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.