Our past together with our future

In 1985, I was jailed in a maximum security prison.

n 1985, I was arrested for being a teacher.

Not for carrying a weapon. Not for planning violence. For teaching. For believing that knowledge belongs to everyone, and that children deserve a future wider than the walls built around them.

They took me to Victor Verster Prison.

Years later, the world would recognize that name as the place where Nelson Mandela spent his final years of imprisonment before walking free on 11 February 1990. But in 1985, Victor Verster was simply a maximum-security prison—cold, efficient, and designed to crush resistance quietly.

When the cell door closed behind me, I understood something immediately: this place was meant to erase people.

They put us in a large communal cell.

There were children inside.

Not teenagers. Children. As young as eight.

Small bodies wrapped in fear. Eyes that had already learned too much. One boy sat near the wall, knees pulled in, trying to make himself disappear. When night came and the lights went out, he began to cry. Not loudly. Not for attention. Just a steady, broken sound that went on and on.

No one came to help him.

That cry cut through everything. Through the concrete. Through the bravado. Through the anger. It was the sound of innocence colliding with state power—and losing.

This was not just immoral. It was illegal. A gross violation of international human rights law. Children are not supposed to be imprisoned. Not under any circumstances. Yet there we were—teachers and children locked together by a system that had abandoned both law and humanity.

We spoke softly in the dark. Teachers always do. We spoke about our learners, about classrooms left behind, about lessons interrupted. And then, without drama or speeches, we made a decision.

We would go on hunger strike.

It was our last tool. Our bodies became the protest. We refused to participate in a system that treated children as collateral damage. We were not asking for comfort. We were demanding dignity.

The authorities responded the way threatened power always does. First, they ignored us. Then they grew uneasy. Finally, they isolated me.

Solitary confinement.

The door slammed shut, and the silence rushed in. Solitary is not just about being alone—it is about being tested. Time stretches. Thoughts loop. Hunger weakens the body, and isolation tries to weaken the mind.

It was hard. Brutally hard.

But resolve is a strange thing. The more they tried to break it, the stronger it became. I thought of that crying boy. I thought of my students. I thought of a country being shaped by fear—and how badly it needed courage instead.

We were not fighting for ourselves alone.We were fighting for our country.We were fighting for dignity.We were fighting for the future.

Years later, Mandela would walk out of Victor Verster, tall and unbroken, and the world would celebrate. As it should. But long before that historic moment, resistance was already alive inside those walls—quiet, hungry, determined.

In 1985, I entered prison as a teacher.

I left knowing something unshakable:You can lock up bodies, but you cannot jail conviction.You can silence voices, but you cannot erase truth.

And some lessons—especially the most important ones—are taught not in classrooms, but in the darkest places, where dignity refuses to die.