Waiting for the Barbarians

In the novel, the magistrate learns many things but to me, one of the most important is by far that the barbarians are not really the barbarians. He sees that the special forces in the book can be seen as the barbaric characters in the book, and the barbarians are not as barbaric as they may seem at first. This reminds me of Brave New World, by Adolus Huxley. Throughout the book, it becomes apparent that the real savages are not the uncivilized people, but the ones that have been controlled and fixed into molds. The magistrates learns a new way to view people and what barbarian really means.

The second important thing that he learns is the difference between what is civilized and what is barbaric. The book describes civilization as having a government, when this disappears and becomes corrupt the civilized people become the barbarians. The civilized people almost give up their ability to call themselves civilized when they do this.=, showing that they might be the real barbarians.

Robben Island

http://africanhistory.about.com/od/apartheid/p/RobbenIsland.htm

-Nelson Mandela was locked up here for over 25 years
-He was only allowed to leave his cell to do manual labor in a quarry, like many other anti-apartheid political prisoners.
-In 1652 Jan van Riebeeck established the first permanent settlement by Europeans in South Africa in the area that today is the city of Cape Town.
-Van Riebeeck was sent by the Dutch East India Company, a company based in the Netherlands which traded goods between the East and Europe.
-Five years later, in 1657, he decided to use the island as a place of banishment, sending exiles and slaves to dig out the white stone found there.
-In 1959 the island became a maximum security prison and between 1961 and 1991 over three thousand men were incarcerated here as political prisoners.
-June 1990 saw the start of the removal of political prisoners by then-president FW de Klerk, the last leaving the island in May 1991.
-It is now a world heritage site.