Читать книгу I Beg to Differ - Peter Storey - Страница 14

The Island

It lies there like the just-visible hump of a submerged leviathan, barnacled with a sprinkling of ugly buildings and smelling of kelp and sea-growth. Just seven miles from the mainland city of Cape Town, it might as well be in the middle of the South Atlantic.

Robben Island.

There is nothing beautiful about this place. Exposed to driving Atlantic gales in winter and the hot summer South Easters, the island is ringed by treacherous black rock shoals and thundering surf. Apart from a few gum trees its vegetation consists mainly of the rapacious Port Jackson willow which has triumphed over the indigenous fynbos. It is traversed by old military roads made of a blinding mixture of crushed shells and white limestone. A rutted landing strip is located at one end. At the other a small harbour provides the only safe approach from the sea.

Ever since Europeans came to the Cape of Good Hope, the island has symbolised white domination and been chaptered with human suffering. Variously a leper colony, a place of exile, a mental asylum, naval garrison and prison, it has always offered cold comfort. It has been a graveyard for unwary shipping and for the hopes of those transported there. When I set foot on its shores in 1962 I was not the first Methodist minister to preach to prisoners there. Some 140 years before, the great Methodist pioneer Reverend Barnabas Shaw visited the Island, “preaching on Captain Peddar’s veranda to such as understood English, and afterwards in the prison to the convicts in Dutch.”43

Among the 1963 arrivals there was Nelson Mandela, who most people do not realise had two introductions to the Island. His first had been via the degrading route that introduced most Robben Island prisoners to their new home, the prison launch Dias. Seasick and desperately trying to keep their balance while shackled to one another in the stinking, rolling hold of the launch, prisoners often endured white prison guards returning from the mainland urinating on them through the skylight above. Mandela’s first stay was short; within months he was taken back to Pretoria to join the rest of the Rivonia treason trialists, so called because they had been netted by a Security Police swoop on the secret headquarters of the African National Congress in the Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia. Those captured were, in Mandela’s words, “the entire High Command of Umkhonto we Sizwe”,44 the fledgeling armed wing of the ANC. The long trial that ensued, the guilty verdict and the sentence of life imprisonment, is now part of the lore of the liberation struggle. The day after their sentencing in mid-1964, Mandela and his colleagues were secretly flown from Pretoria to the Island airstrip to begin the incarceration that was to make the Island notorious throughout the world. They had narrowly escaped the hangman’s noose and when they asked what their sentence of life imprisonment actually meant the answer was, “You will be here until you die.”

The previous year had already seen the arrival of Robert Sobukwe, leader of the banned Pan-Africanist Congress, whom Justice Minister John Vorster liked to call “public enemy number one”. It would be a while before I could make his acquaintance.

As the first Methodist chaplain there, I was also the first minister to visit them. That exposure was to have a huge impact on me. It dramatised the great gulf between white and black realities in our land. Each crossing in the prison boat transported me between worlds that could not have been more different. My congregation of white Camps Bay families expected me to preach to them, to teach them and to minister to their needs within the context of a comfortable faith. The adults worked in banks, insurance companies and other ‘normal’ businesses just over Kloof Nek in Cape Town and their children spent the carefree after-school hours surfing the breakers that rolled in from the west. A few miles out into that same ocean was a different universe, a bleak and hellish prison-house prepared for those who dared to challenge the status quo upon which Camps Bay and every other comfortable white suburb was founded.

When I first arrived, the new maximum security cell block was being completed by common law prisoners and this is where the Rivonia trialists ended up, becoming the most prominent of thousands of political prisoners to experience the horrors of the Island over the next thirty years. Looking back, it seems absurd – even irresponsible – that someone as inexperienced as I should have been entrusted with the sensitive responsibility of being their minister. What could a kid in his twenties do for people of this calibre, and in such straits?

The fact is that the full weight of what was happening on Robben Island had not begun to dawn upon my superiors, nor myself. It would be good to be able to claim that the Methodist Church had the foresight to ensure the best possible pastoral care to these incarcerated men who were obviously leaders of the future, but that would be less than truthful. In what was then a largely white-run denomination, the national significance of people like Robert Sobukwe, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and the others had yet to become evident; it was sufficient that a very junior, recently ordained minister could do the chaplaincy job.

The journey in the prison launch Dias lasted forty minutes – longer in bad weather. As it wallowed through the swells, I travelled on the upper deck with returning warders and their families, experiencing a huge sense of alienation. There was a bizarre disconnect between their bantering chatter and our cruel destination. I learned later that many prisoners who had never seen the ocean before had also to struggle with the terror of this alien element. Ex-prisoners still recall their fear on hearing the mournful hooting of the Mouille Point foghorn for the first time, and their hatred of the gulls’ mocking cries.

On my first visit I was met at the small dock by a warrant officer in a pick-up truck and driven through the entrance archway crudely painted with the Prisons Service crest and motto, ‘We Serve with Pride’. I wondered if this officer or his fellow guards saw the similarity to another arched gateway in Poland, where the mocking words ‘Arbeit macht frei’45 greeted the train-loads of victims herded there by other claimants to a master-race ideology.

The white limestone road led to the Church of the Good Shepherd, also known as the Leper Church. Built in the leper colony days and designed by famed architect Herbert Baker, it is a church of beautiful proportions, but its lovely stone exterior belied the emptiness within. It had been stripped of altar, font and pulpit, as if not one single symbol of the grace of God should be permitted to penetrate the lives of the inmates. Nor were there any pews: the groups of common law prisoners, together with some of the less prominent ‘politicals’ marched from their nearby cells, had to sit on the cold floor. The absence of service books was less of a problem because in those days Christian hymns in Xhosa, Tswana, Sotho and Zulu were widely known by black South Africans, learned by heart when they were children. My own memory of years of vernacular worship in the Kilnerton chapel helped too. The singing was soulful and the sermons simple. I tried to offer homilies on the love of God for these men, and God’s care for their faraway families. In spite of my inadequacies the words were always received with appreciation and with many sighs and exclamations, as if this strange young white man, this hour of rough and ready worship and the words spoken in God’s name offered a tiny crack of light into their shadowed lives.

It was at such a service late in 1964 that one man approached me with a request for Holy Communion. He was wearing the crude prison-issue canvas tunic and the short trousers black prisoners had to wear in both summer and winter, and on his feet were sandals roughly cut from motor car tyres. I had neither bread nor communion wine with me, so all I could do was assure him that next time I came, we would celebrate the Eucharist. His name was Mutlanyane Stanley Mogoba, a young PAC activist who had both studied and taught at Kilnerton Training Institution. I was not to know that he had suffered whippings and unspeakable humiliations on the Island for leading a prisoners’ strike. While he was in solitary confinement, another prisoner, Dennis Brutus, had slipped him a religious book to read, and alone in his cell Mogoba experienced a deep encounter with God and a clear call to the ordained ministry. He would one day be elected Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church, becoming my friend and ultimately my immediate superior. Much to my regret, as it turned out I was not permitted to keep my promise to him.

But that was all in the future.

On that first day, between morning and afternoon services, I was offered lunch in the mess-hall used by the Afrikaner warders. It was an even more isolating experience than the boat ride. Their remarks about the prisoners were crudely racist and I was stung and shamed by their assumption that because I was white, I would share their prejudices. Their world had no space for whites with a different view. It was frightening to see how unquestioningly they assumed superiority over their charges, and the way they relished the power conferred on them by this brutal job. Our conversation soon stumbled. I didn’t have the courage to take them on alone so I shrank into a cocoon of silence, seeking inner distance from them. I determined never to eat there again and after that day Elizabeth provided sandwiches for my lunch. Between services I would trek up one of the island roads to an enormous concrete and steel defensive emplacement dating back to World War II. There I consumed my lunch in the shadow of a 9.2-inch gun turret and in the company of some of the sluggish and harmless black mole-snakes that infested the island. I remember musing at the idea of the prisoners taking over the gun, training it on Parliament a mere seven or eight miles away across the water and turning the tables on their captors. In its operational years, the gun could easily have done the job; I vaguely recalled a movie with a similar theme.

Each visit over the next two years was a deeply lonely affair, but I was given one early gift. The warrant officer driver had pointed out a small, south-facing wooden bungalow. It was there that Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, the charismatic leader of the Pan-Africanist Congress, had begun his lonely exile.46 He had just completed a three-year prison sentence for leading the pass-burning campaign that climaxed in the Sharpeville massacre, and instead of being released at the end of 1963, he remained incarcerated by parliamentary decree, utterly isolated for as long as the apartheid regime chose to keep him there. None but his guards was ever permitted near him, and they were not supposed to speak to him. Sobukwe had been a Methodist lay preacher, so I asked to see him. I was refused at first, but some persistence revealed that the authorities were legally obliged to give me access. For every visit, however, I had first to get written authority from the Chief Magistrate of Cape Town.

By the time I visited him, Robert Sobukwe had already earned the grudging respect of his gaolers. My driver, a tough non-commissioned officer in his fifties, remarked that none of the baiting by bored young guards around the perimeter had succeeded in evoking a reaction from him. “Every morning, this man comes out of his house dressed as if he is going off to work,” he said. “He is very dignified.”

As we approached the weathered hut, I wondered what kind of welcome I would receive. The SABC and the press had portrayed Sobukwe as a dangerous black nationalist with a hatred of whites. Would he want to see me – a young white minister?

Sobukwe met me on the steps of his bungalow. I was immediately struck by his handsomely chiselled features and patrician bearing. Tall and wiry and dressed in neat slacks and a white shirt and tie, he offered me a guarded but polite welcome, inviting me inside as if this was his own home and I was a guest coming for tea. The room we entered served as both bedroom and living space, with a neatly made bed, a simple bedside cabinet, a table and chair, and a small bookcase. It was spartan but adequate. Sobukwe gestured to the only chair and sat on the edge of the bed. Conversation was desultory at first. I knew he was sizing me up and didn’t blame him. I said that many Methodists would be excited to know that one of our ministers had got to see him. We swopped names of mutual acquaintances and stories of Healdtown, the Methodist college both he and Nelson Mandela had attended. It was the year that Reverend Seth Mokitimi was about to be elected the first black President of MCSA, and he spoke admiringly of Mokitimi’s influence as a chaplain and housemaster at Healdtown.

Our conversation soon warmed, and after that, each time I came to the island we were able to have about thirty minutes together. He had a consistent aura of calm about him, sucking contentedly on his pipe while we talked. He chose his words carefully, spoke quietly and had a gentle sense of humour. Our discussions were perforce circumscribed, always in the presence of the guard, who stood near the door, pretending to be uninterested. Even so, it was possible to engage something of the depth and breadth of his thinking. His Christian faith was informed by wide reading and it was quite clear that he saw his political activism as an extension of his spirituality. He was excited by Alan Walker’s 1963 preaching campaign in our country, and the furore around Walker’s challenge to the apartheid state. This was the kind of witness he expected of his own church leaders, only to be frequently disappointed. He was impressed when I told him I was hoping to go and work under Walker for a year. I was later permitted to bring him a few theological books, and included all of Walker’s writings. Both of us being pipe-smokers, I could also bring his favourite tobacco and we used to chuckle that both this Methodist minister and lay preacher had a taste for Three Nuns blend.

Robert Sobukwe impacted me very powerfully. For all my contact with black South Africans, here, for the first time, I was engaging with somebody risking all for the liberation of his people. The calibre of this man, the cruel waste of his gifts, and the silence of most South African Christians around his incarceration, touched me to anger. On his part, he always expressed genuine appreciation of our times together, but even though I was one of the only people, apart from his captors, ever permitted to see him, I sensed that he would never put too much trust in these visits. Why should he place faith in this white man, any more than any other? I always came away angered and ashamed. Once, when leaving him, I expressed my shame that I could depart the island so freely, leaving him a prisoner. His response was quick. Gesturing toward Cape Town, with its Houses of Parliament occupied by his tormentors, he said, “I’m not the prisoner, Peter – they are.”

Every visit made it more evident to me why the apartheid government feared Robert Sobukwe so much, but the years of virtual solitary confinement later began to break even this man. Benjamin Pogrund, biographer and close friend of Sobukwe, tells that by 1969 he was near a breakdown. “The government took fright and hastily sent him off the island, to banishment in Kimberley, which included house arrest and bannings.” Sobukwe qualified as an attorney and practised law in Kimberley, enjoying the admiration of the local people there. Activist Joe Seremane spoke with wonder about the “Prof’s” magnanimity, telling of how, when passing a police van with a flat wheel, Sobukwe stopped to help the white cops fit a spare.47 In October 1975, twelve years after our first meeting on the island, I had a last visit with him in his Kimberley home. A security police car was parked outside as usual, indicating that he was still being watched. With John Rees, then General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches, who had helped support Sobukwe’s family for a number of years, I had an hour with him. The flame still burned within him, perhaps with an even brighter incandescence. We prayed together and parted. Two years later Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in 1978 at the age of 54.

Spiritually, 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.”