Molweni!

I would first like to start by mentioning some of the little interactions with South Africans that have stuck out to me in the few weeks since I have been here. One thing that I have noticed is that South Africans are really friendly. A couple weeks ago I went up to campus with several other students on my program because they needed to buy tickets for an event. One guy that we asked directions from not only told us where we had to go but actually brought us to the building we needed to be at. A similar occurrence happened when we were looking for the computer lab several days later. The guy whom we asked directions from went out of his way to bring us all the way to the computer lab.

Also this week I experience my first minibus ride since I’ve been here. I guess I should explain what exactly minibuses are. They are essentially taxis (vans) take people from one place to another, picking up more people along the way. There is a driver and also another person that shouts out the window trying to find people that want a ride. On a casual walk to the grocery store around five of these honk and see if I want to ride on one. We were trying to go to the V&A Waterfront and thus had to take two minibuses to get there. The first went to Cape Town, where we had to get off and grab one heading towards either Sea Point or Camps Bay. Where we got off was like a minibus station and had minibuses heading to a bunch of different places.

On Saturday we had an excursion to Robben Island, the District Six Museum, and the Slave Lodge with Arcadia. It was a very interesting and insightful day. I just finished reading A Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela, which talks about his life and especially his part in the struggle to end the apartheid. He spent 18 years of his 27-year imprisonment at the Robben Island jail so I was excited to go to the prison and hear about his experience from another point of view. Once we got off the ferry at the island we took a bus tour around the island and then took a tour of the prison, which was given by a tour guide who was a political prisoner there in the 1980’s. He told us about some of his experience from when he was there for six years. He mentioned how the political prisoners would still discuss politics and get political literature even though they were in jail. He also mentioned that one way they passed the time was by studying, and so many prisoners came out of jail with college or high school degrees. He also mentioned that the older political leaders would take time to talk to the young ones and acted as mentors. In his book, Mandela talked about this and also that the political prisoners had to fight for their rights. They often organized hunger strikes in order to get equal food and the treatment that they deserved as political prisoners. At the beginning they were treated terribly, couldn’t study, and were given different food than the white and Indian prisoners. It was interesting to talk to our tour guide at the prison because he was there at a time when the political prisoners had won these rights. Another thing that is pretty interesting is that all of this happened recently. Nelson Mandela was realized from jail in my lifetime. It is hard to believe that so many were wronged (and that so many people in the world still are) so recently. It’s really started to hit me just how sheltered my life in the U.S. really is. On another note the spirit of the people on Robben Island really impressed me. Many people who work at the museum live on the island, even though they were imprisoned there for many years. They stress the importance that they want the island to be used as a teaching point for tolerance, respect, and non-racialism. They don’t want it to become a symbol of the hardships that prisoners faced but rather what they accomplished. I think that is a very powerful message.

After Robben Island we headed to the District Six Museum, which was also fascinating. District Six is an area of Cape Town that used to be a vibrant mixed-racial community that was uprooted and forced to leave when the government declared it a white-only area. The museum was originally set up to serve as a meeting place for the ex-residents of District Six but now serves as a place for tourists to come and learn about District Six. Our tour guide had lived there for about 30 years before everyone was forced into the townships.