Thoughts of home on Mandela’s Robben Island

MANILA, Philippines - Ardor still possessed the old man working as tour guide to the prison facility at Robben Island, now a museum. Despite having to endlessly repeat the story of Nelson Mandela’s – and the tour guide’s own – imprisonment in this high security penal island, his telling was dignified and enthusiastic. These two qualities do not mix well in other places, of course, but the setting supported the tour guide in his duties.

Bleak, heated by the severe southern latitude sun and then scoured by Antarctic winds, Robben Island amplifies both agony and unnatural endurance. It seems that the few trees survive against appalling odds.

Introducing Mandela’s prison cell to visitors was the guide’s narrative climax. Visitors, who all know the story, find they know nothing. Two, three-plus decades of life forced into 3 x 3 meters of space, the confining bars an inch thick, in turn forces the visitors to grasp racist barbarism. The sentence of life imprisonment was white supremacist logic expressed in the same judicial system that validated apartheid.

The cruelties visited on the prisoners on Robben Island cut into the grain of daily life. To begin with, the prisoners were nameless. Said the guide who was as stone-like as the formations of the salt and limestone quarry on which the prison stands: “The guards gave and called us by numbers, because they cannot pronounce our names.”

Xhosa names tend to be kilometric and full of the x’s, z’s, k’s and palate clicks of this African language – hard on the tongue of white South Africans of British and Dutch cultural and political
backgrounds. Hard, too, on minds which automatically associate exotic names with savage threats to civilization.

The Filipino visiting Robben Island inevitably thinks about dominant minorities and dehumanized majorities. 

And while South Africa’s was an exceptionally brutal case of social engineering – an experiment in racial segregation incomparable to any case other than Nazi Germany – subtler manifestations of racism will also grab the mind.

It definitely comes to mind that the Philippines, too, has been a place of privilege for people on the lighter side of the spectrum of skin color. Dark-ish, short-ish Filipinos with flat noses are routinely assigned the letters of the alphabet, “D” and “E” (with the elite and middle class assigned “A” and “B”), ostensibly as abbreviations of class/economic status.

The very same advertising agencies and social surveyors who use this charged alphabet without cringing do so because, strangely enough, the purportedly class-bound categorization seems to be morally neutral. But marketing projects reveal the racist understructure. The vast amount of skin whitening potions unabashedly targeting “B” an “D” if not “E” shows up the cultural rather than overtly political expressions of Filipino racism.

Mestisaje privilege is sustained thus – removing the possibility of political activism against a concept of society imagined to be composed of inherently inferior and inherently superior people.

Robben Island makes clear how Filipinos can vehemently deny their racism because, in contrast to the literal crushing of blackness on the island’s quarries, the Philippines dissimulates, with too many of its leaders regarding poverty as punishment for people “down there,” thought of as inherently lazy in mind and spirit.
And then a real contrast comes to fore. A Nelson Mandela is unlikely to rise among Filipinos under the present circumstances. Filipino heroes are conjured in a Euro-American mould. (And elite circles still have a problem with Andres Bonifacio.) Although there is no need to denigrate the patriotism of these heroes, there is some use in asking, when thinking, for instance, of a phrase like “the Filipino is worth dying for,” who is that “Filipino?” It seems all too abstract.

Mandela remained Xhosa until his death on Dec. 5. An urbane, completely cosmopolitan man, he was nevertheless African above all identities possible for him. It is his insistence that the world acknowledge his blackness that defined his embrace of socialism, hence his critique of capital.
Yet he also redefined his negritude, already fortified by a socialist grasp of social justice, through a political philosophy built on forgiveness.

Nelson Mandela’s passing, a few years after the visit to his Robben Island cell for more than two decades, occasions more than paeans to his greatness.

On that island, and now in the islands Philippine, is room to wonder if anyone in the presently wracked, plural Left, can endeavor to bring race/culture into class analysis – but to do so in a way that Mandela showed to be quite possible indeed – transcending mere ideology from cosmopolitan centers, to arrive at forgiveness as cement for a national community.

Written on Dec. 10, Human Rights Day, this response to a death circles around the bone-chilling winds buffeting the boat on the hour-long trip to the island prison. These winds, to prisoners being transported to Robben Island, must have been the sign of all the cuttings to be endured. Going back the other way, back to Cape Town and freedom, having bested the winds – this would have meant the survival, not only of a human life, but of hope in the resurrections of ever more refined political thought and action.