This story originally appeared on the Gents Cafe Newsletter. You can subscribe here.
The embarkation hall at Cape Town’s Robben Island Museum waterfront was crowded. Queues of tourists moved steadily, waving passports and boarding passes, everyone hurrying to board the ferry. As the room emptied, my chest tightened. I had no ticket, only a booking confirmation…
I’d been invited to a friend’s wedding in the Winelands—several days of fine wines and food that tasted of captured sunlight, entirely insulated from the country beyond the vineyard gates. With my last day free, I’d made a deliberate choice: break out of the bubble and attempt something real. Robben Island felt essential, culturally meaningful in a way that lounging at Camps Bay wouldn’t be. I’d booked late – perhaps too late.
At the boarding gate, I explained my situation: paid but ticketless. My name wasn’t on the manifest. The boat couldn’t wait. My heart sank.
I watched through the window as the last ferry of the day pulled away, its wake white against the dark harbour water. The disappointment was physical. Then a woman named Alison burst into the hall, slightly breathless, holding my ticket. Wonderful, except the ferry was now a white speck in Table Bay.
That’s when Thobani appeared.
A museum employee, he was slight, dressed in light blue jeans and round glasses, a wide-brimmed sun hat hanging between his shoulder blades. He spoke rapidly in Afrikaans to Alison and the ticket agent, gesturing toward the harbour, then toward me, his hands describing the problem and, apparently, the solution. He kept talking, insistent but smiling, until something shifted in their expressions.
He turned to me. “There is another boat,” he said. “For the islanders. You come with me.”
I must have looked confused because he smiled wider. “You have come all this way. We will make sure you see the island.”
What struck me wasn’t just the offer; it was the way Alison and the ticket agent immediately began making calls, rearranging manifests, solving a problem that wasn’t theirs for a tourist they’d never met. Thobani waited patiently, occasionally adding a word of encouragement in Afrikaans, as though my presence on that workers’ ferry was now a collective mission.
Ten minutes later, I was following him down a different gangway toward a smaller vessel, where men in work clothes nodded at Thobani and made space for me. The boat pulled away, engines straining to catch up to the ferry ahead.
I never asked why he’d gone to such trouble. He’d seen someone in need of help and gathered others to provide it, as naturally as breathing. By the time we reached Robben Island, I understood I’d experienced something more valuable than efficient tourism; I’d been pulled into a web of care that existed whether I was there or not.
Later, I learned the word for what I’d witnessed: Ubuntu, the philosophy that translates as “I am because we are.” It’s not a concept you can read about in a guidebook and truly understand; you have to feel it in the moment when strangers come together to solve a problem belonging to no one and yet becomes everyone’s responsibility. Thobani and Alison and the ticket agent hadn’t helped me because they expected gratitude. They’d helped because the alternative was unthinkable to them. In that waterfront hall and on that small vessel cutting through Table Bay, I felt I’d glimpsed something of the philosophy that had sustained a nation through its darkest hours and continues to bind it together today.
