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Robben Island Prison is an inactive prison on Robben Island in Table Bay, 6.9 kilometers (4.3 mi) west of the coast of Bloubergstrand, Cape Town, South Africa. Nobel Laureate and former President of South Africa Nelson Mandela was imprisoned there for 18 of the 27 years he served behind bars before the fall of apartheid .
Fortifications were erected during World War II, and from the mid-1960s to 1991 Robben Island served as South Africa’s maximum-security prison. Most inmates, including Nelson Mandela, were black men incarcerated for political offenses. The last of these prisoners were released in 1991.
From 1961 to 1991, a maximum-security prison here held enemies of apartheid. In 1997, three years after apartheid fell, the prison was turned into the Robben Island Museum.
Jul 16, 2021 · Dutch for ‘seal island’, Robben Island is one of the world’s most famous prisons and is best known as the home to not one but three former South African presidents, Kgalema Motlanthe, Jacob Zuma and for 18 of his 27 years of incarceration, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.
From 1961, Robben Island was used by the South African government as a prison for political prisoners and convicted criminals. In 1969, the Moturu Kramat, now a sacred site for Muslim pilgrimage on Robben Island, was built to commemorate Sayed Abdurahman Moturu, the Prince of Madura.
Prison Life OVERVIEW. Banishment and imprisonment on Robben Island was used more as a means of punishment rather than as a ‘rehabilitative’ tool. Most of the people sent to the Island had at some point, over the past 500 years, opposed colonial and apartheid rule in South Africa.
Robben Island has been used as prison and a place where people were isolated, banished and exiled to for nearly 400 years. It was also used as a post office, a grazing ground, a mental hospital and an outpost.
