“I want to live without fear. You have always been afraid of us. And fear has made you an unjust and brutal people.” —Nelson Mandela, Robben Island, Off Cape Town,

March 20, 2025 – I did not know how to put into words my second day in Cape Town after we boarded an excursion craft and set off across Table Bay for Robben Island. This was the prison where South Africa’s apartheid government held Nelson Mandela and fellow patriots for nearly two decades.

Mike and Denise Vouri with Christo Brand, the former prison warder (guard) on Robben Island, with Cape Town’s Table Bay in the background. Brother and sister spent the day with Brand touring the prison where Nelson Mandela was held for 18 years.

You can read about and watch inhuman behavior everyday now, whether you’re indulging in the latest action film or reading or watching the evening news. Among some, inequity and cruelty have become behavior du jours. I was feeling so hopeless at one point that for a few weeks I turned away and covered my ears. But then my sister and I toured the stockade built to hold political prisoners in 1964, guided by Christo Brand, a former warder (guard) who, though he is an Afrikaner, is greeted warmly by everyone he meets, black or white. He is the living embodiment of Mandela’s quest for truth, forgiveness, and reconciliation…and proof positive that we can change and make the world a better place.

As per arrangements made by my friend, Alan Grodin, a lawyer who was involved in making the 2013 film, “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom,” we met Christo on the steps of the Nelson Mandela Gateway at Cape Town’s Victoria & Alfred Dock. I had neglected to Google a photograph of him (which are numerous), so I had no idea who to look for at first. The clincher was that he had an official South African guide badge pinned to a blue vest. (Later I noticed the URL for his website was embroidered on the reverse.)

I skipped up the steps and inquired, “Christo?” I don’t know who he was expecting, but he seemed surprised. He pulled a scrap of paper from his pants pocket and looked me over.

“Denise?”

(Once Alan had put us in touch, my sister had worked out the details with him. Perhaps he thought the name was a variation of Dennis or Denys?)

I pointed out my sister standing by the clocktower, and we were on our way. Christo guided us through security while exchanging friendly banter with the guards whom he meets on a regular basis. He then led us into an upstairs waiting room apart from the burgeoning crowd, which was composed of school groups and tourists. Tours are scheduled to depart the dock at 9 and 11 a.m. and 1 and 3 p.m. spring, summer and fall. The 3 p.m. excursion is lopped off during the winter months when darkness closes in and Table Bay is unfriendly to harbor craft such as our ferry, the 106-foot catamaran Krotoa. The vessel seats 285 and is capable of speeds up to 26 knots, but to preserve fuel, she is kept at a sedate 15 knots and wallows in the swells during the half-hour crossing.

This is because the bay is located on the western side of the Cape peninsula with Cape Town occupying a scallop below Table Mountain, which means anchoring is spotty, particularly when the Cape is agitated and the swells are doing their worst. Robben Island lies like a punctuation mark four miles off the rip-rap seawall, and is where in 1488 the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias and his crew first staggered ashore on shaky pins. That’s how far Europeans reach back on this part of the globe. Columbus did not land on the island of San Salvador in the Caribbean until four years later. When the Dutch arrived on the Cape for good in 1652, the business of suppressing, clearing and exploiting the local population began in earnest, as it did with Columbus and the Europeans that followed throughout the globe.

By the 18th century, someone decided that a five-square-mile desert island (named for the seals found there), surrounded by an antarctic current (ideal for the African penguin) was the perfect spot to imprison recalcitrant Blacks, lepers and other undesirables, in addition to common criminals. And so the island served, off and on, in varied permutations until 1996. It has since come to symbolize the struggle for freedom and a warning of the consequences of fear and intolerance.

Christo said he first landed on Robben Island in 1978 at age 19 after growing up on a farm in the Western Cape where his father was a tenant. The family could barely make ends meet, he said, but his interaction with Black Africans in his early youth was positive and unfettered by the virulent racism ongoing in the urban areas. However, once they moved to a Cape Town suburb and he melded with the Afrikaner community, Christo’s daily contact with Blacks became more limited and conventional. Ironically, it was his induction into the Prison Service that triggered his social consciousness.

He had been told the political prisoners on B Block, which were to be in his charge, were terrorists bent on overthrowing the government, though he admits to scant knowledge of their movement. Moreover, he had never heard of Nelson Mandela, also known as Madeba, his clan name. But that was soon to change and it was an eye opener, he said. We wound our way down the stairs, along the dock and stepped into the forward cabin of an awaiting catamaran ferry used by staff and visitors to the prison, which was designated a museum and World Heritage site in 1996.

Christo Brand interrupted his private tour a couple of times with Denise and Mike to offer extemporaneous remarks to other groups, including this one in the yard bordering B Block, where Nelson Mandela was held.

He barely broke his presentation throughout, the words coming so fast I could barely understand his Afrikaner accent. However, as an interpreter I know how critical it is to sustain your train of thought. I can deliver most of my lectures and interpretive programs rote and without notes…unless sabotaged by a question or observation. Christo was almost immediately interrupted after we found our seats. Another guide, a young white woman with a clutch of Americans from Michigan, spotted him and pronounced to her group:

“Today is our lucky day! Here is Christo Brand, Mandela’s warder!”

Their lucky day. Ours was an R4,500 ($250) fee for the private tour, which is how Christo supplements his income in a nation with a spare old-age pension. Who could blame her? It was an opportunity she could not pass up. Her group gathered in the seats around us while a stream of passengers continued to board, among them about 20 Robben Island staff who occupied the center seats between the aisles. A bright young woman on the tour asked such good questions I was almost thankful for the incursion. It may have disrupted his program, but it also slowed him down and I could finally process what he was saying.

South African women participate in a peaceful demonstration against the “dompass,” that required the nation’s Blacks to account for their location at all times.

When asked about the apartheid regime, which took power in South Africa in 1948 and marginalized the majority of the country’s citizens, Christo explained that one of the more toxic elements of the policy was the “dompass,” a passbook that Black citizens had to carry at all times. This enabled the minority white population to control the number of Blacks in “white areas” while ensuring that service workers could come and go, as long as they were off the streets after dark. To be caught in a white area or trying to leave the country without a dompass was a capital offense.

By the end of the 1950s, Mandela and his followers in the African National Congress (ANC) ritually destroyed their passes in a mass demonstration and agitated peacefully to end apartheid. The government responded violently, culminating in the March 1960 Sharpville Massacre when armed police crushed a peaceful demonstration resulting in 91 killed and 238 wounded. Responding in kind, the ANC formed Umkhonto we Sizwe (“The Spear of the Nation”), a military arm that started blowing up public facilities identified with apartheid, though never with the intention of hurting anyone. For these acts, security forces tracked down and arrested Mandela and 14 others at their hideout in Rivonia, a suburb of Johannesburg. Following a sensational 1963-64 trial in Pretoria, the court sentenced the “Rivonians” (as they became known) to life imprisonment, the bulk of it on Robben Island.

Mandela would disappear from public view for more than 27 years.

When the ferry rounded the rip-rap breakwater and docked at the island, the museum staff filed off first, followed by Christo with us and the other charges hurrying along in tow to a staging area where a fleet of full-sized blue buses awaited. We took the front seats, which was ideal for me because the PA system was down and our island guide—a middle-aged Black woman in a blue uniform—had to shout and glared menacingly at talkers and kibitzers. She offered another brief history of the prison and its political inmates, interspersed by asides and pointing out that there was a “piece of living history” aboard the bus, namely Christo, who stood, acknowledged applause and said a few words.

The bus followed a prescribed route around the island, stopping at key points such as the first and second prison complexes and the Church of the Good Shepherd, built in 1895 by the lepers living on the island, at first voluntarily, since 1845. They were confined there by law in 1892 and by the time the lazaretto closed in 1931, more than 1,000 were dead and buried in a cemetery next to the church. We then stopped outside a small house surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. This is where Robert Sobukwe, the only inmate officially declared a political prisoner, was held in solitary confinement for more than six years.

This view of Cape Town beneath Table Mountain from Robben Island’s north shore was a torment to prisoners on seaweed gathering detail.

Same view from the 18th century.

We disembarked at last at a visitor center and refreshment station (which Christo helped develop) that gives onto the bay with a view of Table Mountain above Cape Town, a sight that tormented the prisoners on seaweed gathering detail. This is also where the South African (or Cape) penguins of Robben Island hang out. Denise and I had seen “Jackass” penguins (they bray in the same fashion) the day before at Boulder’s Beach near Simon’s Town on the Cape peninsula, where a natural history museum and boardwalk allows controlled viewing of the two-foot-tall flightless birds declared an endangered species. We spent about 15 minutes there, long enough for Christo to consent to posing for photographs with others on our bus before we reembarked for the prison cantonment and B Block, where Nelson Mandela’s former cell is the main attraction of the tour.

The tour route includes the shower rooms, medical center, recreation hall and the yards where the prisoners gardened and played soccer when the conditions of their confinement eased. One of the goal net frames still stands on the hard-packed sand, bordered by cracked concrete walkways with water-collection barrels at every corner. Rainwater was a relief from the brackish well water, though Christo said Mandela disciplined himself to drink from the taps.

Christo Brand explains to Denise how the Robben Island prisoners arranged this sleeping mat in their cells.

The cell blocks proper are bleak and spare, as you would expect. Fashioned of concrete, the interiors are painted institutional green with long hallways and glossed floors running the length of the building. The 8- X 7-foot cells on either side were unheated even in the dead of winter—“like refrigerators,” Christo said—the only comforts being a thin sleeping mat with a threadbare blanket and a toilet bucket. To underscore the stark conditions, Christo led us into a group cell with a sleeping mat and blanket in the middle of the floor. Thinking it was a rug; I stood on it to relieve the stress of standing on concrete. That is exactly what he wanted me to do.

“Do you always stand on your host’s bed when you visit his home?” he asked.

In the early days, the warders were little better than goons, as is graphically recounted by Mandela in his book, “Mandela: The Long Walk to Freedom,” which he wrote while on the island. When the warders found the manuscript buried in his garden, Mandela and four other inmates lost study privileges for four years. A rewrite eventually found its way out but was not published until after his release. As mentioned earlier, a two-and-a- half-hour film was adapted from the book in 2013, though it is not enough time to tell the full story, Christo said, as he walked us through the wards.

Christo Brand and Nelson Mandela forged a unique friendship between prisoner and warder (guard) than endured through Mandela’s death in 2013.

“That would take four films,” he said.

By the time Christo arrived, Mandela was 60 years old and had achieved a state of grace—an acceptance of his condition, without surrendering hope of eventual release— that had allowed him to survive the indignities of incarceration. The young guard’s orientation about the nature of his charges, known to the warders as the “B Block prisoners,” dissipated not long after meeting them. The Rivonians did not seem like the hardened, hate-filled revolutionaries he expected.

“(Mandela) was a quiet, dignified man with an imposing bearing, tall, slim and fit from his daily exercise regimen and immaculate in his prison uniform,” Christo wrote in his memoir, “Doing Life with Mandela: My Prisoner, My Friend,” (Blue Ear Books, Seattle, Second Edition, 2022).

Although warders could not converse with prisoners, they came to know one another during their passages, one behind the other, around the prison. Mandela questioned Christo about his family and upbringing. They had a lot in common, he said, because they had both grown up on farms in the veld. A bond developed between them, and when no one was looking Christo granted Mandela and the other B Block men small favors. However, Mandela urged the warder and fellow prisoners alike to keep the risks at minimum. If Christo lost his job, life would be harder for them all.

The lime quarry where the Robben Island prisoners were forced to break rocks for use on the island roads. After Robben Island was closed, Nelson Mandela and every political prisoner ever held in South Africa added a rock to the pile. An illustration or the pile now appears on the reverse of R100 note.

Mandela’s days of breaking rocks in the toxic limestone quarry in the center of the island (as he had done for 13 years, the lime nearly blinding him) were over by then. He had campaigned for it to end for those over 60, just as he had agitated with the prison board for long pants, gardening privileges and other modest requests, the granting of each considered a small victory. By then, most of the aging Rivonians worked on the seashore, now the site of today’s visitor center, gathering seaweed as the penguins came and went, while Mandela mended clothing.

Although prison life was still hard, the food horrific and isolation from friends and loved ones unbearable, Mandela and his colleagues found relief and distraction by enrolling in correspondence courses and learning from one another. Christo had been placed in charge of prisoner education by then, serving as a liaison to academic institutions. As always, he took special interest in Mandela, tutoring him on the sly in an Afrikaans language course that extended to correcting his work before submission.

“He was a middling student of the language, but he tried very hard and passed the course,” Christo said, clearly proud that Mandela “passed matric,” as it is termed in South Africa.

B Block where Nelson Mandela’s and his fellow political prisoners were located. The cells were 8 X 7 feet and contained a sleeping mat, a toilet bucket and little table. These were Nelson Mandela’s quarters for 18 years.

Eventually we made it to cell #913 that held Prisoner #46664, a number synonymous today for Nelson Mandela. But not before Christo met a former prisoner-turned guide orienting a large group in the courtyard, who asked Christo to say a few words.

Unlike the film “Invictus,” where the rugby captain played by Matt Damon is permitted to walk inside and extend his arms to nearly touch both walls, we could only peer through the bars, which is to ensure busloads of visitors keep moving. There is not much to see: A sleeping mat with a blanket rolled up against the wall, a small green table and a toilet bucket. But there is much to feel. How did the man sustain his spirit in this rectangular box for 18 years? It was an exceptional spirit, as the world would come to learn.

We left the cell blocks and headed for the administration building, where the prisoners went through court proceedings, consulted with their lawyers and received visitors. Across the hall from a nondescript courtroom was the prisoner side of the visitation booths. Christo arranged for my sister to sit on one side, and me on the other, of a small, rectangular window. To the right of each window is a telephone intercom. In the digital photo taken by Christo, I am barely discernible through the dim light and the murky glass. This was the only contact allowed between the prisoner and loved ones during a visit, limited to a half-hour every six months (later shortened to three). A warder was always present and could end the visit if politics entered the conversation.

The hallway that fronted the booths gives onto a waiting room, where visitors sat on long plank benches. It was here that Christo took part in one of the most dramatic and risky incidents of his Robben Island duty and cemented for life his friendship with Mandela.

It was the day Mandela’s wife, Winnie, smuggled their four-month-old grandchild onto the island in violation of the rule that cruelly denied prisoners contact with children. The baby was handed to another visitor after Christo, always under surveillance, denied the Mandelas’ request to give Mandela a peek of the infant. Had he complied, he would have lost his job, and Mandela a key ally among the warders, Christo explained. But that was not the end of the story.

After the official visit, Winnie pleaded for five more minutes so that she and Mandela could plan a Christmas visit. It was then that Christo had an idea. He consented to the extension and then locked Winnie into the visitation booth. To Winnie this was nothing new, as she was then under a ban that dictated she could only be in contact with one person at a time for five years. But the result was different this time. Christo asked if he could hold the baby, and then he passed through to Mandela’s side of the booth. Mandela came to the doorway, took the child in his arms and burst into tears. In his book, Christo explained this blatant violation of the rules.

“I found myself full of stress and sympathy on (Mandela’s) behalf. This family of his was in chaos all over the place and he could do nothing.

No one, not even Winnie, who complained about Christo’s “cruelty” to the press awaiting on the mainland, knew about this act of humanity. Both men kept the secret until Mandela’s release in 1990.

In 1982, Mandela and Christo were transferred (under profoundly different circumstances) to the Pollsmoor maximum-security prison in Tokai, a suburb of Cape Town. Their friendship deepened until 1988 when Mandela was hospitalized with tuberculosis. Then he was moved again to more civilized, though no less restrictive, accommodations outside of the greater Cape Town district.

But he and Christo stayed in touch throughout, the warder doing him favors whenever he could. After Mandela became president in 1994, he arranged a job for Christo through a mutual friend, Rivonian Ahmed Kathrada, as a planning manager for the South African Parliament’s Constitutional Assembly. When Christo grew bored with the work, Mandela next endorsed him for a position on the board of the Robben Island Museum alongside another former B Block prisoner, Vusumzi Mcongo, who became a friend and ally on the board.

Not all has been sweetness and light since majority rule, Christo acknowledged. South Africa remains the most economically unequal nation in the world, with the top 20 percent of the population owning 70 percent of the wealth, owing to decades of racial repression by the apartheid governments. Mandela believed that the way to overcome this economic apartheid was through education.

“Education is the great engine of personal development,” Mandela wrote. “It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farmworkers can become the president of a great nation.”

“All this is true,” Christo said. “He always wanted to know how my sons were doing in school and how he could help. Education was especially important to him… for all South Africans.”

The afternoon was waning as the three of us made our way down to the docks on foot, stopping for a photo of Denise and Christo under the entryway to the prison. The sign above the passage reads, “WELCOME, ROBBENEILAND, WE SERVE WITH PRIDE, ONS DIEN MET TROTS.” While waiting outside a café and gift shop for our return trip to Cape Town, Christo pulled from his pack two copies of his book and signed them for us. Several others from the buses approached and produced copies from their packs in hopes of a signature. He signed them all, asking each for a name to inscribe.

The wind freshened as we headed back on Krotoa, the vessel pitching and rolling as we crossed the bay. Christo must have read my mind, as he turned and spoke. “It’s not so bad. In 2017 a ferry sank.” There was a pregnant pause as he awaited my reaction. “But don’t worry, no one drowned,” he said. “They got everyone off.” We laughed, Christo heartily, me with less conviction. I Googled it later, and sure enough….

As we disembarked one of the crew approached, grabbed Christo’s hand, looked me in the eye, and proclaimed, “This man is my hero, my mentor.” We parted at the dock with handshakes and wishes of good fortune. Later that night as I scribbled my daily journal entry, I drew a blank after a couple of pages. What could I say that has not already been said about Christo, who found friendship with a man who was demonized by fellow whites? And that man, Nelson Mandela, had been willing to forgive after all the unspeakable things done to him.

I returned home to a country that is experiencing political toxicity teetering daily on the brink of constitutional crisis spurred by vengeance. Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail and we can return to a semblance of normalcy…or something near to it. Bearing this in mind, I conclude this story with words from those who lived it beneath the Southern Cross.

“For all those years going back to my first meeting with the Rivonians, I had been thinking that these people didn’t belong in there, in those terrible places,” Christo writes. “The punishment the government had given them was wrong. They were old, polite, friendly, and disciplined men. They were high-minded idealists who believed with all their hearts that their suffering was worthwhile.”

And from the prisoner perspective, this from the “Baobab Way” website:

Long after majority rule, Walter Sisulu and his wife Albertina met Christo at a reception. Sisulu was so pleased to see Christo that he greeted him with a hug, which infuriated Albertina.

“How can you do that?’ she scolded. ‘He is the enemy! He was your warder! “

Walter replied ‘You are wrong. He’s our man. He has always been our man.”

And, finally, from Nelson Mandela himself:

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

To learn more:

Christo Brand & Vusumzi Mcongo

https://thebaobabway.com/nelson-mandela-prisoner-friend/

https://www.theforgivenessproject.com/stories-library/christo-brand-vusumzi-mcongo/

https://thebaobabway.com/nelson-mandela-prisoner-friend/

https://nctr.cahttps://christobrand.co.za