In fact, Mandela’s refusal to appeal against the sentence helped let the diplomats off the hook, and the international attention soon subsided. The British Embassy was keen to resume friendly relations with Pretoria, who by July (the South Africans noted) were finding the Americans and the British more sympathetic toward them.82 The British were now privately expecting that Mandela would eventually be released to play a useful role—like other “prison graduates” elsewhere in Africa or in India. “We can be very thankful that the judge did not give a death sentence,” Stephenson told Rab Butler in September, “because it means that a leader of the calibre of Nelson Mandela, with his credentials enhanced by a term of imprisonment, should be available for the dialogue between black and white which must eventually take place in South Africa.” But Stephenson also warned that new black leaders would emerge, who would be “unlikely to share the distaste for violence and the other civilised values that were a facet of Mr. Mandela’s speech.”83
It was ironic that Mandela was being praised as a possible savior, worthy of Western support, by diplomats who had never tried to meet him, just when he was put completely out of their each. Pretoria was confident that within a few years he would be out of sight and out of mind, the ANC forgotten and abandoned. Their expectations were soon close to being fulfilled.
Mandela went to jail with all the glory of a lost leader, in an aura of martyrdom. He could not, it was true, claim to be either a great military commander or a revolutionary mastermind. The ANC had been incapacitated by bans, and was frequently amateurish, as Rivonia had shown, while MK was a long way from being a disciplined fighting force. For the past decade Mandela’s leadership had appeared not so much in a climb up an organized hierarchy as in successive images of the man of action, leading from the front: the chief of volunteer defiers; the militant speech maker charged with treason; the bearded Black Pimpernel in hiding; the tribal patriot in full costume “carrying Africa on his back”; the guerrilla commander in khaki fatigues, carrying a pistol. These images often seemed more theoretical than real, but the symbolism, the example, the clothes and performance were essential to his dramatic personification of his people, as they were to Churchill or to Gandhi. In his ability to reflect the people’s mood and embody their aspirations, Mandela had become a master politician of his time.
He had emerged from his two trials with more strength and depth than even some close friends had imagined possible. The earlier arrogance and aggression had subsided; the showmanship expressed in different roles had contracted into a single clear commitment; and no one could now doubt the extent of his sacrifice. His drive for leadership had met its challenge, and he seemed, as George Bizos noted, at peace with himself. The greater ordeal was still to come. For all his battlefields would now contract into a tiny stage, which would provide a much more intimate trial of character.
*When I visited Sobukwe in 1978 while he was under house arrest in Kimberley, I found him tolerant and perceptive about South African politics, but also paranoid, convinced that his body had been bugged by the police.
*I had an insight into the speech when I visited the courtroom, reporting the trial for the Observer: as Mandela came up from the cells below he smiled at me and I involuntarily gave the clenched-fist salute in response, which alarmed the surrounding police. I was taken out for questioning before being allowed back. At the end of the day I was asked by Mandela through his lawyers to look through the draft of the speech he was preparing, and to advise about its impact on overseas opinion. I spent the evening going through it with the lawyers but I could suggest only minor changes, most of which were not accepted.51
*Paragraph 4 consisted of five words which not even Mandela himself can now decipher or remember.
PART II
1964–1990
15
Master of My Fate
1964–1971
MANDELA’S LIFE sentence was a more serious test of his resilience than his two previous years in jail. He was now cut off from the world in his prime, at the age of forty-six, with no end in sight. He had never been an ascetic like Gandhi or Lenin: in his letters he would constantly hark back to the delights of Soweto or the Transkei; to the food, the landscape, the women, the music. Now all the bright scenery and characters would contract into the single bare stage of his cell and the communal courtyard.
But there was a powerful consolation: he was not alone. With him were some of his closest friends, who could reinforce each other’s morale and purpose, and develop a greater depth and self-awareness. At an age when most politicians tend to forget their earlier idealism in the pursuit of power, Mandela was compelled to think more deeply about his principles and ideas. In the microcosm of prison, stripped of all political trappings—platforms, megaphones, newspapers, crowds, well-tailored suits—and confined with his colleagues every day, he was able, as he put it, to stand back from himself, to see himself as others saw him.1 He learned to control his temper and strong will, to empathize and persuade, and to extend his influence and authority, not just over the other prisoners, but over the warders.
Between the black prisoners and their white guards, the balance of influence was constantly shifting inside the closed world. But gradually the prisoners, with much stronger motivation and cohesion than the warders, established their influence, with Mandela as their leader. There were many parallels with other twentieth-century political prisoners—with Gandhi in India, or the IRA in Northern Ireland’s H-blocks—but the letters, prison records and recollections of the Robben Islanders over the next twenty years provide a unique record of the psycho-politics of a jail where the prisoners could ultimately dominate their guards.
THE SEVEN prisoners stayed for a few days in Pretoria Local, still buoyant after escaping the death sentence. At 1 a.m. on June 12, 1964, they were told to pack their belongings, because they were going immediately to Robben Island. The other six were put in handcuffs and leg irons like slaves; but Mandela was not manacled.2 They were herded into a police van and driven to the military airport. They were flown in an old, unheated military Dakota, landing just after dawn on a cold, windy island airstrip, surrounded by armed guards.
Robben Island had become a more inhuman place since Mandela had been there two years before. It had been prepared to receive many more long-term prisoners, and reorganized on strict apartheid principles, with the warders, all white, determined to impose their racial supremacy. There had been some brutal “carry-ons”—as the warders called their assaults. They had recently beaten up the political prisoners, leaving one ANC activist, Andrew Masgondo, with serious wounds.3
Mandela once again began with a confrontation. This time it was on the question of clothes, which he always saw as a part of his dignity which he would not give up. The seven were issued with the standard short khaki trousers—the uniform of the “native boy”—except Kathrada, who as an Indian was entitled to long trousers. Mandela protested about the shorts, and a few days later found a pair of long trousers dumped in his cell. “No pin-striped three-piece suit has ever pleased me as much,” he wrote. But when other prisoners were denied long trousers he protested again, and had his own taken away. It was not until three years later that they all wore long trousers.4
Mandela was treated more carefully than the others: he suspected that the prison authorities were concerned about his important friends and royal connections.5 On the plane he had not been manacled, and when he arrived on the island he was offered a special diet because of his medical condition. He was allowed to continue his correspondence studies for his LL.B. at London University. He received law books via the British Embassy, arranged again by David Astor in London. “I will do everything in my power,” he wrote to the Ambassador, “to justify the confidence he has in me.”6 Mandela was soon given a table and chair for his cell, though he was not allowed certain crucial books.7 Granted these rare privileges, he felt all the more need to keep very close to his colleagues.
After a few days in the old jail bui
lding, the seven men were moved on June 25—the day before the traditional protest day of the ANC. They were driven to a bleak new structure which had just been completed: a low rectangle built around a stone courtyard, with three sides containing rows of small cells; the fourth was a high wall which provided a catwalk for a warder with a gun. They were all given similar cells along one side, called the isolation section, or Section B. Mandela’s cell was eight feet by seven feet, with a small barred window looking onto the courtyard, and was equipped with a straw mat and three threadbare blankets. It would be his home for the next eighteen years.
At first the prisoners and their lawyers expected they would serve ten years at the most.8 On their way to Robben Island from Pretoria the friendly young investigating officer, Lieutenant Van Wyk, had assured them that world opinion would get them out in five years: “the girls will be waiting for you.”9 Some of the prisoners, Mandela noted, were seriously asking whether they would still be there at Christmas.10 But they soon had to face the fact that they would be on Robben Island for a long time, and that their life would be “unredeemably grim.”11 He still had something to learn about brutality. “You have no idea of the cruelty of man against man,” he said later, “until you have been in a South African prison with white warders and black prisoners.”12 They had no access to radio or newspapers, and at first could only write and receive one letter, of a maximum of five hundred words, every six months. They could only correspond with their immediate family; and Mandela’s first letter—from Winnie—was blotted out by the censor. Censored portions of letters would be sent on to the Commissioner of Prisons to provide political background, while some letters to and from prisoners containing supposedly political information would be withheld, examined and then retained in the prison records—revealing both the doggedness and the pettiness of the surveillance.13
The political prisoners remained extraordinarily sure of the power of their cause and of their ideas, in total contrast to the common-law prisoners in other cells. “What was important,” said Mandela after his release, “was the fact that the ideas for which we were sent to Robben Island would never die. And we were therefore able to go through some of the harshest experiences which a human being can have behind bars—especially in a South African prison where the warders were drawn from a community which has always treated blacks like pieces of rag.”14 “We never lost confidence,” Sisulu recalled. “Analyzing Rivonia, we thought the policies for which we stood could be sustained, whether we were alive or dead. We had confidence in ideas.”15 “If you enter prison in a negative spirit every moment can be hell,” said Kathrada. “Nobody had in mind that Mandela would be President, but we knew we would win.”16 Despite the setbacks, Mandela was convinced, as he wrote in 1975, that “In my lifetime I shall step out into the sunshine, walk with firm feet.”17 “Man can adapt to the worst of conditions if he feels he is not alone,” said Mac Maharaj, who arrived on Robben Island early in 1965, “if he feels he has support in what he is doing.”18
After two weeks on the island the prisoners had a tantalizingly brief contact with the mainland when their lawyers Bram Fischer and Joel Joffe were allowed to visit them, to ask again whether they wished to appeal. They all said no, believing that a second trial would be an anticlimax; while Mandela was sure that an appeal would not succeed anyway.19 He was delighted to see Fischer again, but was puzzled that when he asked Fischer about his wife, Molly, he turned away. After the lawyers had left, Mandela was told that Molly Fischer had just been killed in a car crash. He was allowed to write a letter of condolence, but the prison never posted it.20 Soon afterward Fischer—whose code name was “Shorty”—disappeared underground; when George Bizos, Mandela’s other lawyer, visited the island, Mandela gave a questioning gesture with one hand, while holding the other hand low, meaning “What’s happened to Shorty?”21
The prisoners’ routine was deliberately harsh, as part of the punishment. They were woken at 5:30 a.m. to clean their cells and wash and shave in cold water in an iron bucket. They were given breakfast in the courtyard, from a drum filled with maize porridge, which Mandela found almost inedible, accompanied by a drink of baked maize brewed in hot water. They were inspected by a warder, to whom they had to doff their hats. Then they worked till noon in the cold courtyard in midwinter, sitting in rows hammering stones into gravel while the warders watched them. It was a punishment which could (wrote Neville Alexander in his subsequent report) “drive the most phlegmatic man into a state of fury.… To have to sit in the sun without moving and (for months at the beginning) without being allowed to speak to one’s neighbour was hell on earth.”22
At noon they had lunch of more maize, boiled in kernels. Then they worked again until four, when they washed for half an hour with cold seawater in a bathroom, where they could exchange a few words. Then they had supper of more maize, sometimes with a soggy vegetable or gristly meat, in their cells. At eight the night warder patrolled the corridor to ensure that they were not reading or writing; though they could sometimes whisper to each other, and prisoners who were studying were soon allowed to read till later. A bare forty-watt bulb burned all night in each cell, and the prisoners were left with their bare beds and lonely thoughts until the morning.
In January 1965 they began much harder labor in the lime quarry, which was to be the center of Mandela’s daily life for the next few years. There they had to hack away the rock to reach the layers of lime, which they then dug out with a pick and shovel. As a workplace it was pitiless, with no escape or protection from the cold in winter or the dazzling glare and heat of midsummer. “I was always thankful I never had to go into that hole, a veritable furnace,” said the warder James Gregory. “In summer the walls deflected any cooling breeze sweeping in off the ocean. Not only were they being burned from above by the sun, but also within the quarry where the sun’s glare rebounded off the white stone, reflecting into their eyes and burning them.”23 For three years they were refused dark glasses, and many were left with damaged eyesight. Kathrada was refused dark glasses because, according to a letter from the Commissioner of Prisons, he belonged to the category of persons who wanted to be above his fellows by wearing dark glasses and carrying a folded umbrella and a briefcase.24 After three years they were allowed sunglasses if they paid for them; Mandela’s eyes never recovered, and even after an operation, he reads with difficulty.
Mandela preferred the exertion, the open air and the glimpses of nature in the quarry to enclosure in the courtyard. The prisoners were soon able to work at their own rhythm—for a short time with the help of African work songs, which became a political contest. In 1965 they were joined in the quarry by three hardened criminals, who began to provoke them—clearly with the warders’ approval—with a mocking work song, “Befunani e Rivonia?” (What did you want at Rivonia?). The political prisoners responded with their own work songs, which became bolder, including a Xhosa song which said: “the white man’s work is never finished: hold your knees”—that is, go slower. But one warder, Jordaan, understood Xhosa, and singing was soon banned.25
Mandela was in a very small, enclosed world. The thirty-odd political prisoners in the isolation section could briefly communicate with each other when they washed, or took their meals, or in the quarry. But they were cut off from the rest of the prison. All the changing pageants of their lives with their families, colleagues and communities contracted into the minimal scenery of a repetitive, long-running play. “The only audience was ourselves and our oppressors,” said Mandela, always aware of his stage.26 “We were a universe of thirty people,” said one of them, Eddie Daniels.27
At the core of this universe were the seven men of Rivonia, who had known each other for ten or twenty years—including Mandela and his most trusted friends, Sisulu and Kathrada. Sisulu, six years his senior, was still Mandela’s chief mentor: “Nelson knew that it was really Sisulu who had made him and molded him in so many ways,” thought Fikile Bam, one of the younger prisoners; “I don’t know of any
one to whom Walter was not acceptable as a leader.”28 Mandela wrote in jail how much he admired Sisulu’s clear vision and judgment, his accessibility and openness to new ideas, his simplicity and love of nature. He shared some of Sisulu’s mannerisms, like the phrase “what-you-call.” Sisulu had helped to teach Mandela how to see the best in everyone—which could exasperate more combative colleagues—but in any dangerous situation Sisulu was in the forefront.29 “He was a lamb at home,” said Bam, “but when it came to the chase he was a lion. He was soft as a person, but never soft on principle.”30
Kathrada, much the youngest of the seven, and the only Indian among them, was equally steadfast, with an unselfishness and inner calm which may have owed something to his Islamic background. He had been a communist since his schooldays, but he could make fun of the dogmatists, and Mandela enjoyed his devastating repartee. He was always loyal to Mandela, whom he would call “Mdala” (the old one), out of respect, but like Sisulu he felt free to criticize: Mandela saw them both as mirrors through which he could see himself truthfully.31
Govan Mbeki was the oldest and best educated. He was a big man with an innocent smile and a preacher’s resonant voice. The son of a Christian peasant farmer, he had been educated by missionaries and named after the first principal of Lovedale, William Govan.32 Like Mandela, he went to Healdtown and Fort Hare, after which he became a shopkeeper, teacher, journalist and political organizer. He found a new faith in Marxism, and devoured history, politics and economics, all with a strong Marxist flavor. His stubbornness could embarrass his colleagues, as it had when he had committed them to Operation Mayibuye; and his pedagogic style was at odds with Mandela’s questioning approach. “He had a more theoretical militancy,” said Sisulu, “while we had to be realistic in assessing the situation.”33
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