Robben Island

Friday saw us take the trip to Robben Island. The island is just outside the harbour of Cape Town and is infamous for being the site of incarceration for political prisoners during Apartheid, most notably Mandela.

We were warned that the trips book up weeks in advance but we just walked into the ticket office and bought a couple for the next sailing. Which was handy. The boat over was a hydrofoil and the waters here are rough. I did not enjoy the crossing. Once on the island itself we began with a coach tour around it which was good, as a desert island off the coast it is quite pretty if slightly bleak. Before use for a prison it was variously a leper colony, a slave colony and a prison again, and there was a museum of its history at this viewpoint:

After finishing the coach tour we were taken into the prison itself by a former prisoner, who explained how it was organised and how the political prisoners were separated from the ordinary criminals so they could not spread their ideology - reminded me of concerns about radicalisation in British jails. The ordinary prisoners were kept in large communal cells like these:

Now our tour guide said he was kept in such a cell. Which, reading between two not so tricky lines, means he was an ordinary prisoner. We didn't ask why. The mural in the shot is because after it was closed as a prison in the 90s it was used as... something else. Children? Can't remember. The sisal mat in the picture is what they slept on before the wardens were prevailed upon to install beds. The longest serving member of the South African parliament was a (white) woman who campaigned against Apartheid for most of its life, and it was she who was responsible for many of the basic amenities provided to the prisoners.

During the coach tour, as well as the standalone single pen in which Sobukwe, founder of the Pan-African Congress and the only political prisoner ever officially to be called that was held with his six guards, we were shown the quarries where the prisoners worked. Part of the prison was built with stone extracted by the prisoners themselves, who were then locked in it. Political prisoners, maintaining separation from the ordinary population, worked in the limestone quarry, which is why most of the leaders of resistance to Apartheid suffered from sight and respiratory problems: they did not have any eye protection with the bright white stone under the blazing sun all year round, nor was there any protection from the dust (which the guide alleged caused TB, clearly indirectly).

After visiting the prison sections for ordinary criminals we continued to the political area. Here prisoners were kept in single cells, the size of which shocked me. They were square, eight or nine feet across. A mat on the floor, a bucket and a small cabinet were the furniture. Mandela's cell (9) had its furniture:

Criticism of Mandela or any of the other leaders seems to be taboo in this country. They were locked up for terrorism after all. The only mention of this was in the gift shop, where newspaper cuttings from the Cape Argus newspaper at the time (biased against them naturally) gave descriptions of the crimes they organised. The roundups however were general, of all the organisation leaders.

The prisoners were numbered by the order in which they arrived in that year, stroke, the year. So Mandela's number was 466/64, which I've seen adorning t-shirts and I recall Mandeep in connection with it.

Last thing: the Cape being one enormous nature reserve/park and this being a desert island, there is a penguin colony. More on penguins in a forthcoming post about Tuesday's tour of the peninsula.