A South African Prison Is a School for Revolution

Just six miles past the luxury beach-front homes of Cape Town’s Clifton Beach lies a tiny outcrop of limestone--a bleak, wind-swept island caught in the icy Benguela Current that flows up from Antarctica. A Readers’ Digest guide lists Robben Island as “noted for its arum lilies” and “superb” view.

But Robben Island is better known as home to more than 500 of South Africa’s most important political prisoners, the rock where resistence lives and grows. It is a sort of graduate school for revolutionaries, as raw youths who have rallied school boycotts discuss technique with elderly founders of the armed struggle who first masterminded bombing and sabotage campaigns aimed at overthrowing the South African state.

A South African hotel mogul wants to buy the island and turn it into a gambling resort, but with dozens of additional people on trial for political crimes, the government is likely to preserve it as is. Like Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, the island’s distance from the mainland across frigid waters makes it virtually impossible to escape. Only one man has done it--Autshumayo, known in white history books as Harry the Beachcomber, who was sent there after the 1658 war between the Khoikhoi people and the Dutch, just six years after whites settled in what is now South Africa.

Many contemporary Robben Island prisoners return to the mainland simply by finishing their sentences. Every couple of weeks, an inmate earns what passes for freedom for blacks in South Africa.

Such released prisoners form a peculiar sort of alumni association, schooled in concrete cells and taught by a tenured faculty of lifetime maximum-security prisoners. The government had hoped that half a lifetime behind bars would dampen the revolutionary fervor of two generations of political prisoners, one sentenced after the government crushed the military wings of the African National Congress and Pan-African Congress in 1963, and the other imprisoned after the 1976 student uprising.

Just the reverse is true. Robben Island alumni form a network of activists who help nurture new resistance. One man who left prison after nearly two decades told me during his first week on the mainland that his plans were uncertain because, “It isn’t up to me. It is up to the organization and my comrades.”

Many former inmates take up positions of leadership in nonviolent organizations affiliated with the United Democratic Front anti-apartheid coalition. Half the executive committee members of the Port Elizabeth Black Civic Organization are graduates of Robben Island. The patron and president of the UDF in Natal Province are both island alumni.

“There is no rehabilitation in prison. Even an ordinary criminal is a more hardened criminal when he comes out,” said Steve Tshwete, 49, once of Robben Island and now a top ANC leader in exile. When they return, most prisoners share a rare political maturity and exert a mystique that commands authority among more hot-headed radicals. Robben Island veterans usually are good listeners, educated and patient, not easily discouraged.

Tshwete’s struggle started three decades ago. In 1958, he was recruited into the ANC by his high school principal. After the ANC was outlawed in 1960, Tshwete joined the underground command structure of the ANC military wing in East London, between Durban and Port Elizabeth, carrying out acts of sabotage. An informer tipped off police. He was arrested and, in 1964, sentenced to 15 years on the island. When released, he was eager for political involvement: “They have imprisoned you for 15 years and you must inflict pain on them.”

The government didn’t make it easy, keeping close watch on Tshwete. Upon his release in 1979, Tshwete was banished to a small town in the black homeland of Ciskei. But he played a role in setting up the UDF and became its regional president. He planned boycotts and helped form black township street committees. Police often warned him that his activity would win him a trip back to the island. In late 1985 when police came to his house, Tshwete dashed out the back door and ran away. Disguised, he later sneaked through a heavy police cordon to address a political funeral before fleeing the country, then resurfacing at the headquarters of the outlawed ANC in Lusaka.

Tshwete sees his years on the island as central to his commitment: “I spent the ripe hour of my youth in prison with the ANC. I know no other life than the ANC.” Robben Island prisoners have contact with the best and brightest South African activists--other inmates. “It is a disadvantage to be in prison, but you must turn it to your advantage,” said Tshwete.

For high school-age activists, Robben Island is a classroom. Through smuggled notes and discreet meetings, prisoners conduct courses in history, politics and economics. Prisoners debate historical and current events in discussion groups, with two people in each group preparing arguments from different ideological points of view. Senior prisoners provide guidance and settle disputes between younger prisoners. Most older men are serving life sentences for roles in the ANC military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. Nelson Mandela was one of the island’s leading lights before the government, realizing the political strength growing among the inmates, transferred him to Pollsmoor Prison on the Cape peninsula.

One of the remaining senior activists is Govan Mbeki, a 78-year-old Communist Party member whose son, Thabo, is a leader of the ANC in exile. (Thabo says he used to write to his father, but that he never received replies and assumed that his father never received the letters.) Author of a book on South African peasant revolts, the elder Mbeki was sentenced with Mandela. Though his eyesight is failing, he runs classes on economics. According to former inmates, he is a gentle person; he likes to bask in the sun and listen to other prisoners reading the Sunday newspapers out loud while he comments on articles.

Harry Gwala is another influential teacher, now serving his second sentence--this time for life. He played a leading role in converting adherents of the Black Consciousness movement to members of the non-racial ANC tradition. “Tell me,” he once said to Seth Mazibuko, a young activist sentenced for leading the 1976 Soweto student uprising, “what is Black Consciousness?” Mazibuko responded with a variety of “black is beautiful” slogans. “But are you a beautician or a politician?” Gwala pressed, finally convincing the young man that whites had a role in building a post-apartheid society.

Conducting education in a maximum-security prison is never easy. Inmates learn to cultivate allies on the prison staff and secretly pass notes during their recess periods. Some documents are smuggled inside books. The island is divided into several sections, isolating top political prisoners in single, seven-foot-square concrete cells. Although prisoners in communal cells have little contact with the leadership in single cells, clandestine communication continues.

But Robben Island cannot prepare prisoners completely for life on the mainland. Many return to a world that only vaguely resembles the one they left. One alum in East London says that when he waits at the bus stop, he stares into people’s faces, thinking he sees someone who looks familiar. Then he realizes that after two decades it can’t be the same person. “I don’t recognize anyone,” he said. Unmarried and in his mid-40s, he misses friends on Robben Island.

Despite loneliness, the East London man possesses the distinctive attitude taught on the island. As people clambered onto a bus one rainy day, a black woman behind him muttered that black people will never learn. “I couldn’t let that pass,” he recalled. So he turned and calmly explained why people forced into miserable living conditions might act that way. The woman stared and said, “You must not be from around here.”