Inkulturationsbemühungen um die deutschsprachige Kirchenmusik im 20. Jh. (German Edition)

Dergleichen ahnte schon Kant, wie Sie selber zeigen. J Das bleibt wahr. J Wie meinen Sie dieses harte Urteil? Aber ich kann nicht antworten. F Dies vor allem. Aber ich meine jetzt zuvor etwas anderes. J Wir stehen jedoch mitten in der Gefahr nicht nur zu laut vom Geheimnis zu reden, sondern sein Walten zu verfehlen.

Sein Gesprochenes kann freilich nie in die Form einer wissenschaftlichen Abhandlung eingehen J weil dadurch die Bewegung des hier verlangten Fragens zu leicht erstarrt. Schwerer wiegt ein anderes: J Dann verstehe ich Ihr Bedenken nicht. J Dann entschwindet ihr Wesen. J Darin bewegen wir uns ohne Zweifel. J Mir scheint, wir bewegen uns jetzt im Kreis. J Was ist dann, wenn es so ist? F Dann ereignet sich der Abschied von allem "Es ist". F Als die Ankunft des Gewesen. J Aber das Vergangene geht doch, ist gegangen, wie soll es kommen?

F Das Vergehen ist anderes als das Gewesen. J Wie sollen wir dieses denken? F und das Selbe bleibt wie die Botschaft He mentions that in Japanese they use mono and koto, where mono refers to things in there being while koto refers to what is happening. The world is the whole of what is happening, not of the things. Libraries are full of mono. Nishida himself practiced Zen and tried to systematize the eastern thought in terms of the western philosophy to overcome the separation between subjectivity and objectivity.

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Capurro himself has deepened his interest in Zen Buddhism and Japanese thought e. Capurro b, c and promoted friendships with Japanese thinkers. The interaction between them is expected to bear fruitful outcomes in the development of information ethics. I think that one of the attractive characteristics of mobile phones for boys and girls is that they provide them with means with which they can communicate among themselves without being disturbed by their parents or family members. The participants want to get connected all the time or they want to feel the potential connection with others by sending e-mails or by just keeping their mobile phones on Nishimura In my view, we need to create some sort of shared field among the participants in which various aspects of communication such as persuasion, transmission of information, greeting and so on can take place.

These utterances and facial expressions have nothing to do with the content or essence of the communication, but at the same time they are indispensable when communication itself occurs. We need a certain sort of meta-communication when we talk with each other or are engaged in interactive actions. Take for instance the following poem haiku by Matsuo Basho Of course, the phatic function is not dependent on speech in this case.

According to Nishimura, and I think so too, we are now facing serious confusions at the level of meta-communication. For example, we can't live alone, but we have to live by sacrificing others to live a better life, or as Fromm pointed out, we need freedom and on the other hand we fear freedom and escape from freedom Fromm We dislike too close friendships. We are facing a kind of confusion or collapse of meta-communication.

Japanese web-sites are full of blogs whose titles are: Mobile phones are a token of a need for easy meta-communication. In this sense, we Japanese face the situation which might be called phatic overload. This might be referred to as distorted phatic overload which is motivated by simple greed, in one way, and by a sense of poverty of communication or human relations, in another.

The intention of sending a message to a receiver is mostly represented as being the sender and the receiver originally separated from each other and connected by a medium. His concept of information as possible selections from a repertoire of physical symbols is the opposite to the ordinary meaning of information as communication of something new. The word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage.

In particular, information must not be confused with meaning. In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with meaning and the other of which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from the present viewpoint, as regards information. Shannon and Weaver , p. What is excluded is not only the shared world but also the moods in which human senders and receivers experience their common being-in-the-world itself. As Heidegger taught us, this emotional tonality is a pre-theoretical experience of embeddedness that precedes the separation between subject and object. This is the reason why I think it is important to develop an intercultural philosophical angeletics in order to be aware of this Western bias as well as to describe different ontic angeletic situations and forms of sharing the world.

They always want to know whether they are in communication or not and they always feel constant anxiety about not keeping in contact with the outer world. The phatic function is closely related with the use of mobile phones, blogs or SMS that provide them us with moods or illusions enabling them us to have a feeling as if we were always in contact with the outer world. In my view, these remarks show typical cases of Japanese ways of understanding the world pre-ontologically and existentially. The following views reflect these ways of understanding the world, i.

Words, people, events, things and experiences are related to one another as a fluid or active process of interchange of articulation and non-articulation of things. The traditional Japanese self-understanding is based on a place of secret inner minds which seem to be sustained by traditional emotional sensitivity mono-no-ahare. People can share the meanings of this traditional emotional sensitivity, but the sadness coming from it is confined to each person.

This is a kind of fragile relationship between persons with fragile minds that underlies the desire to share the same meanings of existence in this world whilst at the same time keeping apart from each other. This is an interesting topic for intercultural angeletics. To put this another way, we might say that Japanese people live in mental situations leading them to constant pursuit of the meaning of life and human relations as well as to meta-communication or shared cultural, existential contexts determining their life, human relations and ways of communication.

This research, done in , is based on samples of Japanese university students. His interpretation of these data can lead to misunderstandings in some ways. I try to interpret the data as follows: Students with an orientation toward strong and constant friendship and with an orientation toward moderate, not strong but also not weak, i.

Do you have a cold? In order to understand some problems related with Japanese phatic communication and with intercultural angeletics, we should take into consideration, using this as an example, the Japanese orientation toward or the pursuit of the meaning of good communication, good human relations and good human living.

I discussed the meanings of Japanese blogs, Japanese popular songs, the Japanese sense of privacy as subject matter for communication via SMS or blogs in my papers Nakada , ; Nakada and Capurro What is exactly meant, from the point of view of angeletics, by the original connection between a sender and a receiver?

And as you know, his studies on aphasia and agnosia are strongly associated with Jakobson's studies on language and aphasia Merleau-Ponty The phatic function might be considered to be the only function that birds have in common with human beings. This is very interesting too. Then we human beings and other creatures would have 'the original connection' in the dimension of the phatic function!

But each function, understood as a basic mood, makes the world openness or ontological dimension, manifest in different ways, at least in the case of Dasein. According to Luhmann, these three dimensions constitute the concept of communication. In this model there is an original and recursive relation between sender and receiver. This means, if I understand you correctly, that the phatic function is an essential element of communication because it enables a distinction to be made within the process of communication itself each time when a selection of a meaning takes place.

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Is my understanding correct? Cybernetics has taught us that every receiver can turn into a sender. This relationship, called the transference phenomenon, takes place from both sides. We can distinguish roughly the following conceptions: I shall try to explain this issue later. Each interpretation is based on a process of message transmission. Which means that hermeneutics presupposes angeletics. Hermes is first and foremost a messenger, no less than an interpreter and translator. Of course, a philosophical angeletics is no less ambitious than twentieth century hermeneutic philosophy.

We should also make a distinction between an ontic or empirical science of messages and messengers, and a philosophical angeletics. As an empirical science, angeletics is not necessarily reduced to the phenomenon of human communication but can include also all kinds of messages and messengers in the natural sciences. Let me further explain what I understand by angeletic philosophy and, correspondingly, by a philosophical angeletics, using other Heideggerian themes, without going into a detailed textual analysis or exegesis of Heidegger. As Jean-Luc Nancy, following Heidegger, remarks, philosophy and particularly hermeneutics can be understood as the presentation of a message.

The task of thinking is of the kind of being a messenger Nancy , ; Capurro This can be expressed in simple terms by saying that we human beings are finite beings and are aware of our givenness as well. Sheehan It is in original unity and difference with its Here. The message is the world. Dasein announces its facticity with the phatic dialogical! Humans as the Here of Being are messengers of Being, letting beings be what they are. The messenger must already come from the message.

But he must also already have gone toward it. Heidegger , , my translation RC. It is the opposite of the kind of messengers we call ambassadors Botschafter. There is an original unity and difference between Being and Dasein beyond or prior to any ontic separation of sender, message, messenger and receiver.

I think that today this double-bind casting of Being is done from a perspective of the digital. Loneliness and anxiety are moods through which, as Heidegger taught us, we discover the truth, that is to say, the finitude of being-in-the-world-with-others. We receive and pass on — and sometimes try to bypass — the message of Being because we are originally the Here of its disclosure. Although we mostly live immersed in the given openness of everyday existence, exchanging messages and maintaining communication through the phatic function, we have the potentiality to grasp a given historical disclosure of Being as a possible one, that is to say, to change its truth.

An example of this at the level of an ontic region is the so-called paradigm change in science where the pre-ontological messages facts that are supposed to prove or falsify a theory are re-interpreted when the theory, with all its biases, pre-conceptions and pre-suppositions, its instruments, institutions, traditions, etc. This opens the debate as to which are the ethical criteria for making a distinction between a messenger of Being and its opposite a charlatan , with all degrees in between. One important criterion for this difficult ethical task that is always endangered by manipulation and self-deception is whether the messenger maintains critically the openness of Being or proclaims an absolute truth.

Another criterion is whether other messengers also remain critical with regard to the alternative casting of Being as passed on to them, or whether they develop from there, say, a political ideology, a mere worldview or a theoretical dogma I thank Michael Eldred for an enlightening e-mail exchange on this issue. I've struggled with the problem why a lot of people are influenced by fiction or the imaginative representation of the mass media, even though they know the difference between the reality facts and the fictions copies of reality.

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This problem can't be solved if we think that facts or messages of some facts are the first original and the mediated portrayal news, dramas are the copies of the first-hand realities. And now I know that we have to think about the presupposition that the message of Being is first and the human messenger is second. This is my personal understanding. Now, I feel that we are close to the core questions of mediated and aesthetic expressions as well as of communication itself.

I wonder how we as messengers can send this kind of discussion to a broader range of possible receivers. I wonder also how we can relate this kind of discussion to the problems of information ethics and robo-ethics in an academic or theoretical as well as in a practical way in order to address difficult matters such as youth's wrong-doings as an expression of the loss of identity, or the loss of sense of fundamental relations between human beings, the poverty of meaning in our minds and so on.

I am also thinking about comparing the phatic function in different cultures. Some of my graduate students come from various countries. Hideo Kobayashi says that if we try to make good use of active wisdom, we have to get rid of selfishness. This means that the interpretation of some poems or novels can't be separated from the imaginative relations between authors and readers.

Narumi and Imai explain the results of this research thus: I remember having heard a story about nodding robots. Even nodding robots enable people to communicate more easily, for example, when speaking on the telephone, even if the nodding robots are just showing fake agreement. It is strange that some autistic patients can communicate with robots more easily than with human beings in some cases, according to studies on human-robot-interaction Feil-Seifer and Mataric In my view, we can explain these phenomena in such a way.

Human communication consists of different levels and in many cases patients with, for example, agnosia, autism or schizophrenia,have difficulty dealing with or understanding information or meanings at the meta-level of communication. I gained this insight from Bin Kimura Kimura and Masakazu Yamazaki Yamazaki ; fake communication with robots might enable patients to deal with the meanings at the meta-level more easily because this sort of communication has a simple structure. So in this sense, the distinction between fake and real is not so important.

Hideo Kobayashi did not study Heidegger or Gadamer but he knew that these questions regarding the relations between texts and readers are important. From this perspective, Socrates is not a sender but a messenger of ideas that come to him from beyond. In the middle of the tale we read about Princess Asagao, daughter of Prince Momozono, brother of the Emperor, who has been courted in vain by Prince Genji, her cousin, from his seventeenth year onward.

Genji is now thirty-three years old. In Chapter 20 Murasaki Shikibu tells the story of the problematic relationship between Genji and Asagao. At the beginning of Chapter 21 she writes: From Genji came a note in which he said: Moved by all that was going on around her she replied: Lady Asagao expressed great displeasure at this lavishness and, if the presents had been accompanied by letters or poems of at all a familiar or impertinent kind, she would at once have put a stop to these attentions.

But for a year past there had been nothing in his conduct to complain of. From time to time he came to the house and enquired after her, but always quite openly. His letters were frequent and affectionate, but he took no liberties, and what nowadays troubled her chiefly was the difficulty of inventing anything to say in reply. Murasaki Shikibu , Princess Asagao is in trouble. Should she answer or not? Should she continue a formal and, at least for her, meaningless phatic communication? But, of course, it is Murasaki Shikibu herself who gives such an answer by writing this story.

This connection between ethics and aesthetics seems to be characteristic of Japanese culture to the present day. The irresistible amorist is a pessimist at heart, weighed down by a sense of misfortune, by the weight of an unhappy karma. At the age of thirty we find him haunted by the impermanence of worldly things, and on the point of embracing a monastic life. Throughout the story, even in its saddest episodes, there runs a thread of delight in beauty.

All the love talk is interspersed with enjoyment of colour, shape, and perfume, and a continual exchange of poetic messages. In this sense, we can say that the Here of Being or the structure of a culture is at best understood if it is conceived and lived as a place where messages pass through instead of being blocked.

This is one of the lessons of Chinese Taoism. One is the level of fixed moral rules and the other one is chaos, where such rules are invisible and can be violated Yamaguchi In his pursuit of love affairs, he violates, on the one hand, fixed mores and, on the other, through the connection between ethics and aesthetics, his life reproduces the cultural norms. We are very close to the core of problems from which our mutual understanding and some misunderstanding arose. I think that our dialogue itself is a realization of an angeletic relationship and shows the importance of intercultural angeletics.

Grundriss der Medizin und der Psychologie.

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Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Frankfurt am Main Orig.: Das System an der Geschichte aufgezeigt. The Digital Cast of Being. Frankfurt am Main Extended online edition Robot-associated therapy for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Cambridge MA , pp. Hito to hito to no aida.

German translation by E. Zwischen Mensch und Mensch. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Livre VII, Paris The Tale of Genji Transl. Das Vergessen der Philosophie. Wien Nakada, Makoto: In Maria Botis Ed. Nakada, Makoto and Capurro, Rafael: A contribution to Intercultural Information Ethics.

Nihon-bunnka ni okeru aku to tsumi. Narumi, Mariko and Imai, Michita: Human-Robot Interaction with Directed Dialogue. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The mathematical theory of communication. A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research. It is often also translated as "humanity towards others", but is often used in a more philosophical sense to mean "the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity".

However, this view is challenged and contextualized by Christian B. The society is still active at the beginning of the 21st century, however, now it plays only a ceremonial role. Members of the Ekpe society are said to act as messengers of the ancestors ikan. The economics of the society is based on paying tribute to the village ancestors. Only males can join, boys being initiated about the age of puberty. Members are bound by oath of secrecy, and fees on entrance are payable.

The Ekpe-men are ranked in seven or nine grades, for promotion to each of which fresh initiation ceremonies, fees and oaths are necessary. The society combines a kind of freemasonry with political and lawenforcing aims. For instance any member wronged in an Ekpe district, that is one dominated by the society, has only to address an Ekpe-man or beat the Ekpe drum in the Ekpe-house, or blow Ekpe as it is called, i.

Ekpe members always wear masks when performing their police duties, and although individuals may nonetheless be recognized, fear of retribution from the ikan stops people from accusing those members who may overstep their limits. Formerly the society earned a bad reputation due to what the British viewed as the barbarous customs that were intermingled with its rites.

At least in the past, very large sums, sometimes more than a thousand pounds, were paid to attain these upper levels. The trade-off is that the Amama often control the majority of the community wealth. The Amama often appropriate hundreds of acres of palm trees for their own use and, with the profits they earn, ensure that their sons achieve comparable rank, which has the effect of limiting access to economic gain for other members of the community.

The Ekpe society requires that its initiates sponsor feasts for the town, which foster the appearance of the redistribution of wealth by providing the poor with food and drink. The Ekpe-house, an oblong building like the nave of a church, usually stands in the middle of the villages. The walls are of clay elaborately painted inside and ornamented with clay figures in relief. Inside are wooden images to which reverence is paid. At Ekpe festivals masked dancers perform.

Some of the older masks show horns and filed teeth. Non initiates and women are not allowed to come in contact with the masked dancers. References "Art and Life in Africa: Eket Information" University of Iowa. As the religion has spread around the world, the name of this Orisha has varied in different locations, but the beliefs remain similar. Eshu is known as the "Father who gave birth to Ogboni", and is also thought to be agile and always willing to rise to a challenge. The name of Eshu varies around the world: Exu is known by various forms and names in Afro-Brazilian religions.

It is, in general, made of rough clay or a simple mound of red clay. They are similar to those found in Nigeria. Ritual foods offered to Exu include palm oil; beans; corn, either in the form of cornmeal or popcorn; farofa, a manioc flour. Four-legged male birds and other animals are offered as sacrifice to Exu. He appears as a bawdy trickster to foil the colonialist Prospero in Act 3, Scene 3. Names and worship of Esu. Retrieved 1 August The Spirit of the Odu.

The Trickster in West Africa: University of California Press. Translated by Richard Miller. He is the messenger of Olofi. He differs somewhat from Exu, who in this case is seen as his brother, by having dangerous and less aggressive characteristics. In Afro-Brazilian religion Elegbara is one of the titles of Exu. Not much has been published on the role that African philosophy can play in thinking about the challenges arising from the impact of ICT on African societies and cultures.

1. Alltag eben... Geschichten von der Liebe (German Edition)?
2. Bankenwerbung in der Finanzkrise (German Edition)?
3. Dietro le porte che non aprirai (Italian Edition).

Most research on ICT from an ethical perspective takes its departure from Western philosophy. Let us review very briefly some recent works on African philosophy that are relevant in a negative or positive sense to the subject of this conference. The terms '"information" and "communication" are absent, not even listed in the index. I explicitly acknowledge modern reason without assuming that its manifestations are inviolable, particularly when they serve the purposes of colonialization.

I locate ethical discourse between the particular and the universal. My aim, following the Kantian tradition, is universality, but I am aware, with Aristotle, that moral and political utterances are contingent, subject to different interpretations and applications based on economic interests and power structures. We are all equal, and we are all different. It consists of the principles of sharing and caring for one another.

Following this analysis we can ask: What is the relation between community and privacy in African information society? What kind of questions do African people ask about the effects of information and communication technology in their everyday lives? Olinger, Johannes Britz and M. The South African government will attempt to draft a Data Privacy Bill and strike an appropriate balance within the context of African values and an African worldview.

The task of such an analysis would be to recognize the uniqueness of African perspectives as well as commonalities with other cultures and their theoretical expressions. This analysis could lead to an interpretation of ICT within an African horizon and correspondingly to possible vistas for information policy makers, responsible community leaders and, of course, for African institutions. Both Britz and Peter John Lor, former Chief executive of the National Library of South Africa, think that the present north-south flow of information should be complemented by a south-north flow in order to enhance mutual understanding.

Although Africa is still far from a true knowledge society, there is hope of success on certain fronts, such as investment in human capital, stemming the flight of intellectual expertise, and the effective development and maintenance of IT infrastructure Britz et al. This should include leadership, followers, agree-upon principles and values as well as effective interaction among all these elements.

A value-based reorientation implies personal awareness, an understanding of information, effective interactions between leaders and their communities without limitations of time and space, and mutual confidence in representative leadership. There is no such thing as a morally neutral technology. This is not to say just that technologies can be used and misused, but to express the deeper insight that all technologies create new ways of being. They influence our relation with one another, they shape, in a more or less radical way, our institutions, our economies, and our moral values.

This is why we should focus on information technology primarily from an ethical perspective. It is up to the African people and their leaders to question how to transform their lives by these technologies. African educational and research institutions should also reflect critically on these issues. The space of knowledge as a space of freedom is not, as Jollife rightly remarks, an abstract ideal. It has a history that limits its possibilities. It is a space of rules and traditions of specific societies, in dialogue with their foundational myths and utopian aspirations.

We are morally responsible not only for our deeds but for our dreams. Information ethics offers an open space to retrieve and debate these information and communication myths and utopias. The main moral responsibility of African academics is to enrich African identities by retrieving and re-creating African information and communication traditions. Cultural memory must be re-shaped again and again to build the core of a humane society. This means no more and no less than basing morality on memory and communication, thereby establishing information ethics at its core.

It is related to our myths and to our dreams. But not for your dreams! The Egyptian god Thot is a symbol of cultural memory as a social task. He is the god of wisdom and writing as well as messenger of the gods, particularly of the sun god Re, and is associated with the goddess Maat, the personification of justice. I think that retrieving the African cultural memory with regard to information and communication norms and traditions is the main information challenge for African information ethics.

It should recognize the different strategies of social inclusion and exclusion in the history of African societies, including traumatic experiences such as slavery and apartheid. Since the emergence of the Internet, this challenge is discussed under the heading of the digital divide. But African information ethics implies much more than just the access and use of this medium. The problem is not a technical one, but one of social exclusion, manipulation, exploitation and annihilation of human beings. It is vital that thought about African information ethics be conducted from this broader perspective.

As readers will discover, this book has a long history. I began writing it clandestinely in during my imprisonment on Robben Island. Without the tireless labor of my old comrades Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada for reviving my memories, it is doubtful the manuscript would have been completed.

The copy of the manuscript which I kept with me was discovered by the authorities and confiscated. However, in addition to their unique calligraphic skills, my co-prisoners Mac Maharaj and Isu Chiba had ensured that the original manuscript safely reached its destination. I resumed work on it after my release from prison in Since my release, my schedule has been crowded with numerous duties and responsibilities, which have left me little free time for writing.

Fortunately, I have had the assistance of dedicated colleagues, friends, and professionals who have helped me complete my work at last, and to whom I would like to express my appreciation. I am deeply grateful to Richard Stengel who collaborated with me in the creation of this book, providing invaluable assistance in editing and revising the first parts and in the writing of the latter parts. I recall with fondness our early morning walks in the Transkei and the many hours of interviews at Shell House in Johannesburg and my home in Houghton.

A special tribute is owed to Mary Pfaff who assisted Richard in his work. I want to thank especially my comrade Ahmed Kathrada for the long hours spent revising, correcting, and giving accuracy to the story. Many thanks to my ANC office staff, who patiently dealt with the logistics of the making of this book, but in particular to Barbara Masekela for her efficient coordination.

Likewise, Iqbal Meer has devoted many hours to watching over the business aspects of the book. I am grateful to my editor, William Phillips of Little, Brown, who has guided this project from early on, and edited the text, and to his colleagues Jordan Pavlin, Steve Schneider, Mike Mattil, and Donna Peterson. I would also like to thank Professor Gail Gerhart for her factual review of the manuscript. The only rivalry between different clans or tribes in our small world at Qunu was that between the Xhosas and the amaMfengu, a small number of whom lived in our village.

AmaMfengu, who were not originally Xhosa-speakers, were refugees from the iMfecane and were forced to do jobs that no other African would do. They worked on white farms and in white businesses, something that was looked down upon by the more established Xhosa tribes. When I was a boy, amaMfengu were the most advanced section of the community and furnished our clergymen, policemen, teachers, clerks, and interpreters. They were also amongst the first to become Christians, to build better houses, and to use scientific methods of agriculture, and they were wealthier than their Xhosa compatriots.

There still existed some hostility toward amaMfengu, but in retrospect, I would attribute this more to jealousy than tribal animosity. This local form of tribalism that I observed as a boy was relatively harmless. At that stage, I did not witness nor even suspect the violent tribal rivalries that would subsequently be promoted by the white rulers of South Africa. My father did not subscribe to local prejudice toward amaMfengu and befriended two amaMfengu brothers, George and Ben Mbekela. The brothers were an exception in Qunu: George, the older of the two, was a retired teacher and Ben was a police sergeant.

Despite the proselytizing of the Mbekela brothers, my father remained aloof from Christianity and instead reserved his own faith for the great spirit of the Xhosas, Qamata, the God of his fathers. My father was an unofficial priest and presided over ritual slaughtering of goats and calves and officiated at local traditional rites concerning planting, harvest, birth, marriage, initiation ceremonies, and funerals.

He did not need to be ordained, for the traditional religion of the Xhosas is characterized by a cosmic wholeness, so that there is little distinction between the sacred and the secular, between the natural and the supernatural. While the faith of the Mbekela brothers did not rub off on my father, it did inspire my mother, who became a Christian. In fact, Fanny was literally her Christian name, for she had been given it in church. It was due to the influence of the Mbekela brothers that I myself was baptized into the Methodist, or Wesleyan Church as it was then known, and sent to school.

The brothers would often see me playing or minding sheep and come over to talk to me. One day, George Mbekela paid a visit to my mother. But she did relay it to my father, who despite — or perhaps because of — his own lack of education immediately decided that his youngest son should go to school.

The schoolhouse consisted of a single room, with a Western-style roof, on the other side of the hill from Qunu. I was seven years old, and on the day before I was to begin, my father took me aside and told me that I must be dressed properly for school. Until that time, I, like all the other boys in Qunu, had worn only a blanket, which was wrapped around one shoulder and pinned at the waist. My father took a pair of his trousers and cut them at the knee. He told me to put them on, which I did, and they were roughly the correct length, although the waist was far too large. My father then took a piece of string and cinched the trousers at the waist.

On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education. The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior.

There was no such thing as African culture. Africans of my generation — and even today — generally have both an English and an African name. Whites were either unable or unwilling to pronounce an African name, and considered it uncivilized to have one. That day, Miss Mdingane told me that my new name was Nelson. Why she bestowed this particular name upon me I have no idea. Perhaps it had something to do with the great British sea captain Lord Nelson, but that would be only a guess.

My later notions of leadership were profoundly influenced by observing the regent and his court. I watched and learned from the tribal meetings that were regularly held at the Great Place. These were not scheduled, but were called as needed, and were held to discuss national matters such as a drought, the culling of cattle, policies ordered by the magistrate, or new laws decreed by the government.

All Thembus were free to come — and a great many did, on horseback or by foot. They were wise men who retained the knowledge of tribal history and custom in their heads and whose opinions carried great weight. Letters advising these chiefs and headmen of a meeting were dispatched from the regent, and soon the Great Place became alive with important visitors and travelers from all over Thembuland.

From that point on, he would not utter another word until the meeting was nearing its end. Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer. People spoke without interruption and the meetings lasted for many hours. The foundation of self-government was that all men were free to voice their opinions and equal in their value as citizens.

Women, I am afraid, were deemed second-class citizens. A great banquet was served during the day, and I often gave myself a bellyache by eating too much while listening to speaker after speaker. I noticed how some speakers rambled and never seemed to get to the point. I grasped how others came to the matter at hand directly, and who made a set of arguments succinctly and cogently. I observed how some speakers used emotion and dramatic language, and tried to move the audience with such techniques, while other speakers were sober and even, and shunned emotion.

At first, I was astonished by the vehemence — and candor — with which people criticized the regent. He was not above criticism — in fact, he was often the principal target of it. But no matter how flagrant the charge, the regent simply listened, not defending himself, showing no emotion at all. The meetings would continue until some kind of consensus was reached. They ended in unanimity or not at all. Unanimity, however, might be an agreement to disagree, to wait for a more propitious time to propose a solution.

Democracy meant all men were to be heard, and a decision was taken together as a people. Majority rule was a foreign notion. A minority was not to be crushed by a majority. Only at the end of the meeting, as the sun was setting, would the regent speak. His purpose was to sum up what had been said and form some consensus among the diverse opinions. But no conclusion was forced on people who disagreed. If no agreement could be reached, another meeting would be held. At the very end of the council, a praise-singer or poet would deliver a panegyric to the ancient kings, and a mixture of compliments to and satire on the present chiefs, and the audience, led by the regent, would roar with laughter.

As a leader, I have always followed the principles I first saw demonstrated by the regent at the Great Place. I have always endeavored to listen to what each and every person in a discussion had to say before venturing my own opinion. Oftentimes, my own opinion will simply represent a consensus of what I heard in the discussion. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind. It was at Mqhekezweni that I developed my interest in African history.

I learned of these men from the chiefs and headmen who came to the Great Place to settle disputes and try cases. Though not lawyers, these men presented cases and then adjudicated them. Some days, they would finish early and sit around telling stories. I hovered silently and listened. Their speech was formal and lofty, their manner slow and unhurried, and the traditional clicks of our language were long and dramatic.

At first, they shooed me away and told me I was too young to listen. Later they would beckon me to fetch fire or water for them, or to tell the women they wanted tea, and in those early months I was too busy running errands to follow their conversation. But, eventually, they permitted me to stay, and I discovered the great African patriots who fought against Western domination. My imagination was fired by the glory of these African warriors. The most ancient of the chiefs who regaled the gathered elders with ancient tales was Zwelibhangile Joyi, a son from the Great House of King Ngubengcuka.

Chief Joyi was so old that his wrinkled skin hung on him like a loose-fitting coat. His stories unfolded slowly and were often punctuated by a great wheezing cough, which would force him to stop for minutes at a time. Chief Joyi was the great authority on the history of the Thembus in large part because he had lived through so much of it.

But as grizzled as Chief Joyi often seemed, the decades fell off him when he spoke of the young impis, or warriors, in the army of King Ngangelizwe fighting the British. In pantomime, Chief Joyi would fling his spear and creep along the veld as he narrated the victories and defeats. When he first spoke of non-Xhosa warriors, I wondered why. I was like a boy who worships a local soccer hero and is not interested in a national soccer star with whom he has no connection. Only later was I moved by the broad sweep of African history, and the deeds of all African heroes regardless of tribe.

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Chief Joyi railed against the white man, who he believed had deliberately sundered the Xhosa tribe, dividing brother from brother. The white man had told the Thembus that their true chief was the great white queen across the ocean and that they were her subjects. But the white queen brought nothing but misery and perfidy to the black people, and if she was a chief she was an evil chief. Chief Joyi said that the African people lived in relative peace until the coming of the abelungu, the white people, who arrived from across the sea with fire-breathing weapons.

Once, he said, the Thembu, the Mpondo, the Xhosa, and the Zulu were all children of one father, and lived as brothers. The white man shattered the abantu, the fellowship, of the various tribes. The white man was hungry and greedy for land, and the black man shared the land with him as they shared the air and water; land was not for man to possess. I did not yet know that the real history of our country was not to be found in standard British textbooks, which claimed South Africa began with the landing of Jan Van Riebeeck at the Cape of Good Hope in It was from Chief Joyi that I began to discover that the history of the Bantuspeaking peoples began far to the north, in a country of lakes and green plains and valleys, and that slowly over the millennia we made our way down to the very tip of this great continent.

I was assisted by Mr. Festile, the induna at the Chamber of Mines, who was once again playing a fateful role in my life. On his own initiative he had decided to offer me free accommodation in the mining compound. Few spoke English, and the lingua franca was an amalgam of many tongues known as Fanagalo. There, I saw not only flare-ups of ethnic animosity, but the comity that was also possible among men of different backgrounds. Yet I was a fish out of water there. Instead of spending my days underground, I was studying or working in a law office where the only physical activity was running errands or putting files in a cabinet.

Because the WNLA was a way station for visiting chiefs, I had the privilege of meeting tribal leaders from all over southern Africa. I recall on one occasion meeting the queen regent of Basutoland, or what is now Lesotho , Mantsebo Moshweshwe. I asked them about Jongilizwe, and for an hour I seemed to be back in Thembuland as they told colorful tales about his early years. The queen took special notice of me and at one point addressed me directly, but she spoke in Sesotho, a language in which I knew few words.

Sesotho is the language of the Sotho people as well as the Tswana, a large number of whom live in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The question embarrassed and sobered me; it made me realize my parochialism and just how unprepared I was for the task of serving my people. I had unconsciously succumbed to the ethnic divisions fostered by the white government and I did not know how to speak to my own kith and kin. Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs.

I again realized that we were not different people with separate languages; we were one people, with different tongues. Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farmworkers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another. Since the turn of the century, Africans owed their educational opportunites primarily to the foreign churches and missions that created and sponsored schools.

Under the United Party, the syllabus for African secondary schools and white secondary schools was essentially the same. The mission schools provided Africans with Western-style English-language education, which I myself received. We were limited by lesser facilities but not by what we could read or think or dream. Yet, even before the Nationalists came to power, the disparities in funding tell a story of racist education. The government spent about six times as much per white student as per African student. Education was not compulsory for Africans and was free only in the primary grades.

Less than half of all African children of school age attended any school at all, and only a tiny number of Africans were graduated from high school. Even this amount of education proved distasteful to the Nationalists. The Afrikaner has always been unenthusiastic about education for Africans. To him it was simply a waste, for the African was inherently ignorant and lazy and no amount of education could remedy that.

The Afrikaner was traditionally hostile to Africans learning English, for English was a foreign tongue to the Afrikaner and the language of emancipation to us. One morning, several days after my meeting with Bram and Joel, we were taken to the head office. The head office was only about a quarter of a mile away and was a simple stone structure that resembled our own section. Once there, we were lined up to have our fingerprints taken, which was routine prison service business.

But while waiting, I noticed a warder with a camera. After our fingerprints had been taken, the chief warder ordered us to line up for photographs. I motioned to my colleagues not to move, and I addressed the warder: The warder was taken aback by my request and was unable to offer any explanation or produce anything in writing from the commissioner of prisons. He threatened to charge us if we did not consent to have our photographs taken, but I said that if there was no authorization, there would be no pictures, and that is where the matter remained.

As a rule, we objected to having our pictures taken in prison on the grounds that it is generally demeaning to be seen as a prisoner. But there was one photograph I did consent to, the only one I ever agreed to while on Robben Island. One morning, a few weeks later, the chief warder, instead of handing us hammers for our work in the courtyard, gave us each needles and thread and a pile of worn prison jerseys.

We were instructed to repair the garments, but we discovered that most of these jerseys were frayed beyond repair. This struck us as a curious task, and we wondered what had provoked the change. The commanding officer announced that the two visitors were a reporter and photographer from the Daily Telegraph in London. He related this as if visiting members of the international press were a regular diversion for us. Although these men were our first official visitors, we regarded them skeptically. Firstly, they were brought in under the auspices of the government, and second, we were aware that the Telegraph was a conservative newspaper unlikely to be sympathetic to our cause.

The two journalists walked slowly around the courtyard, surveying us. We kept our heads down concentrating on our work. The prison service regulations were explicit that each prisoner was permitted to speak only for himself. This was done to negate the power of organization and to neutralize our collective strength. We objected to this role, but made little headway.

We were not even permitted to use the word we when we made complaints. But during the first few years, when the authorities needed one prisoner to speak on behalf of others, that individual would be me. I talked to the reporter, whose name was Mr. Newman, for about twenty minutes, and was candid about both prison and the Rivonia Trial.

He was an agreeable fellow, and at the end of our talk, he said he would like the photographer to take my picture. I was reluctant, but in this case relented because I knew the photograph would only be published overseas, and might serve to help our cause if the article was even the least bit friendly. I told him I would agree provided Mr.

Sisulu could join me. The image shows the two of us talking in the courtyard about some matter that I can no longer remember. I never saw the article or heard anything about it. The reporters were barely out of sight when the warders removed the jerseys and gave us back our hammers. The men from the Telegraph were the first of a small stream of visitors during those early months. There were stories in the press about the inhuman conditions on the island, about how we were being assaulted and tortured.

These allegations embarrassed the government, and to combat them they brought in a string of outsiders meant to rebut these critical stories. We were briefly visited by a British lawyer who had argued for Namibian independence before the World Court , after which we were informed that a Mr. Hynning, a representative of the American Bar Association, would be coming to see us.

Americans were then a novelty in South Africa , and I was curious to meet a representative of so august a legal organization. On the day of Mr. The American arrived in the company of General Steyn, the commissioner of prisons, who rarely made appearances on the island. General Steyn was that unusual thing in the prison service, a polished and sophisticated man.

His suits were always of a fine quality and a fashionable cut. Yet General Steyn oppressed us by omission rather than commission. He basically turned a blind eye to what was happening on the island. His habitual absence emboldened the more brutal prison officials and gave them carte blanche to do whatever they wanted.

General Steyn nodded in my direction, and I stood up. In contrast to General Steyn, Mr. Hynning was a heavyset, unkempt man. I thanked him for visiting us and said we were honored by his presence. I then summarized our complaints, beginning with the central and most important one, that we were political prisoners, not criminals, and that we should be treated as such. I enumerated our grievances about the food, our living conditions, and the work detail.

But as I was speaking, Mr. Hynning kept interrupting me. When I made a point about the long hours doing mindless work, he declared that as prisoners we had to work and were probably lazy to boot. When I started to detail the problems with our cells, he interjected that the conditions in backward American prisons were far worse than Robben Island , which was a paradise by comparison. He added that we had been justly convicted and were lucky not to have received the death penalty, which we probably deserved. Hynning perspired a great deal and there were those among us who thought he was not altogether sober.

He spoke in what I assumed was a southern American accent, and had a curious habit of spitting when he talked, something none of us had ever seen before. Under the circumstances, it was difficult to keep tempers down. The men were angered by Mr. Normally, a visit of any kind lifted our spirits but the visit of Mr. Perhaps that is what the authorities wanted. To meet someone with so impressive an affiliation and so little understanding was depressing. Hynning finally just turned and walked away without so much as a good-bye. We were not sorry to see him go. Hynning for years afterward and many of the men imitated the way he spoke to comic effect.

We never heard about him again, and he certainly did not win any friends on Robben Island for the American Bar Association. In jail, all prisoners are classified by the authorities as one of four categories: A is the highest classification and confers the most privileges; D is the lowest and confers the least. The privileges affected by these classifications included visits and letters, studies, and the opportunity to buy groceries and incidentals — all of which are the lifeblood of any prisoner. It normally took years for a political prisoner to raise his status from D to C.

We disdained the classification system. My father then took a piece of string and cinched the trousers at the waist. On the first day of school, my teacher, Miss Mdingane, gave each of us an English name and said that from thenceforth that was the name we would answer to in school. This was the custom among Africans in those days and was undoubtedly due to the British bias of our education. The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior.

There was no such thing as African culture. Africans of my generation — and even today — generally have both an English and an African name. Whites were either unable or unwilling to pronounce an African name, and considered it uncivilized to have one.

That day, Miss Mdingane told me that my new name was Nelson. Why she bestowed this particular name upon me I have no idea. Perhaps it had something to do with the great British sea captain Lord Nelson, but that would be only a guess. My later notions of leadership were profoundly influenced by observing the regent and his court. I watched and learned from the tribal meetings that were regularly held at the Great Place. These were not scheduled, but were called as needed, and were held to discuss national matters such as a drought, the culling of cattle, policies ordered by the magistrate, or new laws decreed by the government.

All Thembus were free to come — and a great many did, on horseback or by foot. They were wise men who retained the knowledge of tribal history and custom in their heads and whose opinions carried great weight. Letters advising these chiefs and headmen of a meeting were dispatched from the regent, and soon the Great Place became alive with important visitors and travelers from all over Thembuland. From that point on, he would not utter another word until the meeting was nearing its end.

Everyone who wanted to speak did so.

It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer. People spoke without interruption and the meetings lasted for many hours. The foundation of self-government was that all men were free to voice their opinions and equal in their value as citizens. Women, I am afraid, were deemed second-class citizens. A great banquet was served during the day, and I often gave myself a bellyache by eating too much while listening to speaker after speaker.

I noticed how some speakers rambled and never seemed to get to the point. I grasped how others came to the matter at hand directly, and who made a set of arguments succinctly and cogently. I observed how some speakers used emotion and dramatic language, and tried to move the audience with such techniques, while other speakers were sober and even, and shunned emotion. At first, I was astonished by the vehemence — and candor — with which people criticized the regent.

He was not above criticism — in fact, he was often the principal target of it. But no matter how flagrant the charge, the regent simply listened, not defending himself, showing no emotion at all. The meetings would continue until some kind of consensus was reached. They ended in unanimity or not at all. Unanimity, however, might be an agreement to disagree, to wait for a more propitious time to propose a solution.

Democracy meant all men were to be heard, and a decision was taken together as a people. Majority rule was a foreign notion. A minority was not to be crushed by a majority. Only at the end of the meeting, as the sun was setting, would the regent speak. His purpose was to sum up what had been said and form some consensus among the diverse opinions.

But no conclusion was forced on people who disagreed. If no agreement could be reached, another meeting would be held. At the very end of the council, a praise-singer or poet would deliver a panegyric to the ancient kings, and a mixture of compliments to and satire on the present chiefs, and the audience, led by the regent, would roar with laughter.

As a leader, I have always followed the principles I first saw demonstrated by the regent at the Great Place. I have always endeavored to listen to what each and every person in a discussion had to say before venturing my own opinion. Oftentimes, my own opinion will simply represent a consensus of what I heard in the discussion.

He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind. It was at Mqhekezweni that I developed my interest in African history. I learned of these men from the chiefs and headmen who came to the Great Place to settle disputes and try cases. Though not lawyers, these men presented cases and then adjudicated them. Some days, they would finish early and sit around telling stories.

I hovered silently and listened. Their speech was formal and lofty, their manner slow and unhurried, and the traditional clicks of our language were long and dramatic. At first, they shooed me away and told me I was too young to listen. Later they would beckon me to fetch fire or water for them, or to tell the women they wanted tea, and in those early months I was too busy running errands to follow their conversation. But, eventually, they permitted me to stay, and I discovered the great African patriots who fought against Western domination. My imagination was fired by the glory of these African warriors.

The most ancient of the chiefs who regaled the gathered elders with ancient tales was Zwelibhangile Joyi, a son from the Great House of King Ngubengcuka. Chief Joyi was so old that his wrinkled skin hung on him like a loose-fitting coat. His stories unfolded slowly and were often punctuated by a great wheezing cough, which would force him to stop for minutes at a time. Chief Joyi was the great authority on the history of the Thembus in large part because he had lived through so much of it. But as grizzled as Chief Joyi often seemed, the decades fell off him when he spoke of the young impis, or warriors, in the army of King Ngangelizwe fighting the British.

In pantomime, Chief Joyi would fling his spear and creep along the veld as he narrated the victories and defeats. When he first spoke of non-Xhosa warriors, I wondered why. I was like a boy who worships a local soccer hero and is not interested in a national soccer star with whom he has no connection. Only later was I moved by the broad sweep of African history, and the deeds of all African heroes regardless of tribe.

Chief Joyi railed against the white man, who he believed had deliberately sundered the Xhosa tribe, dividing brother from brother. The white man had told the Thembus that their true chief was the great white queen across the ocean and that they were her subjects. But the white queen brought nothing but misery and perfidy to the black people, and if she was a chief she was an evil chief. Chief Joyi said that the African people lived in relative peace until the coming of the abelungu, the white people, who arrived from across the sea with fire-breathing weapons.

Once, he said, the Thembu, the Mpondo, the Xhosa, and the Zulu were all children of one father, and lived as brothers. The white man shattered the abantu, the fellowship, of the various tribes. The white man was hungry and greedy for land, and the black man shared the land with him as they shared the air and water; land was not for man to possess. I did not yet know that the real history of our country was not to be found in standard British textbooks, which claimed South Africa began with the landing of Jan Van Riebeeck at the Cape of Good Hope in It was from Chief Joyi that I began to discover that the history of the Bantuspeaking peoples began far to the north, in a country of lakes and green plains and valleys, and that slowly over the millennia we made our way down to the very tip of this great continent.

I was assisted by Mr. Festile, the induna at the Chamber of Mines, who was once again playing a fateful role in my life. On his own initiative he had decided to offer me free accommodation in the mining compound. Few spoke English, and the lingua franca was an amalgam of many tongues known as Fanagalo.

There, I saw not only flare-ups of ethnic animosity, but the comity that was also possible among men of different backgrounds. Yet I was a fish out of water there. Instead of spending my days underground, I was studying or working in a law office where the only physical activity was running errands or putting files in a cabinet. Because the WNLA was a way station for visiting chiefs, I had the privilege of meeting tribal leaders from all over southern Africa. I recall on one occasion meeting the queen regent of Basutoland, or what is now Lesotho , Mantsebo Moshweshwe.

I asked them about Jongilizwe, and for an hour I seemed to be back in Thembuland as they told colorful tales about his early years. The queen took special notice of me and at one point addressed me directly, but she spoke in Sesotho, a language in which I knew few words. Sesotho is the language of the Sotho people as well as the Tswana, a large number of whom live in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The question embarrassed and sobered me; it made me realize my parochialism and just how unprepared I was for the task of serving my people.

I had unconsciously succumbed to the ethnic divisions fostered by the white government and I did not know how to speak to my own kith and kin. Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs. I again realized that we were not different people with separate languages; we were one people, with different tongues. Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farmworkers can become the president of a great nation.

It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another. Since the turn of the century, Africans owed their educational opportunites primarily to the foreign churches and missions that created and sponsored schools. Under the United Party, the syllabus for African secondary schools and white secondary schools was essentially the same.

The mission schools provided Africans with Western-style English-language education, which I myself received. We were limited by lesser facilities but not by what we could read or think or dream. Yet, even before the Nationalists came to power, the disparities in funding tell a story of racist education. The government spent about six times as much per white student as per African student. Education was not compulsory for Africans and was free only in the primary grades. Less than half of all African children of school age attended any school at all, and only a tiny number of Africans were graduated from high school.

Even this amount of education proved distasteful to the Nationalists. The Afrikaner has always been unenthusiastic about education for Africans. To him it was simply a waste, for the African was inherently ignorant and lazy and no amount of education could remedy that. The Afrikaner was traditionally hostile to Africans learning English, for English was a foreign tongue to the Afrikaner and the language of emancipation to us.

One morning, several days after my meeting with Bram and Joel, we were taken to the head office. The head office was only about a quarter of a mile away and was a simple stone structure that resembled our own section. Once there, we were lined up to have our fingerprints taken, which was routine prison service business. But while waiting, I noticed a warder with a camera.

After our fingerprints had been taken, the chief warder ordered us to line up for photographs. I motioned to my colleagues not to move, and I addressed the warder: The warder was taken aback by my request and was unable to offer any explanation or produce anything in writing from the commissioner of prisons. He threatened to charge us if we did not consent to have our photographs taken, but I said that if there was no authorization, there would be no pictures, and that is where the matter remained.

As a rule, we objected to having our pictures taken in prison on the grounds that it is generally demeaning to be seen as a prisoner. But there was one photograph I did consent to, the only one I ever agreed to while on Robben Island. One morning, a few weeks later, the chief warder, instead of handing us hammers for our work in the courtyard, gave us each needles and thread and a pile of worn prison jerseys.

We were instructed to repair the garments, but we discovered that most of these jerseys were frayed beyond repair. This struck us as a curious task, and we wondered what had provoked the change. The commanding officer announced that the two visitors were a reporter and photographer from the Daily Telegraph in London. He related this as if visiting members of the international press were a regular diversion for us. Although these men were our first official visitors, we regarded them skeptically.

Firstly, they were brought in under the auspices of the government, and second, we were aware that the Telegraph was a conservative newspaper unlikely to be sympathetic to our cause. The two journalists walked slowly around the courtyard, surveying us. We kept our heads down concentrating on our work. The prison service regulations were explicit that each prisoner was permitted to speak only for himself.

This was done to negate the power of organization and to neutralize our collective strength. We objected to this role, but made little headway. We were not even permitted to use the word we when we made complaints. But during the first few years, when the authorities needed one prisoner to speak on behalf of others, that individual would be me. I talked to the reporter, whose name was Mr. Newman, for about twenty minutes, and was candid about both prison and the Rivonia Trial.

He was an agreeable fellow, and at the end of our talk, he said he would like the photographer to take my picture. I was reluctant, but in this case relented because I knew the photograph would only be published overseas, and might serve to help our cause if the article was even the least bit friendly. I told him I would agree provided Mr. Sisulu could join me. The image shows the two of us talking in the courtyard about some matter that I can no longer remember.

I never saw the article or heard anything about it. The reporters were barely out of sight when the warders removed the jerseys and gave us back our hammers. The men from the Telegraph were the first of a small stream of visitors during those early months. There were stories in the press about the inhuman conditions on the island, about how we were being assaulted and tortured. These allegations embarrassed the government, and to combat them they brought in a string of outsiders meant to rebut these critical stories.

We were briefly visited by a British lawyer who had argued for Namibian independence before the World Court , after which we were informed that a Mr. Hynning, a representative of the American Bar Association, would be coming to see us. Americans were then a novelty in South Africa , and I was curious to meet a representative of so august a legal organization. On the day of Mr. The American arrived in the company of General Steyn, the commissioner of prisons, who rarely made appearances on the island. General Steyn was that unusual thing in the prison service, a polished and sophisticated man.

His suits were always of a fine quality and a fashionable cut. Yet General Steyn oppressed us by omission rather than commission. He basically turned a blind eye to what was happening on the island. His habitual absence emboldened the more brutal prison officials and gave them carte blanche to do whatever they wanted. General Steyn nodded in my direction, and I stood up. In contrast to General Steyn, Mr. Hynning was a heavyset, unkempt man. I thanked him for visiting us and said we were honored by his presence. I then summarized our complaints, beginning with the central and most important one, that we were political prisoners, not criminals, and that we should be treated as such.

I enumerated our grievances about the food, our living conditions, and the work detail. But as I was speaking, Mr. Hynning kept interrupting me. When I made a point about the long hours doing mindless work, he declared that as prisoners we had to work and were probably lazy to boot. When I started to detail the problems with our cells, he interjected that the conditions in backward American prisons were far worse than Robben Island , which was a paradise by comparison. He added that we had been justly convicted and were lucky not to have received the death penalty, which we probably deserved.

Hynning perspired a great deal and there were those among us who thought he was not altogether sober. He spoke in what I assumed was a southern American accent, and had a curious habit of spitting when he talked, something none of us had ever seen before. Under the circumstances, it was difficult to keep tempers down. The men were angered by Mr. Normally, a visit of any kind lifted our spirits but the visit of Mr. Perhaps that is what the authorities wanted. To meet someone with so impressive an affiliation and so little understanding was depressing.

Hynning finally just turned and walked away without so much as a good-bye. We were not sorry to see him go. Hynning for years afterward and many of the men imitated the way he spoke to comic effect. We never heard about him again, and he certainly did not win any friends on Robben Island for the American Bar Association. In jail, all prisoners are classified by the authorities as one of four categories: A is the highest classification and confers the most privileges; D is the lowest and confers the least.

The privileges affected by these classifications included visits and letters, studies, and the opportunity to buy groceries and incidentals — all of which are the lifeblood of any prisoner. It normally took years for a political prisoner to raise his status from D to C. We disdained the classification system. It was corrupt and demeaning, another way of repressing prisoners in general and political prisoners in particular.

We demanded that all political prisoners be in one category. Although we criticized it, we could not ignore it: If you protested that, as a D Group prisoner, you could receive only one letter every six months, the authorities would say, Improve your behavior, become a C Group prisoner, and you will be able to receive two letters every six months. If you complained that you did not receive enough food, the authorities would remind you that if you were in A Group, you would be able to receive money orders from the outside and purchase extra food at the prison canteen.

Even a freedom fighter benefits from the ability to buy groceries and books. If you were sentenced to eight years, you would generally be classified as D for the first two years, C for the next two, B for the following two, and A for the last two. But the prison authorities wielded the classification system as a weapon against political prisoners, threatening to lower our hard-won classifications in order to control our behavior.

While I desired the privileges that came with higher classifications, I refused to compromise my conduct. Every six months, prisoners were called before the prison board to have their classifications evaluated. The board was meant to assess our behavior in terms of prison regulations, but we found that it preferred to act as a political tribunal rather than a mere evaluator of behavior.

During my first meeting with the board, the officials asked me questions about the ANC and my beliefs. Although this had nothing to do with the classification system, I was vain enough to answer and think that I might convert them to my beliefs. It was one of the few times we were treated as human beings, and I for one responded. Later I realized that this was simply a technique on the part of the authorities to glean information from us, and I had fallen for it.

Shortly afterward, we agreed among ourselves not to discuss politics with the prison board. As a D Group prisoner, I was entitled to have only one visitor, and to write and receive only one letter, every six months. I found this one of the most inhumane restrictions of the prison system. But it was one of the facts of prison life. This was a restriction we not only found irksome but racist. The African sense of immediate family is far different from that of the European or Westerner. Our family structures are larger and more inclusive; anyone who claims descent from a common ancestor is deemed part of the same family.

It is always harder to cope with the disasters and tragedies one imagines than with the reality, however grim or disagreeable. A letter with ill tidings was always preferable to no letter at all. But even this miserable restriction was abused by the authorities. The anticipation of mail was overwhelming. Mail call took place once a month, and sometimes six months would go by without a letter. To be allowed one letter in six months and then not to receive it is a great blow.

What has happened to my wife and children, to my mother and my sisters? When I did not receive a letter I felt as dry and barren as the Great Karroo desert. Often the authorities would withhold mail out of spite. It required all my self-discipline not to explode at such times. Afterward, I would protest through the proper channels, and sometimes get it.

When letters did arrive, they were cherished. A letter was like the summer rain that could make even the desert bloom. When I was handed a letter by the authorities, I would not rush forward and grab it as I felt like doing, but take it in a leisurely manner. Though I yearned to tear it open and read it on the spot, I would not give the authorities the satisfaction of seeing my eagerness, and I would return slowly to my cell as though I had many things to occupy me before opening a letter from my family.

During the first few months, I received one letter from Winnie, but it was so heavily censored that not much more than the salutation was left. They began to use razors to slice out whole paragraphs. Since most letters were written on both sides of a single piece of paper, the material on the other side would also be excised. They seemed to relish delivering letters in tatters.

The censorship delayed the delivery of mail because warders, some of whom were not proficient in English, might take as long as a month to censor a letter. The letters we wrote were censored as well; they were often as cut up as the letters we received. At the end of August, after I had been on the island less than three months, I was informed by the authorities that I would have a visitor the following day. They would not tell me who it was. Walter was informed that he, too, would have a visitor, and I suspected, I hoped, I wished — I believed — that it would be a visit from Winnie and Albertina.

From the moment Winnie learned we had been brought to the island, she had been trying to arrange a visit. As a banned person, Winnie had to receive a special dispensation from the minister of justice, for she was technically not permitted to communicate with me. Even with the help of the authorities, visiting Robben Island was not an easy proposition. Visits were a maximum of thirty minutes long, and political prisoners were not permitted contact visits, in which the visitor and prisoner were in the same room. Visits did not seem to be planned in advance by the authorities.

If a family member was able to plan a visit in advance, the authorities would sometimes deliberately delay issuing a permit until after the plane had departed. Some men who came from poor families did not see their wives for many years at a time, if at all. I knew of men who spent a decade or more on Robben Island without a single visit. The visiting room for noncontact visits was cramped and windowless. One sat in a chair and looked through the thick, smudged glass that had a few small holes drilled into it to permit conversation.

One had to talk very loudly to be heard. Later the authorities installed microphones and speakers in front of the glass, a marginal improvement. Winnie always dressed up for prison visits, and tried to wear something new and elegant. It was tremendously frustrating not to be able to touch my wife, to speak tenderly to her, to have a private moment together.

We had to conduct our relationship at a distance under the eyes of people we despised. I could see immediately that Winnie was under tremendous strain. Seeing me in such circumstances must have been trying. Just getting to the island itself was difficult, and added to that were the harsh rituals of the prison, the undoubted indignities of the warders, and the impersonality of the contact. Winnie, I later discovered, had recently received a second banning order and had been terminated from her job at the Child Welfare Office as a result.

Her office was searched by the police shortly before she was fired. The authorities were convinced that Winnie was in secret communication with me. Winnie loved her job as a social worker. It was the hands-on end of the struggle: The banning and harassment of my wife greatly troubled me: I could not look after her and the children, and the state was making it difficult for her to look after herself.

My powerlessness gnawed at me. Our conversation was awkward at first, and was not made easier by the presence of two warders standing directly behind her and three behind me. Their role was not only to monitor but to intimidate. Regulations dictated that conversation had to be in either English or Afrikaans — African languages were forbidden — and could involve family matters only.

Any line of talk that departed from the family and verged on the political might mean the abrupt termination of the visit. If one mentioned a name unfamiliar to the warders, they would interrupt the conversation, and ask who the person was and the nature of the relationship. This happened often, as the warders were generally unfamiliar with the variety and nature of African names.

But their ignorance also worked in our favor: That first visit was important, for I knew that Winnie was anxious about my health: I quickly informed her that I was fine and she could see that I was fit, though a bit thinner than before. She, too, was thinner, something I always attributed to stress. She was always dieting, and I was always telling her not to. It was impossible that half an hour had passed. But, in fact, he was right; visits always seemed to go by in the blink of an eye.

I always felt like lingering after Winnie left, just to retain the sense of her presence, but I would not let the warders see such emotion. As I walked back to the cell, I reviewed in my head what we had talked about. Over the next days, weeks, and months, I would return to that one visit again and again. I knew I would not be able to see my wife again for at least six months.

As it turned out, Winnie was not able to visit me for another two years. At weekends, during our first year on the island, we were kept inside our cells all day except for a half hour of exercise. One Saturday, after returning from exercise in the courtyard, I noticed that a warder had left a newspaper on the bench at the end of the corridor.

He had become rather friendly to us, and I assumed that he had not left the newspaper there by accident. Newspapers were more valuable to political prisoners than gold or diamonds, more hungered for than food or tobacco; they were the most precious contraband on Robben Island. News was the intellectual raw material of the struggle.

We were not allowed any news at all, and we craved it. Walter, even more than myself, seemed bereft without news. The authorities attempted to impose a complete blackout; they did not want us to learn anything that might raise our morale or reassure us that people on the outside were still thinking about us. We regarded it as our duty to keep ourselves current on the politics of the country, and we fought long and hard for the right to have newspapers. One of the most reliable ways to acquire papers was through bribery, and this was the only area where I tolerated what were often unethical means of obtaining information.

The warders always seemed to be short of money, and their poverty was our opportunity. When we did get hold of a paper, it was far too risky to pass around. Possession of a newspaper was a serious charge. Instead, one person would read the paper, usually Kathy or, later, Mac Maharaj. Kathy was in charge of communications, and he had thought of ingenious ways for us to pass information. Kathy would go through the paper and make cuttings of relevant stories, which were then secretly distributed to the rest of us.

Each of us would write out a summary of the story we were given; these summaries were then passed among us, and later smuggled to the general section. When the authorities were particularly vigilant, Kathy or Mac would write out his summary of the news and then destroy the paper, usually by tearing it into small pieces and placing it in his ballie, which the warders never inspected. When I noticed the newspaper lying on the bench, I quickly left my cell, walked to the end of the corridor, looked in both directions, and then plucked the newspaper off the bench and slipped it into my shirt.

Normally, I would have hidden the newspaper somewhere in my cell and taken it out only after bedtime. But like a child who eats his sweet before his main course, I was so eager for news that I opened the paper in my cell immediately. Suddenly, an officer and two other warders appeared and I did not even have time to slide the paper under my bed.

I was caught black-and-white-handed, so to speak. In this instance, the authorities were willing to call in an outside magistrate because they knew they had an open-and-shut case. I offered no defense, and was sentenced to three days in isolation and deprivation of meals. I do not think that I was set up by the warder who left the newspaper on the bench, though some assumed I had been. At the hearing, the authorities grilled me as to how I got the newspaper, and I refused to answer. The isolation cells were in our same complex, but in another wing.

Although just across the courtyard, they felt enormously distant. In isolation, one was deprived of company, exercise, and even food: Rice water is simply water in which rice has been boiled. By comparison, our normal ration of pap seemed like a feast. The first day in isolation was always the most painful. One grows accustomed to eating regularly and the body is not used to being deprived. I found that by the second day I had more or less adjusted to the absence of food, and the third passed without much craving at all. Such deprivation was not uncommon among Africans in everyday life.

I myself had gone without food for days at a time in my early years in Johannesburg. As I have already mentioned, I found solitary confinement the most forbidding aspect of prison life. Was that a dream or did it really happen? One begins to question everything. Did I make the right decision, was my sacrifice worth it? In solitary, there is no distraction from these haunting questions.

But the human body has an enormous capacity for adjusting to trying circumstances. Strong convictions are the secret of surviving deprivation; your spirit can be full even when your stomach is empty. In those early years, isolation became a habit. We were routinely charged for the smallest infractions and sentenced to isolation. A man might lose his meals for a sidelong glance or be sentenced for failing to stand when a warder entered the room. Some PAC prisoners, who often flouted the rules simply for the sake of doing so, spent a great deal of time in isolation.

The authorities believed that isolation was the cure for our defiance and rebelliousness. The second time I was charged and spent time in isolation occurred shortly after the first. As I have mentioned, we were having great difficulty making our complaints heard.

The remoteness of the prison made the authorities feel they could ignore us with impunity. They believed that if they turned a deaf ear to us, we would give up in frustration and the people on the outside would forget about us. One day we were working at the lime quarry when the commanding officer came to observe us, accompanied by a gentleman whom we at first did not recognize. He is not to be confused with the Aucamp of Pretoria Local, who looked after us during the Rivonia Trial. The two men stood at a distance, watching us. Aucamp was a short, heavyset fellow in a suit rather than a military uniform.

He normally came to the island on biannual inspections. On those occasions, we were ordered to stand at attention at the grille of our cells and hold up our prison cards as he walked by. I put down my pick and began to walk over to them. The warders immediately became alarmed and moved toward me. I knew that I was violating regulations, but I hoped the warders would be so surprised by the novelty of my action that they would do nothing to stop me. That proved to be the case.

No one called you. I continued to speak as the guards led me away. I was charged and, once again, I had no defense. The punishment this time was four days in isolation. There was a lesson in what I had done, a lesson I already knew but had disobeyed out of desperation. No one, least of all prison officials, ever likes to have his authority publicly challenged.

In order to respond to me, Aucamp would have had to humiliate his subordinate. Prison officials responded much better to private overtures. The best way to effect change on Robben Island was to attempt to influence officials privately rather than publicly. I was sometimes condemned for appearing to be too accommodating to prison officials, but I was willing to accept the criticism in exchange for the improvement. If you are cold and want an extra blanket, you might petition the minister of justice, but you will get no response.

I always tried to be decent to the warders in my section; hostility was self-defeating. There was no point in having a permanent enemy among the warders. It was ANC policy to try to educate all people, even our enemies: In general we treated the warders as they treated us. If a man was considerate, we were considerate in return. Not all of our warders were ogres. We noticed right from the start that there were some among them who believed in fairness.

Yet, being friendly with warders was not an easy proposition, for they generally found the idea of being courteous to a black man abhorrent. Because it was useful to have warders who were well disposed toward us, I often asked certain men to make overtures to selected warders. No one liked to take on such a job. We had one warder at the quarry who seemed particularly hostile to us.

This was troublesome, for at the quarry we would hold discussions among ourselves, and a warder who did not permit us to talk was a great hindrance. I asked a certain comrade to befriend this fellow so that he would not interrupt our talks. The warder was quite crude, but he soon began to relax a bit around this one prisoner. One day, the warder asked this comrade for his jacket so that he could lay it on the grass and sit on it. A few days later, we were having our lunch under the shed when this warder wandered over.

This presented us with a dilemma. On the one hand, he was treating us as animals to whom he could toss a bit of slop, and I felt it would undermine our dignity to take the sandwich. On the other hand, we were hungry, and to reject the gesture altogether would humiliate the warder we were trying to befriend. I could see that the comrade who had befriended the warder wanted the sandwich, and I nodded for him to take it.

The strategy worked, for this warder became less wary around us. He even began to ask questions about the ANC. He would have believed that we were terrorists and Communists who wanted to drive the white man into the sea. Having sympathetic warders facilitated one of our most vital tasks on Robben Island: We regarded it as our duty to stay in touch with our men in F and G, which was where the general prisoners were kept.

As politicians, we were just as intent on fortifying our organization in prison as we had been outside. Communication was essential if we were to coordinate our protests and complaints. Because of the greater numbers of prisoners coming and going in the general section, the men in F and G tended to have more recent information about not only what was happening in the movement, but about our friends and families.

Communication between sections was a serious violation of regulations. We found many effective ways around the ban. The men who delivered our drums of food were from the general section, and in the early months we managed to have whispered conversations with them in which we conveyed brief messages. We formed a clandestine communications committee, composed of Kathy, Mac Maharaj, Laloo Chiba, and several others, and their job was to organize all such practices.

One of the first techniques was engineered by Kathy and Mac, who had noticed that on our walks to the quarry, the warders often tossed away empty matchboxes. They began secretly collecting them, and Mac had the idea of constructing a false bottom to the box and placing in it a tiny written message. Laloo Chiba, who once trained as a tailor, wrote out minuscule coded messages that would be placed in the converted matchbox. Joe Gqabi, another MK soldier who was with us, would carry the matchboxes on our walks to the quarry and drop them at a strategic crossing where we knew the general prisoners would pass.

Through whispered conversations at food deliveries, we explained the plan. Designated prisoners from F and G would pick up the matchboxes on their walks, and we retrieved messages in the same fashion. It was far from perfect, and we could easily be foiled by something as simple as the rain. We soon evolved more efficient methods. We looked for moments when the warders were inattentive. One such time was during and after meals. We helped ourselves to our food, and we worked out a scheme whereby comrades from the general section who worked in the kitchen began placing letters and notes wrapped in plastic at the bottom of the food drums.

We sent return communication in a similar way, wrapping notes in the same plastic and placing them at the bottom of the mounds of dirty dishes that were routed back to the kitchen. We would do our best to create a mess, scattering food all over the plates. The warders even complained about the disarray, but never bothered to investigate. Our toilets and showers were adjacent to the isolation section.

Prisoners from the general section were often sentenced to isolation there and would use the same set of toilets we did, though at different times.

Mac devised a method of wrapping notes in plastic and then taping them inside the rim of the toilet bowl. We encouraged our political comrades in the general section to be charged and placed in isolation so that they could retrieve these notes and send replies. The warders never bothered to search there. In order not to have our notes read or understood by the authorities if they were found, we devised ways of writing that could not easily be seen or deciphered.

One way was to write messages with milk. The milk would dry almost immediately, and the paper would look blank. But the disinfectant we were given to clean our cells, when sprayed on the dried milk, made the writing reappear. Unfortunately, we did not regularly receive milk. After one of us was diagnosed with an ulcer, we used his. Another technique was to write in tiny, coded script on toilet paper.

The paper was so small and easily hidden that this became a popular way of smuggling out messages. When the authorities discovered a number of these communications, they took the extraordinary measure of rationing toilet paper. Govan was then ailing and not going to the quarry, and he was given the task of counting out eight squares of toilet paper for each prisoner per day.

But even with all these ingenious methods, one of the best ways was also the easiest: The island had one hospital, and it was difficult to segregate us from the general prisoners while we were there. Sometimes prisoners from the different sections even shared the same wards, and men from Section B and prisoners from F and G mingled and exchanged information about political organizations, strikes, go-slows, whatever the current prison issues were.

Communication with the outside world was accomplished in two ways: Prisoners who were leaving would smuggle out letters in their clothes or baggage. With outside visitors, the situation was even more dangerous, because the risks were also borne by the visitor. When lawyers visited us, warders were not permitted in the room and we would sometimes pass a letter to the lawyer to be taken out. Lawyers were not searched. In these meetings, we could also communicate by writing as we had during the Rivonia Trial. Through a plastic-wrapped note hidden in our food drums, we learned in July of that the men in the general section had embarked on a hunger strike to protest poor conditions.

The note was imprecise, and we did not know exactly when the strike had started or exactly what it was about. But we would support any strike of prisoners for whatever reason they were striking. Word was passed among us, and we resolved to initiate a sympathetic strike beginning with our next meal. A hunger strike consists of one thing: Because of the time lag in communications, the general prisoners probably did not learn of our participation for a day or so. But we knew that the news would hearten them. The authorities would be telling them that we were not participating in the strike, that we were gorging ourselves on gourmet meals.

This was standard operating procedure; in a crisis, the authorities inevitably started a disinformation campaign to play one section against the other. During the first day of our strike, we were served our normal rations and refused to take them. On the second day, we noticed that our portions were larger and a few more vegetables accompanied our pap. On the third day, juicy pieces of meat were served with supper.

By the fourth day, the porridge was glistening with fat, and great hunks of meat and colorful vegetables were steaming on top. The food was positively mouthwatering. The warders smiled when we passed up the food. The temptation was great, but we resisted, even though we were being driven especially hard at the quarry. We heard that in the main section, prisoners were collapsing and being taken away in wheelbarrows.

I was called to the Head Office for an interview with Colonel Wessels. Such sessions were delicate, as my fellow prisoners knew that the authorities would attempt to influence me to call off the strike. Wessels was a direct man and demanded to know why we were on a hunger strike. I explained that as political prisoners we saw protest to alter prison conditions as an extension of the anti-apartheid struggle.

I said that did not matter, that the men in F and G were our brothers and that our struggle was indivisible. He snorted, and dismissed me. The following day we learned of an extraordinary course of events: They were demanding better food and improved living conditions. The combination of the two strikes was too much for the authorities.

They settled with the warders and then, a day or two later, we learned the authorities had gone to the general section and asked for three representatives to negotiate changes. The general prisoners declared victory and called off the hunger strike. We followed suit a day later. That was the first and most successful of the hunger strikes on the island. As a form of protest, they did not have a high success rate and the rationale behind them always struck me as quixotic. In order for a hunger strike to succeed, the outside world must learn of it.

Otherwise, prisoners will simply starve themselves to death and no one will know. Smuggled-out information that we were on a hunger strike would elicit newspaper stories, which in turn would generate pressure from advocacy groups. The problem, particularly in the early years, was that it was next to impossible to alert people on the outside that we were waging a hunger strike inside. For me, hunger strikes were altogether too passive. We who were already suffering were threatening our health, even courting death.

I have always favored a more active, militant style of protest such as work strikes, go-slow strikes, or refusing to clean up; actions that punished the authorities, not ourselves. They wanted gravel and we produced no gravel. They wanted the prison yard clean and it was untidy. This kind of behavior distressed and exasperated them, whereas I think they secretly enjoyed watching us go hungry.

But when it came to a decision, I was often outvoted. My colleagues even jokingly accused me of not wanting to miss a meal. The proponents of hunger strikes argued that it was a traditionally accepted form of protest that had been waged all over the world by such prominent leaders as Mahatma Gandhi. Once the decision was taken, however, I would support it as wholeheartedly as any of its advocates.

In fact, during the strikes I was often in the position of remonstrating with some of my more wayward colleagues who did not want to abide by our agreement. I have served the struggle for many years. Comrades would sometimes eat on the sly. We knew this for a simple reason: Yet one morning you might see a fellow going to the toilet.

We had our own internal intelligence service because we knew that certain men were weak in this regard. In the midst of the July hunger strike I had my second visit from my wife. It was almost exactly two years after the first visit, and it nearly did not happen at all. Winnie had been under constant harassment since her first visit in Her sisters and brother were persecuted by the police, and the authorities attempted to forbid anyone in her family from living with her.

Some of this I learned at the time, much of it I found out later. Some of the nastiest items were known to me because when I would return from the quarry, I often would find neatly cut clippings about Winnie that had been anonymously placed on my bed by the warders. For the previous two years, her visits had been stymied by local magistrates and by the repeated bannings that prevented her from traveling. I had recently heard through counsel that Winnie had been informed by the police that she could visit me only if she carried a pass. The authorities were clearly attempting to humiliate her and me.

But I thought it was more important that we see each other than to resist the petty machinations of the authorities, and Winnie consented to carry a pass. I missed her enormously and needed the reassurance of seeing her, and we also had vital family matters to discuss. She was barred from taking a train or car and had to fly, making the trip much more expensive. She was required to take the shortest route from the airport to Caledon Square , the Cape Town police station, where she was required to sign various documents. She had to report to the same station on the way back and sign more documents.

I had also learned from a newspaper clipping that a Special Branch officer broke into our Orlando house while Winnie was dressing and she reacted angrily, pushing the officer out of the bedroom. The lieutenant laid a charge of assault against her, and I asked my friend and colleague George Bizos to defend her, which he ably did. This second visit was for only half an hour, and we had much to discuss.

Winnie was a bit agitated from the rough treatment in Cape Town and the fact that, as always, she had to ride in the hold of the ferry where the fumes from the engine made her ill. She had taken pains to dress up for me, but she looked thin and drawn. We reviewed the education of the children, the health of my mother, which was not very good, and our finances.

A critical issue was the education of Zeni and Zindzi. Winnie had placed the girls in a school designated as Indian, and the authorities were harassing the principal on the grounds that it was a violation of the law for the school to accept African pupils. We made the difficult decision to send Zeni and Zindzi to boarding school in Swaziland.

This was hard on Winnie, who found her greatest sustenance in the two girls. I was consoled by the fact that their education would probably be superior there, but I worried about Winnie.