The human spirit sometimes offers us two rare gifts. One of those offerings is a simple recognition of its largest capability, something which is difficult to understand. The rare willingness of the spirit to be overruled by the heart is the ultimate gift of self-possession. The capacity to look at what has been visited upon oneself, and to see beyond it, is a remarkable thing. It is selfless and it is with great intention, a promise to oneself. I will free myself from that which would imprison my nature, if not my body.
You see it from time to time. You see it in wonder. Often at its core is a willingness to offer forgiveness or understanding. Religion, insight, the bigger picture, they all have something to say about this. So does Modise.
He was a political prisoner at the notorious Robben Island. Now he is a guide on the island. He lives there, at the place where the state once held him, and he tells his story, and the story of the other prisoners, and the centuries old place. He bears the scars of his torture. He shows some of the physical ones, and talks of some of the mental ones, and that is only a part of his conversation with his guests, but certainly not all of it.
I realized, too late, that I should be taking notes of all of the things that he said, and so I don’t have a complete recitation to offer you. To try to share parts of it seems, somehow, insufficient and not to say inappropriate for what it would lack.
For years, Modise had a view of walls and barbed wire and the quarry where he was worked. He was incarcerated because, as a student, he stood for for racial equality. As an elder, he talks about forgiveness. Reconciliation. Understanding. To Modise, hating the people who held him here, to foster the bitterness of youth and nurture the anger of his jailtime would keep him a victim. He’s come to see that everyone he encountered, even the warders, the people that ran Robben Island, were all victims of apartheid.
The human spirit is full of wonder.
Modise rode with us on a bus around the island. We saw a lot of the buildings from the road, the quarry where the prisoners worked, the inmate cemetery, and the parts of the island that the prisoners knew nothing about. He dropped us off with another guide for a walking tour.
Have you ever been on a tour where guests hugged the guide at the end of the tour? I have. Today.
We had heard, of course, that Robben Island was a trip to take. You go out by ferry and follow the group along on a guided afternoon. We had heard that, at one time, there were a lot of the former prisoners giving the tours. That’s hard to contemplate. Wouldn’t you want to get as far away as possible? But people told us that this was the way to have taken in the experience, but that there were fewer and fewer of them giving tours today. The personal first-hand experience was becoming more rare. I asked Modise how many still gave tours. He said about a dozen. Then, he sent us inside to see the facility itself, as guided by another former inmate.
One of the mass cells.
There are holes cut into the walls, for light, but there were no windows, so the weather was unavoidable, no matter the weather. We were there on a pleasant, if gray, day. This was not, we are told, a comfortable place.
Our second guide had a great big booming voice. Rattled in your chest, bounced off the cement walls, came back to rattle your teeth. He talked with his hands, forever dancing, no matter if it was a moment of seriousness, or one of his well-trod jokes. The sleeves on his jacket, rubbing against his chest and stomach as he moved from the elbows, were his accompaniment, and all of it in this same, steady rhythm.
There’s a spare courtyard and along the back wall sits this tree. And our guide said that Nelson Mandela, who was a political prisoner here for 18 years, buried his autobiography behind it while he was writing it. It was smuggled out out of prison, and on to London. And I’m staring at this tree when, a week ago, I was at another prison that held Mandela, and at his home, staring at a tree that he planted and trying to remember the bit I have learned about trees in the local cultures, the epicenter of food, shelter, law, memory, trade, medicine, art, identity, the place to anchor your home, the place to hide your story.
While Mandela was here for 18 years, our first guide was here for five, but their time did not overlap. Our second guide was here for a bit longer, and he was here during some of Mandela’s later time. They slept on straw mats. They did hard labor. They were physically and verbally abused. Over time, some conditions marginally. How a prisoner was classified dictated what few privileges they might receive, even down to the number of guests or correspondence. In the late 1960s prisoners were given pants, an upgrade from the shorts they’d previously worn year-round. In 1973, somehow, Mandela managed a bed in his single-occupant cell. It was behind this lock.
Through these bars. And if you’re wondering if that paint was chipped by fingers and nails, you aren’t alone.
I lingered behind the group, staring at those bars, and it took a bit for it to register that this was Mandela’s cell. He lived in this 8-foot-by-7-foot space.
This was the end of the tour. You walked down the last of the corridor, away from those individual cells, and out into another hard, gravel courtyard. Our guide was standing at the gap in the wall, trying to count his guests. I told him I was not the last person out, there was one more guy behind me. I stopped and talked with him for a moment. Shook his hand. Thanked him for telling his story, for keeping this story alive. He smiled and pointed, “And now you can take your short walk to freedom.”
I stood and watched him walk across the front of the place, back to where he picked us up. A lone elderly gentleman, head down, strong shouldered, doing this thing he’s done for who knows how long. I wondered how much longer he would do it. I wondered if he was one of the men he talks about in that clip above. I wondered if I was right, when he told that part of the story, when I thought Simply another kind of political prisoner. I wondered what that meant. I wondered how many more people would get to hear these stories from people who had lived it themselves. I wondered about the rare moment of history that we are sometimes afforded like that and what is lost when that moment passes as the eye-witnesses and participants and survivors pass from us. I wonder about that tree.
Almost by chance, as I walked back toward the ferry, I saw these statues in the distance. We were being urged to hurry, and they were too far away to see. But I have since learned that they were in stalled last September. They are likenesses of six of the former political prisoners here. They are, Khotso Seatholo, Andimba Toivo ja Toivo, Robert Sobukwe,
Nelson Mandela, Krotoa, and Autshumato.
All but the last statue were produced by Cristina Salvoldi.
We took the ferry back to the mainland. The ride was just long enough for darkness to fall along the waterfront. (This shot will join the banners on the site one of these days.)
You come off the ferry, down the ramp, up some stairs, down some stairs, up some more stairs …
And into the night. We had dinner near the waterfront, smelling of dead fish and whatever the sailors next to us were smoking. It was one of those where you try to finish before you lose your patience, and before the rain returns. Also, there was a shuttle to catch back to our hotel. We got the last one back, for a late night in.
