Robben Island

Robben Island is a flat, oval island in Table Bay off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, about 6.9 kilometres from the shore. It was fortified and used as a prison from the late seventeenth century until 1996, and in the late twentieth century the apartheid government held political prisoners there, most famously Nelson Mandela, who spent eighteen of his twenty-seven years in prison on the island before his release and later election as South Africa's first black president. Two other former Robben Island prisoners, Kgalema Motlanthe and Jacob Zuma, were later elected president of South Africa in their own right. The island is both a South African National Heritage Site and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.