Raymond Mhlaba was close to Mbeki, and was also from the Eastern Cape. The son of a policeman, he had bravely been one of the first to join the Defiance Campaign; Mandela enjoyed his down-to-earth approach as a “son of the soil.”34 He was more reluctant than Mbeki and others to join in political argument, and Mandela came to appreciate his conciliatory approach. He was still deeply influenced by his mission education, and Kathrada was once amused to hear Mhlaba, losing his temper with a warder, calling him “You fu … fascist!” “Those mission boys,” said Kathrada. “They would rather be violent than swear.”35
The other two Rivonia prisoners, Andrew Mlangeni and Elias Motsoaledi, were working-class trade unionists who had sacrificed their livelihoods for the struggle. They had been less central to the Rivonia plots, and had expected to be acquitted. They both came from very poor backgrounds, and had educated themselves. Mandela went to some trouble to help in the education of Motsoaledi’s children.
Other ANC members in the isolation section had been convicted in other trials. They included Dennis Brutus, a poet from Port Elizabeth, and two veterans of the Treason Trial: George Peake, a Coloured campaigner from Cape Town; and Billy Nair, a courageous Indian saboteur from Durban. Nair had already been on the island for four months, and the ill-treatment had made him very aggressive. When he joined the isolation section Mandela befriended him, and persuaded him to calm down. Nair was influenced by Mandela’s stoical approach, but always found him maddeningly reticent about his personal life.36
Early in 1965 a batch of guerrilla fighters arrived in the isolation section. They had been sentenced following the so-called Little Rivonia Trials, and included Wilton Mkwayi, a trade unionist from Port Elizabeth who had commanded MK after the Rivonia arrests; Laloo Chiba, a former tailor who would prove to have invaluable skills in transcribing documents in tiny handwriting; and Mac Maharaj, a sophisticated Indian from Durban who became one of Mandela’s trusted allies. A slender man with a neat goatee beard, educated at the London School of Economics as well as Natal University, Maharaj combined a sharp mind with great courage, and resisted severe torture. On Robben Island he would go through a short period of despair in 1970, when he was thirty-five, but he recovered his spirit to begin plotting new schemes for escape.37
The ANC members were mixed up with prisoners from other political parties, which gave Mandela a unique opportunity to get to know them better. It was an extraordinary decision by the government to concentrate all political prisoners on the island. “Some people argued it would be better to spread prisoners over the one hundred and fifty-six jails in the country,” General Willemse, one of the commanding officers on Robben Island, told me afterward. “But there would be a negative effect of spreading their influence. It was better to keep an eye on them.”38 “They thought we were so much poison we had to be kept in one bottle,” said one PAC prisoner, Dikgang Moseneke. “And that worked wonders.”39 Mandela thought it was the government’s greatest mistake, for it allowed rival parties to find common ground, which they never had outside jail.40 And Robben Island soon became a political laboratory, or workshop.
At first, prisoners from the ANC’s chief rival body, the PAC, were in the majority. Their founder-President, Robert Sobukwe, was kept in a separate house on the island until 1969—a cruel isolation which helped to disorient him later—but others were increasingly accessible. Many PAC members began by bitterly resenting the ANC prisoners, who included Indians and Coloureds. “We saw things only in terms of the colour of the skin of an individual,” said Kwedi Mkalipi, who arrived in 1966. “Then we came to Robben Island. It was a queer situation because now, for the first time, we were bundled together with the ANC, who we sincerely believed were all Marxists. So this led us to be chauvinistic in our approach.” Mkalipi would never forget his first approach from Walter Sisulu: “I come from your area,” said Sisulu, “and Mandela also comes from your area; and Mandela would like to talk with you. I know your attitude, but in here this is no place to voice our differences.”41
Mandela found most of the PAC prisoners very insecure, “unashamedly anti-communist and anti-Indian.”42 Kathrada thought they were “colourless, bigoted, narrow and racialistic,” with “massive inferiority complexes.”43 But Mandela was determined to establish dialogue, to provide the basis for unity later outside. He had talks with Zeph Mothopeng, a rugged ex-teacher with unbending principles who was one of the cofounders of the PAC, but made little impact before Mothopeng left the island in 1967. He had more success with Mothopeng’s successor, Clarence Makwetu (later President of the PAC), whom he found more balanced and sensible, but the dialogue collapsed after Makwetu left and was succeeded by John Pokela.44 Most PAC prisoners would retain their differences with the ANC, but many came to respect their viewpoint and their leadership.
Mandela faced more abstract intellectual arguments from the Trotskyists of the Unity Movement, his old opponents. The most articulate was Neville Alexander, a Coloured academic from the University of Cape Town with a Ph.D. from Tübingen in Germany, from whom Mandela learned a lot.45 Alexander had kept aloof from active protest until he rashly joined the small, eccentric group of conspirators the Yu Chi Chan Club (YCC), and had been sentenced for subversion and possessing literature about sabotage. He had been sent with five others to Robben Island in 1964. “The poor YCC chaps (all of them),” wrote Kathrada to a friend in 1971, “first woke to the reality of politics with the shock of their arrest and imprisonment. On the whole their approach still remains very naïve and idealistic.”46 Alexander was a small man, young and hotheaded, as he described himself later, and the contrast with the slow-speaking, older Mandela was striking. Mandela sensed that Alexander was irritated by his height and sometimes “wanted to throw a stone at him,” but found he could disarm him with a smile.
Alexander began with a low opinion of the ANC as a racial body which had separated itself from the Indian and Coloured movements; but he welcomed the chance of arguing with Mandela himself. Over a year they argued man-to-man for more than thirty hours about “the national question”: was South Africa a nation? Alexander believed (like the rest of his movement) that there was no national consciousness, no national unity in South Africa: “We were busy building a nation.”47 Mandela insisted that the African people were a nation, while the others were minorities or national groups. When Alexander asked Mandela to define a Coloured person like himself, he replied that Coloureds were the progeny of a white and black union. Alexander retorted that this was a completely biological, racial argument, and that there was no point in continuing their discussion. “Neville argued for nonracial political parties: I said that was premature for ordinary people,” Mandela recalled. “Look what happens at political meetings—they keep in their own groups. Let’s go on pressing for a multiracial society—but it will take time.”48 The prison arguments would become much more topical in the eighties, when campaigners from all races made a common front against apartheid. In the nineties they would come closer together in the government of the new South Africa, as President Mandela took up the language of “nation building.”
On the island, Alexander soon revised his opinion of Mandela. “In the first few months we were really terrible,” he admitted later. “If it hadn’t been for the statesmanship and maturity of Nelson and Walter and Govan and others I think we could have had a terrible situation in that prison … we would have been totally marginalized, marooned among all the others.” Alexander saw Mandela as a political animal, not a philosopher, but he was fascinated by his sensitivity and his skills in debate. Sometimes, he noticed, Mandela would concede a weakness in an argument, which he could then turn to his advantage—like a feint in boxing: “The other person thinks you’re weak, but actually your very acknowledgment of your weakness is a strength.” “In terms of actual systematic rigorous attention to the logic of an argument,” Alexander thought by the end, Mandela was “way beyond any one of us.”
They argued with good humor until July 1967, when the
y learned that Albert Luthuli, the President of the ANC, had died. Alexander thought that Luthuli had sold out by resisting armed struggle and accepting the Nobel Peace Prize: “It was difficult to talk war and peace at the same time.”49 When the ANC prisoners held a memorial service on Robben Island, Alexander attacked Luthuli caustically. Mandela resented the fact that he had not shown “even perfunctory regrets at the man’s passing,” thus threatening the climate of cooperation between parties.50 In retrospect, Alexander admitted that he had caused needless offense, but he was deeply hurt by Mandela’s reproof in his 1995 autobiography, at a time when, as President, “everybody he frowns on becomes a bit of a devil.”51
Most of Mandela’s colleagues automatically regarded him as their leader, as he had led them from underground, and they would direct any visitor to his cell as their representative. “He wasn’t unquestioned,” said Govan Mbeki. “We put him there. When we came to jail we said: ‘You are our spokesman.’ ”52 To some prisoners Mandela still seemed pulled between his two past roles of traditional chief and democratic leader. “There was this arrogance about him which stemmed directly from the chieftaincy,” said Fikile Bam. “It was Sisulu who saved him from the consequences.”53 But Mandela’s close colleagues saw his detachment as part of his search for unity and consensus: “He tried to be a builder, to take a position which he thinks is more suitable for a leader of the ANC,” said Sisulu. “He avoided expressing emotion: he would rather want a balanced picture.”
The ANC leaders were closer-knit than the others. “We formed a very formidable team,” said Sisulu, “because we knew each other so well, what the other was thinking.”54 They soon re-created their own structure on the island, appointing a High Organ of four prisoners as their ruling body, all of whom had served on the previous ANC National Executive: Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki and Mhlaba. The High Organ decided on policy toward the prison authorities and discipline within the isolation section, and passed on their decisions to the other prisoners through the communications committee, led by Kathrada and including Michael Dingake and Joe Gqabi, who found ingenious ways to smuggle messages to political prisoners in the other buildings.
The morale of the ANC prisoners depended heavily on hearing good news from outside, which at first was rare, but in 1967 more guerrillas arrived on the island with exciting stories to tell of having actually fought in southern Rhodesia as members of the “Luthuli detachment,” who were trying to get through to South Africa. One of the commanders of MK, Justice Mpanza, joined the isolation section, and Mandela as the first Commander in Chief was filled with pride to hear his accounts of the bravery and training of the troops, even though the incursion had failed.55 In the communal cells the ANC prisoners were thrilled: “We crowded round them, pumping them for every detail of the battles, of their training, and what kind of weapons they had used,” wrote Indres Naidoo. And they joined in “The Soldiers’ Song” (to the tune of “Banana Boat”):
Give him a bazooka and a hand grenade-o
Take the country—the Castro Way.56
But the ANC prisoners had to be careful not to antagonize other groups. When members of other parties objected to the High Organ representing them, they formed a wider committee called Ulundi, which advised on common issues, and which had rotating chairmen, including Fikile Bam, who was a useful link between Mandela and the Unity Movement.57 But the High Organ remained the main political power.58 At first its members were all Xhosa speakers, which could annoy others, who sometimes complained that the Xhosa language encouraged flattery by Mandela or Mbeki, even in English, which they called Xhosalisation. Neville Alexander noticed that Mandela’s stories, which sounded wooden in English, were much more vivid in Xhosa.59 But Mandela spent time with non–Xhosa speakers like Kathrada and Eddie Daniels, and the High Organ later added an extra rotating member—including in turn Kathrada, Laloo Chiba and M. D. Naidoo—who widened its scope.60
Mandela’s friends were not all political. One of his closest was Eddie Daniels, a quiet and light-skinned Coloured from Cape Town who had once sailed on fishing trawlers. He had belonged to the Liberal Party but then joined a white group in its violent offshoot, the ARM, which carried out acts of sabotage, for which he had been sentenced to fifteen years. He was the only Liberal on the island, lonely and distrusted by the more antiwhite comrades, though he was not very politically minded. On his second day he encountered a big man in short trousers, khaki shirt and sandals, whom he was thrilled to recognize as Mandela. When he said, “Call me Nelson,” they were the first friendly words he had heard in prison. Mandela thereafter took trouble to brief Daniels personally about his meetings with visitors, so that he would not be isolated. Daniels was soon fortified by Mandela and Sisulu: “When I felt demoralized I could hug them and their strength would flow into me.… We couldn’t see a future—it was blank. But Mandela always could.”
Once, when Daniels was too ill to get up, Mandela came to his cell and emptied his chamber pot. When a warder found that Daniels had been keeping a diary and summoned him to appear before the authorities the next morning, Daniels spent the night shivering with fear; but after breakfast he found Mandela sitting in his cell, to reassure him: “Danny, I know you’ll handle this.” Daniels, as he recalled, “felt lifted, absolutely lifted.”61 In return he was always trying to help Mandela and Sisulu. “He was too good,” said Sisulu afterward; “it was embarrassing.”62 Daniels became quite intimate with Mandela, whom he called Dalibunga. Mandela shared his letters from home with him, translating them from Xhosa, and talking about homely things. He also taught Daniels a song, “Bonnie Mary of Argyle,” which he had found in a book, and which Daniels still loves to sing:
’Tis thy voice my gentle Mary
And thine artless winning smile
That has made this world an Eden
Bonnie Mary of Argyle.
And he taught him the Victorian poem “Invictus,” by W. E. Henley:
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.63
“When you read words of that nature you become encouraged,” Mandela said later. “It puts life in you.”64 He wrote in his memoir in prison: “There is a profound truth in the idea that ‘man makes himself,’ a truth bound up with the whole history of mankind, that has shaped our own history.”65
Mandela had these close relationships with many of the thirty prisoners in the isolation block. A greater problem was how they should relate to the warders who dominated their daily lives, and who had the power to persecute them. They were unpromising material: usually young country Afrikaners, many from poor or broken homes, much less well educated and confident than the prisoners, but therefore often all the more resentful and obsessed by the rules. Kathrada quoted Tolstoy: “In prison the warders have regulations instead of hearts.” The guards had their own insecurities, rivalries and needs, and they lived in their own kind of prison on the bleak island.66 That could provide some basis for communication.
Mandela had already realized from his earlier periods in jail that he could impress warders with a combination of assertiveness, respect and legal knowledge, and that he could retain his dignity in the most humiliating surroundings. When his lawyer George Bizos paid an early visit to the island in October 1964, he was not allowed near the prison building. Instead, a truck arrived, from which eight guards jumped out, followed by Mandela, wearing short trousers and shoes without socks, who was then marched toward him, with guards surrounding him. But Mandela was walking very upright, with his hands behind his back, and setting his own pace. When he came near, Bizos went up to embrace him. Mandela said: “George, let me introduce you to my guard of honor,” and named them. The incident summed up Mandela’s relations with the warders from the start. He would respect them as human beings, like anyone else, but he would never be subservient. He would ensure that the prisoners set their own pace of work, and he would neve
r call the guards “baas,” as they demanded. All the prisoners tried to avoid saying “baas”: some satisfied their pride by saying “tard” after it, under their breath: “Baastard.” Mandela simply refused to say the word.67
Mandela noticed a huge gap between the top and the bottom of the prison service. The Commissioner of Prisons in Pretoria, General Steyn, was a suave, well-mannered man who had traveled abroad; he wore elegant suits and shoes, and a fashionable short-brimmed hat, which he actually doffed to the prisoners. His etiquette, said the prisoner Michael Dingake, “could be dazzling to inmates more acquainted with abuse from junior officers.”68 But the General’s visits to the island were rare, and Mandela soon realized he was turning a blind eye to the abuses. Mandela was more angry with senior officers than with the ordinary warders. His younger friend Fikile Bam thought it was due to his sense of superiority.69 But Mandela had his own reasons: he reckoned that “an ordinary warder, not a sergeant, could be more important to us than the Commissioner of Prisons or even the Minister of Justice … when you had a good relationship with the warders in your section it became difficult for the higher-ups to treat you roughly.”70 When Mandela arrived on the island, Neville Alexander noticed, “he had already come to believe that the warders were not uniformly evil.” In his earlier short stay in 1963 Mandela had encountered brutal warders like the sadistic Kleynhans brothers, but he had also come across others who were prepared to buck the system and show some humanity.
He now realized that there was a raging debate among the warders, between those who treated the prisoners humanely and those who were determined that they “would never again resist white supremacy.” He was beginning to think that “our occupation of the moral high ground could make it possible for us to turn some of the warders round.”71 Alexander never bought that line completely, but Mandela was learning how to relate to the insecure young Afrikaner warders. “I became relaxed in jail as I realized that the warders were not homogeneous,” he told me in 1996. “Some warders wanted me to stay in jail forever, but others wanted to keep in with me. It took some time to realize.” He saw a political opportunity in trying to argue with them and persuade them, and he was always hopeful of converting them. “I soon realized that when an Afrikaner changes he changes completely and becomes a real friend.”72 He began explaining the ANC’s policies to visiting prison officials—which helped to develop his own skills in argument. Sisulu saw those talks as the precursor of the later discussions with government: “The negotiation itself was a process which started from this source.”73
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