Nelson Mandela did not serve his entire term on Robben Island
The name ‘Robben Island’ and ‘Nelson Mandela’ are as synonymous as Honest Abe and Gettysburg, but in fact, Mandela spent eighteen years in total on Robben Island, before he was moved back to the mainland and incarcerated at the Pollsmoor Prison in suburban Cape Town.
Eighteen years, however, was a grim sentence, made even more grim by the early animosity with which he and his fellow political prisoners were regarded. Robben Island had, since the founding of the Cape Colony in 1652, been a destination for troublesome natives, and it was the place of exile of a great many black leaders who led rebellions and uprisings against white rule. The island is an austere tract of hard land rising a few feet out of the South Atlantic, with the lights of Cape Town tantalizingly visible to the north. By Mandela’s time, the complex had evolved into a formal prison, and under the bleakest conditions Mandela and his generation of political leaders languished.
For the period of the 1960s and the 1970s, Prisoner 46664 passed his days in these depressing circumstances, but in 1982, he was moved to Pollsmoor, which was a great deal more comfortable than Robben island. There were many reasons for this move, but mostly it had to do with the fact that he had become such a high profile figure, and his continued incarceration such a hot political potato, that it became inevitable that he would one day be released. One can suppose that authorities wanted to promote better relations with him before he became a political force, although there was no appetite at that point to immediately release him.
Change came in many forms. The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s certainly played a part, but besides that, it was dawning on a new generation of white and black South Africans that the current state of things could not endure forever. By the time that Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison to greet the world as a free man, a clear understanding of how the future would look had already been establish.