Influencing South African Politics

Abstract

Robben Island was like Oxford or Cambridge to the British…. I think that the ruling class in this country miscalculated. And they often said it. They said the Portuguese did not put them together. If they scattered us about all over the country they would be no single concentration but here they concentrated us on one spot with the cream of the leadership there. So, Robben Island was bound to be a big core in South Africa. Going to Robben Island was like going to University…. The harsh treatment on Robben Island produced leaders tempered in that fire of struggle and it produced very capable theoreticians who would argue their case and could map up [strategies for the struggle]. Some of the premiers are from Robben Island … Tokyo Sexwale … Raymond Mhlaba, and some of them are in the House of Assembly. Robben Island did produce part of the leadership of this country. [Robben Island] has been a sort of graduate school for revolutionaries, where raw youths who have rallied school boycotts have discussed technique with elderly founders of the armed struggle…. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, many Robben Island prisoners began to return to the mainland after finishing their sentences. Such released prisoners formed a peculiar sort of alumni association, schooled in concrete cells and taught by tenured faculty of lifetime maximum-security prisoners.