Thousands of penguins on the rocky shores of Robben Island let the visitor for a moment forget that the island is a symbol of all the horrors of apartheid and as renowned as Alcatraz in the bay of San Francisco.
Tourists can take a ferry from Cape Town to Robben Island, the prison where Nelson Mandela and the elite of the anti-apartheid struggle were incarcerated.
Mandela, leader of the African National Congress (ANC), spent a total of 18 of his 27 years in prison on the island, in a cell just wide enough for a mat on the cold cement floor. Cell number five is no different than all the other cells.
The guided tour on Robben Island takes about two-and-a-half hours and also makes a stop at the lime pit where Mandela and his comrades were forced to cut stone, harming their eyesight in the bright sunlight and the fine dust.
The horror of what man does unto nan leaves the visitor speechless but Robben Island at the same time does not have the aura of a somber God-forsaken place like similar memorial sites. It is not just because of the penguins that seem to have taken over control of the island.
The history of Robben Island had a happy end. The apartheid regime was swept aside and the former prisoners triumphed over their persecutors. Some of the former detainees work as tourist guides on the island and others moved on to high positions in
government.
Nelson Mandela not only served as the first president of a democratic South Africa but is also respected as a voice of authority, transcending race and religion, comparable perhaps only to Mahatma Gandhi.
If you want to find out where this biography began, it is necessary to take a drive out of Cape Town and the common tourist sites along the Garden Route.
It takes a three-day car trip from Cape Town past East London in the Eastern Cape province to the impressive, rolling hilly landscape of the Transkei -- the birthplace of Nelson Mandela.
The N2 route in the Transkei is regarded by locals as a no-go dangerous area. The Transkei was an "independent homeland" between 1976 and 1994 -- an apartheid bantustan and even today still almost exclusively inhabited by members of the Xhosa people.
Our landlady in Cape Town warned us never to stop along the road, not even for an accident. Some travel
brochures have the same advice. There are also other visible dangers like cows and goats or pedestrians strolling on the road. The worst potholes have been filled by roadworkers but roads in the Transkei are both a traffic artery and living space.
Our landlady had warned us not to pick up any hitchhikers -- "not even women because these are sometimes men dressed up like women."
Then we come across a motorist stranded next to an ancient Toyota and waving an empty fuel canister. He looks trustworthy and we throw all caution to the wind, taking him along to the next petrol station. The man is very happy. "Nobody wants to stop. Everybody is suspicious in South Africa," he says.
A short distance from Umtata, the capital of Transkei, to the left of the N2 is the village of Qunu with the signboard Nelson Mandela Museum. With its collection of colourful houses and round huts it is no different from the many other villages in the grassland area to the left and right of the road.
Mandela came to Qunu as a two-year-old from the village of Mvezo, some 30km away, after the white authorities withdrew the chieftainship from his father because of obstinancy.
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