sections. On occasion, newspapers and even small portable transistor radios fell into our hands, and the information derived therefrom was immediately written out and despatched to all the sections. Sometimes during searches that took us by surprise, “banks” of the material were confiscated from the prisoners, and sometimes the authorities acting on information dug it up from the yard. But whatever losses we incurred in one section were made up for by the materials that were kept in “banks” in other sections.13
The political prisoners fought year after year to improve conditions on the Island; and as the years passed these struggles helped to win small privileges. An important policy change that directly benefited the political education programme took place in 1980, when access to newspapers became regular (although they were still often subject to censorship and arrived mutilated by the warders’ scissors). The study programme through the University of South Africa also provided both content and cover for political education. Govan Mbeki drew directly for several of the essays in this book upon material gathered towards his courses in business economics, economics Honours and a Master’s degree in economics. The UNISA assignment pads also housed those portions of the political education programme that Govan brought with him when he left the Island in 1987.
The perceived need for an enhanced programme of political education thus intersected with factors making it possible. Govan and others set about drawing up a two-part syllabus. The first part, called Syllabus A, was a history of the ANC. It was far from perfunctory. It commenced in the mid-nineteenth century, with the Wars of Dispossession, and provided an analysis of the social context from which the educated proto-nationalists emerged, who in 1912 were to become the founders of the organisation. It dealt with the subsequent history of the ANC, decade by decade, with particular attention devoted to a study of the Freedom Charter. It also examined closely the “reasons which decided the organisation to embark on the armed struggle” and “showed the relationship between the ANC and the SACP, devoting considerable attention to the distinction between the two organisations – the character of the alliance between the two”.14 Mbeki estimates that it took about three years of study to work thoroughly through Syllabus A.
Syllabus B was essentially a materialist history of the development of human society. It outlined the writings of Marx and Engels, especially with reference to the rise of capitalism, and introduced concepts of class struggle and socialism. In addition to these two syllabuses, other documents were also prepared for the political education programme: essays were commissioned from individuals or groups of prisoners on specific topics and topical issues.
Political education material was circulated and discussed in two main ways: through the clandestine structures that had been set up in all the sections, and during work in the quarries and elsewhere. Small groups of three to five people conducted classes: “As the prisoners would say, they had a greater number of eyes and ears than the jail authorities.”15 In producing the material, it was essential that it could be hidden, copied and passed on. (In one of the essays Govan notes the need to keep it “within a tolerable length and transportable proportions”!) These essays were written on the thinnest paper that could be found, in the smallest possible script. Govan’s eyesight did not permit him to compress his own handwriting, so many of his essays were dictated to “scribes”. Terror Lekota, he recalls approvingly, “could write so small the chaps would want magnifying glasses!” As material circulated from one section to another, it would be copied and stored.
The writings in this book are only a sampling of the material written by ANC historians and theorists. They are not even a complete collection of Govan’s own contributions, but are the ones he was able to preserve. They are discussed briefly in the final section of this Introduction.
THE ROBBEN ISLAND WRITINGS
South Africa has jailed so many gifted men and women that there already exists a sizeable body of prison writing. Bosman’s sardonic Cold Stone Jug begins the genre – and alongside it one might shelve Breytenbach’s True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. Ruth First’s 117 Days and Albie Sachs’s Jail Diary both describe detention without trial – and they are also linked by the terrible bombings which took life and limb from these opponents of injustice. Prison memories by Indres Naidoo, Moses Dlamini and Michael Dingake recreated the cell blocks and rocks quarries of Robben Island. Hugh Lewin and Tim Jenkins took readers into (and in the latter case out of!) Pretoria Central. So did the taut verse of Jeremy Cronin’s Inside. Helen Joseph (treason trial and house arrest) and Frances Baard (prison and banishment) described their lives in other parts of the apartheid gulag. Drum magazine’s photo-essay on life in the Johannesburg Fort and the Rand Daily Mail’s publication of Harold Strachan’s revelations (for which he was promptly re-imprisoned) are journalistic classics.
The essays of Govan Mbeki which comprise this book add to this distinguished list. Yet they differ in important respects from all the others: they were written, circulated and preserved in prison. They were never intended for publication but to be read by other prisoners; their aim is not to share an experience but to educate politically. They are remarkable documents. The circumstances of their production and nature of their initial audience are intriguing enough; but their content and scope mean that they possess far more than mere curiosity value. Ranging over history, politics and economics they draw upon their author’s learning and his life as an activist.
Govan Mbeki agreed that these documents should be reprinted as they stand, and not reworked with hindsight and at leisure. He points out that they will contain gaps and silences. The essays represent only a small portion of the total material produced. Some of the essays were not based on research; in other cases, sources could not be identified lest they fell into the hands of the authorities. Over the years, the Robben Islanders had built up a collection of Marxist texts – and the authors of the political education material were unwilling to draw attention to these.
A couple of the shorter pieces (“A Note on the Comment on the Paper on Apartheid” and “The ANC and Student Organisation”) are written in the first person, responses by Mbeki to written communications from other inmates. Many of the others appear at first glance completely impersonal. Yet even in these, there are constant glimpses of Govan, echoes of his experience. There is the highly educated man: quoting Wordsworth, Kipling, Mqhayi, Cicero and Vegetius (although in this last instance, half a century after his Latin courses, Govan ascribes “Let him who desires peace, prepare for a war” to Caesar). There is the teacher: present in almost every essay, in the deft use of the Socratic question and in the measured emphases “we stress the following significant points” (“The Rise of Afrikaner Capital”, III). At one point Govan suggest that political leaders need “the patience of a conscientious class teacher”, and in the same document he reflects, with characteristically gentle humour, upon his schoolmasterly approach:
You complain that my Note was full of “provocative assertions, hints and undeveloped points” which have set your mind athinking. Blame my training as a teacher, which was entrenched in my mind by having to teach others to be teachers. One of the most important lessons in Psychology of Education and in School Method was the injunction to draw the answers from the pupils. They should work out answers from hints thrown out. When I write I so often forget that my position is no longer that of a teacher. (“A Note on the Comment”)
First cousin to the teacher, there is the scholar. This is most evident, perhaps, in those essays dealing with formal economic issues (“Notes on the Business Cycle, Unemployment, Inflation and Gold”, “Movements in African Real Wages” and, the longest essay in the book, “Monopoly Capitalism in South Africa”). Govan completed an Honours degree in economics on Robben Island, took other courses in business economics, and planned to embark (in his seventies) on a Master’s degree. He effectively recycles data and arguments from his UNISA coursework in these essays. Even where he is dealing with a topical issue – explains Govan in “The
