BEFORE THE PRISON
Banishment, Leprosy and War: The Island Before Mandela
Long before the maximum-security prison, Robben Island was a place of exile, a leper colony and a wartime fortress. A guide to its deeper, layered past.
Check dates and availability ↗Seal island in Table Bay
Robben Island takes its name from the Dutch word for seals, the animals that once thronged its shores, and its story as a place apart begins long before the twentieth-century prison. Lying about 12 kilometres out in Table Bay, low and exposed to the wind, it was never comfortably habitable — which is exactly why generations of authorities found a use for it. Passing ships took seals, penguins and their eggs; early Dutch settlers quarried its stone and grazed sheep on it. From the very start the island's role was defined by its isolation: near enough to Cape Town to supply and control, far enough to keep unwanted people and problems out of sight. That single quality shaped everything that followed across four centuries.
A place of banishment
From the seventeenth century onward, the island became a prison and place of exile under successive colonial powers. Among the earliest political detainees, by many accounts, was Autshumao, a Khoikhoi leader banished there in the 1650s — sometimes described as the first person imprisoned on Robben Island. In the following centuries it held indigenous leaders, exiled royalty and rebels from across the region and beyond, including figures brought from Dutch holdings in the East. Early in the nineteenth century the Xhosa prophet and warrior known as Makhanda was imprisoned here and is said to have drowned attempting to escape; one of the modern ferries carries his name. This long history of banishing the defeated and the defiant is a direct ancestor of the island's later use as an apartheid prison.
The leper colony and the sick
Through the middle of the nineteenth century the island's purpose shifted toward confinement of a different kind. From the 1840s it was used as a place to isolate people the colony wished to remove from society — including those with leprosy, along with the chronically ill and people deemed mentally unwell. For decades it functioned as a leprosarium, and men, women and children diagnosed with leprosy were sent there, in many cases for the rest of their lives. The bleak graveyard and the small church you pass on the island tour date from this era. It is a sobering strand of the island's past that is easy to overlook beside the Mandela story, yet it belongs to the same long pattern: the island as a place to put those the mainland wanted forgotten.
The Church of the Good Shepherd
One of the most affecting survivals from the leprosy years is the small stone church on the island, built in the 1890s to serve the leper community and generally attributed to the celebrated Cape architect Herbert Baker. Modest and weathered, it stands as a rare tender note in a landscape defined by confinement — a reminder that people lived, worshipped and died here long before the famous prisoners arrived. The island tour typically passes it as part of the bus circuit, and it repays a moment's attention. Set against the wind and the sea, the little church quietly humanises a chapter of the island's history that had no political heroes, only ordinary people separated from their families by disease and the fears of their time.
Fortress in two world wars
The island's strategic position guarding the approaches to Table Bay made it valuable in wartime. During the Second World War in particular it was fortified as a coastal defence station, with gun batteries, observation posts and supporting buildings installed to help protect the vital sea route around the Cape of Good Hope. Personnel were stationed there, and for a time the island took on the character of a small military settlement rather than a place of exile. Concrete gun emplacements and other military remains from this period still stand and are pointed out on the tour. They add yet another layer to the island's identity — banishment, disease and now war — and help explain why the site feels like an accumulation of South Africa's whole difficult history rather than a single-purpose monument.
Reading the layers on your visit
Knowing this deeper past changes how the island tour feels. The bus circuit that precedes the prison walk moves through physical traces of each era — the graveyard and church of the leprosy years, the wartime batteries, the quarries — so that the maximum-security prison arrives as the latest chapter in a very long story rather than the whole story. Guides vary in how much of this earlier history they cover, so it is worth arriving already aware of it. Held together, the strands make a single point with unusual force: for more than three centuries, Robben Island was where a succession of powers sent the people they wished to remove. That the same island is now a monument to freedom is the deepest irony, and the deepest meaning, of a visit.