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This post is about one man: Nelson Mandela. It is by no means intended to be a biography or really all that detailed whatsoever. We'll see how short I can make this. Apologies in advance if it's not as short as you want. It's not going to be short.

Some of the places we visit have horrible histories. Wars. Colonization. Repression. Racism. Torture. Revolution. Censorship. Violence. Rampant abuse of power. Corruption. Graft. Disease. Exploitation. Denial of basic human rights. The list could go on and on and on and it does with words far worse than I've written here. South Africa is right up there with the best (or worst, I guess in this case) of those places. I guess at one time or another and for extended periods of time, South Africa could embrace all those terrible words and phrases at the beginning of this paragraph.

I know I've only written one real paragraph so far but lest you think the country of my birth (the United Kingdom) and my adopted home country that I love so much and in so many ways (the United States) are immune from that litany of bad things in paragraph number one, think again. You can put all of those words against both nations at one time or another and they would fit perfectly (and maybe even some today). What else you got? France? Hah! Germany? Please! Spain? Nope, nope, nope! Pick pretty much any nation on Earth and you'll find what I wrote to start this post. It might have been a long, long time ago. But it's there.

But this post isn't about any of those nations. It's about South Africa. And South Africa is different. Not because it's worse than any other country on Earth, but because of how justice was finally meted out. Do you know how the revolution finally happened in South Africa? It was by vote. It was peaceful. Think the United States and Western Europe are superior to the rest of the world? How many nations out there ultimately achieved complete regime change without bloodshed? 

How did that all happen? I have just two words for you: Nelson Mandela. 

All those countries that we have visited that I referenced earlier? On some level, they all have national heroes. I don't think I've ever been anywhere that far and away had a singular guiding force in the true establishment of their nation like South Africa does with Nelson Mandela. 

We had to spend some time in South Africa tracking down Mandela's legacy.

Nelson Mandela Statue. Cape Town.

I knew something was up with Nelson Mandela and South Africa way, way before we set foot in South Africa late last year. I grew up in the 1980s. I turned 12 in the first year of that decade and attended high school and my first university entirely within the '80s. When I was in high school I knew that South Africa was under all sorts of pressure to abolish Apartheid, their segregated societal system that preserved power with the white minority over the black majority. I knew (or at least I thought I knew) that there was some dude named Nelson Mandela imprisoned for his beliefs who advocated violent overthrow of the government. And I knew that Steven Van Zandt wasn't going to play Sun City. And I'm not trying to be funny with that last one.

But I didn't really know what Sun City was. Or who Nelson Mandela was. Or really anything about South Africa really. Time to fix at least some of that.

Nelson Mandela Square, Johannesburg.

Maybe a very quick history of South Africa is in order. Quick being the operative word. I'm skipping a lot here. This post is trying to be about Mandela, not the history of South Africa.

Colonization of what is now South Africa began by the Dutch in 1652. They weren't the first ones to explore the area (the Portuguese were) but they were the first to settle and start pushing the native peoples, the Khoikhoi and San, into less desirable areas of the continent so they could take the harbor of what is now Cape Town for a resupply station for ships making the passage to Asia.

The Dutch held South Africa (it was not the size it is today) until the early 1800s when it was ceded to Britain as a prize in the Napoleonic Wars. The British outlawed the Dutch language, which alienated the European descendants (the Boers) already living there who moved inland away from Cape Town to escape the British. Over the next century (approximately), the British gained full control of South Africa with maybe a war or two in there involving most notably the former Dutch settlers and the Zulu. Oh...and the discovery of both gold and diamonds as abundant natural resources.

In 1910, the British consolidated the former Boer colonies into a single South African Union which was self-governing but also still under the control of the British Crown. South Africans fought on the side of Great Britain in both World Wars and the country was eventually granted independence from colonial control in 1961. By that time, the white minority was fully in control of the country with no desire to give it up. 

There wasn't always Apartheid (which literally means "apartness") in South Africa. That happened in 1948. But there was plenty of institutionalized racism happening in South Africa a long, long time ago. 

Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg. 

By the time Nelson Mandela was born in 1918, the government operating under the South African Union had already passed the 1913 Land Act, which segregated land ownership within the country, allocating about 7% of the total land area for black people. It also prohibited the selling or leasing of any land designated for whites to black people. 

Before Mandela's tenth birthday, the government had proceeded with additional laws like the Urban Areas Act, which segregated living areas for black people outside (rather than within) the cities they worked in, and the Color Bar Act, which prohibited black people from holding skilled tradesmen positions.

Then came the National Party and Apartheid. With the National Party, there was no more pretense about sneaky laws designed to make non-whites feel inferior. It was all just out in the open. Their slogan was "Die wit man moet alkyd baas wees" which means "the white man must always remain boss". They even manufactured some support from God when the Dutch Reform Church asserted that the Afrikaners were God's chosen people and black people were a subservient species. 

More rules followed. 

The below is not a comprehensive list. 

It's just to set the tone here.

1949: The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act. That one is kind of self-explanatory.

1950: The Population Registration Act, which labeled all South Africans by race, and the Group Areas Act, which created separate residential and business areas for each race.

1951: The Separate Representation of Voters Act, which robbed non-African, non-whites of their representation in parliament. This act spread explicit and official race-based discrimination from just black people to all non-white people.

1957: The Immorality Act, which prohibited sexual relations between whites and non-whites.

Getting the picture yet? 

Laws alone don't tell the story. We needed to dig deeper.

Community tributes to Mandela outside one of his houses (the third, if I'm remembering right).

We spent time last October and November in both Johannesburg and Cape Town exploring the history of colonialism and repression in South Africa and tracking down sites relevant to the life of Nelson Mandela. In Joburg, we spent a full day visiting what was probably far too many sites (including at least three former Mandela homes) along with a quick stop at the Apartheid Museum. In Cape Town, our Mandela-quest was informed by a half day trip to Robben Island along with a colonialism-themed food tour around the streets and alleys of Cape Town.

And I'm only sort of complaining about our day trip in Johannesburg but I do feel we could have spent more than the 45 minutes or so we were allotted at the Apartheid Museum. We basically speed-walked through that thing.

Some stuff stuck with me. It usually does with tours like this. We actually learned a ton and a lot of it could be stitched together I am sure to create a window of a portrait of what life might have been like for a non-white in South Africa before the end of Apartheid. But for the purposes of this post, I'm going to focus on three sites.

Mandela House, Soweto

The house in the picture above is located on Vilakazi Street in the township of Soweto outside of Johannesburg. It was built in 1945 along with innumerable residences exactly like it on lots that were similarly sized and pretty much the minimum size that a house like this could be placed upon. The one above is different than the others only in the respect that it was purchased by Nelson Mandela and in 1946, he moved into the house along with his first wife Evelyn and their first child. It was the first house he would own; he would hang on to it until 1997. One wife later (Winnie) as it turned out.

Mandela was not born anywhere close to Johannesburg. He started out life in the Eastern Cape Province. But he moved / ran-away-from-home to Joburg with his older cousin to (1) escape an arranged marriage; (2) finish his education and establish his law practice; and (3) ultimately embark on his life's work which was freeing the country of his birth from codified, institutional racism. His first home around Johannesburg was in the Alexandra township; when it came time for him to buy his own property, he moved in to the place on Vilakazi Street. The house is preserved as a museum today.

From a Mandela history standpoint, the house for me didn't shed a ton of light onto the life of the man. Yes, the house is small. Yes, there was no indoor plumbing. Yes, he lived here at the start of his monumental adult life. But other than that and absent the whole South Africa racism thing (we'll get there...), it's a starter house for a young couple in the 1940s. My mother grew up in that same decade in a house with an outhouse and a non-plumbed bathtub. Nothing surprising there.

Inside the (first) Mandela House today; Nelson's favorite chair.

But there are scars of pre- and post-Apartheid South Africa all around and over the house. First, while this seems like a pretty good 1940s starter home, this was likely the best choice from an extremely limited portfolio of properties available to the Mandelas. 1946 was well after the Land Act and the Urban Areas Act were in effect but before the introduction of Apartheid. Want to buy a house as a black man in 1946? Choose whatever you want and which you can afford from the 7% of the land allotted to the more than 80% black population. This circumstance isn't physically manifested in the house, but a house of this size at that time likely represented somewhere in the upper half of the maximum possibility property ownership for someone with Mandela's skin color.

The other scars on the house are more real. Scorched brick from fire hurled at the house. Bullet holes alongside stories of Winnie and the kids having to shelter in the interior of the house to avoid gunfire. A trash can lid used as a shield to protect from bullets with evidence of just how non-effective such a shield could be in in the house. And that fire and gunfire. All from government forces. No gang warfare here. Just the government of South Africa waging war on its own un-represented population.

A trip to the Mandela House involves parking the car and walking through the circus of street hawkers and Soweto citizens packed close to what is now a top tourist attraction looking for opportunities to assist with anything. Getting there involved driving through Soweto, from its fenced, well-maintained single-family homes in ordered neighborhoods to dirt-floored, corrugated metal shacks and shanties with electricity self-rigged from power poles and portable toilets like we might find on construction sites in the United States as the only place to pee and poop. The level of poverty in Soweto is striking for someone (me) who has never really been anywhere so densely populated with such unnecessarily basic shelter. I know there are places in this world that have it way worse and I'm not just being a white American expressing outrage at a level of poverty that I just don't see regularly but from my perspective, the governments of this world have the power to fix this stuff. It doesn't need to exist. Over simplifying, I know. Call me an idealist.

No pics of the shanties. I'm not taking and posting photographs of other people's poverty handed down by their own government.

Is a trash can lid an effective shield against bullets? Not really, no.

Robben Island, Cape Town

Nelson Mandela was arrested during his struggle to abolish Apartheid a number of times. A quick AI search on Google lists four arrests starting in 1952 and ending in 1962 with at least one additional informal detention in there for good measure. The number of times he was arrested is not that important for the purpose of this blog post. Most of these involved a brief stay in jail followed by a release; most of these arrests were, after all, unjustified from a democratic society perspective, which I get that South Africa was not. But the last one was pretty significant. It landed him with a life sentence with 27 years served at the time of his release in 1990.

Mandela was sentenced to prison in June 1964. As a black man imprisoned for activities in organized resistance to Apartheid, he could end up at only one place: Robben Island, an Island long used to separate undesireables from the rest of South African society (it started as a leper colony in the 1800s) just off the coast of Cape Town that was pretty much escape-proof due to its remoteness. A prison with 1,000 or so inmates and 310 armed guards with German shepherd dogs to watch over them. No women. No white men. No colored men. Just black men. Robben Island was only cruel enough for black men in the Apartheid era. Mandela would remain at Robben Island until March 1982 when he was moved to Pollsmoor Prison on the mainland.

Today (like the Mandela House), the prison is a museum. It was the first place I put on my Cape Town list when we decided that our South Africa trip would stop in that coastal city.

Robben Island's quarry. I have two substandard photos because I was on the wrong side of the bus. I'm electing to post both.

Tours of Robben Island are guided only. A boat takes you from the harbor across the water; a bus takes you around the island; and then a guide walks you around the prison itself. The star attraction on the tour is undoubtedly the cell of Nelson Mandela (shown in the photograph two photos above). Mandela was secured in a single cell in a wing of the prison reserved for ANC leadership so those at the top of the organization would be unable to influence the men sharing communal cells. It didn't work. He was moved to Pollsmoor because he was still leading men at Robben Island from a solitary cell.

The stop at Mandela's cell was useful as a touchstone in our Mandela history quest. The title of this blog post is actually Mandela's prisoner number at Robben Island. I've visited prison sites on my travels before. Robben Island sounds like it ranks up there with the worst.  

Some things we learned.

For prisoners on Robben Island, 23 of the 24 hours of the day were spent inside in confinement, either in single cells, solitary confinement or communal cells. New prisoners and leadership of the various groups imprisoned on the Island were generally confined to single cells. And leadership meant leaders of outlawed political movements like the African National Congress (ANC), of which Mandela was THE leader. The other hour in the day? Two 30 minute long sessions outdoors.

Upon arrival at Robben Island, each inmate was issued an identity card which you had to take everywhere. Caught with no card? 24 hours solitary confinement. Second occurrence? 48 hours solitary with no food. Third "offense"? Six months solitary with reduced diet. And the diet didn't sound that great to begin with. Prisoners at Robben Island received a "Category C" diet which in the 1980s meant porridge with rice, corn, soybeans, powdered egg and fish powder on weekdays with a small piece of actual meat on weekends. Before the 1980s it was worse. Category A and B diets were not for black prisoners.

Robben Island identity card.

Before 1979, sleeping on Robben Island was on the concrete floor and the bathrooms in the cells were one red bucket per prisoner. Those 30 minutes of outside time per day? Bucket cleaning was part of that time too. Contact with the outside world? In the 1960s it was two letters and two visitors per year. That would be relaxed to six by the 1980s. 

Oh, there was one other place that outside time was permitted...hard labor at the quarry breaking rocks. With no protection from rock dust or the blinding light reflected off the white stone by the hot African sun. Inmates who spent a lot of time at hard labor on Robben Island later in life reported extreme difficulty with bright lights and couldn't cry because of damage to their tear ducts by the daily rock dust.

Justice in the prison was handled by the prison court. Discipline was handed out via whippings, days or weeks in solitary confinement and even extensions to prisoners' sentences. Sometimes inmates died. If they did, they were typically buried or cremated and their remains deposited somwhere anonymously. If families were even told that their relatives were no longer on Robben Island alive, it was usually the "alive" part that got omitted. More often it was a lie about the prisoner escaping.

Sipho talking to our tour group.

Pretty much everything we were told at Robben Island was inhumane and chilling. We didn't visit Robben Island for fun or amusement. We did it to honor everyone who was confined there mostly for just disagreeing with people in power. And that included Nelson Mandela. 

There are places in this world that we can visit as tourists that are powerful. Robben Island is one of those. It is most powerful today because tours through the prison are guided by ex-inmates. Our guide was Sipho, who was a resident on the Island from 1984 to 1989. His crimes? Being a member of the ANC and recruiting others to be members, including recruitment outside the country. He was arrested with five others and was tried along with four of the five. The fifth died from torture by the police. There will come a day when there are no more prisoners left to guide people around Robben Island. When that day comes, this experience will be less powerful. There is power in listening to someone who has actually lived through this kind of experience.

Liliesleaf Farm, Johannesburg

How did Nelson Mandela get from Soweto to Robben Island? The answer is at Liliesleaf Farm.

Liliesleaf was an ANC safe house in a white neighborhood on the north side of Johannesburg. The property was purchased by Arthur Goldreich and Harold Wolpe (both of whom were white) with funds provided by the South African Communist Party with a little help from both Cuba and the Soviet Union. Goldreich lived in the house with his wife and two sons, effectively creating the illusion of a family living in suburbia complete with black servants working around the property, including a driver named David Motsamayi, which was Nelson Mandela's cover name while he was at Liliesleaf.

Liliesleaf was purchased in 1961, which was right at the time when the ANC was moving away from non-violent resistance following the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and into violent armed resistance. That change was resisted by Mandela until he realized no matter how non-violent the ANC was being, they were met with increasing violence in their engagement with government forces. Eventually, that realization caused Mandela to push to establish an armed wing of the ANC, uMkhonto we Sizwe (or MK) which meant "Spear of the Nation" in English.

During our travels in South Africa, we learned that the ANC's struggle against Apartheid changed with each decade. Passive resistance in the 1950s was followed by armed resistance in the 1960s. That changed to student protests in the 1970s and world condemnation and sanctions in the 1980s.

In 1963, the police raided Liliesleaf Farm. They were tipped off by a neighborhood resident but also someone inside MK. There's no record that I'm aware of that identifies the MK informant and Gabriel, our guide for our Mandela Day in Joburg, corroborated this information. He also, however, said that everyone knows the informant was later assassinated at his hone in Soweto. How he knows this when nobody knows the identify of the information, I have no idea. But he seemed pretty sure of his information.

The 1963 Liliesleaf raid resulted in the arrest of a number of ANC leaders and effectively shut the property down as a safe house. Nelson Mandela was not one of the leaders arrested that day, because he had already been arrested, tried and sentenced to five years' imprisonment the prior year for leaving the country without permission and inciting workers' strikes. The reason Mandela was out of the country was to secure support and funding from other countries for the ANC's newly launched MK initiative, although during his trial the South African government didn't know that.

That's where Liliesleaf comes in.

Nelson Mandela's desk and chair from his room at Liliesleaf.

While the police didn't find Mandela himself at Liliesleaf, they did find extensive evidence of his involvement in the founding of MK. That information was supposed to be destroyed at Mandela's direction, but whoever was directed to destroy the documents apparently decided there was too much historical value to these documents and he instead hid them in a coal bunker (I'm honestly making up the "too much historical value" thing but what else could the decision be?). And of course, the cops searched the coal bunker.

Five year sentence for Mandela leaving the country without permisson? Let's make that "life" after the discovery at Liliesleaf.

There are innumerable tours around Johannesburg chasing down sites related to Nelson Mandela. I had a hunch that we should go to Liliesleaf and very, very few tours stopped here. It was so worth it. The story of the history of the ANC safe house told through storyboards and videos involving personal recollections by the residents was gripping. We were almost alone out there on the day we visited which was good for us but honestly concerning if that's a typical day.

Liliesleaf also has an exhibit dedicated to the history behind MK, including the story of Mandela's tour around Africa to secure funding and how MK smuggled arms and ammunition into South Africa. The arms smuggling was conducted in secret compartments of a safari truck set up specifically to do cross-border safaris into South Africa. The safaris were legit and tourists paid to be on the trips, having no idea they were actually riding in a truck smuggling weapons being used by South African revolutionaries. In the films in this part of the property, pretty much all the tourists interviewed were proud to have unknowingly fought against Apartheid.  

The picture below is a terrible photograph but it shows the 4" wide slot on one side of the safari trucks that was used to smuggle arms into South Africa. Cool stuff!!!

All told, we probably devoted two full days to Mandela and Apartheid tourism in our approximately two weeks in country. It was nowhere near enough to understand all the atrocities that the South African government committed against its own (black) people. At the same time, there is a ton to digest in many, many sites, particularly around Johannesburg. This is some heavy stuff and absorbing it all takes time. 

The one regret I have about our Apartheid time is the very little time we spent in the Apartheid Museum itself. I know I already complained about this. Honestly, it was so rushed that we could have skipped it entirely and not lost anything, I feel. But, if that rushed visit was the tradeoff for visiting Liliesleaf, I'll take it. Our time at the Farm there combined with our visit to Soweto and Robben Island likely got us the best overview we could have gotten in a couple of days. We are smarter and wiser for our time chasing down Nelson Mandela. Our perspective is forever altered, as often happens with quests like this.

We did not visit Sun City Resort on this trip. We didn't need to.

Our last morning in South Africa was spent at the top of Table Mountain, the flat-topped mountain that dominates Cape Town's skyline. On the cable car ride down from the top of that plateau, we looked over the water in Cape Town harbor and located Robben Island. That was pretty much the last thing we saw in South Africa before we headed home. This trip was worth it. For Kruger and fossils and penguins and even Apartheid. I'm done blogging about Africa for now. On to the next trip.

The view from Cape Town's Table Mountain. Robben Island is the island in the bay.