Mandela’s Island
When, in the winter of 1964, Nelson Mandela landed on Robben Island to serve a life sentence of forced labor, the island had known more than three centuries of horror. First the Dutch and then the British had banished blacks resistant to colonial rule there, simultaneously using it as a leper colony, madhouse, and jail for common criminals. Treacherous currents and sharks took care of the foolhardy who tried to escape by swimming. When the Republic of South Africa was established, the government stopped sending madmen and lepers to Robben Island; from then on it was solely a prison for outlaws and political rebels.
Until a few years before Mandela was sent there, the apartheid government, inaugurated in 1948 with the electoral victory of Hendrik Verwoerd’s National Party, kept the common and political prisoners mixed, so that the former would torment the latter. This policy was discontinued when the authorities realized that cohabitation allowed for the indoctrination of many thieves, assassins, and vagrants, who soon swelled the ranks of the two principal resistance forces: the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress. Though the common criminals and political prisoners were separated, the latter were also rigidly divided among themselves when Mandela arrived; leaders who were considered highly dangerous, as he was, were sent to Section B, where the security was tighter, and to their many sufferings was added that of living in almost constant isolation.
His cell, Number Five, which he occupied for the eighteen years he was on the island—out of the twenty-seven in all he spent in prison—is six and a half feet across, seven and a half feet long, and ten feet high: it looks like a closet, the den of a beast, rather than a human dwelling. The thick cement walls make it an oven in summer and an icebox in winter. Through the single small barred window, one can see a courtyard surrounded by a wall, which was patrolled by armed guards in Mandela’s time. They were all white, and the immense majority were Afrikaners, just as the inmates of Robben Island were all black. The white prisoners had separate prisons, as did those of mixed Indian or Asian origin, dubbed “Coloured” by the system.
Apartheid went much deeper than racial segregation. It dictated a complex ranking of people by levels of humanity, with whites at the top, blacks at the bottom, and hybrids higher or lower on the scale depending on the percentage of whiteness possessed by the individual. In 1964, the South African prison system rigorously applied this philosophy, which had been championed by Verwoerd—more an intellectual than a politician—from his sociology chair at the University of Stellenbosch before the majority of the white South African establishment embraced it in 1948. It determined different regimens of food, clothing, work, and punishments for the inmate depending on the color of his skin. This meant that while mulattoes or Hindus had the right to Diet D, which included bread, vegetables, and coffee; blacks, allotted Diet F, were allowed nothing of the kind and had to nourish themselves solely on maize porridge. Discrimination was inflexible even when it came to the portions of food they all received: Coloured inmates got two and a half ounces of sugar a day and blacks barely two. Those of mixed race slept on mattresses, and the Africans on straw mats; the former got three blankets, the latter, two.
Mandela accepted these distinctions without protesting about the food and bedding, but in the respectful manner he always affected, and which he never tired of recommending that his companions adopt in their dealings with prison authorities, he announced that he wouldn’t wear the shorts that the regime assigned to black prisoners (with the intention of humiliating them, since this was the uniform worn by black servants in white households). Threats, brutal reprisals, solitary confinement, and other savage punishments, like the “box,” which required the inmate to stand inside a small rectangle for hours and hours without moving until he lost consciousness (one of the methods of torture responsible for most suicides among the prison population), were all in vain. In the end, the political prisoners of Robben Island were issued the long pants that until then could be worn only by whites and prisoners of mixed race.
The day began at five-thirty in the morning. The prisoner had the right to leave his cell for a few minutes to empty his bucket of excrement and to wash in a common sink; although it was forbidden to speak to one’s fellow prisoners, rapid exchanges with the other inmates of Section B were sometimes possible in these shared early-morning moments, or at least a silent physical and visual communication that lifted the spirits. After the first maize porridge of the day, the prisoners were led into the courtyard. There, sitting on the floor in silence and widely separated from one another, they broke up loads of limestone with pick and hammer. At mid-morning and at mid-afternoon, they were allowed a half-hour break, during which they could walk around the courtyard and stretch their legs. They received two more helpings of porridge, one at noon and the other at four in the afternoon, after which they were locked in their cells until the next morning. The lightbulb in each cell burned twenty-four hours a day.
The political prisoners had the right to receive a half-hour visit every six months, so long as they weren’t being punished. The visit took place in a room where prisoners and visitors were separated by a glass wall with small openings in it, in the presence of two armed guards who were required to interrupt the conversation the instant it departed from family matters and touched on current events or political affairs. Twice a year, they could write and receive letters, which were subjected to rigorous censorship: any sentences that seemed suspicious or as if they might be hiding some political message would be crossed out.
This maddening routine, intended to destroy the prisoner’s humanity, desensitize him, and deprive him of his vital reflexes, including hope in its most basic form, failed to achieve its objective in Nelson Mandela’s case. The testimony of his ANC friends and PAC adversaries is conclusive: when this regimen was relaxed and he, after nine years of submitting to it, was at last able to study (he received a law degree by correspondence from the University of London), plant a little garden, and interact with the other political prisoners on the island (during the hours of common work in the limestone quarry half a mile from the prison and during breaks), he had achieved a new serenity and profundity. He had also acquired a political knowledge and clarity that were crucial in permitting him to impose his authority first on his Robben Island companions, then on the African National Congress, and finally on the whole country, to an almost comical extent, so that today in South Africa one hears whites (of Afrikaner, English, or other European descent) everywhere lamenting Mandela’s decision not to run in the next elections and his decision to cede the ANC presidency to Thabo Mbeki. In the end, what is most extraordinary about Mandela’s first decade on Robben Island and his passage through that infernal system isn’t that he didn’t lose his mind, or his will to live, or his political ideals. It is that in all those years of terror, rather than becoming filled with hatred and resentment, he came to the conclusion that the only sensible way of resolving South Africa’s problem was through peaceful negotiation with the racist apartheid government. This strategy was aimed at persuading the country’s white community—the 12 percent of the population that had been mercilessly exploiting and discriminating against the remaining 88 percent for centuries—that ending discrimination and embarking on political democratization would lead not to chaos and reprisals, as they feared, but to the beginning of an era of harmony and cooperation among South Africans of all races and cultures.
This generous idea had guided the ANC in its early days, when it was just a group of black leaders determined to do everything possible to show the white racists that people of color were not the barbarians they were believed to be. But at the beginning of the sixties, when the ferocity of government repression reached dizzying extremes, the idea of violent action won over even the moderate trio heading the African National Congress: Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Oliver Tambo. Although they always rejected the PAC’s program, with its calls of “Africa for the Africans” and “Throw the whites into the sea,” they created an activist group within the ANC (Umkhonto we Siswe) to handle sabotage and armed action, and they sent young Africans to receive guerrilla training in Cuba, the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, and East Germany. When Mandela arrived on Robben Island as Inmate 466/64, the idea that apartheid would only be ended by force, never by dialogue and persuasion, was firmly rooted in African public opinion. And with the National Party at the height of its power and its racist policies in full swing, who would have dared to contradict it?
Nelson Mandela dared, and he did so from the terrible solitude of the cave where he was sentenced to spend the rest of his days. In the second decade of his imprisonment, he developed prodigious tactical abilities, first convincing his own party members, the Communists, and the liberals. By his third decade in prison, when conditions had improved, he was able to communicate with the outside world and even Afrikaner government officials, exhorting them to initiate a dialogue and to come to an agreement that would ensure a free and multiracial future for South Africa. It took him twenty years of struggle and steel-willed confrontation of unspeakable obstacles, but in the end he succeeded, and—while still serving his life sentence—found himself having a civilized cup of tea with the last two apartheid presidents, P. W. Botha and F. W. de Klerk. Now, universally respected by whites, blacks, Indians, and mulattoes, he is the president-elect of the most prosperous and democratic country that the African continent has known in its long and very sad history.
That is why, if you come to this country, you shouldn’t content yourself with exploring the pristine South African cities, which seem to have just been scrubbed and polished, or its spectacular beaches, elegant vineyards, or great forests, where lions, elephants, leopards, and giraffes walk free. Nor should you limit yourself to visiting—in order to see all the injustices that still remain to be remedied—the black townships, like Soweto, which sizzle with energy and creativity despite their poverty. Go, first of all, to Robben Island, the scrap of land, dun-colored and hazy in the middle of the sea, that may be spied from the Cape Town waterfront at sunset. One of the most phenomenal and hope-inspiring historical events of the late twentieth century was conceived there, in a cell unfit for man, thanks to the intelligence and greatness of spirit of the most admirable politician alive today.