Robben Island
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| State Party |  South Africa |
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| Type | Cultural | |
| Criteria | iii, vi | |
| Identification | #916 | |
| Region2 | Africa | |
| Inscription History | ||
| Formal Inscription: | 1999 23rd WH Committee Session |
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| WH link: | http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/916 | |
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1 Name as officially inscribed on the WH List |
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Robben Island (Afrikaans Robben Eiland) is an island in Table Bay, 12 km off the coast from Cape Town, South Africa and is located at . The name is Dutch for "seal island" (or to be strictly accurate, "island of seals", because Robben is plural). [Incidentaly, "Seal Island" is a different island in nearby False Bay.] Robben Island is roughly oval and about a kilometer wide. It is flat and only a few metres above sealevel, as a result of an ancient erosion event. The island is composed of Precambrian metamorphic rocks belonging to the Malmesbury Group.
Robben Island was first inhabited thousands of years ago by stone age people, at a time when sealevels 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 sealevels to rise once again (they have gone up and down many times over the ages) 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 and in the 20th century it became infamous as a gaol for political prisoners under apartheid. Notable amongst these were Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Tokyo Sexwale, Govan Mbeki, Dennis Brutus and Robert Sobukwe. 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. In the end, many of the prisoners were moved from the island to the mainland.
When the Dutch arrived in the area about 400 years ago, the only large animals on the island were seals and birds. In about 1960, or a little before, the warden of the island introduced a few antelope that were native to the coastal dunes nearby and also a few giant tortoises, which were not. The tortoises probably originated in the Galapagos Islands or the Seychelles and came from the zoo on the slopes of Devil's Peak in Cape Town, where they have lived in captivity for at least 150 years. It is not clear whether these animals still exist on the island.
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. Robben Island Museum (RIM) operates as a site or living museum.
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.
Robben Island/Acoustic Shock music and video dedicated to Nelson Mandela
