Iron-like conviction behind a gentle face
S IT the era, the context or sheer character of a person that goes into making a freedom fighter? Are people born fighters against oppression, or do they merely stumble against the odds into it, forced by circumstance to fight back?
In his collected texts, Mouroir, which document over two years in solitary confinement at Pollsmoor Prison, the Afrikaner intellectual Breyten Breytenbach’s dreams and meditations are infused with his sense that he had been consigned to what the French call a mouroir, a place where the living are left to die.
Shanti Naidoo’s outlook may have been similarly shaped by the torment she endured during an equally long solitary confinement in the 1980s in Pretoria’s notorious Commissioner of Police Building.
A gentle and caring soul who has found peace in the new South Africa, her prison experience nonetheless resembles Nadine Gordimer’s “dark and hidden places of the country”.
When one meets Shanti Naidoo, one does not expect a meek and fragile person.
Instead, one expects to find a strong, angry, belligerent woman who was able to bear the brunt of solitary confinement and long banning orders under which even the bravest would shudder. Granddaughter of Thumbie Naidoo, Gandhi’s lieutenant in South Africa, and daughter of Roy Naidoo, who became vice-president of the Transvaal Indian Congress, Shanti and her siblings came from a politically charged background.
At our first meeting, she carries her history in a large plastic bag filled with old photographs and press cuttings roughly assembled over the years. In addition to cuttings on her father, she shows me pictures of the strong women in her family, from the Supplement to the Gandhi-founded Indian Opinion of October 29, 1913, “Brave Women Passive Resisters: Sentenced at Newcastle to three months imprisonment with hard labour.” All the women were sari-clad, bearing children.
Among the group of grimfaced, mainly Tamil women were her grandmother, mother and aunts.
Later, in the 1950s, her family home in Johannesburg became commonly referred to as the “People’s House”, where her mother Amma was known for her tremendous hospitality and generosity in sheltering underground ANC and SACP activists.
Shanti recalls that when Nelson Mandela, a regular visitor, first arrived at her family home, Amma offered him crab curry to eat. He had never before eaten crab, and was rather hesitant to try it. However, when he eventually did, he thoroughly enjoyed the dish. Later, in prison, one of his letters to his wife Winnie spoke of the culinary delights of Amma’s crab curry and when Shanti met him in 1989 shortly after his release from prison, he said, only half-jokingly, “All I want now is Amma’s crab curry!” Early life Shanti was born in 1935 in Johannesburg. She was the eldest of five children, followed by a sister and three brothers. According to Indian tradition, the birth of a girl as a first child is considered lucky. Instead, Shanti’s life was not easy – her father Roy died when she was only 18 and she and her brother Indres were forced to abandon their schooling and seek work to contribute to the family’s income.
“For us, politics was our major education which we pursued all our lives in one way or another.”
She worked at several places in a temporary role, while always maintaining her political involvement.
Initially, it was in a secretarial capacity for the Congress of Democrats, until they were banned in 1961 and she lost her job. “I later joined the South African Congress of Trade Unions (Sactu) which lasted for a year until I was banned for five years in 1963, charged with being a political activist.
“After the banning orders, it was increasingly difficult to find jobs as I was confined to a single magisterial district in the south of Johannesburg and had to report weekly to the police station.” But her political life continued, bringing her into working contact with banned persons such as Winnie Mandela and Joyce Sikakane – shortly to bring her directly into danger’s way and change her life.
A life always led with uncertainly, Shanti clearly remembers the day she was arrested in June 1969 under the Terrorism Act – again without charge. At the time, she was aware of the seriousness of her situation as people taken in by the security police were tortured and many died at the hands of state brutality.
After two weeks in Johannesburg Prison, with no communication with her family or the outside world allowed, she was taken to Pretoria to the Commissioner of Police Building (Copol). It was there that police intended breaking her spirit to provide evidence against 22 ANC members. They included Winnie Mandela, Ruth First, Lilian Ngoyi (the president of the ANC Women’s League), Joyce Sikakane, future Parliamentary Senator Rita Mzana, future Cabinet Minister Barbara Hogan and Dorothy Nyembe, who was already charged with terrorism.
It was a stark, windowless building, and she was allocated a small, dark cell. She was given a potty, a thin felt mat and a thin blanket. June is midwinter on the Highveld, but she was expected to sleep on the icy cold cement floor. She remembers making her coat into a pillow.
“Adrift in solitary confinement with no communication, no sunshine, no exercise, indeed no human contact (so that one even seeks the little friendship of one’s guards), one’s thoughts grow into frightening images. I kept myself sane with religious songs for company. They were repeated over and over.”
Under this cloud of fear and uncertainty, her interrogators would suddenly emerge from the darkness. “For a whole week, I was interrogated by different sets of investigators who changed shifts every four hours or so. I had to stand for hours and was tormented with the sight of a chair which was offered to me and then pulled away.
“They questioned me about every person I knew, and made me repeat endlessly the story of my life. They tormented me relentlessly. By the end of the week, I lost touch with reality and started to hallucinate. I dreamed that I was on a plane taking me out of the country with parcels of money… They then started to interrogate me on my hallucinations and delusions as though they had some serious factual evidence!”
“I thought of my mother constantly who, unbeknown to me, was visiting every police station in the area in search of me. Then she heard that sometimes they bring a prisoner for trial, and hoping for the opportunity to see me, she would never give up on her court visits. She did this for an entire year.”
At times like these, prisoners often crack under the strain – ripe at this instant for being turned into State witnesses. How long resistance lasts and how much is given away depends on the character of the individual, his or her courage, the ability to withstand pain and the ultimate strength of the person’s convictions. In Shanti’s case, she remained remarkably strong and unequivocal in her determination to not provide information.
Unbeknown to her, but ultimately equally fortunately, there were other female prisoners who also held out ensuring there was no evidence for the police to take to court against the ANC suspects.
But this did not spell the end of her plight. For not having testified, she was imprisoned for another two months and only released in June 1970 – a total of 371 days in solitary confinement, interspersed with interrogation.
This was almost immediately followed by a five-year banning order in 1971. In relating her story, Shanti cries, and it becomes very clear that some 40 years later, the pain and torment still linger. Another political prisoner who remembers Shanti among other women detainees recounted her pain at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in 1997.
“Twenty-six years have passed since I was among a group of seven women subjected to torture by mindbreaking by the apartheid security police, and yet I often find myself back in the dungeons of solitary confinement, ready to take away my life for no explicable reason.
“This all happens without any conscious thought on my part. I hate it when my mind brings those terrifying memories, but my mind just does it for me. It was orchestrated to destroy me. Today, as I move around in the workplace, I realise that I am not the only one, I am not alone in my ordeal. Countless other fellow South Africans who survived apartheid incarceration are in constant battle within themselves to continue to live and work.
“They are on guard, refusing to succumb to the dictates of the mind breakers who knew the longtermdevastating effects of their psychological warfare against freedom-loving South Africans.”
When one speaks to Shanti, one sees a fragile and vulnerable woman of gentle breeding, propped up by a steel backbone of unwavering conviction. One can only have a deep respect for someone who is so without bitterness.
When asked whether she would have lived her life any differently, she states that her life was her very purpose: “If I had not done what I did, and others not done what they did, then the trial of 22 people would have taken place – but because we all refused to give evidence, it fell apart.
“Our unity was our strength, and our conviction was our weapon.”
After a long and arduous battle to obtain an exit permit was finally successful in 1972, Shanti left the country for England.
There she continued to support the ANC through the International Defence and Aid Fund.
She returned to South Africa in 1991 and now lives in Johannesburg with her husband Dominic Tweedie, a media specialist for Cosatu.
But few know her story.