South Africa: History

Not long ago, Robben Island was the worst place you could be sent in South Africa. Most of the leaders of the anti-Apartheid movement were imprisoned on this lonely patch of rock at some stage during the struggle for democracy. Yet here we are, a group of holiday-makers in T-shirts and Ray-Bans, riding the ferry to Apartheid's most notorious prison.

Confronting the past: Robben Island

'Like all the guides, Afrika Hlapo was a political prisoner'

Not long ago, Robben Island was the worst place you could be sent in South Africa. Most of the leaders of the anti-Apartheid movement were imprisoned on this lonely patch of rock at some stage during the struggle for democracy. Yet here we are, a group of holiday-makers in T-shirts and Ray-Bans, riding the ferry to Apartheid's most notorious prison.

The reinvention of Robben Island as Cape Town's top museum is a testament to the vision of the post-Apartheid government. After the last political prisoners were released in 1991, Robben Island could easily have been abandoned, its history glossed over by an over-zealous tourist board. Instead, it was preserved as a monument to the victory of the human spirit over injustice and adversity.

The trip from Cape Town harbour is all the stranger because of the remarkable changes that have taken place since the fall of Apartheid. When Nelson Mandela began his 18-year incarceration on Robben, the boat left from a prison wharf. Today, it leaves from Nelson Mandela Gateway at the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, home to swish shops and restaurants.

None of us knows quite what to expect as the ferry pulls out into Table Bay. What is certain is that no one is going to have an easy time when it comes to confronting skeletons in the colonial closet. Over the centuries, every power in the region has dumped its undesirables on the island.

The Dutch used it as a prison camp for slaves, exiles and rebels. Under the British, Robben became a leper colony and lunatic asylum, and a staging post for convicts bound for Australia. In WWII, the island was used as a prison camp for French prisoners of war.

The darkest days of all began in 1959, when the Apartheid authorities converted the island into a maximum-security prison. More than 3,000 political prisoners were held here in appalling conditions until 1991, when the gates opened and Nelson Mandela led South Africa to a brighter, democratic future.

For many black South Africans, Robben Island is a place of pilgrimage. This was where Mandela wrote Long Walk to Freedom, where the overthrow of Apartheid was planned, and where the concept of Truth and Reconciliation was hammered out in the prison yard. After a bumpy, spray-filled crossing, we get our first glimpse of the place where some of the most important conversations in South Africa's history took place.

And in the brilliant afternoon sunshine, it doesn't look that unpleasant - but then we aren't being greeted by baton-wielding guards. The chirrup of birds and the rustle of leaves in the trees makes the island seem serene, but as we leave the harbour and walk up to the prison compound, there's no mistaking what the place was used for. The watchtowers and rolls of razorwire are a dead giveaway.

We start our tour of the island by bus under the capable leadership of Yasien Mohamed, a distinguished Cape Town Muslim with a neatly-trimmed grey beard and a gift for public speaking. It's only halfway through the tour that Yasien reveals his own part in the freedom struggle - he was once secretary for the Pan-African Congress in the western Cape.

Yasien delivers a thought-provoking narrative on the history of the island as the bus visits the lime quarry where political prisoners carried out forced labour, and the one-room prison built for Pan-African Congress founder Robert Sobukwe (once regarded as the most dangerous man in Africa). Several visitors shift uncomfortably in their seats as Yasien mentions the support the Apartheid regime received from Britain and America.

Confronting the past begins in earnest when the bus drops us off at the maximum-security prison and Afrika Hlapo picks up the story. Like all of the guides at the museum, Afrika is a former political prisoner. He has a gentle way of speaking, but he pulls no punches as he describes life in the prison where he spent 11 years of a 20-year sentence for alleged terrorism and conspiracy.

It's a humbling story, but also one surprisingly full of hope. During a frank question and answer session in his old cell, Hlapo talks about learning to forgive the people who brutalised him. Under the philosophy of reconciliation, the prison guards were also victims of a racist and violent society. Keeping the memory of the struggle alive is a form of therapy for many ex-inmates. As Hlapo describes it: "The more you talk about the experience, the more you heal yourself."

After the talk, we tour the abandoned prison buildings, stopping off at the dining hall where the current government of South Africa debated the future of the nation, and paying a respectful visit to the tiny cell where Nelson Mandela was held in isolation for 18 years. Robben Island became a National Monument in 1996 and a World Heritage Site in 1999; judging by the number of visitors, its story will be told for generations to come.

Nature is slowly reclaiming Robben Island - there's even a small colony of African penguins close to the ferry jetty - but it's still a lonely place. Just stand on the shore and look back towards Table Mountain, as thousands of inmates must have done over the years, and you'll see for yourself.

On the ferry back to the mainland, most passengers are quietly contemplative. I find myself thinking about the definition of reconciliation provided by Yasien Mohamed: "For one generation we will stand still and not take revenge on those who have wronged us." It's a brave thing to do, and something the whole world could learn from.

Robben Island Museum: 00 27 21 413 4200; www.robben-island.org.za. Tickets cost R150 (£6.80) for children aged 4 to 17; free for children under 4. Includes return ferry trip and three-and-a-half-hour guided tour. Tickets are available from Nelson Mandela Gateway and Cape Town Tourism Information Office at the V&A Waterfront

Joe Bindloss

Battle scars: Rorke's drift

'I imagine 25,000 Zulus, with a roar'

"It was like a religious experience," says Ian Ramsay, bending down to inspect a row of fading photographs in the Rorke's Drift museum. He looks up and smiles. "It changed my life". Ian is in the back rooms of the tiny battlefields museum, gazing at glass cases filled with war memorabilia. He's a bear of a man, but his voice is soft and his eyes gleam as he tells me about his first trip here, three years ago. He now gives talks on the Anglo-Zulu war, and admits to being "obsessed".

The battle at Rorke's Drift, immortalised by Michael Caine in Zulu, has turned a fair number of visitors into obsessives. It's epic stuff: a classic story of stiff-lipped bravery, where 135 soldiers defended a mission station from a raging force of 4,000 Zulus. More Victoria Crosses were awarded here than for any other in British battle - 11 in total. Today, Rorke's Drift is a pleasant little place, with a restored mission station and church fringed by gardens. The landscape lacks the grandeur of the film-set (Zulu was filmed in the Drakensberg mountains, to the south-west), although a suitably gloomy hill towers in the background. A line of stones rings the site, marking where bags of maize where piled as fortifications. My guide Brad, who learned his story-telling skills from legendary local guide David Rattray, leaps across the lawn. He shoulders his walking stick as a Martini-Henry rifle, and swings it around to thrust like a Zulu spear.

The heroic events here were actually an epilogue to a far greater battle earlier on the day of 22 January 1879. Just 16km from Rorke's Drift, the British army suffered its worst colonial defeat in history at the site of Isandlwana, a name which has become synonymous with the power once held by the Zulu nation.

Driving east from Rorke's Drift, the mist-shrouded hill of Isandlwana rises from the plain like the shoulders and head of a sphinx. Brad and I settle on its lower slopes and he recounts the story of the battle. I look out over the plain to the ridge opposite, and it's easy to imagine a force of 25,000 Zulu warriors appearing with a roar on its crest, and pouring in a seething mass over the lip. Their battle cries and the pounding rhythm of their spears on their shields ring in my ears, and I imagine the sky darkening under a partial eclipse, as it did that day. Within hours, all but 55 of the 1,400 British soldiers were dead.

Around us, dozens of white cairns lie in the long grass, marking the mass graves of those who fell. A soft mist swirls around the bone-white stones and I muse what a lonely, unhappy place this is for a grave.

Driving across to the opposite ridge, we gain the vantage point from which the "head and horns" formation of the Zulus descended. Brad shows me how the central regiment of warriors stormed head-on into the valley, while two "horns" of younger soldiers surrounded the British regiment. These were keen to prove their bravery by "washing their spears" in the blood of their enemies; only then would a young Zulu be allowed to marry.

It was a slaughter, and the reaction back home was of horror and disbelief. Although the ensuing victory at Rorke's Drift quelled the disapproval, the British responded to its defeat at Isandlwana with vengeance. By July, King Cetshwayo was forced to surrender, the Zulu kingdom crushed.

The scars are still visible, if not on the land then on the people. A powerful nation was relegated to a position of forced subservience. It feels like a shameful piece of British history, and I wonder what it is that draws in those like Ian Ramsay, the Anglo-Zulu obsessive. But as Brad explains, it is the heroism of individuals that made these battles such epic adventures. The pieces of the puzzle are more intoxicating than the finished picture.

The light drizzle that had darkened the landscape lessens, and behind us three children run from a thatched homestead, giggling and playing in the wet grass. The oldest is carrying a battered radio, and as the rousing tunes float out over the valley, the sun reappears, warming our backs and chasing away the ghosts.

David Rattray runs tours from Fugitives' Drift (00 27 34 642 1843; fugitivesdrift.com). Isibindi Zulu Lodge (00 27 34 642 1620; www.isibindiafrica.co.za), by Rorke's Drift, has accommodation in Zulu beehives and arranges battlefield tours

Sam Southgate

Township turned city: Soweto

'You can still see the bullet holes'

The corner of Moema and Vilakazi Streets seems like any other in suburban South Africa. The bungalows lining the streets are framed by neat shrubs and shady trees. But it was here that the final 10-year battle against Apartheid was sparked, an event that caused townships across the country to rise up. It was at this street corner, on 16 June 1976, that 12-year-old Hector Pieterson was shot dead by riot police during a peaceful school demonstration.

Two blocks away, a memorial shows the iconic photograph of a panicked teenager running with Hector's body in his arms, his sister beside him, wailing. Soweto's first museum now stands here, outlining the history of the township.

Driving around Soweto, home to some 3.5m people, I realise that this is no longer the "South-west Township", a stretch of one-room shacks originally built for Johannesburg's black population, forcibly removed from the city centre. Instead, it is a city in its own right, with districts, suburbs and shopping centres. The streets are well-maintained, and there are banks, golf courses, a football stadium and smart homes with well-tended gardens.

Soweto celebrated its centenary last year, and local restaurateur Sakhumuzi Maqubela tells me over lunch that this is a time of real opportunity. Maqubela has lived here all his life, and has seen good prospects arrive with the new flood of tourists - Soweto is now one of the country's main tourist attractions. His restaurant has a unique location: is on the only street in the world to have been home to two Nobel peace laureates: Desmond Tutu is his neighbour, and Nelson Mandela lived in a tiny two-room house down the road in the 1960s.

My driver, Ike, skirts around the less salubrious areas; for every smart suburban street, there is a district of informal shanties where crime is rife and unemployment is at 80 per cent. We pass markets selling live chickens, pumpkins and maize. Barefooted children beg on street corners and rows of decaying hostels, the scenes of terrible violence between ANC and Inkatha supporters in the early 1990s, still house mining workers.

Signs of Soweto's troubled history are everywhere. At Regina Mundi, the largest church in Soweto, you can still see bullet holes in the ceiling, a lasting testament to shots fired by police. Old photos of government attacks are pasted outside, and a smiling woman sits next to them selling little mosaics which spell out "Welcome to Soweto". I buy one, and wonder at how incongruous these letters might have looked a few decades ago.

Legend Tours (00 27 21 697 4056; www.legendtourism.co.za) offers tailor-made tours of Soweto

Francisca Kellett

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