Bittersweet return to Robben Island

Time stands still on Robben Island.

- Marlan Padayachee

A sea of blue memorial peace race participants were ferried by dozens of boats to take part in the third annual 10km run and walk hosted by the Robben Island Museum Council.

Seconds become minutes, minutes stretch into hours, and the weight of history settles into the limestone walls that once confined dreamers of a different, democratic South Africa.As I sat in the museum's ferry docking station, about to embark on my third visit, my eyes could not miss the power of words from the island's most famous political prisoner Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela etched on the wall: “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.”

For decades, the island was a towering emblem of punishment-first for enslaved labourers and lepers under colonial rule, and later for the anti-apartheid resisters who dared to defy a brutal system.

Thirty-five years after the prison gates swung open and Apartheid's Alcatraz was reborn as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Robben Island has become one of the country's most compelling destinations for political, historical and reflective tourism. And yet, on this third visit, the island unveiled itself in a way I had not experienced before-more emotional, more contemplative, more politically charged.

This time, memory walked with me.

Returning as an activist-journalist who once chronicled the liberation struggle, I felt a mix of nostalgia, sorrow, pride, and a profound sense of responsibility. Tourists marvel today at what has become Africa's equivalent of the Martin Luther King Centre-but for those of us who reported on this painful past, the island remains sacred ground.