Fences...

One of the most striking things about Robben Island is its mundanity. South Africa’s most notorious political prison, a rallying point for the anti-apartheid movement, could have been indistinguishable from any jail. The first post-apartheid generation of leaders thankfully decided more was in order.

10 kilometres and a 20 minute ferry ride from the ridiculously gaudy tourist complex known as the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, Robben Island is a fascinating experience. I visited this afternoon with three friends from the hostel, Nathan (Kiwi), Andrew (American, self-described honorary Canuck) and Stephanie (Brit).

In addition to a leper colony and a small village for prison staff and their families, Robben Island held opponents of various South African regimes for nearly 400 years. Signs of long habitation are omnipresent in the ruins of old docks, crumbling stone houses and surprisingly large cemeteries given the size of the settlement. Now the island is dedicated to teaching South Africans and visitors of the injustices of apartheid and the way this place incubated the movement to end racially segregated rule.

The maximum security wing of Robben Island was reserved for black male political prisoners (whites and women were held elsewhere in South African), and the regime unleashed its greatest brutality on them. Our guide, Sparks, shared the island’s secrets with an authority well earned during his seven years as a prisoner here. Arrested, if I recall correctly, in 1983 for being a member of the anti-apartheid Pan-Africanist Congress, he explained the horrific living conditions and the punishment leveled at intransigent passengers. To hear a man describe his days of solitary confinement and starvation has rather more impact than reading any textbook on apartheid.

Nelson Mandela’s prison cell was like all the others in the solitary wing of the prison. It was perhaps six feet by five, with three paper-thin coarse blankets, a metal plate and cup for food and drink, and a single bucket for predictable purposes. He spent twenty years in that space, twenty-three or more hours a day, enduring sporadic torture and constant humiliation as did all the other opponents of apartheid held there.

The most remarkable thing that every visitor to Robben Island sees (aside from the penguins, of whom I saw only two) is the attitude of the former prisoners. Sparks explained to us that he, along with the other prisoners, made a decision to view their time in Robben Island not as an injustice, nor even as a sacrifice per se, but as a critical precondition for toppling apartheid. Robben Island strengthened and bound together the anti-apartheid movement by bringing together its most forceful leaders and their disparate groups. It was on Robben Island that the most courageous men in South Africa first set out common goals and methods for freeing their country. It was there that Nelson Mandela wrote The Long Walk to Freedom and smuggled his manuscript to the waiting world. It was there that the world first truly saw the face of apartheid and began to undo the system from abroad. It’s hard to overstate the significance of the place, or the power of Sparks’ (and others) conviction that apartheid could not have been overthrown without their suffering.

Lest the talk of forgiveness and reconciliation sounds like mere words, consider that Sparks, like many of the other former inmates now guiding visitors around the prison, chose to live in the island’s village after he was released. Some of the men who imprisoned him are now his neighbours, coworkers and even his friends.