Are We There Yet?

by David Smiedt

  Turns out the cottage had been home for six years to a remarkable man, who in my opinion is certainly in Mandela’s league when it comes to selfless sacrifice for the betterment of all South Africans. Sobukwe was the founding president of the Pan Africanist Congress, a group which split from the ANC over the issue of co-operation with non-Africans in the liberation struggle. While Mandela and his cohorts believed any future democracy rested on the idea of obliterating racial divisions, Sobukwe favoured a policy whereby Africans would regain their sense of self-worth even if it meant turning their backs on other racial groups fighting for the same cause.

  Although the ideologies differed – with Sobukwe’s vision being broader than South Africa and entailing what he described as the United States of Africa – the ANC and PAC employed many similar strategies, such as anti-pass campaigns. Although the PAC never mustered the same following as the ANC, its message resonated in enough black South Africans to bring Sobukwe to the attention of the authorities.

  On 21 March 1960 he presented himself, along with a small crowd, at the Orlando police station for arrest on the grounds that he was not carrying his pass. Between 3000 and 5000 people had heeded the PAC call and done the same at Sharpeville police station. And we know what happened next.

  A leader of obvious influence and charisma, Sobukwe was jailed for three years for the pass offence. After which he was sentenced to six years of “preventative detention” on Robben Island thanks to a law specifically drafted to minimise his influence. From 1963 to 1969 Sobukwe was forbidden from communicating with anyone on the island. However, as the prisoners shuffled past him on the way to a lime quarry nearby, Sobukwe made a daily speech of rare power, poise and poignancy. When a free man, he was known for addressing his speeches to “sons and daughters of the soil”. In prison he would grab a fistful of sand as his shackled audience marched by and let it drop to the ground as a visual reminder that they were sons of the soil, that Africa belonged to them and they belonged to Africa. Although Sobukwe was released in 1969, he was to spend the final nine years of his life under house arrest and severe restrictions.

  Robben Island proved an effective mechanism for silencing those with dangerous voices and when Nelson Mandela and seven colleagues were found guilty on four charges of sabotage on 11 June 1964, life imprisonment on Robben Island was a fait accompli.

  After years of non-violent resistance to the apartheid machine only engendered increasingly vicious responses, the ANC had established a militant arm called Umkhonto we Sizwe. Its aim was to destabilise the nation through the bombing of Bantu administration offices, post offices and other government buildings, as well as electrical and railway infrastructure. In the eighteen months from December 1961, 200 such attacks took place. The authorities responded with a predictable raft of draconian knee-jerks. One of these was the Ninety Day Act in which police were permitted to detain suspects on suspicion of political activities and hold them – without access to a lawyer – for three months of questioning. This period could also be extended indefinitely, or as the justice minister of the time put it “to this side of eternity”.

  The last time Mandela spoke in public before being jailed for twenty-seven years was from the dock. He gave an impassioned statement that would sustain the armed struggle that he was being jailed for participating in. It concluded with the words: “During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, for which I am prepared to die.”

  Mandela arrived on Robben Island to find a mix of political activists and hardened criminals. No distinction was made when it came to how they were treated and hard labour in the prison’s limestone quarry occupied a significant amount of the prisoners’ time. A blinding white face of stone, the quarry was continually buffeted by sharp winds off the water, resulting in a near constant haze of dust that would blow into the prisoners’ eyes and lungs. Zinzi reported that Nelson Mandela’s eyes are so sensitive as a result of years of quarry work that he cannot be photographed with a flash and his ducts are damaged to the point where he is physically unable to shed tears.

  A seven square metre cave hacked into the rock functioned as the prisoners toilet and meal space. Two buckets were deemed sufficient for the ablutions of thirty prisoners over an eight-hour shift in the quarry.

  Robben Island is now also a wildlife sanctuary and as we drove towards the finale of the visit – a tour around a cell-block led by a former resident – springbok, bantabok, steenbok and eland bounded between the eucalyptus and aloe vera trees introduced to the island in 1891.

  Waiting in front of B section, a sombre grey bunker fronted by a pair of hefty metal doors, was Sipho, an ANC activist who spent five years on Robben Island. He ushered us into a wide corridor lit by fluorescent bars and pointed to a wooden door inscribed with the word kantoor (office). “It was where we were given our ID cards,” he said. “From that second till the time you left, your name became a number.”

  If the authorities viewed the prisoners as numbers, the imprisoned ANC hierarchy saw them as students. Operating under the motto “Each one teach one”, prisoners were instructed in everything from basic literacy and numeracy to biology, history and political courses with titles such as “Deepening and Broadening the Theatre of Revolution”.

  The secrecy of this education program is a matter of some debate as Mandela and others actively encouraged the warders to further their own education. That said, it is difficult to imagine approval being given for the structured examinations, assessments and ceremonial recognition of academic performance that took place on the island.

  Sipho guided us into a courtyard that separated B block, where the high-ranking political prisoners were interred to minimise their influence, from C block, home to minnows and murderers alike. It was here that the ANC brains trust would conduct amplified conversations that functioned as lectures to the inmates who listened intently on the other side of the wall. The prisoners whose job it was to deliver food also slipped scraps of paper with topics for discussion or test results back and forth.

  Next were the solitary confinement cells. On the walls were laminated remembrances from the prisoners who once occupied them. One of the most chilling was from Napthali Manana who was incarcerated on the island from 1982 to 1991. “During the medical check-ups,” he wrote, “authorities would talk about which organs would be taken from our bodies for transplants.”

  Each of the fifty cells – with the strange colour scheme of grey to head height and white to ceiling – had one of these grim memoirs affixed to the wall. Except cell number 5.

  Measuring six square metres, the cubicle which only just accommodated a metal cot, bedside table and steel bucket that served as a night toilet was Nelson Mandela’s home for eighteen years. Of his period on the island he wrote that “time moved glacially”. I was awestruck that he had emerged from these depths of deprivation and indignity not brimming with vengeance but possessing the quiet grace of man who always believed that his faith in humanity would be fulfilled.

  What’s to say about a man who not only invited two of his former jailers to his inauguration as president, but insisted one retain his job overseeing the facility when it became a tourist attraction? I have two heroes in life: one is my father for reasons too numerous, modest and sentimental to mention. The other is Mandela – no explanation required.

  The tour ended in a dormitory measuring twenty metres by fifteen which Sipho and sixty-four others had occupied for half a decade. Pointing out his bunk, he smiled for the first time and said, “I’m home now”. Shaking his hand as we made our way back to the bus, I asked if it was difficult coming back here every day to tell his story.

  “Sometimes,” he replied. “But it’s easier when there ar
e children in the tour groups. Aside from my wife, that’s what I missed most: their laughter, their hope and the future of my country which they represented.”

  With the boat pulling away towards Cape Town harbour, I took a last look at the island, hoping to glean even a hint of stark beauty. There was none.

  Robben Island is surrounded by the carcasses of thirty ships whose hulls were torn to tatters by shark-teeth rocks beneath the surface. The perils of sailing in this region are illustrated by the fact that on the night of 17 June 1722 ten ships were lost in Table Bay. Twenty-eight years earlier, the Dageraad was buffeted into a reef by a malevolent northwester off the island. Seventeen chests of gold sank into the icy brine with her, but only a trio were recovered. The Dageraad is one of many ships laden with riches that disappeared off the rock-ringed island, and hushed rumours of undiscovered fortunes beneath the waves still flit around Cape Town every now and then. Who would have thought that a treasure beyond measure had been sitting in cell number 5, B block?

  Chapter 15

  Dangling a Carat

  With Jennie on a plane and the knowledge that I would be home in three weeks, I left Cape Town before dawn the next day. By the time it had broken, I had passed through the Cape Flats and Hugenot Tunnel into the Hex River Valley. A quilt of vineyards surrounding white homesteads from which chimney smoke rose, the scene was dipped in toffee by the rising sun. This region, cradled by the Cape’s highest mountains, is the largest producer of table grapes in Africa. The surrounding area is where much of the Western Cape’s fresh produce is harvested. Beyond the mountains, however, lies the Karoo, a semidesert that covers almost a third of South Africa and is barely inhabited. The word comes from the language of the early Khoikhoi who coaxed food, shelter and water from the boundless wilderness. It means “hard”.

  The transition between farmland and scrubby plains was no gentle fade. Rather, it was like someone had a flicked a switch from fertile to arid. I had been warned to expect a visual palette bereft of variation and character, but after the tourist-clogged maelstrom of Cape Town and the Garden Route, the Martian landscape, clean air and shimmering lace of tarmac offered a gift of stark solitude.

  Far from being visually monotonous, driving through the Karoo was rather like looking through one of those Viewmaster toys we had as children. Only this time I was clicking through a series of stark and desolate landscapes unified by an austere beauty. Georgia O’Keeffe would have done her nana in the Karoo, but as aesthetically pure as it was, it was the sound that I liked best. Or should I say, the lack thereof. For urban types, silence is the rarest of commodities and the Karoo is a repository of the stuff.

  Nine hours after leaving Cape Town on a northeastern tack, I arrived in “the gem of the Karoo”. Wedged in a niche of the Sneeuberg range where the Sundays River loops lazily back on itself, Graaff-Reinet was the precise centrepoint of Gondwanaland before the continents began absconding hither and yon.

  Today it is a sedate town of gracious Cape Dutch and Victorian homes whose tumultuous history is acknowledged through its 220 national monuments and memorials. In addition to those commemorating locals who sacrificed their lives in World War I, II and the Anglo-Boer conflict, stood plaques, plinths and parapets of practically everyone who broke wind in the district.

  The next morning I awoke at the positively uncivilised time of 4.30am to catch a sunrise at the aptly named Valley of Desolation. Thanks to fortunate timing, I arrived in time to see the first golden wash spill over Driekoppe Mountain into a vast basin shaped by a hundred million years of volcanic and erosion forces. The spectacle was framed by pinnacles of piled dolerite that could have been the columns to some ancient temple whose high priests I aped in a reverent and ritualistic salute to the rising sun. Between me and the horizon, so distant it was convex, was a sheer drop to hectare upon hectare of ochre soil. The odd low hill sprang up here and there but was swallowed by the red sand giving them the appearance of welts on a sunburned back.

  I’m anything but a religious man, but such was the sparse magnificence of the Valley of Desolation that I couldn’t help but wonder whether some supernatural guiding hand had been at work alongside the erosion and magma. A lone black eagle riding the zephyrs in the valley signalled the time had come to leave – it wasn’t going to get any better than this and I’d heard the sound of shutting doors in the carpark.

  At peace yet craving coffee, I headed to a hamlet in the hills called Nieu Bethesda. It is located at the end of a dirt track which barrelled along grassy dykes and fissures before twisting through a valley floor where willow-laced rivers ran and a handful of impassive sheep grazed in an emerald paddock. The population of the town barely scratched four figures yet it buzzed with a low-frequency hum that sat somewhere between mystical and “on the count of three, freak out”. Equal parts isolated and inspiring, the town has long been a magnet for artists, but the most bi-polar of the lot was Helen Martins, whose home is Nieu Bethesda’s prime attraction.

  Born in the town, Helen left an unhappy marriage to a local farmer, then floated between Johannesburg, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth before returning in the 1930s to care for her ailing parents. Her mother died soon afterwards and her cantankerous father, whose less-than-affectionate nickname was the Lion, moved into a small windowless room off the verandah where he refused to have anything to do with his daughter. When he died in 1941, Martins painted his dwelling black and called it the Lion’s Den.

  It was the start of what is far and away the eeriest endeavour in South African art. Martins was ill in bed one night shortly after the Lion had roared for the final time when she became transfixed by the moonlight shining through her window. It symbolised how grey and dull her life had become and she resolved from that moment to flood her existence with colour. The desire to embellish her environment manifested itself in the installation of coloured glass panes in place of clear windows. These bathe her home in technicolour reds, greens and blues with each room having a different mood. Walls and ceilings were coated with elaborate patterns of crushed glass embedded in bands of bright paint. Natural light was viewed as a fuel to be diffused, and an alcove in one room was entirely given over to a wall made of amber jars through which a golden sheen radiated.

  The place is known as the Owl House, as a result of the emblematic bird images that work as a motif throughout, and walking through it is like wandering through an animated LSD trip. Once Martins had finished treating her home as a canvas, she turned her attention to the garden. There she utilised cement, wire and glass to create the hundreds of sculptures and relief figures that crowd her yard like a surreal mosh pit. Her favourite animals – owls and camels – abound in an otherworldly fantasia also populated by distorted sphinxes, Buddhas, bejewelled mermaids, acrobats and shepherds en route to a nativity scene in stable of tiered glass bottles. She and Lewis Carroll would have got on famously. On a cold winter’s morning in 1978, unable to take pleasure from her creations due to failing eyesight, Helen Martins swallowed enough caustic soda to kill herself.

  Despite the self-inflicted demise of its owner, the Owl House was an uplifting celebration of a fiercely creative life. Following hard upon the sunrise over the Valley of Desolation, I left Nieu Bethesda with a light heart.

  Hours later I crossed the Orange River and the desert began to recede in the face of the platteland’s rich farmland. Turning left at Bloemfontein – where as you’ll recall I spent a weekend one evening – the road bisected paddock after paddock of sunflowers, their heads bowed as if in solemn remembrance. These gave way to fenced-off empty scrubland where what lay beneath the soil was far more valuable than anything that could be grown in it. Hang on to your tennis bracelets, ladies, because we’ve just reached diamond country.

  One lazy afternoon in 1876, young Erasmus and Louisa Jacobs were exploring a riverbank on their neighbour’s farm near Hopetown when they found a shiny pebble. The children duly handed it over to the farm’s owner, Schalk Van Niekerk. Not knowing quite what to make
of the curiously glinting stone and being a spectacularly trusting type, he transferred it into the custody of a passing trader named John O’Reilly. When O’Reilly showed it to some wizened heads in Hopetown, they dismissed it as being of little value, one trying to console O’Reilly with the suggestion that it was topaz. The trader was unconvinced and passed the stone – so to speak – to the Acting Civil Commissioner of Colesberg. Its next stop was our friend Dr Atherstone in Grahamstown.

  It was a discovery which transformed South Africa from an Empire backwater to a source of unimaginable wealth. More deposits were unearthed shortly afterwards and by 1870 over 10,000 diggers from southern Africa, Australia and the United States were working plots along the Orange River.

  A year later a prospector with the marvellously appropriate name of Rawstone was doing his thang on a farm called Vooruitzicht, which has the uncanny meaning of Prospect. Semantic fate came to pass when an African employee of Rawstone’s excitedly showed his boss three stones he had found on a nearby hill. Known as the Colesberg Kopje, the rise proved to be the head of an ancient pipe of diamondifer-ous lava and fell within the property owned by brothers Diedrik and Nicholaas De Beer. Eleven years earlier they had paid £50 for the land. In just over a decade they turned a major – if shortsighted – profit by accepting 6000 guineas for the property. Their naivety was set in precious stone when the new owners retained the farmers’ name as the trading title of the company which would eventually dominate the global diamond industry.