© The Prison by Koto Bolofo, Claudia van Ryssen-Bolofo published by Steidl http://www.steidl.de
At the age of four, Koto Bolofo left South Africa as a political refugee, and did not return until 1992, two years after Nelson Mandela was released from prison. The first thing Bolofo did was visit Robben Island, where Mandela had been held for the majority of his 27 years in confinement in a cell barely six square meters in size. The photographs he took with his wife have just been published in a new monograph titled The Prison (Steidl). Bolofo graciously agreed to speak with L’Oeil de la Photographie about this project.
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“My parents decided to go back to South Africa after Mandela was released. My father said that the country had changed, to come back and see for myself, as there could be good opportunities. My first intention was to visit Robben Island. I had heard so much about it, but I had only seen five photos. One was taken in the early 1960s when Mandela was held there, and I wanted to see this place for myself before I discovered what South Africa was.
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“I took the boat, a fisherman’s boat, that took the prisoners to the island. It wasn’t yet a Museum at that time. This was in the very early days. I had to go because I knew that when a new regime comes into power, the first thing that they do is try to eradicate all the traces of the past. They don’t want to be reminded of a bad symbol of the past.
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“Fortunately humanity was on the mainland celebrating getting their country back and no one was paying attention to Robben Island. It was my wife and I. When we landed we saw an old board with paint peeling off and in Afrikaaans it said, “Welcome to Robben Island.” Then we saw the main gate with the same words and it was painted really well. The slogan really shook me. Here you are, as a black person, and they are celebrating, welcoming you. And there was a sickness in that.
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“When you go there, you completely break down. You cannot believe a human being could do this to one and other because they are fighting for freedom and equal rights. How can they do this? ‘Why? was the word going through my head over and over again. You are breaking down, the tears come, you are weak at the legs.
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“South Africa is a vast country with a 13% white minority. And they had the black prisoners wearing shorts and going barefoot, while the Indian prisoners got to wear long trousers, pullovers, and shoes. There were other forms of discrimination, like black prisoners received no bread. Nelson Mandela was campaigning to have equal rights on that island and it took years. There is a photo of Mandela in shorts in the courtyard breaking stones. That was designed to break the human spirit. Everything they did was to break the spirit. The post was vetted, and words were blanked out in a black pen so that the prisoners couldn’t see what their loved ones were writing. They tried to break the prisoners but little did they know that the prisoners had a nobility and a strength of intellect that was part of their survival instrument. They would never break an African person down.
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“I couldn’t take photos. I couldn’t even pick up the camera. It’s a burning pain that you can’t describe; it’s so close to you. My wife was saying, ‘You have to take pictures. It can be taken away and destroyed. No one is paying attention now.’”
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“We came to a harrowing thing: Mandela’s cell. You can put it on paper, but you have to experience what that space is, put yourself in that room, and say, ‘How on earth can you put a man in a space like that for so many years?’ Once you are in his cell, you are completely gone. It’s really cold in there and they were wearing shorts, and the blanket was horsehair, designed to degrade you to the lowest common denominator.
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“These photos are very poetic. They are not photos that wanted to provoke. This is a peace document. You sit down and look at it in your quiet moment to have a moment of your humanity and ask yourself, ‘Why?’ and ‘How can we move forward from this?’
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“The most important thing in this book is the list of all the prisoners that had been sentenced to Robben Island. No one knows about this list. Thank God we have the Internet. I asked myself, ‘Who are these people? Where are these people? Where are he rest of them?” We only knew about the main people, eight or ten of them. The impression we had was these were the only prisoners they were keeping, because that’s all the South African media focused on.
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“I asked about the others. I didn’t get the information so I snooped around the Internet for two and a half months before I came to a website and a massive list popped up and it had the names of all the prisoners, the date of sentence, admittance, release, and their address. There were thousands of names on the list.
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“I printed it off that night, kept it, and stored it away. I later went back to the website and the list had been taken down, like it did not exist at all. I published the list in the book. The youngest prisoner who was sentenced to Robben Island was only 15 years old. He was sentenced for 10 years! His is amongst the list of prisoners in the book. His name is Dikagang Moseneke. His current occupation is the Justice Minister of South Africa.
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“This is the most important book my wife and I will do in our lifetime. This is a book of education. All schools should pay a compulsory visit to Robben Island. When you show them the instrument of evil forced upon a people, the youth can see the truth stands counter to corruption. The truth can make democracy more transparent. That’s when a nation moves forward. Go back to your past and you will find your future.”
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Today, Robben Island is a museum, included on the World Heritage List by UNESCO in 1999. Bolofo’s book is a monument to the past, a story of lives that will never be forgotten, lives that were given to justice, truth, and freedom.
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First Published in L’Oeil de la Phootgraphie, May 2014
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© The Prison by Koto Bolofo, Claudia van Ryssen-Bolofo published by Steidl http://www.steidl.de