The sound of poetry rocked gently against the walls of Pretoria Central Prison last weekend. Hugh Lewin, a political inmate of Central in the 60s, reports on a day with LKJ and eight South African poets
Ask any prison graduate: there’s one fear greater than the fear of going to prison. It’s the fear of going inside again.
Especially if it’s back to the Big House, Number One, Pretoria Central, where the gallows were (before they built Beverley Hills round the back); where Mini, Mkaba and Khanyinga, John Harris, Solomon Mahlangu and the others were executed. They went in through that castle- like front gate and left through Pos Nommer 5, feet- first in coffins.
We went in that front door in March 1966, a motley group of white politicals, and fortunately came out the same way eight months later, to continue our sentences just down the road at Local Prison (the one on Potgieter Street, that’s been rebuilt to look like a warehouse).
I’ve been obsessed by Central ever since. It’s the epitome of apartheid: an encapsulated society without moral core, where order is maintained only by corruption and force, with the gallows as the final symbol of state authority.
I’ve always been terrified of returning to Central. But I said I would go last Saturday for Arts Alive’s “Poetry in Prison”. What better way to exorcise the old and usher in the new?
Yet what if it all went wrong? What if we went in and somebody suddenly threw away the key? I was almost relieved when, midweek, I heard from organiser Elaine Rumboll that the event was off, blocked by fearful bureaucrats. Then we were on again, in a truly new South African way: on the orders of one-time bandiet Carl Niehaus, now parliamentary boss of his former jailers.
Inevitably, there was a twist. We would meet them, Rumboll reported, at the tennis courts. Not in the central Saal? I asked. “She said by the tennis courts,” said Rumboll. This is the same Central and the commandant is now a She. What else, I wondered.
We never got inside. We met by the tennis courts, yes. No Central bandiet ever went near those courts, ever saw them, well beyond the walls, in the domain of prison officials. We arrived at the front door and turned right, down the stairs and away from the walls, to find a neat cluster of chairs under the jacarandas. Like St James’ Park on a summer’s day, waiting for the band to play.
And a sprinkling of discreet boere, admirably relaxed as the 40-odd bandiete arrive from inside. Their shirts and longs are now puke green (ours were a decent khaki) and the bandiete are all black.
“We’d better start,” said Rumboll (she seemed to be the one most in charge), so we all sat down and began with a little ceremony where the MC (one of the men in green, called Jethro) called out the name of each visitor and Madam Commandant (wearing a weekend skirt and steely smile) presented us with hand-made keyrings, each embossed with our initial.
Then we began, a poem or praise song each. All I remember now is standing awkwardly facing the lines of pea-green bandiete, and behind them the boere, with arms folded, and behind them the unmoving outside walls of Central, which I had never really seen before. It was wholly unreal, in the filtered sunshine beneath the jacarandas: struggle verse and celebration song, as if sounding the trumpets outside Jericho.
Our contributions were capped by two recitations from Linton Kwesi Johnson.
I doubt they knew of him, yet the rhythm was right and they clapped as “Brixtan Prison” and the “Great Insohreckshan” echoed across the tennis courts.
The bandiete performed the results of their workshops with Rumboll. “This is a joyous moment,” said one bandiet, “we never believed this would happen.”
“This is a first time for all prisoners, like the first day of spring.”
There was much about spring, and the senses — “the taste of sweet fresh morning air” — and a crunch line: “You out there are aliens, but you have given us light and fantasy.”
Then one bandiet, staring firmly at the officials who were about to lock him up again, announced that he had no poem to read but, he said, “we are sitting here with sorrow in our hearts” because Standard 8 and Standard 10 studies have just been “closed down”. The reason given, he said, was that there were “no books”. The boere muttered. The bandiete turned to “Mr Carl Niehaus”, who said he would look into the matter.
Finally, still in St James’ Park, we moved to the tennis pavilion for a spread of soft drinks and neatly cut sandwiches. Then everyone shook hands and waved goodbye. The men in green went back inside and we, thanks be, stayed out.