Christine. WoW - My work since Session #2

Really enjoyed today's session. This is what I worked on since last Thursday, and it will be included in 'Travels with an Angel on My Shoulder'. All comments gratefully received. Haven't got a title yet ....

Notes from South Africa – Nov. 1998

Robben Island –

I met Bukiwe Sofute when the group I was travelling with to see South Africa’s notorious Robben Island prison was hustled past Nelson Mandela’s cell.

“Sorry,” the prison guide apologized. “No photos allowed.” But we were a group of journalists, for heaven’s sake, brought to Cape Town to attend Indaba, the country’s annual tourism trade fair. And Cell Number 5 was one of South Africa’s new attractions.

It was 1998, eight years since Mandela, once South Africa’s most wanted man, took his ‘long walk to freedom’ and walked out hand-in-hand with his then wife Winnie. He became President of South Africa four years later. But this is not about Mr. Mandela, of whom much has been, and will likely continue to be, written. This is about Bukiwe.

I didn’t know her name then ... just that we made eye contact, and after the rest of the group had filed past, complaining because they couldn’t take photos, she beckoned me to her side.

“Quick,” she whispered. “Take a photo. Before they come back.”

Why me I don’t know, but I didn’t hesitate. The cell was tiny, with a lidded bucket in one corner, a small iron bed with a thin pillow and coarse blanket folded on top, and an iron-barred window. I remember thinking that window must have been some small comfort to Mandela, who was here for 18 of his 27 years’ incarceration.

I took my pictures and went to leave but so many visitors crowded the narrow corridors that I turned in the other direction and stepped outside for air. Bukiwe joined me and we started chatting. Her story held me in thrall.

She was the only female among the 15 museum guides. Robben Island in its latter incarnation was used for male political prisoners only and when it became a museum, guides were enlisted from their ranks. Bukiwe had also been a political prisoner. Yet her history as an activist for the African National Congress, her arrest, and subsequent torture in Constitution Hill women’s prison belied the way she looked that day. Her black eyes were soft, her gleaming white smile contrasting pleasantly with her milk-chocolate toned skin. It was an infectious smile and I still find it hard to believe I was talking to a woman whose face once adorned police ‘wanted’ posters as South Africa’s most dangerous female terrorist. Who was the true Bukiwe? This gentle soul sitting with me on the prison steps gazing over the compound seemingly holding no ill-will towards her torturers? The woman who, she was telling me, had killed men, women, and even a child or two, trained by the ANC in all possible terrorist activities? It was like trying to grasp a true image in a maze of funfair mirrors.

“I need to show visitors that women, too, participated in the struggle,” she told me. “Only our bodies were in jail. Our minds and brains were free.”

She was imprisoned in 1989, just six months before Nelson Mandela was released to a new South Africa free of Apartheid: the very cause his followers fought for. Her ANC training included using AK47s and placing limpet mines.

The punishments imposed on her in an attempt to get names and information about the terrorist cells are bone chilling to hear. Half rations became a way of life. Guards would tell her that family members had died. She still refused to divulge information. The worst torture, she tells me with a shudder, was when she was stripped naked and placed in a sack with a cat. The sack was attached to a helicopter, which flew over the ocean to repeatedly and systematically dunk its cargo into the sea. Bukiwe’s terror was superseded by the cat’s, which clawed her flesh to ribbons in its effort to escape. The salt water added to the pain. Who thinks these things up? Another was to keep her awake for days at a time, dousing her with scalding hot water, then freezing cold water, at the same time telling her over and over again that they were “not her enemies”.

She was a prisoner for six months, in isolation during most of that time, and tortured incessantly.

“I had no idea about time, what day it was, or month, even though I tried hard to keep some sort of tally in my head. But when I chose to take the ANC training, I knew I would either be killed or jailed and tortured.” Surprisingly, she admits, her attempts at a hunger strike got results and she was allowed to appear in court. “At least then I knew my people would know where I was. I didn’t eat for 11 days. They were scared to have people die in prison, and once you got to court they couldn’t kill you.” (This might be questioned by relatives of others, who died in prison.)

Bekuwe was raised in Port Elizabeth as part of a poor family. “I suppose I first became an activist when I started working in a metal products company as a machine operator. The conditions were horrible and after a few years I managed to get most of the company organized into a union. But my dream was to help the ANC – to take some real action to see the end of Apartheid. So I joined them and they sent me to Zambia to train.” Bekuwe shrugged. “Now I dream of seeing more white people in the ANC party. There are already a few,” she told me. “We’re going to win.” And they did, as history shows. “I was in prison when Nelson Mandela was freed. That was when the jailers opened my cell and said ‘you’re going home.’ They gave me a phone and let me talk to my sister. Yes,” she answered my unasked question. "I cried.”

Of Nelson Mandela, she said to me “He’s born a leader, and has an answer for every question.” But she was worried about the future, for the time when he’d retire. She said she was afraid that the whites would all leave, and if they did, the economy would take the worst dive it has ever seen. She was mostly right. The whites did leave, but many returned to be re-hired as ‘consultants’ in their old jobs, while training the black South Africans to do the same work.

Despite promises to keep in touch, we never did. When we parted that day, Bekuwe hugged me. I felt as if I’d been hugged by Mother Africa.

That meeting provided me with a philosophical conundrum. I had felt a deep connection with her, and yet I abhor violence. How far must a person be deprived of rights before she or he is driven to take violent action I wondered? How could her jailers think up such devastatingly cruel tortures? I have found no answers. I've revisited South Africa since, and met black people and white people and people of all shades in between. They might be nice or nasty and most often a bit of both. They’re human beings. Nelson Mandela’s dream was to see a ‘rainbow nation.’ It seems to me, from the South Africans I’ve since met, that the dream is happening, but the question is, can it remain?