Robben Island lies off Cape Town, but its history cannot be reduced to the distance between the harbour and the shore. For centuries, the island was used to confine people considered inconvenient or dangerous by successive authorities. UNESCO records its changing roles as a prison, a hospital for people isolated from society and a military base. The buildings and remains make the island a physical record of power, exclusion and resistance in South Africa.
The name most visitors recognize is Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned there during apartheid. Yet the island’s heritage includes many other political prisoners, criminalized people, patients, military personnel and communities. Dutch and British colonial authorities used the island as a place of banishment; a leper colony operated there from the nineteenth century, and twentieth-century military structures still mark the landscape. Each layer helps explain why the island is a memorial rather than a single-person shrine.