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Outlook: The prison escape and the wooden keys

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05/10/2023 GMT

The prison escape and the wooden keys

BBC World Service - Outlook, The prison escape and the wooden keys

Anti-apartheid activist Tim Jenkin's remarkable escape from a South African prison

In 1978, anti-apartheid activist Tim Jenkin hatched an audacious prison escape plan. From his cell, he would make his own wooden keys and open the prison doors to freedom.

Tim Jenkin grew up in apartheid-era South Africa. At his school, he was taught that non-white neighbours ‘weren’t like real people.’ But when Tim moved to London the year after finishing school, he had a total shift in perspective. He encountered anti-apartheid films which cast his country in a completely different light and came to the realisation that ‘I had been lied to my entire life.’

Tim returned to South Africa for university and met an underground network of students who, like him, were eager for change. After graduation, Tim and his classmate Stephen Lee joined the African National Congress (ANC), an anti-apartheid group then considered a terrorist organisation by the South African government. 

By the mid-1970s, Tim and Stephen were travelling across South Africa, secretly distributing ANC literature. But in March 1978, the South African police caught up with them and Tim was sentenced under the Terrorism Act to 12 years in a Pretoria prison.

Tim began to plan his escape as soon as he entered the prison. Examining the lock on his cell-door, he decided to make a key to open it. Using smuggled tools from the prison wood-shop, Tim constructed a key that would fit the door’s dimensions; it opened first time. But there were many more doors, and many more keys, between Tim and freedom. 

Tim wrote a book about his experience, which was made into a film, both called Escape from Pretoria. 

(This interview was first broadcast in March 2020)

Presenter: Jo Fidgen
Producer: Thomas Harding Assinder

Get in touch: outlook@bbc.com or WhatsApp +44 330 678 2707

(Photo: Tim Jenkin. Raw Television)

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