Sedick Isaacs was a prisoner of conscience on Robben Island where Nelson Mandela spent m18 years. This is another perspective of another section of the prison through the eyes of a scientist.

Sedick Isaacs was a prisoner of conscience on Robben Island where Nelson Mandela spent m18 years. This is another perspective of another section of the prison through the eyes of a scientist.

Table of contents

Robben Island – best known as the place where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for eighteen years – has been a place of harshness and brutality; its history steeped in the suffering of those banished there. Yet it has also become a universal symbol of hope, forgiveness, and triumph. With a storyteller’s sensibility, combined with rigorous research, Charlene Smith charts the evolution of the Island’s political and social history, from mail station, place of exile, and military defence post to maximum security prison and World Heritage Site. Fully revised, this new edition of Robben Island provides absorbing accounts of daring escapes, maritime disasters, lepers ostracized from mainland society, the fates of the great Xhosa chiefs of the nineteenth century, and the unique bonds of friendship and compassion forged among the political prisoners confined on the Island during the apartheid era. Today Robben Island is recognised for both its environmental riches and its cultural significance. More than just a geographical location or a tourist attraction, it is an enduring tribute to the resilience` of the human spirit. Sobering and uplifting, Robben Island is an essential read for anyone interested in South Africa’s turbulent journey to democracy and the people who made it possible.

The island starts slowly moving back; the reverberations in the boat increase; the engine noise gets louder, and we feel the prison dock being torn from us. We are standing, silent, each at his own porthole, having our last look at what has been our home for ten years. There is a strange optical effect: the Island seems to get bigger as we get further from it. First we see only the little dock, then the rocks and bushes at either side and, finally, the whole expanding coastline, a complete island; a green and picturesque stretch of land in the ocean, the harsh monotony of its internal life totally hidden by its outer physical beauty ... Goodbye, Robben Island, may we never see you again, may all who live on your be liberated, may you go to hell, may you sink into the sea and become part of the bitter memories of the past, our past, of the past of apartheid. In 2001, Island in Chains was the runner-up for the prestigious Alan Paton Non-Fiction Prize.

This text tells the story of Robben Island. For more than four centuries it has been a place of banishment, exile and imprisonment but, since the 1960s, it has become an international symbol of the brutality of apartheid on one hand and of human dignity on the other.