MANDELA: An Audio History
— ROBBEN ISLAND (1964-1976)

NPR HOST: In June 1964, Nelson Mandela began serving a life sentence at South Africa's Robben Island Prison. With him were colleagues from the banned African National Congress.The rest of the ANC membership was underground or in exile.

The anti-apartheid movement was leaderless....until South Africa's children rose up to galvanize the struggle once again.

Here is Part 3 of Mandela: An Audio History, produced by Joe Richman and Sue Johnson



(SOUND OF WATER LAPPING)

NEWSREEL: This is the site of South Africa's top security jail, Robben Island, a narrow pencil of land off Cape Town seven miles out in the South Atlantic. These watchtowers stand guard over men whom millions of black South Africans regard as their government in exile.

(BIRD SOUNDS)

EDDIE DANIELS: We landed at Robben Island with these big iron gates. And every gate bangs behind me and bangs behind me. Then the warder opened the doors of one of the cells – a wooden door – then opened the grill and just shoved me in. There was my bucket and a couple of blankets. That was my first night.

(SOUNDS OF MEN WORKING IN QUARRY)

AHMED KATHRADA: We worked at the lime quarry. We had never done pick and shovel work before. So every day we had bleeding hands and blisters. Very very hot. When we started working there, we were told we would work for six months. We in fact worked there for about 13 years.

SONNY VENKATRATHNAM: The lime quarry. Most of the time you are leaning on your shovel or your pick axe. But all of the time you are in a group of people discussing things.

NEVILLE ALEXANDER: Every single man on the island was a book. You could learn from each and every one of them.

(QUARRY SOUNDS FADE)

EDDIE DANIELS: Our universe was 30 people. We were completely isolated.

SONNY VENKATRATHNAM: They put us in what was known as "the terrorist camp." They called us "the terries." Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu – people they identified as leaders.

NELSON MANDELA: It was to a very large extent a mistake for the regime to bring us together. In spite of the fact that we were in prison, we were able to stand away from ourselves and to discover the weakness and the mistakes we made in the course of our struggle.

SONNY VENKATRATHNAM: People say that life in prison is very tedious. But nobody wandered around, bored, doing nothing. You know, if I wanted to see you, talk to you, I needed to make an appointment with you. Can you believe that? In prison, I have to make an appointment to see somebody when I am locked up with you for 24 hours a day? And people were pretty strict about it. I couldn’t go up to somebody and say, "Okay, can we have a chat about this?" "No, I can’t. I am booked.” But I ended up being like that. Because if you didn’t have appointments, your life would have been unstructured and meaningless.

(SINGING)

NELSON MANDELA: My family lived under very difficult conditions without a head of the family who could support them, give them the love and the security which they deserved.

(BIRD SOUNDS)

ZINDZI MANDELA-Hlongwane: My name is Zindzi Mandela. When my father went to prison, I was 18 months old. So I had no memories of him whatsoever. So I think I was about thirteen, fourteen when I saw him for the first time.

WARDER: The following rules are applicable to all visitors to Robben Island: no parcels or articles…

(WARDER FADES)

ZINDZI MANDELA-Hlongwane: I thought he would hold me, you know, lift me in the air, maybe spin me around. But obviously that didn’t happen.

(SOUNDS OF PRISON VISIT)

ZINDZI MANDELA-Hlongwane: The reality was that I had to see him behind this glass partition and we spoke through a telephone. There were warders on either side of us. They kept interrupting the conversation saying, “You cannot speak about that. Whose name is that? You cannot talk about that person.” For many years I never saw my father standing because you would walk in there and find him sitting already. So I had no idea even how tall he was. For him it couldn't have been easy.

(SINGING)

MAC MAHARAJ: When I think of the nature of the apartheid system, they had no option but to bury us alive. No newspaper was allowed to publish a photograph of a prisoner. They hoped, that way, the public would simply forget us.

(BAND MUSIC)

NEWSREEL: Cape Town glowed with sunny weather today for one of its most colorful ceremonies, the opening of Parliament. It was opened at noon by the President, Mr. Fouche.

FOUCHE SPEECH: The republic has enjoyed a year of peace and tranquility.

SONNY VENKATRATHNAM: All political movements were banned. Everything was quiet, ostensibly. In terms of the struggle, we were in the doldrums.

DR NTHATO MOTLANA: Protest, agitation completely died out and yet, under the surface, it continued to bubble.

BONGI MKHABELA: They had locked up Mandela in jail. But they hadn’t looked around to see where were the children. What are they doing?

DR NTHATO MOTLANA: The student movement, and the leadership of people like Steve Biko – there rose a group imbued with the spirit of black consciousness.

STEVE BIKO SPEECH: Black people need to defeat the one element in politics, which is working against them; this was a psychological feeling of inferiority.

STRINI MOODLEY: The reaction of the older generation to us was, “Are you guys mad? Those guys are gonna come blow you away, kill you.” And we said, “No, the first thing is you stand up, speak your mind as any normal human being has the right to do.”

DR NTHATO MOTLANA: You could feel that something had to give. And it happened on June 16th.

(MUSIC)

NEWSREEL: Teach yourself Afrikaans…Good evening, this is AJ Erasmus. Let us start off by getting to know all the Afrikaans sounds – “lach, dach, nach.”

DR NTHATO MOTLANA: Afrikaans is a hybridization, if you like, of Dutch. It was a language used by the rulers and the black children hated Afrikaans with a passion.

NEWSREEL: It is 1975, and Afrikaans is exactly 100 years old. To pay homage to the Afrikaans language, pupils of the school present a play in Afrikaans.

BONGI MKHABELA: Every school day began with an assembly of all the kids. One day there was an announcement:

ANNOUNCEMENT: I am going to speak to you about Bantu education, the education of a million Bantu children…

BONGI MKHABELA: As of today, every subject would be taught in Afrikaans. The teacher walks in, History becomes Haskeedinis. And we were like, “What are you talking about?” He says, “I don’t know either.” And that didn’t work – entire classes failed. When they did that, they actually mobilized the whole school generation.

NEWSREEL: At 8:15 in the morning, and precisely according to plan, students simultaneously marched out of five schools in Soweto, intending to protest the Afrikaans issue in a mass meeting at the Orlando Football Stadium.

BONGI MKHABELA: We had hundreds, probably thousands of school kids. And we thought we knew everything there was to know about managing protests. But the first thing we worried about was that everyone must be accounted for at all times. We then had chains of five kids, and make sure that you are holding somebody’s hand at all times. If you are not holding somebody’s hand, get worried because where is your partner?

DR NTHATO MOTLANA: It became a torrent, a sea of young black faces. And at that point the police tried to stop the march from going on to Orlando Stadium.

BONGI MKHABELA: I’ve never seen that many police. You didn’t only have the police at that time, you had the Defense Force. So you actually had the army. I mean, this is a group of kids. Kids with shining black shoes and little white socks and teeny little tunics. And they are singing freedom songs, holding one another. We actually looked cute! It’s unbelievable to think that anyone could have stood firm on their feet and actually shot into that crowd.

(GUN SHOTS, BREAKING GLASS, CROWDS)

BONGI MKHABELA: Police simply started shooting. You had hundreds of school kids running helter skelter, running all over the place. We had planned for water pipes, we had planned for maybe rubber bullets. We had not planned or thought that it's possible people would actually be killed on that day.

NEWSREEL: Within 36 hours of the start of a march by 10,000 school children in protest to Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, 29 people were dead and 250 injured.

DR NTHATO MOTLANA: The mayhem went all over Soweto. The following day, it went all over the country. And really South Africa was on fire.

NEWSREEL: Here in Durban, three police were needed to break up a two thousand strong demonstration at Claremont native township.

STUDENT DEMONSTRATOR (ARCHIVAL): It was like a country at war. And I’ll never forget listening to my radio as the demonstrations were spreading like a prairie fire. It occurred to me that the regime we thought was powerful, seemed to be terribly disorganized. The panic!

(GUN SHOTS)

NEWSREEL: Since June the 16th, when South African troops and police opened fire on a peaceful school children’s demonstration, the white government has presided over the largest massacre of its black population since South Africa came into existence…

THANDI MODISE: When you see your friends being shot at for just walking in the street, it does something to you. Therefore, you would look around – what are the alternatives? Do I become like my mother, forever under the yoke of apartheid? The alternative was for me to not be like my mom, great as she was, but to go and fight.

(SINGING "NELSON MANDELA")

NELSON MANDELA: Information kept on coming through the prison walls about what was going on. The significance of the 1976 uprising was that the government actually produced one of the most rebellious generations of African youth. They were very militant, they were very brave. And there is nothing as encouraging to a political prisoner than to know that the ideas for which you are suffering will never die.

STRINI MOODLEY: 1976 was the turning point. Black people had made up their mind – we are not taking this any more. South Africa was never the same again.

(SINGING)

Produced by Joe Richman/Radio Diaries and Sue Johnson
copyright Radio Diaries, 2004
All Things Considered (NPR) Broadcast 4/28/2004

You can find biographical information about the people in this story here.