Ex-political prisoner a messenger of reconciliation

Visitors of the now defunct maximum security prison on Robben Island near Cape Town had a little birthday girl to thank for a rare opportunity given by their tour guide Modise Phekonyane to enter the cell where South Africa's former president Nelson Mandela spent most of his 27-year jail term.

"The gift is a birthday present for my little angel," said Phekonyane, while lifting the cute white girl onto his firm arm. He then asked everybody to sing happy birthday for his angel.

Phekonyane ushered the group around the prison's compound and a tour of the past, a period when people who rose to resist discriminatory policies and injustice were isolated and punished, many of them without trial.

The guide cracked some jokes to catch the visitors' attention while they took a close look at every corner of the once monstrous prison, a parallel to Alcatraz for political prisoners who stood up to the apartheid government in South Africa.

"Robben Island was a place of banishment and a place designed to brutalize prisoners, render us so painfully powerless and helpless that we would not be able to stand up against the state ever again. It was also to serve as a living example and deterrence to those who might dare to fight the system of apartheid," recalled Phekonyane.

In a bid to force prisoners to give up their struggle, the prison guards left the freedom fighters without food for days or put them in solitary confinement, the cells prisoners would like most to avoid.

Phekonyane was sent to the prison in 1977 when he was a 17- year-old student, too young to undergo the physical and mental torment.

However, the prison later turned into a ground for him and other prisoners to learn politics.

"I used Robben Island as a place of learning and growth. I refused to be confined to even ideological limits, but chose to broaden my political knowledge by opening myself up for more teaching by these men," he said, referring to his mentors he used to talk to.

There were no teachings of violence or hatred shared among the prisoners, which probably was the reason why no jailbreak attempts were heard of, said Phekonyane.

Despite the torture and beatings he had to withstand during five years of his incarceration, Phekonyane, like hundreds of other former inmates, has opted not to give way to vengeance following the fall of apartheid in 1994.

"I feel no anger and have no room for racial bitterness in my life. I am freer than being freed from prison itself. I love life and love people. I cannot love a life without loving people and I cannot love either of them by halves, but I love them both without pretense. Without both, life itself has no meaning," he said.

Those who were imprisoned here wrote their testimonies in their cells as a legacy for visitors. They recounted the violence and humiliation they suffered, but said they left the prison with no hard feelings.

That's why Phekonyane felt called to work at the prison after it was closed and turned into a museum in 1997, soon after he obtained his master's degree in political science.

He is working with four of his former prison guards in the museum, one of the prominent tourist destinations in South Africa's Western Province.

Phekonyane has embarked on a new life as a history teller for museum visitors wherever they come from about the will to learn from, forgive and reconcile with the past, as he puts it in one of his poems titled Backward Never:

Let's make use of time

While we can really can

There is only one way for time

To go forward only

Backward never

To uphold the future

Time is good and tough

Time makes friends and enemies

It is torturous on memories

It makes the heart ponder

Time for reconciliation the best way

Maybe to deal with time itself