Robben Island
from LIFE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
Summary
[The missing tape and transcript may have described events leading up to Brutus's incarceration at Robben Island. The narrative picks up at the point where prisoners are about to be transported to the island. No date recorded.]
At the Cape Town docks the area was cordoned off and heavily guarded. There were two tugboats at the wharf, or jetty, the first one a kind of decoy, so that you passed from the one boat through it to the second one where men stood armed, with their guns at the ready. We were herded aboard the second boat, which was the ferry to Robben Island and which was named Issie after the wife of the former Prime Minister, Jan Smuts, but first there was a rather nasty experience to be undergone, because the first boat, while it was tied up at the quay, was some distance from the landing, and we were required to jump from the land to the boat.
This would not have been particularly difficult, except that the boat was heaving and swaying on the tide, and that we were handcuffed and manacled together at wrists and ankles so we had to jump in pairs, and there was a real danger that if you mistimed the jump or lost your footing, that you would go down, the pair of you, into the sea between the land and the boat. I murmured to the prisoner chained to me that we ought to time it correctly, that I would count to three, and that we would jump on the count of three.
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- The Dennis Brutus TapesEssays at Autobiography, pp. 92 - 109Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011