ABSTRACT
Some people are hard to forget. Our guide on Robben Island, the notorious prison for political opponents of the apartheid state in South Africa, was one such person. Modise Pheknonyane spent over five years (1977—82) incarcerated on Robben Island for his protests against the Bantu segregated education system. 1 Modise was one among many in the youth wing of the ANC who demonstrated against the apartheid regime, refusing to speak Afrikaans at school and protesting for better education for black youngsters. 2 Like well over 200,000 opponents of the regime, he was imprisoned for his resistance. Modise speaks with a quiet passion, which is hard to resist: ‘I despised apartheid. I was not a human being in apartheid. I was humiliated during apartheid. I was degraded’. 3 It is not just his words that illuminate his trauma. He used his whole body to communicate and bring the 1970s back to life (figure 5.1).
