Cape Town!

We arrived safely in beautiful Cape Town on Friday, and checked into our hotel in the Sea Point neighborhood, near the gleaming new soccer stadium and just a block from the ocean.  We have Lion’s Head mountain behind us and the ocean in front of us and it’s a lovely welcome to this lovely city.

We woke up Saturday to bad news:  the weather was too windy for us to go up Table Mountain, and the sea was too choppy for us to go to Robben Island.  So instead, we started with a drive around the older part of the city and a walk through the Company Gardens.  The Company Gardens were the original plantations of the Dutch East India Company, created to supply the passing ships on their way between Europe and Asia on the spice trade route.  Now this is the main park in central Cape Town, and it’s a lovely walk lined by very old trees.  The oldest tree in the park is an ancient pear tree, brought from the Netherlands, and now gangly, hollow and heavily propped up with metal bars.  There are breadfruit and nut trees and citrus.  They are also returning a part of the park to a vegetable garden, planted with the same types of food that used to grow there.  This garden was the reason Cape Town was founded, so the park is of central historical importance.  In fact, the parliament building and all the main museums and libraries now line the gardens.  It’s a really nice walk right in the middle of the city.

After we walked the Company Gardens, we went to the older main walking street in town, Long Street, which is lined with shops and restaurants.  There is a traditional African craft market just off Long Street, in the square that used to be the main commerce center of the old city.  We had a little time to see what was there and walk around.  One of the most interesting things that students discovered was that they could walk into a shop, pick out some awesome African print fabric, and get measured or provide a description, and get almost anything they wanted sewn to custom order.  There were also lots of carved bowls and gorgeous African beaded jewelry, drums, masks, and just about anything else we wanted to see or purchase.

Then for lunch, we went to a new development called the Old Biscuit Mill.  This is an old brick mill yard that has been redeveloped into a sort of farmers market with cafes and restaurants and little artisan shops.  It was very charming and the food options were overwhelming and delicious.  The most interesting thing, however, was that this wasn’t really a tourist destination.  It was busy and crowded, but it was mainly South Africans who thronged around us.  It was quite a symbol of the growing economic power of the middle class.

In the afternoon, we got great news:  they had started running ferries back to Robben Island and we could go on our scheduled trip!  We went to the waterfront dock and waited for our ferry.  There are several ferries, two that are the original ones that used to take prisoners back and forth, and several gleaming new ones.  Ours was the Susan Kruger, which was the actual ferry that took Nelson Mandela on his trip to the island prison.  It was older and creakier, and while the sea was calm enough to run the ferry, it in no way was calm.  We rocked and we rolled and we pitched and dropped, and many of us didn’t feel all that great an hour later when we arrived on the island. 

We got a tour of the island and learned some of the history:  this island was used as a sort of containment area for some of the great early Xhosa chiefs who were captured by the British.  It was also the nation’s leper colony.  There are thousands of people buried on the island; the whites have grave stones, and the ‘colored’ people (as they are called here) are in unmarked graves.  The prison was built right on top of a colored graveyard.

We saw the famous quarry where Nelson Mandela and other prisoners worked daily.  They would crush rock all day in the hot sun, and then in the evening, all the chalk they had mined would just be dumped in the sea.  It was purely an exercise in hard labor.  But it did give the prisoners an advantage:  they could mix with each other as they worked, and even hold secret meetings in the small cave area that served as both a bathroom (with buckets) and a lunchroom.  The guards didn’t enter and the prisoners could talk relatively freely.  This was also a place where the political prisoners mixed with the criminals, and they ran an informal school teaching some of the criminals how to read, how to do basic math, and teaching them the real history of the country.  The rock is very white, and Nelson Mandela permanently injured his eyesight from all the years he worked there without sunglasses or other protection.  You might notice that in photos after his release, his eyes kind of squint, this is from the damage.  After the end of apartheid, there was a reunion of former political prisoners on the island, and Mandela gave a short talk in the quarry.  As he left, he picked up a stone as is Xhosa custom, in memory of the dead.  One by one the other former prisoners added stones to the pile to honor the memories of the political prisoners who died while incarcerated.  The rock pile still stands at the entrance to the quarry. 

Our guide as we entered the prison was a former political prisoner.  All of the main prison guides are former political prisoners.  Our guide told us as much about his experiences as he did about the prison itself.  Up until the 1970s the prison was a terribly brutal and deadly place, with prisoners on starvation rations and sleeping in overcrowded dorms on the floor.  There were no shoes and the prison was very cold.  Illnesses and injuries often went untreated.  As a result of international pressure—which built as photos were smuggled out of the prison—the conditions were somewhat improved.  Still, it was a very difficult place to be.  The guards worked to prevent communication between the prisoners, and worked especially hard to prevent news and information from the outside world from reaching the political prisoners, who were still running ANC strategy from inside.  The prisoners devised many creative ways to communicate, through the pipes in the bathrooms, through the kitchen, through notes left in the exercise area, etc. 

We had the chance to see inside the different barracks.  The closed courtyards where the prisoners would sometimes be forced to sit all day and chip at rocks were still as barren and oppressive as ever.  We also had the chance to see Mandela’s old prison cell.  He was a very tall man, and the cell is so small that he couldn’t lie straight.  It had a small barred window overlooking the closed courtyard.  It had a mat on the floor, a bowl, and a small table, as well as a sort of small cupboard case on the wall.  That’s it.  The place was so simple and yet so cold, and it’s hard to imagine how someone could live there for decades and still not be bitter or angry.

Today was our free day.  We had some students climb Table Mountain, which they did in the morning and then took the cable car back down.  We had other students go wine tasting in the excellent wineries outside of Cape Town.  Other students went to the small Sunday market outside our hotel and then to the South African culture and natural history museum right near the Company Gardens.  Sadly, the ocean was too choppy for shark cage diving, which left a lot of us very disappointed.  But still, I think this free day was well used.