In Bentham’s day punishment at the Cape followed Roman-Dutch law and was usually of the body in open display – breaking on the wheel, brandings and amputations – so as to regulate the imported slave and conquered indigenous population by terror. Whites were punished following military procedures. The most celebrated European offender against Company rule was the free burgher and diarist, Adam Tas. For his petition agitating against the Governor’s tariffs, as tourists to the Castle well know, he was incarcerated in its black and airless dungeon for all of thirteen months during 1706-07. Admiring this rebellious, contrary Jew, Bosman made a point on a return visit of his to the Cape in 1947 of inspecting the site of his ordeal and even sketching the Tas mausoleum.
According to Dirk van Zyl Smit (in his South African Prison Law and Practice of 1992), the British Occupation of the Cape set in place some reforms more in line with the Enlightenment view that the aim of punishment should be the changing of the offender’s mind. Hence the immediate importation of prefabricated treadmills to Cape Town and Natal. These soon went to ruin, but in the second number of The Cape of Good Hope Literary Gazette (on 21 July, 1830) it was reported that, in propitious summer weather back home at Reading Gaol, each prisoner could be made to ascend up to 13 000 feet daily. The South African colonies preferred convict stations which, by reliably supplying heavy labour, contributed more to expansion. Thus were chain gangs used to execute public works, notably constructing spectacular mountain passes into the interior. Over 1848-50 there was the famous Anti-Convict Agitation organised to prevent the British Foreign Secretary declaring the Cape another penal settlement (along with Tasmania, mainland Australia and several islands in the Caribbean), where wrongdoers from the motherland would be dumped at the colony’s expense. This movement was so successful that it had the effect of Britain curtailing its notorious transportation policy. Public executions were also abolished on British territory in 1868. By the 1870s, when the great linguist Dr Bleek needed the Bushman informants whose language and literature he was instructed to preserve, entire tribes were on hand, building that notorious Breakwater into the Atlantic, stone by chiselled stone, before dwindling into extinction.
To the traveller inspecting the old Transvaal Republic of President Kruger’s days, the prison system might have appeared rather ramshackle. The first white sentenced to imprisonment there was one Alexander Anderson in 1865, with one year including hard labour. By a special deal with the landdrost, Anderson was during that period himself to build the very tronk in which he was meant to be held. One of the most chilling stories in Bosman’s Mafeking Road collection is “The Widow”, featuring the Transvaal Republic’s first judicial execution at Potchefstroom, the place of Bosman’s early schooling. In his version, after a lengthy trial the murderer of the husband of the heroine is put to death by firing squad and buried in the yard of the courthouse. The actual event was somewhat different, being a hanging from a tree in a field outside town, where the trussed burgher made his last stand as the horses attached to the cart which supported him were geed up.
In his biography of his father-in-law Piet Prinsloo, public prosecutor of Prinsloosdorp, Sarel Erasmus records that no landdrost would go to the trouble of sentencing his black offenders, but merely flog them in the back yard himself. White suspects held before a circuit court were often perforce boarded in the local law officer’s own home. As Sarel recounts (in Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp):
There was no gaol at Krugersdorp, and if there had been there was no money to pay a gaoler. My uncle turned a stable into a gaol, but it was only wattle and daub, and when drunken Kaffirs were inside, they fell against the walls and tumbled outside, so that there was much repairing, and the guard had to keep his rifle and hammer going all the time.
Then, one night during the great storm in this legendary tall tale, of course the entire contraption is blown away.
Sarel Erasmus is later imprisoned himself in a British gaol and, like John Bunyan before him penning his plea for grace, is destined to deliver his immortal A Burgher Quixote as his protest. In reality ‘Sarel Erasmus’ is Bosman’s predecessor, Douglas Blackburn, the journalist and satirist of Transvaal affairs. During the middle years of the 1890s, as part of his duty as the editor of his scabrous weekly newspaper, The Sentinel of Krugersdorp, Blackburn had occasion to attend executions in Pretoria: a typical note of his is “Jan, hanged for murdering Paul le Roux, died without a wriggle.” But the favourite tale of prisoners in the old Transvaal was often retold, as in this unsigned piece (called “The Gaoler of Groenfontein” in The State, July, 1911):
Those [prisoners] who were well behaved were allowed out on leave on condition that they were to be back by nightfall. On one occasion certain of them – so the story ran – had been kept too long in the village by kind friends, and when they returned to their prison home they found that the gaoler had wearied of their tarrying and had barred the gates against them: so they had to seek refuge for the night elsewhere. But with the morning light they crept back to the fold, and that day lodged with the Magistrate a formal complaint at the Gaoler’s conduct in shutting them out.
The Transvaal had erected its central penal institution at what was known as the Convent Redoubt. (Originally a military camp adjacent to the Loreto Sisters, the site later became the Royal Mint and is now the African Window museum.) As a stream ran through the property, prisoners were obliged to undertake their own laundry arrangements. Here in the garden hangings were held on Saturday mornings, open to the public as one of the capital’s few spectacles. Here old Chief Lebogo (Malaboch), the last in the line of defeated black leaders of rural resistance against the commandos, was held after the Bagananwa War and widely photographed. Over New Year, 1896, he was joined by the defeated Dr Jameson and his hundred Raiders.
But the Benthamite concept of the prison as a total institution, in which every facet of the inmate’s daily existence may be controlled until such time as he has changed his attitudes to authority, to work and to the society outside, and where the benefit of literacy training and religious instruction may be inculcated, arrives in the Transvaal only with the building of the Fort in Johannesburg (where Bosman was held while awaiting trial), and then with Pretoria Central Prison as the prime example. Described by penologists as the Pennsylvania system of prison management, it was introduced in Britain notably at Pentonville before being exported to the colonies. The blueprint allowed for single-occupancy cellular accommodation for longtimers (to prevent amorous alliances and to break up gangs), with the exercise of labour in specially designed workshops.
During the military occupation of Pretoria in the Second Anglo-Boer War, it became clear to the Governor, Lord Milner, that Pretoria too needed to join the worldwide network of formal Imperial prisons stretching, as Boer prisoners of war knew well enough, from Ceylon to St. Helena and Bermuda. The prison reserve was set aside out of town on isolated, higher ground for this purpose. By the peace of 1902 the surrounding wall was completed. In 1903 a contract for building the Central Prison itself was awarded to Johannesburg’s Brown and Cottrill, but on their bankruptcy it was taken over by Maudsley, and then by Prentice and Mackey. By 1906, at a cost of £125 000, that stone fort, the Pretoria Central Prison, was completed and ready to admit its first six hundred. It has enjoyed full occupancy ever since. And