Learning From Robben Island: Govan Mbeki’s Prison Writings

“South Africa has jailed so many gifted men and women that there already exists a sizeable body of prison writing … The essays by Govan Mbeki which comprise this book add to this distinguished list. Yet they differ in important respects from all others: they were written, circulated and preserved in prison. They were never intended for publication but to be read by other prisoners; their aim is not to share an experience but to educate politically. They are remarkable documents.“They offer historians and political scientists valuable raw material for any study of the ANC-SACP alliance. They provide activists with a distillation of practical lessons about political organisation, learned in the most testing conditions. They include extended historical, political and economic analyses that must be read alongside Mbeki's other writings in any assessment of the intellectual history of the South African left. And they are pages in a truly international literature — a record throughout the ages of the creativity and indomitability of people imprisoned for their beliefs. These prison essays mark a victory in the continuing contest between the pen and the sword.”— Professor Colin Bundy in his introduction