There is a book and documentary which I believe should be compulsory resources for black consciousness/pan afrikanist activists across the world. The book is 'The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness' by Prof Michelle Alexander.Alexander's central thesis is that "the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control." Then there is the documentary "13th" by Ava DuVernay.Through this documentary, DuVernay argues that "America uses the 13th Amendment, through the legal system, to continue slavery and highlights the fact Black Americans are over-represented in America's legal system. "Although Black people make up 6.5 percent of the U.S. population, they comprise 40.2 percent of the prison population."Alexander's book and DuVernay forces you to examine the weapon of mass incarceration from another angle.Apart from being a central part of the systems of slavery and capitalism (through the prison-industrial complex); mass incarceration was also intended to be an instrument with which to weaken black resistance by breaking black families.In the South AfriKKKan context, have we ever stopped to think about how instruments such as detention and banning orders were used by the apartheid-colonial regime and what impact these had on black families, intergenerationally?Let us take the examples of Madiba, Baba Rolihlahla Mandela, Hlathi, Baba Mangaliso Sobukwe and MaNgutyana, Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.On 13 July, 1969, Madiba's eldest son, Thembekile Mandela died in a car accident. At the time, Madiba was incarcerated on Robben Island.He applied for permission to attend his son's funeral and his application was rejected.Thembekile was 24 at the time of his death.When Madiba was released he visited the accident site and Thembekile's grave. In the same year (1969) of the death of Madiba's son, Baba Mangaliso Sobukwe was relocated (not released) from Robben Island and was banished to my home town Ga-Kgosi Galeshewe in the Northern Cape province.Hlathi's extended incarceration included being under house arrest, restricted movement, allowed to meet a limited number of people at a time, prohibited from political activities, teaching, or being quoted by the media.Despite all this, Hlathi obtained a law degree and opened a legal practice in Ga-Kgosi Galeshewe.He reportedly died of lung cancer in February 1978, while still under extended incarceration.He essentially died a prisoner.In 1977, the apartheid regime banished MaNgutyana, Mama Winnie Madikizela-Mandela to the town of Brandfort in the Free State province. She was dumped in Majwemasweu township in a three-roomed house that didn't have running water, electricity, floors, or ceilings.Her banning conditions were not too dissimilar from those of Hlathi.She was not allowed to receive visitors, was not supposed to engage in any political activity and was under constant police watch.Despite her restrictions, MaNgutyana did lot of ungrounded political work, including recruiting for uMkhonto Wesizwe. She also contributed to important community self-help projects and organised the women of Majwemasweu.Madiba, Hlathi and MaNgutyana have written down how this and other deeply personal experiences affected them and in particular, the psychological effects of being cut off from their families and in their children. Their testimonies reveal atleast three things.The first is that, the torture of isolation can never be aptly described in words.Two, we have yet to understand the depth of the heartlessness of white people and how the residual trauma continues to live in the Black community and three, revolutionaries don't cease to be human purely because of the path they have chosen