In 1961 Nelson Mandela and became the leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress. In 1962 he was captured, and sentenced to five years in prison for leaving the country illegally and inciting a strike. In 1963 he was sentenced to life for sabotage.
On June 12, 1964, Mandela and his co-accused were flown by a military plane to Robben Island Prison.
In his autobiography, “A Long Walk to Freedom,” he wrote: “Prison is itself a tremendous education in the need for patience and perseverance. It is, above all, a test of one’s commitment.”
Upon arrival at the Robben Island airstrip, Mandela, with others, was handcuffed, loaded into a vehicle and taken into an old building, where he was issued with prison clothes, shorts pants, no socks and sandals - not shoes.
As the apartheid logic of racial segregation extended to the prison system, African prisoners received different food rations and clothes in contrast to their Indian and Coloured inmates.
“Like everything else in prison, diet is discriminatory,” Mandela wrote in his autobiography. “Food was the source of many of our protests, but in those early days, the warders would say: ‘Ag, you kaffirs are eating better in prison than you ever ate at home!’ For supper, Coloured and Indian prisoners received a quarter loaf of bread and a slab of margarine. Africans, it was presumed, did not care for bread as it was a “European” type of food.”
Mandela remembers the guard who brought his food saying: “Here is your brown sugar for the porridge. You know - the white sugar is reserved for us white people.”
Mandela’s former prison cell, was about four square metres in size. A deep and a shallow plate, a spoon, a small wardrobe, a two-centimetre-thick sleeping mat and a blanket were all that lay inside. It was Mandela’s home for 18 years. Here his name was simply “46664.”
“Every hour seemed like a year,” Mandela wrote of his time in captivity. “I found myself on the verge of initiating conversations with a cockroach.”
Another inmate, Mac Maharaj, who went on to serve as transport minister under Mandela’s presidency, remembers the close bonds the inmates formed in prison.
“All around the world, prison has got its black humour, and we did laugh a lot and rib each other in those times. With extreme suffering and physical and psychological pain it is part of your defence mechanism; to be able to laugh at yourself.”
“Sometimes you miss it, and there’s something to miss because we were forced to live so closely with each other - you had no material trappings to surround yourself with, none of the people you would normally count as family and loved ones to be cushioned by. You had to rely on a sense of comradeship - that was the only thing that held you together.”
During his time at the quarry at Robben Island, Mandela was exposed to the glare of the sunlight reflecting off the bright lime, resulting in eye damage. This was in spite of a three year fight against prison authorities to obtain dark glasses for protection.
In later years, prisoners used to enjoy certain privileges, such as gardening and playing tennis.
“We opened up tennis balls and put in secret messages. We casually threw the balls over the wall into the other section - so we could communicate with each other,” said Itumeleng Makwela, an ANC member and fellow inmate of Mandela’s.
Mandela and his co-prisoners were not allowed any newspapers and did not have a radio. Mandela and his comrades were also forbidden from keeping watches or clocks. He initially made a calendar on the wall of his cell. Later he was allowed to order a desk calendar a year from South African Tourism, with scenic photographs and the words ‘Land of Golden Sunshine,’ an Irony indeed considering the misery of Robben Island.
In 1986, Mandela was transferred to Pollsmoor Prison outside Cape Town. For the next six years he was kept in almost total solitary confinement.
He was released in 1990.