Robben+ISland

Robben Island is an island off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. Throughout history, it has been used for many things, but it is mainly known as a prison. Many Africans came to be imprisoned at Robben Island during the Apartheid era, but there is much more to the island's history.

Bartolomeu Dias was an explorer who anchored his ship in Table Bay and first discovered Robben Island in 1488. However, at that point it was not a prison yet. It wasn’t until the British and Dutch colonists used this as an outpost and prison for so many years that it started to grow. In 1591, it was used as a refuge for all native people who opposed the “New Way” of the European governments.

Later in its history, the island prison held Nelson Mandela. He served twenty years of his life sentence at Robben Island. While there, he (and the other political prisoners) were segregated from the common criminals and forced into hard labor, working in quarries and gathering sea weed along the rocky shore. While in prison, Mandela did not give up his fight against the Apartheid government. Instead, he fought for better treatment in the prison, snuck notes out to his free comrades, and secretly wrote his life story.

Despite its dark past, Robben Island is now considered a symbol for strength of the human spirit. Today the prison is a museum and tourists can walk the corridors and see the cell Nelson Mandela spent most of his sentence in. Also there today, there are around 13,000 penguins that live on the island. Yes, African penguins. Penguins have used the island for as long as we know, but in the 1800s sailors killed the penguins for their meat. The population decreased immensely, but in the early 1980s, the penguins started to make a come back.