Robben Island

The ferry pulls away from the harbor, and the city shrinks behind you. Cold spray flecks the railing. The engine hums steadily beneath your feet. Ahead, low and flat, lies a green-grey island in the middle of Table Bay. From the deck it looks calm, almost gentle, a thin line of land on the water. For centuries it was anything but.

Robben Island sits about seven kilometers off the coast of Cape Town. Its name comes from the Dutch word for seals, which once gathered here in great numbers. The island is small and low and flat, swept by wind, surrounded by cold and dangerous water. Strong currents pull at anyone who tries to swim its channel. That isolation is exactly why the island was used the way it was.

For more than three hundred years, this island was a place of banishment. Rulers and governments sent away the people they feared or rejected. Political prisoners, exiles, the sick, and the outcast were all brought here across the water. The sea around them was the wall, and it needed no guards. Few who were sent could ever leave on their own.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the island became a leper colony. From 1846, people with leprosy were sent here, separated from society against their will. A hospital and a chapel were built for them. Many lived out the rest of their lives on the island, and were buried in its soil, far from their families and homes. Their graves, some marked and many not, still lie in the island's ground.

During the Second World War, the island turned military. Gun batteries and lookout posts were built to guard the approach to Cape Town harbor. You can still see concrete bunkers and gun mounts along the shore. A small village grew up around the prison staff, with houses, a church, and a school. After the war, the prison buildings found a new and harsher use.

From the 1960s, the apartheid government made Robben Island a prison for those who fought against it. Men who opposed the system of racial separation were locked away here, cut off from the country they were trying to change. The most widely known of them was Nelson Mandela. He spent eighteen of his twenty-seven prison years on this island.

Step into the prison block. The corridors are bare and echoing. The light is hard and flat. Walk to the row of cells and find the small one that held Mandela. His cell was number five. It is a tiny room, barely longer than a tall man. A thin mat lay on the floor for a bed. Through the bars he could see only a narrow strip of the courtyard.

Mandela was not alone. Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, and many others were held here with him. They were leaders, teachers, and ordinary men united by their stand. Inside the prison, against the rules, they taught one another history, law, and language. The place earned a quiet name among the prisoners. They called it the university.

Each day the prisoners were marched to the limestone quarry. They broke white stone under a hard sun. The glare off the bright rock damaged Mandela's eyes for the rest of his life. Near the quarry, a small cave gave shade, and there the men talked, argued, and planned in low voices. The labor was meant to crush the spirit. Instead the quarry became a place to hold on to hope.

Today your guide through the prison is often a former prisoner. This is the heart of a visit to Robben Island. The person walking beside you may have lived inside these very walls. They speak from memory, not from a book. They show you where they slept and where they suffered. Listen closely. Their calm is its own kind of lesson.

In 1994, the prisoners of conscience had won. Apartheid ended, and Nelson Mandela became the first freely elected president of South Africa. The prison closed its doors. In 1999, the island was named a World Heritage Site. The place that was built to silence people now exists to make their voices heard.

Stand at the island's edge before you leave. Across the water, the city and the flat mountain rise in the light. The prisoners saw this same view for years, so close and so far. That a man could look out at those bars and still choose to forgive is the story this island holds. Carry it with you back across the bay.