The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

confirmed when it was the site where Mandela handed over “the flame of freedom” and
“the beacon of leadership” to an already installed president Mbeki in a carefully
choreographed, internationally televised millennium occasion. 225
Research by Fran Buntman has analysed the ways in which heritage presentations on
Robben Island have reflected a process of “Mandelaisation”, by which the history and
experience of political imprisonment in South Africa came to be understood in terms of
the image of Nelson Mandela. 226 Former Robben Island researcher, Noel Solani, who
conducted extensive interviews with ex‐political prisoners for RIM, examined the various
“mythical” images that had emerged about Nelson Mandela and his period of
imprisonment on Robben Island. For example, Solani has pointed to a number of ways in
which Mandela’s record on the Island was not that of a forgiver, reconciler or
conciliator. 227 These analyses have been important in drawing attention to the ways in
which images of heroism, leadership and reconciliation were constructed of Nelson
Mandela.
It is the research on prison memory that Noel Solani did with his colleagues, when he was
a researcher at RIM, that led to the launch of a significant exhibition in A‐Section that
broke new ground in Robben Island’s cultural economy, taking some attention away from
the Mandela experience. Called Cell Stories Exhibition and Archive, this exhibition was
innovative in the ways in which prison cells were turned into multimedia memory spaces,
which served to connect personal prison mementoes, on loan to the Museum, to prisoner
oral histories. It was coupled to a working oral history archive, based in the old A‐Section
prison library and intended to enable visitors to engage the exhibition at different levels of
complexity. Perhaps the most important feature of this exhibition was that it deliberately
225 Jyoti Mistry, ‘Trafficking Politics in Cultural Guise: South Africa’s Coverage of Millenium 2000’, in
A Bove (ed), Questionable Returns (Vienna: I.W.M. Junior Visiting Fellows Conferences, Vol. 12, 2002).
226 Fran Buntman, ‘Politics and Secrets of Political Prisoner History’, Biennial Conference of the South
African Historical Society, “Not Telling: Secrecy, Lies and History”, UWC, 11‐14 July 1999.
227 Noel Solani, ‘The Saint of the Struggle: Deconstructing the Mandela Myth’, Kronos, No 26, August
2000.
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