page 277 - Long Walk Original Manuscript [LWOM_277.jpg]

sugar, milk and tea. For lunch they had sandwiches or meat pie with soup , and for supper quality meat far larger in quantity than that of blacks, vegetables, rice, gravy, pudding, coffee and milk. So colour conscious are South African whites that eve the color of sugar supplied to blacks and whites differed. Blacks received brown while whites were provided with white sugar.

Basically the African diet consisted then, as it still does now, of mealies prepared in two different forms. The quantity of meat and vegetables supplied was too small to make much difference and that of sugar even worse. Few things incense me as a prisoner as to see human beings having to stuff their bellies with plain porridge for breakfast and supper and munching boiled mealies for their lunch. It is cruel to treat any man in this fashion but hatred and anger welled up in me when I saw our aged and respected leaders like Chief Luthuli, who was to be honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize in less than two years, and Professor Matthews, an assistant principal of a university and a deputy president of the African National Congress, being subjected to such humiliating treatment. There are matters which fill one with a sense of real shame because, even making due allowance for all the pecularities of our situation and our protests against such practices, their continued existence is an indictment against us as a people. Even as I look back now over all those years in prison I cannot avoid the feeling that with proper organisation and super human determination that freedom fighters are capable of, we should have by now brought an end at least to these aspects of prison life.

Of course, as detainees, we protested about the diet and the improvement made by the authorities