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Robben Island - Cape Town

Robben Island is an island in Table Bay, 12 km off the coast from Cape Town. The name is Dutch for "seal island" (or to be strictly accurate, "island of seals", because Robben is plural). Robben Island is roughly oval and about a kilometer wide. It is flat and only a few meters above sea level, as a result of an ancient erosion event.

Robben Island was first inhabited thousands of years ago by stone age people, at a time when sea levels were considerably lower than they are today and people could walk to it. It was then a flat-topped hill. Towards the end of the last Ice Age the melting of the ancient ice caps caused sea levels to rise and the land around the island was flooded by the ocean.

Since the end of the 17th century, Robben Island has been used to isolate certain people, mainly prisoners, and amongst its first permanent inhabitants were political leaders from various Dutch colonies, including Indonesia. From 1836 to 1931 the island was used as a leper colony. During the Second World War, the island was fortified and guns were installed as part of the defenses for Cape Town.

Robben Island became a maximum security prison in 1959. Between 1961 and 1991, over three thousand men were incarcerated here as political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela. During the time that the island was a prison, security was very tight and it was off limits to almost all civilians, including fishermen. Before about 1980 there was not one citizen in 10,000 in Cape Town who had set foot on the island. It is not generally known that the use of the island as a prison was greatly inhibited for centuries by a lack of fresh water. The island is arid, with low scrubby vegetation and has no watercourses. Boreholes were drilled in the first half of the 20th century but in due course the fragile water table was invaded by sea water and the bores became useless. Sometime after 1965 a pipeline was laid on the bottom of the ocean from Cape Town.

F.W. de Klerk initiated the removal of political prisoners in June of 1990, with the last gone by May of the following year. The last of the non-political prisoners (who had always been held separately from political prisoners) left the island in 1996, and it became a museum in 1997.

Robben Island has been the nemesis of many a ship and its crew. The surf of the open Atlantic Ocean thunders continuously at its margins and any vessel wrecked on the reefs offshore is soon beaten to pieces and disappears. In the latter half of the 1600s a Dutch ship laden with gold coins earmarked for the payment of the salaries of employees of the Dutch East India Company in Batavia (now Indonesia) disintegrated on these reefs a short distance off shore, in relatively shallow but very restless waters. The gold today would be worth tens of millions of pounds sterling or U.S. dollars. A few coins have washed ashore over the centuries but the treasure itself remains in the ocean. It is protected largely by the almost ceaseless and violent surf. Many other vessels have been wrecked around the isle.

All the land on the island is owned by the State, with the exception of the island church. Today the island is a popular tourist destination and was declared a World Heritage Site in 1999. It is reached by ferry from the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town and is open throughout the year, weather permitting, and tours of the island and prison are led by guides who were formerly prisoners there. Robben Island Museum (RIM) operates as a site or living museum.

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