strategies and growing international support under Cold War conditions. And in Lusaka, the ANC began, with limited resources, to establish a rudimentary living and working base, as well as the elaborate machinery and structures, to wage the military and propaganda campaign against the apartheid state (Macmillan 2013). In all this, the role of its (acting) president, Tambo, loomed large. But we begin this chapter on an island within view of Cape Town’s Table Mountain, which used to be a leper colony and is today one of the wonders of the new world.
ROBBEN ISLAND
The winter of 1964 on Robben Island, when Mandela and six other Rivonia prisoners arrived there, was the coldest that anyone could remember. So fierce were the Atlantic winds sweeping across the island that prisoners working in the quarries were numbed to the bone, hardly able to raise their picks … [The cell of the man who would forever be remembered as the world’s most famous prisoner] was so cold he slept fully dressed in prison garb. Outside the cell was fixed a white card giving his name and identification number: 466/64 (Meredith 1997: 281).
While robust, organised discussions occurred on matters of political economy and strategies of political liberation, very little of what we could describe as economic and social policy debates occurred within ANC or other circles on Robben Island. Here, as compared to the more policy-oriented, evidential and analytical chapters that follow, we can only offer some anecdotal and personalised glimpses into issues that are tangentially linked to economics and social policy. This is partly because, as Pallo Jordan has noted (see chapter 1), little such policy debate took place on the Island for understandable reasons, but also because so few reliable or consistent sources exist about those aspects of life on Robben Island. Ahmed Kathrada and Andrew Mlangeni (among the most senior ANC leaders who were imprisoned on the island from the mid-1960s), whom we interviewed for this study, confirm these impressions obtained from the secondary literature.
Education and economics on the Island
Robben Island lies off the coast of Cape Town and is the site where political prisoners were incarcerated by the National Party government. It was often referred to as ‘the university’ because a lot of learning took place there. Less well-educated prisoners took high school courses through Rapid Results College, and more formally educated comrades registered for degrees and diplomas at the University of South Africa (Unisa) – both were correspondence-based institutions. Mandela and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) leader Robert Smangiliso Sobukwe both studied at the University of London by correspondence, the latter for a degree in economics (Pogrund 1990: 195). One of the biggest problems faced by prisoners in relation to their studies was the restriction and censorship of books and other study material. All books bearing in the title the words Marx, Marxism, Lenin, Leninism, Russia, China, Cuba, socialism, communism, revolution, civil war, violence, Africa, anti-apartheid and all books of any kind written by black authors were routinely banned. Although most academic journals were also subject to draconian censorship, the South African Journal of Economics and African Studies were not proscribed. Most issues of the Financial Mail were stopped; the few let through were extensively redacted, apart from the advertisements. The British Economist somehow got through but only in a mutilated state until it, too, was banned in 1968. Farmer’s Weekly, Huisgenoot, Readers Digest, South African Panorama and Lantern were allowed in, although often heavily censored (Alexander 1994: 60–65).
Around 1966, Sobukwe was allowed to read the British economics magazine Economica, which had suddenly and without explanation been made available to him (Pogrund 1990: 241). Later, when formal studying was allowed, Sobukwe read, among other ‘heavyweight titles’ (as Benjamin Pogrund puts it), Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (presumably by Joseph Schumpeter). Sobukwe comments, ‘I never dreamt I would come to enjoy Economics like this … [though] some articles, while interesting, contain so much maths that they leave huge gaps in my understanding’ (Pogrund 1990: 250).
Few would contest the view that Govan Mbeki was the most educated and well-read of the Robben Island prisoners in matters related to the study of economics. We rely mainly here on Colin Bundy’s (2012) excellent biography of Mbeki. Mbeki took formal courses in business economics through correspondence study at Unisa and other tertiary institutions; he successfully read for an Honours degree in economics and began coursework towards a Master’s in economics. His essays, some for formal study, were many and varied and showed a highly sophisticated grasp of both economic theory and economic history. His three-part essay on ‘The Rise and Growth of Afrikaner Capital’ demonstrates his skills as an analyst of the economics and politics of the growth of this racially defined fraction of South African capital; significantly, it predates Dan O’Meara’s (1983) classic study of the same subject (Volkskapitalisme) by two years. Mbeki also wrote a theoretical essay entitled ‘Notes on the Business Cycle, Unemployment, Inflation and Gold’, making the point that Afrikaner economists favoured a certain amount of inflation for economic growth, as rising prices would lead to rising profits and business development. He wrote an insightful essay entitled ‘Economic History: South Africa’ as well as one on a subject once again very topical in South Africa today, entitled ‘Monopoly Capitalism in South Africa: Its Role and Extent’. One final example of the essays he wrote was entitled ‘Movements in African Real Wages: 1939–1969’ (Mbeki 2015).
Given the time, context and prevailing restrictions, it is not surprising that Mbeki did not turn his undoubted intellect to matters of economic policy. Nevertheless, his work suggests that he understood the Freedom Charter as a policy document of the National Liberation Movement, and not just as a political programme. Among other arguments Mbeki made was one against the proposition that the Freedom Charter would permit a flowering of African capitalists, making a case instead of the Freedom Charter as a vision of a ‘national democratic republic’ and as a ‘transitional phase towards a socialist society’ (Mbeki 2015: 37). We learn from Bundy’s afterword to the book that Mbeki settled for the ‘modest revolution’ of 1994 and voiced no public criticism of the neo-liberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution programme, championed by his son, Thabo (Mbeki 2015: afterword).
Despite restrictions on reading, there were often robust and sometimes tense debates and clashes among ANC comrades over a range of political and social issues, some of which have only come to light after 1990. Mandela and Govan Mbeki clashed over the latter’s attempts to get the ANC to mobilise and organise to link worker and peasant struggle, as well as over Mandela’s apparent willingness to open talks with Bantustan leaders.
Although both men have denied it, Govan Mbeki’s relationship with Mandela was particularly complicated. They disagreed strongly over Operation Mayibuye – the swashbuckling programme for armed insurrection which Mbeki wrote with Joe Slovo in the early 1960s – and then, in prison, over Mandela’s willingness to entertain alliances with Bantustan collaborators. So serious was the conflict between the two men at one point that, in 1975, a group of nine ANC leaders on Robben Island convened to try to find a solution; a report smuggled out to ANC leadership in Lusaka contended that ‘the two who represented polar opposites in attitudes and opinions were Madiba and Govan’ (ANC 2001: n.p.).
In the midst of such titanic clashes over political tactics and strategy, some further evidence of matters related to economic and social issues could be found. Thus, for example, in Long Walk to Freedom Mandela remarks:
For a number of years, I taught a course in political economy. In it, I attempted to trace the evolution of economic man from the earliest times up to the present, sketching out the path from ancient communal societies to feudalism to capitalism and socialism. I am by no means a scholar and not much of a teacher, and I would generally prefer to be asked questions than to lecture. My approach was not ideological, but it was biased in favour of socialism, which I saw as the most advanced stage of economic life then evolved by man (Mandela 1994d: 455).
This sense that socialism was the end goal of the struggle,
