Robben Island

Robben Island

Author: Charlene Smith

Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa

Published: 2013-07-01

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1920545794

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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 Robben Island Shakespeare

The Robben Island Shakespeare

Author: Matthew Hahn

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-01-12

Total Pages: 81

ISBN-13: 1474283896

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During the Apartheid years in South Africa, a copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare was smuggled around the prison on Robben Island. The book's significance resides in the fact that the book's owner, Sonny Venkatratham, passed it to a number of his fellow political prisoners in the single cells, including Nelson Mandela, asking them to mark their favourite passages with a signature and date. Informally known as "the Robben Island Bible", numerous prisoners selected the speeches that meant the most to them and their experience as political prisoners. In 2008 and 2010, playwright and scholar Matthew Hahn conducted interviews with eight former political prisoners in South Africa. Offering a vivid and startling account of the experience of these political prisoners during Apartheid, this extraordinary verbatim play weaves Shakespeare's words together with first-hand accounts from these men. They offer their reflections on their time as Liberation activists and, twenty years later, on the costs, consequences and whether or not it was all worth it. The play is published alongside a preface by Sonny Venkatrathnam and an introduction by South African actor, director , playwright and cultural activist John Kani.


Robben Island

Robben Island

Author: Barbara Hutton

Publisher: Pearson South Africa

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 92

ISBN-13: 9780868774176

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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.


Voices from Robben Island

Voices from Robben Island

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13:

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Om fangeøen Robben Island ud for Cape Town i Sydafrika og nogle af dens politiske fanger, bl.a. Nelson Mandela og Sfiso Buthelezi, og deres fangevogtere


The Island

The Island

Author: Harriet Deacon

Publisher: New Africa Books

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9780864862990

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Robben Island is a low-lying outcrop of rock and sand guarding the entrance to South Africa's Table Bay. Although it is just a few kilometres long and a barely swimmable distance from Cape Town, it may well be the most significant historical site in South Africa today.


Long Walk to Freedom

Long Walk to Freedom

Author: Nelson Mandela

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2008-03-11

Total Pages: 598

ISBN-13: 0759521042

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"Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand history – and then go out and change it." –President Barack Obama Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. After his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela was at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's antiapartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is still revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality. Long Walk to Freedom is his moving and exhilarating autobiography, destined to take its place among the finest memoirs of history's greatest figures. Here for the first time, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela told the extraordinary story of his life -- an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph. The book that inspired the major motion picture Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.


More Than Just a Game

More Than Just a Game

Author: Chuck Korr

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2010-04-27

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 1429922761

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Timed perfectly for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, Chuck Korr and Marvin Close's More Than Just a Game tells the timeless true story of how political prisoners under apartheid found hope and dignity through soccer. In the hell that was Robben Island, inmates united courageously in an act of protest. Beginning in 1964, they requested the right to play soccer during their exercise periods. Denied repeatedly, they risked beatings and food deprivation by repeating their request for three years. Finally granted this right, the prisoners banded together to form a multi-tiered, pro-level league that ran for more than two decades and served as an impassioned symbol of resistance against apartheid. Former Robben Island inmate Nelson Mandela noted in the documentary FIFA: 90 Minutes for Mandela, "Soccer is more than just a game.... The energy, passion, and dedication this game created made us feel alive and triumphant despite the situation we found ourselves in."