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TOUR of Constitution Hill gave a group of education officials and schoolchildren from all over South Africa a harrowing insight into what it was like to be a prisoner during the dark days of apartheid.

Describing the daily living conditions with the aid of information boards in the prisoners' own words, trained tour guides took the 45 officials and 90 pupils (10 high school children and three officials from each province) through the reconstructed Constitution Hill's prison museums - the Old Fort and Number Four - as well as the new Constitutional Court.

Visitors to Constitution Hill get a guided tour of all prison buildings and exhibitions

Inscribed on the roof of a passage to Number Four prison, a quote from Nelson Mandela's book "Long Walk to Freedom" captures the essence of the tour: "No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails."

Number Four is where thousands of black men were imprisoned, and brutalised. The inside of the prison block has been restored and the buildings look as they did when this was a working prison.

In the food area, where prisoners collected their food from trolleys before moving off to eat in the yard or cells, food drums display the ghastly menu selections prisoners were faced with. African National Congress stalwart Joe Slovo describes the motive for the drums in his unfinished autobiography: "The first drum, marked 'Congress One', contained cooked chunks of beef or pork for white accused. The 'Congress Two' drum, for coloureds and Indian prisoners, contained either porridge or boiled vegetables on top of which floated a few pieces of fatty meat that were most probably from the discarded cut-offs from 'Congress One' drum. The 'Congress Three' drum (for black prisoners) was always meatless and the contents alternated between a plastic-textured porridge and a mixture of boiled mealies and beans."

Eastern toilets were used, and besides the indignity of having to relieve themselves in full view, outbreaks of diseases like enteric fever and typhoid were commonplace. Writer and political prisoner Alex La Guma wrote: "One of the reasons for my disease (typhoid) is found in this jail. Filth. The mats are filthy, the blankets are filthy, the latrines are filthy, the food is filthy, the utensils are filthy, and the convicts' clothes are filthy. The latrines overflow and make a stench."