I’m in Cape Town, South Africa, and so I took a tour of Robben Island. The almost barren, oval-shaped land off the coast of the legendary Cape, that one filled with such Good Hope and so many disappointments, was the repository of prisoners for four centuries before it held the likes of Nelson Mandela and Jacob Zuma.

When Cape Town “belonged” to the Dutch, the island provided the perfect offshore prison space. Within sight of town but far across a body of water, it also housed a leper colony in the nineteenth century. Its only “drawback,” as far as the civic authorities could tell, was a lack of fresh water. So they built a pipeline under the sea spanning the 10 km distance between the idyllic coast and the wasteland. By 1959, they’d primed the land to house a forbidding, barbed-wire maximum security prison set to give Alcatraz a run for its money.

During apartheid and until 1996, Robben Island held 3,000 men, many of them, such as Mandela and Zuma, political prisoners fighting against the segregationist government. Robben prisoners worked in the lime quarry and were often starved, tortured and held in solitary confinement with no promise of anything but culled mail and 30 minute visits every six months.

Now, the island bears trees shading rabbits, birds and even penguins, and the prison is a museum that offers tours led by former inmates. That second part amazes me.

One of the guides I met, Eugene, had been incarcerated for many years as a political prisoner and terrorist for his association with the African National Congress (ANC). He too had been starved; he too had been tortured. The time he spent in solitary remains vividly imprinted on his mind. Yet he came back and faces those memories on a daily basis, reliving them again and again.

Perhaps what struck me most was the irony. Eugene nostalgically mentioned that he looks back on his time at Robben Island, where the motto inscribed on the gate said “We Serve With Pride,” as an enriching one. In prison, he said, he became an educated man, studying for his exams while exposed to the “great minds” of men like Mandela.

He also laughed at the idea that when he was a prisoner, his lodging was free.

Today, tourists are his only company and, as an employee, he pays to live on the island.

So why come back? His answer couldn’t but be complicated. I expected him to dwell on the facts that he was passing on knowledge, sharing a past that might benefit the future, that in a way he was “sticking it to the man” by showing up at his holding place over and over again.

It was all of that, he said, but also the age-old practical problem of re-integration. How does an ex-convict get job? If you’re in prison half a lifetime, what training do you have, what skills have you gained, what the hell are you equipped to do?

Well, if your prison is no longer a prison, you work there.

Tags: apartheid, jacob zuma, mandela, robben island