Robben Island: The 'dumping site' of the liberation fighters

| Friday August 13, 2010 00:00

Looking closely into the history of Robben Island, one gets a clear view that the place has been synonymous with banishment, neglect and ostracism.

Besides the colonisers, warders, health care providers, missionaries and clerical staff who provided essential services to the slaves, lepers and political prisoners that were brought to the island by the apartheid authorities, Robben Island remains nothing but a dumping site.

Sikhululekile, which name translates to 'We are now free', is the only commissioned boat to ferry visitors from the mainland harbour at Cape Town City to the island where icon Nelson Madiba Rolihlahla Mandela spent 18 years.

Emotions swelled up inside me as I pondered the question: 'With this body of water, wherein whales and other creatures live; how possibly  inhuman was it for the apartheid authorities to push people to the edge, some 1,000 miles away from their families in the name of seditious charges?

'With their hardened hearts, what was impossible in them to drown their victims en route to the island?

The smooth sail of Sikhululekile and its Boeing-like comfort with six television monitors churning out a brief history about the place with famous South African liberation melodies in the background, I was somewhat soothed that at last.

'The heroes did achieve freedom for all of us, not just South Africans, for I was on board the two-deck 300 capacity luxurious ship predominantly white-populated, a thought impossible to imagine had these men not offered their heads on the block to purchase freedom and civil liberties.

Mandela was subsequently transferred to Victor Vester to serve the end of his life sentence, which miraculously ended after 27 years, when former President Frederick de Klerk surprised his Afrikaner community and shocked the blacks by announcing on February 2, 1990 that he was freeing all political prisoners and a peace deal was on offer to reconstruct South Africa.

He stuck to his word as a principled man. No wonder he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Mandela!In fact, the voice from the video clip cites Oliver Tambo as having said: 'Robben Island was the most inhospitable place on earth that I know and remember and it could only be so fitting under apartheid'.

Thus it began that those who resisted the regime like Tambo began populating the island in 1962. Their activism, in the eyes of the regime, was sedition and attracted a life sentence or death.

It was subversion, sedition, saboteur and so forth that many young black politicians rubbed the apartheid supremacists the wrong way and they had to teach them a lesson they could never forget.

Apart from the indigenous Khoikhoi people who lived on the island happily until the arrival of Jan van Riebeck in 1652 to forcefully displace them, the island was a slave colony, until the practice was abolished in 1834.

Then there was an outbreak of leprosy and sufferers were concentrated there, not permitted to practice sex across the colour bar.

Only nature took its course and 41 babies were born on the colony free of leprosy. However, a total of 1,500 inmates died of leprosy. The colonisers were scared of leprosy and the whole place was burnt down in 1931.

It was a place of ostracism and stigma because lunatics and undesirable elements in society were sent to the island. In 1960, after the buildings were demolished from the hard labour of the political prisoners of the Pan Africanist Congress and the African National Congress, the whole place was reconstructed, this time as a maximum security political prison for the anti-apartheid rebels. 

'Robben Island Maximum Security Prison was built on the hard labour of prisoners. It is the only prison in the whole world that I know which was constructed this way,' stated the youthful and knowledgeable guide, Mphumelele Phakhati or 'MP' as he would like to be remembered.

According to MP, whose grandfather was hanged in 1967 for fighting to be free alongside the heavyweights in Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, whom he regards as his hero and father of PAC, Oliver Tambo and Govan Mbeki among others, who have gone down as forgotten heroes, overshadowed by the legacy of Mandela.

The island is notorious worldwide for curtailing the freedoms of those in the forefront of liberation.

Standing lonely on the island is the third prison, known as the solitary confinement, which was specifically built with Sobukwe in mind and anyone who might prove to be difficult like him.

The Eastern Cape-born Sobukwe's sin against apartheid was to have no patience like the ANC leaders, who were careful to watch their steps in destabilising the regime.

As a professor at the Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, Sobukwe organised a march on March 31, 1960 that left the authorities wondering as to his sophistication to carry out such an act without them detecting it as they had their intelligence spread around, including some fellow blacks.

Instead of arresting marchers on that fateful day, 30 were shot with clear instructions to kill in Sharpeville. The Sharpeville Massacres as it is known in history circles, made Sobukwe the most dangerous and feared activist, particularly because he had formed a party.

Two years before he had visited Ghana where Dr Kwame Nkrumah, is believed to have had an influence upon him.

He served his term at the 'dumping site' and when time for his release came, the authorities could agree on only one thing: he remained the most dangerous and feared man because he did not lie to them about abandoning his ideas of freeing South Africans. Thus they constructed the solitary confinement for him and he did not mix with the others.

'This man was an intellectual and still he managed to talk with fellow prisoners when they left their jail-cells to do manual work near his prison. He would lift the sand with his left hand, raise his right hand and slip the sand through his fingers.

'Fellow comrades would raise their right hands, smiling back, of course under the watch of the angry warders. They were communicating even before sign language came into fashion, except the warders did not understand.Sobukwe was saying, 'I am the son of this soil. I'll fight to the bitter end. Amandla!'' explained MP.

The fighter would later suffer from vocal cancer and then lung cancer and the objective of the apartheid regime was steadily being achieved with his mental retardation, until he slid completely into a state of derangement.

It was only at this point that his family was allowed a visit. Sobukwe was released in 1969 to be rearrested after a publicised public relations stunt dubbed the media conference to placate to the international community that something positive had been done.

The pressure had become too much for the regime to bear. He was sent to Kimberly, away from his Eastern Cape home until his death in 1978.

The political prisoners were too dangerous and feared people such that paedophiles, murderers, rapists and convicts of heinous crimes had to occupy the fourth prison on the land.

It is said that the longing for freedom by political prisoners was so deep, and dated backwards to the colonisation of the Cape when the slave man, David Sturrman, risked his life twice to swim across the 13 kilometres of big waves of the Atlantic Ocean to the mainland, but twice was arrested by the authorities who were manning the coastline after tip-offs.

After the second escape, the authorities must have eliminated Sturrman only to parade that they transferred him to a prison in Australia, a democratic country whose credentials would not approximate apartheid.

Another Khoikhoi man, Makana, swam but was too weak and died in the ocean. The third one, Ashomat, popularly known by his Afrikaans' nickname, Harry Die Rondlooper, stole one of the canoes during Jan van Riebeck's occupation and reached the mainland but was arrested and forced into being an interpreter for the colonisers.

This longing for freedom by the natives carried on for centuries from the days of the Khoikhoi.

South-west of the main entrance of Robben Island is a lime quarry that gives the impression that some huge machinery was at work clawing the earth to create a massive pit mine.

The bare hands of prisoners and shovels for 13 years and six months of painful labour resulted in the quarry, though they were told initially that it would be a short assignment of six months.

'If you can't dig the soft lime, how do you think you can govern South Africa?' the warders are reported to have mocked political prisoners.

Obedient they had to be, or warders were given authority to shoot and kill any 'cheeky' prisoner.

However, 30 percent of the prisoners were educated, not just schooled. Some were lawyers, educationists and academics, yet others were arrested in the early stages of their education.

Also, the Bantu education was designed such that it did not offer much to make its products well rounded. These conditions were fought against by the black activists and they do not forget to acknowledge a white lady who played a pivotal role though a lone voice in parliament, Helen Suzman of the Liberal Party, who died in 2009 at aged 91.

She argued for good treatment of prisoners by warders including good sanitation to be provided. The prisoners adopted 'each one will teach one' principle that enthralled men who had ample time to study and left Robben Island armed with honours and degrees depending on the length one served. For most of them, working at the quarry brought lung cancer and tuberculosis.  For example, Mandela had to seek medical treatment off the island after his family made demands because he came down with tuberculosis.

At the quarry, there is a pile of stones and MP explained it is where the famous Truth and Reconciliation Commission was born.

Mandela picked up the first stone and put it down and one-by-one, former prisoners did the same to forgive those who pained and humiliated them, birthing a democratic and peaceful South Africa that is living in harmony with itself today. Addressing a press conference on the island in 1994, Mandela is said to have reminded all: 'We may not forget what was done to us, but we can forgive them so as to free our spirit of bitterness and look into the future with great hope'.

MP was impressive with mastery of the subject, but even more moving was the testimony of the former prisoner, Itumeleng Makwela who led us to the jail cells where he spent a seven year sentence for being an underground youth activist in the military wing of the then opposition African National Congress. 

Makwela was arrested on the way to Botswana to mobilise support, citing Michael Dingake as a comrade in the struggle and confessing that political prisoners were harboured here during the struggle.

They were denied family visits. They slept on cold, bare floors, ate bad food and from time to time, they were physically abused by the warders and forced to work harder than their bodies could take, not to mention the verbal abuse they underwent.

Makwela revealed that President Jacob Zuma and his vice; Kgalemang Mohlanthe also had their share of jail terms between 1963 and 1973 on Robben Island as freedom fighters.

'We should show our solidarity and gratitude to our neighbours like Botswana and Angola and the SADC region in general for helping us to be the free country we are proud to be today. Those guys after arresting me, instead of asking what I was up to, they told me everything and they were right. But I refused to confirm their stories. They tortured me at the Zeerust Police Station. I refused.

'They took me to Thabazimbi and tortured me more. I refused. They then took me to Pretoria and tortured me on the electric chair. You go there once and you tell everything you know, my friend,' Makwela described to a dead-silent group of visitors.

After disclosing where Umkhonto-we-Sizwe were hiding the weapons they were going to use to topple the regime, he was tried and sentenced to seven years on Robben Island to endure the pain with fellow comrades in the struggle.

'Under the apartheid regime, there was no parole and no remission. You had to serve your whole sentence and I did that from 1983 to 1990. What troubled us the most as political prisoners was to realise that the apartheid that we were vigorously fighting against out there was institutionalized even worse in prison.

'They deliberately segregated us into groups A, B, C and D. The latter group was for the ill-disciplined and new prisoners. As such, you did not have privileges such as smoking, reading newspapers; you could not receive money from your family and relatives when they visited. This brewed feelings of jealousy among us, who were brought here by the common cause of liberation,' Makwela explained.

Infighting and feelings of resentment against one another would be the objective of the regime. However, even those in the top category had their liberties limited. For example, the newspapers had to go to the office for removal of any political story or writing that might be seen as empowering them to rebel against authority.

'Fortunately, I don't smoke now. But that is what I did all the seven years - it's meat and tobacco that prisoners can't go without. We noticed this method of division and quickly tackled it. We encouraged sharing.

Worse still, even as political prisoners, we were not equal before the law. The Indians and Coloureds were preferred over us and their meals were better in quality of course. Everything was better than the blacks'. Those who served in the 1960s and 1970s had terrible stories that they were given shorts and shirts, while the Indians and Coloureds had jackets, socks and trousers.

It did not matter what political crime a white man committed during apartheid, Robben Island was not his place. It was a dumping site for the cursed blacks. Dimitri Tsafendas, a white criminal, who stabbed the Prime Minister, Hendrick Verwoed in 1966 in parliament is the only white to be banished to Robben Island, albeit for a short stay before his transfer to Pretoria Maximum Prison,' Makwela said.