We Do!

It's all confetti and roses as Robben Island shakes off its ugly past and becomes a wedding venue of choice. Cosmo Duff Gordon gets tears in his eyes

Some people get chocolates for Valentine's Day, others get roses and a lucky few get breakfast in bed. Rashieda Marlie got a wedding.

"Sedick told me to wear something nice, not jeans, and meet him at the V&A Waterfront, and he'd take me somewhere special for lunch." Their destination was Robben Island, the world's unlikeliest romantic hot-spot, where they then got married.

Lying 7km off the coast of Cape Town, Robben Island has been through a fair few metamorphoses. First it was a whaling station, then a leper colony, next an apartheid-era prison where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for 27 years and, finally, a post-apartheid tourist hub and world heritage site - all of which makes its current apotheosis as a venue for mass Valentine's Day weddings rather unexpected.

The first such weddings were introduced by the Department of Home Affairs in 2000. Down at the quayside is Martha Mgxashe, a senior Home Affairs official and, as she puts it, the "grandmother of Valentine's Day on Robben Island". When the ferry eventually pulls out of Cape Town harbour, 24 loved-up couples, presumably full of Cupid's little arrows, try hard not to be sick; it's a rough sea.

Almost all are South Africans. Some are in traditional wedding dresses with sparkling tiaras, others in themed red-and-white outfits; most are doing their best to save expensive coiffures from the wind. Notes of hairspray and vomit waft up from the hold. Luckily for Marlie, her hair is safe under a scarf.

We pull into the harbour. Dark, brooding cormorants infest the concrete breakwater. After negotiating a metal detector, Samukelesiwe Noel from Kuilsrivier explains why she's getting married here: "It's romantic because it's pain that became love and which we turned into democracy. I'm imagining Madiba all the time."

Sonia Sauls and Charmaine Webber, from Paarl, echo this. They may not be wearing wedding dresses, but they are wearing big grins: "It symbolises the struggle to get freedom for us as a gay couple. Now we're here to change the house of pain into a house of love." Row after row in the church is filled with couples. The official keeps up a keen pace as he marries them. One hopes that no important vows have been omitted.

Romantic intentions notwithstanding, most are really here on a pilgrimage to honour Mandela and to celebrate their freedom.

Framed by barbed wire and high prison walls, Asaida Ndima, 22, and Danny Kabuigo, 27, from Cape Town, are keenly aware that it's the 20th anniversary of his release from prison: "It's about Madiba ... I think he'd smile. And now it's our duty to help change history."