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The Robben Island Museum in South Africa is an institution that limps despite a pandemic and weighed down by its roller coaster history.
In our book, Robben Island Rainbow Dreams, we describe the creation and breakdown of an institution, with difficult lessons and truths about the early years. We hope that our ideas can be useful for the future of the museum. And more widely in the country.
For most of South Africa’s 342-year period of colonial conquest, including 46 years of formal apartheid, the island has been a place of banishment, exile, imprisonment, and pain. He became known for his institutional brutality. A hellish hole, like other notorious prison islands like the Senegalese slave island of Gorée.
In his heyday as a political prison in the 1980s, Oliver Tambo, who guided the ANC through the 30 years of his exile, said that
{l} Africa’s tragedy, in racial and political terms, {was} concentrated in the southern tip of the continent – in South Africa, Namibia and, in a particular sense, on Robben Island.
Great historical figures have been banished from the island over the centuries. They include Autshumato and Krotoa, the first native Africans to be banished and imprisoned on Robben Island. In a very deep sense, Autshumato represents the first “symbol of timelessness” of the banishment and imprisonment of the African freedom fighter in the struggle for freedom and liberation. Top Red / Lynne Rienner Editors
During British colonization, political prisoners included a long list of notables such as Langalibalele, King of the Hlubi in KwaZulu-Natal.
Among the most recent prominent prisoners on the apartheid-era island were, to name a few, Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe, Dikgang Moseneke, Jacob Zuma, Nelson Mandela and Raymond Mhlaba. Namibian political prisoners included Helao Shityuwete and Andimba Toivo ja Toivo.
The Robben Island Museum was established in the early 90s as South Africa achieved political freedom and reinvented itself. It was a highly symbolic part of the unique process of national rebirth.
The first democratic government decided that the island should be developed as a place of memory, learning and healing.
Capturing the zeitgeist, in the words of Ahmed Kathrada, politician and anti-apartheid activist imprisoned on the island, he was supposed to represent
the triumph of the human spirit over the forces of evil; a triumph of freedom and human dignity over repression and humiliation; a triumph of wisdom and greatness of mind over petty minds and pettiness …
Opening the museum in September 1997, Nelson Mandela said in the colonial and apartheid past,
most people had little or no say in the description of their history in textbooks, libraries or research institutes… Our museums and the heritage sector as a whole are being restructured.
The museum would forever remind South Africans that
the unity of today is a triumph over the division and conflict of yesterday.
In short, the Robben Island Museum aspired to be part of the reconstruction and development of the national soul. Nelson Mandela’s cell on Robben Island. Avalon Group / Universal Images via Getty Images
One of the aims of this book is to contribute to the undeveloped institutional memory of the Robben Island Museum and to provide an opportunity for black heritage workers and intellectuals to be published and have their diverse voices heard.
The beginning
There were no black directors in South African museums when the Robben Island Museum was designed. The role of disenfranchised people was to be laboratory assistants, cleaners, security guards, and one or another education agent.
The Robben Island Museum changed all that in terms of leadership, people, operations, vision and partnerships.
It was a once in a lifetime experience. And a complex task. It was about managing a 575 hectare plot in the middle of Table Bay – an area larger than downtown Cape Town – and trying to open up and reimagine a place of banishment and pain, with its multiple layered story.
No one who was present will forget those first defining moments. When we unlocked and opened the prison doors on January 1, 1997, the first day. Or when Nelson Mandela greeted the new millennium with a candle in his cell.
In Rainbow Dreams, 22 of those who helped set up the first heritage institution after democracy convey something of what it meant to build a new kind of museum. They tell about the attempt to create an innovative institution and learning environment. They used multiple voices, new types of programming, capacity building, beneficial business models and a shared vision for the triumph of the human spirit.
Seeking to carry on the island’s legacy of being the “university” of wrestling, the Robben Island Museum has encouraged thoughtful knowledge, debate and solid contestation. One of its four main essences was to be a place of critical debate and lifelong learning.
After five years, the new museum began to emerge as a distinct feature of the heritage and cultural landscape of a country in transition. There had been some major accomplishments that put it on a platform for future growth. These included UNESCO World Heritage Site status and transporting a million visitors to the island.
In addition, the Robben Island Heritage Training Program had been launched in tandem with local universities to prepare future heritage leaders. And the ex-political prisoners had been respectfully hired as part of the Robben Island Memories Project.
But could the dream continue in such an exhilarating way? Almost inevitably, the answer was no.
Division and conflict set in. In 2002, there was a major rupture at the museum. This led to the resignation of the director and ushered in a period of organizational instability that changed the focus and character of the museum.
Shady office break-ins, home burglaries, wiretapping, misuse of information from stolen computers have all become supposedly “high-profile” attempts to save the island from corruption and corruption. mismanagement.
The institution became crippled by toxic politics and intrigues with private business interests aimed at changing a leadership that refused to comply. The Robben Island Museum, we argue, has become a pilot case for the capture of the state.
In a chapter on “Curious Coincidences,” links are found to the corruption and abuses of state institutions that emerged a decade later.
Protect institutions
The current vulnerability of the Robben Island Museum is part of a larger crisis facing basic institutions and service delivery in South Africa. As in society in general, destructive behaviors and interventions – and dual authority systems – have become part of the way things work.
Long delays in appointing the museum’s boards and permanent senior managers compounded the museum’s problems, resulting in leadership gaps.
The case of the Robben Island Museum proved the validity of the saying that it takes a generation to build an institution and five minutes to tear it down, and once the damage is done it takes more than a few flowcharts and a few new faces. to rebuild what has been broken.
The unfinished mission of the Robben Island Museum invites us to revisit the visions that led to its formation, this time recognizing the change of context and engaging with a new generation of imaginations, ideas, actions , loyalties and languages.
Thanks to Noel Solani (Director of the Ditsong Cultural History Museum in Pretoria) and Khwezi ka Mpumlwana (Director of Zenalia Consulting and co-founder of the Liberation Heritage Route initiative, which led to the first nomination in series of a heritage property release for UNESCO Heritage List), are co-editors of Robben Island Rainbow Dreams. All the editors worked at RIM in its early days, Andre Odendaal being the first manager.
Neo Lekgotla laga Ramoupi is chairman of the transformation committee of the Wits School of Education. He is a member of the advisory board of America’s Voices Against Apartheid.
Andre Odendaal has received support from the Bertha Foundation for his research. The book, Robben Island Rainbow Dreams, was funded by a grant from the National Institute for the History of Social Sciences.
By Neo Lekgotla laga Ramoupi, Senior Lecturer and Director of History at the School of Education of the University of the Witwatersrand and
Andre Odendaal, Writer-in-Residence Center for Humanities Research and Honorary Professor of History and Heritage Studies, University of the Western Cape
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