Ex-prisoner 885/63 revisits Robben Island as his book on the subject is reissued
Henk Rossouw
When Indres Naidoo returned from exile, his nephew handed him a tattered photocopy of his memoir, banned in 1982. “It was still full of curry marks,” chuckled Naidoo as we drove down to the harbour to catch the early ferry to Robben Island.
In the Eighties, a copy of Island in Chains could get you five years’ accommodation, courtesy of the prisons department. Still, the book was smuggled into the country in the hundreds, photocopied, and passed from hand to hand. Eighteen years later Penguin has finally released the first South African edition. Unbanned, we can read from it aloud: “I learned who I was going to be on the island – number 885/63.”
Amidst the gloss of the Waterfront, wading through dollared tourists to reach our boat, the Makana, that fact was too thick for me to swallow. As 885/63, Indres Naidoo lived 20 years on Robben Island.
We sat down on the plush seats of the ferry. Next to me, in a sports jacket, his beard greying, was someone who had survived the accumulated fury of verbs like “shot”, “tortured”, “beaten”, “deprived”. How? I wanted to understand that.
If I opened Island in Chains on any page, I would have found his answer – in one word.
We.
“We refused to call them baas,” said Indres, as the ferry shuddered off from the dock. “We refused to tausa” (clap in the air, spin around, shout ‘My king!’, and bend over so the warder can inspect). “They beat us with canes, batons, pipes, anything they could lay their hands on, and still we refused. When they would not listen to us, we refused to eat.”
Through the perspex windows, the coast of Table Bay drifted further away. Naidoo’s first glimpse of the open sea was through a porthole in the hold of the Disa, bound for the island, his arms and legs in chains.
When his ama (mother) came to visit him she was put in the hold, like the other “coolies”. That was not her first visit to prison, though, nor her last – she was jailed twice herself. By 1990 each of her five children had also seen the inside of a cell for their efforts against apartheid.
Born into the Naidoo family, Indres grew up with the demand for human rights a part of him, like a tongue. His grandfather used his body as a shield to protect Mahatma Gandhi in Johannesburg from the blows of the police, and was sent to prison 14 times. His grandmother gave birth in prison. His father studied under Gandhi in India, and was jailed six times on his return.
For more than a hundred years, the solidarity of the Naidoos, with their strong sense of “we”, gave them the agency to protest, fight, resist. Even at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in The Fort, they submitted their testimony together, as a family.
The ferry docked in Murray’s Harbour, Robben Island. When Naidoo arrived in 1963 the maximum security prison was only a quarter built. With a makeshift 14- pound hammer he chipped stones that were used in the walls of his own prison.
We disembarked. As our guide ushered us into a van, I glanced across the vista of stunted bushes, and windswept buildings. A desolate place, still.
Along the dirt track, on the rim of the island was the stone quarry. Naidoo got out and stood at the edge. Here the prisoners built a dyke to push back the sea and reach the granite underneath. Slowly, the sea has seeped back. Where Meintjies, a warder, once burst his eardrum with a blow to his head there was only a pool of water.
Stories of warders, bent on breaking down their prisoners, flowed from Naidoo’s lips. Cofimvaba, head warder Delport, Spy Thirteen, the infamous Kleynhans brothers, the “refined brute” Major Kellerman. The only woman’s name in the prison was Mary, nickname for the whipping post where Naidoo received his lashes.
Back in the car, we circled the island to reach the prison complex. The first boat of tourists had arrived, paying R100 each. The crowd, in their sturdy shorts and souvenir T-shirts, shuffled after the tour guide, through the blank corridors. On craning necks and pointing arms hung Pentax, Sony, Rolex – I even saw a compass.
We hid away from the crowd in the acquisitions room. On a bubble-wrapped table, next to a shackle, a spade, a hammer, was a fat brown register: “1963- 1965”. Inside was name after name, like goods in the state factory. Naidoo flipped through the pages, running his finger down the columns, looking for numbers he remembered, of friends.
I picked up the book, feeling its weight. Listed under “N” I found Indres Naidoo, number 885/63. He was recruited into Umkhonto weSizwe in 1961, when the Sharpeville massacre had made it clear that the defiance campaign was not enough. One of the so-called “dynamite coolies”, Naidoo was arrested in 1963 for attempted sabotage of a signal box. His trial was short, methodical, meant to be a warning to the others.
Yet Naidoo did not see his sentence as lost years. “Are you bitter?” is the standard question of countless journalists, and one they asked him first on his release. His answer – too honest to be a clich – is shared with many. “It was my contribution.”
For stints lasting weeks Naidoo contributed time in the isolation cells in “C” section. Our guide led us in. From the corridor, gates opened out into boxlike cells. The concrete floor and smooth walls were unmarked, the cells now empty.
When Naidoo was locked inside, alone, he had to find a way to talk to the others. He gestured at the single toilet at the end of the corridor. Having a conversation meant writing a message on a sheet of rationed toilet paper – precious when there are only two a day – disguising it with shit, and hiding it under the pan.
For political prisoners – numbered, like cattle – talking with each other was essential to shield their sense of identity from the state. Overworked and starved, finding strength to continue was not easy. Without conversation there could have been no solace in their sense of “we”. As important was contact with the outside, in smuggled newspapers, hidden radios, and sweetest of all, the rare visit allowed.
The state did not recognise this need simply to talk. In his book, Naidoo tells of this in his story of Laloo Chiba, during the trial: “The warders had insisted that he speak only English or Afrikaans and his wife knew only Gujarati and so the two of them had … to stare at each other for the whole visiting period … saying nothing.”
When Naidoo was released he was placed under house arrest for five years. His brother Murthie was listed under the anti-communist Act and it was illegal for them to talk. They lived in the same house.
After years of boots on his tongue, Naidoo went into exile in Mozambique. Free to talk, Naidoo told stories of prison life in an attempt to make sense of his experience – like the story of the prisoner who made a saxophone out of seaweed, or making sense of finding Dennis Brutus on the floor of the zinc hospital, barely able to speak.
In Maputo, Albie Sachs eventually persuaded Naidoo to sit down with him, at night, over weekends, so he could record his stories. Even written down, they were all essentially oral. For Naidoo, telling his stories, out aloud, “makes one feel easier”. Over 11 weeks Island in Chains was read over Radio Maputo, reaching South Africa, Zambia, Swaziland, with the jazz piano of Abdullah Ibrahim in the background.
We ate a meal together in the mess. We. It took a journey to Robben Island with ex-prisoner 885/63 for me to finally understand that pronoun. Before the ferry departed, we tried to enter the communal cell in “F” section which Naidoo shared with the others. It was locked, so I peered in through the bars. It was there, inside, in a prison within a prison that the dream of human rights was long fostered.
We live in the same neighbourhood now. Naidoo. Rossouw. “A good Afrikaans name,” smiled Naidoo, as we drove away from the dock. From my flat, I can stroll up the hill for a cup of coffee and a chat, crossing 348 years of divorce, without looking back.