Robben Island, located off the coast of South Africa, was used as a prison for political and other prisoners during colonial and apartheid eras. Nelson Mandela was held there for 18 years. The island has a long history of human settlement and is now a World Heritage Site and a museum. It is also home to various wildlife species, including 132 bird species and 23 mammal species.
Robben Island is a small island off the southwest coast of South Africa, 12 miles (19.3 kilometers) from Cape Town and 30 minutes by ferry. It is a part of the nation of South Africa that is most notable for its housing of political prisoners during the past colonial and more recent apartheid era of apartheid policies in the nation. Nelson Mandela was held here for 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment and, during that time, he wrote his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Geological changes over time have affected the accessibility of Robben Island, which was once an ancient mountain top that connected it to the African continent.
People have been known to have lived on Robben Island for thousands of years, and the Dutch and British began using it as an outpost and prison in the 1500s during European colonial expansion. It is believed that around 12,000 years ago, during the last ice age, sea levels were high enough to create a channel between the island and the mainland that was not covered by water. Around this time, Stone Age people were for the first time able to reach the island on foot and settle there. Colonial attempts to settle the island in the normal way failed, and its value was therefore seen solely as a location for both a penal colony and a leper colony.
A long list of notable prisoners, including South African President Jacob Zuma, elected in the 2009 general election, had been imprisoned on Robben Island for ten years. The Table Mountain Prison site also served to hold many indigenous African leaders, Muslim leaders, convicted soldiers of Dutch and British forces, as well as women and ordinary civilians. The site was declared a national monument in 1997 and a museum was created in the prison. The museum is quite active and runs regular educational programs for children and adults, as well as conducting research into the island’s history. Five years after apartheid was officially outlawed in South Africa, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated Robben Island a World Heritage Site in 1999, with the aim of preserving it as a place of extraordinary cultural importance for humanity.
Robben Island’s nomenclature comes from a Dutch phrase, Robbe Eiland, which means “seal island”. Seals, penguins and turtles were abundant on the island at the time of its discovery by the Dutch. In more recent years, it has instead become home to 132 bird species and 23 mammal species, including several types of wild deer, such as springbok, fallow deer and eland deer. The warden of the prison at the time introduced antelopes and giant tortoises to the island in 1960. A notable native species on the island was the African penguin, which became extinct there due to human action in the 1800s, but has since been reintroduced and it has successfully established breeding colonies.
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