30 Robben Island

Pictures
Route
1 Windhoek to Joburg
2 Views and gold
3 Kruger bound
4 Elephant and rhino
5 To Olifants
6 To Blyde River
7 Swaziland beckons
8 Ezulwini Valley
9 To Dundee
10 Zulu battlefields
11 To Hluhluwe
12 Hluhluwe & coast
13 to Winterton
14 Wits End
15 The Sphinx
16 Bus day north
17 Kimberley mine
18 Through the Karoo
19 Plettenberg Bay
20 Pootling about
21 Buffalo Bay
22 South of Africa
23 On to wine lands
24 On to Paarl
25 Wine and port
26 Cheetah and eagles
27 Paarl and Stellenbosch
28 Paarl to Cape Town
29 Museum and art
30 Robben Island
31 Cape of Good Hope
32 Around Cape Town
33 Table Mountain
34 Going home

South Africa

Cape Town

Thursday 18 May 2006

Behind bars on Robben Island

But luckily our friend, a former inmate, has the key!

Rain again delayed play for the morning but in the afternoon we headed out to Robben Island. The island has a long history having been occupied at some stage over the years by several of the foreign nationalities who traded in the Cape. Primarily it has been used as a place of quarantine, a leper colony or a place of incarceration but has also served as a military base. It is perhaps most famous for its time as a prison for those opposed to the national regime in the Apartheid years with Nelson Mandela possibly being the most well known of its inmates.

From the main harbour you are taken by catamaran over to the island which takes about half an hour. I thought it was a relatively calm day but the boat seemed to roll quite heavily and I spent most of the journey across feeling a little queasy to say the least. Being hemmed inside a hot cabin from where I couldn’t easily see out to the horizon didn’t help and I vowed to get an outside seat on the way back even if it was tipping down with rain.

At the island you are bundled on to a large bus and a guide takes you on a tour of the island. In some ways it is similar to Alcatraz in San Francisco. The prison is the dominant feature of the island but around it is a small village which was, and still is, home to the people who work at the prison. Today many of those buildings have now been converted into a conference centre. Our guide on the bus was a very entertaining chap from the Indian community. He had a great way of involving everyone in his commentary and soon had us chuckling away. Soon he had revealed how broad the foreign interests and involvements in South Africa had been. The bus was full of tourists from quite a wide range of nationalities. If they didn’t come from one of the early settling countries their country had been key in supporting the anti apartheid movement so he was able to demonstrate that wide influences have come together to shape the modern day South Africa.

As we toured around the island he told us about some of the other people who were key to the anti apartheid struggle. Nelson Mandela attracts pretty much all of the focus these days but he also told us about Steve Biko and Walter Sisulu. A number of different political organisations were all active but the ANC gets the most focus. We passed one small building in a caged enclosure which is where one very influential prisoner, whose name escapes me, was held. He was deemed to be so influential in the anti apartheid movement that he was kept in solitary confinement for many years. When he was finally released his vocal chords had effectively seized up through lack of use.

We also passed a small limestone quarry which is where the prisoners were sent to work each day. It was futile work consisting mainly of moving rocks from one side of the quarry to the other and then back again the next day. We saw the quarry in the rain so it was hard to imagine the sun glaring off the face of the rocks and magnifying the heat the prisoners would have worked in. The combination of bright sunlight, dust and no sunglasses took its toll on their eyesight and many were left partially blind. Apparently you cannot take flash photographs of Nelson Mandela because his tear ducts have been totally blocked up from this dust.

Our guide told us how the prisoners also filled their time by getting an education and how many left their time in captivity with two or more university degrees to their name. Education wasn’t always available but it was allowed from a certain stage. Prisoners could apply to study with the courses all being distance learning programmes. Many of the guards who stood over them with guns during the day also benefited as the prisoners included them in the loop teaching them how to read and write so the guards also got an education.

Cape Town's worst busker

At the prison complex we were handed over to a different guide, a former inmate who had spent seven years on Robben Island. He was quite happy to answer questions if you had any but his opening shot was “we’re short on time and need to push on” and that set the scene for our tour. We were the last group to arrive at the prison but the first to leave and there wasn’t really any time to think about what you were seeing and decide what questions you wanted to ask.

We both left with no idea of what daily life was really like for the prisoners and how they were treated by the prison system. We saw their cells, 2m x 3m, sparse rooms with a mattress on the floor to sleep on and a single bucket for use as washbasin and toilet. There were exercise yards outside where they could play tennis, using the balls as message carriers to send information from one block to another. There was a hospital and a room where prisoners could see their political party’s legal representatives in private.

It seems ironic that this site has come full circle for some people. The early criminal prisoners (which included Mandela) quarried rocks to build the more permanent prison for the political prisoners (Mandela included). They then spent many years here as inmates but now still live on the island but working as tour guides. In the spirit of reconciliation they do not seem, publicly at any rate, to harbour any grudges or grievances for the time they spent as prisoners. It’s very much just a period of history that happened and much as horrific incidents and experiences occurred, the present is the present and its time to move on. It’s a mindset that could be effectively copied to other areas of the world.

We took the boat back to the mainland and toured the different places to eat looking for something a little different. As with many major cities cuisine from many parts of the world is on offer here but, if our experience of the Greek place we went to was representative of the rest there weren’t many typical dishes on the menu.

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