Tour.

"I was assigned a cell at the head of the corridor. It overlooked the courtyard and had a small eye-level window. I could walk the length of my cell in three paces. When I lay down, I could feel the wall with my feet and my head grazed the concrete on the other side. The width was about six feet, and the walls were at least two feet thick. Each cell had a white card posted outside of it with our name and our prison service number. Mine read, "N Mandela 466/64," which meant I was the 466th prisoner admitted to the island in 1964. I was forty-six years old, a political prisoner with a life sentence, and that small cramped space was to be my home for I knew not how long."


"One morning, instead of walking to the quarry, we were ordered into the back of a truck. It rumbled off in a new direction, and fifteen minutes later we were ordered to jump out. There in front of us, glinting in the morning light, we saw the ocean, the rocky shore, and in the distance, winking in the sunshine, the glass towers of Cape Town. Although it was surely an illusion, the city, with Table Mountain looming behind it, looked agonizingly close, as if one could almost reach out and grasp it."

Excerpts from Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela.

Today Kristin, Mike and I went to the waterfront in Cape Town and took the Robben Island historical tour. The pier was piercingly beautiful, and the water sparkled like diamonds. It was hard to imagine this being a place of imprisonment and despair, because today, it looked like a treasure. The contrast was haunting.

The tour felt long and drawn out, I confess. We piled into a tour bus when we arrived and drove a few feet at a time before pausing and our tour guide would tell us different stories about the history of the island, all the way back from the 1653. It has long been a place of banishment, and later in the 1800s, was the home to a leper colony. More than 1500 graves are scattered about the island, which is 5 by 2 kilometers in length.

I appreciated seeing the places that became so significant to Nelson Mandela, and which I already knew a lot about from reading his autobiography. The prison grounds were bleak, and the sky felt like a ceiling to the tall grey towers instead of a glorious expanse. I cannot imagine what life must have felt like, how excruciating it must have been, to have been imprisoned there indefinitely merely for pursuing justice.