ABSTRACT
Robben Island, the place where Nelson Mandela and his colleagues were imprisoned, is perhaps one of the best-known cultural heritage sites in the world today (Fig. 23.1). On 1 December 1999 at a meeting in Marrakesh, the island was inscribed as a World Heritage Site1 in recognition of its outstanding universal value to mankind, having already been designated as a national monument. Designation and inscription are only the beginning of a management process, however, which poses the dilemma of how best to conserve the place in a way which retains its significance and yet at the same time caters for the hundreds of thousands of people, both local and international, who want to visit. More imporantly, in the longer term, sites such as Robben Island may force us to re-examine traditional models of heritage management which have been developed in Europe.
