In 1964, two years after Nelson Mandela arrived at Robben Island, the prison’s commanding officer ordered Mandela and his fellow political prisoners to work in the island’s lime quarry.
The quarry, which I visited in December on a tour of the island, is, as Mandela wrote in his autobiography, “an enormous white crater cut into a rocky hillside.” Mining the lime required the prisoners to break through it with a pick, and then extract the lime with a shovel. Warders with automatic weapons watched from raised platforms as the men worked.
Though the work could be blinding – the lime reflected the sun’s rays into the prisoners eyes; the prisoners would not receive sunglasses for another three years – Mandela wrote that he preferred being outside in nature and the opportunity to use one’s muscles, as opposed to working in the prison compound.
Work in the quarry aided the prisoners in other ways. The men used a cave that measured about 22 feet by 9 feet as a latrine that doubled as a meeting place. (The cave appears as a rectangular hole on the left side of the wall in the above photo.) The guards did not use the latrine, which meant that Mandela and his colleagues could huddle in it. “It is said that 69% of our constitution was drafted there,” said the guide who led our tour. “It is known as the first democratic parliament of South Africa.”
Initially, the commanding officer told the prisoners they would labor in the quarry for six months and thereafter would be given light tasks. “His timing was considerably off,” wrote Mandela. “We remained at the quarry for the next thirteen years.”
In 1995, Mandela, who died in December, and about 1,300 former political prisoners returned to the island to mark the fifth anniversary of Mandela’s release from prison. There he visited the quarry, where he chipped at a rock that now forms the base of a memorial to the men who labored there. A photo from the reunion shows Mandela wearing a blue shirt, his hair mostly white like the excavation that surrounds him. Sunglasses shield his eyes.