Mandela was disappointed by the Reverend Jones, the Methodist preacher, who kept insisting on reconciliation, without suggesting that whites should be reconciled to blacks.38 But the Anglican, the Reverend Hughes, was (said Michael Dingake) “everyone’s darling.”39 “What a delightful man Rev. Hughes is, and what sense of humour!” wrote Kathrada in an uncensored letter.40 Hughes, a Welshman, who arrived on the island with his own organ, loved the prisoners’ singing, which reminded him of home. He wove news from the outside world into his sermons, and delighted Mandela by quoting Churchill: “We shall fight on the beaches …”41 There was sometimes tension between warders and priests, and one thuggish guard objected to wine being served at communion. As Kwedi Mkalipi said: “I had seen what I used to think the most sacred thing in Christianity now shattered.”42
Mandela’s own faith was a matter of much speculation. Many of his basic principles—his capacity for seeing the best in people, his belief in the dignity of man, his forgiveness—were essentially religious. Some visitors, like Frieda Matthews, found him positively Christlike.43 And he was becoming more sympathetic to the Churches. He liked to talk about sympathetic priests like Trevor Huddleston, and defended missionaries against critics such as Nosipho Majeke, author of The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest. “Is that really what we thought about missionaries?” he asked his young friend Bam, and his letters often harked back to his missionary teachers.44 But he was not a formal believer like Oliver Tambo; he did not quote the Bible, or discuss theology. His interest in the Sunday services was more political than religious. “He gave us hope when everything was rock bottom and we saw no future,” said Eddie Daniels. “But character, not religion, was his strength.”45
Mandela’s capacity for forgiveness already amazed visitors. Fatima Meer was exasperated when he asked after an earlier colleague in Durban, who had since been denounced as a quisling. “Why do you want to know about him?” she asked impatiently. Mandela reminded her that the man had once provided a car to drive Luthuli to the airport. Fatima silently thought: “Is he redeemed, for that?”46
Mandela’s forgiveness was shared by many of his fellow prisoners, who were determined to avoid bitterness and self-pity. “Prison completely cured me of self-pity and of being self-centred,” said Bam.47 They were reminded that their situation could have been much worse when prisoners joined them who had been tortured, or when they heard about many who had died in detention. Kathrada always remembered the Chinese proverb which Father Hughes quoted: “I grumbled and groused because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.”48 But it was Mandela who remained the model of tolerance.
If the Robben Islanders had a common culture and text, it was not the Bible or the Koran, but Shakespeare. “Somehow Shakespeare always had something to say to us,” said Kathrada, who had once tried to argue that Shakespeare was a racist, but was soon shouted down.49 “We would recite long, long passages from Shakespeare,” Neville Alexander recalled. “Usually the more militant passages: Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, of course, and Henry V.”50 Shakespeare’s political relevance to black South Africans was clear enough: Julius Caesar offered a kind of textbook for revolutionary theory. But his deeper understanding of human courage, suffering and sacrifice reassured the prisoners that they were part of a universal drama.
Sonny Venkatrathnam kept a copy of Shakespeare’s works on his shelf, disguised behind Indian religious pictures. “I’m not a religious person, but I wouldn’t part with this, because it gave us such joys and countless readings,” he said later. He circulated it to all the inmates of the single cells, to autograph their favorite passages, providing a unique jailbirds’ anthology. Kathrada chose Henry V’s “Once more unto the breach.” Wilton Mkwayi chose Malvolio’s “Some are born great,” from Twelfth Night. Govan Mbeki chose the opening lines of the same play: “If music be the food of love.” Billy Nair chose Caliban’s lines from The Tempest: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother.” Sisulu chose Shylock’s
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,
For suff’rance is the badge of all our tribe …
Neville Alexander chose the sonnet beginning
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end.
Andrew Masondo chose Mark Antony’s
O! pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers.
Mandela also chose a passage from Julius Caesar, with his signature for December 16, 1977:
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.51
Classical drama gained a new intensity in the prison; Sophocles’ Antigone was seen as especially relevant to the struggle. The playwright Athol Fugard wrote a short play, The Island, based on reports from the prison, which was performed in Cape Town in 1973, and later in London and on Broadway, in which two prisoners perform a minimal version of Antigone. On the actual island Mandela played the part of Creon in a full-length production of Antigone. He saw Creon as a leader who was originally wise and patriotic, but who showed himself merciless and inflexible in refusing to let Antigone bury her dead brother, while Antigone was a freedom fighter “who defied the law on the ground that it was unjust.”52
The prisoners were gradually allowed more forms of recreation. After 1967 these included outdoor games such as rugby and cricket, though they were withdrawn for a time in 1971, and a court ruling defined them as privileges rather than rights.53 They even played Monopoly, which helped to educate the socialists about capitalism. Mandela did not always excel at these games: he told Winnie in January 1975 that he had been trounced at chess, draughts and dominoes as well as tennis, explaining that he could not concentrate because he was thinking of her.54 But he played a relentless game of chess or draughts: “Nobody wants to play chess with Nelson because he takes three days to play a game,” reported Venkatrathnam. “But that’s part of the man’s makeup. Sometimes he becomes very inscrutable, slow, but very smart, very adept.”55 In one chess tournament Mandela played a game against a young ex–medical student called Salim, which went on for two or three days before Salim resigned from exhaustion. It was, said Kathrada, Mandela’s war of attrition.56 The Namibian leader Toivo ja Toivo complained that Mandela would use a lawyer’s tactics: “He would sit there the whole day and only move one piece. And I’m a man who likes to move about.”57 “I carefully considered the ramifications of every option,” said Mandela about his draughts technique. “It is my preferred mode of operating, not only in draughts but in politics.”58
Mandela’s happiest relaxation was the small garden which the prisoners were eventually allowed to establish in a corner of the courtyard, excavating the rocks above the soil. It gave him a sense of freedom and creativity, taking him back to his Transkei childhood and the garden at his mission school at Clarkebury, which he had tended for the headmaster, the Reverend Harris. “Nowadays the garden is Nelson’s baby and he is fanatical about it,” wrote Kathrada in November 1975. “As expected he has read everything he could lay his hands on.” Mandela got seeds from the warders, and diligently practiced horticulture, helped by a team of prisoners led by Laloo Chiba. Kathrada watched them “trooping out each morning with rulers, ballpoints, labels, and other instruments, and carefully taking measurements and making copious notes.” By late 1975 they had raised two thousand chilies, nearly a thousand tomatoes, a few radishes, onions and sweet melons and two watermelons. Mandela’s preoccupation with producing the best possible crops could be trying even for his fellow gardeners. To provide compost he insisted on collecting the bones after any meal of meat, and asked colleagues to hammer them into powder. When he lacked volunteers he proposed a simpler form of compost: hum
an waste. The prisoners dug a big hole in the courtyard, and every morning tipped their toilet buckets into it. But the stench, as Kathrada reported, “did not endear this scheme to any of us,” and soon it was abandoned.
The great excitement of 1975 was the arrival of a female chameleon, which moved from chili to tomato to radish to lettuce, trying in vain (Kathrada observed) to alter her pigment accordingly. She gave birth to six babies, and promptly abandoned them—which (wrote Kathrada) “excited all our parental feelings, and our concern for the orphan, the lowly, the helpless. Each morning, and throughout the day you’d find a cluster of chaps around one little baby, engaged in animated discussion.” But no one could solve the question: where was Papa chameleon?59
Mandela saw the garden as a substitute for cultivating human relationships with absent friends, including Winnie, but also as a metaphor for politics: a leader, too, he wrote, “sows seeds, and then watches, cultivates and harvests the result.”60 He wrote to Winnie about nursing a tomato plant which had been injured, and sadly pulling it out when it died: Winnie equated it with nursing a child in the midst of the struggle, only to see it mown down by the police.61
It was the opportunity to study that was most precious to the prisoners. Mandela had earlier urged the Commissioner to “let the atmosphere of a university prevail,” and by the late sixties that atmosphere was appearing: the quarry was becoming a kind of campus for what came to be called “the university of Robben Island.”62 The prisoners saw it as their own achievement, though the Red Cross liked to think it was the “Red Cross University.”63 Anyone with a degree or other qualification would teach his subject, and each morning they would plan their courses at the quarry. They could combine teaching even with hard labor: “People could present actual lessons, even lectures, while they were swinging a pick or shoveling lime,” said Alexander. But as the work was relaxed, or stopped altogether, the teaching became more organized, and they could stand in groups, drawing diagrams in the sand, as Fikile Bam recalled: “There was always movement as you got to the workplace, little groups assembling in different places, and you knew that there were classes in progress.”64
Mandela taught a course on political economy, tracing the development of societies from feudalism to capitalism to socialism—which he still saw as the most advanced stage. But he preferred arguing to teaching, and always welcomed questions from his pupils, which forced him to think harder about his views. He saw the Robben Island system as essentially Socratic, using dialogue to clarify the ideas of both teachers and pupils.65 Michael Dingake, the Botswanan freedom fighter who took two degrees on the island, remembered Mandela as the most tireless participant in these discussions, with a fiercely candid approach which could offend his opponents: “In argument against someone with insubstantial facts, Nelson can be vicious, by adopting a modified Socratic method. Very few people like to be cross-examined and exposed in their vagueness and ignorance. Quite a few times I have come out of an argument with Madiba ‘bloodied’ and humiliated. None the less, I have found such an experience fruitful in the long term. For it has taught me to look at both sides of the question, to attempt to give an objective and honest answer to it.”66
Some prisoners were actually illiterate when they came to the island. At first, much of the education was informal and oral, “simply talking to one another, sharing views about what we knew of politics, history, language,” as Alexander recalled.67 But for most illiterates, before long, learning to read and write became an engrossing interest. “We took people from the lowest level, who came to the island illiterate, and they had to be taught,” said Govan Mbeki. “And by the time they left Robben Island they were able to write letters home.… And they spoke English.”68 Dikgang Moseneke, a PAC activist who came to the island as a boy in 1963 (and who later became Chairman of South African Telkom), reckoned that everyone in his section could read and write within a few years.69 Many progressed to more formal studies through correspondence schools, acquiring both the motivation and the opportunity for higher education which they might never have had outside. Several who arrived with a minimal education left with one or two degrees. Some of the young warders were also infected by the educational atmosphere. “Many recruits volunteered for the island,” recalled Colonel Willemse, the prison head. “It was a university for the warders too.”70 Sergeant Aubrey du Toit, the warder who ran the Prisoners’ Studies Department, recalled that Mandela was “very strict about people studying—not only prisoners but warders.” When he told Mandela that he had been studying only practical Afrikaans, Mandela replied, “Sergeant, you should be ashamed of yourself. I am Xhosa and I did Afrikaans and Nederlands.”71 Later one of the prisoners advised du Toit to leave the prison service and to join the insurance company Sanlam—which he did.
The atmosphere of self-improvement and education helped the political prisoners to overcome the sexual strains and frustrations which caused ructions among common-law prisoners, who sometimes resorted to sodomy or violence. “The sexual urge was sublimated into politics,” reckoned George Bizos, who was warned that the prisoners did not appreciate dirty jokes.72 Many of the younger political prisoners undoubtedly felt frustrated by their enforced abstinence, but the discipline was strict. Mandela himself, as he explained later, had had plenty of experience of abstinence at his mission boarding schools, but his friends were surprised by his ignorance about homosexuality. He had once, he said later, “reacted with revulsion against the whole system of being gay.”73 But when a prisoner boldly brought up the subject, he was glad to debate it. Dr. Motlana, who saw many ex-prisoners after their release, believed that the body became accustomed to abstinence, though there were often problems with wives and girlfriends. Mandela would warn prisoners before they left that they would have difficulties adjusting to their wives.74 The prevailing atmosphere remained puritanical and self-denying—reinforced by the complete lack of alcohol, which in some other jails could incapacitate intelligent prisoners.
The prisoners’ isolation provided a unique opportunity for continuous and organized study, protected from all the interruptions and discontinuities of urban life—the advertisements, magazines and sound bites which normally provided constant distractions—what Coleridge called “destroyers of the memory.”75 The lack of written texts put a premium on memory, and many prisoners found they could recall quotations or verses they thought they had forgotten. “The amazing thing is that people were remembering things,” said Fikile Bam. “They came back in their sleep.”76 Lesley van der Heyden, a former English teacher who gave classes on the island, found his mind bringing back forgotten poetry.77 The need to memorize facts concentrated the mind. “You had to listen to what they say outside: that listening had got to be sharp,” said Sisulu afterward. “I had to rely on my memory, now I rely on what I write.”78 “One thing a prisoner has is his memory,” recalled Raks Seakhoa, who came to the island as a barely educated boy and emerged a serious writer. “My memory was very intact—unlike now, when I forget both silly and serious things.”79 Even Neville Alexander, who arrived as a highly educated academic, found his memory improved on the island because he could not write anything down. Meanwhile his mind was being sharpened by argument: “The challenge of debating and competing with people like Nelson was quite important for becoming rigorous and systematic.”80
Mandela already had an exceptional memory, as he had known since school. After his humiliations at university, he was able to study more systematically in his cell, pursuing his LL.B. degree until that privilege was withdrawn. He sometimes worried that his memory was failing, but his legal mind was honed by establishing an informal practice on the island, advising all kinds of prisoners, many of them illiterate, on matters such as how to appeal against their sentences, and even helping warders with their own legal problems.81 More important, he was developing his intellectual powers and his interest in ideas. “From year to year he was changing and revising his views,” said Fikile Bam. “He didn’t have ideological depth before h
e came in: he got that in prison.”82
The climate of discipline gave graduates of Robben Island an authority and confidence which never left them. It was, in the words of the historians Tom Karis and Gail Gerhart, “a culture of comradeship, co-operation and learning, of fierce debate coupled with a political tolerance.”83 It was this common culture, with Mandela as the role model, which would be so important during the peaceful transfer of power twenty years later.
The quarry was not only a campus, but a debating club. After the first two years the warders became less strict in supervising the prisoners, and allowed them to talk as they worked. Mandela would join their small groups in discussing all kinds of topics. Should boys be circumcised? Were there tigers in Africa? Should homosexuality be tolerated in prison? But it was in the political arguments that he faced his real challenges. Within the isolation section there were always differences between the four ANC leaders who made up the original High Organ. Mandela and Sisulu, both conciliators from the Transvaal, were often at odds with Govan Mbeki from the Eastern Cape, who as a convinced Marxist was impatient of consensus; but the High Organ had most trouble from Harry Gwala, a fiery communist from Natal known as the “Lion of the Midlands,” who was in the communal cells until he was released in 1973, but who returned four years later. Gwala combined a thorough knowledge of Marxist theory and history with a soapbox style which appealed to the younger prisoners; he organized lectures on “the labor theory of value.”
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