Robben Island: from Place of Banishment to Symbol of Freedom

Introduction

Robben Island rises from the cold, grey waters of Table Bay like a low, flat scar on the surface of the sea. Roughly oval in shape, covering an area of approximately 5.07 square kilometers, it sits just 6.9 kilometers northwest of Cape Town, South Africa, yet for centuries it existed in a world apart — a place beyond reach, beyond help, and for many of those sent there, beyond hope. Today it is one of the most visited sites on the African continent, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a living museum that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. But its significance stretches far beyond the tourist trade. Robben Island is nothing less than a repository of human suffering and human resilience, a place where some of the most important events in twentieth-century African history unfolded within walls of lime and stone, and where the seeds of South Africa's democracy were painstakingly, improbably, sown.

The island's name is itself a window into history. "Robben" comes from the Dutch word for seals, and early Dutch sailors and settlers found the island's rocky shores and surrounding waters thick with Cape fur seals. Those seals are still there, lounging on the rocks and swimming in the kelp forests of the Atlantic Ocean, indifferent to the centuries of human drama that have played out around them. The island is flat, rarely rising more than thirty meters above sea level at its highest point, and its landscape is a mixture of scrubby fynbos vegetation, planted pine forests, open fields, and the built structures of its many historical phases — stone buildings, military bunkers, the walls of the maximum security prison, a lighthouse, a church. Viewed from the ferry that carries visitors out from Cape Town's Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, Robben Island appears small and almost tranquil in the blue expanse of Table Bay, with Table Mountain rising behind the city on the southern horizon. That peaceful appearance is deeply deceptive. No piece of land of comparable size in Africa has witnessed so much deliberate human cruelty and, ultimately, so much that is ennobling about the human spirit.

The island's history as a place of confinement and exile stretches back nearly four hundred years, encompassing Dutch colonial exiles, prisoners of war, leprosy patients, the mentally ill, and finally, in the apartheid era that defined modern South Africa's tragic and extraordinary story, political prisoners of the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress, and other liberation movements. To understand Robben Island is to understand South Africa itself — its layers of colonial violence, its racial hierarchies, its decades-long struggle for freedom, and its ongoing, incomplete journey toward justice and reconciliation.

Geography and Natural Environment

Table Bay, the body of water in which Robben Island sits, is exposed to the full force of the South Atlantic Ocean's prevailing winds and swells, and the crossing from Cape Town can be rough even in summer months. The ferry ride, which takes approximately thirty minutes from the V and A Waterfront, passes through waters that were notoriously dangerous in the age of sail, and many ships came to grief on the rocky coastline of the Cape Peninsula and the islands nearby. This natural hostility made Robben Island an ideal place of detention long before anyone built a single prison wall. The sea itself was the first and most formidable barrier.

The island's geology is relatively simple. It sits on a bed of Precambrian metamorphic rock overlaid with sandy soils and, in many areas, deposits of blue slate. Its flat topography meant it was well-suited for agriculture, and at various periods in its history, crops were grown there, animals grazed, and gardens cultivated. The island has a Mediterranean climate, dry and warm in summer, cool and wet in winter, though the winds are rarely gentle. The Cape Doctor, the powerful southeast wind that scours the Cape Peninsula in summer, blows across the island with force, and in winter the northwest gales can be savage.