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Lying only a few kilometres from the commerce of the Waterfront, flat and windswept Robben Island is suffused by a meditative , otherworldly silence.
This key site of South Africa's liberation struggle was intended to silence apartheid's domestic critics, but instead became an international focus for opposition to the regime.
Measuring six square kilometres and sparsely vegetated by low scrub, it was Nelson Mandela's "home" for nearly two decades.
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Nelson Mandela is the most famous Robben Island prisoner, but he wasn't the first.
In the seventeenth century, the island became a place of banishment for those who offended the political order.
The island's first prisoner was the indigenous Khoikoi leader Autshumato, who learnt English in the early seventeenth century and became an emissary of the British.
After the Dutch settlement was established, he was jailed on the island by Jan van Riebeeck in 1658 for murdering a Dutch herder and stealing his cattle.
The rest of the seventeenth century saw a succession of East Indies political prisoners exiled here for opposing Dutch colonial rule.
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During the nineteenth century, the British used the island as a dumping ground for deserters, criminals and political prisoners.
Captured Xhosa leaders who defied the empire during the Frontier Wars of the early to mid-nineteenth century were transported by sea from the Eastern Cape to be imprisoned here.
In 1846, the island's brief was extended to include a whole range of the socially marginalized: criminals and political detainees were joined by vagrants, prostitutes, lunatics and the chronically ill.
In the 1890s, a leper colony existed alongside the social outcasts.
Lunatics were removed in 1921 and the lepers in 1930.
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Robben Island's greatest era of notoriety began in 1961, when it was taken over by the Prison Department.
When Nelson Mandela arrived, it had become a maximum security prison, and prisoners were only allowed to send and receive one letter every six months.
Harsh conditions, including routine beatings and forced hard labour, were exacerbated by geographical location: icy winds routinely blow in from the South Pole, and inmates wore only shorts and flimsy yerseys.
Like every other prisoner, Mandela slept on a thin mat on the floor and was kept in solitary confinement in a cell measuring two metres square for sixteen hours a day.
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Amazingly, the prisoners found ways of protesting, through hunger strikes, publicizing conditions when possible (by visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross, for example ) and, remarkably, by taking legal action against the prison authority to stop arbitrary punishments.
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They won improved conditions over the years, and the island also became a university behind bars, where people of different political views and generation met; it ws not unknown for prisoners to give academic help to their warders.
The last political prisoners were released from Robben Island in 1991 and the remaining common-law prisoners were transferred to the mainland in 1996.
On January 1, 1997, control of Robben Island was transferred from the Department of Correctional Services to the Department of the Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, which has now established it as a museum.
In December 1999, the entire island was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Questa foto di Robben Island è offerta da TripAdvisor.
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