Holding the Fort. Toni Strasburg

dropped a little ball of paper close by. It contained a note from Bertha Mashaba and Violet, two of the black women detainees at the Fort, complaining about their food and included a sample – some horrible-looking black mealies.

      Acutely aware that the conditions of their black women colleagues were far worse than their own, the women managed to get a wardress to send the black detainees some of their bread and meat and were allowed to transfer some of their money into their accounts.

      They also managed to obtain the release of one of the black women, Georgina Mofutsanyana, who was mistaken for her husband’s first wife.

      What a day! To end it all, the girls in the second cell saw a metal plate above Freda’s bed, and she was convinced it was a microphone. Sheila climbed on Freda’s shoulders – Freda standing on the bed – and with a great effort they managed to pull at the plate. Down came a cloud of black soot, all over them. There was a great deal of hilarious laughter.

      There was camaraderie among the women, who found comfort in being together. As a group of highly vocal, middle class political activists, being together gave them the strength to complain and make a nuisance of themselves to the authorities.

      All our watches have been taken away. The time of day is to be ascertained only by the routine sounds of routine days.

      Woman prisoner cleaning floor.

      ‘When they were taken out into the yard to exercise or out of their cells for any other reason, the wardresses would shout: ‘Maak oop die hek, hier kom die Noord Regulasies’ (‘Open the gate, here come the Emergency Regulations’). Soon they were known all over the prison as the ‘Emergency Regulations’.

      Meanwhile, the men were also grappling with the dreadful food

      and poor conditions.

      During the day we have access to a tiny enclosed yard on a lower floor where the light filters in dimly through a dusty steel mesh roof. In one corner is a cesspit where chamber pots are emptied each morning and food bowls scrubbed.

      Poor-quality food arrives from a distant kitchen in battered steel bowls, which are laid out in the stair hall and left to congeal before they reach us. Ronnie Press, the scientist amongst us, makes a trawl through the lunchtime stew and mounts his catch of weevils, grubs and other creepy-crawlies on white card, like a museum exhibit. He presents it to the Prison Commandant on his next inspection. It’s received without comment and taken away.

      Before long, we have an outbreak of diarrhoea. The prison doctor looks at our tongues from a safe distance and hands out sulpha tablets. As the outbreak becomes an epidemic, dispensing pills becomes too onerous for him and he hands a wholesale supply of sulpha tablets to our two pharmacists – Archie Lewitton and Jock Isaacowitz – to dispense as they see fit.

      Around 4 pm the steel grille gates between our cells and the corridor are locked for the night. Lights go off around ten.

      On their second day in prison, the routine of the male detainees was interrupted by unusual panic.

      It’s about 2 pm. It should be quiet with warders off having lunch. Suddenly there is the noise of men shouting and hurrying about, doors and gates slamming. It cannot be an escape – there are no alarms, though we can hear vehicle sirens in the streets beyond the walls, and the wail of emergency vehicles. The warders seem unusually hostile. Routine is the source not only of our sense of time but of all sense of normality. Rumour spreads like wildfire. It is said that Verwoerd has been shot. It would be dismissed as false were it not the turmoil around us. And, even more scary, could the killer be one of OUR people? If so, it has terrifying implications for all of us.

      Hours later, the rumours and gossip solidify into facts. Verwoerd has been shot while on a visit to the Easter Show6. He has been rushed off to hospital – no one knows whether he is alive or dead – and not many of us care.

      We find out only later that the shot was fired at point-blank range by a white dairy farmer with a grievance. The shot has passed through Verwoerd’s cheek but has not deprived him of the ability to speak.

      Prime Minister Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, known to have been a sympathiser with the Nazis during the war, was known as the chief architect of apartheid and enforced it with a rigid brutality that caused enormous suffering. Although he survived this attempt on his life, on 6 September 1966 he was assassinated by the parliamentary messenger Dimitri Tsafendas, a Portuguese national of Greek descent, who stabbed him in parliament.

      I regard him as not just bad but mad; and his apartheid to be the most inhuman attempt at human engineering since Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’7.

      Looking back at that time, with the knowledge of what came only a year or two later, it seems a benign and lenient way to detain political prisoners. These conditions lasted only during this first State of Emergency. It wasn’t long before far harsher treatment was given to political prisoners, when torture and solitary confinement were introduced. After 1960, political prisoners were denied any of the comforts of the Emergency detainees.

      Nevertheless, detention wasn’t a kind of enforced holiday camp. This was prison. Conditions at the Fort were cramped and unhygienic. The male political detainees were housed in a double-storey block of cells that led onto a hall, which doubled as a dining room. Leading off from this was a concrete exercise yard with high walls. On arrival the cells were indescribably dirty, containing a straw mattress, a few blankets and a sanitation bucket.

      After protests and the diarrhoea outbreak, both the living conditions and the food improved to some extent. To the warders, the men were an enigma: clean, tidy and well-educated, and utterly unlike the awaiting-trial prisoners who were their usual charges.

      However bad conditions were for the white detainees, they were far worse for the black and other detainees. Worst of all were the conditions of convicted prisoners.

      Sunday, 10 April

      Lights out at eight leaves one plenty of time for lying in bed and thinking. Whether you fall asleep early, in which case you wake at 3 or 4 am and can lie and think until the morning bell goes at 6:30 am, or else you do it at night before getting to sleep. Others have young children, too, but we do not discuss it, we each nurse our own sorrows. We all have our own individual worries. To me, Molly’s (Fischer) is the worst of all.

      Memorandum of conditions of hygiene and medical attention.

      The Fischers youngest child, Paul, suffered from cystic fibrosis and was chronically unwell, needing a lot of care.

      As soon as I think of Keith or Frances, or someone mentions them, tears rush up. Frances was due back from her holiday today. Who met her and told her? How will poor Fuzzy cope with shop, home and all the children? Will relatives assist financially? And how long will it last?

      Cover image of my mother’s gaol poetry collection.