Araft of draconian regulations governing the writing of letters by South African political prisoners and their random implementation by mean-spirited guards was designed to control the most precious aspects of a prisoner’s soul – their contact with loved ones and news of the outside world.1
After political prisoners were sentenced in court, they were assigned to the prison where they were supposed to serve their punishment. In Nelson Mandela’s case, his life as a condemned prisoner began in Pretoria Local Prison after he received a five-year sentence on 7 November 1962 for leaving the country without a passport and inciting workers to strike. Already a prisoner, he was brought back to court on sabotage charges in 1963, and on 12 June 1964 he received a lifelong sentence. His wife, Winnie Mandela, visited him in Pretoria that day, and hours later, without warning, he and six of the seven comrades sentenced with him were taken from Pretoria for the long flight in a military aircraft to the notorious prison on Robben Island. They arrived on a bitterly cold winter morning on 13 June 1964. Unlike inmates who had committed ‘common law’ crimes like rape, robbery, and assault, who were classified as C Grade and sometimes B Grade on arrival, political prisoners were assigned to D Grade, the lowest possible classification with the least privileges. They were allowed only one visitor every six months and were entitled to write and receive only one letter of five hundred words every six months. So unpredictable was the process of sending and receiving letters that six years after he was imprisoned, Mandela met with his lawyers on Robben Island and listed examples of ‘unreasonable and vexatious behaviour and conduct of the authorities’. He said that the disruptions to his correspondence, ‘indicate a deliberate intention and policy on the part of the authorities to cut me off and isolate me from all external contacts, to frustrate and demoralise me, to make me despair and lose all hope and eventually break me.’2
Later on, when the censors tired of counting words, they began accepting letters of a page and a half.3 Letters to their lawyers and prison authorities did not come from their quota. Saturdays and Sundays were earmarked for visits, and letters were delivered on a Saturday. Prisoners could give up a visit in exchange for the receipt of two letters. Initially, both visits and correspondence had to be with ‘first degree relatives’. Prisoners were forbidden from mentioning other prisoners in their letters or from writing about prison conditions or anything the authorities may have construed as being ‘political’.4 Every letter went through the Censor’s Office on Robben Island, where incoming and outgoing mail was checked.5 Decades later, Mandela recalled:
They didn’t want you to discuss things other than family matters and especially when they were considered by them to be of a political nature. And that was the reason, that you must confine yourself purely to family matters. And then there was ignorance of language. If you used the word ‘war’, it doesn’t matter what context, they would say, ‘Take it out’ because they didn’t understand the language very well. And war is war; it can’t have any other meaning. If you said the ‘war of ideas’, then you had said something you were not supposed to say.6
In his book about the fifteen years he spent as a prisoner on Robben Island, in the same section as Mandela, Eddie Daniels paints a picture of the ‘frustration’ of arbitrary, incompetent, and ‘vindictive’ censoring and holding back of letters.7
Conditions began to improve slightly from 1967, arguably due to the intervention of Helen Suzman – an opposition member of Parliament to whom Mandela reported ‘a reign of terror’ on the Island. The International Committee of the Red Cross and the prisoners’ own efforts also contributed to these changes. They were then allowed to write and receive one letter every three months and be visited every three months.8
A prisoner was supposed to remain in a category of privileges for two years, meaning that after six years D Grade prisoners would be in A Grade, with the most privileges. Mandela, however, remained in D Grade for ten years. We can see from his letters, where he sometimes wrote his grade (the prisoners also referred to this as a ‘group’), that he was in B Grade in 1972 and finally received A Grade designation in 1973, allowing the writing and receiving of six letters each month.9
Before being upgraded, a prisoner had to have their behaviour assessed by the prison board, which conducted discussions with prisoners that Mandela said were for the purposes of ‘victimising’ political prisoners.10
Despite the relentless censoring by bureaucrats, Nelson Mandela the prisoner became a prolific correspondent. He copied down his letters in notebooks to aid him with rewriting them when the censors refused to send them unless he removed certain paragraphs or when letters went missing in transit. He also liked to keep a record of what he’d said to whom. Jailed from 5 August 1962 until 11 February 1990, he wrote hundreds of letters. Not all of them, however, reached their destination in one piece. Some were censored to the extent that they became unintelligible, others were delayed for no reason, and some were not sent at all. Some he managed to smuggle out in the belongings of prisoners being released.
Prisoners were rarely informed if a letter remained unsent and usually discovered this if a recipient complained of not having received a letter. It is not known, for instance, whether all the letters he wrote to Adelaide Tambo under the guise of various nicknames reached her in London where she was living in exile with her husband, Oliver Tambo, president of the African National Congress (ANC) and Mandela’s former law partner. The letters were likely intended for both of them. We do know from fellow prisoner Michael Dingake that Mandela had ‘demanded the right to correspond with O. R. Tambo and exchange views on the liberation struggle.’11
A father of five young children when he was first taken into prison, Mandela was not allowed to see his children until they were sixteen years old. Letters became a vital tool of his parenting.
In an official letter of complaint to officials twelve years into his imprisonment, Mandela wrote, ‘I sometimes wish science could invent miracles and make my daughter get her missing birthday cards and have the pleasure of knowing that her Pa loves her, thinks of her and makes efforts to reach her whenever necessary. It is significant that repeated attempts on her part to reach me and the photos she has sent have disappeared without trace whatsoever.’
The most painful of Mandela’s letters is the series of ‘Special Letters’ in addition to his quota, written after the deaths of his beloved mother, Nosekeni, in 1968, and of his firstborn, his son Thembi, a year later. Forbidden from attending their funerals, he was reduced to consoling his children and other family members in letters through this harrowing time, and writing to thank senior family members for stepping up and ensuring that his mother and son got the send-offs they deserved.
A lawyer by profession, Mandela habitually used the written word to press officials to uphold prisoners’ human rights, and on at least two occasions he wrote to officials demanding that they release him and his comrades.
Dingake described Mandela’s role in prison from the early 1960s as that of a ‘battering ram’.12 In the face of ‘atrocious’ conditions, he could not be ignored, ‘not only because of his status, but because he would “not let them do it”’.13 His relentless campaigning for prisoners’ rights eventually broke down the resolve of the authorities to have each prisoner raise their complaints individually.14 Mandela ‘defiantly continued to describe general conditions’ in his letters to the commissioner of prisons, and the rest of the prisoners began laying personal complaints ‘at every opportunity’. It was ‘impossible’, Dingake writes, for guards to record the ‘complaints from every single one of more than a thousand inmates’.15 The rule was ‘repealed by practice’ and individuals or groups from each section in the prison were allowed to speak on behalf of all the prisoners.16
During his discussions and in letters to government officials in the late 1980s, Mandela urged for the release of his comrades. See for instance his letters to the commissioner of prisons dated 11 September 1989 (page 545) and 10 October 1989 (page 556). Finally Mandela’s efforts bore fruit when the remaining five men sentenced with him to life were freed on 15 October 1989. (Denis Goldberg had been freed in 1985 and Govan Mbeki in 1987.) He walked out of prison less than four months later.
Nelson Mandela has left us a rich archive of letters documenting his twenty-seven years in prison, which echo his anger, his self-control, and his love for family and country.