It is more than 30 years — almost half his life — since Hugh Lewin left New Section, Pretoria Local prison, after serving a seven-year sentence for political activities. Three decades in which he has been able, in the words of his poignant poem, Touch, “to learn again/how life feels”.
So why, now, would he want to revisit that period by republishing Bandiet, his keenly observed account of those seven years, with its painful, graphic, frequently ironic, sometimes angry, insights into life behind bars?
“I don’t think I’m obsessed with it,” he says. “I am aware of the impact it had on my life. It was a rewarding experience in some ways because I was so young, though it’s not something I would recommend.”
The writing of Bandiet was inspired by fellow prisoner Ivan Schermbrucker’s injunction: “You go tell it!” and nourished by “the need to tell people what conditions were like”. Bandiet Out of Jail (as the book is now titled) comes from a different need — to remind a society with a notoriously short memory that “there was a group of whites who made that commitment”; that “involvement in the 1960s was very different from what happened after 1976 — that’s why it was important to resuscitate this”. The revised edition also gave him the opportunity to include contemporary essays and some pieces — both prose and poetry — that could not have been published while there were still political prisoners in Pretoria Local.
“The other thing that’s important is the question of prison and prison reform.” Many of those imprisoned are criminalised by the experience.
In prison, says Lewin, “the only way to survive is to beat the system and become a crook. Whether you behave yourself or whether you don’t you get thumped. That is something we haven’t recovered from or yet seen the full effects of. It was only in prison that I became really politicised and saw how the frustration and anger built up because of the totally arbitrary way we were treated. We now have to ask why the same things apply.”
Bandiet first appeared in South Africa soon after it was published in the United Kingdom in 1974 when Lewin was in exile and his words were officially banned. Contraband copies did the rounds of the political left.
Along with the skill with which it was written and the unforgettable portrait it painted of the life of prisoners, both political and criminal, the most remarkable thing about it in those harshly bitter times was its lack of bitterness and self-pity. “It was very important to write as descriptively and factually as possible,” says Lewin, who still refuses to name in print the “friends” who turned state witness and sent so many to prison (and, in one case, the gallows).
Far from being the story of one man’s experience, Bandiet reflected an awareness of the effect of the inhuman, arbitrary prison experience not only on the group of politicals, but on all who were forced to participate in it from warders to petty thieves.
So it is not surprising to hear Lewin say: “It’s not so much my story as that of a number of people. It is very important to tell their story. For all of us it was a totally complete experience, extraordinary and defining.
We were a really peculiar group and there were all sorts of tensions — huge personal differences. It was interesting to see, when you throw a group of disparate, egotistical and self-centred people together, how they interact.”
Lewin returned to South Africa in 1992 and, with the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), became a member of its human rights violations committee. It was not an easy experience. “I don’t think anyone has recovered from the TRC. Everyone was just smashed at the end so the real work on it is probably going to be done by outside scholars or another generation of journalists.”
Will he write about it? Perhaps. But probably in fictional form. “I’m not sure it’s possible to handle it as non-fiction.”
These days Lewin is “thoroughly enjoying myself as a trainer in journalism. His work involves taking “a serious look at news values, social actors and how you report a process rather than an actual event”.
News was, of course, always important to Lewin the journalist. But it took seven years in which perhaps the most inhumane part of the punishment was the deliberate and total deprivation of access to any news, however trivial, to make him realise just how important it was.
“Absence of news began to define for me the importance of news. That’s how we exist — by being aware of events and of thought.”