Marvin Close - More Than Just a Game - Football v Apartheid

There, Sedick took his mind off the pain and loneliness of detention by applying his curiosity and scientific knowledge to figuring out ways to dismantle the bars and escape. In conjunction with a fellow prisoner, Eddie Daniels, they bribed a guard to get a hacksaw and set up transportation for when they broke out of the cell.

To work on the bars undiscovered, they had to rely on the co-operation or at least silence of fellow activists. Dullah Omar frequently risked his personal safety and his career to act as attorney for many political prisoners, including Sedick. On one of his visits to Sedick, it became clear that the men in neighbouring cells were singing in order to mask the noise of the hacksaws at work on the bars. Dullah Omar was shocked and, when he recovered his composure, warned Sedick that the guards positively relished the opportunity to shoot escaping prisoners.

At no time did he ever suggest he would no longer act as Sedick’s attorney, even though he knew he could be accused of conspiracy if the escape plan were discovered. Dullah Omar continued to champion the politically oppressed and in 1994 was chosen by President Mandela to be the Minister of Justice in the first democratically elected government in South African history.

After weeks of work, Sedick and Eddie Daniels managed to loosen the grille but, a few days before the intended escape, a group of warders came through the cells banging on the bars to test them, and the loose grille was discovered. Allegedly, the search was the result of a common-law prisoner informing the warders that a hacksaw blade had been sold to a fellow common-law prisoner, and that the same prisoner had been seen talking to the political prisoners. However, the warders were as keen to avoid embarrassment as the prisoners were to avoid punishment. They concocted a story that the bars were faulty as a way of diverting blame from themselves and on to the contractors, who must have installed sub-standard equipment. The story may have precluded any direct reprisals on the would-be escapees but, from now on, as far as the guards were concerned, Sedick was a marked man.

When the trial of Sedick and his three co-defendants came up it was heard by two ‘assessors’ rather than a jury. The basis of the case against them was simply that, since explosives had been found in the car in which they were travelling, they were all guilty of conspiracy. Sedick decided not to take the stand, but his brother was called to testify and was asked to identify handwriting found on documents in the car. He pretended not to be certain whether it was Sedick’s writing, but the judge ruled that, if his own brother could not definitively deny that it was Sedick’s handwriting, then this failure must be construed as positive identification. As Sedick would discover on many occasions over the next couple of decades, surreally skewed logic was lodged at the heart of the apartheid sense of justice.

Sedick was sentenced to twelve years, and given a long lecture about letting down staff and students, past and present, at Trafalgar High School. He had to smile at the irony – it was staff at Trafalgar who had helped to stir his political awareness in the first place.

When Tony Suze’s case came to trial in Pretoria, he was astonished to be handed down a fifteen-year sentence for treason, sabotage, and crimes against the state rather than the couple of years he had been expecting. Despite his age, the courts had decided to make an example of him. Back in Cape Town, Marcus Solomon was given ten years for sedition and conspiracy, and Lizo Sitoto was given the longest sentence of all: a whole raft of charges levied against him resulted in a sentence of sixteen and a half years.

These four men – Sedick, Lizo, Tony, and Marcus – from different backgrounds and of different political affiliations, were soon to discover that they would serve their sentences in a place that was to be the site for a new security-service experiment. Concerned that the militants would turn other, common-law prisoners and make them sympathetic to the terrorist cause, the government had decided to behead the resistance movement and isolate its senior leaders, active members, and – potentially the most dangerous to the regime – its foot soldiers. They would all be sent to a place where they could no longer pose a threat: Robben Island.

A windswept lump of rock 7 miles off the coast of Cape Town, Robben Island was known as South Africa’s Alcatraz (the infamous island prison off San Francisco), and had for hundreds of years been the place where successive regimes banished the unwanted. The island was battered by harsh Atlantic currents, and the seabed nearby was littered with shipwrecks. Over the centuries, many sailors had lost their lives in the turbulent, shark-infested waters.

The Dutch used the island as a makeshift prison for army deserters and criminals until 1795, when the British seized the tip of Africa. For the next century, Robben Island was a hell hole. Lepers, the mentally ill, and prostitutes suffering from syphilis were all forcibly extradited to the island to live in squalor.

The British set a precedent for the island by using it as a prison for political opponents. It was here that the great African general Makana was incarcerated. His tribe, the Xhosa, went to war with the British after the colonial power stole their cattle, and Makana was captured and banished to Robben Island. He died attempting to escape. Almost a hundred and fifty years later, in 1964, another prominent member of the Xhosa tribe was imprisoned on Robben Island – Nelson Mandela.

The island was cleared of its inhabitants in the Thirties, all dispersed to prisons and hospitals on the South African mainland. The military took possession of the island, burned down the ramshackle old buildings, and began to turn it into a fortified sea defence, complete with gun emplacements and underground workings. In the early Sixties Cape Town’s first line of wartime defence was to become South Africa’s first line of attack on the men who opposed its apartheid regime. The security forces requisitioned the island from the military and erected 20-foot-high razor wire fences to mark out the perimeters of a new high-security prison, a vast institution that would house well over two thousand men. Those men would in a couple of years include Sedick, Tony, Lizo, and Marcus.

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