In 1981 the younger prisoners went on a hunger strike, inspired by the IRA’s Bobby Sands, demanding, among other things, to be allowed visits from younger children. Mandela warned them that it was their duty to survive, to preserve their intellects and to protect weaker prisoners.28 But he joined in the strike, which went on for six days. Eventually he negotiated an agreement which included allowing children as young as three to visit the island.29
The monastic conditions provided an apt setting for concentrated teaching and debate. Many other political leaders, from Jawaharlal Nehru in India to Robert Mugabe in Rhodesia to the IRA rebels in Northern Ireland, had developed their political theories in jail. But Robben Island, with hundreds of political prisoners serving long sentences, provided a more sustained opportunity to sharpen political ideas with dialectic and polemic, and to put the struggle in a wider context. It was like a protracted course in a remote left-wing university. The isolation and shared predicament of the prisoners, with no scope for consumerism, moneymaking or rabble-rousing, encouraged idealism and egalitarianism, and developed human sensitivities and communal attitudes. But the island had limitations as a school for practical government. It preserved much of the innocence and naïveté of the powerless, who had little experience of the complexities of administration, the drawbacks of state bureaucracies or the dangers of corruption. It encouraged theory rather than practice.
In this questioning university atmosphere, Mandela was soon challenged. Many of the young comrades were ardent Marxists when they arrived, inspired by the coming to power of communist governments in Mozambique and Angola, and by stories of Eastern Europe, Cuba and the Soviet Union. Some were startlingly innocent: “Do they really catch colds in Russia?” Kathrada was once asked.30 But they saw their belief in revolutionary Marxism justified in South Africa by the fascistic government, by the evident collusion between capitalists and apartheid, and by the long tradition of communist heroes of all races, from Moses Kotane to Yusuf Dadoo to Bram Fischer.
On the island they were stirred up by the veteran Stalinist Harry Gwala, who after finishing his sentence in 1973 had joined a secret network to recruit MK fighters and organize strikes, only to be caught in 1975 and sentenced to life imprisonment back on the island in 1977. He returned more fiery than ever, and captivated the young comrades with his rhetoric. “We crammed daily into his tiny cell, analysing nearly all political conflicts in the world,” said Thami Mkhwanazi. “Whenever Gwala roared, the young lions roared with him.”31 “He was a good writer, a good Marxist with a fantastic memory,” said Billy Nair. “But he was a hard-liner, with a sectarian approach. He endeared himself to the youth. He didn’t hesitate to take a swipe at anybody: he would go for Madiba.”32 “He was the best-read man I’ve ever met,” said Eric Molobi. “He knew all the details about the Second and Third Communist International. And he didn’t conceal that he was challenging Mandela.”33
Gwala saw himself as the protector of the true revolutionary flame from bourgeois reformists. “There was no way of reconciling ideological differences,” he said later.34 He was determined to achieve a genuine workers’ democracy in South Africa, which would control the means of production: when the Freedom Charter said “the people shall govern,” it meant that the workers must rule. “He had kept a hawkish eye on the non-communist Rivonia trial leadership,” said Mkhwanazi. “He would bark at the slightest move that appeared to be threatening his dream.”35 Mandela would later praise Gwala as a “stalwart of the struggle,” but Sisulu would be openly critical: “He was a real Stalinist and took a narrow view. He was intellectually able to analyze, but alas he analyzed wrong. The majority of the young people who took an ultraleft line would follow him.”36 The Marxists saw the island as offering a unique opportunity for political education: “A crying need was felt for a theory that would correctly interpret the world,” said Gwala. “Such a theory was the labor theory as propounded by Marx and Engels and developed by Lenin.”
At first the young militants had no time for “the dusty manuscripts of Marx and Engels,” as Govan Mbeki complained, and were not well informed about either the ANC or the Communist Party.37 But Mbeki, Gwala and others were determined to educate them. Political classes would be provided surreptitiously, sometimes while prisoners were walking in the exercise yard. They managed to remove a copy of Das Kapital from the library, and a team then copied it out through the night.38 The High Organ had already prepared Syllabus A, which provided a history of the ANC, and a reading course which Mbeki reckoned would take three years to complete thoroughly.39 Syllabus B provided a history of human society, much influenced by Marx and Engels.
Gwala’s return to the island in 1977 sparked off a fierce new round of debates between the pure Marxists and the “nationalists”—as they called Mandela’s group—of which details and documents have only recently come to light. Gwala was put among the young militants in Section E, which was called the Klipgooier (stone-thrower section), and it became a hotbed of Marxism. “It was the most like the Soviet Republic in South Africa,” said one of them, Naledi Tsiki.40 Gwala continually called for the “seizure of power”—the battle cry of the guerrilla fighters—which would require a decisive military victory, as in Cuba. Mandela, on the other hand, always saw the armed struggle as a means to force the government to the negotiating table.41 It was an angry debate. “Young people became more and more hot about the issue of seizure of power,” said Sisulu. “Any doubts about it created problems for them, though they had high respect for the leadership. Because we were firm, and had examined the situation, we were able to keep to our line. The greatest danger was to attempt the impossible, to be defeated completely, and to ruin the country.”42
A more fundamental issue was the relationship between the Congresses and the Marxists, which resurrected all the arguments that had raged about the Freedom Charter twenty years earlier. Mandela always saw the ANC as a distinct national party, with its own proud history and policies, which “welcomed all those with the same objectives.”43 But Gwala and Govan Mbeki regarded the Communist Party as the dominant force, increasingly closely bound to the ANC: Gwala even wanted to replace the ANC anthem, “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika,” with “The Internationale.” “He saw the ANC as a passenger,” Eric Molobi thought, “who’d get off before the revolution.”44
It was not a straight confrontation between communists and anticommunists, or between the SACP and the ANC. Many past loyal members of the SACP, like Maharaj and Kathrada, believed in the primacy of the ANC; while the ANC itself had many different strands, including Christians, Muslims, trade unionists, small businessmen and academics. Nor was it a racial division: since 1969 the ANC had admitted non-African communists like Joe Slovo (provoking some pure Africanists to retreat into the PAC or BPC); while the presence of courageous Indian and Coloured leaders on the island made racial arguments harder to sustain. The real issue was about the integrity of Marxism: the hard-line communists stood out against any dilution of Marxist principles and workers’ control.
The argument raged among the thirty prisoners in Mandela’s block, Section B. The rival camps exchanged documents, or “polemics.” Document 1/B set out the position favored by Mandela: that the Freedom Charter was always intended to establish a “bourgeois democracy,” which could be the prelude to a socialist state, as in Europe; but in the meantime the Congresses must fight on the broadest front possible, against racial barriers, rather than against capitalism.45 Document 2/B went further, emphasizing that Congress was a national front, not a party, and must work together with all enemies of fascism, including the PAC and new groups including the Zulu movement Inkatha and Black Consciousness. “I do not think we can afford,” wrote its author, “the lordly metaphysical categorisation of fixed enemies and fixed friends.”46 But Document 3/B from the Marxist side, which showed the clear influence of Govan Mbeki, insisted that the Freedom Charter represented the workers and the oppressed, confronted by the white capitalist class.47
Mbeki was
always strongly opposed to a broad front against apartheid: race oppression, he insisted, was born of class conflict, and so-called allies like Black Consciousness were really linked to “far-flung imperialist forces.” He denied that blacks could benefit from capitalism: he strongly contradicted Mandela’s notion, in his now famous 1956 article in Liberation, that after victory African free enterprise would “flourish as never before” (see this page). And he wanted to hear rival views from other sections, following Mao’s professed principle “Let a hundred flowers bloom.”48
The leaders in Mandela’s section put forward their views in a document with the code name “Inq-M”—“Inq” (for inqindi, meaning fist) was the Congress Movement, and “M” (for Marxist) was the Communist Party. It explained that the immediate struggle was against racial oppression, not capitalism, and was based not on Marx but on the Freedom Charter, which promised a democratic system in which the communists could put forward their own policies.49
The High Organ in Mandela’s section then extended the debate to the other cells. They were not supposed to communicate with each other, but the prisoners copied texts in tiny writing on thin pieces of paper, which they smuggled between cells, watching the warders like hawks: “They had a greater number of eyes and ears than the jail authorities.”50 Kathrada, who had been appointed a librarian, was able to move between cells with his books. One group of young militants asked him, “What is a people’s democracy?” The question helped to set off the fiercest debate.51 Books were the ammunition in the battle of ideas. “If we laid our hands on any book, however thick,” said Mbeki, “it was copied out and distributed to our membership throughout the various sections.”52
The debate raged through the general cells, magnified by Harry Gwala, and taken up by his militant young comrades, who had more recent experience of the mainland than the veterans, who soon felt disadvantaged. “We didn’t have enough ammunition,” said Kathrada. “We unearthed everything we could find.”53 The militants complained that “Inq-M” was thoroughly misleading and out of date: South Africa had changed greatly over the last decade while the veterans had been in jail. Supermarkets, hypermarkets and chain stores had helped to obliterate small entrepreneurs; big monopolies were buying off the middle class; industries were turning the peasantry into a rural proletariat; and even whites were becoming more removed from the ownership of industries and finance houses. As a result, the Marxists claimed, most South Africans had moved to the left politically, and now rejected capitalism. And elsewhere in Africa communism was gaining ground, controlling governments in Angola and Mozambique, and inspiring rebel forces in Rhodesia and Namibia. Within South Africa, they argued, apartheid was a fascist movement which threatened all democratic values, so it must be countered by a people’s democracy, not a bourgeois one. They quoted from Sechaba, the organ of the ANC in exile, which said in 1969 that “On the wake of the victorious revolution a Democratic People’s Republic shall be proclaimed.”54
Mandela was worried by the growing acrimony among the prisoners. He always encouraged debate, but the arguments were becoming increasingly tense. Within his own section he and Mbeki were barely on speaking terms, and sometimes Sisulu had to act as peacemaker.55 The tension was spreading through the cells. “You got a helluva debate,” said Raks Seakhoa, “but sometimes it could be very ugly. It would go down the ranks.”56 Mandela always saw his role in prison as promoting unity, both within the Congresses and between the parties. “He always tried to be a builder,” said Sisulu. “He avoided expressing his emotions: he would rather want a balanced picture.”57 But he was now hard-pressed to maintain balance.
Eventually Kathrada was asked to write a summary of the arguments, to try to reach a consensus. He produced a masterly document of twenty-one closely written pages. It began by welcoming the “ferment in our own ranks,” praising the alertness and knowledge of the comrades and humbly admitting that “Inq-M” contained mistakes and confusions which arose from the isolation of the prisoners in Section B. It reemphasized that Congress was leading the national struggle, while the Communist Party led the class struggle, and that the ANC’s tactics would be decided by the concrete conditions inside South Africa. The Freedom Charter could under certain conditions provide a “qualitative leap towards socialism,” but in the meantime it allowed for the sharing of power among all classes and groups who had supported the struggle; it also allowed for Africans to own freehold land, factories and businesses, as stated in Mandela’s article in Liberation—which, the document stressed, had expressed the views of the whole board of the journal.
Kathrada’s document attempted to dampen the most revolutionary expectations of the comrades from the battlefields. South Africa, it warned them, was not yet ready to replace capitalism with a workers’ state. The growing black middle class were investing in long leases, cars, television sets and refrigerators—which would make them more conservative and less political. The South African struggle was quite different from the revolutions in Eastern Europe, where the Communist Parties had overthrown Nazism with the help of the Red Army. And the Congresses had never said that they stood for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The document encouraged the comrades to study revolutions and Marxism, which could (echoing Mandela’s words) “operate like a bright searchlight in a dark tunnel.” But it stressed too that “To fully harness the people’s patriotism we should first be clear of our priorities.”
Kathrada’s document was passed to the other sections, with a covering note in Mandela’s handwriting:
This document was unanimously approved by the High Organ and we are now sending it to you for attention. We are also circulating it again to the membership here and, should there be any additional comments, we will prepare an addendum and forward it to you in due course.
Amandla!58
The warders intercepted the document as it was on its way to Tokyo Sexwale’s cell. Surprisingly there was no punishment, and nothing was said about it. But the general conciliation between the two sides was relaxing the tension, as prisoners in other cells noticed: “Suddenly in about 1978 Nelson and Govan were walking and talking,” said Sonny Venkatrathnam. “This was a strange sight to us.”59 Govan Mbeki would insist that there had been no challenge to Mandela’s authority: “The decision was taken by the High Organ that Nelson would be our spokesman,” he wrote later, “and that position continued until we parted in 1982.”60
In spite of the fierce arguments, Robben Island was acquiring a special spirit of tolerance and discipline. Many of the young rebels had acquired from the veterans the habits of self-control, team spirit and rational argument, which became the distinctive marks of the Robben Islanders who would later exert such influence on the new South Africa. In Western terms, it was as if the military discipline and camaraderie of the Guards or West Point had been combined with the intellectual stimulus of Oxford or Yale and the moral conviction of the French wartime resistance. There was also an African element of ubuntu in the concern for human relationships—“a person is a person because of other people”—which was shared by the other races. Kathrada had often thought about Oscar Wilde’s desolate lines
The vilest deeds, like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison air;
It is only what is good in man
That wastes and withers there.61
“It hasn’t applied in my experience,” said Kathrada. “On the contrary, I learned a great deal about human relationships while in prison. Political prisoners generally have a positive approach that carries them through.”62
The spirit of self-discipline and tolerance would still flourish after Mandela left the island in 1982. “We all had the same view of forgiveness,” said Eric Molobi, “because the level of debate, with logic and ideas, was extremely high. I’ve never again seen the same intensity of discussion.”63 Mandela’s contemporaries had developed similar control and tolerance. But Mandela himself was the chief role model, adding his own authority and insistence on reconciliation, based on
strength: after all his sacrifices and uncompromising confrontations, it was hard to depict him as a sellout.
The prison graduates would retain much of the same spirit after they left prison. Terror Lekota, when faced with his own setbacks as a premier in government, would return to the island to recapture the atmosphere of reflection and reconciliation.64 “I can spot a Robben Islander a mile away,” said Raks Seakhoa. “When they find themselves in a conflict, they have this containment of anger, which is then channeled. I’m really thankful for it. It has had quite an impact on conflict situations, including my home life.”65
Mandela remained the prototype of this self-control, and his presence radiated authority. His physique remained formidable as he approached his sixties, with the help of rigorous early morning exercises. His family doctor, Nthato Motlana, had visited him in 1976 under trying conditions, warned that he was forbidden to mention politics. When he began talking about boxing and Muhammad Ali, the warder quickly told him he could only talk about the family. “It was the most miserable two hours ever,” Motlana said later. “When it came to an end I think Mr. Mandela was glad to go away.” But he found him in strikingly good health, with a diet which, though bleak, conformed to nutritional requirements. “Oh, powerful, powerful!” he described Mandela afterward. “Except for a few gray hairs he was the same Nel I have known for many years. Absolute dignity, a grand Xhosa chief! Extremely fit, mentally and physically.”66
Priscilla Jana, a family lawyer, was impressed the next year by both Mandela’s “fantastic physique” and his legal mastery. “He hadn’t been acting as a lawyer for fifteen years, but I must tell you, he commented on the documents as a lawyer, which was amazing, without letting emotionalism have an effect on him whatsoever.” Instead of asking about his wife and children he enquired about “my people,” and asked Jana out of the warders’ hearing, “Tell them that there is still hope and it’s not going to be long, and they must know he is still with them.”67
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