Sources and References

The following works inform the narrative below. They are drawn from the established historiography on South African segregation, apartheid, incarceration, and resistance, and form the scholarly backbone for the chapters that follow.

• Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (1994)
• Saul Dubow, Apartheid, 1948–1994 (2014)
• Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (2003)
• Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa (3rd ed., 2001)
• Fran Lisa Buntman, Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid (2003)
• Paul Maylam, A History of the African People of South Africa (1986)
• Belinda Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid (2004)
• Jonny Steinberg, The Number: One Man’s Search for Identity in the Cape Underworld and Prison Gangs (2004)
• Deborah Posel, The Making of Apartheid, 1948–1961 (1991)
• Tom Lodge, Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and its Consequences (2011)
• Helen Bradford, A Taste of Freedom: The ICU in Rural South Africa (1987)
• Shula Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa (1986)
• Anne-Marie Singh, Policing and Crime Control in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2008)
• Christopher Saunders, The Making of the South African Past (1988)
• Ruth First, 117 Days (1965)
• Albie Sachs, The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1966)
• Hugh Lewin, Bandiet: Seven Years in a South African Prison (1974)
• Breyten Breytenbach, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1984)
• Caesarina Kona Makhoere, No Child’s Play: In Prison Under Apartheid (1988)

Chapter 1: The Long Road to Apartheid

Segregation Before 1948

Apartheid did not arrive fully formed in 1948. The National Party’s victory that year gave a systematic name and ideological coherence to practices of racial exclusion that had been assembled, piece by piece, across the preceding half century. As Leonard Thompson and Saul Dubow both stress, the architecture of white supremacy in South Africa was already dense by the time Daniel F. Malan took office. Colonial conquest in the nineteenth century had stripped Africans of land and political standing; the mineral revolution on the Witwatersrand had built an economy that depended on cheap African labour; and the Union of South Africa, created in 1910, had entrenched the disenfranchisement of most Black South Africans from the outset.

The Native Land Act of 1913 is rightly remembered as the foundational statute of territorial segregation. It restricted African land ownership to roughly seven percent of the country’s territory, later expanded to around thirteen percent under the 1936 Native Trust and Land Act. In a single stroke, Parliament criminalized squatting and sharecropping arrangements that had allowed African families to remain on ancestral land, forcing many into migrant wage labour. Sol Plaatje’s famous lament that the African had become “a pariah in the land of his birth” captures the rupture.

Alongside the land acts, a matrix of labour and movement legislation took shape. The Mines and Works Act of 1911 established the colour bar in skilled employment on the mines, a legal structure that Helen Bradford and Shula Marks have shown interlocked with rural dispossession to produce the migrant labour system. Pass laws, whose origins stretch back to the Cape and the Boer republics, required African men (and later women) to carry documents regulating their presence in white-designated areas. These laws predated the National Party but would become the beating heart of apartheid’s carceral machinery.

The National Party and the Apartheid Project

When Malan’s National Party won a narrow parliamentary majority in 1948, it inherited these tools and set about tightening them into a total system. Hermann Giliomee, sympathetic chronicler of the Afrikaners, argues that the post-war NP drew on a mixture of Christian-National ideology, demographic anxiety, and the pragmatic self-interest of white workers who feared competition with African labour. Dubow emphasizes instead the regime’s technocratic ambition: apartheid was not only a doctrine but also a bureaucratic project of classification, separation, and control.

Historians often distinguish between petty apartheid and grand apartheid. Petty apartheid regulated the minutiae of daily contact: separate benches, entrances, ambulances, beaches, and drinking fountains, cemented by the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953. Grand apartheid pursued the more ambitious fantasy of territorial partition, to be realized through the Bantustan or “homeland” policy that assigned each Black South African a notional ethnic nationality in one of ten rural reserves. The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 and the subsequent granting of nominal independence to Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei attempted to denationalize Africans altogether, converting them into foreigners in the country of their birth.

Chapter 2: Incarceration as Governance

The Carceral State Expands

If apartheid was a project of classification, its enforcement relied overwhelmingly on confinement. Deborah Posel’s work on the making of apartheid shows how the 1950s were a decade of frenetic legislative activity: the Population Registration Act, the Group Areas Act, the Suppression of Communism Act, the Native Laws Amendment Act, and the Natives (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act of 1952, which despite its name extended pass-law controls to African women for the first time. Each statute produced new categories of offender, and the jails filled accordingly.

The scale is difficult to absorb. By the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of pass-law prosecutions were heard in South African courts every year, making ordinary Africans the largest single category of criminal defendants in the country. Paul Maylam and Christopher Saunders both underscore that most of this incarceration was administrative rather than punitive in any conventional sense: it did not respond to harm done but enforced the regime’s control over where people could live, work, and move. For many African men and women, a stay in jail for a pass offence was simply a recurring episode of adult life.

Detention Without Trial

Alongside this mass traffic in petty-offence prisoners, the state built a parallel apparatus of political detention. After Sharpeville in 1960 (analyzed at length by Tom Lodge), the government declared a state of emergency and banned the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). The General Law Amendment Act of 1963 introduced the infamous “90-day” clause, allowing police to hold suspects incommunicado for ninety renewable days. Later legislation pushed the ceiling to 180 days and, with Section 29 of the Internal Security Act of 1982, to indefinite detention at the discretion of a senior officer.

These powers produced the shadow prison system that Ruth First, Albie Sachs, and others would document from the inside. Interrogation at John Vorster Square, the Sanlam building in Port Elizabeth, and other police headquarters became synonymous with torture and, in a distressing number of cases, with death in custody. The state’s insistence that detainees had “fallen down stairs” or “hanged themselves” became a grim national joke whose punchline was the corpse of Steve Biko in September 1977.

Chapter 3: Robben Island, Part One — The Political Prison

Establishing the Island

Robben Island, a wind-scoured sliver of land in Table Bay off Cape Town, had served as a place of banishment since the days of the Dutch East India Company. Khoikhoi leaders, Xhosa chiefs, and nineteenth-century lepers had all been confined there. In the early 1960s the apartheid government converted the island into a maximum-security prison reserved almost exclusively for African, Coloured, and Indian men convicted of political offences. White political prisoners, by contrast, were sent to Pretoria Central.

The geography was deliberate. The island’s isolation made escape nearly impossible and visits by family or lawyers logistically forbidding. Ferry schedules could be cancelled at the authorities’ whim, and letters were censored to the point of incoherence. Robben Island was designed not merely to hold its prisoners but to erase them from public life.

The Leadership Cohort

After the Rivonia Trial of 1963–1964, the apartheid state concentrated on the island almost the entire senior leadership of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe. Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni, and Elias Motsoaledi were all sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour. Robert Sobukwe, founder of the PAC, was held separately under a special clause of Parliament’s own creation that allowed his detention to be renewed annually on the minister’s signature.

Fran Buntman’s Robben Island and Prisoner Resistance to Apartheid argues that the regime’s strategy of mass political concentration backfired. By warehousing the liberation movement’s most disciplined cadres on a single island, the government inadvertently created a permanent seminar in political organization, strategy, and mutual education. The prison became, in the words of many alumni, a “university.”

Hard Labour at the Quarry

The everyday texture of Robben Island in the 1960s was brutal. Prisoners were classified from A to D on a racialized and politically inflected scale that determined everything from meal rations to the frequency of visits. Africans received thinner blankets, shorter trousers, and less food than Indian or Coloured prisoners, a gratuitous refinement of hierarchy even among the condemned. Morning after morning, the men walked out to the limestone quarry to break rock under the Cape sun. Mandela later wrote that the glare of the white limestone permanently damaged his eyes; decades afterward, photographers were still asked not to use flashbulbs in his presence.

Chapter 4: Robben Island, Part Two — Resistance and Prisoner Culture

The University of Robben Island

From the outside, Robben Island looked like the extinction of a political generation. From the inside, as Buntman insists, it was the making of one. Within months of their arrival, the ANC prisoners organized themselves into a clandestine internal structure, with a High Organ coordinating policy and subordinate committees handling education, recreation, and negotiations with the warders. They taught each other history, economics, and languages; they memorized Shakespeare and Marx; they debated the future of a liberated South Africa.

The study opportunities that prisoners wrung from the administration became one of the signature victories of island life. Correspondence courses through the University of South Africa were grudgingly allowed, and men who had entered prison as primary-school leavers left with law and arts degrees. The same limestone quarry where they broke rock became, in quieter moments, a classroom. Ahmed Kathrada recalled that educational discipline was treated as a form of political discipline: a man who slackened in his studies was understood to be slackening in the struggle.

Hunger Strikes and Slow Victories

The history of Robben Island is punctuated by hunger strikes, go-slows, and complaints lodged in every possible forum. The prisoners understood that they could not break the walls, but they could negotiate the terms of life within them. Over years and decades, they won warmer clothing, the right to long trousers for Africans, improvements in diet, a cell library, the eventual abolition of hard labour, access to newspapers, and irregular but consequential visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

None of these gains was granted freely. Each followed a pattern Buntman names as characteristic of prisoner resistance: a careful reading of the regime’s own legal and bureaucratic commitments, followed by collective action that made the cost of refusal higher than the cost of concession. Resistance on the island was not primarily heroic rupture; it was patient, disciplined pressure.

Chapter 5: Beyond Robben Island — Women, Gender, and Incarceration

Women Under the Pass Laws

The historiography of apartheid prisons was long centred on men, and on Robben Island in particular. Recent scholarship has worked to recover the parallel and often harsher experience of women. From the 1950s, when the state extended pass-law controls to African women, the female prison population expanded sharply. The women’s anti-pass campaign of 1956, when twenty thousand women marched on the Union Buildings in Pretoria, was one of the most dramatic demonstrations of the era — and was followed by a wave of prosecutions.

Women detainees were held at institutions including the women’s prison at Kroonstad in the Orange Free State, at Barberton, and in the female sections of Pretoria Central. Conditions there combined the standard apartheid scale of racial rations with specific gendered vulnerabilities: humiliating strip-searches, the separation of mothers from infants, and the near-complete absence of external oversight.

Winnie, Dorothy, and the Rest

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela endured a long period of detention under Section 10 of the Internal Security Act in 1969–1970, much of it in solitary confinement, and recounted her experiences in a manner that indicted both the regime and the wider historical silencing of women political prisoners. Dorothy Nyembe, an ANC organizer from Natal, served fifteen years for her activities with Umkhonto we Sizwe — one of the longest sentences ever handed down to a woman political prisoner. Caesarina Kona Makhoere, whose memoir No Child’s Play is indispensable to this history, spent six years inside for her student activism.

The memoirs of women prisoners record something that the canonical Robben Island accounts rarely discuss openly: the pervasive threat and reality of gendered violence in detention. Interrogators used sexual threats, enforced nudity, and the implicit menace of rape as tools of extraction. The omission of these experiences from earlier liberation historiography was not accidental; it reflected both a masculine narrative tradition and the prisoners’ own understandable reluctance to revisit such trauma in public.

Chapter 6: Mandela, the Rivonia Trial, and the Long Negotiation

“I Am Prepared to Die”

The Rivonia Trial of 1963–1964 remains the central legal drama of the apartheid era. Arrested at Liliesleaf Farm in Johannesburg, the MK high command was charged under the Sabotage Act with crimes carrying the death penalty. Mandela, already serving a five-year sentence for leaving the country illegally, opened the defence not with denial but with a long speech from the dock. Its closing passage, in which he described the ideal of a free and democratic society as one “for which I am prepared to die,” has become one of the twentieth century’s iconic political utterances.

The judge declined to impose the death sentence, and the Rivonia accused received life imprisonment. The prosecution believed it had decapitated the liberation movement. In one sense it had; in another, as the subsequent history of the island showed, it had founded an academy.

Twenty-Seven Years and the Path Out

Mandela’s twenty-seven years of imprisonment — eighteen on Robben Island, followed by stints at Pollsmoor and Victor Verster — span the rise, maturation, and slow crumbling of apartheid. The regime’s long refusal to release him produced an international iconography that the government could neither contain nor refute. “Free Nelson Mandela” was sung in cities where most listeners could not have placed South Africa on a map.

By the mid-1980s, with the country ungovernable and the economy buckling under sanctions, officials began quietly visiting Mandela in prison. Dubow and others have shown that the secret negotiations of 1985–1989, conducted variously by Kobie Coetsee, Niel Barnard, and eventually President P. W. Botha, were possible precisely because Mandela had preserved, across decades of isolation, the political authority that the regime needed to talk to. The transition was not the gift of a reformist government; it was the harvest of a disciplined prisoner’s long cultivation.

Chapter 7: Prison Memoirs as a Literary-Historical Genre

Witnessing from Inside

The apartheid prison produced one of the twentieth century’s richest traditions of carceral writing. Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, drafted in secret on the island and smuggled out in instalments, anchors the canon, but it is only the most famous entry. Ruth First’s 117 Days records her detention under the ninety-day law with a journalist’s eye for the bureaucratic banality of terror. Albie Sachs’s The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs offers a similarly disciplined account of solitary confinement in Cape Town. Hugh Lewin’s Bandiet is a searing record of seven years in white male prisons. Breyten Breytenbach’s The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, written after his return from an Afrikaner’s unlikely route through political imprisonment, experiments with form and voice in ways that complicate the genre. Makhoere’s No Child’s Play remains the essential women’s counterpart.

What Memoirs Reveal and Obscure

Taken together, these memoirs are the most accessible window into the sensory, emotional, and political textures of apartheid incarceration. They record the smell of the cells, the sound of warders’ keys, the rhythm of censored letters, and the particular loneliness of Christmas behind bars. They also register the inner life of commitment — the doubts, the quiet triumphs, the theological arguments with oneself at three in the morning.

But memoirs also obscure. They privilege literate, often mission-educated prisoners with access to publishers. They tend to foreground men. They reconstruct decades in tranquillity, smoothing the rough edges of memory. Historians such as Fran Buntman and Belinda Bozzoli have urged readers to use memoirs alongside oral histories, archival records, and the courtroom transcripts of political trials, precisely so that the silences of the genre are not mistaken for the silence of the past.

Chapter 8: Truth, Memory, and Incarceration After Apartheid

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The transition of 1994 posed an old question in new terms: what was to be done with the perpetrators? Criminal prosecutions risked derailing the settlement; a blanket amnesty would betray the dead. The compromise, brokered in the interim constitution and implemented through the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995, was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and active from 1996 to 1998.

The TRC offered conditional amnesty to individuals who made full disclosure of politically motivated gross human-rights violations committed between 1960 and 1994. Its hearings, televised and widely broadcast on radio, became a kind of national seminar in confession and listening. Torturers from the security branch, ANC operatives, PAC cadres, and the perpetrators of township massacres sat under the same bright lights.

Achievements and Critiques

The TRC’s defenders credit it with averting civil conflict, generating an unrivalled archive of testimony, and giving victims a forum for public acknowledgement. Its critics, most forcefully Mahmood Mamdani, charge that it settled for “reconciliation without justice,” individualizing crimes that had been bureaucratic, focusing on spectacular violence while leaving the structural harms of apartheid — forced removals, Bantu education, migrant labour — outside its mandate. Reparations promised to identified victims were slow and partial. Many hearings ended without amnesty granted and without prosecutions pursued.

Memory, Monuments, and Museums

Memory work continued outside the commission. The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, Constitution Hill on the site of the old Fort Prison, and Robben Island itself — declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999 — have become the principal public theatres in which South Africans, and foreign visitors, encounter the carceral past. Former prisoners guide tourists through the cells where they once slept. The politics of these sites is never simple: what is curated, what is omitted, whose photographs are chosen, and whose narratives frame the tour are all live questions.

The Rhodes Must Fall movement that began at the University of Cape Town in 2015, demanding the removal of Cecil Rhodes’s statue, reopened debates about the monuments of the pre-apartheid colonial order. The movement’s spread to Oxford and beyond indicated that the reckoning was not finished.

Incarceration After 1994

The prison system the new government inherited has not withered away. South Africa today has one of the largest prison populations in Africa. Anne-Marie Singh’s work on post-apartheid policing documents the expansion of private security and selective privatization of corrections. Jonny Steinberg’s The Number traces the older Numbers gangs — the 26s, 27s, and 28s — whose origins lie in late-nineteenth-century mining compounds and whose codes continue to organize daily life in many men’s prisons. Gender-based violence remains catastrophic, and the racial geography of confinement still maps with disturbing fidelity onto the townships and informal settlements that apartheid built.

A Closing Thought

The story this course tells is double. It is, first, a history of a state that believed it could govern by locking people up — that imagined incarceration as a tool fine enough to sort, regulate, and ultimately disappear an unwanted population. That belief failed, politically and morally. It is, second, a history of the men and women who were locked up, and of what they did with the years they were given. They taught each other. They organized. They wrote. They negotiated their long trousers and their longer freedom. They left the prison, and the prison, for a time, left them. The patient discipline of that second story is what makes the first story bearable to read, and worth returning to.