“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” Nelson Mandela.

 

Through the bars, we scrutinized the cell located in Prison 7. We were speechless.   It is 8-foot long by 7-foot large. The only furniture consists in a thin straw mat (the “bed”), a 1-foot tall table with a cup. In the left corner stands a bucket for the collection of stools and urine.

The mat was obviously too short for the 6’1” frame of the civil rights leader, Nelson Mandela, who lived there for 18 long years.  Instead of such a treatment, some would prefer death. Mandela, aka Prisoner 46664 (the 466th prisoner taken there in 1964) obviously did no see it through the same prism.

 

By 4:00 this morning, we were on the bus, sleepless in Johannesburg, on the way to the airport.  After a two-hour flight, we landed in Cape Town at around 9:00 AM.  Via a maze of manicured streets and through a shopping mall, our guides took us to a ferry that carried us to Robben Island, 8.6 miles (14 km) off the coast of Cape Town.

 

The group was then transferred to the good care of the Island staffers.

 

Originally, in the 1600s, Robben Island, 2.0 sq. mile large, was a prison, then later a whaling station, then a leper colony and a sanatorium, then a prison again.  Few inmates escaped from this Alcatraz; almost none survived to tell their story.

 

The worse at Robben Island was not the sleeping quarters, it was the forced labor in the lime quarry, breaking rocks and absorbing the particles in your lungs, and becoming severely ill of it.

It was the intellectual deprivation (no reading), the physical deprivation (no sport), the inability to see or having news of your family, the feeling of being buried alive.  Then you have the daily abuse and sadism of the guards who would bury prisoners to their neck, urinate on their face, or force them to eat their own stools.

Outside the brick and mortar of the prison, Robben Island offers several curiosities and utilities that take about two hours to tour:  the leper graveyard, the WWII canons, the penguin sanctuary, etc.

The maximum-security prison closed in 1991. It is now a museum. The island is nowadays a UNESCO heritage site. The memories will forever survive, but South Africa wants the horror, lived by the political prisoner, to be a never-again saga of the past.

The group was privileged to have had Kgotso Glen Ntsoelengoe, a former Robben Island political prisoner (1984-1991), as the guide who gave us a tour of the prison where he was held for 6 & ½ years for sabotage.  For four years, Ntosolengoe was a co-inmate of Nelson R. Mandela.

(The Traveller, Saturday, October 7, 2017)

 

 

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