Race & Reconciliation: Christie Nguyen

Christie Nguyen is a senior studying Industrial and Systems Engineering. She and other students and faculty from Virginia Tech are currently in South Africa on a trip entitled "Race and Reconciliation: An Immersive Case Study of South Africa and Apartheid."

The purpose of the trip is to participate in a culturally immersive case study in South Africa and to become acquainted with its history and potential, including challenges associated with racial injustice, economic development, governance, and education.

Read on to hear about Christie's third day in South Africa!

Day 3 in Cape Town, South Africa:

5:20 am: I snoozed the alarm on my phone.

I thought, third day’s the charm.  I have to get myself out of bed to see the sunrise.

5:30 am: I walked upstairs to the patio area and saw that Monica had the same idea when I found her awake as well sitting at table.  We sat and watched the gorgeous sunrise unfold over the African mountain scape.

Wow, I still could not believe that we’re really here and get to witness these amazing views.

7:00am: Breakfast

8:00 am: The group piled into the tour bus and headed towards the harbor.

We waited in line at the docks as our tour guide, Bruce, arranged our tickets to head to the infamous Robben Island.  After going through a security check and snapping a photo before hopping onto the boat, off we went.

A majority of our group opted to sit on the roof of the boat to soak in the morning sun and sea breeze. This turned out to be a great idea because as the boat traveled farther away from the mainland it gave way to a magnificent view of Table Mountain and the city of Cape Town.

However, I couldn’t help but think to myself the purpose of our excursion today and where we were headed.  I imagined what it would have been like to journey to prison and move further from everything that you loved with each crashing wave.

When we reached the shore, the first leg of the tour was a narrated bus ride around the island. The second half was a walking tour guided by a former prisoner at the maximum security prison.

Highlights and things that struck a chord in me:

• We began the bus tour at the visitor center. Our guide explained that prisoners could only receive visitors if they were granted the privilege and that they would only be able to come once every six months for a half an hour visit. However, they were not allowed to touch their loved ones or speak in their mother tongues. They must speak Afrikaans or English. Due to the education disparity and depth of different African languages, our guide said that these visits often involved sitting in silence. Children could also not visit until they reached the age of sixteen.
• The view of the mainland was stunning because the entire view of the Table Mountain was in the distance with its billowing “table cloth” atop. I imagined how torturous this must have been to gaze off and dream of being just a few miles closer to freedom.
• I learned that prisoners were given study time as a privilege. Some prisoners have said that they learned more about political education in their time at Robben Island than from the time that they were imprisoned.
• As we walked around the different sections of the prison there were accounts of the prisoners’ experiences in their former cells. In one cell there was the following quote:
  “The guy who comes to hit me with a donkey piel or unleashes a dog on me, I can deal with. But when a guy comes to you and exercises his power over you by giving you a letter with a big window cut into it, it was the cruelest form of punishment. We tried very hard to fight it.”
  Letters to the prisoners were tactfully censored. It made me think about the power words and the emotions we evoke from them. The pain of not being able to read phrases, “I love you” “have hope” “stay strong” or not get all the pieces of a story seemed unfathomable.
• As we were standing in the courtyard just outside of Nelson Mandela’s prison cell, our guide mentioned that notes were delivered over the walls in holes punched into tennis balls. He also stood beside an image of political propaganda in order to show that prisoners were “treated fairly.” He explained that prisoners depicted with pants and shoes were classified as Coloured and those barefoot with shorts were labeled Black Africans.
  • This goes to show the lengths that the captors went to in order to continue to discriminate the prisoners of Robben Island. They also had to carry ID cards assigned to them upon arrival and even had a different diet assigned to them due to their heritage and labels.

Toward the end of the walking tour I asked our guide what it meant to him to give these tours and how did it make him feel. Did you ever imagine yourself coming back here?

He responded by saying, “somebody has to give them.” When he left the island he told his friends that he would never go back again. Before working as a guide he had come back to visit four or five times. He said that he would often blackout or have flashbacks and need to call for help, but that it has been the best therapy to talk about and share his experience with visitors to island.

I greatly admire this man’s bravery and willingness to share a piece of history with us.

I just wished I could have remembered to ask him for his name.

11:51am: Headed to the dock to return to the mainland. As we drifted away from the island I could see hordes of people piling into buses and arriving to Robben Island to go through the same tour we just had. Our visit lasted only a few hours, a paling comparison to the 18 years Nelson Mandela and the other prisoners of the island.

Isn’t it hard to think about how grand a sacrifice time is?

It left me wanting more time on the Island to reflect but grateful for the experience and history shared by the tour.

The rest of the day involved meals and a visit from Frank’s colleague, Ian, whose two hours spent with us gave enormous insight to the value of education in South Africa. His lecture-style discussion leaves me with more questions and pages of scrawled notes that I feel could not be done justice in this short blog post.