Masondo was lucky to make it into the sick bay. Ill or injured prisoners were often abused and hit, accused of being ‘lazy blacks’. When men complained of feeling sick, guards would swing a baton at their heads. If he ducked, the prisoner was ‘obviously’ well. The other method applied to determine if a prisoner was ill or merely shamming was to order him to take a dose of castor oil. If he refused, there would be no medical examination or treatment. The authorities provided the prisoners little in the way of medical help or support, and the sick were mostly nursed back to health by fellow prisoners who happened to have had training in first aid.
In addition to beatings and threats from the guards, the men were deliberately robbed of their dignity at every possible turn. Tony soon discovered that if he wanted to relieve himself or fetch a drink of water, he had to hand over his work card and literally negotiate permission. Often, the request was refused for no reason other than malice.
The warders missed no opportunity to trick and belittle the prisoners. Early on, Marcus and his work group were gathered together and made to stand to attention in the quarry. Any man who had a driving licence was asked to put his hand up. Hoping they might get an easier, less strenuous job driving a lorry or a tractor, a number of men enthusiastically raised their arm aloft. A grinning guard pulled them out of the pack and led them to a nearby shed. It was full of wheelbarrows with rusted and bent iron wheels. ‘You can drive? Good. Then you can drive these.’
The barrows had a big heavy wheel on the front, were notoriously difficult to push and keep balanced, especially when they were full of rocks, and regularly toppled over. Whenever this happened, the prisoner responsible would immediately be beaten and the warders would scoff triumphantly, ‘You want to govern the country? You can’t even govern a wheelbarrow,’ or ‘What’s the problem? Is this wheelbarrow tired?’
At midday, the prisoners were allowed a short break for lunch, which was eaten in the quarry. Once again served up from metal drums, it was usually a slop made from maize. Sometimes, but rarely, it might contain a little meat gristle and fat, or fish scrapings. Food was allocated according to race. Blacks received 340 grams of meal each day; Asians and coloureds, 400. Officially, coloured and Asian prisoners were allowed 170 grams of fish or meat four times a week; blacks 140. In practice, though, prisoners were seldom given their ‘official’ ration. Run by the common-law inmates, the prison’s kitchens bubbled over with corruption. The cooks kept the best food aside for themselves and their gang associates or used it to bribe the guards in order to gain favours.
After the brief break for lunch, it was back to an afternoon of hard labour. The pace of work became more and more frenzied as the day progressed. Each group had a strict quota it had to satisfy and, whatever the job, each prisoner was given a daily target. If he failed to reach it, his work card was taken away from him and the prisoner placed on a ‘spare diet’ as punishment. Meagre though normal rations were, the men soon learned to fear being put on the spare diet – two days with nothing but rice water, which contained little in the way of energy, sustenance, or calories. Working in the quarry with only that in your belly was ravaging.
In his first few days on the island, Sedick found life in the quarry almost impossible. Slight in build and distinctly unathletic, he struggled desperately to meet his daily quota of broken stones. However, help was at hand, and it revealed to Sedick a growing sense of unity and selfless solidarity among the prisoners on the island. He would turn around from hewing out a rock from the quarry face to discover that the amount of stones in his pile had suddenly multiplied. The stronger, fitter men were keeping a running daily check on those who were older, weaker, or just plain ill. Wherever humanly possible, they hit their own targets and then surreptitiously helped other comrades to attain theirs.
After a day in the quarry, the exhausted men were jogged back down the barbed-wire corridor to their cell blocks, once again in double-quick time, harassed by dogs and swinging batons, harried to move faster, always faster. The routine of humiliation, however, was far from over. Back in their compound, prisoners were made to perform the most degrading of acts: the ‘tausa dance’. Naked, they were ordered to leap up into the air and click their tongues so that the guards could make sure there was nothing hidden in their mouths, then they had to twist around, clap their hands, and land with their backsides exposed so that the warders could check they weren’t smuggling anything back from the quarry between their buttocks. The political prisoners steadfastly refused to perform the tausa – and paid the consequences with further beatings and abuse. They received the same punishment for their defiance in not addressing the guards as baas or ‘master’ – terms of utter submission.
As the vast majority of the political prisoners were locked up for the night in their cramped cell blocks, a few hundred yards across the prison, Nelson Mandela, ANC leader Walter Sisulu, and a score of other imprisoned black and coloured party leaders were led back to the isolation block, having spent their day labouring in a smaller, lime quarry in the middle of the island.
The isolation section was a quadrangle of buildings separate from the rest of the prison, made up of three double rows of cells, each with a corridor running down the middle. On the fourth side of the quadrangle there stood an imposing wall just over 20 foot high, on top of which armed guards with Alsatian dogs patrolled twenty-four hours a day.
Inside the isolation block, the political leaders lived in tiny, single, seven-foot-square cells, the walls and floors of which were riddled with damp. These men were permanently segregated from the main jail, and the prison regime worked hard to ensure that they had no contact with their party lieutenants and foot soldiers. The policy proved to be unsuccessful.
Common-law prisoners who served in the isolation block as trustees could be bribed to pass messages, news, and information between the various leaders and their men. Sedick was particularly impressed with a method that had been developed by the prisoners on the island to produce ‘invisible notes’. To all intents and purposes, these appeared to be blank scraps of paper but, when exposed to heat, the note revealed orders, directives, and advice, which had been written with milk. Other prisoners perfected a system of quasi-semaphore or wrote in the sand in order to pass messages between the two areas of the prison.
The overwhelming message that came back to the main prison from the political leadership was that Robben Island must be turned into a ‘university of struggle’. The political education of the prisoners was positively encouraged, as were discussion and debating groups that would plan for a new, apartheid-free South Africa of the future.
This message reinforced the existing desire of the other prisoners to start studying, and this soon became a vital and important way of boosting morale and helping the political prisoners to create their own sense of community. Studying was not a solitary exercise; the men would teach and learn from one another. Those who threw themselves into studying provided an example for comrades who might otherwise have allowed prison to turn them into passive human beings. It served to create a sense of self-respect in the most dire of circumstances – but it also allowed the prisoners to believe that they were wresting back some degree of control over their lives in the prison.
Skilled teachers such as Sedick and Marcus directed all their energies into organizing study sessions with the other prisoners, and in so doing instantly gained a real sense of purpose. Some of their comrades were unable to read and write, so a concerted effort was made to wipe out illiteracy in the prison. Soon, in the evenings, the cell blocks were abuzz with a whole range of educational activities. The prisoners organized a variety of seminars, many of them dealing with political and economic matters. However, throughout the early years of the prison, the discussions and seminars were segregated strictly along political lines.
The men also took advantage of the prison regulations concerning educational opportunities for inmates, which enshrined the right to take approved correspondence courses at both the matric (secondary school) and university level. Essentially, this ‘right’ had been instituted as a piece of window dressing, which the apartheid regime could point to as an example of its ‘fairness’, because, in truth, only an isolated few had ever asked to exploit