ABSTRACT
Robben Island, probably best known as Nelson Mandela’s prison between 1964 and 1982, has played a key role in South African history. Since the sixteenth century, it has been used as a place of exclusion: variously for political dissidents, criminals, people and animals under quarantine, sex-workers, ‘lunatics’, ‘lepers’, and black and female military trainees. While the historical construction of the space has been deeply exclusionary, after the democratic transition of 1994 the Island has been reinterpreted in the official imagination as a site of nation-building and a symbol of national reconciliation. Always a geographically marginal and isolated site, Robben Island has operated as a symbolic container within which the contradictions 1 inherent in the development of a mainland identity have been played out.
