Six weeks after I’d arrived on Robben Island, I started to feel weak. I had attacks of aching whooping coughs, which deteriorated to a point where I was coughing blood. My movements became heavy and lethargic; my whole body was semiparalysed by hunger and pain. I had to drag my feet just to go to the toilet. My body trembled from both heat and cold as my temperature fluctuated between the two extremes. On top of that I suffered excruciating pangs of pain on the left side of my chest.

For a while, I didn't want to show any sign of weakness. I was a man, too old to cry, I told myself. I asked Mme and God, in my silent prayers, to help me stay the course. Eventually, however, I couldn't do otherwise; I just had to go the prison doctor at the makeshift hospital at Zinc Tronk. Subsequently, I was confined there with others who had developed acute asthma. From an altitude of 1 500 feet above sea level, we had descended to the level of the ocean, which wreaked havoc with our health, compounded, no doubt, by the very poor diet we were subjected to and the exerting manual labour we did.

I remember that at about the same time, Njongo Ndungane, now the Archbishop and spiritual head of the Anglican Church in South Africa, was struggling with a nasty cough. Many others besides, people whose immune system was somewhat weakened by the conditions, fell quite sick.

The doctor who examined me – hair greying; well scrubbed, clean-shaven face adorned by an impeccably groomed black-brown goatee and moustache – had an air of disinterest and the physical profile of a Nazi doctor (or what I imagined a Nazi doctor would look like). Every time I saw him, he wore a fresh clean white shirt and blue tie under his starched blindingly white lab coat. All this and his thickset build and protruding stomach no doubt had something to do with that ‘Nazi doctor’ notion coming into my head.

Twice a week, this man used state money to take the trip to Robben Island, supposedly to tend to the sick. To see him do that ‘tending’ you’d never have guessed, if you didn't know any better, there was an oath the man had ever sworn.