They also created soccer teams, rugby teams, and a makeshift prison Olympics with sack races and egg races. Robben Island's history of despair began more than three centuries ago, long before apartheid. Over the years, the various rulers of nearby Cape Town the Dutch, the British, white South Africans banished what they considered their human refuse to the 1,250-acre island only four miles offshore. It has held a leper colony, a lunatic asylum, a hospital for the chronically ill and, intermittently, a prison for undesirable political agitators. Its isolation made it not simply another prison but a world of its own.
Tourists then take a bus ride around the island.
They visit the quarries where Mandela and other political prisoners mined lime and damaged their eyes in the harsh sun that reflected off the white rock. They tour the compound that in the 1960s held Robert Sobukwe, the leader of the Pan Africanist Congress and an activist so feared by the government he was forced to live alone in a house separated from the prison. They see the bucolic coastline, covered by flocks of the African penguins who still live in peace on the coast. Then the tour heads to the whitewashed walls of the high security prison, the museum to oppression that draws most people to the island. Tourists are shown few displays beyond Mandela's tiny cell and a row of cells holding objects from life here chosen by former prisoners.