Berkley Center

I felt a sense of foreboding approaching Robben Island. It was a beautiful summer day, and the breeze made the ferry ride across Table Bay very pleasant. However, as the bustling V&A Waterfront and Table Mountain grew smaller and Robben Island came into focus, I started to feel the ominous presence of the water-bound prison. I began to imagine the apprehension, fear, and uncertainty undoubtedly felt by Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners who were thrown unceremoniously onto boats and dropped at this degrading space of isolation to wait out their sentences.

Robben Island was utilized as a prison dating back to Dutch colonialism in the seventeenth century. During the apartheid era, the National Party imprisoned criminals and political prisoners in three separate prisons on the island, in deplorable conditions. Prisoners had to work long hours in a physically demanding limestone quarry. They were not given adequate food, water, or sanitation facilities. Many were packed into overcrowded communal cells with few blankets, despite the cold Cape Town winters. Others were kept in solitary confinement for inhumanly long periods with limited contact to the outside world. The tour of Robben Island made these atrocities very real to me. When I stood outside of Mandela's bare and minuscule cell, I could not believe that the Nobel Prize Winner was made to endure such conditions for the supposedly “treasonous” crime of fighting for peace and freedom.

Mandela had been imprisoned for 18 years before then president F.W. de Klerk ordered his release in 1990. I began to wonder—how did Nelson Mandela leave this prison and then work together with the very people who incarcerated him? On a more macro level, how has the black population of South Africa come to live alongside the people who subjected them to substandard living conditions and then threw them in prisons like Robben Island when they protested such conditions? Current politics in South Africa may be contentious, and the nation continues to have a crime problem, but there are not daily race riots, which one might expect after such an oppressive history.

Part of this seemingly paradoxical reality can be attributed to the actions of Mandela and the Government of National Unity following the fall of apartheid, and what eventually amounted to an institutionalization of an inherently religious concept: forgiveness. Although Mandela had been imprisoned unjustly for almost two decades, he did not leave Robben Island clamoring for the blood, or even the subjugation of those who had put him there. Instead, he advocated forgiveness and a unified nation. In his inauguration speech after winning the first democratic elections in South Africa, Mandela said, "The time for the healing of the wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come. The time to build is upon us."

He facilitated the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. At the commission, victims of abuses during the apartheid regime could testify about what happened to them. Those who committed crimes could also give public statements about their acts and request amnesty. In total, 7,112 requested amnesty and 849 were granted it by the commission. The commission set the tone for a new South Africa. Sixteen years after Mandela took office, the Republic of South Africa still has many problems to confront. The legacy of apartheid looms heavy as half the country, mainly blacks in townships, live below the poverty line. Unemployment is roughly 25 percent, and less than 63 percent of students can be expected to graduate high school. However, South Africa remains a multiracial society with a peaceful democratic government, committed to addressing the existing inequalities and bridging the race divide. The infusion of religion into the secular government arena, in the form of political forgiveness, enabled the country to start to reconcile following apartheid. At the very least, it is an amazing testament to a national will to heal.