Shawshank Redemption

View of the Fair Valley - where we live

This film is rated as probably one of the most watched films ever. And I can see why. It is a triumph of hope against hopelessness. The hero of the film Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) says to his fellow prisoner Red (Morgan Freeman)


“Remember Red, hope is a good thing,
maybe the best of things,
and no good thing ever dies”


This morning was our second time in prison since being here in South Africa. The first was to visit Robben Island where Nelson Mandela spent around 18 of his 27 years in prison.

Today was for real. We were invited to spend a morning in a prison in the Western Cape. It’s a prison built for 250 inmates, but this morning, as with every morning 392 prisoners were present at roll-call. We were simply full of admiration for the head of the prison and what he had done there. It is a disconcerting thing to spend a morning being introduced to prisoners, shaking their hands, looking at what they are doing to keep themselves sane, knowing that some are in there for life because they murdered people.

The highlight was being put into a room with a group of the prisoners and being asked to talk to them.
What do you say to men who are in prison for life (min 25 years)?
So I talked about hope.
I talked about potential.

As I looked at these men in front of me, all in orange overalls covered with those little arrows that prisoners always had on the cartoon figures of my youth,  I was flooded with fresh clarity as I spoke to them..... that these guys weren’t born to end up in a prison. They were young guys full of potential to be musicians, artist, engineers, firemen, taxi drivers, fathers. Not murderers. That wasn’t what the seed of their potential was designed for. And that potential for who they should have been was still there, sitting there, unrealised.

Children are full of hope, curiosity and playfulness (they wanted to know about our training)

I told them that Mandela had entered prison as an angry young man. Labeled as a terrorist. But he used the time to lead his own life. To work on who he was. To end apartheid within his own heart, because if he didn’t do the work in prison on leading himself then he wouldn’t have been able to lead anyone to a place of hope when he was released.


I talked with them about hopelessness and how poverty gets inside the head. I talked with them about that hopelessness feeling like an impossibly high wall, how after a few generations of that kind of hopelessness they lose sight of who they could be. I talked about how leadership is like getting the pen back to write your own life story, not letting others write it for you.

We chatted together about the power of gangs to write a story that causes harm, but the potential power of gangs to be a force of good in the community.
They sat transfixed. One guy told our host, in tears, that if he’d just known some of what we were teaching he knew he would have made different choices and not ended up in prison where he knows he didn’t do his victim or his family any good.

National flower of South Africa - the Proteus plant (it grows everywhere)

On our way to Robben island

Jane & I stepped out of the prison three and half hours later into the burning sun of the beautiful Western Cape. Free. But we were on fire in our hearts. We have had to work through some challenging things in the life of Emerging Leaders in the past few weeks but one thing has become clear – we are on a mission, to the best of our small ability….and it’s a mission of hope.
Napoleon said that a leader was a ‘dealer in hope’. In the midday sun you just say to yourself ‘if we could have just left a little bit of hope inside that prison how amazing would that be.

-TW