The multi-purpose Robben Island, a half-hour boat ride off the coast of Cape Town, is best remembered for hosting Nelson Mandela’s political incarceration during the aparteid era. The only way to get to the island was to join an well-oiled organised tourist machine which, judging by the glitzy mainland entrance building in the harbour, is doing very well for itself, thank-you-very-much.

In the first half of the tour, we were driven around the island on a bus formerly used to transport prisoners on the compound. (The photograph of the ‘pile of stones’ in the album below was symbolically started by Nelson Mandela upon returning to the island as a free man. Fellow ex-prisoners added a stone to the pile on their subsequent visits.) Afterwards we were lead around the prison wing when Nelson Mandela was held captive for eighteen of his twenty-seven years of imprisonment. This part of the tour should have been really interesting as it was lead by an ex-political prisoner who himself had done time on the island. Unfortunately, as with most African politicians that we’ve seen on TV, our guide was rather partial to raising his voice and in fact shouted his way through the entire tour such that almost nobody could understand what was being communicated.

Once back on the mainland, we spent the afternoon mooching around the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront shopping mall which was a very pleasant, if costly, experience. At last I managed to get a half-decent haircut within Africa by a very colourful character in Mr. Cobbs English Barbershop. Thank the lord that his workmate called him Jonanathan before I made the mistake of greeting him in the feminine form!

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