Story and photos by Jack Souther
I must have read these words a dozen times before I came to Africa. They are quoted in almost everything written about the struggle against apartheid but now, reading them again in the Nelson Mandela Gateway, surrounded by pictures and memorabilia of that violent era, they have an even more powerful resonance. The Gateway, an unassuming three-storey building on the Victoria and Albert waterfront of Cape Town, is where the Robben Island ferries now dock. It also houses a small museum that documents in stark detail the suffering and indignity endured by black people under apartheid and traces their long struggle against the regime – a brutal one-sided struggle that lead to the arrest and imprisonment of Nelson Mandela and thousands of other political dissidents.
Sixteen years have past since Mandela was released from prison and the racist laws of apartheid were officially repealed. Before that every South African citizen was classified at birth as either white, coloured, or black. Those lucky enough to be born white were granted almost unlimited power and privilege, the coloureds (mixed race, and Asians) enjoyed grudging acceptance, but the black majority had virtually no rights at all. Pass laws required every black person over 16 to carry a document that prescribed where its holder was allowed to go. Getting caught in the wrong place or without your pass was punishable by imprisonment, and beatings suffered by those arrested were all too often fatal. White neighbourhoods, public parks, restaurants, washrooms, buses – the list of places where blacks were totally excluded goes on and on. Black housing consisted of shacks, their medical facilities were sub-standard, and segregated schools provided black students with just enough education to become useful servants and labourers.
Not surprisingly the oppression erupted into violent protest.
Our perusal of the Gateway museum was interrupted by a loudspeaker announcing the next departure for Robben Island and we boarded the sleek, high-speed catamaran which takes only a few minutes to make the 11-kilometre crossing. Robben Island, a barren, windswept place off the coast of Cape Town has been a dumping ground for the unwanted and dispossessed for at least 400 years. The Dutch used it to get rid of Malaysian prisoners as early as 1600. In the 1800s troublesome African chiefs were banished to the island by the British, and from 1844 until 1931 it served as a leper colony. The final chapter in this litany of human misery came during South Africa's apartheid era when more than 3,000 political prisoners were held there from 1962 until the regime was overthrown in 1991.
The official tours, which follow a tightly prescribed three-hour schedule, are the only way visitors are permitted to visit Robben Island. We are met on the dock by Yungama, who accompanies us by bus to the gate of the old maximum security prison. There we are turned over to Thulani Mabaso, a large soft-spoken black man who seems more like a schoolteacher than a terrorist. Thulani was a prisoner here for eight years. As a member of the African National Congress (ANC) resistance he was convicted of taking part in the bombing of a police station and, at age 22, sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island.
Even now, many years after the prison closed, the place has an evil, sinister feel – high stone walls topped with rolls of razor wire and towers where armed guards once stood watch behind the glare of spotlights. We followed Thulani through a heavy iron door into the cell-block where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison. Here in this tiny bare cell, is where Mandela worked secretly on the manuscript of his classic book, Long Walk to Freedom. A small barred window overlooks a central, walled courtyard where prisoners were given brief periods of exercise and where Mandela was allowed to plant a small garden. Although everything coming in and out of the prison was censored, he managed to hide the manuscript pages in his garden where they were picked up and smuggled out by a sympathetic guard and by priests who conducted weekly church services for the inmates.
In the bleak dormitory of the medium security wing Thulani tells us about his experience on Robben Island. As an "enemy of the state" he was permitted one 30-minute visit every six months. When his father attempted to pay him an unscheduled visit he was shot by guards and crippled for life. Black prisoners were given different food and fewer clothes than coloured prisoners. They had no shoes or underwear and were allowed to wash only once a week. For infractions of the rigid prison rules Thulani and other prisoners were routinely tortured. During his eight years in prison he endured solitary confinement, electric shock, beatings, and the humiliation of being forced to eat his own feces. He speaks to us softly, his voice flat, without a trace of bitterness or self pity – simple statements of fact delivered without emotion. But he adds that the warden who was in charge of this brutality is now a wealthy resident of Cape Town who has been granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
The TRC was set up shortly after the apartheid laws were repealed and political dissidents were released. By bringing together perpetrators and victims in public confessionals the TRC, which heard testimony from 1995 to 1998, was designed to heal the social wounds inflicted by the apartheid regime and by those who subsequently struggled against it. By placing responsibility on the system rather than the individual (I was just doing my job) perpetrators of unspeakable crimes were granted amnesty. And once granted amnesty they were immune from any legal action. It was an imperfect exercise but as Thulani put it, "For the country to move beyond apartheid we need to focus on reconciliation, not revenge."
At the end of our tour I asked Thulani how he felt about coming back to Robben Island and working along side his former tormentors. "It's very hard for me to keep reliving those years," he said, "but it is important to remember and for people to know how it was so that future generations will never have to endure what we did." As for his former jailers, "I hate the system that divided us," he told me, "not the people."
Back at Victoria Wharf we could have taken the bus back to Planet Africa, the small backpacker's hotel near Sea Point where we were staying, but we chose instead to walk. The broad pedestrian promenade alternately hugs the rocky shoreline, skirts around sandy beaches, and cuts inland through parks and gardens. It's only about four kilometres but we spent most of the afternoon walking and people-watching. Where breakers crash into the seawall a group of giggling kids duck in and out of the salt spray. On some of the beaches families have spread out picnic lunches, groups of young people play pick-up soccer and softball on the lawns, and high divers practice their aerial gyrations in one of the beachfront pools.
We buy a cone from an ice cream vendor and settle down on a park bench near a playground where a group of fathers take turns pushing their kids on swings. There is nothing remarkable about all this except that some of the fathers are black and others are white. And like the kids, both black and white, playing together in the surf and the young ball-players on the lawns there is not the slightest hint of discrimination. Yet only a few years ago, when Thulani was a young man, only those blacks employed to tend the gardens and clean the washrooms would have been allowed here. And I thought how far the country has come along the road to racial equality in those few years since the hated pass-laws of apartheid were repealed.
If one looked no farther than the Cape Town waterfront and Green Point Common it would seem that the legacy of apartheid had been banished to Robben Island. But sadly many blacks still have a long way to go down their walk to freedom. A huge economic gap still divides the races but South African society continues to strive for racial equality. And by the time the kids now playing together in the Cape Town surf have become adults – when the young people who have never known discrimination are grown up – perhaps by then Mandela's dream of equal opportunity will have become a reality.
