Despatches From Robben Island

The publication of ‘Island in Chains’ in India 2000 poses a question: can we, who are so far from Naidoo and his comrades in time and space, still empathise with their struggle?

ISLAND IN CHAINS: TEN YEARS
on Robben Island
By Indres Naidoo
Penguin
Price: Rs 250
Vandita Mishra
It is difficult not to be awed by this story even before one has begun to read it. It is the story of the struggle against South Africa’s apartheid regime. For 10 long years, Indres Naidoo was Prisoner 885/63 on Robben Island. Island in Chains is his account of those years on an exposed piece of prison land surrounded by freezing sea.

There is much that is familiar in the tale. We have heard and read of that time in South Africa’s history when thousands like Naidoo sacrificed their youth, their freedom and their lives, as they fought against a racist regime. But the publication of Island in Chains in India 2000 poses a new question. Can we, who are so far from Naidoo and his comrades in time and space, still empathise with their struggle, their suffering? Is it possible still to retrieve some of that indomitable spirit of courage and resistance in the face of savage brutality and violence? We live in comfortable, complacent times. Our own tempestuous freedom struggle has receded to a distant sanitised memory. For us, Mandela is the genial patriarch of a battle already won. Can we find it in us to reach out to Indres Naidoo’s bruising narrative of a daily violence and daily resistance?

On his part, Indres Naidoo makes no concessions for his audience. He begins his story without much of a preamble and tells it in an unsparingly dry-eyed tone. Nor does he let himself be distracted by the sheer grandeur and sweep of his own tale. Like jottings in a diligently maintained journal, his narration maintains a stern, unswerving focus on the daily unfolding event.

For much of the first half and more, the book meticulously recalls the tortures to which Naidoo and others were subjected everyday, day after day. The cruel back-breaking work regime in the quarry, the constant strippings and beatings, the coarse invective and abuse, the stench of blood and urine in the airless insanitary cells, the insufficient tasteless food, the rampant TB, asthma, blood pressure, epilepsy. A bald account of the complete brutalisation of the apartheid system — from the ceaseless sadism of the prison warders to the received malevolence of the child who mounted a little platform each day to fire a toy gun at the procession of barefoot prisoners filing past his garden.

In the second half of the story, the grimness of the narrative is alleviated somewhat by the slow and hesitant breakthroughs. The small victories achieved by the prisoners — the freedom to play football and to smoke, to watch movies, even to be medically treated. There is a palpable wresting of power from the oppressor by the oppressed here, through the prisoners’ unbreachable solidarity and their hunger strike. And like a silent sutradhar, there is Nelson Mandela — a grave and patient presence in the Isolation Block, that prison within a prison on Robben Island.

But at the end of it, there is that question again — about the accessibility of Naidoo’s narrative. There is a problem here and it is not just us. It is not just that we are unable to cover the distance that stretches between the prisoners of Robben Island and us. It is also that Naidoo’s narrative does not hold out a long enough helping hand. But then, one may well ask, must it?

Perhaps the answer to that is that a narrative like Naidoo’s must tread a fine balance between the local and the universal. While the suffering and the determined fightback of Naidoo and his fellow prisoners is rooted deep in South African soil, their story is also resonant with echoes of other stories — those that already have been and those that are yet to be. Naidoo’s account often fails to seize these echoes. What is missing in his narrative is that rare moment of alchemy when the individual detail melds indistinguishably into the collective context. That sudden moment which stealthily steals up on us from behind — drawing a bridge almost between the oppressor and the oppressed.

Naidoo’s account is a precious document. But it misses the opportunity to be more than a meticulous prison diary by one who has lived through and participated in his nation’s courageous fight for self-respect and freedom. One suspects that in keeping his story so faithfully grounded to his experience, Naidoo did not allow himself to soar, not even once, to that moment of transcendence, and yes forgiveness, that Nelson Mandela has shown the world to be possible.

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