken down to the seashore to collect seaweed, which was shipped off to Japan as fertilizer. It was hard work, and the Atlantic could be icy in winter, but Mandela welcomed the view of the sea and the swooping seabirds. For lunch they picked mussels and clams, and caught abalone and sometimes even crayfish to provide their own seafood stew, which the warders shared. Away from the prison buildings, Robben Island has a wild natural beauty, like an unspoiled nature reserve—“a tiny Garden of Eden,” Denis Healey called i
t—and Mandela became fascinated by the wild birds.11
The political atmosphere on the island was beginning to change as younger warders arrived, some only seventeen, who were more easily influenced. The political prisoners tried hard to educate them. It was “a tedious, burdensome duty imposed on all prisoners by the necessities of survival with dignity,” said Alexander; but it had compensations: “The patient, tactful, often hurtful, discussions occasioned by this need are one of the great human events on the island, for here many of the (black) prisoners and (white) warders for the first (and probably in most cases for the last) time are able to exchange ideas about the way of life of South Africa.”12
Kathrada saw the young warders as delinquents in need of rehabilitation. “If they spend their impressionable years working with political prisoners,” he wrote in 1971, “I am sure it will have a healthy impact on their outlook. Ironically it is in jail that we have closest fraternisation 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 listening in to a tête-à-tête will find it hard to believe it is between prisoner and warder.”13
Mandela was becoming more clearly respected by most of the prison staff: when George Bizos visited the island now he lunched with Mandela on crayfish and other delicacies in the officers’ club, served by prisoners in white gloves.14 Mandela was a star attraction for newly arrived warders. “They were anxious to meet Mandela because they’d read about him,” said Billy Nair. “As the years went by we’d have the warders having meals with him, playing tennis or table tennis when their superiors weren’t watching. We’d have Madiba sitting with a warder in his cell, making the tea, giving biscuits, having long discussions, speaking Afrikaans—though not very well. He would win these chaps over.”15
Mandela was developing a special interest in the Afrikaner mindset. He urged the other prisoners to talk with the warders in Afrikaans, however much they disliked it, to understand more about their psychology and culture.16 “I realised the importance of learning Afrikaans history, of reading Afrikaans literature, of trying to understand these ordinary men … how they are indoctrinated, how they react,” said Maharaj. “They all have a blank wall in their minds. They just could not see the black man as a human being.”17 Maharaj was at first bitterly anti-Afrikaans, but came to realize that “You must understand the mind of the opposing commander … you can’t understand him unless you understand his literature and his language.”18 Mandela himself studied Afrikaans systematically, reading many Afrikaans books, and spoke it quite well, though Kathrada thought his pronunciation was “atrocious.”19 He acquired an understanding of the Afrikaner which colleagues in exile would later envy. “Mandela in his cell learnt much more about the Afrikaners than we who were fighting them,” said the MK leader Ronnie Kasrils. “He knew he could negotiate with them.”20
Mandela’s accommodation with the warders worried militant newcomers like Sonny Venkatrathnam, a Trotskyist from Durban who had been arrested for sabotage and was brutally tortured before arriving on the island. He was very skeptical about Mandela’s negotiations with the prison authorities: “Wow, Nelson is doing all that, how come we’re in such shit?” He saw Mandela mainly from a distance, as he was in a separate section, but he learned much from his behavior. He regarded Mandela not as a revolutionary but as a Christian nationalist: “I came out a different person: totally philosophical about things.… What amazed me about Nelson and Sisulu and other people who had life sentences was the calmness, the equanimity with which they led their prison lives. They didn’t throw in the towel. They didn’t display bitterness. They showed me how to laugh at the tortures we went through.” At first Venkatrathnam had vowed to revenge himself on the policeman who had tortured him: “I have no problems about that now. I said, ‘This guy’s a lesser human being than I am: why bother about that stuff?’ … I think I am a relatively calm person now.”21
The thirty prisoners cooped up in the isolation section faced their own strains. “Living with the same faces day in and day out must be having adverse psychological effects on us,” Kathrada wrote after seven years in jail. “We do get on one another’s nerves and we have long exhausted all conversation relating to our experiences outside. All the jokes have been told, even gossip has become repetitive.”22 But Mandela maintained his curiosity about other people. “He was learning all the time,” Fikile Bam noticed, “always going out and probing people. He schooled himself in our backgrounds.”23 Mandela enjoyed hearing people’s life stories: “Few things are more exciting to me here,” he wrote in 1975, “than to listen to a man’s background, the factors that influenced his thoughts and actions, the unknown battles he has fought and won.” He was always amused when new versions kept coming up.24
Mandela had his own pressures and setbacks. His old friend Fatima Meer—later his biographer—came to visit him at a time when he was confined to his cell as a punishment. “He looked terrible—emaciated, overworked in the prison yard. I knew Mandela as a strapping fellow; but now he was like a face in a pane of glass, or a squashed-up butterfly in a museum.… He sat there looking sallow, emaciated. I said, ‘You’ve grown so thin.’ He said, ‘But you’ve grown fat.’ ”25
The authorities tried to project a rosy picture of conditions on Robben Island to the world. In 1973 an Australian journalist, David “Whiskers” McNicoll from the conservative news magazine the Bulletin, arrived on the island and wrote a glowing account of Mandela in his cell, “scrupulously clean, like everything was on Robben Island.” Mandela looked to him to be in his mid-forties (he was then fifty-four), with smooth skin, alert, humorous eyes and hands which “showed no particular signs of hard work.” Mandela complained to him about the lack of news from outside and the strict censorship—twenty articles had been cut out from a single issue of Reader’s Digest—but sounded thoroughly optimistic: “I can say I have never had a single moment of depression, because I know that my cause will triumph. I am satisfied with the way things are proceeding.”26 McNicoll portrayed Mandela as preoccupied by his own status, resentful of being treated as inferior to Indians and Coloureds. (Neville Alexander, himself Coloured, accused McNicoll of having distorted “the image of one of the least snobbish and most modest men in any South African jail.”)27 All the prisoners were dismayed by the report. “He certainly saw the prison through different eyes to our eyes,” said Mac Maharaj. After his visit the prisoners insisted that they must have forewarning of press visits, and must be allowed to choose their spokesmen.28
The prisoners still harbored dreams of escape—though only one man, Autshumao, known as Henry the Strandloper, had ever escaped from Robben Island, in the seventeenth century. They had to be doubly wary because at times they suspected that the government wanted to provoke a shoot-out: some prisoners noticed in 1967 that warders were pointing their rifles at them while they worked in the quarry, as if to incite them. And there was one wild escape scheme which was uncovered before it could be attempted. It was originated in 1969 by Gordon Bruce, a left-wing idealist who had become a friend of Mandela through the International Club in Johannesburg in 1950.29 He devised a far-fetched plan to “spring” Mandela from the island by bribing a warder to let him out. Bruce would then take him by speedboat to Cape Town disguised as a frogman, then drive him to an airstrip and have him flown off by a well-known aviatrix, Sheila Scott—after which Bruce proposed to involve Mandela in a crusade for world peace, based in South Africa.30 Bruce advertised in the London Times for a “competent organiser, prepared to execute unusual work”; but one of the applicants was Gordon Winter, an informer for the South African secret service, BOSS, which planned to infiltrate the escape plot and have Mandela killed when he boarded the plane.31 But the British secret service (according to both Winter and Bruce) was tipped off about the scheme by Sir Robert Birley, an ex-headmaster of Eton then teaching in
South Africa, in whom Bruce had confided, and the whole plan was scrapped. After his release Mandela remained friendly with Bruce, and in 1992 arrived unannounced at his seventieth birthday party.32
In 1974 Mac Maharaj discovered a possible escape route after he had visited a dentist in Cape Town who turned out to be related to the wife of an underground ANC supporter, and who had insisted on the warders removing Maharaj’s leg irons and leaving the operating theater. Soon afterward Mandela arranged to be taken to the same dentist with Wilton Mkwayi and Maharaj, who armed himself with a knife he found in the truck. Their leg irons were removed, the warders left, and Maharaj prepared to jump through the window to a side street. But then he noticed that the street was empty of people, and suddenly suspected that the police were waiting in hiding to shoot them as they emerged. Mandela agreed to abort it. Maharaj was certain afterward that it had been a police ambush: “I kicked myself that I could have got Madiba killed.”33
There were some diversions from the monotony of prison life, including religious services each Sunday conducted by chaplains from different denominations. After the third year they preached in the courtyard, which gave them the added attraction of fresh air: the more long-winded the priests, the more the prisoners liked them.34 Mandela listened to them all: “I started my own ecumenical movement in jail,” he joked afterward. The Muslim priest was popular, Mandela recalled, because on special days “he came not only with the Qur’an but with biryani, samosas and other lovely delicacies.”35 (The warders clamped down when twenty-four prisoners suddenly declared themselves converts to Islam.) Mandela took the opportunity to learn more about the faith which had influenced many of his friends. He even got permission to visit a Muslim shrine on the island which commemorated one of the heroes of Islam in South Africa, Sheik Mantura, who had been banished to the island in 1744, and who had died there. Mandela was fascinated by the shrine, particularly by its murals, and insisted that the guard take his shoes off before entering.36 Mandela also became quite friendly with the Dutch Reformed chaplain, the Reverend André Scheffler, a lean, craggy man who had begun by mocking the freedom fighters; but when he warned the prisoners against blaming everything on the white man, Mandela agreed with him. After Scheffler preached about Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, the authorities told him he was no longer acceptable; Mandela gave him a parting gift of guava for his wife.37
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