Lie on your wounds. Robert Sobukwe

      ⁵¹This was a point of considerable political importance for Sobukwe: he would not petition the apartheid government – which he viewed as wholly illegitimate – for release. To do so would be “to play their game”, to cede them a degree of legitimacy. By the same token, Sobukwe was determined that he would not accept any form of “charity” from the apartheid state. Hence his insistence that his wife and children pay for their own meals on the island while visiting him, and the constant need – so evident in his correspondence with Pogrund – to raise money for books, clothes, a heater, etc.

      Nelson Mandela and Sobukwe differed on this issue of petitioning prison authorities for better conditions or greater privileges, as Mandela (1994) describes in Long Walk to Freedom:

      "I have always respected Sobukwe, and found him a balanced and reasonable man. But we differed markedly about…prison conditions. Sobukwe believed that to fight poor conditions would be to acknowledge the state’s right to have him in prison in the first place. I responded that it was always unacceptable to live in degrading conditions and that political prisoners throughout history had considered it part of their duty to fight to improve them. Sobukwe responded that prison conditions would not change until the country changed." (323)

      ⁵²Isaiah 35: 1: “the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose”.

      ⁵³The report entitled “Sobukwe Not Ill-treated” (Sunday Express, 28 October 1962) quoted Sobukwe describing his current physical condition as “Fit and well”. In response to allegations made by his former PAC associate Potlako Leballo, according to which he (Sobukwe) was being subjected to horrifying and brutal conditions of imprisonment, the journalist Gordon Winter quoted Sobukwe as saying, “Leballo’s report is entirely untrue and without foundation”. It is perhaps this last statement that Sobukwe has foremost in mind when characterising Winter’s writing as “imaginative”. This being said, Pogrund (2015: 199) does note that Sobukwe “insisted on going public to repudiate the allegations of his poor conditions [on Robben Island]”. Winter was later revealed to be a spy for BOSS, the Bureau for State Security. He later fled South Africa and published a book about his spying career, entitled Inside BOSS.

      ⁵⁴Pogrund is referring to the detention without trial of a number of his friends and colleagues.