New books on the subject have to live up to the standard set by works such as Herman Charles Bosman’s Cold Stone Jug, Ruth First’s 117 Days, The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, Hugh Lewin’s Bandiet, Breyten Breytenbach’s True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist and Jeremy Cronin’s poetry collection Inside.
Apart from the Bosman, all those books are accounts of imprisonment during the anti-apartheid struggle, and they were published while that struggle was still underway. More recent books dealing with similar experiences inevitably have a double focus, a split between past and present (a present in which the victory of that struggle is implicit). In the best of them, that double perspective allows for interesting reflection on the past experience.
That split is made explicit in Else Schreiner’s Time Stretching Fear (Robben Island Museum), which interleaves present-day commentary with diary entries and letters dating back to the ”Yengeni trial” of 1989. This material provides an immediacy that recreates the fear and determination of the time, the emotional rollercoaster on which detainees (who were tortured and subjected to various humiliations) and their families – Schreiner’s daughter Jenny was one of those on trial – were compelled to ride. The larger perspective provided by the retrospective vision, into which the letters and diary entries are slotted, is well written.
The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for Fatima Meer’s Prison Diary: One Hundred and Thirteen Days, 1976 (Kwela), which is staggeringly dull. It is a lesson in how much the writing itself counts, whatever the importance of the content. For all the interest that historians may find in this account, it is simpy beyond the patience of an ordinary reader. Meer has managed to render her dreadful experience entirely banal.
Raymond Suttner’s memoir Inside Apartheid’s Prison: Notes and Letters of Struggle (University of Natal Press/Ocean) fares much better. Most is a reconstruction of the events from Suttner’s involvement in the underground to his arrest, trial, detention, torture, imprisonment and finally house arrest. Letters from the time show that Suttner’s eloquence is not just something created in the recollection of relative tranquility.
Fallen Walls: Voices from the Cells that Held Mandela and Havel, edited by Jan K Coetzee, Lynda Gilfillan and Otakar Huler (Robben Island Museum) provides a different kind of dual perspective to that I mentioned earlier: it contrasts South African and Czech experiences. Six former prisoners recount their experiences, with contextual and autobiographical background. The similarities outweigh the differences: the often casual cruelty of the guards and warders, the emotional strain suffered by the prisoners above and beyond the physical suffering. ”Staying sane” is one theme; the discussion of the ”aftermath” of such experiences is enlightening. The other books reviewed here would have benefited from more detailed accounts of the aftermath: Schreiner’s ends with a note on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigation into the torture suffered by the Yengeni trialists, but we need more material that establishes a continuity between those past experiences and their echo in the lives that have been lived beyond it.
These experiences should remain alive in the collective memory, even as we move on as a society. The truth commission helped see to that, to place the evil done by politicians, warders and torturers in a larger historical perspective, to judge those actions, to give these stories a new ending. The despicable acts of the perpetrators are only partially offset by the victories of the sufferers, who overcame that suffering and whose struggle triumphed. To undermine that process, as the state has recently done by granting amnesty to people who had been denied it by the commission, is to hurt such detainees again.