Robben Island and the Waterfront

The boat leaves from the waterfront and takes you out across the bay with Table Mountain getting slowly larger behind you, which is the view every prisoner had on the way in and the one most of them describe afterwards. Robben Island is low, flat and windswept, and from it the city looks close enough to be cruel.

The visit has two halves. A coach goes round the island: the lime quarry where prisoners worked in glare that damaged their eyes, the leper graveyard from an earlier use, the church, the houses where the warders lived with their families and sent their children to school. Then the prison itself, walked on foot: the corridor, the exercise yard, the communal cells, and the single cell with a mat and a bucket where Nelson Mandela spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years.

The prison section has long been guided by former political prisoners, and that is what raises the visit above a monument. A man stops in a corridor and tells you what happened in it while he was standing there. Nobody performs and nobody dramatises. It is delivered flatly and it is very hard to forget.

Back at the harbour, the V&A Waterfront is the other side of the same city: a working dock with tugs and seals in it, wrapped in a market hall of craft stalls, restaurants along the quay, an aquarium that is genuinely good with children, and Zeitz MOCAA in a converted grain silo, a museum of contemporary African art cut out of a honeycomb of concrete storage tubes, which is worth going into for the building alone.

Put the island early in your Cape days so the weather has somewhere to move it to, and put Table Mountain and the city bowl either side of it. The order matters more than people think: the island explains District Six, and District Six explains the island. The two fit in one full day, with the Walk to Freedom morning in District Six and Langa and the ferry out in the afternoon.

Good to know

• Book as soon as your dates are set. The ferry is the constraint on the whole visit.
• Weather cancels sailings. Early in the stay means a second chance rather than a missed one.
• The crossing is open water and can be rough. Take something for it if you are prone.
• Wind on the island, always. A jacket, whatever the city is doing.
• Little shade and little shelter out there. Hat, water, sunscreen.
• Leave the afternoon light. It is not a visit you want to follow with something noisy.