Robben Island repurposed

One of our guides said that in four days, we had experienced all four seasons this week.  Wind, rain, heat, fog.  You can find it all in one day; Cape Town weather is unpredictable and unstable.  Today was windy and the sea was choppy, and we were fortunate that the weather did not prevent our trip to Robben Island, which lies 13 km from Cape Town. 

Table Mountain from the lighthouse on Robben Island

The trip out was bouncy as we crossed the waves.  Those of us from Semester at Sea smiled knowingly as we went over the crests and into the troughs, as the tourists who had flown or driven into town gasped on our thrill ride.  The way back (going into the wind) was much worse, with the spray of waves hitting the windows of the boat.  We stopped our silent gloating and got about the business of grimly bearing it.  My stomach stayed put, but I developed a bad headache and broke into a sweat.  The waves weren’t high compared to a day at sea, but you feel them much more intensely in a smaller boat.  I was very happy to be back on land.

Robben Island (Robbeneiland in Afrikaans) is the famous prison island where Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were held until the 1990s.  It started out as a prison island for the Dutch, and the name means “thieves’ island.”  This is kind of obvious when you already know about it, but until it’s pointed out, you might think it was named after someone named Robben.  On my first tour, I learned that convicts from the prison had quarried the stone for the Castle of Good Hope, which means it was a prison island back in the 17^th century.  Later, it became a leper’s colony, and then was repurposed as a prison holding both political prisoners and garden variety criminals.  (Well, not garden variety because it was a high security prison.  Also because it’s pretty much a desert out there.)

Like Alcatraz, Robben Island is in sight of the city, surrounded by water that’s freezing cold and treacherous to swim in.  No one escaped.  Because of the distance from the mainland, there has always been a residential village there.  They gave up their school last year because there were only about a dozen kids in town.  Sports were hard, because at best you could only make up one team.  Now the kids take a ferry in to a mainland school every day (that weather permits).  It must be a lonely place.  

The houses are tidy, but stark, and there is nothing but sand in the yards.  Every one has a rain barrel, a mute testimony to the scarcity of fresh water.  Every one also has a satellite TV dish, a more recent addition.

The tour is broken into two parts, a bus tour covering the town, cemeteries, and outbuildings, and the tour inside the main prison, which is led by a former political prisoner.  Our guide was a gun-runner whose unit was betrayed by an agent inside the ranks.  He got 25 years, but served only 8 before the apartheid government fell and all the prisoners were released.  He’s been giving tours for ten years, living on the island with his family.  When asked what motivated him to come back to the place where he was imprisoned, beaten, and forced to labor under inhumane conditions for so long, he said, “Free place to live and I needed a job.”  Financial reality trumps ideology.

The leadership of the ANC was kept on A Block, and those cells are locked.  Mandela's cell is furnished as it was when he was there, and the others are empty.  On C Block, the cells are open, and most have narrations in them written by the prisoners.  Some are mundane, some harrowing.  One I couldn't make any sense out of.  All are touching in their own way.  It's a tour that really gets to you.

My companion for the day was Louise, a multi-talented woman who is teaching courses in bioethics, sociology of education, and philosophy of religion aboard ship.  (Back home, she teaches at a law school.)  She said she’s been to worse prisons.  Without taking anything away from the obvious hardships, I was surprised at some of the routines. 

Kids outside Mandela's cell

The cell doors were left unlocked and the prisoners had access to each other for much of the day.  Each cell block had a recreation area, and they could choose what playing fields to have.  Each cell block had a tennis court, and they sent tennis balls with messages in them over the walls into the neighboring cell block.  They cells had windows, so they had light and air.  They had access to books and received visits from family.  They called the lime quarry “Parliament,” because they drafted the constitution there, and the cave they used as a toilet was called “The University” because they hid books in there.  The leaders of the movement were housed on the same cell block, which made communication easier (but of course made surveillance easier, too).  

It was also freezing in the winter, starvation diet, with torture and intimidation.  All black and mixed race prisoners, all white guards.  It was a horrible place, no disagreement there.  But the men at Robben Island formed a community and then the essentials of a constitution and a government.  

South Africa is still a very segregated country.  While there are no laws forcing the black South Africans to live in specific areas, they still live in the townships.  

Or, to use their chosen verb, they "stay" in the township.  As is in, "Where does your daughter live?"  "She stays in the East Cape."  It's a bit of a contranym.  We would use stay to mean a temporary stay, as in a motel, and they use it to mean a permanent residence.

High unemployment keeps a lot of them there all day long.  They don't even visit back and forth between the townships.  The townships are generally remote, and the transportation system moves people from township to city, but not from one township to another.  It's a kind of village life, very supportive of one another within the village, but with horizons that often don't extend outside of the village.  

The township system started almost 100 years ago.  It will not be dismantled quickly.