Freedom will not be Manacled!
Visiting Robben Island, where the late President Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years, was a humbling experience. As if by design, the cheerful blue skies that greeted us as when we first set sail were traded in for morose hues of grey and black the closer we got to the island. As Cape Town’s semblance became covered by the mist, I couldn’t help but wonder how Mandela felt when he was sent to the island. Did a man of his stature know fear? Helplessness?
Once arriving, we noticed large blue panels bolted into a 10-foot tall stone wall. Vignettes of compelling personal stories of the political and social activists incarcerated on the island were displayed on the panels. The irony. The wall that once was used to keep them in and oppress them was now being used to project their voices out forever. What a victory. We explored the rest of the island via a tour bus. Robben Island served many roles in South African history such as serving as a safe place to house patients with mental and physical illnesses in the early 1900s to serving as a military base during the Second World War. It was during apartheid that it was converted into what it is now well known for, a prison for political prisoners.
The last stop on the tour was the actual jail the prisoners were kept in. We were guided through the jail by an elderly man, himself a prisoner of Robben Island during apartheid. His voice had a special type of authority. He has lived through history. The cells he once occupied were so barren. It was so cold. The conditions, he would tell us, were so poor that it was easy to break a man’s spirit. Some of the prison cells had audio recordings of voices and experiences of the prisoners who lived in those cells. As visitors to the island began playing these recordings, the voices of the deceased filled the corridors, uttering words and thoughts that during the time of their imprisonment they probably could never express. A cheerful but somber trumpet was played from a cell, and all visitors fell silent and stood still for a moment to listen to it.
As I approached Nelson Mandela’s prison cell, I noticed a pair of visitors standing in front of it and talking in a low voice. It was an older black woman and white teenager. “Madiba” (Xhosa for Father), the black woman said as she walked away. The teenager stood in front of the cell, holding its bars as she peered through. Her blue eyes seemed to search for something in what few possessions President Mandela had. She sighed, nodded, and said “Ja” (or yes), as she followed behind the black woman. She must have been an Afrikaner, a descendant of those that benefitted from apartheid. I would like to believe that she was agreeing with the black woman. As we exited the jail, I asked the elderly guide if I could take a picture of him. With a genuine warmth that almost brought me to tears, he smiled and agreed. As soon as I took the photo, it began to rain. As we sailed back to Cape Town, I thought of the wall, the voices, the trumpet, the pair of visitors, and the elderly man. The tour bus guide had even brought us to the prison quarry were Mandela worked. In the middle of the quarry, a pile of rocks were collected into a heap. When Mandela and a couple of prisoners revisited the island after their liberation, the story goes that he, without saying a word to anyone else, picked up a single stone and placed it in the middle of the quarry. His friends, the other past prisoners, did the same. My last glimpse of the island was of these words printed on the blue panels on the stone wall:
“Repression. Release. Resurrection. Freedom will not be manacled!”