Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison in a tiny claustrophobic cell on Robben Island, a forlorn windswept place, just 45 minutes by ferry but a world away from bustling Cape Town. 

His young Afrikaner warder, Christo Brand, describes the prison routine in his book “Doing Life with Mandela. My prisoner my friend.”

“An ear-splitting clanging would start up all over the prison at 5am.  We used metal pipes with a chain inside to make the maximum noise, a horrible grinding sound, to wake up all the prisoners in their icy cells.”

“The cells were as cold as fridges, all year round. They were made of cement and unpainted. Overnight they would freeze…. I would see Mandela doing exercises in his cell at 5am, usually for an hour. He would have been cold all night, so he would be doing sit-ups to warm himself up. He was a tall man and the two mats issued to him were too short. When he lay back, his head would be touching one wall, his feet the opposite wall.”

I stood in Mandela's cell and tried to imagine the horrors of such a brutal existence, year in, year out. (Photo right)

Close friends

Brand was nineteen and Mandela sixty when they first met and they grew to be close friends, a relationship which had to be concealed from everyone, not just the prison authorities.

Inevitably, if people had known about it they would have talked.

Astonishingly, I met Christo Brand, now 63, who was on Robben Island on the day we were there.

He described a visit from Winnie Mandela who had smuggled her four-month old granddaughter into the prison under a heavy wool blanket. It had been a rough crossing on the ferry and black visitors had to sit on the top deck, exposed to the wind and lashing rain. 

She pleaded with Brand to let her husband see the baby but he sternly told her this was out of the question. It was expressly forbidden. He told her to leave the baby in the waiting room with other visitors while she saw her husband.

When the time was up Winnie was escorted out of the booth with no idea that Brand had given the child to a tearful Mandela and let him hold her for 30 seconds. 

“On the way back to the cells Mandela walked close enough to tell me: “Thank you, Mr Brand. I know you can lose your job for that. Now it’s a secret between us, just you and me.”

It was a secret kept for decades.

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Christo Brand earlier this month talking to visitors in the former prison on Robben Island, now a UNESCO World Heritage site.