The experience of studying in South Africa is strangely interwoven with Robben Island, the former leper colony and military base best known for imprisoning Nelson Mandela for 18 years. I’ve been nibbling my way through his autobiography since I got here, the place comes up in any class having to do with South African history, and you get a visual reminder any time you squint about 10 km out from Cape Town’s harbor. As long as I’ve been here, it’s been out there, looming in my consciousness.

Maybe that’s why, when I actually visited the place yesterday, everything seemed a little bit surreal–like I was walking through a diorama with no actual people in it. This is where the first prisoners were offloaded after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960. This is where they slept, on thin felt pads. This is where they quarried lime for eight hours a day, the cave where they both relieved themselves and taught each other political philosophy during breaks. All empty now, and with a fresh coat of paint. And everywhere, the almost ghostly presence of Nelson Mandela, patron saint of Robben Island.

So, we tourists shuffled through the corridors and courtyards, waiting our turn to snap photos of Mandela’s tiny cell–smaller than the dog kennels–and imagining breaking up gravel in the blazing sun. There to help us visualize was our guide, an honest-to-god former political prisoner, who went off on tangents about various aspects of life under apartheid that made you realize this wasn’t just a job for him. In the absence of Mandela-sized book deals, this is probably the best way he knows to educate these foreigners and munchkins about what that felt like.

And you do feel it, more than a Civil War battlefield, or a Holocaust concentration camp, or the site of an Indian massacre. Maybe because it’s more recent–the last prisoners left less than 20 years ago–or because I’ve been reading about it and thinking about it and writing about it for months now. I think the biggest factor, though, is that the ideals it stood for didn’t die with apartheid. They’re still an undercurrent in South African society, coming to the surface in conversations at bars or youtube videos splayed across the internet. Maybe someday, Robben Island will be just another relic of an historical war–for now though, it’s just a field where one battle has been won.

Pictured: Nelson Mandela’s cell.