Touching History

After a restful sleep, our hostess Hendrina dropped us off at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront. Wandering about the shops and lunch of fish & chips amongst a crowd of very many Brits, Germans, and Americans, set us up for an afternoon trip to Robben Island. Unfortunately a brush fire obscured the view to Cape Town, but the 45-minute ferry ride was refreshing and smooth. The best part was the Obama t-shirt that one of the island's administrators had on when we arrived...Unfortunately, the camera was buried too deep in the pack for me to snap her photo.

At Robben Island we loaded onto a bus for a tour around the island, stopping at various points to have the significance of a building or patch of fenced yard or WWII battery or warren of rabbits explained to us. It was quite a sobering experience to begin to understand how Apartheid had transformed -- actually cemented -- the island's purpose as a harsh, unforgiving place for punishment. Imagine being Robert Sobukwe, one of the first political prisoners placed on the island for opposing the Apartheid Regime's required use of passbooks for all black or coloured peoples, living in a small cement holding cell with almost no interaction with others prisoners for 6 years.

We then offloaded from the bus and were guided through the maximum security prison itself by a former inmate, who was imprisoned in the early 1980s. He served time on Robben Island just after Nelson Mandela had been sent to a different prison on the mainland. Now a medium-security prison, the conditions were less harsh, but still hard to believe. Our guide's own stories of living in a cell with 80 other prisoners, no glass in the windows and limited access to bathrooms paled in comparison to Nelson Mandela's 18 years of time in a 2m x 2m isolation cell, spending a significant portion of that time working hard labor and enduring the cold, wet winters of Cape Town with little clothing and meager rations.

It was a tiring day, but a fascinating peak into the painful recent history of South Africa.