Molefe Pheto had spent three nights under intense security police interrogation, standing, and without sleep. The interrogation teams took turns on him, and on the morning of the third day, when he was allowed to sit down for the first time, he couldn’t.
He believed his body was dying as his joints would not obey any of his commands. His body was rebelling. The ankles would not move, and as he was about to fall, a policeman rammed a chair behind him and he flopped into it, knees still straight. He says the pains all over his body, triggered by the sudden sit down, “were worse than when I had been standing”.
This was April 1975, on the notorious 10th floor of John Vorster Square, now Johannesburg Central police station, where a number of detainees had been killed during interrogation by the security police. Pheto had been detained a few days earlier and was being held under the Terrorism Act, which allowed for indefinite detention without trial. It also prohibited visits by relatives, a doctor or lawyer.
He records this in And Night Fell: Memoirs of a Political Prisoner in South Africa, his book published in 1983. He states that after his body collapsed and he couldn’t move on his own, he was half-carried to the lift to take him down to the cells.
As the lift door opened, his wife, Deborah, stepped out, saw him in that condition and screamed his name rushing towards him. There was confusion as the assault team had not anticipated that Pheto’s wife would be bringing him clothes and food on that day, at that time.
He was quickly whisked away, but she had seen him, and more importantly for Pheto, he had seen her. He was to remain in custody for 285 days, 217 of them in solitary confinement. He was charged with aiding people to skip the country to go for military training. The charge didn’t stick and he was discharged in court.
Pheto, an internationally acclaimed poet, musician, author, political activist, and music teacher, turns 90 on July 11. While there will be a small celebration on that day, amore elaborate celebration of this icon of the arts and symbol of political activism is planned at the Soweto Theatre on July 18.
The Molefe Pheto@90 committee is putting together a show that will feature both national and international acts of various genres including visual and performance arts, poets, musicians and sculptors from across the continent.
Born in Alexandra Township, north of Johannesburg, in 1935, he was schooled at Alexandra Swiss Mission Primary and then Orlando High School in Soweto. He first worked as a part-time clerk at the Alexandra University Health Clinic and later at the library of Witwatersrand University.
It was while working at Wits that the first brush with the security police happened. He studied music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London from 1966 to 1968, then became an associate member of the school.
In 1969 he took extra studies at the school, learning voice, the double bass and orchestra conducting, which he completed in 1970.
He returned to South Africa in 1971 and was instrumental in the formation of the Mihloti Black Theatre group that year. Mihloti’s programme was to perform theatrical pieces and poetry relevant to the liberation struggle against colonialism. It shunned collaboration with white artists, arguing for a pure black arts movement that was unashamedly political.
“We in Mihloti knew the risks we were taking, but we were still determined to contribute our bit and some of us suffered the consequences. I was detained in April 1975 and was in prison for 285 days, 271 of them in solitary confinement.
“Prior to my detention, Mihloti Black Theatre had joined hands with other theatre groups, individual artists, painters, sculptors, writers and poets to form Music, Drama, Arts and Literature Institute (MDALI).
“The major project of MDALI was an annual Black Arts Festival, starting on the 1st of April each year, and went on for four or five days. Besides performances by different theatre companies and individual poets, there was also an arts exhibition by artists and sculptors including works from Mozambique. This had never happened in the townships before,” Pheto said in a recent interview.
MDALI organised three of these arts festivals in Soweto, working with writers such as Wally Serote, and the group became a travelling support show at schools, churches and political rallies. Pheto had just closed the 1975 festival the night he was detained.
A man who believes in organisation, he became the founding president of the Soweto-based Medupe Writers’ Association until he went into exile. Medupe grew to become South Africa’s biggest poetry and writers’ group, with poets such as Matsemela Manaka, Ingoapele Madingoane, Duma Ndlovu and Maishe Maponya among its prominent members.
Medupe was banned on October 19 1977, together with other Black Consciousness organisations, including two newspapers and an ecumenical periodical that had been severely critical of the colonial regime.
On his release from detention in 1976, and following the June 16 student uprisings that started in Soweto that year, Pheto left for the US in 1977 with the manuscript of what became And Night Fell, detailing the torture and abuse he underwent at the hands of the police.
The title comes from a chapter detailing his desire and hope for the sun to touch him in a Hillbrow police cell on his first morning there after more than 200 days without seeing the sun or being touched by its rays at John Vorster Square. The chapter chronicles a detainee’s attempt to deal with the boredom of solitary confinement, as he watches the sun move throughout the day, with hopes for a ray touch that never came.
It reads in part: “On the 16th, the sun rose in a halo of glory. I felt as if I were the only man in the universe waiting for it, and through the window of the cell, I saw its rays. It promised to touch the window of my confined room as it played in the ceilingless courtyard outside the cell.
“It did not matter that I was not allowed out of the cell. As long as the sun could kiss the window momentarily and perhaps my face and hands, through iron bars, the only exposed parts of me. As it rose higher, I realised its rays were slanted southwards, touching the entire south wall, signalling its move towards me.
“By midday it began to dance away from me, its rays receding eastward on its journey westwards, taking a course north of the cell. At about two in the afternoon, I had given up hope. Towards five o’clock, I saw the shadows made by my cell rising upwards on the east wall, by which time the sun was behind me, growing weaker, about to set.
“I sank on the mat, spread out the three grey blankets, folded my black jersey to make an uncomfortable pillow and prepared to sleep at 5.30 in the afternoon. And in a little while, night fell.”
The fixation with the sun can only be understood by those who have once been deprived of it. In another poem penned from John Vorster, titled There is No Sun in Here, he writes:
There is no sun in here
Only the rain outside, incessant
There is no shade in here
A mist, grey, blue-black
Through meshed wire-windows.
There is no nothing in here
Except my breathing
Which I and the two unblinking
Policemen on the ceiling
Of cell 201 can hear.
What had been a journey to the US turned into exile after he was warned post the killing of Bantu Biko in detention in September 1977 that the police were looking for him again. He lived in exile in the UK until 1995.
In exile he immersed himself in advancing the struggle for freedom and was a founding member of the Black Consciousness Movement of Azania , the external wing of the BCM organisations within South Africa. On his return he joined the Azanian People’s Organisation , where he is still an active member.
Pheto’s other book is The Bull from Moruleng: Vistas of Home and Exile. His writings have also featured in other compilations such as Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing, which features Nelson Mandela, Kwame Nkrumah, Ken Saro Wiwa, Agostinho Neto and Ingoapele Madingoane, among many other prominent African leaders who have tasted prison.
Pheto today lives in a colourful house painted in IsiNdebele colours on a family farm, Bangadile, in Magaliesburg outside Krugersdorp.
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