34

AT 1:30 IN THE MORNING, on March 30, I was awakened by sharp, unfriendly knocks at my door, the unmistakable signature of the police. “The time has come,” I said to myself as I opened the door to find half-a-dozen armed security policemen. They turned the house upside down, taking virtually every piece of paper they could find, including the transcripts I had recently been making of my mother’s recollections of family history and tribal fables. I was never to see them again. I was then arrested without a warrant, and given no opportunity to call my lawyer. They refused to inform my wife as to where I was to be taken. I simply nodded at Winnie; it was no time for words of comfort.

Thirty minutes later we arrived at Newlands police station, which was familiar to me from the many occasions when I had visited clients there. The station was located in Sophiatown, or rather, what was left of it, for the once bustling township was now a ruin of bulldozed buildings and vacant lots. Inside I found a number of my colleagues who had been similarly rousted out of bed, and over the course of the night, more arrived; by morning we totaled forty in all. We were put in a cramped yard with only the sky as a roof and a dim bulb for light, a space so small and dank that we remained standing all night.

At 7:15, we were taken into a tiny cell with a single drainage hole in the floor which could be flushed only from the outside. We were given no blankets, no food, no mats, and no toilet paper. The hole regularly became blocked and the stench in the room was insufferable. We issued numerous protests, among them the demand to be fed. These were met with surly rejoinders, and we resolved that the next time the door opened, we would surge out into the adjacent courtyard and refuse to return to the cell until we had been fed. The young policeman on duty took fright and left as we stampeded through the door. A few minutes later, a burly no-nonsense sergeant entered the courtyard and commanded us to return to the cell. “Go inside!” he yelled. “If you don’t, I’ll bring in fifty men with batons and we’ll break your skulls!” After the horrors of Sharpeville, the threat did not seem empty.

The station commander approached the gate of the courtyard to observe us, and then came over and berated me for standing with my hands in my pockets. “Is that the way you act around an officer?” he yelled. “Take your bloody hands out of your pockets!” I kept my hands firmly rooted in my pockets as if I were taking a walk on a chilly day. I told him that I might condescend to remove my hands if we were fed.

At 3 P.M., more than twelve hours after most of us had arrived, we were delivered a container of thin mealie pap and no utensils. Normally, I would have considered this unfit for consumption, but we reached in with our unwashed hands and ate as though we had been provided with the most delicious delicacies under the sun. After our meal, we elected a committee to represent us, which included Duma Nokwe and Z. B. Molete, the publicity secretary of the Pan Africanist Congress, and me. I was elected spokesman. We immediately drew up a petition protesting the unfit conditions and demanding our immediate release on the grounds that our detention was illegal.

At six o’clock we received sleeping mats and blankets. I do not think words can do justice to a description of the foulness and filthiness of this bedding. The blankets were encrusted with dried blood and vomit, ridden with lice, vermin, and cockroaches, and reeked with a stench that actually competed with the odiousness of the drain.

Near midnight, we were told we were to be called out, but for what we did not know. Some of the men smiled at the expectation of release. Others knew better. I was the first to be called and I was ushered over to the front gate of the prison where I was briefly released in front of a group of police officers. But before I could move, an officer shouted.

“Name!”

“Mandela,” I said.

“Nelson Mandela,” the officer said, “I arrest you under the powers vested in me by the Emergency Regulations.” We were not to be released at all, but rearrested under the terms of what we only then discovered was a State of Emergency. Each of us in turn was released for mere seconds, and then rearrested. We had been arrested illegally before the State of Emergency; now we were being properly arrested under the State of Emergency that came into force at midnight. We drafted a memorandum to the commander asking to know our rights.

The next morning, I was called to the commander’s office, where I found my colleague Robert Resha, who had been arrested and was being interrogated by the station commander. When I walked into the room, Resha asked the commander why he had erupted at me the previous night. His answer was that of the typical white baas: “Mandela was cheeky.” I responded, “I’m not bound to take my hands out of my pockets for the likes of you, then or now.” The commander jumped out of his chair, but was restrained by other officers. At this moment, Special Branch Detective Sergeant Helberg entered the office and said, “Hello, Nelson!” in a pleasant way. To which I shot back, “I am not Nelson to you, I am Mr. Mandela.” The room was on the brink of becoming a full-scale battle when we were informed that we had to leave to attend the Treason Trial in Pretoria. I did not know whether to laugh or despair, but in the midst of this thirty-six hours of mistreatment and the declaration of a State of Emergency, the government still saw fit to bring us back to Pretoria to continue their desperate and now seemingly outdated case against us. We were taken straight to Pretoria Local Prison, where we were detained.