Sedick was sentenced to twelve years, and given a long lecture about letting down staff and students, past and present, at Trafalgar High School. He had to smile at the irony – it was staff at Trafalgar who had helped to stir his political awareness in the first place.
When Tony Suze’s case came to trial in Pretoria, he was astonished to be handed down a fifteen-year sentence for treason, sabotage, and crimes against the state rather than the couple of years he had been expecting. Despite his age, the courts had decided to make an example of him. Back in Cape Town, Marcus Solomon was given ten years for sedition and conspiracy, and Lizo Sitoto was given the longest sentence of all: a whole raft of charges levied against him resulted in a sentence of sixteen and a half years.
These four men – Sedick, Lizo, Tony, and Marcus – from different backgrounds and of different political affiliations, were soon to discover that they would serve their sentences in a place that was to be the site for a new security-service experiment. Concerned that the militants would turn other, common-law prisoners and make them sympathetic to the terrorist cause, the government had decided to behead the resistance movement and isolate its senior leaders, active members, and – potentially the most dangerous to the regime – its foot soldiers. They would all be sent to a place where they could no longer pose a threat: Robben Island.
A windswept lump of rock 7 miles off the coast of Cape Town, Robben Island was known as South Africa’s Alcatraz (the infamous island prison off San Francisco), and had for hundreds of years been the place where successive regimes banished the unwanted. The island was battered by harsh Atlantic currents, and the seabed nearby was littered with shipwrecks. Over the centuries, many sailors had lost their lives in the turbulent, shark-infested waters.
The Dutch used the island as a makeshift prison for army deserters and criminals until 1795, when the British seized the tip of Africa. For the next century, Robben Island was a hell hole. Lepers, the mentally ill, and prostitutes suffering from syphilis were all forcibly extradited to the island to live in squalor.
The British set a precedent for the island by using it as a prison for political opponents. It was here that the great African general Makana was incarcerated. His tribe, the Xhosa, went to war with the British after the colonial power stole their cattle, and Makana was captured and banished to Robben Island. He died attempting to escape. Almost a hundred and fifty years later, in 1964, another prominent member of the Xhosa tribe was imprisoned on Robben Island – Nelson Mandela.
The island was cleared of its inhabitants in the Thirties, all dispersed to prisons and hospitals on the South African mainland. The military took possession of the island, burned down the ramshackle old buildings, and began to turn it into a fortified sea defence, complete with gun emplacements and underground workings. In the early Sixties Cape Town’s first line of wartime defence was to become South Africa’s first line of attack on the men who opposed its apartheid regime. The security forces requisitioned the island from the military and erected 20-foot-high razor wire fences to mark out the perimeters of a new high-security prison, a vast institution that would house well over two thousand men. Those men would in a couple of years include Sedick, Tony, Lizo, and Marcus.
‘We would be better off fighting the system than trying to live in it.’
Dikgang Moseneke, Prisoner 491/63
It was the middle of December. As the white people of Cape Town packed out the city-centre department stores and shops buying presents and decorations, a group of black, coloured, and Asian Pollsmoor Prison inmates were about to receive the most unwelcome of Christmas surprises.
The prisoners were herded out of their cells, shackled together at the ankles and wrists, and pushed into the back of a truck. Under heavy guard, the lorry drove off from Tokai and into the centre of Cape Town, past the twinkling Christmas trees and decorated shop windows and down along the concrete harbour front to an isolated wharf. It was early evening and there was a chill in the air.
Sedick Isaacs was in an extra set of shackles. He was regarded by the prison guards as a major security risk, thanks to his unsuccessful escape attempt. He and his fellow prisoners were kicked off the back of the truck, made to line up, and then jogged across the dock to a waiting boat. Bound with a chain, the prisoners struggled hard to stay on their feet, steel cuffs biting into wrists and ankles as they staggered, like drunks, towards the boat.
The hold was opened up and the prisoners were ordered to jump off the jetty and inside. Because of the shackles, everyone fell together in a painful heap. It was becoming clear to Sedick that every stage of the journey had been carefully planned to maximize the humiliation of the prisoners.
Crouched in the hold, he looked up and saw a mass of leering faces. One guard gleefully told him that he would never see his family again, another that it would be so long before he managed to get off the island, when he did cars would no longer drive on the roads but across the sky. Then everything went dark, as the doors of the hold closed and the engine was fired up.
Though it took less than an hour, the crossing from Cape Town to Robben Island breached a stretch of water notorious for its unpredictable storms and turbulent crosscurrents. Many of Sedick’s fellow travellers had never been in a boat before and, as the craft heaved its way through the choppy waters, they were badly seasick. The smell of the diesel fumes made it even worse. Still manacled together, the prisoners arrived on the island soaked in one another’s vomit, shaken by the uncertainty of their future.
They had all heard stories and rumours about Robben Island, but none of them had any concrete knowledge of what really awaited them. They had every reason to expect the worst, and more. Back on the mainland, the guards had warned the prisoners of ‘carry-ons’ (a euphemism for beatings) with rubber batons and pickaxe handles, and that they would have to work long shifts in a quarry, sweating out their guts in summer and freezing in the winter.
As the boat made its way into Murray’s Bay Harbour on the south of the island, the prisoners were herded up top. Two dog-legged concrete jetties stretched out from the harbour, drawing the boat into the island like the pincers of a claw. A phalanx of olive-green-uniformed guards was already waiting on the wharf. Judging by the long batons and truncheons they were brandishing, Sedick figured they were unlikely to be the most cordial of welcoming committees.
Gazing beyond, Sedick caught his first sight of the place that was to be his home for the next thirteen years. Many prisoners would share his initial impression, experience the same gut-churning sense of grim foreboding. Flat and barren, the island was crisscrossed with rough tracks and roads bordered with low, scrubby vegetation. It looked roughly oval in shape and was smaller than Sedick had expected. It was just over half a mile wide.
On the western side, a lighthouse blinked out into the Atlantic Ocean, warning vessels of the island’s treacherous offshore reefs. Tucked down a road to the south of the lighthouse was an Anglican church, what looked as if it might be the warders’ barracks, and a small village of houses Sedick would later learn was home to the married guards and their families. The east appeared to be the ‘business end’ of the island. A few hundred yards down a gravel track sat the old prison buildings, ringed by a 20-foot-high double-corridor fence topped with razor wire. At each corner of the compound, brooding watch towers stood sentinel.
Further down the jetty, an army truck waited for the boat to disgorge its convict passengers. Still hobbled together, the men scrambled and struggled off the boat and on to the bare concrete. A row of armed guards jeered and spat, delighting in seeing the prisoners fall over one another, relishing the fact that many had vomited on each other. As the wind swept in off the sea, the Afrikaner warders shouted the chilling words: ‘Dit is die Eiland. Hier gaan julle vrek!’ (‘This is the island. Here you will die!’), then ran at the men without warning, beating them around the head and shoulders with their truncheons and batons,