THE former leper colony, military base and political prison, Robben Island, is becoming an unofficial monument to the spirit of resistance and freedom.
Yesterday, on the second day of state visit to South Africa, the President, Mrs Robinson, made her own pilgrimage to the sandy, scrubby islet in Table Bay, where Nelson Mandela spent 18 years in strict and arduous conditions.
The President and her party were shown around the prison by Mr Ahmed Kathrada, a senior African National Congress member, who was among the small group of prisoners confined with Mr Mandela.
Mr Kathrada recounted with no trace of anger and occasional flashes of humour how the apartheid regime had set out to break the resistance of the ANC prisoners from the moment they came on to the island in 1964.
He showed Mrs Robinson the 7ft by 6ft cell where Mr Mandela had spent 18 years, most of them without even a bed. He spoke of the deprivation, humiliation and censorship with which the government had tried to demoralise them.
Afterwards the group travelled to the island's lime quarry, where the ANC leaders had been put to work crushing rock.
Standing with the President in the white dust, Mr Kathrada described the hardship of the task and the ruses they had used to avoid it. As he spoke the sun came out for a moment from behind the clouds and the heat began beating off the white quarry walls, a hint of how hellish the place must have been for those set to work there.
Thanking Mr Kathrada, Mrs Robinson said she was struck by the lack of bitterness shown by him and his fellow graduates of Robben Island.
"More than anything else I think I admire the spirit and the way they decided amongst themselves that this was not going to beat them, that they were not going to accept the breaking of their minds that this was designed to achieve," she said.
Earlier in the day Mrs Robinson began her official programme with visit to the headquarters of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which will shortly begin its task of investigating apartheid era political crimes.
The visit began with a private discussion with the Commission chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who then presented her to the other members of the 17 strong commission.
The President told them that as a patron of victim support in Ireland she understood the need to know and to have recognition and respect for trauma.
"I will be following it very closely," she said. "This has a bearing on other countries, as you know, including Ireland and northern Ireland."
The President's party then travelled on foot from the Commission's offices on Adderley Street to the nearby Anglican cathedral of St George's. Here the President was presented to a number of homelessness workers including Father Declan Collins, an Irish Salesian priest working with the organisation, Co ordinated Action for Street People.
In the evening Mrs Robinson and her party flew on to St Gabriel's Catholic Church in the black township of Guguletu, where she was greeted by an enthusiastic crowd of parishioners with a choir and a marimba band.
Mrs Robinson's party includes her husband, Mr Nick Robinson, and the Minister of State at the Department of Defence, Mr Jim Higgins.
Her official escort is the ANC's minister for water affairs, Prof Kader Asmal, her former law teacher in Trinity College Dublin.