I'm on a (Ferry) Boat

On Saturday, we were due to go to Robben Island, the island where Nelson Mandela spent most of his prison sentence. Unfortunately, as I was driving to Quynh's house, Jack decided to die. Literally, I was driving and all of a sudden the accelerator just gives up and I slow to a stop in the middle of a turn lane just 2 blocks from Quynh's house. Luckily a nice guy helps push me to the side of the road while Quynh meets me.

When the mechanic gets there, he informs us that our cam belt has snapped, a repair that should be able to be done in a day (just replace the belt), but mysteriously all possible repair shops are "closed", so we are stranded without a car and rely on the help of Moosa to drive us down to the Waterfront to catch the ferry.

The ferry ride is quite nice. The boat holds about 300 people and is docked right behind the Gateway Museum. The weather has luckily held out for us, as the bay is just sunny and blue, everything you could ask for a day in which you have to sail across to the island. As you sail out of port, I feel like I could be leaving like a Greek island, just replaced with the mountains of South Africa and the houses of the flats extending across the land.

Robben Island is named so because there were seals on the island (seal, Afrikaans- rob). When you sail into port, it smells like bird...shit. There's something like a natural port set up of interweaved stones, all covered with white splotches of birdshit. After stepping off the ferry, you are met by tour buses which initially take you around the island to see most of the general buildings. Our guide, like most South Africans, is full of very strange jokes involving how strict he is, but his grandfather had been imprisoned on the island.

The houses are very Dutch colonial and very prison-like. They are all almost identical and plain and would probably make any prisoner crazy out of boredom. But the island itself is beautiful- strangely, maximum security prisons tend to be in awesomely beautiful locales (Alcatraz?). It's strange because people still live on the island- staff, families- and still use many of the old apartheid facilities. One of the more profound things we saw was the rock quarry that all the political prisoners had to work in, now with a monument made of rocks placed by the ex-prisoners a few years after their release. It literally is just a pile of rocks, but when you see how big the quarry is, how big the open spaces where prisoners just sat and broke rocks all day are, it's really quite moving.

The strangest part of the tour is when we went inside the prison blocks. Robben Island has employed former political prisoners to conduct these tours- the one we had was a very nice, old man wearing a beanie too big for his head who had been sentenced for "high treason". He was incredibly cordial and outgoing, even making jokes that "the prison was ours" and to make our "short walk to freedom" after we left the prison. You could see his face had been worn out from years of imprisonment- he could barely recognize his family when he was released and didn't even know that he had a son, whom he inadvertently made him buy cigarettes. It's a very strange thing to see people who spent their whole lives trying to figure out ways to get out of Robben Island being paid to go back and walk through their actual cells, show where they were tortured and where they were refused food and where they hid documents. It would be like paying old Jewish women to lead trips of concentration camps. I don't know how they have the strength to do it other than it being a presentation of their life, an enlightening of other people to what they had to endure for years.