“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones – and South Africa treated its imprisoned African citizens like animals.”
The words of Nelson Mandela greet visitors to Number Four prison at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, one of the most emotionally searing relics of racial apartheid. I found myself there alone one morning, walking among the ghosts of former inmates who left their trace in words.
The power of Number Four lies in the stark testimonies of some of the thousands of non-white men, including many political prisoners, who were incarcerated and brutalised there. They read like the barbarism of another age, but it is all raw and recent: the jail officially closed in 1983.
I began in the so-called canteen, which was immediately next to the so-called toilets, forcing inmates to watch and smell as they ate. I moved on through the yard to the so-called showers and the tiny cells where men were kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, sometimes for more than a year.
It struck me that this bleak, concrete prison has few rivals as an acute reminder of what apartheid meant, and that it left the kind of wounds that cannot heal overnight. It stands as a collective rebuke to those who would forget this national trauma. Here are some memories of prisoners — and warders — in their own words.
Molefe Makiti, political prisoner, 1963: “The biggest thing in prison is sex. The way that the cell bosses would entice young men to have sex with them was by giving them better food.”
Molefe Pheto, political prisoner, 1975: “Supper was a mixture of old rotten boiled fish whose stink would reach us, permeating from the prison’s kitchens, long before the fish itself had arrived; and when it did so, it was hardly recognisable as fish, with hundreds of thin bones which made it difficult to eat, quite apart from the disgusting smell of it. On the day it was pig skins, the fat had long curdled … with the pieces of skins sticking out of the mess like shark fins.”
Alex La Guma, political prisoner, 1956: “The tin plates .. were unwashed and encrusted with layers of dried food accumulated over months, well mixed with rust … One of the reasons for my disease [typhoid] is found in this jail. Filth. The mats are filthy, the blankets are filthy, the latrines are filthy, the food is filthy, the utensils are filthy, the convicts’ clothes are filthy. The latrines overflowed and made a stench.”
Indres Naidoo, political prisoner, 1963: “‘Strip!’ We took off our clothes and stood stark naked in the yard … The warders mocked us for the nakedness they had ordered. ‘Tausa!’ We refused, we had seen other prisoners doing the tausa and we were not going to do it. The naked person leapt in the air, spinning around and opening his legs wide while clapping his hands overhead, and then in the same moment, coming down, making clicking sounds with the mouth and bending his body right forward so as to expose his open rectum to the warders’ inspection.”
Henry Nxumalo, pass offender, 1954: “I didn’t know how it was done … I didn’t jump and clap my hands. The white warder conducting the search hit me with his fist on my left jaw, threw my clothes at me and went on searching others.”
Martin “Panyaza” Shabangu, prison warder, 1973-80: “Some of these people grew up with me and as a warder I did not like to make them open their anus. Sometimes it was an old man in his 50s, a respectable somebody. White warders wouldn’t have done it to their own people. But it was a duty that we were forced to do … The prisoners were cleverer than us. When they came from court or work, they were carrying things like blades and money which they could hide up their anus.”
Samuel Nthute, political prisoner, 1963: “It was wrong, it was not nice. For us, the children of the Basotho nation, we respect elderly people. A man can never undress in front of me. But in this place they don’t care. You undress, the older men in front of the younger men. But we could do nothing about it, absolutely nothing.”
Prema Naidoo, political prisoner, 1982: “After we arrived in Number Four we did not have a shower for three or four months. Because of interaction of our lawyers, tackling the authorities, threatening them with interdict, they allowed us out to shower. It was cold water, but at least it was a shower. It was quite a relief. Then we were allowed to shower about once a week.”
Godfrey Moloi, prisoner, 1956: “The bosses again. If they felt a man seemed to enjoy the shower, he was assaulted. One of the bosses would stand at the gate with a dish full of soft soap better known as “sop-sop”. He would scoop it with his hand and paste it on to our heads as we rushed past him.”
Molefe Pheto, political prisoner, 1975: “To add insult to injury, that unbelievably shameless, most degenerate species of human degradation, the white warders, would actually stand at the entrances of the toilets and watch us squatting over the floor toilet-pails trying to shit the slimes out of our bodies. I could not believe that type of indignity, it was beyond me to comprehend their nonchalance at their own debasement.” – guardian.co.uk