I felt I should come and explain under oath some of the reasons that led me to join these organisations. There was a sense of moral duty attached to it. Secondly, for the simple reason that to plead guilty would to my mind indicate a sense of moral guilt. I do not accept there is moral guilt attached to my actions.”
. . . Something in Govan’s quiet and courteous way of speaking arouses in Yutar [the state prosecutor] a greater antagonism than he has yet displayed to the accused . . . He returns again and again to questions of identities, places, names, which Govan refuses to answer.
Although Govan’s admissions make it unnecessary for Yutar to press his cross-examination of Govan – there is no question of the verdict in this case – he continues to question him for three more days, interspersing questions about documents with the questions that seek information. He is like an angry fly hitting himself again and again against a pane of glass; because the glass is transparent he believes he only has to hit hard enough and he will reach the other side. Govan steadfastly refuses to answer any question which might implicate anyone else.8
Life sentences for eight of the nine accused were handed down in the Pretoria Supreme Court on 12 June 1964. As a huge crowd filled Church Square with the strains of “Nkosi Sikelele”, the police van left the court behind its convoy of cars and motorcycles. That night, apart from Denis Goldberg (held in the whites-only Pretoria Central Prison), the men of Rivonia were flown to Cape Town. The next morning the Dakota aeroplane crossed the wintry waters of Table Bay to the flat, windswept island that was to house them for so many years. It was also to become their “university”, the site of an extraordinary programme of political education. It is a portion of that programme which makes up the body of this book.
POLITICAL EDUCATION ON THE ISLAND
Michael Dingake (an ANC operative jailed from 1966 to 1981) published an account in 1987 of his years on the Island. The prison was – he suggested – “a laboratory of a major political experiment”: here, “the political fibre of the oppressed” was to be tested. And, despite the controls available to the experimenters (over diet, mail, study rights, and punishment) the attempts to destroy that fibre failed.9 Instead, the ANC re-established itself as a political organisation with identifiable leadership, underground structures, ingenious communication channels, and committees with a wide range of responsibilities. Committee structures existed for day-to-day administration amongst the political prisoners on the Island, for organisational discipline, for developing a programme of study, for devising leisure activities – and more. The full story of how this “complete underground organisational machinery” (as Mbeki refers to it) was set up on Robben Island awaits its own history.
Two educational initiatives were mounted on the Island: academic education and political education. Govan Mbeki speaks proudly of the attention given to academic study on the Island:
We took people from the lowest level, who came to the Island illiterate, and they had to be taught. I remember one group I had – I started with them when they were illiterate – started them up. And by the time they left Robben Island they were able to write letters home – they didn’t require anybody to write letters for them, and to address their envelopes. And they spoke English. And, so we did that. Most people when they came to Robben Island were at about the JC [Standard 8] level, and by the time they left they were doing degrees and things like that. Take one case, you had a special case like Eddie Daniels. Now Eddie Daniels when he came to Robben Island was starved of education. But when he left Robben Island he had a B.A. and a B.Comm.
On another occasion he spoke again about the academic educational programme.
We encouraged people to study. It is good for them. It is good for our discipline too. It is good for them to improve their qualifications. It is also good for their parents. Like before I was released, there was a young chap from UWC [the University of the Western Cape], Leonard. We asked for a report from the section: “Who are studying of the new chaps? Who are studying and what are they doing?” So we are given the report and it shows that Leonard is not studying. So we make an enquiry why is Leonard not studying. Leonard replies, saying, “Look, here’s Comrade Mteto in this section” (it was section B), “here’s Comrade Mteto, he has no degree and yet he is up and up his politics and he has given us guidance here. Why should I bother? I want to concentrate on political studies.” So we replied, “Leonard, when your parents took you to the UWC they expected you to come out of there with a degree for your good and for their own good, and their satisfaction as parents – and now that you are here, the organisation stands in loco parentis! You’ve got to study!”10
But as well as encouraging educational activities from literacy skills to postgraduate degrees, the ANC leadership on the Island also devised a programme of political education. A good deal of less formalised political education took place in earlier years, but it was mainly after 1979 and especially in the early 1980s that a full-blown course of studies was devised, material prepared and circulated, and study groups set up. The project was both more necessary and more feasible at this time.
The necessity arose from the influx of political prisoners in the late 1970s and early 1980s. By the beginning of the eighties, explains Mbeki,
a new crop of very young comrades started streaming into the Island. Most of them were MK cadres, but also among them were BCM [Black Consciousness Movement] members whose leadership stated that they did no time “for the dusty manuscript of Marx and Engels”.
It did not take long to establish the fact that as enthusiastic as the young ANC cadres were about the national democratic revolution, they were not well informed about the history of ANC, nor were they clear about its politics and how they differed from those of the Communist Party.11
These circumstances had two implications for the senior ANC prisoners. Firstly, they wanted to equip their own members with an adequate knowledge of their own history and struggle; secondly, in doing so they would also be able to counter the claims of rival groups on the Island, particularly the Pan-Africanist Congress.
Several factors made it possible to implement political education on the desired scale by the end of the seventies. A major barrier to a successful programme was the difficulty of developing communication channels between the various sections. (When the Rivonia trialists arrived on Robben Island in 1964, they were housed in an antique building originally used as a prison by Cape colonial government, and segregated from other political prisoners in the “zinc tronk” – a cluster of buildings constructed of wood and corrugated iron. Prisoners worked on the Island to quarry the stone which went into the construction of the new maximum security wings, divided into seven sections, named “A” to “G”. High walls were erected between the sections, so that inmates of one could not even see those of another.) Gradually, the prisoners devised ways of breaching their isolation and making effective contact between the sections.
One man is credited, in particular, with defeating the system of isolation between the sections. “The transfer of the late Joe Gqabi from the main section to the B section where the Rivonia group was isolated” (Govan Mbeki narrates) “was one of those inadvertent mistakes the jail authorities committed.”12 Gqabi belonged to the first group of Umkhonto we Sizwe cadres sent out of the country for training as military commanders, and his instruction had included covert communication methods. “He was absolutely good, very good, at it!” recalls Mbeki. Joe Gqabi immediately set about devising all sorts of communication channels – and with this breakthrough, it became possible to prepare material and to smuggle it from one section to another.
Moreover, if
