The Long Walk to Freedom

The past couple of days have been beautiful here in Cape Town, and we've had a lull in our work where were able to have Sunday, Monday and Tuesday off, so we've been playing tourist and seeing some of the sights. Last week we tried to go to Table Mountain, but for some reason, it was closed, so we decided to wander into a little neighborhood called Bo-Kaap instead. I didn't know what to expect, other than that it is a colorful, picturesque area, but it certainly held up to that reputation. We started with the museum which was absolutely god awful. The only thing I learned from it was that Bo-Kaap is a Muslim area of town. The rest of the museum jumped around between different decades an topics- a wall about slavery in Cape Town, a room full of 18th century pots, and a Carnivale costume? It incredibly was weird, but we enjoyed our stroll through the streets. 

On our off day last Monday we decided to go see one of the top items on my Cape Town to do list: Robben Island. Robben Island is most notoriously known as the location where Nelson Mandela spent the majority of his imprisoned years (18/27 years) during Apartheid. A slightly lesser known fact is that the two presidents after Mandela also served time on Robben Island as political prisoners.

The island is surprisingly large, roughly 5 kilometers square area, and our tour guide described that it would take the average person two hours to walk to perimeter.

Our guide also described the island’s most recent history as a prison to be half Alcatraz (with incredibly dangerous criminal prisoners) and the other to be hostage for political prisoners. Currently, the only tour guides on the island were once political prisoners themselves, so we got to meet and talk with a small piece of history while on our trip. Our tour guide, for example, was arrested as a youth for participating in a protest against the Apartheid regime. Because of his participation, simply standing in a row and chanting, he was arrested on charges of sabotage, terrorism, and incitement of violence. 

One of the Muslim mausoleum from the island's early days.  

The criminal section of the island. 

The leper graveyard. Before the island was home to a series of jails, it was a colony for lepers. They were exiled to the island to slow the spread and were housed in villages with appropriate medical facilities and staff also located on the island. 

The church that the lepers would attend. Medical staff had a separate place for worship as to limit exposure. 

The beautiful, albeit hazy, view of Table Mountain from Robben Island. 

The limestone quarry where Mandela, and other prisoners, worked. 

Located inside of the limestone quarry, this "monument" was laid after the prison had closed down and the island became a museum. Before opening to the public, the museum hosted a series of prisoners to come back, see the exhibits and walk through the halls where they were once imprisoned for things you and I wouldn't dare call a crime. When they got to the quarry, Mandela laid a stone down and others followed, as a memorial to those no longer living who also slaved away in the quarry.  

A baby springbok! They're basically antelope, but the springbok is the national animal of South Africa and it was so exciting to see my first one. It's crazy the amount of wildlife that we would consider exotic that you see roaming free on an almost daily basis.

Believe it or not, up until a few years ago there was a school on the island to serve those who lived on the island. This was the K-7 school where island children attended. A few short years ago it closed down because most of the kids on the island had moved up to secondary school, and with only 5 students registered, it wasn't worth the city's money to keep the school operating. Children must take the ferry to and from the mainland in order to attend school. Our tour guide didn't state this explicitly, but I imagine that many of them are home schooled instead, purely for logistical reasons.  

Mandela's solitary confinement cell. 

The political prison campus. 

Overall, the tour was both a sobering reminder of how very recent the Apartheid regime ruled and their outrageous charges, as well as an incredible interesting look a the 300 year history of this small island 12 kilometers off the coast of Cape Town.