My Visit to a Famous Prison Cell

By David Corn  May 17, 2023

From Nelson Mandela’s cell on Robben Island, he could see a large concrete wall and the sky above it.

When I was an Angry Young Man, a long time ago, I participated in the movement for freedom in South Africa. For many of my generation, who were too young to have rallied against the Vietnam War or marched with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the fight against the apartheid regime and its supporters and enablers in the United States was one of our coming-of-age protests. (There was also opposition to nuclear power, demonstrations against US support for brutal and murderous dictators in Latin America and elsewhere, and other causes.) Living thousands of miles from the African continent, we trained our ire upon American institutions and corporations that did business in South Africa or invested in firms that did so. This commerce propped up the vile racist state.

As the Reagan administration and many conservatives resisted calls for the end of apartheid and even offered support to Pretoria, the divestment movement placed pressure on colleges and universities with portfolios that included holdings in transnational companies engaged in South Africa. This included sit-ins at school administration offices and protests at board meetings. I was part of all that. And decades later, about a week ago, I experienced a moving moment when I stood outside the cell where Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned for 18 of the 27 years the South African government held him behind bars.

Robben Island, the notorious prison, once a leper colony and a disposal ground for the blind and the mentally ill, has become one of the most popular tourist attractions of Cape Town. It is best known as the location where the apartheidists locked up Mandela and other leaders and members of the African National Congress, the main opposition to the racists of Pretoria. This South African Alcatraz, which over the years held about 3,000 anti-apartheid activists, as well as common criminals, is a 30-minute boat ride from the city’s highly developed waterfront—Krispy Kreme doughnuts! TAG Heuer watches!—and the ship that carried us through Table Bay and into the South Atlantic Ocean was packed with about 300 visitors for the three-hour tour.

Upon landing at island, we were steered into air-conditioned busses for a largely sterile zip around the island, while a tour guide pointed out assorted landmarks: the town where the prison guards had lived, the various cemeteries, and a mosque built in 1969 to honor an imam exiled to the island in the mid-1740s. One spot that stood out on this portion of the visit was a limestone quarry where Mandela and his comrades had been forced to work with primitive tools, such as spades and pickaxes. There was no compelling need for the limestone they chiseled. This was punishment. Prisoners would break up slabs of limestone and carry the pieces to the other end of the quarry, only to be ordered the next day to move the stones back. Mandela, who toiled in this pit for 13 years, and other ANC prisoners ended up with eye problems due to the prolonged exposure to the limestone dust. Mandela’s tear ducts were injured, and his ability to cry impaired.

But in this quarry, which was first set up by the Dutch during their colonial rule, Mandela and other ANC leaders spent their break time discussing politics, history, culture, and the sort of constitution the nation would have once they triumphed and South Africa was liberated. Imagine Alexander Hamilton and James Madison thrashing out the finer points of the Federalist Papers during respites from hard labor in a penal colony. The ANCers called the quarry “Robben Island University.”

From the bus, we could see a small mound of rocks in the middle of the pit. According to our guide, during a commemorative ceremony held at the quarry some years ago, Mandela stepped away from the crowd and silently placed a stone in a certain spot. Other former prisoners followed suit. This pile, unmarked by any signage, still stands as a modest memorial created by freedom fighters who were unjustly and illegally denied their freedom by racist tyrants.

The commemorative mound of stones in the limestone quarry where Nelson Mandela and other ANC prisoners were forced to work.

The tour’s emotional punch intensified once we were deposited at the concrete barracks where Mandela and other ANC leaders had been kept in small cells with no plumbing, and, initially, no beds. In its first years as a prison for the anti-apartheid crusaders, each political prisoner was provided only a thin mat for sleeping.

Here we met Sipoh Msami, a sixty-year-old former ANC activist, who had been imprisoned for five years on Robben Island. He would escort us on foot through the buildings where he, Mandela, and their compatriots had been incarcerated. Msami began by telling us his personal tale. He was arrested in 1982 with six other ANC campaigners. They were tortured, one lethally. Msami was charged with being a member of the outlawed ANC and recruiting others to join it. He was sent to Robben Island and placed in a large barracks-style room with about 30 to 40 other political prisoners. Mandela and top ANC officials were locked up in a separate wing in single cells.

Msami showed us what had been Mandela’s cell and the dusty courtyard, surrounded by a tall concrete wall, where Mandela and other ANC leaders were allowed to gather. At one point, these men created a garden in this small space. Msami told us various stories of how the ANC prisoners outfoxed the guards. They were not allowed access to newspapers. But they found ways to steal papers from their warders and grab discarded newspapers and magazines from garbage bins when taken to the medical clinic on the island or the hospital on the mainland. This is how they learned that their struggle was being widely covered throughout the world—and that people in other nations (like those of us participating in protests in the United States) were supporting the battle for freedom in South Africa.

Mandela’s cell in the Robben Island prison.

Months after Mandela was released from prison in 1990—he had been transferred in 1982 from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison, where conditions were better but where he and other senior ANC officials were isolated from the younger ANC activists—he addressed the US Congress and thanked Americans who persisted in “your resolve to have us and other political prisoners released from jail.” He added, “You have given us the gift and privilege to rejoin our people, yourselves, and the rest of the international community in the common effort to transform South Africa into a united, a democratic, and non-racial country…. We are glad that you merged with our own people to make it possible for us to emerge from the darkness of the prison cell and join the contemporary process of the renewal of the world.” Four years later, he would become the first leader of South Africa elected in a fully democratic contest.

Years afterward, a State Department official told me of listening to a Mandela talk in which Mandela remarked that he and his imprisoned ANC allies had been deeply heartened when they learned of the anti-apartheid protests in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. These actions, he said, boosted their spirits and fortified their resolve.

I thought about that as I stood outside his old cell, as we tourists crowded around it to take photos. (It was tough to get a good angle.) Back in the day, we divestment supporters were fixated on our targets in the United States. I never thought much about how the actions of college agitators on distant campuses could be encouraging for Mandela and his colleagues. Solidarity can often seem abstract. But the divestment movement is a reminder of how important faraway support and recognition can be for those doing the arduous work of social justice.

In the courtyard, I stood beneath the one window of Mandela’s cell and envisioned the view that he had for years: only a concrete wall and the sky above it. How he must have gazed into that space, imagining a better future and scheming about how to reach it. Much has been said and written about his magnanimous nature—how once he was freed and led South Africa to democracy, he concentrated on reconciliation, not retribution. I wondered if he worked out some of that while staring into the bright blue sky above this barren prison island.

There was much personal and national trauma for Mandela and his ANC comrades to overcome. And that was true, too, for Msami, our guide. He cheerfully showed us where he and other low-level ANC prisoners were held. As he stood in that cell talking to several dozen day-trippers, he reminisced—almost fondly—of the camaraderie he and his cellmates experienced. There was no violence among them. They spent hours deep in conversation about history and politics.

As we left that part of the prison and our tour concluded, I asked Msami what it was like to return to this place day after day, as he has done for almost 20 years. “It was hard at first,” he replied. “I was angry. It hurt. It scared me to be here. But now I am happy to tell our story. I am glad people from all around the world come to hear it. And to feel it. We are lucky. There are many stories like ours that never get told, that people do not learn from.”

Msami was beaming as he said this.

Premium Our Land subscribers, scroll down for more photographs from Robben Island.

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More from Robben Island

When tourists step off the boat at Robben Island, they encounter billboard-sized photos showing the first prisoners being brought to the island in 1962.

Here’s the courtyard where Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders could congregate. The ANC prisoners created a garden in this spot. “To plant a seed, watch it grow, to tend it and then harvest it, offered a simple but enduring satisfaction,” Mandela later observed. “The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a taste of freedom.”

The cells are now adorned with stories from ANC veterans who had been imprisoned in them. Benson Fihla, incarcerated on Robben Island from 1964 until 1978, recounted how he and other prisoners who refused to work in the quarry were placed in isolation cells and became skilled ping-pong players. His old cell now features the certificate he won for “a highly commendable and articulate performance” in a table tennis tournament.

Our guide, Sipoh Msami, walks through the halls of the prison where he was once incarcerated. In the not-too-distant future, as the former ANC inmates age and pass on, there will no longer be guides at Robben Island who were imprisoned there. It was a poignant experience to be steered through this important and inspiring history by a person who had lived through—and survived—it.

On the Cape Town dock, there is a display that shows the dimension of Mandela’s cell. It invites people to step inside and imagine what it would be like to be forced to reside in such confining quarters for so many years. How Mandela emerged from that small space with such a large soul is a wonder.

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