Elias Mzamo's grin is at odds with his story.
A former African National Congress political prisoner on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was held for almost 27 years, he tells of breaking stones, random violence, sickness, hopelessness and woe.
He tells, too, of freedom and reconciliation. When by chance he met a former camp warder, they embraced. "If we want to build our country to become one nation we've got to know each other," he says.
From a man who endured bigstick brutality at the boots of apartheid's foot soldiers, such words are striking.
"The warders, they never got tired of punishing us," he says.
Mr Mzamo was imprisoned for five years on the island 11 km from Cape Town in 1963, when aged 21. His crime? Furthering the aims of a banned organisation. For five hard years he was held, years known as the "swinging 60s" elsewhere.
Now he works as a tour guide at the island museum. Daily in the whitey glare of avid sun, he brings holidaymakers through the prison.
The island is mostly flat, mostly green. Its air is dry and sandy, its silence that of the remote. The shadows are tall and the brooding bulk of Table Mountain on the mainland dominates its skyline.
It is unlikely, however, that the lepers and insane banished there in the 19th century relished the view.
In a newly democratic South Africa, the outcast are no longer condemned to Robben. There the pull of Mr Mandela's legend has proved a significant draw for visitors.
Tour guides, many of whom were once prisoners, tell stories that stretch faith in humanity.
Slow-moving yet sharp of mind, Mr Mzamo speaks of a regime where guards pitted criminal-code inmates against the political ones - and where black prisoners received fewer rations, such as they were, than Asians and coloureds of lighter skin.
At meal times, there were no plates or tables - outdoors on their hunkers, hungry, weak men ate with their fingers from the hand. Sand got in the food. So accustomed were inmates to dirty water that many became sick after drinking fresh water when released. Until 1978 prisoners slept on concrete floors with grass reeds for bedding. Resistance guaranteed punishment.
A favourite reprisal was to bury an inmate in a hole. There, criminal-code prisoners and wardens would urinate on his face. "You'd be kept there the whole blessed day. No food. No water. Buried up to your neck," Mr Mzamo said.
The aim of South Africa's tourism authority is to portray Robben as a symbol of hope, of the triumphant human spirit rising over adversity and wrong. The message is one of forgiveness.
Yet forgiveness will not fix the many problems facing South Africa's ANC government, led by Mr Mandela's successor, Mr Thabo Mbeki.
As well as crime - the yearly homicide rate is 24,000 - it must also deal with soaring unemployment, which averages 30 per cent.
Still, opportunities in South Africa are seen as more attractive than elsewhere on the continent and the country now faces an immigration problem.
But South Africans were shocked last month when video-footage from 1998 showed policemen hunting down three black men suspected of being illegal immigrants with dogs. Many said the approach matched that of the apartheid regime itself against the majority community.
This was implied again this week in a South Africa Human Rights Commission report on current conditions at the Lindela Repatriation Centre, near Johannesburg.
In an appraisal citing conditions not unlike those at Robben Island, it said the arbitrary and indiscriminate detention of undocumented migrants was common. "This practice flies in the face of the many universally recognised human rights that migrants are entitled to, whether they are documented or not."
It added: "What is more alarming are the dangerous xenophobia and the callous attitudes of officials during the arrest and detention procedures."
