Govan Mbeki

7. Cold comfort: The Robben Island years

122 7 Cold comfort The Robben Island years Govan Mbeki spent 23 years and four months in prison – more than a quarter of his long life. His incarceration lasted for 8,522 days: days mapped on the unremitting coordinates of the prison timetable; activities at every waking hour specified by a grid of rules and regulations, strictly applied by one’s captors. For almost a quarter of a century, his life was defined by privation, by what was not possible, not permitted, unavailable. The major hardships of prison life are obvious: confinement, loneliness, monotony, the loss of freedom, and the absence of all that was ordinary – taken for granted – in life outside. The petty privations are harder to imagine; but they emerge over and over again in prison memoirs: the daily indignities and discomforts – dress, diet, exhaustion, frustration, the casual harshness and arbitrary vindictiveness of the guards – what Kathrada called a ‘litany of degradation’. In an existence that offered so little, 123 punishments were particularly harsh. The food on Robben Island – especially the F Diet given to African prisoners – was unpalatable and at times barely edible. But every warder could impose drie maaltye – the loss of all meals for a day – for any perceived infringement. If he had to choose a single word to encapsulate life on the Island, wrote Kathrada, it would be ‘cold’. ‘Cold food, cold showers, cold winters, cold wind coming in off the cold sea, cold warders, cold cells, cold comfort.’ Every prisoner found different ways of coping. Each experienced his own version of what Saths Cooper called ‘the phenomenal human suffering that took place’ on Robben Island. Govan Mbeki coped; he survived; but he did so at immense physical and psychic cost. Bram Fischer and Joel Joffe visited the seven Rivonia triallists just after they had been flown to Robben Island, to discuss the prospects of an appeal. Joffe had grown accustomed to Govan’s presence during the trial – dignified, controlled, courteous – and it was a particular shock to see him in khaki shorts without underwear and a rough shirt. He ‘looked strange and uncomfortable … He was shivering and cold.’ A year later, Mary Benson saw Mbeki when he appeared as a witness in a trial in Humansdorp: ‘he had aged considerably and it seemed to me that weariness had settled on him like fine dust.’ By the 1980s, Govan’s health had deteriorated: high 124 blood pressure, a slipped vertebra and pinched nerve, vision so poor that he could no longer read (happily rectified by operations for glaucoma and cataract) and other ailments took their toll. The fact that the Robben Island years occupy just one chapter here does not mean that their impact on Mbeki should be underestimated. He wrote to me in August 1988, and in seven typed pages set out ‘a sketch of the experiences we went through … on the Island’. All the familiar details are there: prison clothing, food, threadbare blankets in a tiny cell; and the slog of work breaking stones, digging lime, building roads and the new prison – ‘that jail was built by us prisoners, with our own hands, we dug the stones, dressed them and laid them … we built a veritable fortress, an ultra-maximum security jail for our own imprisonment.’ There are details of violence by named warders; random beatings; the inadequacy of medical treatment; the protracted battles to win minor improvements in conditions; and so on. He recounted the infamous raid under Lieutenant Fourie in May 1971, when warders stormed the B section (where the Rivonia prisoners and about 20 others were kept, in isolation from the common-law and other political prisoners). ‘The order: staan op, trek uit, teen die muur, hande op. They were armed with sjamboks and black rubber staves. We stood naked for 125 more than an hour while they searched, threw books and letters and all sorts of papers on the floor. It was cold – bitterly cold. At some stage my arms started jerking high above my head. It was uncontrollable. One warder shouted it was a heart attack – pull him down, he shouted. As I lay on the floor – it was so cold – the bloody sadist of a lieutenant said: do you hear that cannon sound? ... We are giving hell to the Communists – to the Russians. They can’t help you, you Communists are cowards.’ And he ended the story by adding, ‘I won’t forget nor...