Robben Island and the Cell That Changed a Country

Robben Island and the Cell That Changed a Country

Robben Island held Nelson Mandela for 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment in a cell measuring 2.4 by 2.1 meters. Tours are led by former political prisoners. Standing in the doorway while a guide who was imprisoned in the next cell tells you what the days were like produces a feeling no museum can replicate.

The island is evidence that moral imagination can survive physical confinement, and that a prison can produce a president.