Robben Island

After Christmas, we traveled to Cape Town and one of the first things we did while we were there was to visit Robben Island, which was used at one time as a leper colony, and more recently as a prison for political prisoners (including Nelson Mandela) during the apartheid, and now has been converted into a museum and a chance to write a new history. For example, the second picture here is of the limestone quarry where prisoners were forced to work. After apartheid ended, Nelson Mandela returned here with hundreds of former prisoners and dropped a single stone of remembrance there, and others joined to form a pile you can see in the bottom right corner. Mandela proclaimed that every five years they would come and return to this spot with stones of remembrance until the last prisoner passes away. Our tour guide was a former prisoner who was arrested for his work in organizing a school protest, and he shared from his own personal experience. We got to see the courtyard outside the cells where Mandela kept a small garden, and also visit his cell. I continue to be so impressed by the continued example of this great man. A couple days after visiting this place, I was reading from the book "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" a passage that reminded me of him: "The oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity, become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both. This then is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well."