The history of Robben Island is so dense with incident, tragedy, hope and despair that you can almost touch it. You can almost hear the ghosts and the slamming of prison doors.
The past hangs thick in the air. It swirls in the lepers' cemetery, the cells, the forced-labor lime quarry, the many shipwrecks, the World War II gun emplacements, the elegant Anglican church once off limits to "blacks and coloureds" and the water butts with their "Don't drink" messages. Rainwater was for guards. Everyone else drank brackish water.
The past is particularly alive in the damaged eyes of our guide, a former apartheid-era prison inmate called Speech.