![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Political prisons are not only places of violence and silence. They are also productive. Building on recent literature that pays close attention to prisoners’ social and political projects, the article argues that significant, often hidden, aspects of political work take place within the prison, and reach beyond its walls. A focus on the writings and oral histories of political prisoners reveals a remarkable range of imagination and practice within the tight embrace of a hostile state, and shows also its post-colonial reverberations. Through a focus on settler-ruled Rhodesia, I explore the projects and possibilities of nationalists in detention and guerrillas in maximum security prisons, noting their varied and shifting modes of story telling, and the political charge of these stories in the present.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Rich bodies of work in this regard have emerged from scholars of Kenya and South Africa. See contributions by Anderson, Histories of the Hanged; Clough, Mau Mau Memoirs; Elkins, Imperial Reckoning; Buntman, Robben Island; and Gready, Writing as Resistance. Beyond Africa, see particularly the studies of Zinomann, Colonial Bastille, on Vietnam; Arnold, “The Self and the Cell” on India; and Feldman, Formations of Violence, on Northern Ireland.
2 Writing about Mau Mau detainees, Peterson, “The Intellectual Lives,” 75, makes this point explicitly in response to the work of Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, and “Detention, Rehabilitation”.
3 See Branch, “Imprisonment and Colonialism in Kenya,” 241–2. He rejects the application of the Foucauldian notion of the ‘carceral archipelago’ to Kenyan institutions in Bernault’s influential, A History of Prison, arguing for a violent penal practice aimed at groups not individuals.
4 Anderson, “Guilty Secrets”. See Phillips, “The Migrated Archives,” 1003–4, for a skeptical view of the new insights offered by these archives generally.
5 See Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.
6 McCracken, “In the Shadow of Mau Mau,” 536, fn 2.
7 Ibid., 547.
8 There is of course a lengthy debate on the extent to which colonial archives may be used to access the worlds of ‘subalterns’, notably in the annals of the Subaltern School, but also beyond it. For a discussion relevant to southern Africa history, see Lalu, “The Grammar of Domination”.
9 Gready, “Autobiography and the ‘Power of Writing’.”
10 See for example Nuttal, “Telling ‘Free’ Stories?”, Clough, Mau Mau Memoirs, and Schalkwyk, “Writing from Prison” and “Chronotypes of the Self.”
11 See the wide-ranging discussion in Rasch, “Autobiography after Empire”.
12 A large literature addresses the qualities of letters. See e.g. Stanley, Documents of Life.
13 Peterson, “The Intellectual Lives,” 80.
14 For a revealing collection of prisoner letters in these regards, see Kathrada, Letters from Robben Island.
15 See discussions in White, “Telling More”; Portelli, “The Peculiarities”; Summerfield, “Culture and Composure” and the classic work of Halbwachs, On Collective Memory.
16 See discussion in Werbner, Memory and the Postcolony, and especially Werbner’s introduction “Beyond Oblivion”.
17 Steinberg, The Number, 272–8; Filippi, “Deviance, Punishment and Logics of Subjectification,” 639–42. Filippi draws on letters as well as interviews. She along with others underlines the categorical distinctions drawn by political prisoners between themselves and criminals. Also see Alexander, “Nationalism and Self-government”; Buntman, Robben Island.
18 West, “Voices Twice Silenced.”
19 Alexander, “Nationalism and Self-government,” 552–6.
20 On law specifically in Southern Rhodesia, see Karekwaivanane, The Struggle. The contrast with Kenya is a fascinating one into which I cannot delve in detail here. See Berman and Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley; Anderson, Histories of the Hanged; Branch, “Imprisonment and Colonialism.”
21 The state archive, which is fullest in this early moment, contains vast correspondence files that recount negotiations over the most intimate aspects of detainees’ lives – family relations, housing, school fees, business and farm management, debts. The records of detainee support groups provide a window on exchanges with officials, which attend to legal and bureaucratic matters, as well as on detainees’ lives and views. A record of these interactions can be found in the Terence Ranger Papers (TRP), held in the Weston Library, Oxford University. Also see Ranger’s autobiography, Writing Revolt. The National Archives of Zimbabwe (NAZ) contain extensive records of correspondence with detainees and their supporters and among state bureaucracies. See Alexander, “State Writing.”
22 Karekwaivanane, The Struggle.
23 See the account of a key state official involved in these efforts in NAZ, ORAL/256, Francis Anthony Staunton, November 1986.
24 ZAPU is the Zimbabwe African People’s Union and ZANU the Zimbabwe African National Union, which became ZANU(PF) at independence, the PF standing for Patriotic Front.
25 See Feltoe, “Law, Ideology and Coercion”; Munochiveyi, “Suffering and Protest,” 49–52.
26 See Alexander, “Political Prisoners’ Memoirs.”
27 On India, see the discussion in Arnold, “The Self and the Cell,” 30, in which prison writing is cast as a ‘nationalist convention’. In recent years, the genre of political memoir in Zimbabwe has become a distinctly critical one in regard to the ruling party’s nationalist claims. E.g. see Tekere, Edgar ‘2Boy’ Zivanai Tekere; Mhanda, Dzino.
28 On the symbolic politics of heroes and their material and political claims, see discussions in Munochiveyi, Prisoners of Rhodesia, chapter 6; Kriger, Guerrilla Veterans.
29 On the politics and violence of the 1980s, see CCJP/LRF, Breaking the Silence.
30 See discussion in Cole, “The Uses of Defeat,” 106.
31 Munochiveyi, Prisoners of Rhodesia, 13–17, chapter 6.
32 For a detailed account of life in Gonakudzingwa, see Alexander, “Nationalism and Self-government.” ZANU members were held at other sites of detention and made similar efforts at self-government. See Munochiveyi, Prisoners of Rhodesia, 121–54.
33 Interview, R. K. Naik, Oxford, 17 September 2008.
34 Nkomo, Nkomo, 124; Interviews, Naik; John Mzimela, Bulawayo, 4 February 2009.
35 Interviews, Welshman Mabhena, Bulawayo, 9 October 2008; Fletcher Dulini Ncube, Bulawayo, 1 October 2008; Jane Ngwenya, 14 October 2008; NAZ, MS308/15/1, Detentions and Restrictions 1967, ‘Cephas Msipa, or the one that got away’, Free Labour World, November 1976.
36 There is a rich literature on education in all its senses on Robben Island. Political prisoners in many other locations also considered education a central goal. See Buntman, Robben Island.
37 Interview, Mabhena.
38 Interviews, Paul Themba Nyathi, Bulawayo, 29 September 2008; Dulini Ncube; Mabhena; Ngwenya.
39 There were different kinds of courts in different spaces of nationalist detention, but all established systems of justice and order. Interview, Nyathi; Munochiveyi, Prisoners of Rhodesia.
40 Nkomo, Nkomo, 133–4; interviews, Mabhena; Dulini Ncube.
41 Also see Werbner’s account of Nkomo’s 1986 speech at the funeral of Lookout Masuku, the former commander of ZAPU’s armed wing, who died after a long period of post-independence imprisonment. Werbner, “Smoke,” 91–2.
42 See Alexander, McGregor, and Ranger, Violence and Memory, chapters 9–11.
43 On post-2000 politics, see Raftopoulos and Mlambo, Becoming Zimbabwe, and Hammar, Raftopoulos, and Jensen, Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business.
44 Interviews, Nyathi; Dulini Ncube.
45 See, e.g. Buntman, Robben Island, on South Africa.
46 See Munochiveyi, “Suffering and Protest,” 59–61.
47 See Ranger, Writing Revolt, for a vivid account of this period.
48 Nyagumbo, With the People. Letters cited are held in the Terence Ranger Papers, noted above.
49 TRP, Maurice, Salisbury Central Prison, to Shelagh, Stockport, UK, 4 August 1978; Maurice, Connemara Prison, to Shelagh Ranger, Pacific Palisades, California, 10 June 1974; Maurice, Que Que Prison, to Terry, 24 August 1974 (smuggled letter).
50 TRP, Maurice, Salisbury Central Prison, to Shelagh, Stockport, UK, 4 August 1978.
51 TRP, Maurice, Salisbury Central Prison, to Terry, 18 August 1978; Shelagh, Stockport, UK, to Maurice, 25 September 1978; Maurice, Salisbury Central Prison, to Shelagh, Stockport, UK, 6 October 1978; Shelagh to Maurice, 15 October 1978; Maurice, Salisbury Central Prison, to Shelagh, Stockport, UK, 16 March 1979 and 25 May 1979.
52 See TRP, Maurice, Salisbury Central Prison, to Shelagh, Stockport, UK; Terry to Maurice, 9 July 1979; Maurice, Salisbury Central Prison, to Shelagh and Terry, Stockport, UK, 17 August 1979; Pers, Comm, Terence Ranger, Oxford, 5 March 2014.
53 See account in Conradie, “Preface.”
54 See Nyagumbo’s letter of 31 August 1979, quoted in Conradie, “Epilogue,” 234; TRP, Maurice, Salisbury Central Prison, to Shelagh and Terry, Stockport, UK, 17 August 1979; Maurice, Salisbury Central Prison, to Terry, 12 October 1979; John Conradie to Guy Clutton-Brock, 27 June 1978.
55 TRP, Maurice Nyagumbo, Salisbury Central Prison, to Mr. R. Mugabe and ZANU Central Committee, Maputo, Mozambique, June 1979.
56 Compare to the letters of Kathrada, Letters, or Suttner, Inside Apartheid’s Prisons, in South Africa, for example, or Peterson’s Mau Mau study, “The Intellectual Lives.”
57 See Ralinala et al., “The Wankie and Sipolilo Campaigns” and Macmillan, “‘Past History’.” There are also accounts from a Rhodesian view point.
58 Interviews, Moffat Hadebe (ZAPU, commander of the Sipolilo campaign), Gwanda A1 Resettlement Scheme, 3 February 2009; Sly Masuku (ZAPU), Dromoland, Village 3, 9 August 2010; George Tau (ANC), Rangemore, 8 February 2009; Pilate Dube (ZAPU), Bulawayo, 2 October 2008; Actwell Siwela (ZAPU), Bulawayo, 18 August 2010; Moffat Hadebe and Actwell Siwela, Bulawayo, 28 July 2017. I also draw on interviews with others who played a key role in prisoner organisation in Khami at this time, notably Batandi Mpofu, who served in intelligence in ZAPU, Interview, Bulawayo, 5 February 2009. The two further ANC accounts are Thula Bopela’s, in Bopela and Luthuli, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and the transcript of Ralph Mzamo’s interview of 21 June 1980, held in the NAZ, Harare, MS591/4.
59 See Alexander and McGregor, “War Stories”.
60 For example, interview, Masuku.
61 Bopela and Luthuli, Umkhonto we Sizwe, 146.
62 Interview, Mpofu.
63 Ling, “Release from Khami Prison,” 2.
64 Longstanding prisoner Batandi Mpofu (interview) estimated that, in the late 1970s, there were some 600 ZAPU, 150 ZANU and 15 MK prisoners. In his memoir, Bopela (Bopela and Luthuli, Umkhonto we Sizwe, 168) names 15 MK soldiers in around 1970. Ling, a researcher for the International Defence and Aid Fund, “Release from Khami Prison,” 2–3, reports 673 prisoners in 1977, of whom ‘95 per cent were politicals serving sentences ranging from seven years up to life’. Ling visited Khami in March 1980 and found 10 ANC prisoners. Another three were held in Chikurubi Maximum Security prison in Harare.
65 Interviews, Masuku; Siwela. And see Mzamo’s detailed account of the architecture of Khami, NAZ, MS591/4.
66 Interview, Hadebe and Siwela.
67 Accounts of the daily regime are in Mzamo, NAZ, MS591/4, Bopela and Luthuli, Umkhonte we Sizwe, 164–6, and in interview accounts, e.g. interview, Dube.
68 Interview, Masuku.
69 Interview, Dube. See also the account in Bopela and Luthuli, Umkhonto we Sizwe, 166.
70 Interview, Masuku.
71 Interview, Mpofu. Also interviews, Masuku; Hadebe and Siwela.
72 Interviews, Hadebe, Dube, Tau, Masuku. On Mninzi’s roles, interviews, Siwela, Mpofu.
73 Interview, Hadebe; Hadebe and Siwela; NAZ, Mzamo, MS591/4.
74 Bopela and Luthuli, Umkhonto we Sizwe, 126. It seems that in the last years of their imprisonment reading materials were allowed once again. Interview, Siwela.
75 NAZ, Mzamo, MS591/4. Batandi Mpofu and Freddie Mninzi also taught. Interviews, Siwela, Mpofu, Masuku.
76 E.g. interviews, Siwela; Mpofu. Also see interview with a former Khami prison warder, John Nyamakawo, in Munyaradzi Huni, ‘I worked for Smith, I hated the System’, Sunday Mail (Harare), 3 July 2016, who held that a small number of guards, himself included, delivered messages and newspapers, among other things, for prisoners.
77 NAZ, Mzamo, MS591/4. And see Ling, “Release from Khami,” 5–6. Other soldiers remembered Mzamo organising lively political debates. Interview, Masuku.
78 Bopela and Luthuli, Umkhonto we Sizwe, 167–9.
79 Interviews, Siwela; Dube.
80 Interview, Masuku.
81 NAZ, Mzamo, MS591/4; interviews, Hadebe; Masuku; Tau.
82 Interviews, Mpofu; Dube.
83 E.g. interview, Masuku.
84 Interviews, Siwela; Mpofu.
85 Interviews, Mpofu; Siwela. Siwela and Pilate Dube had some medical training.
86 Interviews, Masuku; Hadebe and Siwela.
87 Interview, Siwela.
88 Interview, Mpofu.
89 Interview, Mpofu. Detainees in Gonakudzingwa had established committees to counsel young men with concerns over infidelity, similarly advising them that adultery was to be accepted. Alexander, “Nationalism and Self-government,” 562.
90 This was the case both in Mzamo’s 1980 account, NAZ, MS591/4 and in Bopela’s account 25 years later, Bopela and Luthuli, Umkhonto we Sizwe, 183. Both men, however, rapidly fell out with the ANC after their release. Ralinala et al., “The Wankie and Sipolilo Campaigns,” 528.
91 Interview, Masuku.
92 Alexander, “Loyalty and Liberation.”