I Beg to Differ. Peter Storey

Robert had travelled a bumpy journey. After I left the Island, the chaplaincy was taken over by the Reverend Theo Kotze, who was later to become Beyers Naudé’s right-hand man in the Christian Institute. Theo was a seasoned minister, and could offer far more to this remarkable man than I. After Theo, however, there was an encounter with a very different, legalistic religious approach, which put Robert off chaplains for good. I believe that he refused further ministry.

      I was also the first chaplain to Nelson Mandela and his fellow Rivonia trialists. When they arrived in mid-1964, they entered a period of extreme hardship and very tough manual labour in the island’s lime quarry. I of course saw nothing of this, because Sunday was the one day of rest granted them. They were incarcerated in the squat, Maximum Security B Section, with its ugly watchtowers, cold grey passages and grey-painted barred doors. The whole place had a makeshift look about it, as if thrown together in a hurry, using the cheapest materials – all except, that is, for the frontage, built of finely pointed stone. It was a hateful place, and it struck me just how little it cost to oppress people. Stone walls, crude iron bars and doors, a mix of concrete and barbed wire and a few miles of icy ocean was all that was needed. Robben Island terrorised not only its inmates, but was a bleak warning to all considering defiance of the apartheid state.

      Services of worship for Mandela’s group were an exercise in ingenuity. I was not permitted into their cells and in those early days of their incarceration they were not allowed out of them, even for church. Each cell in the now famous narrow hallway in B Section had two doors: an inner iron grille, which was kept locked, and a wooden door, left open. I had to lead worship walking up and down the long passage, pausing at each door to make eye contact with the prisoner within. I was touched by the way each returned my glance very intentionally, and by the friendliness on most of their faces. At each end of the passage stood a stony-eyed warder who preferred to fix his gaze on the middle distance until I turned around to retrace my steps. The young Nelson Mandela was in the prime of his life, strong and robust, with a feisty look in his eye, and a ready twinkle too. In those days he gave the impression of a coiled spring – much more the prize-fighter than the father figure who later became beloved around the world. Walter Sisulu was the studious-looking one, helped by his heavy spectacles and the kindest of faces. I recall the gnome-like, not-so-friendly features of Govan Mbeki, Communist Party ideologue, who I’m sure critiqued my ideological impurities after I was gone. Eddie Daniels was the only non-ANC person48 as well as being the only representative of the Cape coloured community, and had an impish smile. The other person I recall especially is Ahmed Kathrada, the only Muslim among the Rivonia group. I was struck by his quiet dignity and the respect he showed an alien faith.

      Obviously this was a poor substitute for community worship. While we got the singing of hymns right very quickly, and the harmonies were as good as any, the reading of Scripture and the preaching had to come piecemeal to each person as I passed. This led to my developing a series of ‘sound-bites’ (the phrase had not been invented yet) to leave with each one, a style that may have become part of my preaching.

      I began to agitate for a better deal, demanding that the Rivonia group be given the same minimal privileges of worship as others on the Island. My requests fell on deaf ears until, on one particularly cold day, I pleaded with the senior warder for the service to at least be held in a sunny corner of the exercise yard adjacent to the cells. To my surprise he agreed and we all crowded into that one warm spot, using a couple of wooden benches for pews. The singing was hearty, the smiles much in evidence, and I couldn’t resist choosing an appropriate text from John’s Gospel, ‘If the Son sets you free, you shall be free indeed’.49 As they basked in the welcome sunshine, Mandela and the group had no difficulty seeing the pun, and it added to the high spirits of the moment. I was struck by the poise and strength of these men. Being their first years there, my time visiting the Island coincided with the worst and most degrading cruelties they were to suffer, yet they had a collective energy about them, an obvious solidarity with each other and, yes, a confidence that was remarkable.

      There can be few instances in the world where such a remarkable group, of such moral stature, have been gathered in one place of shared suffering. Here were leaders of their people and future leaders of us all, in short trousers, canvas jackets, sleeping in those early years with nothing but thin floor mats between their bodies and cold concrete, and regularly subjected to dreadful indignities. None of them was permitted more than two letters and two family visits each year. The story of their victory over these humiliating circumstances has been told and retold as a triumph of the human spirit.

      Robben Island introduced me to the most remarkable of South Africa’s future leaders, but it also stamped on me a deep aversion for the apparatchiks of apartheid and a lifelong inability to make polite small-talk with fellow whites who supported this system. It affected my preaching in the comfortable white enclaves of Camps Bay and Milnerton and would distance Elizabeth and me from some friends and family too. Like most whites they preferred not to hear about such unpleasant things, while I found it impossible to be silent about my experiences. It was not something I could control. It was a reaction to the grotesque contrast between life for those prisoners and the life that went on for the rest of us just a few miles over the water. I remember conducting a family wedding around that time and struggling to get through it because a prominent National Party member was present. For me there could be no easy conversations with the kind of people who needed a Robben Island to support their civilisation, yet there was also the uneasy awareness that I and ‘my people’ were complicit too.

      I was never able to bring Holy Communion to Stanley Mogoba. Later in 1964 a letter arrived from the Prisons Department indicating that my security clearance had been withdrawn, and that I could no longer visit the Island. No reasons were given.

      I did not realise just how deeply the pain of that place had seared my own psyche until the turn of the century, when I found myself escorting two American friends on what is now an obligatory pilgrimage for visitors to Cape Town. It was my first return to the Island in 37 years and I had not prepared myself for this sudden encounter with long-buried memories and emotions. In the tourist bus I suffered an unexpected and embarrassing breakdown. It happened outside Robert Sobukwe’s house, where I was able to share some extra information about him. The guide was overwhelmed at meeting somebody who had actually been with Sobukwe, and she and the driver, who I recognised as an ex-prisoner from those dreadful years, both joined me in a flood of tears. When we got to the lime quarry, the three of us had to walk off some distance to have our weep, with a busload of bemused foreign tourists looking on and probably wondering whether people bawling on each other’s shoulders was de rigueur for such visits. Fortunately this is not the case; the Island is today a shining example of reconciliation, with former prisoners and former guards sharing responsibility for its management. Nevertheless, as another well-known former inmate, Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, says, “Don’t romanticise the Island. It was a hellhole.”