Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [106]
Our main courses—bobotie and piri piri chicken livers—redeem the starters but don’t appear for almost an hour due to an electrical blackout. The piri piri seasoning—the name is a pan-African term for chiles, the dominant ingredient—works great on the livers, and the curried lamb and vegetables shine in the bobotie, a widely popular local dish from the Malay Muslim tradition that resembles a shepherd’s pie. Unfortunately, the waitress delivers the food only ten minutes before the scheduled boat departure, requiring us to scarf down tastes hastily, throw money on the table, and bolt out the door.
The Robben Island Museum depresses and exhilarates in the same moment, illustrating both institutional barbarism and the courage of prisoners who endured the malice and eventually triumphed. When the boat lands, the staff ushers the passengers onto waiting school buses for a circuit of the island. On our bus, a charismatic young black man greets us with an impassioned speech about freedom, emphasizing that the past is past and that South Africans of all colors must now work together. The driver and tour guide show us various areas, including one of the three limestone quarries used for forced hard labor and the building where prisoners were allowed to see family without any physical contact for thirty minutes every six months.
The bus stops later at the cell blocks that housed prisoners, and a former inmate takes us inside. He starts by telling us how he got sentenced here. “I was an activist in the African National Congress, like Nelson Mandela, but I was stationed outside the country doing intelligence work to help undermine the Apartheid government. I came back home with some associates on a sabotage job, and we were arrested. They held and tortured us for six months without bringing charges until one of the group cracked under the pressure and testified against the rest of us. I was sent to Robben Island for twenty-five years, and served six and a half years before the Apartheid regime collapsed.”
“What happened to the guy who betrayed you?” one of the visitors asks.
“He got off more lightly, but I don’t blame him for anything. Torture wears a man down. We must look ahead, not back.”
The guide leads us through the cell blocks, explaining that even here the authorities segregated people racially, keeping blacks, coloreds, and Indians in separate sections; white political prisoners stayed in mainland jails. He and Mandela occupied the same building, with him in cell number 30 and the future president in number 4. Everyone got the same furnishings, still in place: a bench, a rudimentary cabinet, a thin blanket, and a miserably slight, small mattress on a basic bed frame.
On the boat going back to the harbor, when the sun is dropping toward the horizon, Cheryl says, “I’m too drained emotionally now to care about the sunset.”
Bill agrees. “But I’m awed as well by what we’re seeing. This is a country in birth throes. It’s creating a new identity for itself right in front of our eyes, starting from scratch in many ways. Utterly amazing.”
The sign above the tasting-room door at the Kanonkop winery reads: “Pinotage is the juice extracted from women’s tongues and lion’s hearts. After having a sufficient quantity one can talk forever and fight the devil.”
The first professor of viticulture at the nearby University of Stellenbosch, Abraham Izak Perold, created the Pinotage grape in the 1920s by crossbreeding two French varieties, the noble Pinot Noir and Cinsaut, a far humbler grape that thrives in the growing conditions of the South African Winelands. Kanonkop helped pioneer Pinotage wines and brought them to the world stage in 1991 when the estate’s version won a prestigious international