Some of the country’s Struggle heroes have called on South Africans to not only celebrate diversity on Heritage Day but also to remember the past. Reliving some of their experiences during their incarceration on Robben Island, Ahmed Kathrada, Denis Goldberg and Kwedie Mkalipi recall the darker days of the country’s history as well as the triumph of the human spirit. Rebecca Jackman highlights some of their stories.
Cape Town - For Struggle veteran Ahmed Kathrada, history is a place that can never be left behind.
Kathrada served at Nelson Mandela’s side, but despite fighting the same cause, was given better privileges simply because of the pigment of his skin.
“The importance of this celebration must be seen against the backdrop of apartheid, where the cultural heritage of the majority of South Africans was suppressed,” Kathrada said on Monday.
He said the day should be about celebrating the diversity, the richness of different cultures and the country’s inherited past. He said even though South Africa was now a democracy, “some still misuse the concepts of culture, ethnicity, race and religion to entrench divisions”.
Reliving some of his experiences on Robben Island, he recalled how at the time of his arrest, he was immediately set apart from black Rivonia trialists including Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and Andrew Mlangeni.
“The first thing we had to do was change into prison clothes,” Kathrada said, explaining that they arrived on a cold and wet winter’s day.
“Because I was an Indian I was given long trousers while all my colleagues, Africans, had to wear short trousers – right through the winter.”
Kathrada explained that black people at the time were regarded as children and labelled with terms such as “garden boy” and “kitchen girl”.
As an Indian, Kathrada said he also had special privileges in terms of the prison food he was allowed – more sugar than his colleagues, but less than Goldberg who was serving his time at a white prison in Pretoria. He was also allowed bread with his meals, unlike his African colleagues.
But for 13 years, they worked in the quarry together, with pick and shovel, even though he said Mandela and Mbeki, for example, could have excused themselves for having high blood pressure.
And when it came to meal times, Kathrada said he ensured his extra rations were shared with his friends and inmates.
Kwedie Mkalipi also served on Robben Island, describing how Mandela encouraged all of them to demonstrate “exemplary” behaviour, even within the confines of prison.
He said he, and other black inmates, were not given bread for 10 years, but their “brothers” (coloured and Indian inmates) would not allow them to starve.
“We must pay tribute to our fellow comrades. The bread that was given to them was the bread of all of us,” he said.
“We were spared the embarrassment of starvation.”
Goldberg said he couldn’t lie about the dire quality of the prison food, even for a white prisoner who was allowed meat and fish, but occasionally when the bread was warm and they were allowed a little butter “it tasted like honey”.
He said the coffee looked like coffee, but didn’t taste like it and most of the time when eating, he said he had to hold his nose. Goldberg said prison, for him, was about “dehumanisation” with too many hours alone in the dark with prison guards he described as “sadists”.
But he said a lone blessing at the time was that political prisoners did not have to live with any moral guilt in the way criminal prisoners might have.
“We were committed to what we were doing, we knew we were right,” he said.
Goldberg said it was still hard to believe that it took 30 years of “untold death” and “untold pain” before anything changed.
Cape Times