Because They're Burning Bricks

Posted By Sika on February 23, 2009

We were meant to go to Robben Island our second day in South Africa. We had also booked it by phone, since the website tells you how to make online bookings but then refuses to actually accept them. We were told that Robben Island is worth going to and books up early. So we did what we were told.

High winds and crazy waves canceled the Robben Island trips, I guess because the powers that be weren’t all that keen on the idea of the tourists vomiting all over their nice boat. Here’s where we get lucky: After wandering around V&A Waterfront, trying to follow the colored trail markers and adjusting tack at every map, we showed up just in time to find out about the cancellation. When we got to the ticket counter, we asked if they were going to have trips on New Years Eve. They were, and they quickly booked us in for that day. The woman who stepped up to a different teller about 30 seconds after we did asked for the same day and was told they were all booked up until 3 January—the day we were traveling back to Malawi.

When the 31st came, we were excited to get on the ferry and watch the movie about Robben Island. The itinerary involves a bus tour of the whole island and then a walking tour of the prison itself. There were separate tour guides for the bus part and the prison part, but all of the tour guides used to be inmates at the prison.

Our guide for the bus had been a prisoner for about 15 years. He told us about the troubles he had after being released from prison. His wife had to “put food on the table” and he never could find the kind of job he was qualified for—even after Mandela was released. One day a friend who was a muckety muck in the ANC and told him that there was a job available that would pay enough that he could support his family again. His kids were so happy, and our guide was pretty excited, but was also pragmatic. “What’s the job?” “You’d be working on Robben Island.” Even after all this time, we could see in his face how difficult it was to make the decision. Either continue to be unemployable, or return to the site of the most miserable years of your life. Every day. Monday through Friday. 9 to 5.

Some of the tour guides live on Robben Island. There’s an Irish charity (or the government? I’m not sure because they’re only ever referred to as “the Irish”) that helped out with building housing and the school the staff members’ children go to. Our guide said that he, too, used to live on the island, but eventually he couldn’t take it anymore and moved off the island so that he would only have to be there during working hours.

We drove past the limestone quarry where Mandela and his compatriots laboured for years and years. The light shined off the limestone so brightly that prisoners and guards alike would have retinal scarring and begin to have declines in their eyesight. The prisoners asked for sunglasses and were refused: not surprising when you consider how inhuman the government considered them. But the guards also requested sunglasses and were refused, because it wasn’t part of the official uniform. Which makes one wonder exactly what the government thought of all people who weren’t at the highest echelons of society.

The prisoners would congregate in a cave in the quarry. It served as a place to rest, away from the blinding glare of the reflected sun; it served as a meeting place where the leaders of the ANC in prison could make plans, get notes to each other, plan the lessons for the next day; it also served as the toilet. It was this last function that was in a way the most important, not just because the smell was nearly overpowering, but also because its final function was why the prisoners could have enough privacy to plot. It was a “Coloured toilet” and as such, whites couldn’t go in there. Not even the guards.

The prison was separated into different sections for different levels of political prisoners. White political prisoners and women political prisoners were sent to different prisons, closer to Jo’burg. So Robben Island had only the “Bantu” and Coloured political prisoners.

It was very important to the Apartheid government that the Coloureds and the Blacks get different treatment even in prison, so there were regulations on everything, including the different amounts and types of food. The ANC didn’t like the idea, so they had the Coloured prisoners and the Blacks on better terms with the prison brass—those who could buy things from the commissary—buy tinned items and special things for everybody. This was, though, only on the days when the prison served food so unpalatable that no one could stand the idea of eating the food served. The regular kind of awful, scheduled into their weekly menus, didn’t count. It had to be a special kind of horrible. On regular days, they would all pool their food and divvy it up equally. They figured the purpose of the Coloureds being allowed coffee at dinner and the Blacks not being allowed it was to encourage division between the prisoners.

But they refused to bow to what the guards wanted. The more educated prisoners taught the illiterate prisoners how to read, how to do math. Some people say the huge mistake in Robben Island was that at first there weren’t only political prisoners there and the political prisoners educated and radicalized the regular types of prisoners.

In the late ’70s, the group cells got bunk beds. But before that, the bed for each prisoner (about 60 of them in a room the size of a small classroom) was a small rectangle of carpet kept rolled up during the day and then unrolled at night.

We were running out of time by the time we got to the wing where Mandela had stayed. He loved to garden, and spent as much time as he was able in the garden. The garden was also where he and the other ANC leaders in the wing stashed contraband and passed notes. One copy of Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom was confiscated, but he had another buried in the garden. There was another prisoner leaving from his wing, and so they smuggled the manuscript and a pair of the guys shoes to another prisoner experienced in shoe repair who then inserted the manuscript into the sole of the shoe. At least, that’s what we were told. I’m not sure how they managed to fit a whole manuscript in just one pair of shoes.

Categories: Plugging, Saving the World, South Africa
Tags: