Hints to Lady Travellers: Robben Island

So, I managed to cut 361 photos down to about 30 and am now ready to describe my visit to Robben Island. Well, fairly ready. I’m still processing my feelings about the day and I think I will be for a while to come.

I was in the awfully lucky position of being the guest of the Robben Island Heritage Department. I had met the research manager and exhibitions manager a few weeks back and they invited me to come and visit. Naturally, I accepted with alacrity.

The ferry left Cape Town Waterfront at 9. I was so anxious not to miss it, I was there at 7.45. It was grey and windy and we had a choppy ride over to the island, which is only 7 km off the mainland.

In the morning, I went on the regular tour.

We got on buses and passed through this archway. I don’t know when the sign is from, but I found it a bit chilling. (If you can't read it, it says: Robben Island - We Serve With Pride.)

There’s a lot to get through on the tour – and even with a week, I doubt you could cover all the stories, so by necessity the tour just deals with the highlights.

From the bus window we saw the leper graveyard (the island has been, at various times, a prison, a leper colony, a naval base, a prison again and now a museum), the village where the staff of the prison lived with their families (there’s an abandoned church, school, village hall, post office and some rather nice houses, mostly lying empty now), the huts used as a base by the SWANS (South African Women’s Auxiliary Naval Service) in World War II and the quarry where the political prisoners were forced to work.

(If you look very closely you'll see a tortoise in the bottom left hand corner. I'm sure there's a metaphor in that somewhere.)

(Bunnies, by the way, are the scourge of the island. The warders used to keep the population down, but since the prison closed the number of rabbits has escalated and they've eaten every scrap of grass on the island.)

There are some beautiful views back to Cape Town, but even the views are sad, because they underscore the fact that the island has been a place of banishment for most of its history.

The bus dropped us at the prison, and we were taken round by a former political prisoner.

He took us into this communal cell, where forty men would once have stayed and explained the basic context of life in the prison. There is something very eerie about being in a place that has so recently been a prison – the last prisoners only left in 1996. The utilitarian green paint, the smell of cleaning fluid and the bareness everywhere make it all very real.

Of course the moment everyone anticipates is seeing Mandela’s cell. After our guide talked in general about life in the prison for about 25 minutes (one of the facts that really stuck was that black prisoners had different rations to the coloured and Indian prisoners – divided even, or still, behind bars) and then we shuffled through the corridor where Mandela’s cell was and queued to take a photo.

With only about 45 minutes to see the prison the tour does feel a bit rushed. I would like to have known more about the other people – Mandela’s neighbours, for example.

When the tour was over, the other people in my group were waved back to the ferry, while I waited for Mavis, the exhibitions manager, to collect me. I had lunch with the Heritage Department staff and we talked about intepretation – the challenges they have (most notably of keeping track of visitors to an island – making sure that everyone who arrives, leaves!) and things they would like to do.

In the afternoon, Mavis and Sandra, the education manager, took me on my own personal tour of Robben Island (I know I’m lucky). One of the absolute highlights (if that’s the right word) of the day was visiting the house where Robert Sobukwe was kept for six years. I didn’t know very much about him before my visit, but he was a resistance leader, head of the PAC (Pan Africanist Congress), university lecturer who encouraged people to protest against the pass laws that severely limited the freedom of movement of black people (those protests led to the Sharpeville Massacre). He was jailed for three years by the Apartheid government and served his time. But the government were worried about having such a charismatic and influential person on the loose and passed a special act of parliament to allow them to incarcerate him on Robben Island.

Because he wasn’t officially a prisoner, he wasn’t kept in the prison, but in a tiny house further along the island. His living conditions were Spartan but not uncomfortable; he had access to books and a radio and could send and receive letters, albeit censored and often blocked. But he couldn’t speak to anyone and no one could speak to him. Even his warders were forbidden from speaking to him and if any of the other prisoners spoke to Sobukwe on their way to the quarries they were punished.

His family was allowed to visit twice during the six years.

His four little children slept in these iron beds and drew games on the floor with chalk - they weren't allowed to set foot outside the small compound either.

He was finally released in 1969 but was kept under house arrest in Kimberley, a dusty town in the Northern Cape and died there at the age of 53.

There was something terribly sad about the whole story – reinforced by the machinery of the regime that declared the man wasn’t a prisoner, and yet subjected him to a kind of torture. When Helen Suzman, the only member of parliament openly opposing apartheid at the time, came to visit Sobukwe, he told her he had forgotten how to speak.

In a piece of dramatic irony, the area around the Sobukwe house was later used as kennels for the prison guard dogs.