Mandela - teacher to his jailmates, 'father' to his jailers

ROBBEN ISLAND, South Africa (Reuters) - Apartheid-era South Africa's most feared prison, Robben Island, remains inextricably linked with Nelson Mandela, its most famous inmate who spent decades of hard labour educating his comrades and charming even his granite-hearted jailers.

Now a museum and popular tourist attraction, the windswept lump of rock in shark-infested waters off Cape Town kept black agitators in isolation for three decades until president F.W. de Klerk began dismantling white-minority rule in 1990.