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Published: March 2nd 2010
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Robben Island
Robben Island seems to have been transformed from a maximum security prison to
Cape Town’s #1 tourist attraction in a remarkably short time. It was top of the list of places in Cape Town I wanted to see when we organised this trip. I was only nine years old at the time of the Rivonia Trial but I think I was vaguely aware of what was happening at the time. I do remember reading some of the transcripts of the trial as a teenager {
I was a strange child!!}.
To make the tourist trip to Robben Island now you need to book in advance. We went to the booking office at the
Victoria and Alfred Waterfront on a weekday and were able to get tickets for the next day but people trying to get tickets for the same day were disappointed. I’m told it’s even more difficult to get tickets for a weekend day and some tourist guides recommend that you buy tickets as much as 3 weeks in advance. It’s also good to have a couple of alternative days to go as the ferry can be cancelled if the sea is too rough.
The ferry makes
four trips a day to the island carrying 300 people each time. The problem for the organisers must be that they have 300 people arriving at the island at the same time who all want to go and cram into Nelson Mandela’s cell. So when we arrive we are put into coaches for a coach tour of the island - I guess the coaches must “stagger” their arrival times at the prison.
We’ve even done some homework by watching a DVD about the history of the island that Leon has given us! Our young guide for the coach tour, Craig, is very well informed and talks passionately and eloquently about the history of the island and his hopes for the future of South Africa. He grew up at a time when the apartheid laws were just beginning to be relaxed.
We end up at the main prison for the second part of the tour. Our guide for this {
unfortunately I don’t remember his name} is a former prisoner on Robben Island. All the guides for the tour of the prison are former political prisoners. We are taken on a walking of the prison visiting the large dormitory cells,
the individual cells where the leading members of the resistance were detained and the exercise yard while our guide talks about his experiences there.
We get a total time of about two and a half hours on the island. We would have liked some more time but we find ourselves rushing to catch the return ferry. It would have been useful to have had some more time to look around on our own instead of being in an escorted group all the time. As we were being lead out of the prison and back to the ferry we discovered a set of cells where each cell had a photograph of its inmate, a few memories of their time in prison written by the inmate and a few artefacts left in the cupboard. We would have loved to have a bit more time to explore these cells.
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SHARON CAMPBELL
non-member comment
africa
very interesting