33 years since the great hunger strike

And Dr Max Coleman’s part in it

Afew days before January 23 1989, we, political detainees at Johannesburg prison, took a decision to embark on a hunger strike after our leadership, the executive committee, consulted with us. On January 23, 20 selected colleagues out of 170 fellow detainees began their fast.

The criteria used to select the group of 20 included their leadership positions, variety of organisations and duration of detention; such that we would get maximal attention to our plight based on their prominence. The 20 were “shuffled” into a single communal cell and the group of 50 detainees who were to join the hunger strike when the group of 20 was on its eighth day, was moved to two other cells. The rest, 100 of us, expected to join on the 15th day, and were taken into three or four communal cells. This rearrangement was quietly done to avoid raising the eyebrows of the prison authorities.

On the 15th day all 170 of us were on hunger strike — and the world noticed. Hundreds of detainees from across the country joined the strike. A delegation from the clergy — led by the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu and including the reverends Allan Boesak and Frank Chikane — was in talks with apartheid minister of law and order Adriaan Vlok.

Due to SA’s repressive media laws, it was the media in the US and Europe that published stories on this campaign. With the matter on the agenda of the UN Special Committee on Apartheid, the world was discussing the hunger strike and apartheid, a system declared a “crime against humanity” by the UN some years earlier.

The regime came under pressure as we held on in line with our petition to the regime, to “take our lives into our own hands” and “to be charged in a court of law or to be unconditionally released”.

On my eighth day, alongside a group of 100, our comrades in the group of 20 were now on their 22nd day, with some having collapsed and been admitted to hospital, while those in the group of 50 had entered their 15th day. When the group of 20 was on its 24th day a decision was taken to end the strike, with progressive doctors warning of irreversible damage to organs and the clergy warning of possible deaths. The major factor in abandoning the strike was the regime’s undertaking to release a “substantial” number of detainees. “I cannot release ‘skeletons’ to walk in the streets,” said Vlok on realising that we would not compromise but continue with the fast.

Indeed, the 24th day of hunger strike was the last day of fasting for the Johannesburg detainees, but detainees elsewhere continued with the campaign. I was released, alongside the late Clifford Sedibe and a few others, on February 20, four days after the strike ended. However, comrades in other prisons, who started fasting in February, continued into March, and one detainee in Durban, Sandile Thusi, reached 38 days without eating until an undertaking for his release was given.

Any story of detention without mention of Dr Max Coleman would be incomplete. Coleman, who passed away peacefully in his sleep on the night of January 16, aged 95, founded the Detainees’ Parents Support Committee (DPSC) after the detention of his son in the early 1980s. He was active in mobilising support for detainees’ parents and for detainees themselves.

His was a full life and one well lived. Last month, in recognition of their immense role, the government honoured Coleman and his wife Audrey with the Luthuli Award, bestowed on them by President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Coleman edited and compiled reports on detention without trial and on detention before trial, especially of those convicted as political prisoners, mostly on Robben Island, while pursuing his anti-detention campaign work with the DPSC. He subsequently monitored and wrote on destabilisation programmes by the forces of darkness in the 1991-1994 period of political transition.

In his report to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) in an SAHRC publication that he edited, Coleman singled out the 1989 hunger strike and asserted that that year “will go down as a watershed in the struggle for a nonracial democracy in South Africa. If there was one event which could be said to have ushered in this new phase in our history, it was the detainees’ hunger strike.”

He further wrote that 1,000 detainees, “detained from one state of emergency to another, took matters into their own hands and by their determined action forced open the detention cells. But they did more than that. They opened the floodgates to the resistance of the masses of South Africa after four years of oppression under emergency rule.” He emphasised that the “success of the hunger strike unleashed a new mood, a mood of open rejection of detentions, bannings, restrictions and other forms of state repression. A mood of open defiance against apartheid laws and apartheid government.”

This February 1989 hunger strike triggered a chain of events, including the September 1989 Defiance Campaign and the November 1989 release of Walter Sisulu and other Rivonia stalwarts.

May his soul rest in peace and may the family find solace in knowing that Coleman’s contribution to the cause, as that of Madame Audrey, did not go unnoticed. Their contribution touched thousands of lives, certainly that of mine and of many detainees.

My heartfelt condolences and deepest sympathy to Audrey Coleman and the entire family.

His was a full life and one well lived

✼ Masemola is a former general secretary of the Food and Allied Workers Union. He is co-founder, director and consultant at SEMO Advisory. His manuscripts, “Taking Our Lives Into Our Own Hands’’ and “Apartheid Torture: Pains and Harm”, are due to be published later this year