We recovered nicely after the long arrival yesterday. The plan today was to take in Robben Island, so we Ubered down to the beautifully updated V&A Waterfront, the tourist heart of Cape Town. The waterfront is very cool - a really nice way to mix the industrial port activities that are still very much active, condos and business offices, and a lot of tourist centric stores and restaurants. Looking at it from another perspective, its also yet another way they've separated the wealthy from the have nots, which leaves me with a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.
In Cape Town so far, I definitely see two worlds. There's a high class, white, armed to the teeth and potentially living in real and imagined fear of crime and violence, and there's the majority of the population - the coloureds and the blacks (I learned a bit about that later in the day) left behind by decades and decades of legal discrimination under Apartheid.
Alex had bought the Robben island tickets online months ago, so in due course we were loaded onto a ferry boat of sorts that was jammed full of tourists and we were headed towards the former prison island.
When we got out of the harbour, the water got pretty choppy. Robin and I were sitting on the side of the boat at the back and we were taking in fumes from the engine. That and the rocking seas, and maybe lunch from yesterday (who knows) and I was suddenly not feeling great at all. It wasn't typical motion sickness, I just felt feverish.
After about an hour of watching the island hang tantalizingly in the distance, we made it to the island. We were offloaded and led to a bus, where a young female tour guide gave us the run down. I missed the next 45 minutes of driving, stopping and explanations, but the gist of it was that Robben island was a prison not unlike Alcatraz where the guards and families lived on the island. There was a school and a church and everything else that you would need for a basic community. We saw a cemetery for the one time leper residents who were essentially sent to the island to live out their days. We also saw the limestone quarry where some of the prisoners were given hard labour, including the most famous resident, Nelson Mandela.
The highlight of the day was when our bus group got out and met our inside guide. I guess he was close to 55 years old, a handsome bald black man with a very commanding voice. He was a political prisoner at Robben Island from 1983 to 1990 and over the next 45 minutes, he gave us a tour of the key prison areas while he wove in his own personal story.
The guide was part of the military wing of the African National Congress, the military wing that Nelson Mandela himself had founded years before. Eventually, he got caught and was interrogated as to the locations of weapons caches and where different groups were hiding. He was very matter of fact that he had told them everything they wanted - torture can make a man say anything. He described some of the torture methods and it was pretty much as brutal as you could imagine.
When he got to Robben Island, he was sent to work in the kitchens, a pretty decent job. He walked us through the way things used to be in the 60's and 70's, where white prisoners got the best oft he best (for prison standards), coloureds got the next level down, and the blacks got the worst. He explained that the coloureds were considered the 2nd original South Africans (after the native tribesmen) and had a higher standing than the aboriginals. Coloureds would include the Muslim slaves that were brought over from Malaysia and India and had lived and eventually prospered there for years.
He told us about one inmate that had a hate on him almost from day one. He accused the guard of serving him just chicken spine with no meat on it (he newbie didn't realize that the meat they ended up getting at the prison was very substandard and picked over. The guy didn't let his grudge go and always grave our guard the evil eye throughout the rest of his stay.
Our guard showed us Mr Mandela's cell and told us of how he began writing his book, Long Walk to Freedom, secretly from his cell, stashing the manuscript in the garden, page at a time. Eventually the administration found that manuscript and confiscated it, but it was smuggled back and out of the prison and published.
One of the guards parting stories was that as soon as he got out of prison, he met and quickly married a beautiful woman that he'd met outside the prison. Turns out, it was the sister of his nemesis who had accused him of serving crappy chicken. That is funny.
We walked back to the ferry terminal area and this time we got on an up to date ferry with decent indoor seating and nice big windows. It was a more pleasant trip back to Cape Town for sure.
I was not doing that well, but we did manage to tour around the waterfront and gift shops for an hour and half or so. They had a number of outdoor busker type performances - music, dancing, comedy that was pretty well done.
After hitting a large grocery store, it was time to Uber back and for me, to sneak into bed and crash.
The rest of the group went to dinner at Codfather's - a sushi and fish restaurant that was apparently amazing. Beth brought me back some dinner which I struggled to get down, but I was back in bed by 8 to try and sleep whatever I had off.
No comments:
Post a Comment