It was at such a service late in 1964 that one man approached me with a request for Holy Communion. He was wearing the crude prison-issue canvas tunic and the short trousers black prisoners had to wear in both summer and winter, and on his feet were sandals roughly cut from motor car tyres. I had neither bread nor communion wine with me, so all I could do was assure him that next time I came, we would celebrate the Eucharist. His name was Mutlanyane Stanley Mogoba, a young PAC activist who had both studied and taught at Kilnerton Training Institution. I was not to know that he had suffered whippings and unspeakable humiliations on the Island for leading a prisoners’ strike. While he was in solitary confinement, another prisoner, Dennis Brutus, had slipped him a religious book to read, and alone in his cell Mogoba experienced a deep encounter with God and a clear call to the ordained ministry. He would one day be elected Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church, becoming my friend and ultimately my immediate superior. Much to my regret, as it turned out I was not permitted to keep my promise to him.
But that was all in the future.
On that first day, between morning and afternoon services, I was offered lunch in the mess-hall used by the Afrikaner warders. It was an even more isolating experience than the boat ride. Their remarks about the prisoners were crudely racist and I was stung and shamed by their assumption that because I was white, I would share their prejudices. Their world had no space for whites with a different view. It was frightening to see how unquestioningly they assumed superiority over their charges, and the way they relished the power conferred on them by this brutal job. Our conversation soon stumbled. I didn’t have the courage to take them on alone so I shrank into a cocoon of silence, seeking inner distance from them. I determined never to eat there again and after that day Elizabeth provided sandwiches for my lunch. Between services I would trek up one of the island roads to an enormous concrete and steel defensive emplacement dating back to World War II. There I consumed my lunch in the shadow of a 9.2-inch gun turret and in the company of some of the sluggish and harmless black mole-snakes that infested the island. I remember musing at the idea of the prisoners taking over the gun, training it on Parliament a mere seven or eight miles away across the water and turning the tables on their captors. In its operational years, the gun could easily have done the job; I vaguely recalled a movie with a similar theme.
Each visit over the next two years was a deeply lonely affair, but I was given one early gift. The warrant officer driver had pointed out a small, south-facing wooden bungalow. It was there that Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, the charismatic leader of the Pan-Africanist Congress, had begun his lonely exile.46 He had just completed a three-year prison sentence for leading the pass-burning campaign that climaxed in the Sharpeville massacre, and instead of being released at the end of 1963, he remained incarcerated by parliamentary decree, utterly isolated for as long as the apartheid regime chose to keep him there. None but his guards was ever permitted near him, and they were not supposed to speak to him. Sobukwe had been a Methodist lay preacher, so I asked to see him. I was refused at first, but some persistence revealed that the authorities were legally obliged to give me access. For every visit, however, I had first to get written authority from the Chief Magistrate of Cape Town.
By the time I visited him, Robert Sobukwe had already earned the grudging respect of his gaolers. My driver, a tough non-commissioned officer in his fifties, remarked that none of the baiting by bored young guards around the perimeter had succeeded in evoking a reaction from him. “Every morning, this man comes out of his house dressed as if he is going off to work,” he said. “He is very dignified.”
As we approached the weathered hut, I wondered what kind of welcome I would receive. The SABC and the press had portrayed Sobukwe as a dangerous black nationalist with a hatred of whites. Would he want to see me – a young white minister?
Sobukwe met me on the steps of his bungalow. I was immediately struck by his handsomely chiselled features and patrician bearing. Tall and wiry and dressed in neat slacks and a white shirt and tie, he offered me a guarded but polite welcome, inviting me inside as if this was his own home and I was a guest coming for tea. The room we entered served as both bedroom and living space, with a neatly made bed, a simple bedside cabinet, a table and chair, and a small bookcase. It was spartan but adequate. Sobukwe gestured to the only chair and sat on the edge of the bed. Conversation was desultory at first. I knew he was sizing me up and didn’t blame him. I said that many Methodists would be excited to know that one of our ministers had got to see him. We swopped names of mutual acquaintances and stories of Healdtown, the Methodist college both he and Nelson Mandela had attended. It was the year that Reverend Seth Mokitimi was about to be elected the first black President of MCSA, and he spoke admiringly of Mokitimi’s influence as a chaplain and housemaster at Healdtown.
Our conversation soon warmed, and after that, each time I came to the island we were able to have about thirty minutes together. He had a consistent aura of calm about him, sucking contentedly on his pipe while we talked. He chose his words carefully, spoke quietly and had a gentle sense of humour. Our discussions were perforce circumscribed, always in the presence of the guard, who stood near the door, pretending to be uninterested. Even so, it was possible to engage something of the depth and breadth of his thinking. His Christian faith was informed by wide reading and it was quite clear that he saw his political activism as an extension of his spirituality. He was excited by Alan Walker’s 1963 preaching campaign in our country, and the furore around Walker’s challenge to the apartheid state. This was the kind of witness he expected of his own church leaders, only to be frequently disappointed. He was impressed when I told him I was hoping to go and work under Walker for a year. I was later permitted to bring him a few theological books, and included all of Walker’s writings. Both of us being pipe-smokers, I could also bring his favourite tobacco and we used to chuckle that both this Methodist minister and lay preacher had a taste for Three Nuns blend.
Robert Sobukwe impacted me very powerfully. For all my contact with black South Africans, here, for the first time, I was engaging with somebody risking all for the liberation of his people. The calibre of this man, the cruel waste of his gifts, and the silence of most South African Christians around his incarceration, touched me to anger. On his part, he always expressed genuine appreciation of our times together, but even though I was one of the only people, apart from his captors, ever permitted to see him, I sensed that he would never put too much trust in these visits. Why should he place faith in this white man, any more than any other? I always came away angered and ashamed. Once, when leaving him, I expressed my shame that I could depart the island so freely, leaving him a prisoner. His response was quick. Gesturing toward Cape Town, with its Houses of Parliament occupied by his tormentors, he said, “I’m not the prisoner, Peter – they are.”
Every visit made it more evident to me why the apartheid government feared Robert Sobukwe so much, but the years of virtual solitary confinement later began to break even this man. Benjamin Pogrund, biographer and close friend of Sobukwe, tells that by 1969 he was near a breakdown. “The government took fright and hastily sent him off the island, to banishment in Kimberley, which included house arrest and bannings.” Sobukwe qualified as an attorney and practised law in Kimberley, enjoying the admiration of the local people there. Activist Joe Seremane spoke with wonder about the “Prof’s” magnanimity, telling of how, when passing a police van with a flat wheel, Sobukwe stopped to help the white cops fit a spare.47 In October 1975, twelve years after our first meeting on the island, I had a last visit with him in his Kimberley home. A security police car was parked outside as usual, indicating that he was still being watched. With John Rees, then General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, who had helped support