Robben Island, now a popular tourist destination, became world-famous largely because of former president Nelson Mandela’s long imprisonment on the island. Situated some 14 km from Cape Town, surrounded by treacherous seas, it was considered the perfect place for political prisoners, because there was almost no chance of surviving an escape attempt.
A lesser-known fact to many, however, is that from 1846 to 1931 Robben Island housed a leper colony as well as a mental asylum. It is against this background that Barbara Townsend’s second novel Out of Mind is set.
Townsend, who lives in Botrivier, is passionate about creative writing, and storytelling comes naturally to her.
Out of Mind is the fruit of seven long years of research, writing and re-writing. “I first thought about writing this book in 2008, but I put it away and wrote Ida’s Line, which was published in 2020.”
Asked why she chose Robben Island as the setting for Out of Mind, she said: “My great-grandfather was a medical officer on the island in the late 1880s and my grandmother, who is pictured on the cover of the book, was a theatre sister there from 1911 to 1918. She met my grandfather, who was a clerk in the Office of the Commissioner, on the island and my father was born there in 1914. I wanted to find out more about their life there and followed a trail that involved my family.”
The book is not autobiographical or political. It is a novel about characters who lived and worked on the island when it was used to house the leper colony, the outcasts of society. Along with the other island residents, readers will meet Reggie van der Riet, the new senior clerk, and Vera Goodwin, a beautiful, intelligent young theatre sister who works in the hospital of the leper colony.
Asked about the title of the book, Townsend said: “When the male protagonist in the story, Reggie van der Riet, asked William Wade, skipper of the boat that took him to the island, about the leper colony he said: “People with leprosy are not a pretty sight so they have been moved out of sight and out of mind of the good people of Cape Town.”
Interestingly enough, the leper colony was housed in the Hemel-and-Aarde Valley before being moved to Robben Island “for health reasons”.
Out of mind was launched in Botrivier on Saturday 3 December.
Townsend read a selection of passages from the book and her daughter, Catherine, and Isabel van Niekerk, a friend from Pretoria who came down for the launch, led the Q&A discussion.
Short snippets from the book can be read on the Facebook page “Tea Pot Publishing”.
The book is available at R270 from Liberty Books in Grabouw, the Book Cottage in Hermanus, the Book Lounge in Cape Town, or it can be ordered directly from www.teapotpublishing.co.za
