In a grey room with a concrete floor, bars on the windows and fluorescent tube lighting, a group of about 40 tourists is sitting on narrow benches listening to Ntambo Mbatha, a 49-year-old former inmate on Robben Island, explain what life was like in the notorious prison where Nelson Mandela was held during the struggle against apartheid.

Mbatha has just shown us a dirty mat on which inmates used to sleep and is pacing about as he used to during his seven-year “terrorism” sentence in the 1980s. “When you arrived you were given a number. Your name ceased to exist,” he says. “We lost our identities and were divided on racial grounds: blacks, coloureds and Indians.”

The policies of apartheid were maintained even on this hot dusty island that is only a 45-minute ferry trip from the Cape Town waterfront. “But we refused to be divided,” Mbatha says proudly, leading us through a courtyard full of weeds to the section where Mandela and other political leaders were held in solitary confinement. Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in captivity on Robben Island. He was released 20 years ago next Thursday.

Mandela’s cell was small and grim — much smaller than the bathroom at my swanky hotel back on the Victoria & Alfred docks in Cape Town. We file past with cameras flashing, taking in the mat on which he slept, a tiny wooden table and a red toilet bucket. “We” consists of a mixed group of overseas tourists and South Africans of all colours. Although there has been chatter as we walk through the courtyard, we fall silent by the grey metal bars.

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