Rehana Rossouw
Personal History
The banging on the door came at 4.30am, as usual. As armed policemen surrounded the house, an officious security policeman marched in waving a detention order in terms of emergency legislation.
It was July 8 1988 and security policemen were hunting down organisers of a campaign to celebrate Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday.
There had been a planning meeting the night before, where ideas were discussed, including manufacturing black, green and gold balloons, organising a birthday-card campaign and a music concert.
Someone decided these ideas were a threat to national security, and orders were signed allowing for the detention for two weeks of the people working on this event.
I was not even aware that I was on a committee organising Mandela’s birthday party. I had been nominated in my absence to serve on a media committee and had not yet had the opportunity to decline or agree. But an industrious informer had recorded the entire meeting and passed the information to his superiors.
All the detainees were taken to Bellville police station, processed and then moved to prisons. Black men were taken to Victor Verster Prison and black women and the one white man (Mail & Guardian cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro) were taken to Pollsmoor Prison. Shapiro had also not been at the meeting the night before. Another Jonathan had been there.
Most of the women had been held at Pollsmoor before. When we arrived, one of the warders greeted us by name, with an ironic, “Welcome back. I had been hoping I wouldn’t see you girls again.”
During the 1980s there were thousands of reports of detainees tortured and ill-treated in detention. This was not our experience at the hands of Pollsmoor warders.
It had been a year – almost to the day – that I had last been there and thousands must have passed through those gates, but one warder, in particular, remembered the name of my son, then two years old, and asked why I had not brought him with me this time.
Pollsmoor was not a comfortable place, particularly in winter, even for nine detainees in a cell built to hold 20.
The youngest woman in our group woke up screaming shortly after lights-out on the first night. A couple of mice had run over her face soon after the cell went quiet, and she spent the rest of the night sitting upright, awake and alert.
But we made the most of our time. The day was structured with exercise classes in the morning, followed by prayers, then lunch at 11am, an hour’s exercise in the concrete courtyard, supper at 2pm. We played games during the afternoon with battered equipment left in our cell – Monopoly, drafts, even quoits, for some reason – until lock-up for the night at 4pm.
Like most women in prisons around the world, our conversations were, in order of importance and amount of time allocated: our children, what food we were going to eat the day we were released, and men.
Prison food was terrible. The kitchens must have been at least 1km away because it was always cold by the time it reached our cell at the bottom of a long corridor intersected by at least 10 locked gates. It was primarily pap with a smattering of gravy on top as tasteless as the starch below.
So when July 16 arrived and one of the warders approached us with a remarkable offer, it took hours of discussion to arrive at consensus.
The warders had decided that, in honour of Mandela’s 70th birthday two days later, they would arrange a birthday party for us. They offered to bring in food – any kind we wanted – for a special celebration on July 18.
What food did we want? What food did we miss? Which shops would they travel to? Could we send them all the way to town to get a cake from Zerbans? How much money did we have? (Very little, unfortunately.)
Eventually we settled for Kentucky Fried Chicken, a fresh cream cake, cool drinks, crisps and as much chocolate as could be bought with the change.
The food arrived on the afternoon of July 18. The chicken was still hot, the cake was creamy and dripping with chocolate. Like good comrades, although there wasn’t much, we invited the two warders involved in the birthday celebrations to join us. And we asked them why they had done this for us.
The answer was simple. They believed the campaign we were organising was so innocuous it did not deserve the harsh response from the authorities. They resented having to lock us in with people who had been convicted of serious crimes.
Mandela had been moved to Pollsmoor in 1982 and they had heard from their male colleagues what a gentleman and a stately person he was.
The warders claimed Mandela was being held in the hospital at the women’s section. This was approximately 20m away from our cell. They said if we sang “Happy Birthday” loud enough, he would hear us.
So we all stood up around the cake – two warders included – and sang at the tops of our voices.
Madiba did not spend his 70th birthday in the women’s section. He couldn’t have heard us. But we felt we had done justice to the occasion. It had brought together people regarded – in those days – as enemies.
When Mandela was released and newspaper articles were published about his relationship with Warrant Officer James Gregory, we were not surprised. He had worked his Mandela magic on warders in the women’s section at Pollsmoor who had never even met him.
We were released on July 22 and when we found out what activities had been organised by a replacement Mandela Birthday Campaign Committee, we smugly believed our celebration had been the best of all.