Robben Island is a 30 minute ferry ride from the port in Cape Town and the journey reminds me a lot of the ferry ride from Dar es Salam to Zanzibar - just minus the roaches!
As soon as we arrive, everyone from the ferry is loaded on to buses and we go on a guided tour of the island. Our guide is a very proud Capetonian and he makes sure we learn as much as possible during the ride. We pass a limestone quarry where the prisoners used to work. Prisoners who worked in this quarry have suffered long term effects from spending so much time around the limestone. It has mainly effected their eyesight and made them very senstive to light. Nelson Mandela has undergone several bouts of surgery to try to correct the damage it did to him. This is the reason he cannot be photographed with flash and almost always wears sunglasses. We also see Robert Sobukwe's solitary confinement area. Robert Sobukwe was founder of the PAC (Pan Africanist Congress) - a black South African liberation movement - and considered such a threat to the Aparteid government, they passed an Act that allowed them to renew his imprisonment on an annual basis at their discretion. They did finally release him but he remained under house arrest, and banned from participating in politics until his death in 1978. And finally we pass by the village amenities used by Robben Island's current residents.
The second part of the tour is around the prison itself with a former prisoner as a guide. We learn a bit about what life was like as an inmate and how the large number of political prisoners incarcerated there shaped the atmosphere of the prison. The prisoners used Robben Island as a way of building the movement against Apartied. They organized protests and hunger strikes by secert messages. The guards never understood how the prisoners were communicating with each other. Sometimes the prisoners would speak to each other through the toilets at night, by emptying out the water. Also as part of the tour, we pass by Nelson Mandela's cell in B-section so we can see where the great man slept.
Overall, the tour is very good and provides us with some more important insight into Aparteid South Africa. However, there's still a lot more to learn so maybe we'll stop by the Aparteid Museum in Johannesburg before we fly out in a few days...
