Return to Contents PageHaving completed stage one successfully, Alex, Steve and I were keen to get on with stage two, but the others were concerned for our safety. Before proceeding, a meeting of the escape group was held to discuss the strategy to be adopted. Denis was unhappy with the plans as they stood but said he would not stand in our way. He was still worried about the guard on the pos and felt that our current plans might lead to disaster. He was still of the opinion that the guard would eventually be withdrawn, despite the fact that there was no evidence of a crisis situation which he believed had been the cause of the guard being put there in the first place. Dave K was for proceeding but Dave R only agreed in principle that we should proceed: he preferred deferment.
Stage two was to be different from stage one in that its object was not to test one door but all doors beyond number six. This meant that we would need much longer than the few minutes afforded by the 8 p.m. inspection round. If we went down immediately after lockup we could give ourselves about three hours to work on the doors. But how could we get past the warder in his office without being seen?
The plan that finally emerged was for Alex and me to go down to the film cupboard as soon after lockup as possible. Someone would open their lamp cover (with the lamp spanner we'd made from a bent nail), break the bulb or replace it with a burnt out one and call Vermeulen up with his lamp spanner. Vermeulen would have to wait around in the section while the bulb was replaced because he had to turn off and on the light from the outside, get a new bulb from Dave K - who kept a supply in his cell - and finally collect the spanner and old bulb. While he was doing this the two of us would come out of the cupboard, pass through door four, press the button for door eight in the warder's office, open five and six and then close them behind us. Beyond door six we would be cut off from view and would have until the eight o'clock inspection to attempt to open the remaining doors on the way to the front door.
Stage two would also involve our attempting to find out if there was a way of seeing out into the street to ascertain what time the sentries came on duty at the gate, where they stood and how they operated. It was also agreed that if there was time we should attempt to enter the Captain's office, which was the first office in the administrative section as you came in the front door, so that a window could be opened to see the position of the pos-guard.
Shortly before eight o'clock the doors beyond six would be relocked and we would wait next to door six for Vermeulen to go upstairs on his round. Door six would then be opened and we would proceed back to the cupboard, closing all doors behind us. After Sergeant Vermeulen had returned to his office we would return to our cells in the same manner as we'd done on stage one.
Theoretically, after completing stage two we would have all the keys needed to get to and open the front door and be in a position to leave, provided the existing security arrangements prevailed.
The planning for stage two was in fact the planning for the actual breakout and the attempt was in effect a practice escape run. The plan had come a long way from the first one and even from the last one that was current before stage one took place. Knowing that it was now possible to penetrate beyond door six without having to have the contingency route through the visiting-room, there was no longer any need to accost the warder. It was also now entirely feasible to make our way out of the prison right under the warder's nose. This offered the most tremendous advantage in that it would give us thirteen and a half hours to get away before our absence was discovered, assuming they only discovered it at open-up the next morning.
The plan for stage two was accepted in principle by all those remaining in the escape group. But when it came to the crucial question of who would break their light bulb, the question of their security from incrimination was raised. Objectively speaking, Dave R was in the best position because his cell was at the far end of our section and thus furthest from door three which Vermeulen would leave open when he came in with the lamp key. It would take Vermeulen some time to walk the length of the passage and back, giving us more time to get through door six and place him in a better position should we happen to make any noise while doing our business downstairs.
Stephen, who had offered to break his bulb in lieu of Dave, was in the worst position because his cell was nearest to door three and opposite the pos-warder's alcove. The pos-warder would easily see Stephen standing on top of his cupboard, fiddling with his lamp and the light going out, but when in his alcove Dave's cell was out of his sight. Dave R could not be included in this plan because if we got caught he would automatically be implicated.
To reduce suspicion being pinned on him it could be arranged that he replace his bulb with a burnt out one we'd acquired from burnouts in the rooms downstairs. Afterwards he could smash the good one and flush it down his toilet, together with our lamp spanner. If we were caught, his burnt out bulb could in no way be linked to the fact that we were wandering around the prison. But this was too problematical.
The following weekend a long and heated meeting of the escape group took place. Stephen expressed the view that all should share the risks, but this was not accepted. Although he had not contributed much in a material sense to the escape preparations, he had always been firmly behind Alex and me in all our thinking, had voted with us on practically every occasion and had never hesitated to assist in whatever way he could. He was prepared to break or replace his bulb if no one else would do it but he was in the worst position to do so. He felt that if he could do it so could others because the risks were the same for all.
After hearing our views Dave replied that he had given the matter his most intense thought and believed that the plan would only end in disaster. He saw no reason why risks should be shared by everyone because in any organisation those best at performing certain tasks should specialise in those tasks.
Alex, Steve and I listened silently to all this, for we knew that what he was saying was the collective statement of all those who were not involved in the escape project. When he had finished we did not counter arguments but asked him whether he was prepared to continue to assist in the carrying out of stage two. But he felt he could not and that it was best for him to withdraw from the escape group so long as the existing strategy and conditions existed. He was not opposed to escaping but wanted outside assistance, the guard on the pos to disappear in the evening and the plan of execution changed so that there would be no unnecessary risks. Since these were matters over which we had no control, the three of us considered him to be expressing his resignation from the escape group. This entailed his losing the vote and no longer being informed of developments. As a disciplined comrade, he accepted this and withdrew from the group.
Denis had never formally refused to assist in the stage two attempt, but it was obvious that there was not much advantage in him breaking his bulb instead of Stephen.
Dave K, when pressurised, agreed to assist by replacing his bulb with a burnt out one. Finally a plan was worked out which involved both Stephen and Dave - one which eliminated any risk for Dave. This required Stephen breaking his bulb but Dave being responsible for delaying Vermeulen.
Immediately after lockup Alex and I would make our way down to the film cupboard. Denis would call Vermeulen to tell him to bring up the lamp spanner. (This was normal practice as Denis was responsible for calling the warder for whatever reason when we were locked in our cells. Dave K was permitted to keep a supply of new bulbs in his cell, because in the past when bulbs had burnt out after hours the night-warders had not had access to the spare ones locked in the store.) When Vermeulen came upstairs with the spanner Denis would direct him to Stephen's cell. Stephen would unscrew his lamp cover as slowly as possible and perhaps drop the spanner a few times to cause a delay. He would extract the broken glass with great care so as 'not to cut his hands'. Then he would tell Vermeulen to go to Dave K to fetch the new bulb, thereby moving him further down the passage. Dave K would be 'unable to find' the bulbs in the box under his bed, so as to delay him even further. Stephen would find it difficult to install the new bulb and 'lose' the screws for the lamp cover by dropping them under his bed while trying to replace the lamp cover. In that time Alex and I would hopefully have advanced from the film cupboard to a position beyond door six.
Stage two was finally carried out in early November. The tension that Alex and I experienced before the event was even greater than that we'd endured before the stage ones. This was because stage two was a much more involved expedition, amounting in effect to a dress rehearsal for the actual breakout. We had been out of our cells for almost as long before, but somehow the thought of placing ourselves on the freedom side of the warder's office was far more frightening. The stage ones had been hit and run guerilla operations; this time we were placing ourselves right in the middle of enemy territory - over the enemy's lines as it were.
We had no idea what went on beyond door six. No one had ever seen a light on in any of the windows beyond the warder's office so we assumed the area was sealed off and dark at night. But we did not know for certain: maybe someone popped in every now and then to shout to Vermeulen through door six; maybe the front door was left open for the sentries on gate duty to use the toilet; maybe the lights would be on in the passage. Would we be able to turn them on if they weren't? Would turning them on arouse the guards in the street or the guard on the pos?
In much the same way as before Alex and I placed dummies in our beds, released ourselves from our cells, took from the cache all that we needed for the adventure and made our way down to the film cupboard. The major difference this time was that we went down much earlier: immediately after lockup. This in itself was a much more risky venture as we could not tell what Vermeulen would be doing so soon after lockup. We knew though that he was alone because when the day-warders left they did so with much loud banging of doors.
Stephen broke his bulb by loosening his lamp cover with the spanner we'd made for the purpose and by squirting water inside with a syringe (bulbs would often burst when moisture condensed inside and dripped onto them). Denis shouted for Vermeulen and as the sleepy old screw entered our section the two of us leapt out of the cupboard and made our way beyond door six, after first pressing the button for door eight in the office. If door six had not yielded to our forward thrust we would have implemented our contingency plan of ducking into the warders' toilet to wait until Vermeulen had returned.
We found ourselves in the 'cage' between doors six and seven. Unexpectedly the passage light was on, allowing us to see all the way to door nine across the far end of the passage. We'd expected the light to be off and had brought along a piece of cloth to place along the bottom of door six to prevent it shining through when we turned it on. The light was a great relief because not only did it allow us to see what we were doing, we'd worried that if it had been off and we'd turned it on it would have lit up the doorless visitors' toilet and been seen by the pos-warder.
Before getting to work on seven we waited for Vermeulen to return: we wanted to be sure that he had not smelt a rat and that he was going to settle down in his office and get on with what he usually did in there. To prevent him seeing anything in case he had a habit of opening five and peeping through six's keyhole, we taped a little flap over it on our side. After waiting about ten minutes we could hear him closing the section door and door four. Watching him through the keyhole as he walked down the passage towards us was a peculiar sensation that was both frightening and exciting. He appeared to be looking directly at me but at the last moment he turned into his office and banged his keys down on the table.
I had made several roughly-cut keys for lock seven based on the very infrequent glimpses we'd had of its key. As expected, none of them worked. This did not worry us in the slightest as we'd expected to have to dismantle the lock to open the door. For the purpose we'd made two special spanners to loosen the bolts holding it together. One of them was a kind of ring-spanner that Alex had made from an old tin-opener (he never gave up!) and the other a sort of box-spanner I had made from wood. Yes, wood, or 'arborium' as we preferred to call it. The idea was that the metal spanner would be used to do the initial loosening and then the wooden spanner the final loosening. The wooden spanner was really a piece of dowelling jammed into a metal pipe with the shape of the nut chiselled in one end. Although we had brought along a shifting spanner from the workshop in case ours were not the right size, we had made the spanners because we had thought the shifting spanner would be too noisy to use.
The lock was bolted to the bars by four bolts which had to be very quietly and carefully loosened. Fortunately the ends of the bolts had not been hammered over as they were in our cells, but just in case we'd brought along a triangular file to clean the threads. Vermeulen was sitting a mere three or four metres away so the nuts had to be turned very slowly to make sure the spanner did not slip and bang against the lock or drop on the floor.
After what seemed like an eternity we were able to extract the bolts and loosen the screws holding the face of the lock with a screwdriver we'd also brought from the workshop. Once the face was removed the levers and bolt were exposed. We carefully removed the levers and stacked them on the floor so that they could be replaced in the correct order. Then we pushed the bolt back and opened the door. Door eight was already off its bolt and only had to be swung back and hooked against the wall.
While Alex attempted to open the Captain's door with a piece of plastic card (it had a Yale-type latch) I tried out our various small keys on door nine. As luck had it the key for the visiting-room worked and I opened the door. We both crawled through on hands and knees into the small vestibule between doors nine and ten and surveyed the last door between us and freedom. From the ground it appeared tall and robust but from the kind of lock we knew it had we did not expect it to be much of a problem to breach.
It had taken us longer than expected to reach the front door and when we looked up at the windows it was already quite dark. We could hear voices coming from close by in the street. The window panes in the vestibule were of frosted glass but we dared not stand up for fear that our shadows would fall on them, allowing those outside to see our movements. I was dying to try out our keys on door ten but Alex would not allow it. He was right, it was too risky.
We retreated into the passage and relocked nine. I felt annoyed and frustrated at not having had a chance to get my hands on, or at least my keys and picks into, ten's lock. It was an admission of defeat and forbode another stage two attempt if we were going to get it to give up its secrets. We had also not figured out the nature of the security outside.
We took the parts of lock seven into the visitors' toilet, which was half way between doors seven and eight and out of Vermeulen's hearing, so that we could examine them and take their measurements. I made careful tracings of the levers onto a piece of paper so that I could later cut a key to the correct dimensions without having to test it in the actual lock. To make sure the key I would be making would definitely work, I rounded and widened the gates in the levers with a file so that virtually any key would work in the lock. We knew enough about keys to know that this would not impair the functioning of the lock when the correct key was used.
This little task was carried out with great satisfaction because we were in effect sabotaging the lock and rendering it almost ineffectual as a lock. But suddenly it struck us that the whole operation had taken a long time and that we'd been too lax about the time. Hurriedly we pushed the levers back into position, replaced the cover, tightened the screws and began to fasten the bolts. It was a slow and tedious business so we took turns to do the tightening. On one of my turns the spanner slipped and made a loud clang against the grille. 'What the hell are you doing?' Alex shouted, 'Vermeulen must have heard that'. In a state of panic I went to door six, lifted the flap and peeked through the keyhole. There Vermeulen was, standing directly in front of the door with his hands on his hips and looking at it. My heart stopped cold and in an irrational fit of panic I took one of the number two keys out of my pocket, pushed it into the keyhole and turned the lock its second turn (we'd left it unmastered). Why I did this I can't explain. Perhaps I imagined Vermeulen would test the lock. A guilty conscience makes you do strange things in a moment of fear. As I withdrew the key I realised what I'd done: I'd exposed the end of it through the keyhole and made a noise turning the lock.
Both of us thought this was the end of the road and dived into the visiting-room, closing the door behind us. We huddled together in fear waiting for the inevitable. Alex cursed in my ear: 'You stupid bastard. What did you do that for?' I had no reply. We both agreed: 'When he comes in we'll use the "pea". We'll tie him up. We'll get out somehow'.
We waited for a siren, for frantic shouts, for voices on his walkie-talkie, for Vermeulen to unlock six to find out what was going on. But after a few excruciating minutes we realised that nothing was happening: Vermeulen had not shouted 'Who's there?' or 'What's going on?'; he had not attempted to open the door to find out what had caused the noise; no sirens were blaring. The silence was scaring.
We emerged gingerly from our hiding place and took another peek through the keyhole. There was no one there. 'Perhaps he's radioed or phoned for help?', Alex suggested. The only sound we could hear was the plaintive wail of music coming from his radio.
Realising suddenly that eight o'clock was very close we continued to reassemble the lock. While Alex tightened the bolts I removed all traces of our activities and wiped down the grille with my handkerchief to remove fingerprints. Almost as Alex tightened the last nut its last turn the eight o'clock bell rang.
Through the keyhole I watched Vermeulen come out of his office and turn the corner at the end of the passage. Door four clanged as he went through it and we could hear him making his way up the stairs to the stokkies' section. As soon as we heard the clang of their section door we opened doors six and five, relocked them behind us, and dashed back to the film cupboard. Alex pulled the cupboard door closed and in the darkness I suddenly thought: Had we in the rush replaced the levers in the right order? I couldn't remember taking any special note of doing so and they had been truly mixed up when I was filing them. Alex tried to reassure me that we'd not mixed them up and that all was well. Only the next day would tell.
No sleep again that night. On top of the nervous residue of the build-up to and the carrying out of the operation was the thought that the prison staff would not be able to get into the prison in the morning: What if they're unable to open door seven? They'll check the lock and suspect the obvious. Levers don't just swap themselves over on their own!
My fears were allayed the next morning when the cells were unlocked. Everything seemed normal: the same old dozy turnkeys; no angry-looking Captain or big-shot. Later in the day Denis was taken out to the dentist and reported on his return that lock seven had performed quite normally. Perhaps our filing job had been so good that it really didn't matter in which order we'd replaced the levers. Or perhaps we'd replaced them in the correct order after all.
*****
There was a belief among some of the comrades that being a political prisoner was not a complete waste of time. Political imprisonment served a purpose: it inspired others and kept alive the notion that there were fighters against apartheid who had sacrificed their personal freedom for the greater freedom of the oppressed.
I never subscribed to this theory. I was not proud of being in prison. In fact I was downright ashamed that I had failed the Movement and allowed the enemy to score one over us. While there were people like Nelson Mandela who had been turned into martyrs and symbols of freedom and whose imprisonment had ultimately served a political purpose, your average activist could not champion the cause better by being in than out.
To maintain that being in prison served a purpose seemed to me like an excuse for the fact that you were doing nothing or believed you could do nothing about it. If you weren't bent on escaping what else could you say? Giving purpose to imprisonment was, I rationalised at the time, an anodyne justification for the fact that the enemy had stopped you fighting against their evil rule and that they were wasting your time and making a mess of your life. In the fight against apartheid it was not good enough merely to be doing something against the system: you had to be doing your utmost. By being in prison you certainly could not say that you were doing this.
It was legitimate to argue that if you had made up your mind not to challenge your immurement then you should make sure that the time was not wasted. Every opportunity should be used to advance your knowledge as best you could: an educated ex-prisoner would be of more use to the Movement than an uneducated one.
Our motivations to escape were manifold. It would be impossible to rank them in order of importance, although we liked to believe that our chief motivations were political. We had to free ourselves so that we could throw ourselves back into the struggle, so that we could achieve a victory over the apartheid regime.
We had a duty to escape, a duty to our organisation - the ANC - and to the oppressed in whose name we had gone to prison. We viewed ourselves not as 'common criminals sentenced for serious crimes against the security of the state' but as prisoners of war. As members of the liberation movement we had been captured while participating in a war of liberation. To escape was to continue waging that struggle; to reconcile ourselves to our fate was to surrender.
Despite claiming that we were in prison for ordinary criminal activities, the enemy viewed our confinement as a victory scored by themselves over the ANC, as an action aimed at thwarting the struggle to overturn their political rule. So long as we remained in prison they were exerting that victory and depleting the forces of our organisation. An escape would turn their victory into a defeat, undermine the belief of their supporters that the state had security under control, and serve as a boost to the morale of other political prisoners and all opponents of apartheid.
Certainly, being in prison was not a pleasant experience and among our strongest motivations to get out was the desire for individual freedom. To live with the thought that for the next twelve or so years you are not going to be able to decide what to do with your life is pretty daunting. But we'd got into prison through being inspired by political motives so no one could claim that our motives to get out were entirely personal.
To emphasise some of the personal motivations that drove us to the front door I wish to say a little more about the unpleasant aspects of life in prison, and correct the impression, if it has been given, that our prison was a three star hotel without egress. This was most definitely not the case, although compared with the conditions our black comrades on Robben Island and elsewhere had to face, ours were five star.
The worst aspect of prison life, as any prisoner will confirm, is the almost complete loss of freedom to decide what you will be doing with your life for the duration of your sentence. As white South Africans this was for us a particularly acute loss; for our black comrades less so as life outside was in many respects the same as life inside. It is no exaggeration to say that for black South Africans the country is one giant prison where they have virtually no freedom to decide what to do with their entire lives.
In prison you developed a better understanding of the meaning of personal freedom not because the experience gave you some unique insight into its essence but by learning what it means to be utterly unfree. There are degrees of unfreedom but so far imprisonment is the most extreme form yet devised by humankind. Even in imprisonment there are degrees of unfreedom, solitary confinement being the most extreme.
The thought that you will be unfree for the length of your sentence is terrifying and demoralising, especially if it is a long one. My twelve years seemed to me a meaningless, interminable period. I tried various ways to give it content: I compared it to the previous twelve years of my life but that only made matters worse, for time when you are younger seems to go much more slowly; I tried reminding myself that my release date, 1990, was a mere decade and a bit away, and decades were not a long time. None of these ploys had the desired effect because I could not visualise myself out of the world for the whole of the 1980s. When I was released I would be 41 years old; my entire thirties would have been spent inside; my remaining youth would have been wasted. How poor Denis must have felt with his life sentence I could never comprehend.
The reverse side of losing your freedom is that other people decide what you will be doing with your life. You lose your dignity as an independent being. You become a thing, a piece of property with a number, like a dixie or a pair of handcuffs. If you damaged yourself you could be charged with damaging prison property in the same way as if you had smashed a window. To your number becomes attached your surname, but this is a mere label to make it easier for the warders to distinguish you from other objects of prison property.
It is a thoroughly degrading experience. It reduces you from being a self- respecting, proud, motivated individual to a piece of trash. You are cast into society's rubbish bin, or, to be more precise in our case, apartheid's rubbish bin. You begin to understand what it feels like to be one of the countless victims of apartheid's grand plan who are uprooted and removed to some remote, rural dumping ground. Fortunately for political prisoners the degradation does not stick and taint you for the rest of your life. On the contrary, having spent a period in jail for opposition to the apartheid state raises your status in the eyes of the majority of the population. There is no need to feel any shame at being imprisoned for political reasons. The only shame is that for letting down your side and for allowing the enemy to get the better of you.
It is also an intensely lonely experience, made worse by the fact that there is no relief from it. You can expect no commiseration from your fellow prisoners as they are in the same boat and people outside can do little to help. Although in our case we were held in the same section and were together in the yard during the day, for nearly 15 hours a day we were locked in our individual cells with only our own selves for company. In that time we were left to stew in our own thoughts, which were not always the most rational or comforting.
Because prison life is so routinised and ritualistic, because every day is so much like the previous ones, because nothing new ever happens, your thoughts tend to become routinised and repetitive too. The same boring images return to you day after day, night after night. There is nothing to trigger new chains of thought. They seem to take on a life of their own; they separate from your body and your life.
In the university psychology class they had taught us the unity of mind and body and the fallacy of Cartesian mind/body dualism. In prison you come to think that perhaps Descartes was right. Your thoughts rise above your existence. They fly out through the bars, out over the walls and away to freedom. You're back in Cape Town visiting your friends, driving around the streets, going shopping, climbing mountains and going spearfishing. You're also placing leaflet bombs on every street corner, blowing up police stations and courts and wreaking your vengeance on the security cops. Your thoughts are so free yet your body remains trapped in that little cube that is your world. You look out of your window and can see over the top of the wall the buildings and trees that are in freedom. They are so near... You look at the size of your body and think: how small it is; the hole above the prison skywards so large. Why can't I just lift my little body over that wall and place it on the other side? If my thoughts can be out there, all I've got to do is move my body a short distance and they'll be reunited. Perhaps we can make a giant balloon to lift us out of the yard. Perhaps a huge kite, a glider, a rocket. There must be some way?
You miss your family and friends terribly. How you wish you could be with them so they could cheer you up, so you could explain everything. You visualise your mother sitting at home grieving for you. How you wish you could put her at ease. The suffering you've caused is worse than your own. How could you do this to others? You've embarrassed your family. How do they feel every time they have to say they have a son or brother in prison. What do people think? Visits are no compensation because the glass between you only reinforces your separation. The frustration caused by your powerlessness is torture.
You realise how important women are to making you a complete human being, not in some sexual sense that you can't survive without them, but what an important component they are in making human society human. Contact only with men makes you begin to notice that relationships are rough and lack a certain perspective that you would not normally notice. You can't describe it because you wish to avoid the sexist cliches of feminine softness, kindness, caring, submissiveness and so on. But you notice it particularly when for some reason you suddenly have contact with a woman, such as when you are taken to a doctor or dentist. You immediately become strongly aware of the difference in the way you have been spoken to, of the way the person has responded to you, of the way you have responded to the person. It fills you with a strange sense of warmth and satisfaction, as if in that fleeting moment you had made real contact with a human being.
Sexual drive never disappears but after a few years, they told me, it is reduced to manageable levels. The palm of your hand is more frustrating than relieving as you know there is nothing to give you relief from that reliever. The comrades had found that eliminating reminders that women existed was worse than not doing so, as frustrating as it was. If you did so you had to rely on your memory and that could lead to uncontrollable fantasising. To prevent this the comrades had for years been ordering a range of women's magazines in which we would normally not have had the slightest interest. The thought of a bunch of lefties reading Vogue or Women's Own might seem somewhat incongruous but the magazines served a purpose: they kept alive the visual image of the opposite sex which was as important as keeping alive the skill in relating to them.
Boring is the word for life in jail. Every day is a repetition of the previous one. Even the efforts you make to overcome your boredom are boring. Reading, drawing, listening to music, thinking and sleeping are not in themselves boring; it's when you do them at the same time and in the same order day in and day out. There are no highlights, nothing to look forward to, nothing to look back to. Time shoots by but paradoxically also feels static. There are no reference points, nothing to give time meaning and motion. Nothing moves, nothing changes. It's a movie of a still life.
As for our material conditions, let's just say they were not intolerable. However, we could not help comparing our conditions to what we knew was the lot of our black comrades. The authorities claimed that one set of regulations applied to all political prisoners and hence conditions were the same for all. Such claims were irrelevant, for in the last instance it was the unwritten regulations that made the difference: black prisoners were subjected to all the indignities and injustices inherent in the apartheid control of the prisons; we were not. It cannot be denied that over the years conditions on the Island, and for political prisoners generally, have improved. But no matter how much the authorities claim that conditions for all 'races' are the same, you can be sure that so long as apartheid rules, conditions for blacks will be worse.
For many years the prison chiefs did not deny that conditions for black prisoners were inferior: special regulations applied to them covering diets, clothing, bedding, work, numbers of prisoners per cell - everything. Only in 1977, for instance, was it decided that black political prisoners should be given beds to sleep on. Many books have been written describing the appalling conditions experienced by Robben Island prisoners in those years. Read for example Island In Chains as told by Indres Naidoo to Albie Sachs which describes life on the Island from 1963 to 1973. The conditions you will read there bear no relation to anything described in this book.
'Conditions' refer to different things. First of all there were the things which the prison authorities were obliged to provide, what they referred to as our 'rights': food, clothing, shelter, protection. Then there was the regimen imposed on the prisoners - work, inspections, chores, the daily routine.
The very notion of a prison conjures up thoughts of bad food. Ours was uniformly poor but it would be wrong to say that it was bad. Occasionally, very occasionally, we would be served something that was better than poor. Never though did anything remind us of home cooking. Most times the food was edible; often not.
Diets were allegedly scientifically formulated by dieticians from the regime's Department of Health. Where they got their training you could not help wondering for there was something profoundly 'unscientific' about our diet. It consisted largely of carbohydrates to make you feel filled but little that could be said to have contributed to general health. Even if the basic ingredients of a healthy diet were there, the cooking process leached out of the food any goodness that it might have contained.
The main characteristic of our food was monotony. Breakfast and supper at the beginning and end of the day were almost identical; lunch at midday almost the same from day to day. The latter consisted usually of a 'meat', stamped mielies (maize) or mielie-rice and an overcooked vegetable or two. The 'meat' was either chicken legs, bony fish, gristly stew or 'plastic meat'.
'Plastic meat' was a sort of imitation meat made from soya beans and served at least twice a week. We had no objection to that, it was just the way they cooked it - in tons of pork fat. It's taste was so vile and its effects so violent that most of us refused to touch the stuff. We tried a boycott but without success as there was nothing with which the cooks could replace it. In protest we would regularly leave the pot standing in the middle of the tennis court where it had been dumped by the black prisoner/porters. At every opportunity we'd complain about the muck but the more we objected the more determined they became to keep it on the menu. We did not feel inclined to pursue the matter too far though, as it wasn't really an important issue.
Breakfast consisted of porridge - either mielie pap or oats - bread and 'coffee' or 'tea' made from substances bearing no relation to real coffee or tea. The evening meal, supper, consisted of soup, 'coffee' or 'tea' and more bread. Included in our daily rations were a white powder for making 'milk', sugar, a sort of pink or orange sticky substance euphemistically called 'jam', and over-salted prison-farm butter, but only enough for a very thin scraping if you saved some for your morning bread. Once a week at suppertime, on separate days, there would be crumbly cheese, a blue hard-boiled egg, battered fruit, runny peanut butter or some other semi-edible extra.
Most of our food came from prison farms but occasionally farmers would dump surpluses or imperfect crops on the prisons. At different times of the year there would be sudden gluts of one thing or another: sacks of oranges with spotted skins, boxes of dented avocadoes, bags of bruised apples. It never rained but it poured.
Poor food over which you have no control is very demoralising. To add a little spice to our lives we would take turns on Saturday afternoons to prepare for each other small savoury or sweet snacks from the meagre grocery purchases the 'A' groupers were allowed to make. A tin of spaghetti and tomato sauce or a packet pudding, which under normal circumstances would be considered junk food, were devoured with great relish. Culinary standards sink to a low level in clink.
Prison clothing doesn't fit; everybody knows that. It is either too large or too small. Most of the comrades didn't care, for it was not as if we were expected at the opera. I found it degrading to be kitted out in the prison's vestments and the poor fit reminded me all the time of where I was. To lessen the sense of shame I unstitched all my shirts and trousers and 'refashioned' them to look and feel more like civilian clothing and less like bin liners. I enjoyed sewing and would sit for hours at night reshaping my clothes while listening to the music.
There were two uniforms: one for summer and one for winter. The summer one consisted of a green 'safari suit' with short trousers; the winter one of light-brown longs, a similarly coloured long-sleeve shirt, a brown jersey with red rings around the neck and bottom, and a brown corduroy jacket. Of course there were shoes and socks, but they didn't seem to mind if we went barefeet in summer. Other items provided were green overalls, grey pyjamas, baggy underpants, hanging vests and red handkerchiefs. All of it was made by prison labour and like all products of alienated labour they were shoddy and ill conceived. From the escapers' point of view none of it was of much use apart from the handkerchiefs, underpants and vests which could be turned into other things.
Each prisoner was expected to wash and iron his own clothing, but with only two pairs of each item you wore everything for as long as possible and covered the smell with deodorant. The older comrades were more institutionalised and the product of earlier, more severe prison regimes: they washed and ironed regularly; the rest of us as infrequently as we could get away with. Trousers under the mattress kept them permanently pressed; shoes unworn meant less polishing.
Our health provisions, too, were not scandalous. But as with all aspects of our condition we could not help comparing them with those of the black prisoners. We found it astonishing that the prisoners with whom we smuggled newspapers would ask us for the most basic things like aspirin, plasters and soap. It was claimed that all prisoners were granted the same health rights but again, black prisoners were faced with the prejudices of the apartheid jailers. If they asked for medicaments they would be accused of being malingerers or shirkers; we would be given virtually anything without argument.
Medical requirements were dispensed by a warder disguised as a medical orderly who would appear each morning with a tray of medicines. The medicine queue was generally longer than would have been expected in ordinary life. The great range of ailments the prisoners complained of was a function of the poor diet and most of them would undoubtedly have been avoided had our food been more wholesome. Colds and flu were common, upset stomachs the order of the day, piles everyone's blight and headaches the normal condition.
A doctor visited the prison once every two weeks but he brought with him the attitudes he had picked up at other prisons: when a prisoner complains about a medical problem there is an ulterior motive, such as a desire to get off work or be taken for a joyride to see a specialist in town. This was understandable but it took a lot to persuade him that you had a genuine complaint. Specialists, too, cast aside their Hippocratic oaths when dealing with prisoners. In their eyes a prisoner was not a real patient worthy of dignity and respect: consultations would be abrupt and perfunctory; they would tell you what was wrong with you before you had a chance to explain your problem; everything you complained of was an 'exaggeration'.
We feared to think what sort of treatment black prisoners received from outside doctors, if ever they saw them. One dentist who treated me displayed his vicious racism when I was taken out to have a tooth-nerve removed (the prison dentist only did extractions). On the counter in his waiting room were displayed a number of large bullets. One of my accompanying warders made some comment in connection with these, prompting the dentist to produce the associated weapon. He brought out the largest revolver I have ever seen, so huge that he needed two hands to hold it. To explain its power he said that if he stood ten 'kaffirs' one behind the other the bullet would pass clean through all of them.
The warders' attitude to the stokkies was quite different from that shown to us. This was because they knew that the stokkies would not kick up a stink like we would if anything went wrong or was not found to be satisfactory. Very frequently alcoholic stokkies would be brought in and would be given no assistance to get over their delirium tremens. They would shout and scream for hours and you could hear them smashing their cells to pieces. Sometimes they would pull down their bookshelves, smash their toilet bowls, rip out their sinks and cause a flood; often they would damage themselves. More than once we saw bodies being carried out with a blanket pulled over the face.
This is not to imply that the warders' attitude toward us was impeccable. On many occasions they paid scant regard to the rules. Prisoners who complained of serious problems after lockup would be left until the next morning instead of a doctor being called immediately. One comrade, it was reported to me, who had a stroke during the night was only visited by a physician the next morning, with serious consequences. It twice happened during my term, once to me, that prisoners were brought back to the prison far too soon after having an operation. In my case I had barely woken up from my nose operation and while still in an anaesthetised and bleeding state I was slung into the back of a prison van and carted back to the prison. A shortage of staff, they explained.
Work, another concept normally associated with prison life. But there was no chipping of rocks or sewing of mailbags for us; that was 'kaffirs' work'. Prison was a microcosm of life outside: whites did the more skilled work; blacks the backbreaking manual labour.
Most of the comrades, especially the 'academics' among us, welcomed any respite so they could get back to their studies. John and I, and to a lesser extent Dave K and Denis, were the only ones who liked to work with our hands as well as with our brains. This is not to say that we preferred prison work to reading: we felt there was sufficient time to read and study and grew more bored than normal if there was nothing else to do but read. We had creative energies to be dissipated, even if on prison work.
The work was dusty and boring but there was little pressure on us to increase productivity. Alex deliberately did everything incorrectly and as slowly as possible as a kind of running sabotage. I couldn't bring myself to do this as I had an innate perfectionist streak that had to find an outlet. I treated my work not as something for the prisons but as something on which I released my pent up drives. Raymond was a scream: he would regularly fall into a trance while sanding his pieces of wood and wake up half an hour later to find that he had sanded a huge dent into an otherwise perfectly smoothed surface. Johnny was the expert who showed us how to cut our dovetails, how to sharpen our chisels and how to disguise our mistakes.
There were other forms of work as well. The garden had to be tended, the dishes washed, the dining-room kept clean, the dogshit collected each morning, the prison cleaned each week and sundry other little chores. Occasionally one of us would be required to assist in tidying up or repairing a cell that a delirious stokkie had torn apart.
Inspections were central to prison life. Every day at opening and lockup there were inspections. These were mechanical affairs and seldom would a prisoner be brought up for bad appearance or having an untidy cell. At around eleven each day there would be a more formal inspection, or rather, a tour of the prison by the Captain to inquire if there were any 'complaints and requests'. It was important to know the difference between a 'complaint' and a 'request' as a complaint could not be acknowledged unless there was an accompanying request; a request could not be granted unless there was a preceding complaint.
The main inspection was on Fridays when the Captain would inspect the section on his morning tour. Beds had to be clean and properly made, floors shiny, ledges and grilles dust free and windows spotless. He would always make his longest stop in Alex's cell because Alex refused to recognise the official standards of cleanliness and neatness. This was why it took Alex so long to reach 'A' group.
At weekends we had to stand to attention on the tennis court while the Captain walked slowly along the rank as if he were inspecting a guard of honour. He would check our uniforms and haircuts and recommend a trim before the end of the day if your hair was longer than the stipulated half-thumb's length. Haircuts were a routine carried out by our in-house barber, Johnny, every two weeks. Alex and I attempted to set new standards by having our hair cut only once a month. It appeared to work, for by the time we said goodbye our hair had reached a respectable length. The Captain's instructions were just ignored; Brylcreem also helped.
Such were our conditions. Not an abysmal state of affairs, but even if we'd been served haute cuisine, had been given Paris fashions, had had a swimming pool at the bottom of our yard and had had personal videos in our cells, it was the spiritual conditions that mattered. Prison is prison and that means you've lost your liberty. No amount of 'privileges' can compensate for that. Nevertheless, the struggle for better conditions continues, both outside and in, until inside becomes part of outside, until all our comrades are free. Then the prisons will be ours and the real criminals will fill the cells.
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