I’ve taken a longer break than anticipated, mainly due to the fact that I was lazy, and was considering instituting a fixed routine of blogging every Tuesday evening. Tuesday’s aren’t especially good days, however, so I am still undecided.
Tuesdays might be better in general than any day on which you choose to take the ferry to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and many other luminaries of the revolution were incarcerated. IOL reports today that, as part of the “New Visitor Experience” programme, visitors would be shackled during the trip, to give them a better idea of what the prisoners felt like on the way over.
Wait… Just let me collect my wits…
Nope. No luck. Every time I read this, I expect that on some level I will see that it is not the most astoundingly bad idea I’ve heard this year. Unfortunately, it is, on a great many levels.
Firstly, would you want to set out on the ocean off The Cape of Storms in handcuffs? Handcuffed people have died in swimming pools, let alone the Atlantic Ocean!
Ms Shalo Mbatha, spokesperson for the Robben Island Museum, assures us that visitors will not be shackled directly to the boat, and that it will be done safely and only by choice. What, specifically, would the visitors be shackled to? A lifeboat? A 16 ton weight on the deck of the boat? How could it possibly be safe to set out to sea in handcuffs?
The boats themselves don’t have a great record either. In January, trips were cancelled because the boat had broken down. In the same week, two senior officials were suspended for “financial irregularities”. At the launch of the new, 26 Million Rand boat, 1 year late, on 31 January of this year, it was found to leak and had to be removed from the water for repairs. Granted, this is not an unusual occurrence for new vessels, but it still doesn’t inspire me to hog tie myself before going aboard a boat run by an organisation that ran at a loss of R25 Million during the 2006/2007 financial year!
On a more human level, however, we should be asking ourselves, as South Africans, what this New Visitor Experience could possibly lend to our nation. Are we discovering our history, or taking part in some bizarre passion play in our cargo-cult holocaust? Does a first-person re-enactment of the plight of Nelson Mandela amplify his undeniable greatness as a person, or does it just amplify in me a festering resentment of his oppressors and (if I happened to be black) of white people? Is this helping to build a nation, or are we symbolically chaining ourselves to the inequities of the past when we chain ourselves to the Robben Island ferry?
I feel a great solidarity with the victims of apartheid. In a recent reply to a comment, I lamented the use of the K-word on my fellow South Africans, because of the immediate and unjustified emotional pain that it inflicts. If you, however, choose to inflict the painful memory of apartheid on yourself unnecessarily, sympathy becomes far more difficult to motivate. It is far easier to sell people tickets that enable them to arrive on Robben Island in shackles that it is to sell them tickets that enable them to walk out of the Victor Verster Prison and embark on a path of reconciliation so profound and sincere that it formed the foundation of our modern, reborn nation.
