The Dark Years for world:

 The Dark Years for world: Robben Island 

when Nelson Mandela was asked how his 27 years in prison, most of them  on Robben Island, had affected him, his  answer was unexpected. “I came out mature,” he said.

Mandela disappeared from the world with the reputation of a charismatic but often  boastful lawyer, a keen boxer and ladies’ man who did not have the temperament to remain undetected for long when he went underground. He returned a dignified old man who had won the respect of his captors, so much so that they were anxious to negotiate the hand-over of power to him. Thanks to Mandela’s imprisonment there, Robben Island is now a World Heritage Site, but when visitors see the conditions in which he was held, few find it easy to imagine how he retained his sanity, let alone triumphed over his oppression.

Journeying to Robben Island was like going to another country,” Mandela wrote in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. “Its isolation made it not simply another prison, but a world of its own.” He first saw it in May 1963, having been sentenced the previous October to five years for sabotage.