Apartheid Prison Tour

The day

The Old Fort, Number Four and the Women's Jail, where Mandela, Gandhi, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and thousands of others were held. Above the cells now stands the Constitutional Court, built from the prison's own bricks.

Nowhere else in the country puts the before and after so close together. You walk the isolation cells and the communal yards of Number Four, hear the recorded testimony of men who were held there, and then climb into a courtroom whose walls are the prison's reclaimed bricks and whose great carved doors spell out the Bill of Rights in every official language. The Apartheid Museum is added in the afternoon for the fuller story. It is a heavy day, and worth every hour.