The guards justified throwing the sandals into a pile in the yard by claiming that common-law prisoners had been hiding blades and sharp objects in their footwear for night-time fights and score settling. The truth, though, lay more in the petty, infuriating lengths the authorities would go to in order to humiliate, frustrate, and punish the political prisoners. A lot of days would be spent barefoot, which, given the work that Tony and his fellow politicals were forced to do, was a painful proposition. Common-law inmates were given the less strenuous jobs, working in the kitchens, the offices, or the library. The toughest work was reserved for the political prisoners: toiling eight hours every day in the quarry.
Having been harried to finish their miserable breakfast of porridge, the prisoners were marched in columns, double-quick time, down a rough gravel road enclosed on either side by high walls of barbed wire. The track led to the east coast of the island, to Rangatira Bay. When they reached the bay, the men were corralled in a barbed-wire pen so that the warders could divide them up into work details. In the pen, prisoners were harassed, beaten randomly, and set upon by Alsatian guard dogs which snapped and chewed at their arms and legs. This was their introduction to the stone quarry, the place former prisoners refer to as ‘where everything happened, where life was really lived’.
The quarry itself was a bleak spot, cold and inhospitable. Both Sedick and Tony recalled their first sight of it. The Atlantic’s gun-powder-grey waves roiled and swelled and then crashed into the quarry, sending walls of spray flying across the grim natural bowl of rock, filling it with seawater. The men’s initial task would be to pump out this water and build dykes across the shingle beach to stop the quarry being re-flooded. For their first few weeks and months on the island, they worked in bone-chillingly cold water, hewing out and then carrying heavy boulders to the beach.
Once the quarry was cleared and sealed off from the ocean, the men were set another task: building cell blocks for themselves and the new prisoners who were being brought on to the island. The old military buildings were full to bursting point, and inmates who arrived after Tony were warehoused in iron sheds, zinktronk (zinc jail), which were freezing in winter, baking hot during the summer months. Despite their lack of concern at the poor living conditions, the prison regime had decided, with a sadistic ingenuity that would come to seem typical, not to go to the expense of employing government contractors but to force political prisoners to build their own jail – the only convicts made to do so in modern times.
The work was backbreaking. Wielding hammers weighing over 13 pounds, the men were driven hard by the warders, day in and day out. It was particularly tough for prisoners such as Sedick and Marcus Solomon, who were not used to such hard physical labour. On Marcus’s first day working in the drained quarry he had to push an iron wheelbarrow, loading and unloading rocks. By mid-morning his hands were a mass of blisters which soon began to chafe, burst, and bleed.
No medical aid was provided and prisoners were expected to carry on working at full tilt irrespective of injury or fatigue. Those who fell behind were beaten and put on short rations. It did not seem to occur to the prison regime that denying prisoners full rations would further diminish their ability to work.
Tony Suze spent his first few days on the island on a work detail cutting stones inside the quarry. He used his vantage point to try to find his school friend Benny Ntoele. The two had played football together for years, and Tony knew that Benny had been shipped out to Robben Island a month before him. He was one of Tony’s oldest friends, and finding him would be a real morale-booster – or so he thought.
A work party passed Tony’s group, and another prisoner said that Benny was part of it. Tony did not see him and the next day he asked someone to point him out. Tony peered long and hard towards where the man was indicating but couldn’t recognize his friend. His work-mate pointed again, singling out a small, crook-backed figure. Tony couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Back in Pretoria, Benny had been a chubby little guy. This man was a skeleton, drawn and aged. The two exchanged waved greetings before a guard stepped in to make Tony return to his stone cutting. The sight of Benny scared the life out of Tony. As he worked, tears trickled down his cheeks. He thought to himself, if they can do that to someone in just one month, did any of them have a hope of getting off Robben Island alive?
The sheer physical burden of working in the quarry was punctuated by acts of violence perpetrated by the warders. It did not take the prisoners long to understand the depth of their sadism. The warders patrolled the work groups in the quarry relentlessly, enforcing a strict no-talking rule with rifle butts to the head and beatings with batons and truncheons. One warder, an Afrikaner Nazi, proudly sported a swastika tattoo on one arm and was nicknamed ‘Suitcase’ Van Rensburg by the prisoners because of the case he carried around with him.
Many of the older guards shared Van Rensburg’s far-right views. During the Second World War a pro-Nazi movement called the Ossewabrandwag was formed in South Africa. By the end of the conflict it boasted 300,000 members. The party even had its own version of the Brownshirts, the Stormjaers. Many ex-members of the Ossewabrandwag went on to work in the military, the police, and the prison services.
Tony was taken aback by the venom of some of the senior guards. Warder Delport was known as the ‘terror of the quarry’. He despised the black prisoners and regarded them as vermin, a danger to the white race. Delport was determined to make their time on Robben Island a living hell. Strong and muscular, he was free with his baton and encouraged his junior guards to be the same. Prisoners in Delport’s area of the quarry quickly became used to regular beatings and assaults. Being young and naturally defiant, Tony often found himself a target.
Before he arrived, there had been a number of coloured warders on the island guarding the common-law criminals. Once the political prisoners began to arrive, however, the coloured guards were transferred back to mainland prisons and replaced with an all-white staff. The authorities feared that the coloured guards might empathize with the political prisoners or at least see them as persons, rather than as objects or numbers. Many of the new junior warders were young, poor, illiterate Afrikaner whites who were malleable, totally unquestioning supporters of apartheid. The senior guards taught them to view the political prisoners as nothing more than terrorists and communists committed to driving the white man out of Africa. The propaganda they were fed by their government stressed ‘black danger’ to both South Africa and white civilization.
Over time, the prisoners would work patiently on the attitudes of the warders, but their initial, fundamental lesson was learned swiftly. Although the Minister of Justice had overall control of the judicial system, the Department of Prisons in Pretoria set policy, and the commanding officer on Robben Island was the head of their institution, none of these mattered to the prisoners anywhere near as much as the warders in charge of individual sections and work groups. These were the men whose actions directly affected the daily lives of each and every prisoner; these were the men who could sabotage or ignore any policy established by Pretoria or the senior officers.
In the beginning battle lines between warders and prisoners were strictly drawn and the entrenched prejudices of the warders seemed intractable. Warders were positively discouraged by their officers from having ‘unnecessary communication’ with prisoners and forbidden to discuss politics or talk about any of their family members. The guards were not to grow close to the prisoners but rather to impose a regime of institutional violence and random persecution across the entire quarry. No warders embraced this more enthusiastically than the Kleyhans twins, Pieter and Ewart.
One blazing hot day in the quarry senior ANC member Johnson Mlambo questioned an order given by a guard. As he was carried away from his workplace, kicking and screaming, the Kleyhans ordered other prisoners to dig a deep hole in the grey, dusty soil. Mlambo was then buried up to his neck in the ground and left to swelter in the hot sun. A couple of hours later, Ewart Kleyhans swaggered back over to Mlambo with a group of other guards and sneeringly asked if he wanted water. Yes? Well, Kleyhans would go one better – he would give Mlambo ‘whisky’. And, with that, Kleyhans unbuttoned the flies of his trousers and urinated into the prisoner’s face.
Another inmate to fall foul of the Kleyhanses was one of the first political prisoners on Robben Island,