Special Hearings — Prison Hearings — 1997-07-22

CHAIRPERSON: We have been told that Michael Kabine who was supposed to give us light about Charles Kabine who also died in detention, has not come and so we are going to break up for lunch, so that Harold Strachan and Benjamin Pogrund could be the next witnesses soon after lunch.  But we will not take an hour for lunch, we are just going to give you half an hour or Hugh says 45 minutes.
 I was kinder, any way, both Dumisa and Hugh feel that it should be 45 minutes, so I have been outvoted, so indeed it will be 45 minutes.  We will be back here at quarter to two.
COMMISSION ADJOURNS FOR LUNCH - ON RESUMPTION

CHAIRPERSON: We call upon Harold Strachan to come forward.  We will be grateful if you will take your seats now, because we are ready to start.  Have a seat Harold for a few seconds, until we get absolute silence.
 Thank you.  Harold, I would like you to stand to either take the oath or the affirmation.

HAROLD STRACHAN: The affirmation.

HAROLD STRACHAN: (affirmed)

CHAIRPERSON: Hugh Lewin is going to lead the interview.

MR LEWIN: Thank you very much Madam Chair.  There is actually a connection between what Harold Strachan will be talking about this afternoon and this prison which goes back to 1950, I think it was, when Drum magazine in one of its famous reports by Henry Khumalo published a stolen photograph.  It was a photograph taken from, as I remember it, one of the blocks of flats in Hillbrow onto one of the yards at the Fort, where Black prisoners were dancing a "towsa" and Drum magazine published the photograph of the conditions at the time which led to the then State President walking into the then all White parliament with a cat-o-nine tails and holding this up and saying, holding that and the photograph up and saying that because of this, we needed to make sure that the press did not get its filthy paws on what was happening on prisons.
 And as a result of that, the 1950's Prisons' Act was introduced which made it a crime to publish for newspapers to publish, reports about what was happening in prison, putting the onus on the Editors to prove that what they were saying, was correct.  As a result of that, there was no reporting at all on conditions in prisons for at least 15 years and what then happened was that in 1965, Harold Strachan was released from three years of imprisonment.
 He was one of the luckier of the early political prisoners, because he got sentenced before the Sabotage Act came in with a minimum five year sentence.  But he came out of prison and together with the Rand Daily Mail, published a series of articles which are in fact, some of which are printed on the, or posted or the board outside.
 A series of articles about conditions.  Harold, what we would like to hear about today, is not so much about your first three years, but actually what happened thereafter when those, how you came to publish those articles and specifically what the Prisons' Department did, thank you.

HAROLD STRACHAN: I would have to touch briefly on the first stretch to set some sort of background.  Let me correct you, I didn't get three years because the Sabotage Act wasn't in the book, it is because nobody knew what the hell was going on in PE, they couldn't imagine anything like MK was in existence.
 But if I had been sentenced two years later, I would have been with Madiba and Dennis Goldberg with life, because I was in the same complot as they were.  In any way, look the point is this, when I went to prison first, I didn't expect special treatment or special consideration as a political prisoner, a man of conscience.
 I think in any country, if you get sentenced for conspiring because of explosions in a public place, you can expect to go to prison as a criminal and have a fairly hard time, and that was what I was prepared to do.  In PE before leaving for Pretoria, I spent six weeks with some pretty brutal and experienced and callous prisoners from Pretoria Central who were going to do their second indeterminate and they described to me what the place was like.
 So I was prepared for it, but when I got there, I did get special treatment as a political prisoner.  I got put into solitary confinement for eleven months straight.  And that cell, I was looking a moment ago at the interpreter's box there, it was as big as that box plus a hand's breadth in either direction.
 It was as big as four squares on the floor here and I came out of that cell, 20 minutes a day to exercise indoors, total silence.  That was for eleven months that I didn't speak to anybody.  I had to felt mats to sleep on, small table, a mug of water and a pot, two blankets, and that was it.
 So that by the end of the eleven months, you know one handles that sort of thing all right, you just can crack your universe a bit you know, but I find I had a very serious reading disability, very similar to a stammer in speech and I have it to this day.
 You know, I get stuck when reading and I can't break past certain words, it is a sort of - it is like a stammer in speech and it is still with me and I don't know how that developed in solitary confinement, but it did.
 Any way, after eleven months I was allowed to come out and clean a long passage, about 50 metres long, 50 paces long, about eight paces wide, I used to clean that for three hours every morning with Ben Turok.
 But then after two months of that, the Security Branch arrived at Central and said they wanted me to give evidence against Mbeki and Goldberg, they wanted the rope for them.  And I refused.  They put me back into solitary for another two months.
 So the first three years, I spent 13 months in solitary in the cell that wide in both directions.  This tale of mine doesn't have the drama of the evidence we heard this morning, but it is a tale about nothing because that is what happens to you in solitary.  It is like I used to think that my life then was like a 400 page book with two ditto marks on each page and you had to take 24 hours to read each page.
 It was like that, in absolutely invariable routine.  No sort of essential stimulus whatsoever in any way, but in any case, I eventually got released.  But I conferred about this with Mr Turok who has a good political mind.  You know he had been in the struggle longer than I had been and he knew the craft of survival in it and he said look, when you get out, he said, they are going to trap you one way or another.
 They are somehow going to entice you into some sort of enterprise which will get you another stretch you see.  Now as I say, they hadn't known that MK was in existence, they couldn't imagine anything as bizarre as that happening under their noses in Port Elizabeth, so they were very vengeful indeed about this and Pen said they are going to trap you somehow and so I came out very cautiously and I could see that they were indeed doing this.
 I mean sometimes the attempts were very crude.  I remember feeding the pigeons outside the City Hall in Durban when this started up woman came and engaged in conversation, said she was an artist you know, visiting the  country on holiday and very lonely.  Very clearly you know the SP had told her that I had been an art lecturer and this was her ploy and she had a hotel room and would I like to come and talk about art.
 You know from that sort of clumsy attempt right up to having planted people like John Brooks, you know, who is a very swarthy young man and had insinuated his way in amongst the young people in the struggle at that time.  You know having various affairs with the girls and playing the guitar with all the lads, singing, you know and so forth.
 But he was clearly, clearly, clearly a cop.  You know, and you develop a nose for this.  And I have a good one for it, of sniffing out policemen and he was a cop.  It was just the way he looked at me and the way he spoke, you know.  And the fact that he couldn't conceal his values, you know.