“Let’s go, let’s go and fight;
we don’t know where we’re going, but fight we must,” sing Grant Shezi,
Muntu Nxumalo and Thembinkosi Sithole, harmonizing around a microphone
in a high school auditorium on Chicago’s West Side. “Let us take over,
take over, they take our country and give us homelands, let us take
over, take over, take our country the Castro way… .”
These lyrics
are among the many that sustained Shezi, Sithole and Nxumalo during
their multi-year stay at the infamous Robben Island Prison. As participants
in the anti-apartheid struggle, they, along with thousands of other
dissidents were jailed in the ’70s and ’80s on
“We would use songs to ease our hunger,” Sithole tells a crowd
of mostly African-American high school students at
“We spent most of our time
in prison struggling to improve prison conditions,” says Shezi, jailed
in 1980 for 10 years after being charged with illegally leaving the
country and membership in the banned ANC. “We were always studying
politics and holding political classes and debates.”
Located about
8 miles off the coast of
In 1997, the former prison was turned
into a museum and historical institute that aims to keep the stories
of anti-apartheid activists and other political prisoners alive. A
comprehensive electronic database of former prisoners is being compiled,
and the museum holds an extensive collection of prison artifacts and
former prisoners’ belongings and writings, including testimony of
more than 200 former prisoners. Its archive of prisoners’ papers,
including letters, internal correspondence, minutes of meetings, reports,
political discussion papers, recreation plans and equipment orders,
is called the “Apple Box Archives,” because when prisoners were released,
the last of them in 1991, they carried their possessions in apple
boxes.
The museum’s Web site describes the island today as a symbol
“of oppression, as well as a place of triumph.” It continues: “Overcoming
opposition from the prison authorities, prisoners on the
The
museum has published four books detailing prisoners’ memories and
three albums of prison music, including Prison Songs: Cell Stories,
the project which brought Shezi, Sithole and Nxumalo together.
Jeff
Spitz, a Chicago-based filmmaker, bought Prison Songs on CD in 2001
when he was in
From the left: Thembinkosi
Sithole, Muntu Nxumalo, Grant Shezi