Only a half-hour ferry ride from Cape Town’s Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, Robben Island has become one of South Africa’s most recognized attractions. The Robben Island Museum is said to be “living.” The first minutes of the guided bus tour of the island highlighted the relics of the island’s history. A timeworn graveyard revealed its use as a hospital and place of quarantine for leprosy patients while rusted artillery batteries bear the marks of its military use during World War II. Our next stop on the tour took us to a scenic outlook back on Table Mountain and Cape Town accompanied by a period spray where the ocean swell met the island. Shortly afterwards, we arrived at the prison. The maximum-security prison was opened in 1959 and was the home to nearly three thousand prisoners including many political activists from the Apartheid era.
The “living museum” really came alive when we were introduced to Modise, a former student activist and political prisoner. For five years, Robben Island was his home. Words cannot describe the sound of the steel door between the outdoors and the prison’s processing room slamming into its frame. Even at “half-speed,” the sound was more than sufficient to preface Modise’s harrowing account of the atrocities that occurred on the 5 square kilometer piece of rock in the middle of Table Bay. Subsequent to our discovery of the physical abuse and humiliation that welcomed the prisoners, we were led into Cell Block C. Although our stay was no more than thirty minutes, it was as if Modise pulled up in the DeLorean and we all hopped in before he gunned it to eighty-eight and took us back in time. Modise’s stories that followed brought the island to life. The scars on his wrists from when two guards swung him on a tree from his handcuffs are a living reminder of events that took place. Many prisoners died from sickness, questionable injuries and complications, or suicide. Picture a cockroach. Yes, that unpleasant insect that thoroughly enjoys poor sanitation. At one point during his stay at Robben Island, Modise was beaten badly and thrown into solitary confinement. While on the floor barely able to move, a small cockroach was crawling by. He picked it up and began to play with it in his hands because it was the only thing he could do. And then he began to cry. He cried because his only connection to another living thing had vanished. He cried over the death of a cockroach. “How do you find forgiveness?” he asked.
One of the greatest and most inspiring figures of our time is Nelson Mandela. Mandela spent more than twenty-five years imprisoned for his activism against the Apartheid and became the first black president of South Africa. Robben Island serves as an important reminder of the progress that has been made in the country of South Africa. The struggle for freedom in South Africa can be compared to the civil rights movement in the United States. And perhaps it is only appropriate to write this today, the twentieth of January. The day we inaugurate Barack Obama; the first black president of the United States of America.