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Posted: November 16
This Sunday was the second day of the Signis meeting. We delegates met for a formal role call on Saturday evening, followed by an opening dinner. This morning the archbishop of Johannesburg talked about South Africa and then all of us made a pilgrimage to Robben Island, about a one-hour boat ride off the coast of Capetown. Over the centuries the island served a number of purposes, beginning as a post to resupply sailing ships bound around the Cape of Good Hope. Later it housed lepers and psychologically troubled people, but it became famous, or better, notorious, after World War II when it became a prison. At first regular convicts were housed there, but after the initial movement against apartheid the island became the place where political prisoners were removed from society, hidden away and tortured for information. The most famous inmate, of course, was Nelson Mandela, who served 18 of his 27 years imprisonment on the bleak sand of the island.
I found the trip fascinating, not the least because I am working on a photographic essay about the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in the United States. For three years I regularly visited that symbolic space and photographed both the monuments themselves and the events that took place in the sacred space they delineate. It was clear today from the comments of our guides that South Africa is very intent in doing the same thing with this former prison island. We were explicitly told that the prison is not merely a historical preserve but a monument to the will to survive that led to the formation of a new, racially-mixed country. Our guide to the actual complex where the political leaders like Mandela were held is himself a former prisoner, who was arrested for his activities as a student leader and incarcerated on the island for five painful years during which he was tortured repeatedly. All of the cells are bare today, except for the one where Mandela endured his long years of detention and maintained his iron determination to achieve freedom for his people. You see a simple sleeping pad on the concrete floor (which would not have given much protection from the damp cold of the southern winter storms raging across the island.) He had a stool to sit on, a pot to use for a toilet, and some blankets carefully rolled up in the prescribed manner. Of the force applied to attempt to break his spirit, you can only guess from hearing the personal account of your guide. It is not hard to imagine the incredible violence he suffered, and to be amazed by the theme of reconciliation with which he began his presidency of the new nation.
It is hard to avoid the feel of tourism since you begin the trip on the very upscale dockside area that feels more like San Diego or the renovated malls of Boston and Baltimore. The grinding poverty of the townships is far, far removed from the tourist haven where you board the ferry; and the clean air and sea spray of the boat ride don’t really prepare you for the intense didacticism of the guides who are eager to make their points. I found myself thinking that understatement would probably be more effective, yet I could not deny our guide’s right to tell his own story as he saw it and to connect his suffering with the larger project of crafting a new nation. I thought about what he suffered and then of the poverty around Capetown, not far at all from where we were meeting for Signis. The long-range struggle is complex and difficult, yet much of Africa does look to South Africa for leadership as the most developed country in the region. Signis is a world-wide organization, but you cannot escape the local reality, be it Robben Island or the townships where poor people don’t seem to be much better off. What can the field of communication do to promote the reconciliation that is celebrated by the monument of the former prison; how can we help create a more just world? At days end, I find much to ponder.
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