Special Hearings — Prison Hearings — 1997-07-21

DR BORAINE: I call Mrs Jean Middleton please.  Mrs Middleton thank you very much for coming, you're very welcome.  You've had to wait a little while and it's nervous in waiting but your turn has now come and in a moment I'm going to ask Mrs Seroke to assist you but before that would you please stand for the taking of the oath.

UNKNOWN: I'll affirm.

DR BORAINE: Thank you.

UNKNOWN: (sworn states)

DR BORAINE: Thank you very much, please be seated.  Mrs Seroke?

MRS SEROKE: Good day Jean.

UNKNOWN: Good day.

MRS SEROKE: You're going to tell us about your experience from 1964 and you say in your statement you were accused number seven in a trial which was known as the trial of Braam Fischer and fourteen others.

UNKNOWN: That's correct.

MRS SEROKE: Could you tell us about that trial and what you were charged with and so on.

UNKNOWN: Well I joined the Communist Party in the early 60's as it seemed to be the most effective form of protest at that time but we protested against Government policy, we gave out pamphlets and leaflets illegally of course, we put up illegal slogans and eventually we were arrested and detained and charged and brought to trial about the end of 1964.  That was the trial of Braam Fischer and fourteen others.
 In April after we'd been in custody for nearly a year, we were sentenced.  We received sentences between one and five years, I got three.  During the trial we were being held here at The Fort, the men in the men's section and the woman down the hill in the women's section.  I have to mention that there was a married couple being held and they were not able to visit each other all that time, they were told that there wasn't the staff available to provide a guard.  
 When we were eventually sentenced, the men were taken to Pretoria and the women were taken to Barbeton and it seems that at that time they were setting up a kind of centre for White women political prisoners at Barbeton.  It's Barbeton I'm really going to talk about because that's where I really spent my sentence and it has since become notorious as you know but then we didn't know much about it.  Subsequently they started keeping women prisoners on their own in small isolated groups in different jails but at this time they had the policy of having a centre and there were only eleven White women political prisoners in the three years that I was there, coming and going including the one's from our trial, never more than nine at a time.  It was very hard you know, such a small group and we were kept very isolated.  
 The section we were in consisted of a large central room, very bare with a table and chairs to eat at and concrete sinks for washing clothes in and we did wash clothes, I'll come to that.  There were two larger cells capable of holding three at a pinch and three very, very tiny single cells and a courtyard with a washing line and a patch of grass.  The traumatic thing, the worst thing was that we were forbidden to talk to each other and none of us felt that we had the strength to put up with being put onto the three meals for days on end so we didn't talk to each other.  It was difficult if you were in a single cell, it was like being back in solitary. This was where we spent our sentences, in this space I have described to you.  
 Our work the washing, the ironing, the darning was brought to us, we didn't go out to it.  Most of the time the furtherest we went was down the corridor maybe ten yards at the most, to the office to speak to the Matron in charge or to speak to Brigadier Pretorious who was in charge of the jail or to see our visitors.  The only times we went further than that was for the yearly visits to a dentist which we paid the fees for out of our own money.  We were kept very strictly isolated from other prisoners.  All the other women in the jail seemed to be Black common-law prisoners who we only saw when they brought the washing to the door for us to wash or the ironing or the darning or when they brought our food.  We certainly were not allowed to greet them although we did so illegally sometimes.
 We were also isolated from the rest of the world, I mean other ex-prisoners speaking before me have described the special conditions that ... for political prisoners, the D category where you started with one visit and one letter every six months.  What happened to us of course happened to all political prisoners and this was made worse by of course the visiting, letters would be heavily censored, news, you couldn't describe prison conditions.  It was very difficult to talk to people really.  This was a common experience of political prisoners.
 What was unusual in Barbeton was that it was so far away, it wasn't close to Cape Town, it's not close to Johannesburg, it's not close to Pretoria, it was very, very difficult for our visitors to come and see us.  They came but we didn't get visits at all except from the ICRC, The International Committee of the Red Cross who came once.  We didn't get visits from the people who generally made it their business to visit political prisoners, lawyers, MP's, they didn't come.  We knew that prison regulations were being broken in our case, of course they were but anyway we asked for a copy of them and we were given a two page document of what was supposed to be the prison regulations that applied to us.  
 When you speak about Barbeton, what you really have to speak about is the brutality of the place which we didn't experience personally, we experienced this harsh isolation.  Sometimes it was penetrated by what we could hear, the way people in other sections were being treated, you know the way the wardresses spoke to them, in a kind of screaming rudeness, contemptuous rudeness.  They never spoke in a normal voice, only in a scream.  Through a window we used to see women, Black women prisoners carrying things sometimes.  However fast they tried to run, the wardresses would urge them on by whipping them with those long leather straps attached to their keys and sometimes there would be a baby on a woman's back so the baby got whipped.  
 Worst of all were the shirts we used to wash, those came from the men's jail, they used to come in every Monday and at least one shirt and one pair of shorts every week and they only got one clean shirt a week and they did very hard work it seemed in a hot climate, would not be stained with blood but caked with blood from clogging and that sulphur ointment, caked.  It was a very cruel place and of course the Commanding Officer Brigadier Pretorious was responsible for that.
 Worst of all was, I've just got one more story I want to tell you, one day we heard a shot down in the sisal fields and the wardress told us that a prisoner had been shot dead and she said, this was after lunch and she'd come back, she said it's all right we're going to say he was trying to escape.  This was Brigadier Pretorious again who boasted to one of our visitors about how we broke prisoners in the sisal fields.  It was a very evil place and I hope it has changed but I fear it may not have.  That's all I want to say at the moment.

MRS SEROKE: Jean you mentioned that during the trial you were kept here in The Fort.

UNKNOWN: Yes.

MRS SEROKE: How do you feel now that you have revisited The Fort even though it's under different circumstances.

UNKNOWN: Okay.  It was never the worst of the jails, I'm talking now of the White women's section, it had a relaxed air something a little ramshackled about it but it wasn't anything like Barbeton.  It's a long time ago now so I don't feel very traumatized by any revisiting now.

MRS SEROKE: You also mentioned that you were fourteen people who were charged and that the men and the women were separated, how did you feel about being in the same movement, a Communist Party but when you go to trials and so on you are separated from the men?