|
|
Article: Playground Robben Island? (South Africa).
- Article from:
- Queen's Quarterly
- Article date:
- September 22, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Queen's Quarterly. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
MOST nations cherish their sacred places: battlefields where the soil is soaked with the blood of unsung heroes, who gave birth to the new imagined community; prisons and slave houses that bear witness to the suffering of untold victims of human cruelty. Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland, Buchenwald and Dachau in Germany, the forgotten unmarked gulags in Siberia or the museum with the remains of Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia stand out as reminders not to let such horrors happen again.
Robben Island is South Africa's equivalent sacred soil. During more than a quarter of a century, the country's anti-apartheid leaders from all ideological factions trod across the ...