Robben Island is to South Africa what Kaala Paani was to India during the British period. During apartheid, white racist government kept the black prisoners including Nelson Mandela confined to this jail.
Recently during one of my shoots I was in Cape Town, the city closest to Robben Island. This Island has a special place in my heart because I had been doing an Indian adaptation of a play based on this jail called The Island, since a long time.
The trip to the island in a huge double-decker boat was amazing. It was biting cold, strong winds coupled with gigantic waves. We got tossed around in the sea but reached finally to the destination. The weather started clearing up and we spotted a bus waiting to take us around.
The jail is now a museum. Interestingly, there were lots of rabbits jumping across the road and it was quite an interesting sight. The jail-turned-museum is in the middle of the sea. With huge grey stone walls, barbed wires and watch towers, the jail consists of dormitories, toilets, stone quarries where prisoners spent their lives breaking stones. I also learnt that they were just digging and filling up sand in the same holes, this unproductive work again and again. The main motive was to break their spirit, the will to live.
Our guide, a former prisoner himself, told us how the authorities intercepted letters, changed the content. For example, a letter from a wife saying she can’t wait for him anymore and is leaving him for another man or your children are all dead. The prisoners used to go mad and suicidal.
They became guinea pigs in the hands of the white racist police. Now of course, it was all whitewashed and painted, more like visiting an accident site after the blood stains have been washed.
The floors were squeaky clean. I also got to know that Nelson Mandela secretly started teaching his co-prisoners to read and write and made them aware of their rights. They in turn taught the others. It was so remarkable to discover that this was done in a dark dingy stone quarry which was popularly known among them as University of South Africa.
The experience was truly overwhelming. I was amazed and humbled to discover scattered proofs of the triumph of the human spirit, I walked back towards the boat enriched and evolved. On the same island a few feet away I could see hundreds of penguins walking around. Enjoying the sun, those happy-feet perhaps gratefully saying to God, “Thank God, we are not human.”
