Special Report Transcript Episode 58, Section 1, Time 00:17

Hello. Our focus this week is entirely on prisons. The Truth Commission held a special hearing on prison conditions over the last three decades in the Old Fort in Johannesburg this past week. We also bring you a profile on a rather forgotten hero of the 1960s, Bram Fischer. It is often been said that one can judge a civilization by the way it treats its prisoners. South Africa has always had a large number of people in jail. Until a few years ago many of these were imprisoned because they demanded a say in the government of the land of their birth. In fact, our president served 27 years in prison. The names of some of these prisons are interwoven with our political culture: Robben Island, Pollsmoor, Victor Verster, Pretoria Central. There is another name, to many as infamous Quatro, the ANC’s detention centre north of Luanda. We start with a prison island, a few kilometres from Cape Town. Since Jan van Riebeeck’s days Robben Island had been used as a place to isolate so-called undesirable elements, first some Khoi leaders and Xhosa rebels and then it became a leper colony. In the 1960s activists of the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress were banished there. At this week’s truth hearings three more veterans added their voices to the growing story of prison life on the island, Andrew Masondo, Hanry Makgothi and Johnson Mlambo; all arrived on South Africa’s Alcatraz in 1963 as convicted Umkhonto we Sizwe and Poqo cadres.

Notes: Max du Preez