Robben Island Museum
Robben (or “Seal”) Island, eleven kilometers from Cape Town’s refurbished Victoria and Albert Waterfront, in perennially cold and often turbulent Table Bay, is internationally known as the island fortress that held Nelson Mandela during twenty out of the twenty-seven years he spent as a political prisoner of the apartheid state. In 1996 the island was converted into a national monument that highlights the imprisonment of leading members of the African National Congress (ANC), including Nelson Mandela and others who received life sentences for “sabotage” in the early 1960s. In the main museum building, which was the maximum-security prison built of island granite by the prisoners themselves, images and narratives of Mandela and other senior ANC members guide the visitor. The concession shop on the mainland wharf, managed by the warder Mandela called Warrant Officer Brand (one of three former warders invited to Mandela’s inauguration), also sells ANC and Mandela memorabilia (T-shirts and hats as well as postcards and posters of party slogans) and numerous published accounts by and about the best-known prisoners as well as more wide-ranging documentation of the island’s colonial and postcolonial history. Drawn from the Mayibuye Centre and ANC archive at the University of the Western Cape, these images and period posters hail the leaders and protest against the Treason Trials of the 1950s and the Rivonia Trial of 1962—trials that culminated in life sentences for Mandela and his comrades Govan Mbeki (father of the current president, Thabo Mbeki), Ahmed Kathrada, and others. These images and posters are strategically placed at the entrance to Section B (which contained the single cells reserved for ANC leaders), in the “smuggled camera” photographic exhibit in Section D, and in the yard once used for crushing stone as well as for more conventional exercise.
End of Excerpt | Access Full Version