One of the pioneers of long-distance education, Michael Young, suggests a new use for Robben Island
IN the primary school hangs a large model of the most famous prison island in the world. The plaster island, made by the children, is green and peppered with tiny squares for the white houses where they and their parents live. Their island, from which they can see Cape Town and the towering Table Mountain, has a little harbour, a jetty and beaches. But no prison.
According to this child’s-eye view, the prison a few metres away where Nelson Mandela and other African National Congress leaders were locked up for 20 years or more, and where the children’s fathers still work, does not exist. For them, the most powerful symbol in the history of South Africa is, on the map at least, simply not there.
The children at least disabused me of one of my stereotypes of Robben Island on my recent visit — that it is a rugged and remote kind of Alcatraz with an equally grim prison. The prison is grim. But the island is also as the children see it, home to a small community of 250 prison staff and their wives and children. As well as a primary school, they have two churches, sportsfields, camp sites, beaches for swimming and fishing, their own shop and two clubs. They belong to the privileged community of white islanders.
The other community is the 850 ordinary prisoners (no “politicals” any more) in two compounds surrounded by high fences topped by barbed wire. The two communities are intertwined. The black and coloured prisoners create the jobs for the white warders and the white warders create the work for the prisoners. Because the island has limits made secure by the seas and the fear of sharks, the prisoners can be left relatively free on the island itself. Their jobs are to maintain the property. The old British naval guns on the island, monsters mounted during the second world war to repel any Japanese invasion, are lovingly maintained in a way that would put Portsmouth to shame.
The place has a misleading air of stability. The expectation is that the prison will close in a year or two, once enough new jails can be built in the Western Cape. So then what?
Businessmen are lobbying for a tourist resort, with a new hotel and an emphasis on water sports. I doubt whether they have the remotest chance of success. It would be an insult to privatise a symbol. Ex-prisoner, now President Mandela said the island should not “be a circus”.
There is a better-grounded lobby for a nature reserve. There are already penguins, many birds and a collection of ostriches, springboks, bonteboks, fallow deer and a few elands. The animals largely look after themselves. But the island’s ecology will, apparently, not stand many more animals. Vegetation and water are limited and already some water has to be transported from the mainland. In any case, it already has nature reserve status and can remain so without closing off other choices for the rest of the island.
Some of the older buildings are already national monuments and the prison is bound to become one in its turn, housing an anti-apartheid museum. But that would only be a beginning.
The real achievement of Robben Island, as described in Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela’s recently published autobiography, lies in the manner in which, even in prison, the wounds inflicted by apartheid began to be healed. Political prisoners from different tribes and parts of the country put their time to constructive use through an extraordinary effort in education. They summoned in the resources of distance education and open learning to enable them to follow all manner of courses, and did more besides.
“In the struggle, Robben Island was known as ‘the University’,” Mandela wrote. “This was not only because of what was learned from books, or because prisoners studied English, Afrikaans, art, geography and mathematics, or because so many of our men like Billy Nair, Ahmed Kathrada, Mike Dingake and Eddie Daniels earned multiple degrees. Robben Island was known as ‘the University’ because of what we learned from each other. We became our own faculty, with our own professors, our own curriculum, our own courses. We made a distinction between academic studies, which were official, and political studies, which were not.”
The prisoners extended their education to the warders who had been so brutal and so racially prejudiced before they brushed against the humanity of the inmates. The warders were moved every few years to avoid too much fraternisation, but this just meant that the task of the rehabilitation of a new crop of warders had to begin again, usually successfully. The warders did not reform the prisoners; the prisoners reformed the warders. Education was used as part of the process of healing.
The hope of many ex-prisoners is that this is how it will be in future. That university needs to be revived in the form of the Robben Island Open University, eventually to bring hundreds of thousands of young people to the island on short courses to learn about the new “people’s history” of South Africa and engage in peace studies. It could also serve a large body of students throughout South Africa (and later the whole of Africa) by educational radio beamed by satellite and by the other techniques of open learning. “Robben Island Calling” could become part of the daily life of the nation.
Millions of young adults in the townships and ex- homelands have missed out on education almost totally in the last 20 years. Many are illiterate, waiting for a lift in their education and in their morale. It is a cause which could attract resources from an international community which has been almost as emotionally engaged in the liberation of South Africa as people in the country itself. A powerful stimulus for the young people could come from this amazing place which was a landfall for the first Portuguese explorer in 1488, which was where the first Dutchmen arrived in South Africa 400 years ago and which was where the first black President of the most powerful country in Africa spent much of his life in incarceration.
Lord Young of Dartington is the originator of the British Open University
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