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My story is a small story. Nelson Mandela spent 27 long years in prison. I spent mere weeks. Many of my colleagues and friends spent much longer times in prison. South Africa’s current President Cyril Ramaphosa was held in detention without trial for 17 long months of which 11 were in solitary confinement.
I’ve not spoken or written about this experience because it is very personal, but I guess it is something that should be recorded as it is part of a wider tapestry about the relationship between race, law, and rights that may be of interest to many worried today about the future of democracy and the future of the rule of law.
My name is Wilmot James. I’m a professor of practice at the School of Public Health at Brown University. I’m also a senior advisor to the Pandemic Center at the same institution.
I am a child of apartheid. I was born in 1953, five years [00:01:37] after its introduction. The first thing apartheid leaders did was legally classify people into four race groups. They then proceeded to segregate the groups in as many aspects of life as possible, in death too.
Probably the most consequential measure taken was to strictly segregate neighborhoods by race, stripping people of their homes and their land, and compelling them by law to move into a neighborhood set aside for their so-called race. They also went about segregating society in terms of the schools and colleges one attended, the park benches you sat on, the beaches and public toilets used. Graveyards were segregated by race, and so on. Sex across the color line and so-called mixed marriages were criminalized. They tried to segregate churches by race and succeeded in large measure. Prisons were segregated by race. If you were a political prisoner and you were [00:02:49] white, you went to one jail, which is the one in Pretoria, and if you were black, you were confined to Robben Island. It was divide and rule.
I come from one of four race groups called colored, a minority population descended from Malaysian slaves brought to the Cape by the Dutch from Java, as well as European settlers and indigenous peoples.
On my mother’s side, my great-great-grandfather was an Indian slave, and my great-great-grandmother was the first freeborn individual to an Indian slave that was captured by the Dutch East India Company as they hugged the coastline with their boats coming down to Cape Town. And so we were neither black nor white, had more rights than black people did, but less rights than whites did.
My place of birth was Paarl, which is Afrikaans Dutch for ‘pearl.’ The name derives from the fact that in the morning [00:04:01] dew the large granite outcrops that caught Charles Darwin’s attention when he visited in June of 1836 glistened like pearls. Victor Verster Prison, where I was held in detention and from which Nelson Mandela was released in 1990, is a 15-minute drive from Paarl.
It is a small town with a population of about 300,000 people today. In the 1950s, it was a town of white and colored people, very few South African Indians, and a small black population that was confined to an area on the town’s outskirts. A large river, called the Berg River, runs through it. It is a very dangerous river. Tragedy struck one day when a neighbor’s son drowned. His leg apparently got caught in the undergrowth. His mother wailed in grief. It left an absolutely dreadful memory. I still fear water and treat the rivers and oceans with the greatest of respect.
We stayed opposite a vineyard. It had no fences. The [00:05:15] boys walked bare feet. Our streets were unpaved. Colored and white people lived in the same neighborhood cheek by jowl, as they say, but there was very little integration. People largely kept to themselves.
I remember as a small boy being sent to buy eggs from our white neighbors. They talked down to me, never invited me in, always kept me waiting on the stoop for the eggs. Perhaps that is how they treated all children, and that I was nothing special in that respect. Who knows?
My father built and owned his own home. It was a large house on a relatively big piece of land. He had his chicken [00:06:04] run, which was amusing to us, and a large vegetable garden in the back.
During 1958, when I was five years old, my father received a letter from the local government to say that our neighborhood was legally declared for exclusive white settlement, and that all the colored people on the one side of the river had to move to the other side or to somewhere else. He had to sell it below value to an entity called The Group Areas Board. My parents were heartbroken. I was too young to understand why anyone would do such a thing, but I knew then at a very young age that something was not right in my country. Trouble was brewing.
In March of 1960, we heard the news of the police firing on a group of marchers in a town called Sharpeville. Most of them shot in their backs.
[Archival news clip]: In two days of demonstrations that began here, between 50 and 100 were killed and hundreds injured. Worldwide protests were raised including a condemnation of the violence by the United States State Department.
They killed over 70 unarmed men and women. The marchers were protesting against harsh treatment under apartheid and felt aggrieved that they were the only citizens obliged to always carry an internal passport, much like the people in the Soviet Union had to do.
Black people had to live in the worst parts of towns and cities. They were disrespected at every turn. Their conditions of life were [00:07:41] unforgiving, and it was harsh. The law was not on their side, and the police treated them as if they were animals. There was a lot to protest about.
On the 22nd of November, 1962, this is two years later, in the middle of the night, a loud and menacing noise woke our family, and we peered through the front door to identify its cause. It was a march, the second largest after Sharpeville, led by black men armed with machetes, axes, sticks, and revolvers marching on the local police station.
As they approached the station, the police opened fire and killed quite a number of people. As the marchers dispersed, they killed two residents. Lemme tell you, it was Paarl’s worst nightmare, and the town and its residents were left in shock. It was the end of my innocence at the age of eight.
My parents, both teachers, tried to explain. They were politically aware, but they were not political activists. My [00:09:01] father had eight siblings, who all became teachers except for one. On my mother’s side, the same. Her eldest brother doubling up as a teacher and what you would in the U.S. call an Episcopalian priest.
When the family got together, they spoke about how to ensure that their children and those they taught at school had the tools and the capabilities to rise above and beyond the limits apartheid leaders defined as their destiny. They were a generation that believed that children should receive a classical education consisting of languages including Latin for law and medicine, the sciences and mathematics, geography and history. Having teachers as parents meant that there was an unrelenting drive to get their children the best education there is.
I have three siblings. I’m the second eldest. My eldest brother Paddy and sister Salthea became teachers, my youngest brother, an engineer. My wife Delecia [00:10:05] Forbes is an arts administrator, and we have two daughters. The first one is from my first marriage, and she lives in Cape Town, and she teaches business ethics at the University of Cape Town. My youngest daughter is in architectural grad school in New York City at The New School.
My brother-in-law became a geriatrician. My sister-in-law, an obstetrician and gynecologist. It comes from that wish to demonstrate that you’re as good as anybody else by exceeding expectations, reacting to a world where other people are saying that you’re not good enough.
As an extramural activity, sports, uh, were important, but I wasn’t a great sports person. I didn’t like rugby. It was too physical, and I wasn’t very good at soccer. I played table tennis instead.
All of us took piano classes. I learned to play the piano at the age of four, and I finished my piano classes when I was 13. My father would drive me twice a week for all those years from the colored neighborhood into the white neighborhood for me to have my piano [00:11:14] lessons on a Wednesday night at 6, and on a Saturday morning at 10. He would sit in his car, smoke his cigarettes, and read the newspaper, and then he’d drive me back. It was extraordinary parental commitment.
I finished high school in 1970, worked for a year in a book warehouse and attended the University of the Western Cape on the outskirts of Cape Town starting in 1972. This university was for colored people only and it is there that I got drawn into a social movement to protest against apartheid. Leading organizations like the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela’s party, was banned. He was on Robben Island in prison. I became part of an entity called the South African Student Organization, which was a black consciousness organization for university students.
To tell you the truth, my real, real interest was in theater and drama, which I really loved. My English teacher, Pat Wagner, in high school was very enterprising. He found [00:12:24] the best theater producer in Cape Town. Her name was Rose Ehrlich, she was quite fierce, to produce our high school plays. I was a terrible actor, but I liked to take care of the technical components. So I used to do the props. I set up the lighting and managed essentially all the equipment required for the performance. And that is what I did at the University of the Western Cape. I joined the Drama Society led at the time by a philosopher and poet by the name of Adam Small. The theater was not Shakespearean but consisted of works of protest. That kind of theater became part of the political movement at the time, and that put me in a position of becoming a sort of third string student leader at the university.
When the Soweto protest broke out in 1976 in Johannesburg, it spread to Cape Town. I used the Drama Society’s vehicle to drive political activists around. [00:13:30] I became a chauffeur literally to political leaders going in and out of townships. As the protest spread, the police became more aggressive and started to arrest students in waves.
After the shock of Sharpeville in 1960, the police set up a dedicated division of thugs called the Special Branch similar to the KGB in Russia or Stasi in East Germany. We called them the SBs. And it was on the 9th of September, 1976, at 4AM in the morning, when they knew we were at home, the police knocked on my parents’ door, barged into our house, and walked straight into my bedroom.
The night before I had a secret meeting with some colleagues and friends, and we were planning to distribute a pamphlet at a local factory. I had the pamphlet in my pocket. When the police came into my bedroom, I had the presence of mind saying that I needed to go to the toilet, and I flushed it [00:14:38] away. That would’ve been evidence of a threat to internal security.
As we left my home, they lied to my parents. They told them that they were taking me to one place called Caledon Square, which is actually a fearsome place to be taken to, but instead they took me to a local jail.
I was alone in the cell. It was foul smelling and quite horrible. There was an open toilet in the corner. I curled up on a mat and didn’t move. You know, I just sort of lay there.
The most disturbing thing about that experience is I couldn’t tell night from day. That is really, really disturbing to the human psyche because sunlight wakes us up and darkness of course is a trigger for sleep, and it is part of our circadian rhythms.
After five days, I was taken to Victor Verster Prison, which is about a 30-mile drive from Cape Town. I was handcuffed, hands behind my back, and I was [00:15:56] flanked by two policemen at the back and two upfront and driven at great speed in a very large car. They used obscene language along the way, and I was handed over to the prison officials at Victor Verster Prison in Paarl.
The prison officials were a different category of those serving in correctional services. They were racist, many of them, but they did not want to see any harm done to their prisoners. So they were really custodians of prisoners, and they behaved accordingly, and they did not have much respect for the security police, they often regarded them as thugs, which is what they were, most of the time.
In our cells there was no bed, there was a mat on the floor. You had your own toilet, and the facilities were really clean and so it was okay. It was a modern facility with proper ventilation and situated in the most exquisite of environments surrounded by mountains in the middle of the winelands. I recognized where we were just looking at the mountains. [00:17:10]
We were fed properly but our diets, like everything else was segregated. Black people got porridge and white people chicken on Sundays. The kitchens were organized accordingly. Being students, we thought, no, we are not going to put up with this, so we actually started to protest against the food that we received, and we started a campaign to have chicken on Sundays, and we won that fight. We also wanted to spend more time in the courtyard playing volleyball, but that one I’m afraid we did not win.
Sometimes we got on the wrong side of our jailers when some of the prisoners brewed a version of wine by fermenting fruit. We got caught and some of us ended up in isolation for a while. The prison routine is a very tough one. You get up at five in the morning, you have your breakfast at six, and then they lock you up again for three hours and let you out for an hour. Dinner arrives at 4:00 or 4:30 in the afternoon and they lock you up again for the evening at 6PM. [00:18:33]
The prison guards were not necessarily hostile. They were obviously rule bound. But what happens is that one develops a relationship with your jailer. They could be racist and nasty sometimes, but when it comes to ordinary human things like food, they understood our desires. Life in prison becomes a negotiated thing. A pharmacist would come around once a week to ask you whether you needed any pills. We were allowed radios and because we were students, they made a deal with the university to bring books into our cells and so we could actually read, which made a huge difference.
I spent a number of weeks there. Some of my colleagues stayed in prison for three months. It is of course a very distressing thing for parents when they visit. I remember when my mom used to come and visit. A proud woman, she would always talk in a very appealing way to the prison officials, sometimes to our, being inside, annoyance, but what she was doing [00:19:43] was trying to appeal to the sense of humanity so that I was not caused, we were not caused, any harm.
We were in prison as protesting students. We were young and we were adventurous. We had a cause. It was difficult, but we were part of a movement with an unfolding sense of optimism and self-confidence that you build up when you’re busy in a righteous fight and pursuing a principled cause.
I had no access to legal counsel. There was no due process. I was never, ever charged with anything. I was fortunate to be spared being tortured. Some of my family members were tortured. This is what happens when there is no rule of law and no real justice. I know what it feels like not to have access to lawyers. I know what it means when the police are not accountable, that’s a very bad place to be, and that is what happens in authoritarian [00:20:48] societies when you don’t have courts and lawyers to protect you against abuse by the state.
It is very important at this time to remind ourselves that the purpose of a constitution is to protect the rights that people have against state abuse and the protection of that right is the responsibility of the courts and the people who serve in those courts. That is what it means to live in a democracy, and that is what needs defending. And the courts have to rise to the occasion to do so. It is up to the courts in the end to vigorously compel constitutional compliance with the rule of law and the separation of powers. When leaders start to undermine the institutions of a democracy, when they think that they are above the law, and when you open that door to people having that inclination, then what comes out of that is a Chile under Pinochet, a South Africa under a Verwoerd, and a Russia under Putin. Young people take these rights for granted and don’t understand what it means when you don’t have those rights and how difficult it is to get them back once you surrender them.
Looking back on my life, I wasn’t doing all that well during my first few years at university. I got through, but my grades were not great. My ambition was to become a teacher like my parents, or perhaps a college lecturer. But one day, something really amazing happened. Two young, spirited lecturers came to the university I attended. Janis Grobbelaar, who became a lifelong friend, and someone called Joachem Ewert. They held modern views about life. They had us read really good contemporary books. The one that stands out in memory was a book, The Origin of Dictatorship and Democracy by Barrington Moore, Jr. It helped us understand how systems like apartheid came about and how it may disappear. [00:23:10]
Most important of all, they expected the best of us. They were not patronizing. They thought we were capable of major achievements. Janis one day said to me, you should apply for a Fulbright Scholarship. She changed my life. I was in prison in 1976. A year later, I found myself in Rio de Janeiro on the day Elvis Presley died, which was August the 16th, 1977, and a week after that in New York, and a week after that in Madison, Wisconsin, to start a graduate program in sociology. I graduated with a PhD in 1982, and that Fulbright Scholarship completely changed my life. [00:23:54]