Amandla!

Amandla!

In November 2001, A.M. Kathrada told my wife and me in Cape Town, “We’ll catch the early staff boat and get there before the tourists arrive.” The next morning we were going to Robben Island, where for 27 years Nelson Mandela and other alleged treasonists including Kathrada himself were held by the South African apartheid government. It was Indian activist Mahatma Gandhi who first called it “the dark chamber of South African segregation,” though he was thrown off after six months for trying to play tennis with a white man.

Kathrada is of Indian descent; his fellow dinner guest Barbara Hogan won a place in history as the first white woman convicted as a traitor. In those days it was easy to become one. “Amandla!,” a new documentary about music’s role in bringing down apartheid, begins with the exhumation of Vuyisile Mini, who wrote a song called “Beware Verwoerd!” (“The Black Man Is Coming!”) that was aimed at South Africa’s chief racist separationist politician. Mini was hanged in 1964 and buried in a pauper’s grave. Robben Island is about 20 miles offshore from Cape Town; looking back across False Bay toward its squat limestone ramparts gives you your first good view of Table Mountain’s slopes.

When I was a student at the University of Cape Town in 1965 they used to point out Robben Island from Rondebosch Beach, slap their chests and whisper: “Mandela!” It would be almost 25 years before he walked out of Pollsmoor Prison to hear F.W. de Klerk Verwoerd’s last white successor invite him to run for president; no one then or for many years afterward believed there would be regime change without civil war here, but Cranford’s can now legally be owned by black South Africans, and it still has a coffeepot and crooked stairs up to the crowded room. Kathrada is in his early 70s now; everyone on the staff boat knows him. At the Robben Island Store, where we buy our tickets, he introduces us to the manager a white man who used to be one of Kathrada’s guards and smuggled forbidden letters (“and even the occasional visitor”) on and off the island. “I would have thought,” I said, “that relations between you guys would be a bit strained.”

“Oh no,” said Kathrada mildly. “You know how it is with warders. After all, they are just prisoners who come back every day.” On the island itself, you walk under a crude arch that welcomes you in Afrikaans and English; enter a second prison building (the first was dynamited by prisoners in 1963), which is squat and unlovely, thick with glossy lime paint. The office isn’t open yet and Kathrada can’t find a key. “First I am locked in,” he observed cheerfully. “Now I am locked out.” Eventually they find one and we file down into Mandela’s cell: low ceiling, barred window opposite iron bedstead against right wall; blue bucket for toilet next to sink; tiny blanket spread across bedbug-ridden mattress; mandala of colored tissue squares tacked up over sink mirror, so that Madiba could escape his own face when shaving at sink before morning roll call.

“This will cost extra,” says Kathrada, pointing to double bunks along opposite wall of eight-foot-square space: “For visitors from abroad.” It is about long enough to lie down in. “For the first seven years,” he said matter-of-factly, “we didn’t have cots. You got used to sleeping on the floor.” White politicals like Hogan were kept in a Pretoria prison. There weren’t many Indian prisoners, and Kathrada was jailed with Mandela’s Africans.

“They issued us different uniforms,” he said matter-of-factly. “I was an Indian and was issued with long pants. Mandela and the other Africans were given short pants. They called them ‘boys’ and gave them boys’ pants.” A crude nutritional chart hung on the wall, indicating that Indians were given a few hundred calories more to eat every day because South African scientists had somehow determined their minimal caloric requirements was a little greater than those of blacks.

All of the men worked in a quarry on weekdays. They hammered rocks into gravel. Sunday did not allow any work within the Afrikaans society, which was deeply religious. Most prisoners were fed whole grains with a few vegetables and little fruit or animal protein. ‘We were healthy and still are because of that diet combined with exercise and all the sunlight at the quarry,’ Kathrada said, smiling. However, our eyes suffered due to the sun on white rocks and dust from quarries.” In the 1970s, apartheid governments sealed opposition so tightly it seemed like they could grip forever.

“Amandla!” is an uplifting film about South Africa’s music of protest leading up to its eventual overthrow of apartheid rule. Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) stayed nonviolent until last years when one branch started bombing and sabotage after an internal struggle (whites had always used murder and torture as weapons). Music proved ANC’s most dangerous weapon; we see footage showing streets lined with tens-of-thousands-of marchers singing dancing down expressing spirit that cannot be quenched.

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