Thuli Madonsela singing in the key of freedom in new book

The day jailed and tortured activist Neil Aggett was buried, a young Thuli Madonsela joined the struggle — and was in time also detained, writes Thandeka Gqubule in an extract from her book 'No Longer Whispering to Power: The Story of Thuli Madonsela'

On a cold day in June 1986, I was in my room in the female Jubilee residence, in a plush suburb of Johannesburg. There was a knock on my door. I opened it, and there stood a friend, a red-haired white student. He had come to announce himself as a member of the security establishment and to lead the apartheid police to my door.

In that same fateful month, Thuli Madonsela was arrested along with scores of activists all over the city. Madonsela was detained without trial; I was taken to the notorious John Vorster Square, a central police station and prison, and held for a month in solitary confinement. The prison's name struck fear into the hearts of activists because of the deaths in detention that had taken place there.

Neil Aggett had known John Vorster Square only too well. Madonsela knew the 28-year-old —  she may have been much younger than him, but they moved in the same circles. Aggett worked as a doctor in Soweto and as a volunteer for the Food and Canning Workers' Union.

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He had studied medicine at the University of Cape Town after attending the prestigious Kingswood College in Grahamstown. He was detained on 27 November 1981; years later, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the physical and mental torture to which Aggett had been subjected in detention had led to his taking his own life on 5 February 1982.

It was only fitting that Aggett's funeral service on 13 February 1982 was held at St Mary's Cathedral in Johannesburg. Madonsela attended the funeral; thereafter, over fifteen thousand of all races followed the coffin in a procession of over 10km to the whites-only cemetery.

It was large, and befitting of Aggett's contribution to the struggle. It was passionate. The fury was palpable. The union movement called for a work stoppage; about a hundred thousand workers across South Africa downed tools to mark their idealistic fallen hero and social justice crusader.

Bishop Desmond Tutu gave a keynote address and sermon that railed against the racist system that had caused Aggett's death.

Thirty-four years later, Kingswood College invited Madonsela to deliver the annual Neil Aggett Memorial Lecture. There, Madonsela told her young audience that Aggett had played a crucial role in her politicisation — the day he was buried was the day she joined the struggle against apartheid and began her journey as a social justice activist. Teddy Mpisi had met a friend of Madonsela's at Aggett's funeral, and had subsequently come to Madonsela's Dlamini home to recruit her. Mpisi had taken care of his new young charge's education and introduction to Soweto's political community.

Of Mpisi, Madonsela said: "He was very idealistic and he imprinted in me a vision of the future that was based on the idea of equality and justice. He knew that young people were hungry for something greater than themselves, that they wanted to belong to a community of people seized with the great challenges of improving society."

She became animated when speaking of Teddy Mpisi, and smiled frequently when narrating her tales of him.

With Mpisi, she and others would move from house to Soweto house discussing what needed to be done to overthrow the apartheid government. "Uninvited, we would go to the home of Mrs Albertina Sisulu, eat and discuss, and then move on," she said, explaining how they visited many politically important homes in Soweto.

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They also went to lowly homes, middle-class homes —  all sorts of homes, conscientising and recruiting others to the cause of freedom. They were a band of dreamers, Soweto's travelling salesmen peddling a better life. She was not to know that she would share Aggett's fate in part, by being detained for deciding to join the struggle against injustice.

At John Vorster Square, periods of heavy interrogation were interspersed with long days of isolation. Through a misty window high above the cell, one could see some homes across the road. One day, the security police drove the Wits students and some others from John Vorster Square to Diepkloof Prison, where Madonsela had been detained without trial in contravention of United Nations detention prescripts. At Diepkloof Prison, also known as Sun City, political prisoners were separated from criminals. The female political prisoners were held in a part of the prison known as Babasorg, Afrikaans for "baby care".

A series of routines regulated life at Diepkloof. There was no main dining area. So, early each morning, a warden served a breakfast of either bread or porridge by placing a plate at each cell door. At about eleven in the morning, the female prisoners were taken outside into the sun for exercise and communal time. Lunch —  a bowl of samp with no beans and abnormally large chicken wings on most days —  was at about noon. A light evening meal was served before sunset —  slices of bread with soup or tea.

The tiny prison cells were neat; each prisoner had to clean her cell daily before breakfast. Inspection time was a few minutes to seven. By then, prisoners had to be bathed and dressed for the day. Political prisoners were allowed to wear their own civilian clothes. The clothes and toiletries permitted were carefully vetted to prevent "accidents", including suicides.

block_quotes_start Singing freedom songs in the belly of the beast was a way of telling the jailers that the prisoners were unbowed and unafraid block_quotes_end

Outside in the sun, the political prisoners sang their songs — including Bahleli bonke etilongweni, yini Mandela ("They are all sitting in prison, oh Mandela!"), a song that internationally renowned singer Johnny Clegg had sung as a tribute to Dr Aggett.

The songs were a form of creative expression, the singing of them an act of defiance. Singing freedom songs in the belly of the beast was a way of telling the jailers that the prisoners were unbowed and unafraid. The prisoners fortified one another through song as an act of subversion, sabotaging efforts to break their spirits; Madonsela and her sisters in chains sang their politics, their moral outrage and their collective longing for freedom. Joy's 1980 song Paradise Road was a firm favourite, with its mournful line, "Paradise was almost closing down".

In the sun, solidarity, love and hope were the gifts offered from one woman to another as the country raged beyond Sun City's walls and barbed-wire fences. From time to time one of the women would get up and dance as the others sang and clapped their hands. The songs kept despair and paralysis at bay, filling the prison with such ferocity that the prisoners imagined their enemies quivering in their boots.

After all, it was Plato who wrote that "any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited ... when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them". Freedom and gospel songs melded together, as did sorrow and joy, in a fierce, collective refusal to accept defeat.

Yet the concrete of the cells may have been too hard for the two pregnant members of the group of about sixteen female prisoners. While one baby survived and is now a thirty-year-old economist, the other died.

'No Longer Whispering to Power' is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers, and sells for R250