President Obama's emotional visit to hero Mandela's prison island

  More pictures below

 

Barack Obama told how he was "deeply humbled", after the US President and his family visited Robben Island prison - where Nelson Mandela spent nearly two decades under South Africa's apartheid regime.

He wrote in a guest book: "On behalf of our family, we're deeply humbled to stand where men of such courage faced down injustice and refused to yield.
"The world is grateful for the heroes of Robben Island, who remind us that no shackles or cells can match the strength of the human spirit."

The President, wife Michelle and daughters Sasha and Malia were shown around by politician Ahmed Kathrada - himself a former inmate alongside the legendary civil rights leader.

They visited the damp, cramped cell where Mandela, 94, spent 18 of his 27 years under lock and key - and which he blamed for the chronic lung problems which have dogged him ever since. The jail - with its high barbed wire fences and forbidding watchtowers - became a museum in 1997, in tribute to all those who were forced to endure its brutal conditions and years of hard labour in a nearby lime quarry.
It was the second time Mr Obama has visited the Island following a 2006 trip as a senator.

But he said: "For me to be able to bring my daughters there and teach them the history of that place and this country ... that's a great privilege and a great honour."
He went on to deliver a keynote address at the University of Cape Town, as the US leader prepared to travel north east to Tanzania on the next stage of his African visit.

Hero Mandela remains critically ill in hospital in Pretoria - 19 years after he was elected South Africa's first black President, in 1994.
On Sunday, two church groups sang hymns outside Pretoria's Medi-Clinic Heart Hospital, as veterans from Umkhonto we Sizwe - the ANC's armed wing Mandela set up to combat South Africa's racist government - arrived with a portrait of their former leader in military uniform.