When the Olympic Games start in Athens this month, former Robben Island prisoners will remember their own Summer Games.
The torch that started the Robben Island Olympics was a Molotov cocktail made by the prisoners out of a glass lampshade filled with earth and combustible oil.
At the December opening of the ”Olympics”, a selected athlete would run on to the field, set up the flaming torch and, amid wild cheers from participants and spectators, declare the games open.
There was a small measure of triumph for the prisoners because the real Olympics were a symbol of their struggle against apartheid. South Africa was banned from the world’s greatest sporting spectacle from 1960 until 1992, so while the inmates enjoyed their games, the apartheid government couldn’t send a team to the real thing.
According to documents in the archives of the Robben Island Museum, preparations for the islanders’ Summer Games began in August each year. Teams were selected, training programmes devised, plans discussed and tyres painted with paint smuggled from the bougroep to demarcate and decorate the ”stadium”.
”We did everything they do in the Olympics to the extent that we could on Robben Island,” said Tokyo Sexwale, the leader of the Recreation Committee set up to represent the island prisoners.
”The rugby and soccer matches were held earlier in the year but the points gained all counted towards the tally in the December Summer Games.”
The games culminated in a festive awards ceremony, at which results were announced and prizes handed out. Once the formal prizegiving was over, there was a party which was the premier event of the Robben Island social calendar. This was always held on New Year’s Day. ”January 1st, when we celebrated the opening up of the year,” said Paul Langa. ”Because all the Boers gave you at Christmas time was additional sugar and coffee, nothing else.”
Langa is at present the interim director of the Robben Island Museum, whose collection boasts a large number of the former prisoners’ depositions and memoirs, as well as many artefacts.
To make up for the less-than-merry Christmases endured by the long-term political prisoners, their annual New Year braai boasted its own team of party planners to negotiate the purchase of special food. ”Food from the outside, because that was then allowed,” said Langa, who was then chairperson of the stores committee. ”So, we decorated the hall and had meat, chicken and boerewors. We sat at tables and even invited the warders, the head of the prison and the commissioners who were there at the time.”
The Summer Games were so-called, said Langa, because a summer constituted the lifetime of the event which featured tennis, volleyball, boxing, track events and indoor games, table tennis, snooker, badminton and board games like chess, draughts, Monopoly, dominoes and snakes and ladders. On the track were egg-and-spoon races, a bunny race, sack race, a ”needle-and-cotton” race as well as the more usual 100m, 200m, 400m and a unique event, the ”23” — 23 laps of the course.
In the early 1960s when the political prisoners were first incarcerated on Robben Island, no communication was permitted between inmates in the different sections of the prison. Sexwale said of the A Section, known as the hardegat [stubborn] section, ”I think they (the authorities) used to say: ‘this one has leadership skills, if we put him amongst people he will be a problem; isolate him.’ They did that with Nelson Mandela. They wanted to hang him and he ends up not just the best leader for this country, for the continent or even all the world, but he’s now described as the greatest leader of the 20th century. This was the man they called hardegat!”
Sexwale admitted that while the division of the prison into small sections prevented organised resistance, it made for greater tensions that could not find an outlet through the normal channels of social or sporting interaction. There were not enough prisoners in the individual sections to allow for the formation of two soccer or two rugby teams apiece. Intersectional sports were eventually permitted, but only after a protracted 10-year battle.
Sexwale said, ”This did not come easy, it came after many years of not being allowed to have a single thing, where people who made chess pieces out of stones were punished if the stones were discovered. But we really had been able to achieve a lot for the prisoners, at the cost of many struggles, disappointments, insults, beatings, all the ugly and evil things that were done to others before us.”
John Nkosi said: ”There was an easing in the Seventies because some prisoners had been released by then and stories about the conditions on the island reached the press. This led to visits from the Red Cross and from some of the judges, after which we were allowed to set up sports and recreation committees.”
The new dispensation meant the prisoners could at last get access to soccer jerseys, sports equipment and board games with help and generous donations from church groups and embassies. The late Steve Tshwete said in his deposition: ”Initially, the clubs were arranged along political lines, an ANC club, a PAC club, etc, but this did nothing to ease tensions when the PAC, say, beat the ANC, or vice versa!” When the authorities finally agreed to allow the sports between the various sections, Tshwete was elected president of the Island Rugby Board and chairperson of the Robben Island Amateur Athletics Association. ”We had every structure in place, disciplinary committees, selection panels, a referees’ association and a constitution for every club,” said the man who was to become minister of sport in the first post-apartheid Cabinet.
The constitutions were written ones, drawn up by the lawyers among the prisoners, and may be seen in the Mayibuye Archives of the Robben Island Museum today.
”Sport has the capacity to bring people together, and when harnessed and organised in a disciplined way, it is a builder, a reconciler,” Tshwete said. ”It reduced tensions even between the prisoners and the warders, some of whom identified themselves with the clubs, particularly the rugby clubs. Tensions were also eased in that people were involved in looking forward to matches at the weekends, preparing themselves, working out mentally and physically for the recreation, doing something constructive instead of thinking only of home.”
As new inmates were brought to the prison, every man would be assigned to a house or club, each of which had its own convenor. Sport on Robben Island was designed to be as inclusive as possible, so everyone had a role to play, according to his particular talents. They ranged from stars of the rugby, soccer and athletics teams, to veterans, judges of events, first-aiders, members of organising committees, decorators, caterers and calligraphists who embellished the merit certificates given as prizes.
Jeff Radebe recalled a lighter story: ”There was a chap, a Comrade Liter, who was in the Black Consciousness Movement. He was arrested in about 1976, I think. Liter was physically fit, every inch of his body was muscle. He used to exercise daily, run almost the whole day … you wouldn’t beat him in running. Then comes the Olympics in December. We had this 17-round spectacular, the highlight of the Summer Games, so this Liter wanted to enter the competition. When you look at the way he used to prepare from January to December, no one could touch him. But on that day, the great Olympic day, he ran one round and collapsed!”
An important aspect of sport on Robben Island was the simple pleasure of spectating. ”There was nothing that pleased the prisoners more than to go and watch a game of rugby or soccer, or even tennis,” said Sexwale. ”I learnt to play tennis by watching, engaging my first strokes, then playing and losing all the time. I think I did win against one or two people but all the games I really wanted to win, I lost! Still, sport was at the centre of survival outside of debates, in which we exercised our minds.”