Biography | Nelson Mandela — The Lime Quarry Yard on Robben Island

People treat Robben Island as a ferry stop and a photograph of a small cell. The work of the sentence was the quarry. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was received here on 13 June 1964 after the Rivonia trial. The island sits in Table Bay, thirty minutes by boat from the V&A Waterfront. Section B held the political prisoners. Cell 5 is the room usually shown. The lime quarry is the yard where the same men broke stone in the glare that damaged Mandela's eyes. The prison had been a leper colony and a naval station before it became a maximum-security island. Mandela left it on 31 March 1982 for Pollsmoor, then Victor Verster. He walked out of Victor Verster on 11 February 1990. The island was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1999. The pin is the prison precinct, not Qunu and not the Houghton house. Those addresses matter. This is the one that still has a jetty, a bus, and a guide who was often a former inmate. The quarry wall is the part of the sentence you can still stand in.