Zuid Afrika

Finally I am back at an internet cafe and I have some time to kill.

Well, where was I?

Aah. Day 3.
I walked down to the waterfront and bought my ticket for the 10am ferry to Robben Island. Former prison of black and coloured political prisoners in Apartheid South Africa. Including Nelson Mandela for a period of 18 years who was there from the sixties till the eighties. The ferry we traveled across on was the same ferry used to transport prisoners' wives to the island prison, so that they could visit their husbands. At the island we boarded a bus and toured the island, visiting a small jail that was set up to contain just one person, Robert Sobukwe, who the authorities considered such a threat that they had him there in solitary confinement for years, and passed laws in parliament, just to govern him. A contemporary of Mandela's, in the 1960's there were pass laws, requiring all black South Africans to carry identification cards, which showed where they were and were not allowed to go. If you were caught without one, you were immediately sent to jail for three months. Sobukwe rallied black South Africans to all walk into police stations on the same day, without their pass cards, and demand to be arrested. Unable to arrest so many people, the administration was thrown into chaos, and their solution was to make sure that this man never spoke to anyone again.

We also saw WW2 guns on the island, which had been placed there, but never fired in battle. There is a whole village there now, where ex-political prisoners live in harmony with ex-wardens. Don't ask me how that happened.

Then we were taken to a limestone quarry where the prisoners laboured, and were shown a cave which the prisoners had used for a toilet. In Nelson Mandela's toilet the political prisoners taught each other about politics, they called it the university.

Then on a tour to the prison cells, where our guide, who was a political prisoner himself for 5 years in the 1980s told us what life had been like as a prisoner. We saw Nelson Mandela's cell and on the way out I saw a bird, which had flown into a cell, stuck there and flying repeatedly into the window. An interesting symbolism there, I think.