Have you noticed how many South Africans you know now? Never met one before a couple of years ago, now they’re everywhere!
Here’s a game you can play at your next dinner party. Ask one of them what they think of the “new” South Africa? They’ll talk for hours, put the Duracell bunny to shame doing it. Fascinating though, a people and a country full of contrasts and surprises.
Take Cape Town, for example. Beautiful.
When Nelson Mandela looked at it from Robben Island, just 12 kilometres away, it must have been a special torture. If his guards had allowed him to lift his eyes from the dusty path as he walked between his cell and the quarry where he toiled, he would have seen the deep blue Atlantic Ocean forming a white fringe around the town’s feet. So close, and yet so far from his living hell.
Robben Island is a world heritage site these days, a living museum and a tribute to Nelson Mandela and the other political prisoners who fought apartheid. Modern day tourists step off onto the same wharf where the prisoners arrived. The official buildings made of stark grey granite are caricatures of prison buildings, instantly recognisable to Australians as the work of convict labour. The message must have been impossible to misinterpret, the effect immediate. A guard tower rises over a road leading directly to the jail. This was an institution designed to break the spirit.
Our guide inside what was the maximum security jail is Speech Subuwo. He’s a former inmate. All the tour guides are former political prisoners. Speech’s crime was to run guns across the South African border into Angola. He was a dozen years captive on Robben Island, and crossed paths with his more famous colleague.
Speech shows us cell 5 in B block where Nelson Mandela spent 16 of his 23 years in captivity, rising at 4 each morning from a straw mat in this impossibly small room, digging in a limestone quarry that almost sent him blind and existing on meagre rations. Like all prisoners he was forced to speak an alien language, Afrikaans. Contact with the outside world was limited to a couple of heavily-censored letters a month. Beatings were frequent and severe.
A walled courtyard was Mandela’s only free space, shared with scores of other inmates jailed for defying the “pass laws” which prevented blacks from moving freely in the white controlled nation. Even here there was no escaping apartheid. The so-called political prisoners shared the jail with rapists, murderers and thieves, but white outranked “coloured”, who outranked blacks. Food was rationed accordingly.
And there was worse – solitary confinement. No talking, no communication, not even with guards, sometimes for years on end.
And what about Speech?
“Oh yes, two and a half years.”
Speech uses few words to say a great deal.
“It was very bad. Many men went mad.”
It is not what was done to the prisoners here that make Robben Island special, it’s how the inmates reacted to the cruel, unusual and inhumane punishment after they were released. It would have been forgivable if Nelson Mandela had sought revenge, risen-up against his oppressors. Instead, he preached reconciliation and convinced others to lay down their arms. A new and prosperous nation was created when blood and ashes could have been all that was left. The “new” South Africa, the free, democratic South Africa was born on Robben Island. To visit here is to understand how different things could have been without Nelson Mandela, and to appreciate how a great nation full of hope and promise was made.
Tours to Robben Island leave from the Nelson Mandela complex at Cape Town’s V & A waterfront every hour until mid afternoon. The tour takes 3 and-a-half hours and costs 1200 Rand per adult and 100 Rand for each child.
