“QUITE militant”. This is how Nelson Mandela once described Andimba Toivo ya Toivo, with whom he spent around ten years in the same section on Robben Island.
Two years after he was released, Madiba recalled Toivo in a conversation with Richard Stengel, who collaborated with him on his autobiography ‘Long Walk to Freedom’. “He was quite militant,” Madiba said. “He wanted very little to do with whites, with the warders.”
While the other Namibian prisoners were briefly held in what became known as the ‘punishment’ wing, of the prison, Toivo was the only one with Madiba and other comrades in B Section. The B Section was one arm of a U-shaped construction, while the ‘punishment’ section formed the other, placing them parallel to each other.
For most of their time on Robben Island, the other Namibians were held in the communal cells, known as D Section.
In an extensive series of recorded conversations, which are housed in the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s archive in Johannesburg, Madiba detailed the system which graded all prisoners into privilege-related rungs.
The system started at D Group for all prisoners and went all the way up to A Group which allowed for the most privileges such as having contact visits and being allowed to buy groceries. He said that while some people “behaved very well” in order to be promoted, Toivo was different.
“Andimba was not concerned about that,” Madiba said. “He didn’t care to be promoted and he wouldn’t cooperate with the authorities at all in almost everything.”
“We did persuade him that he has many people there who want to be looked after and – because his people were in D Section and we felt it was his duty, you know, to speak, to have the conditions of his people improved and that we thought he should play a more active role in that regard.”
While Toivo and his comrades from Namibia were on Robben Island from early 1968, they were brought to the punishment section in May 1971.
Madiba and his comrades got to hear that the Namibians had embarked on a hunger strike because of their isolation and started their own in solidarity.
At the time, the prison was run by the notorious commanding officer, colonel Piet Badenhorst, and conditions were brutal.
The solidarity hunger strike angered the warders, who on 28 May 1971, embarked on a raid of B Section. Madiba and his comrades were stripped and made to stand in the icy winter night for some time while their cells were searched. They only stopped their tormenting when Govan Mbeki collapsed.
The next day Madiba and his comrades heard that the Namibians had been beaten up. Toivo, who Madiba called in his autobiography, “a formidable freedom fighter,” had hit back and knocked down a warder.
Madiba left Robben Island on 31 March 1982, two years before Toivo was released after having served 16 years of a 20 year sentence. In his famous rejection on 10 February 1985 of president PW Botha’s offer to release him if he renounced violence, Madiba who had then served 22 years in jail, said, through his daughter, Zindzi: “Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts. Herman Toivo ya Toivo, when freed, never gave any undertaking, nor was he called upon to do so.”
After his release from prison in 1990 Madiba stayed in touch with Toivo who visited him at both his home and his office in recent years.
