“Let’s go, let’s go and fight; we don’t know where we’re going, but fight we must,” sing Grant Shezi, Muntu Nxumalo and Thembinkosi Sithole, harmonizing around a microphone in a high school auditorium on Chicago’s West Side. “Let us take over, take over, they take our country and give us homelands, let us take over, take over, take our country the Castro way… .”

These lyrics are among the many that sustained Shezi, Sithole and Nxumalo during their multi-year stay at the infamous Robben Island Prison. As participants in the anti-apartheid struggle, they, along with thousands of other dissidents were jailed in the ’70s and ’80s on Robben Island, a small rocky island off the southwest coast of South Africa. The three men were incarcerated for their involvement in the African National Congress’s (ANC) armed wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe (or MK), which means “Spear of the Nation.” Now, they are trying to keep the legacy of that struggle alive for the generation born after the end of apartheid in the early ’90s.

“We would use songs to ease our hunger,” Sithole tells a crowd of mostly African-American high school students at Chicago Academy High School during a February visit to the city. He described how the prisoners would often get only one bowl of gruel per day, which, though scalding hot, they had to eat with their hands until a hard-fought campaign forced their jailers to give them spoons.

“We spent most of our time in prison struggling to improve prison conditions,” says Shezi, jailed in 1980 for 10 years after being charged with illegally leaving the country and membership in the banned ANC. “We were always studying politics and holding political classes and debates.”

Located about 8 miles off the coast of Cape Town across a turbulent ocean strait,Robben Island was used as a hospital for leprosy patients and the mentally ill in the 1800s and early 1900s, and a military base during World War II. It has been used as a prison since the mid-1600s. Its inmates have included everyone from indigenous African leaders and Muslims from the East Indies to Dutch and British soldiers and civilians. Most infamously, it was the repository for anti-apartheid activists, including Nelson Mandela, who became the first democratically elected president after the fall of apartheid, and Pan Africanist Congress founder Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe.

In 1997, the former prison was turned into a museum and historical institute that aims to keep the stories of anti-apartheid activists and other political prisoners alive. A comprehensive electronic database of former prisoners is being compiled, and the museum holds an extensive collection of prison artifacts and former prisoners’ belongings and writings, including testimony of more than 200 former prisoners. Its archive of prisoners’ papers, including letters, internal correspondence, minutes of meetings, reports, political discussion papers, recreation plans and equipment orders, is called the “Apple Box Archives,” because when prisoners were released, the last of them in 1991, they carried their possessions in apple boxes.

The museum’s Web site describes the island today as a symbol “of oppression, as well as a place of triumph.” It continues: “Overcoming opposition from the prison authorities, prisoners on the Island after the ’60s were able to organize sporting events, political debates and educational programs, and to assert their right to be treated as human beings, with dignity and equality. They were able to help the country establish the foundations of our modern democracy.”

The museum has published four books detailing prisoners’ memories and three albums of prison music, including Prison Songs: Cell Stories, the project which brought Shezi, Sithole and Nxumalo together.

Jeff Spitz, a Chicago-based filmmaker, bought Prison Songs on CD in 2001 when he was in Cape Town screening his documentary The Return of Navajo Boy, which details the toxic legacy of uranium mining in Navajo lands in the southwestern United States. Intrigued and disturbed that he had never heard of Robben Island, Spitz tracked the men down. He convinced them to come to the United States in 2002 for a performance at theChicago Field Museum and began filming a documentary, along with South African filmmaker Mickey Madoda Dube, about the singers’ lives and music.