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.  

It's time for Africa!

It stayed sunny all day, and it stayed just as windy, too.  What a glorious day to be on land!

My time in South Africa is largely taken up with Semester at Sea trips.  I had signed up for three of them, and then was asked to lead a trip where there were no faculty or staff members, so now am committed to running three trips and participating in a fourth.  It will be an intense week, but so much fun.

Today's trip was the City Orientation tour, which turned out to be largely history, with a bit of politics and geography thrown in.  Our tour guide, Buz, has an infectious enthusiasm for his native country.  And he is, of course, full of interesting information.

First off, he said, Table Mountain is absolutely the reason for Cape Town's location.  In every other way, Cape Town is a lousy port, the most dangerous in the Southern Hemisphere.  Unpredictable weather, terrible storms, crazy winds, dangerous ocean currents.  But Table Mountain acts as a giant cistern, and an early shipwrecked sailor saw streams flowing from it and realized that good water and good land allowed for restocking ships' provisions on the way to India and the Far East.  So Cape Town it was, the only green spot in southern Africa.

Our first stop was the Castle of Good Hope, the oldest building in Cape Town.  Originally built by the Dutch trading company, it later became the headquarters for the English governor.  Buz told us the stone for it was quarried on Robben Island, which was a prison back in the 1600s as well as more recently.  The yellow brick came from the Netherlands as ballast in the ships and was repurposed.  You can see it all over town in historic buildings.

Afternoon sundial at the castle.

Highlights of our castle tour included the small of freshly cut grass (ah, small pleasures of being on land!) and seeing the parade ground in front of the city hall building, where Nelson Mandela addressed the public after his release from prison in 1990.

The smell of the land, specifically, grass!

It's an unimposing space, but it was the only space where the thousands of people could be accommodated.  Tensions were running high, he said.  White South Africans were terrified of losing power and terrified of the Other.  For years they had been told that blacks and coloreds were going to ravish their daughters, run wild, and so on.  Blacks came with arsenals in the boots of their cars.  And Mandela said, "Put away the guns."  His message was one of peace.

And it was one of strategy.  As Buz told us, the whites had been preparing for the eventuality of armed insurrection, and they would have overwhelmed the opposition forces, with great loss of life on both sides.  He told us of a colleague who said, "We were gobsmacked" by Mandela's announcement.  But peace was the possibility that had not been tried.

Mosaic bench in the Company's Garden, depicting community watch

Parade ground outside the Castle, with City Hall in the distance.

It's a rocky peace.  There are still huge disparities of income, there's 40% unemployment, a miner now makes about $10/day after a recent 50% raise.  Cape Town has the highest crime rate in Africa.  But they are doing some things right, too.  South Africa has a flag that was designed as a result of a public competition, truly representing the people.  Children are taught in their native language, and college students can take their exams in the language of their choice.  (Imagine that in the US!  Perhaps that's operationalized by having only objective tests.  Otherwise, what a grading nightmare.)  The staid colonial building that houses the art museum has vibrant native art front and center.  Land seized from the colored population is being developed to benefit all, and some compensation is being offered.

The second stop on our tour was the Company's Gardens.  Originally the vegetable gardens for restocking ships, it has been a botanical garden for over 100 years.  We stopped there for "a bit of something," tea (or other beverage) and scones.  Scones on steroids!  The scones themselves tasted more like shortbread, cut open and served with a large dollop of jam and a generous portion of whipped cream.  Ohmigawd good.

Not just for breakfast.

We spent about an hour in the natural history museum.  (No photos allowed.)  Possibly the most remarkable thing about this museum is that it does not have a gift shop.  It has a locked cabinet of things you might buy, outside the cafe.  A couple of pieces of jewelry, a few books, some souvenir keychains.  Probably a dozen items, total.  A four hour tour with no opportunity to fill the coffers of the host country, no opportunity for kickback to the tour guide.  We were gobsmacked.

In addition to the usual dinosaur skeletons and jaws from whales, there was an exhibit of rock art--paintings and carvings from caves and outdoors--mostly depicting shamanic healing and trance dancing.   That was amazing.

Intense colors of the Malay Quarter

There was also an installation on rats, throughout the museum.  It is supposed to challenge the way we organize and present information.  A brochure on the exhibition says rats are closely connected to humans, but they are rarely shown in natural history museums.  So here they are incorporated into the history of mankind:  their skulls compared to the skulls of other animals, their contributions, positive and negative, on museum cases and display cards.  In one diorama, a pair of mice is being expelled from paradise (an allusion I don't get even with the explanation).  There is an exhibit of newspaper headlines about rats, and a display of rat movie titles.  It is all beautifully done, but I found the brochure vital to interpret what I saw.  Sneaky little critters!

Leaving the rats behind, we made our way back to the ship.  I had planned to go out to dinner on shore with a friend, but reports of salmon aboard ship kept us home.  In deference to the parents who are visiting, we get fancy food.

With the parent trip, the open ship event, and being in a beautiful city where English is spoken, we have a lot of visitors.  A surprisingly large number of students have family living in Cape Town.  There are over 100 visitors on the manifest, and more who will not come aboard.  As I walked back from the dining room, I was acutely aware of being a solo traveler.

and a child shall lead them

[Tomorrow, we return to travels overseas.  This post is inspired by an email from home.]

This just in from the Human Rights Campaign:  Republican Senator Rob Portman supports gay marriage.

His change of heart came about for the same reason that millions of others have taken a fresh look at this issue around the country: someone close to him came out as gay. In the Senator's case, it was his college-aged son, Will. As Portman told reporters,

"It allowed me to think of this issue from a new perspective, and that's of a Dad who loves his son a lot and wants him to have the same opportunities that his brother and sister would have – to have a relationship like Jane [my wife] and I have had for over 26 years."

We are asked to thank Senator Portman.  I think we should be thanking Will. 

I think we should be throwing out of office every elected official who can’t see beyond his own family when considering laws that affect every constituent in his district. 

It wasn’t until my own daughter was struggling in school that I saw we needed to provide public education.

It wasn’t until my son fell in love with an undocumented worker and my granddaughter went back to a third world country with her deported mother that I understood we need to think on a global level about immigration and trade.

It wasn’t until my sister couldn’t get health insurance…

Really, Senator Portman, Vice President Cheney, and all of the rest of you on both sides of the aisle, in the pulpits of the country, or holding signs in the street.  Look around!  If you don’t know a gay person flying under the radar, it’s not because you don’t know a gay person, it’s because the gay person you know is good at flying under the radar. 

Even if that person is your son, evidently.  I think about what it must have been like for Will, knowing that his father was making a career out of trampling on his civil rights.  How much harder to have the conversation knowing that your father’s affirmation costs him his job.  How many family photos paste a smile on the pain of supporting a campaign that invalidates you as a person?  It’s not just the law that keeps people like Will from marrying their true loves. 

I am glad that Senator Portman chose love over party.  I am glad that Will’s future can include bringing his boyfriend home for Thanksgiving dinner. And I hope that every policy maker can look beyond his or her own family album and realize that government for the people means ALL the people, not just the ones that you have personally invested in.