Robben Island is an unmistakable landmark from any point in Cape Town. It can be seen from the glamorous beaches and shopping malls, from the spectacular peaks of the Table Mountain range and at many points along the Atlantic Ocean waterfront. After dark, the single beam from its lighthouse is a blur on the choppy sea, visible for miles around.
It sits in the inhospitable Atlantic Ocean, seven kilometres from the mainland, a wretched monument to the centuries of misery it has seen.
The island, a flat oval about 11 kilometres in diameter, was once a leper colony where unfortunates were sent to die. Later, it was a quarantine station housing sick animals. But its natural God-given purpose must surely have been as a prison. A low-lying, windswept place tantalisingly in sight of land but from where escape was virtually impossible.
In the late 19th century, Mandela’s own ancestors, a group of Xhosa chieftains, were imprisoned there by the British after the skirmishes that ensued when the settlers forced 20,000 tribal people out of the Eastern Cape. Their leader, Chief Maqoma, died on Robben Island, and many of his descendants campaigned to have the place renamed after him. On a day of wild weather, you can almost hear their ghosts wailing.
Violent surf constantly pounds its shores, the scene of many shipwrecks. In the late 17th century, a Dutch galleon, the three-masted Dageraad, carrying gold coins to Indonesia for the salaries of Dutch East India Company employees, sank there literally without trace, and remains inaccessible to this day. From a hoard of seventeen chests of gold worth tens of millions of pounds, only a few coins have ever washed ashore, with some ducats and silver pieces-of-eight found in rock pools.
Ironically, its isolation makes Robben Island a safe and sheltered haven for more than 100 bird species, among them African penguins and breeding colonies of seabirds like the crowned cormorants, Caspian terns and black-crowned herons that circle the shoreline.
More sinister are the three quarries. Robben Island maximum security prison itself was built from the dark grey-black slate hacked out by its first inmates. A stone quarry on the eastern side of the island is where the first Dutch settlers used their slaves to harvest slate that built Cape Town’s castle. A plaque today commemorates their work.
The limestone quarry, which almost cost Nelson Mandela his sight and his general health, lies at the centre of the island. For 13 years, he broke rocks from the sunken cliffs here every day, the white limestone reflecting direct sunlight. The constant south-east wind would whip up choking dust clouds, burning the prisoners’ eyes and entering their throats.
The convicts would be accompanied by dog-handlers and armed warders on the 500-metre route-march to the quarry each morning. They would then be forced to break down rocks and mix it with seashells for use in constructing roads across the island.
The prisoners were not allowed sunglasses, so they attempted to fend off the glare with home-made contraptions of netting and bent wire. Mandela’s eyesight suffered for the rest of his life, with eye-drops making little impact. A strict rule of his after his release was the banning of flash photography.
By the time I arrived to work at Robben Island, the older men, like Mandela, had successfully campaigned to stop these outdoor work groups after the age of 60, but they recalled them bitterly. Mandela would tell me of the horrendous hard labour of those days in the quarry, and the lesser horror of his later duties hauling kelp – Cape seaweed – from the sea and the beaches, to be processed and exported as fertiliser. In Afrikaans, we called it bambous.
There were some advantages to the beach work, though, he said. Few officers were around and the warders were more relaxed. Sometimes, they would be able to set traps to catch rabbits and guinea fowl. They would make a fire on the spot and eat it. They would also pick limpets off the rocks and sometimes eat them raw.
Other small transgressions could also take place in the more relaxed conditions. One day when they were working with kelp on the northern beach, it was agreed that two prisoners could get into the seawater to catch crayfish while a warder guarded the rest of the work group. They lit a fire and cooked and ate the crayfish, prisoners and warders together. This fraternising would have been greatly frowned upon by the authorities. It was a small, conspiratorial, defiance of the rules.
Another day, the prisoners found a seal on the beach and immediately saw it as a rare source of meat. They killed it with a spade and one of the warders lent them his knife to skin it and clean it out, providing that he could share the meat with them. They lit a fire then and there on the beach and cooked it. The red meat was tender, Mandela told me. It tasted like lamb in so far as they could recall the taste of any meat. They cooked and ate in a little group alongside their warders, and imagined the barbecues they would enjoy once they were back home again. Each and every one of them believed they would be out of prison one day, with a life to look forward to.
It made me smile sadly to hear them talking of the future. They were all inside forever; they were never going to have a real life again as far as I could see. Political prisoners were allowed no reduction of their sentences for good behaviour and they could not apply for parole. They were in prison for their whole term. Mandela himself was serving life – and he and his comrades, the High Command of the banned ANC, were old already.
I used to tell him: ‘Why don’t you relax and take things easier? You don’t need to waste your money sending postal orders to buy books and university courses, and doing studies for a future career. You’re having your life now. This is it. Why not take books from the prison library and enjoy them, instead of driving yourself with all these exams?’
It was true: Mandela was consumed with studying, and used every spare minute to further his knowledge. He believed education was, in his words, ‘the future of our country’, even telling us that we guards should be studying. The way he saw it, if you have education, if you have degrees, if you have knowledge – even if it’s about motor mechanics – for as long as you are alive, they can’t take it away from you. He wanted us to have careers, to be thinkers, to lift up our lives for ourselves and our families. He made us think about that, mostly by his own example.
He put pressure on his own people to study and had this great dream that Robben Island could have its own university. Many of the prisoners began to study with the warders without the authorities knowing, and they would exchange books. We worked together well, and I even saw prisoners help warders with their assignments.
Mandela’s mantra to his fellow captives was that ‘your years in prison will go faster if you enhance yourself with education’. That way, he would say, when they all came out, they would be better educated and would qualify for better work.
The opportunities for education for black people on the outside were very limited, he said. If you studied here in prison, you could keep your mind alert and also avoid trouble. Through his persuasive arguments he converted some of his less-educated comrades into great thinkers armed with degrees. Among the prisoners there were doctors, lecturers and schoolteachers and they all helped each other. It was like an informal university where the men educated each other.
But Mandela was up against a lot of opposition in his determination to study. He needed to organise money for books and assignments to be sent in from university correspondence courses. He would apply to see a lawyer, then pass him a list of names of those who needed funding. Money came in from the church and charitable organisations, the South African Educational Trust and supporters on the outside. The government tried to stop this by stipulating that money could only be sent in by their families.
Mandela himself was determined to learn Afrikaans and take exams in the language. He believed it would give him an edge. He had already received a certificate in 1964 in Afrikaans-Nederlands, but he wanted to take those studies further, and so he enrolled every year to take written exams. Unfortunately, he failed his practical Afrikaans every time. I began to help him by always talking to him in Afrikaans and by reading his ‘homework’ before it was sent off to a school on the mainland, where mistakes would come back underlined in red. Of course, the teachers had no idea it was Nelson Mandela’s handiwork they were marking.
His first essay assignment was to write about a day on the beach. So he wrote about a day on Robben Island where he was working outside, hauling the seaweed plants out of the sea and cleaning them off the rocks on the beach, then hanging it on railings so it could dry before being chopped up, bagged and exported as fertiliser. On this particular day, he had slipped on the sharp rocks and gashed his foot badly.
I had to hand the essay back and tell him to do it again. It was too long. He was only allowed 450–500 words and so I had to tell him he needed to shorten it. We didn’t talk about his day on the beach.
After a year of talking to me only in Afrikaans, he finally passed the exam. This was a victory that clearly gave him enormous pleasure.
Before I arrived, Mandela had fought long and hard for the right to study in prison, continually writing to the Minister of Justice until it was agreed that certain subjects were to be allowed. Political science and military history were of course banned, and Mandela was warned that if he persisted in studying law it would be a waste of time for him. There were several attempts to have him struck off as a lawyer when he was in prison, but he fought and won. He and his fellow activist Oliver Tambo – the leader of the ANC since 1967 – had represented hundreds of black defendants in their time as partners in a Johannesburg law firm, and Mandela dreamed of returning to that work one day.
Tambo was living in Zambia, running the ANC in exile. To many of the Rivonians, he was their only hope, keeping their organisation alive until it was ready to come into power in South Africa. But he and other political prisoners were not allowed to be quoted publicly within the country; their voices could not be heard. Without the oxygen of publicity, the government hoped that the ANC would quietly wither away and die.
Mandela, meanwhile, was obsessively applying to UNISA, the University of South Africa, to take their correspondence courses, and all of the political prisoners in B Section did the same. Sometimes, I would be on the mainland, sitting in the UNISA office for hour after hour waiting to register them. I also had to pick up the study books they all needed from government-approved bookshops in Cape Town.
The right to study was one I knew Mandela valued extremely highly. This had been used against him earlier, before I started working on the island. He had once lost his study privileges for four years, when the original manuscript he had written for his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom had been found hidden in cocoa tins buried in his garden. The punishment was the most severe they could think up.
Now he needed more time to gain his exams, and he appealed to UNISA. Mandela made himself busy every day applying for something, or demanding more blankets, better food or more visits. His policy was to make himself and his comrades noticed, to keep themselves alive and alert.
It struck me that all of these old guys were really serious about advancing themselves, and were never going to give up. Even when they failed exams, they enrolled again and again, or appealed to have them remarked. Occasionally, one of Mandela’s subjects would be remarked and he would get through when he had previously failed. He wasn’t a natural student and he admitted to me that it became more difficult as he got older.
I was gradually coming to realise what he and his comrades were fighting for, what they had risked their lives for, what they had given up their freedom for. It was impossible not to notice the impact that Mandela had made when I was out in the ‘real’ world. We were all living in a police state and there was no freedom of speech but occasionally I would see some graffiti in Cape Town before the authorities cleaned it off. Always the same words: ‘Free Nelson Mandela’, painted on a bridge or a wall. People all over South Africa were thinking of him. People all over the world were thinking of him.
And when we had to take him and his group outside once a week for recreation – when they would spend an hour just kicking a football around on the deserted air strip – we would hear hundreds of other prisoners clamouring for him. ‘Amandla! Amandla!’ We would hear them shouting and chanting, though they could hardly recognise their leaders from 200 metres away. They would never meet Mandela face-to-face. Yet they became hysterical at the very sight of him in the distance.
Mandela could not really acknowledge them; he would just give a slight nod towards them. Anything more and the men from B Section would not be allowed outside the prison buildings again.
Even in prison, Mandela had a sense of purpose and drive. As much as the prison regulations ruled every minute of his life, he also had his own rules, his own discipline. His day would start early – all part of the hardship – but he worked to turn it to his advantage, using every minute to try to go forward with his life, always fighting for the future, never looking back on his 60-plus years and accepting that it might all be over.
An ear-splitting clanging would start up all over the prison at 5 a.m. We used metal pipes with a chain inside to make the maximum noise, a horrible grinding sound, to wake up all the prisoners in their icy cells.
The cells were as cold as fridges, all year round. They were made of cement and unpainted. Overnight they would freeze. Prisoners slept on the floors with two mats, one hard sisal mat and another softer one. They had three blankets with no extra ones allowed, even in winter. Requests to the prison office for more blankets would be turned down. Occasionally, some of them would persuade a warder to feel sorry for them and one of us would give them an extra blanket on condition it was handed back early the next morning before inspection.
I would see Mandela doing exercises in his cell at 5 a.m., usually for an hour. He would have been cold all night, so he would be doing sit-ups to warm himself up. He was a tall man, and the two mats issued to him were too short. When he lay back, his head would be touching one wall, his feet the opposite wall.
I would see him running on the spot, doing push-ups and sit-ups, everything you could do on your own in the cell. He would wear black or white, or black and red, gym shorts donated by the Red Cross, and a sleeveless running vest.
He was over 60 years old but to me he looked very fit, lean and wiry. He was slender and you could see his muscles. At this time in the morning, he would not have had anything to eat, just a few sips of warm water from the coffee flask he had bought himself through the prison tuck shop, and was allowed to keep in his cell.
At 6 a.m., the bell rang again and prisoners had to get ready for inspection. Like all the others, Mandela had a cleaning pack that he kept in his cell. In the mornings, he would take a piece of old prison blanket out of it and polish the floor until it shone. The floor was cement but prisoners were given liquid polish to rub into it. It had to look like a mirror when it was finished, and be clean enough to eat off. He would also need to fold up his mattress and bedding and put them tidily in a corner. All this would take about an hour, then maybe he would look through his study books while he waited for inspection.
At 7 a.m., the warders reported for day shift. We started with parade in the courtyard. We had to stand to attention, present ourselves for inspection, then stand at ease. We had strict rules about being clean-shaven with short haircuts, the same rules we imposed on the prisoners.
The prisoners were also inspected every morning to see if they were properly dressed and that their uniform was neatly ironed. As they were not allowed access to irons, their only way to achieve that was to sprinkle water on it, rub it hard with a prison mug, and then press it overnight underneath their sleeping mats on the cement floor.
Then it was time to say the daily prayer. It was always the ‘Our Father’. When it came to the line ‘give us this day our daily bread’, I would feel bad for the prisoners who could hear us. The black prisoners never had any bread. It was given only to the mixed-race and Indian prisoners.
Discrimination in South Africa at that time was multilayered. So, although all of these men were being punished for their beliefs, some were being punished more cruelly than others. For example, Mandela and the other black Africans were at first only issued with khaki shorts and sandals, with no shoes or socks. They wore a canvas khaki jacket of which three buttons had to be fastened during inspections. They had protested for several years that they were cold and also humiliated by wearing boys’ clothes, and by the time I arrived on the island they were beginning to be allowed long trousers and socks.
This racial discrimination even extended to food allowances. Black prisoners had 12 ounces of maize-meal porridge with no sugar or salt in it for breakfast, and a mug of black coffee. The coloureds and Indians had 14 ounces of porridge and bread, and coffee.
After the parade, the day-shift warders entered the sections and counted the prisoners with the night shift. The master key was used to open the cells. B Section was about 50 metres inside the one-storey prison building, on the left-hand side. It was accessed by a metal door cut into the solid wall and controlled by a series of locking and unlocking procedures in a sequence to be strictly followed. Each warder carried the key to B Section on a leather strap held in place under the epaulette of his uniform. His single black metal key would open all the cell doors in that section. The night-shift warders held different keys to the day-shift.
Once the prisoners had been counted, the numbers were written on an official record so that they tallied. Some prisoners may have been taken to the hospital section, or some to the harbour with escorts for the ferry trip to the mainland for a Cape Town hospital. We needed to know at all times how many prisoners were physically on the island, so these records were an important security measure to prevent escapes.
At 7.30 a.m., when the cells had been opened, the prisoners could take their toilet buckets to the community toilet to empty them. They washed them out under the showers and put them in the courtyard to dry in the sun. During this cleaning, the prisoners would talk intensely. They knew very well that we didn’t want to be near them during this unpleasant task, and it was a chance to exchange news. In general, though, we had to observe the prisoners closely throughout the morning rituals, even when they were using the community toilets. The stalls were designed so that you could see their heads and their feet.
The prisoners were given a disinfectant like Jeyes Fluid to clean the buckets. They were steel half-drums with a lid on. Once, for several days at a time, Mandela went to a neighbouring cell where fellow prisoner, Eddie Daniels, was quite sick. He took his toilet bucket out for him, cleaned it and dried it in the sun.
All of these actions, without a word being exchanged, were making us realise the extent of the comradeship, the solidarity, between these guys. We had never seen this before.
Prisoners would then use the communal showers. The water was just lukewarm, with no soap provided – though the water was so hard that soap did not work anyway. They used shampoo bought in bulk from the tuck shop, having pooled their money allowance to buy it. They didn’t complain. Years before I came to the island, the conditions were even harsher. There was no warm water and prisoners would be forced to line up naked in the courtyard to be hosed down with cold water by the warders.
I heard that one time a group of drunken warders got them all out of bed in the middle of the night to stand in the freezing cold while they hosed them down, cackling with cruel laughter while they searched through all of their cells. Some of the more unlucky prisoners were kept in their cells and the guys outside had to listen to them being beaten. Fikile Bam, who later became Judge President of the Land Claims Court, was reduced to tears at the sounds. Govan Mbeki ended up collapsing, and had to be taken to hospital on the mainland. I hope I would never have gone along with that harsh treatment, I hope I would have rather have resigned from the service.
Breakfast was dished up in the courtyard. In winter, the food tables would be undercover. They all queued up with a plate and a mug. One bucket held fresh water and prisoners could take two mugs each. Mandela had taught himself to tolerate the brackish water that came out of the taps from the island’s boreholes so he didn’t have to take a turn at the bucket. Wherever possible, he was self-reliant, disciplined.
At 8.30 a.m., there would be duties like cleaning the courtyard, the passageways and the recreation hall. Before I came to the island, they would be sent out in working groups at this time, either marched to the quarries accompanied by the dog-handlers, or to the beach where they hauled kelp.
However, by the time I arrived on Robben Island, the hard labour had finished for the older prisoners after years of petitioning, mainly by Mandela. They now worked in the courtyard and indoors, sewing mailbags sent over by the Post Office, repairing prison clothes, and cleaning and polishing the floors.
In my time there, the authorities established a home-made washing machine, a big 44-gallon diesel drum. They put it on a stand at an angle, and somehow poured in the water and washing powder. It was made in the prison workshop. The prisoners didn’t like it; it was hard work turning a steel handle for many minutes at a time. But then they came to realise it cleaned their bedding well, especially the blankets.
Mandela would also work in the little garden he had made. It was about fifteen metres long by two-and-a-half metres wide. There was topsoil to which he added pigeon and other bird droppings. Other prisoners gave him droppings from outside their cells. He taught me to look after and respect a living thing, a fruit or a flower, something alive. He would say that he just wanted to feel the soil in his hands. He managed to grow a peach tree, which bore fruit. He even planted carrot seeds and people would bring him tomato seeds they found in their food. He would sometimes manage to get some wild flowers to grow around the edges, but he was mainly interested in growing food.
He would spend half an hour there in the morning and half an hour in the afternoon. I am also a gardener and I watched how things were growing. I encouraged him. He knew the water from the island borehole was sour so he put buckets out to catch rainwater and others would bring him their water from clothes-washing.
For lunch, the prisoners got samp – mealie-meal (corn) – with a meat sauce on top, or something resembling meat. They would have a mug of tea with powdered milk and a little sugar. Again, the blacks would not be given bread. A list of the amounts of food and drink given to prisoners, divided according to their ethnic origin, was posted in the kitchen. Visitors to Robben Island today can still see the originals. At all times, the black prisoners were given less than the others. Their allowance for fish or meat four times a week was five ounces. The others were given six ounces.
Comrades would share with them. Indian prisoners like Mandela’s great friend Ahmed Kathrada would divide up his own bread. It was humbling to see this, yet as warders we had no power to change the rules, so all we could do was observe how they dealt with it and be privately impressed.
On someone’s birthday, they would all try to make something. One prisoner would provide chillies, and maybe tomatoes and onions from the kitchen. They would make a prison cake by collecting all the leftover bread and adding water to soften it and sugar to sweeten it, and porridge or condensed milk if they had managed to save some. When they got jam, they would spread it in the middle. The porridge became stiff and you could cut it like a cake. Sometimes they could persuade the prisoners working in the kitchen to give them an egg to put in the cake and then bake it in the oven for a short time.
They also made birthday cards. They would use paper from a notebook, and draw and colour it in using leftover paint. Everyone would sign it and write small messages and sing ‘Happy Birthday’.
There were other small occasions when the rules were relaxed, for both warders and prisoners alike. Sometimes from the shore you could see huge flocks of gulls catching fish in the sea, with fishing dinghies circling around out there in the distance. Boats were not allowed to come nearer than one nautical mile to Robben Island, but you could see there was plenty of fish close to the island on days like that.
So, on occasion, we warders would all decide that we fancied an afternoon fishing. The head of prison would call in the section committees representing the prisoners and tell them the warders would like to go fishing that day and it would mean locking the prisoners up at noon. We would give them their lunch and supper at the same time. They always agreed, knowing they could ask for something special in return.
For example, they might want to play a soccer tournament on a Saturday, with teams of prisoners from different sections playing against each other. We would agree on that in return for our day’s fishing, and we would also bring back some of our fish to the kitchen for it to be cooked for them. We had a good relationship of give and take.
I came to realise how important these little glimpses of common humanity were to the prisoners. One day, long after I had left the prison service, I met the family and lawyers of a former prisoner on their way to the beach at Robben Island. Wilton Mkwayi, a prominent trade union leader who served many years with Mandela, died in 2004, some 15 years after his release, and had left a request with his family to take his ashes back there.
They told me how he had been the unofficial cook, arranging an extra drum of fresh water to be taken with the work group so he could rustle up wonderful fish stews they all enjoyed, warders and prisoners alike – small, pleasurable moments during a long period of pain. It was a measure of how much those moments of humanity had meant to him during the years of harshness and desperation that he had asked for his ashes to be scattered there.
I know many prisoners have come over on the ferry after their release – maybe to show their families the hardship they suffered. But I don’t know any other prisoners who wanted it to be their last resting-place.