Part X: Nelson Mandela

The next day I took the ferry out to Robben Island to see where Nelson Mandela had spent so much of his imprisoned life. 

On the Ferry I met two girls from Johannesburg who I ended up doing the entire tour with. 

This below is the limestone quarry where Nelson Mandela and other prisoners were made to mine the stone, breaking it up into small pieces, all of the work done for no reason whatsoever – merely to be given hard labor.  The dust that rose from this work has given Mandela and his compatriots has caused permanent damage to their lungs and destroyed Mandela’s tear ducts.

The view of Cape Town and Table Mountain as seen from Robben Island.

He took us to the cell were Nelson Mandela spent so many years of his life.  Naturally, everyone had a look and a picture of the bare room.  Xi wanted to do an exercise with the group to show one of the types of work required of them, and since I volunteered I actually didn’t look in the cell.  All I have is this picture of other people looking.

And this man’s name below is Xi. (Pronounced ‘Zee’)  Incredibly, all of the tour guides for Robben Island are former inmates.  Perhaps that seems like a cruel twist of fate, however Xi made an amazing guide.  He was not only a first-hand witness to the things that occurred in the prison, but because he lived the events, his ability to tell the stories was immensely powerful. 

The part that moved me the most was Xi’s closing speech.  He demanded that the prison not be looked at as a sad and terrible place.  It is a world heritage museum, he said, and by the simple act of people coming to visit, to see, to learn, it heals all the wounds of the past.  The act of memory does not merely preserve, it changes the past, makes it something greater than it was, something now healthy, a foundation for greater strength.

Interestingly enough, as I lingered to listen to Xi talk to reporters and get one more snapshot, the two girls I had gone on the tour with had some trouble on the Ferry.  When I finally caught up, they were not on the top deck as we had planned (top deck has limited seating).  They reiterated how they had been kicked out of the row they were hoping to sit because someone else – someone white – had the row ‘saved’ for friends still not aboard.  Apparently there was a little quarrel and the two girls left for the lower deck.  My two friends, both of darker complexion summed up their view:  Apartheid might have ended but it’s still real, it’s still alive. 

Now I take this with a grain of salt.  Especially since I come from the U.S. and one of my concentrations in University was on literature spawned from the Black Atlantic Slave Trade.  There was also a course on South African literature somewhere in there.

The end of Apartheid was relatively very recent and the apparent strides made in that short span of time, I find amazing.

The thirteenth amendment was passed 148 years ago and race relations in many parts of the states are still piss poor.

I remember several years ago I was regaling some of my cross-country adventures to a regular at the bar I was working; an extremely intelligent man of very dark complexion.  When I suggested he should do something similar, he gave me a disappointed look and said that he could never do something like that.  Why? I dumbly asked without giving any real thought.  He pointed at me.  “White,” he said.  Then he pointed at himself and said, “black.”

There is also another point to be made:  I spent most of my time in Cape Town, a rather diverse and cosmopolitan city.  City culture often differs quite a bit from the rest of the country.  There are the townships just outside of Cape Town, and my only regret of the whole trip was that I did not visit one of the Townships.  For anyone who doesn’t know, the Townships are a living vestige of Apartheid and the systematic segregation of non-whites and whites.  Apartheid may have ended but the Townships still exist and they exhibit terrible living conditions.  It’s very easy to think there isn’t much of a problem when the problem has been removed from one’s immediate vision.

So all in all?  I can’t get much of a good grasp having been there for such a short time.  There is definitely a strong culture of fear that is palpable.  Did I see anything to confirm this fear?  No.  But I was no where near the areas where this crime generally occurs.  What I saw was encouraging but this was a tiny slice of the South African situation and not a good one upon which to accurate gauge.  I would say that the TIME article on Oscar Pistorius was rather accurate and spot-on with regard to the culture of fear.