[ Billy Nair. Former Robben Island Prisoner. Now a tour guide. Photo by Shel]
Everyone I meet in So. Africa seems to hold Nelson Mandela in high esteem. “He is Tata,” Marian Pike told me, the nation’s grandfather. Yet most people who live here in Capetown seem to dismiss the ferry ride and tour to Robben Island where Mandela was detained for 17 years to be something for tourists and not for locals.
Maybe so, but I considered it to be a pilgrimage–a visit to an almost holy place, where someone was treated so harshly for so long and emerged with the wisdom to preach equality over vengeance. To me, Mandala is in that very small cluster of humans that include Ghandi and King who led people to become the best that they could be as a society –at least for a while.
I’d rather be called a traveler than a tourist. Be that as it may, I jammed myself onto the ferry, where I heard people say they were from Norway, New Jersey and Nepal.
Perhaps the only person who paid from Cape Town who paid to make the trip was Matt Visser, the 28-year-old local who is making a decent business of
helping rock groups have a social and digital presence. He is also a speaker at the WTF Media Conference where I keynote tomorrow. Matt told me that he had been to the Island four times before but only as a school kid, where the big deal was not Mandela, it was being out of school.
He readily admitted he had accepted Marian’s invite to join me so that he could spend time hanging out with me and the island was simply a venue. I think he was disappointed when I whipped out my notebook and started taking notes, the moment the instructional video came on during the ferry ride.
But in the end, I think Matt was as touched by the visit as I was. We saw the lime pits, which Mandela and the other black freedom political leaders were assigned to mine. The glare of sunlight on the white stone damaged Mandela’s eyesight. He organized a protest that would eventually equip the prisoners with sunglasses, but it was too late for him. Despite eye operations, he suffered permanent damage.
The heart of the tour came for just about everyone in our group when Billy Nair, who served seven years on Robben Island for “sabotage” as an ANC 
operative escorted us through the compound where the prisoners were held in a series of Sections. Nair was released in the early 90s & held several jobs, including with the Military Police, but he didn’t seem to find a place where he belonged.
He came back to Robben Island about five years ago. “This,” he said gesturing to his tour group, ” is my therapy.”
Nair showed us his former cell which he shared with 29 fellow inmates, then took us to D Section where Mandela resided with other African political leaders. Each had a private cell of about 6×9 feet. They had a floor mat for a bed and a bucket for a toilet. Mandela was there for 17 of his 28 years in prison. He became friends with one of his warders.
Inmates called the prison “the university,” Nair told us, not just because they earned the right to have books, but because of what they learned from each other. Many graduates of this university are now officers in the South African government.
One of the most painful ironies is that Robben Island is a place of great beauty. It is a shade over a half-mile offshore from Cape Town. From its shore you can see the glistening Cape Coast and the dramatic range of six jagged mountains, whose cloud formations steadily and sometime dramatically change their look and color. Penguins frolic on the island.
In the 400 year period that Robben Island served mostly as either a prison or a quarantined leper colony extremely few people ever successfully escaped to
shore. The swim is relatively short but there are two formidable barriers: a current that carries you sideways rather than shoreward and sharks that consider swimmers a nice aperitif.
The prisoners were all nonwhite. Apartheid was meticulous in classifying humans as “colored” “Islamic” and “African.” In this white supremacist system the lowest caste was the darkest skinned. prisoners were all convicted of awful sounding crimes, but it seemed to me that the universal crime is that they had fought for equality.
But in this injustice, power grew. The world eventually noticed what was being done on this island and why. Robben Island became an enduring symbol of racial discrimination and a touchstone for social action.
It is a place where Mandela and an entire team of people did not just endure. They would eventually prevail.
I took pictures while I was on Robben Island. I think they tell you more about what life there was like than I possibly can. I do hope you’ll go take a look.
One last thought tat has lingered with me. Mandela and the ANC used traditional media well to turn world opinion into pressure against Apartheid. I just cannot help to wonder how social media may have brought the revolution to fruition faster than the 85 years of the ANC struggle before victory came.
