Many of the dictionaries in the Western world still speak of the term “comrade” as if it is associated only with communist parties, but its use embraces labor and social movements as well. During the French Revolution, titles of nobility were abolished, and monsieur and madame (literally, “my lord” and “my lady”) were replaced by citoyen for men and citoyenne for women (both meaning “citizen”). The deposed King Louis XVI, for instance, was referred to as Citoyen Louis Capet to emphasize his loss of privilege. When the socialist movement gained momentum in the mid-nineteenth century, socialists began to look for an egalitarian alternative to terms like “mister,” “miss,” or “missus.” Ultimately they chose “comrade” as their preferred term of address.
Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, and its allies in the labor unions and Communist Party, all used the term “comrade” to project a common identity and show mutual respect. Beyond the salutation, there’s another meaning of great value to Mandela: the idea of a community based on comradeship.
Many of the former prisoners I met on Robben Island, at a reunion of ex-prisoners in 1995, said that the comradeship they shared with each other allowed them to cope with the brutal prison experience.
The Rivonia Trial defendants who were sent to “the Island” worked closely together as a team. Two were acquitted, the rest given life sentences, including the two white defendants.
They respected each other and they relied on each other, consulting on political issues and finding ways to be supportive, even though they heard each other’s stories endlessly, sometimes to the point of boredom.
They saw Mandela as their leader, although there was also a formal decision-making body called “the high organ” run by the Communists in the group who believed in a Marxist-style centralized hierarchy. Mandela was seen as “leading from the back,” as he explained in his Long Walk to Freedom: “A leader . . . is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.”
Former prisoner Laloo Chiba confirmed that “the comrades” often had differences with each other, and sometimes that led to tension, even violence. He credited Mandela, Sisulu, and Kathrada with restoring calm: “There were a lot of debates that we had, you know. You live in prison conditions, tensions are high, the pressure from the warders, and of course you are also frustrated, and under those conditions people do tend to boil over sometimes, not physically but in other ways . . . but Kathy [Ahmed Kathrada] was always calm, ensuring that he brought order and stability into any relationship.”
I interjected: “Even when fights threatened, even when people were ready to go at each other?”
“Yes. He was still calm. One of the things about Kathy, like Madiba, like Walter, when there were problems, they always moved to the front row to absorb the shocks and the pressures. But when things were calm, when things were okay, when things were running smoothly, like Walter, like Madiba, they moved right to the back. That’s one of the great things about any leader.”
A pensive Nelson Mandela, in 1951, with journalist Ruth First. Jurgen Schadeberg
The prisoners were up against rules and routines designed to break their spirit, but, in retrospect, many now say they had it easier than their comrades on the outside. Ahmed Kathrada, who became very close to Mandela, spoke to the sense that they were, in some ways, lucky: “What sustained us also on Robben Island, besides the longest expectation, was the knowledge, all the time we were suffering in prison, although it was not a picnic, although it was hard, that as difficult as it was, there was always the knowledge that while we were having it difficult inside, our comrades outside were in the cold face of the struggle. In a sense we were protected, because no policeman could come to Robben Island and start shooting at us. We were protected. Our comrades outside were not.
“Many of them were tortured, many were killed. We were protected. The 600 who were killed in the Soweto Uprising, they were in the cold face of the struggle. We were not. I think that sometimes the suffering of the prisoners is exaggerated, in a sense. I must emphasize that I am not trying to minimize the hardship of prison, but on Robben Island, and for political prisoners as a whole, we were not the core of the struggle. That was taking place outside Robben Island, in the country, in exile. That was the core of the struggle.”
That may be, but at the time the prisoners were being challenged every day by hostile warders, repressive conditions, and arbitrary orders. Former prison guard Christo Brand told me that he and his colleagues were required to be brutal. Brand is a native Afrikaans-speaker; English was, as for many white South Africans, particularly those with little education, his second or even third language. He revealed the harsh calculation in the prison’s methodology in his rapid-fire Afrikaner-inflected English: “Prisoners must do hard labor. We must keep them physically and mentally hard-working, breaking stones, making this, doing that in the limestone quarry, whatever will make them so tired in the evening when they get back to their cells they can’t think to make something, uprising, whatever. They are too tired. The must just eat, relax and fall asleep.
“The next day: push them again. And through this hard labor we keep them, in a way, fit. And the food is also bad. And that was prison’s way to break the person down, to rehabilitate him in prison with hard labor. That’s why we were brutal on them. You will see there was a few incidents that happened where they dig a hole and urinate on one of the prisoners, that type of thing happened. Brutality happened.”
Resisting brutality gave the prisoners a common struggle and brought them together. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Africa scholar Fran Buntman concluded that it was the conditions in prison that fostered the will to find effective forms of resistance: “A common spirit of resistance helped them develop habits of mutual tolerance and construct autonomous social and political structures outside the authority of their warders. Assimilation of new inmates and the release of old ones helped to spread organizational tactics and knowledge back into the wider political struggle; experience acquired through interactions with prison authorities prepared a cadre of leaders with the patience and bargaining skills necessary to negotiate an eventual settlement with the regime.”
Raymond Suttner of the ANC found Buntman’s research of value: “A key element of the book is understanding the responses of the prisoners as an attempt to create an alternative world insofar as they come to control more and more of their lives, albeit within a situation of incarceration. They were able to establish a culture that was in the first place a continuation of the political cultures of their respective organizations prior to imprisonment, although the African National Congress (ANC) was able, partly through its numbers and partly through its long experience, to achieve this process most effectively.”
White prisoners like Denis Goldberg have said they had it harder than the blacks because they had less support and were considered traitors. He told us, “The attitude was—and I experienced this throughout the twenty-two years from my arrest to my release, from the lowest policeman and prison guard, to generals—‘We don’t like Nelson Mandela, but we respect him for fighting for his people. But you, Goldberg, we hate you. ’Cause you have betrayed us, because you are white.’ And the hatred was palpable throughout.”
The filmmakers and production designers worked imaginatively not only to depict this harsh reality but also to create an environment to show the comradeship of the prisoners in action.
The actor Fana Mokoena (Govan Mbeki) said, “I think it’s an amazing environment for a performer. [Movie director Justin Chadwick] has kind of made it too easy, but very difficult as well—because it’s almost too real. But that’s what he wanted to create from the onset. . . . He doesn’t want to see Mandela the hero, he wants to see the man. He wants to see how these men were tired every day. He wants to see them scared, almost half crying. He wants to see them cold, he wants to see them happy. He wants to see the people. And he’s created that environment for that to happen, which has been really quite amazing.”
In a 1996 interview with archivist Padraig O’Malley, Ahmed Kathrada stressed the positive aspects of comradeship that sustained the men’s morale:
What one misses very much is the camaraderie, the very close contact with friends and colleagues, although we were of course confined to one section of the prison, the B section where the president and, on average, about twenty or twenty-five of us stayed. But we also had the advantage in our section of prison, the fortunate advantage of being in the presence of outstanding individuals, political leaders, academicians, and just your average person of exceptional quality. . . .
Over the years that we shared together, we built a very unique sort of relationship with one another. . . . You know, you build a relationship where you are free with each other, you are frank with one another, you criticize one another, you accept criticism, you make observations, you analyze situations. It was very easy and informal.
Out in the world here you are thrust into bureaucracy, into a lot of formality where you are not able to have these extensive relaxed discussions as you had in prison. Those are the things one misses and much of it brings back fond memories both of a serious nature and more light-hearted. One misses also the atmosphere free, or relatively free, of tensions because as the years went by there was relaxation, there was less and less harassment so that we were free of tension, we had time to think, we had time to discuss seriously, we had time for fun. One misses all that.
What they didn’t miss were rules that led to deep feelings of isolation: strict silence in their cells, twenty-three-hour lockups on weekends and public holidays with little time for exercise. They were ordered to sleep at 8:00 p.m., but lights were kept on. Working in the very white lime quarry left them covered in dust. In Mandela’s case, the dust damaged his tear ducts. To the government, his cell was meant to be his tomb.
Mandela responded by finding something to do that took him outside the austere cells, in his case, tending a garden. The Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka once wrote, “Your Logic Frightens Me, Mandela,” in which he compares Mandela’s patience to that of a gardener. Unknown to Soyinka, that’s what Mandela became.
Elleke Boehmer wrote, “Given how many prison hours were spent in introspective seclusion, gardening became especially important to Mandela, as it has to other political prisoners, as a link to the material world.”
In l975, working with Laloo Chiba—a former commander in the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the Spear of the Nation—they raised two thousand chilies, one thousand tomatoes, and two watermelons, as well as peppers and cucumbers. The gardening continued when Prisoner 466/64 became 220/82 at Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison. Some of the fresh vegetables from Mandela’s gardens were given to the guards, others were used for special meals on Sundays.
Boehmer continued, “How to explain the sustained importance of gardening to the prisoner Mandela? For one, from the perspective of a self-styled ‘country boy,’ the pleasures of working the earth no doubt recalled the rural environment of his childhood . . . for another, in his garden he could practice prudence, self-sufficiency, and provident planning.”
Mandela himself has said, “In prison, a garden is one of the few things you can really master and call your own. . . . The feeling of being the steward of this tiny patch of earth is a small taste of freedom.”
There was also a spirit of compassionate concern in what were called the “single cells,” even for prisoners who came from other political parties, like Eddie Daniels.
Daniels was the only member of the Liberal Party behind bars, serving a fifteen-year sentence for sabotage. He told me one story that captured why he came to love Madiba and the community he led. It also speaks to the way Mandela and “the comrades” looked after each other:
“I was sick in jail. We were not allowed to go to the hospital. . . . I’m laying on the floor. Madiba comes back from the quarry and he says to someone, ‘Where is Danny?’
“They say, ‘Danny is lying on the floor in his cell, he is sick.’ Madiba’s cell is at the bottom of the corridor, my cell is right at the top. He walks all the way up to my cell, sits on the floor and comforts me. Then he’s locked up in his cell, I’m locked up in mine.
“The next morning . . . our cells are opened up for us to go and clean our buckets because we haven’t got running water or flush toilets. So we go into the common toilet and clean our buckets.
“So Madiba walks all the way up the corridor to my cell with his bucket on his arm. Puts his bucket on the floor, sits down next to me, and he comforts me. He comforts me. Then he stands up puts his bucket over his arm, puts my bucket over his other arm, and he goes to the common toilet, cleans my bucket, brings it back to me.
“Now, to put the story into context, Madiba, an international figure, the most important leader of the most powerful organization fighting the apartheid government, the most important prisoner in South Africa, he could have instructed any of his members to look after Danny. He came to look after me himself, freely, not because he had to.”
Even as he supported the collective and often spoke in its name, he also asserted his own personality and style as a leader who stood out from the others, yet kept the respect of the group.
Historian Verne Harris of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory saw a conflict within him. “It’s a tension that has played out inside of him too because there’s a part of him that enjoys the adulation, there’s a vanity. He enjoys the crowds and the elevation. But there’s another part that precisely feels uncomfortable with that. ‘I’m part of a collective, I’ve always relied on others. I’ve had mentors, I’m part of a movement.’ . . . It’s complex.”
Sahm Venter works alongside Verne at the Centre. She calls herself a “recovering” journalist, and is absorbed in a deeper analysis of Madiba’s role. She has become critical of the way her former colleagues treat personalities like Mandela.
She told me, “Well isn’t that what the media does? The media likes to pick out a character. I mean, here’s a perfect person that Walter Sisulu found to front the organization, but having said that, Madiba often strays away from the collective. For example, when he was in Pollsmoor Prison and he started talking to the government, he didn’t purposefully tell his comrades until it was kind of too late because he was such a democrat, because he knew that if all of those people had said ‘don’t do it’ he would’ve stopped and we would not have reached democracy when we did.”
He anticipated criticism and sometimes even asked for it.
Venter, who is now more of a historian than a reporter, explained, “At that time, when they were in the trenches with the National Party, it was difficult. But from what I understand, when he became president, and in the run up, he would enjoy being criticized and say, ‘Well, just give me your best shot and I’ll argue my way out of it.’ I suppose you know he’s a human being, having gone through everything he did, and then to get some question he regards as impudent or whatever. He’s human.”
Sometimes he seemed superhuman, perhaps because of his discipline.
On April 10, 1993, Mandela was interrupted for a phone call in the middle of a formal reception. Over the phone, he was told that ANC leader Chris Hani had just been killed. Mandela was shaken, and put the phone down to reflect on the ominous news. After a minute of silence, he returned to the reception line without telling anyone what he had just learned.
He became tougher as he moved into the next phase, outside of prison. “He could be dismissive,” said Venter, who recalled the way he stood up to then South African President de Klerk’s attack on the ANC during the multiparty Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) talks, which took place in 1991 and 1992.
“That was amazing. I mean that was classic Madiba. No prepared speech. He just got back up on that stage and he let him have it, you know, cutting him off at the knees. He could do that. I think he stands with a great deal of moral authority.”
If, at times, he lost his cool, slamming the table and wagging his finger at underlings—if as Verne Harris said, he was “not a saint”—it was because he knew how important it was to express his views. So although Mandela, most of the time, was the best of comrades, he also believed that sometimes this meant going in the opposite direction. As Mandela himself would say, “Good leaders lead.”