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Mandela's cell now a shrine to political miracles

boat March 2, 1997
Web posted at: 5:45 p.m. EST (2245 GMT)

From Correspondent Christiane Amanpour

ROBBEN ISLAND, South Africa (CNN) -- South Africa's latest tourist destination is at the end of a 6-mile (9-kilometer) ferry ride to hell, tracing a journey human beings once made in chains.

At the end of the ride is the Robben Island prison block that held Nelson Mandela -- once the world's most famous inmate -- for 18 of his 27 years in prison.

cell

Days in solitary confinement and nights on thin mats shaped the prisoner who became president.

"When we came here in 1964 conditions were grim," tour guide Lionel Davis tells a group. "They all believed we were monsters, the anti-Christ, you know; we eat people."

Davis and other former inmates conduct the tours, explaining how food and clothes were rationed by race. And they tell of the assaults and beatings, and how afterward prisoners were forced to scrub their own blood from the cells.

Outside, visitors see the lime quarry where prisoners were forced to break rocks, their eyesight permanently damaged by the glare from the harsh sun.

tour

"This was real. This was about pain. People experiencing blood," said one visitor. "People (defecating) in little buckets, then having to clean it. Put water in those same buckets and having to wash their face."

Robben Island is surrounded by natural beauty and a wildlife sanctuary, making it difficult to imagine the cruelty that was done there.

But Mandela called it the iron fist, the harshest outpost of South Africa's penal system. It was only after pressure from sympathetic South Africans and the international community that conditions began to improve.

Thanks to that pressure, the inmates were eventually allowed to study, and to receive a visitor and a letter more than once every six months. But Mandela had to lobby three years for the right to wear sunglasses in the quarry.

wire

Some of Robben Island's visitors come from abroad, but it's the South Africans, black and white, who find their reckoning at the isolated outpost. Most note a sense of remorse about what happened at the prison.

Davis and his fellow former inmates preach forgiveness now, born from the necessity of bridging political and personal differences while they were locked inside.

For some, of course, reconciliation does not come easily. And neither is a journey across the water to the prison an easy one.

Visitors on the way back generally sit quietly, lost in thought. They talk of the evil that lived on the island, of the "extreme sadness" they feel about the waste of time and resources to keep the prison going.

And they worry about the legacy left to their children.

But the trip to Robben Island affords a glimpse not only into the depths of despair and cruelty suffered by the prisoners who lived there, but it also offers a vision of the triumph of human spirit, a pilgrimage to the shrine of Nelson Mandela, patron saint of political miracles.

 

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