Cape Town Attractions - Robben Island
At the Victoria & Alfred waterfront’s clock tower complex you can book a ferry ride across the Atlantic Ocean to Robben Island. You will travel by modern ferry about 11.5km (7miles) out to sea. While waiting for the ferry you can browse through some of the memorabilia from display cabinets with labels attached.
Once anchored at the Island harbour you will walk a short distance to an assembly point to join a bus ride across the island. Each bus has a tour guide which will point out certain landmarks along the route like the blinding white limestone quarries where prisoners were forced to work with only their hands without any protection from the sun or eyes. You will also be shown the leper graveyard where people with leprosy from the mainland were buried, and the church and school on the island used by the wardens that worked here.
After your bus trip you can walk through the prison cell blocks, as tour guides will guide you and the highlight would be to visit Nelson Mandela's cell as well as the "garden" where he worked and wrote his book. The living museum supports a tiny village. Among notable structures are the 1800’s lighthouse which is still operational today, the Church of good Shepherd, designed by turn of the century architect Herbert Baker, and the old Residency, once the home to the local commissioners and the Robert Sobukwe’s prison house. There are also some World War II features when the island played a role in Cape Town’s sea defences.
In 1999 the island gained status as a world Heritage site. Today it is a baffling remembrance to the newly democratic South Africa and the price for freedom. Mr. Nelson Mandela – or Madiba as our people know him, was a political prisoner here, where he wrote his book, "A long walk to freedom”.
Conservationists are preserving the island as a forest reserve and as breeding ground for Caspian and Damara Terns, rare African or Jackass penguins. There are around 30 different bird species on the island as well as wild flowers with rugged coast line around the 574ha (1418 acres) island.
In the winter of 1964, Nelson Mandela arrived on Robben Island where he would spend 18 of his 27 prison years. Confined to a small cell, the floor as his bed, a bucket for a toilet that every prisoner had to clean themselves, he was forced to do hard labour in a quarry with wardens watching your back etc. He was allowed one visitor a year for 30 minutes. He could write and receive only one letter every six months.
Robben Island became the crucible which transformed him. Through his intelligence, charm and dignified defiance, Mandela eventually bent even the most brutal prison officials to his will, assumed leadership over his jailed comrades and became the master of his own prison. He emerged from it the mature leader who would fight and win the great political battles that would create a new democratic South Africa.
Historically early Portuguese, Dutch and English mariners on their way to and from the Orient visited its shores for fresh provisions (seals, penguins and birds) and in the early 1600’s it was used to confine convicts. The first Dutch colonists collected seashells (to produce lime) and they also collected its beautifully veined slate and stone to construct the Cape Castle and some other buildings around Cape Town. Over decades from the 17th to the 20th centuries, Robben Island also served as a place of banishment for chronically sick and otherwise unwanted, (the suffering caused a public outcry that eventually put a stop to the abuse), a leper colony. On this tour you will get a taste to just imagine what the prisoners had to go through at Robben Island. It really broke my heart to see and hear the stories. The displays are extremely touching, and the tour guides, ex-prisoner on the island, brings the cruel past alive in a sympathetic manner.
On our boat trip back to the Cape Town harbour visitors where quite, reflecting on what they had seen and heard. If you are in Cape Town, do not miss this truly awe inspiring tour. We all could learn something about humanity. Link to: http://www.robben-island.org.za/
Tourist Information: Phone: 021 4095100
