"IF I WERE TO ASK YOU to tell me a cave story, I bet you’d have one. Not as memorable, perhaps, as the one told by Prisoner 46664, who spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in prison hewing stones in and out of the caves of Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. There, Nelson Mandela’s ideals of mercy and reconciliation were honed with every strike of the hammer that broke the rocks — rocks broken for no other purpose than to break the spirit of the prisoners. Constant movement from pitch blackness to glaring sun caused Mandela’s eyes to be burned to the point where he lost the ability to cry, even after he was released. But his suffering in the caves of Robben Island taught the world to cry."
(Leonard Sweet. The Well Played Life)
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