The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

implicit acknowledgement of the need for debate and contestation over the historical
meaning of political imprisonment for South Africa’s public history.
Almost as soon as Cell Stories was created as an exhibition, the power of its heritage
interpretations were undermined by the demands of commerce, as the contracted ferry
company prevented any plan of a longer, more contemplative island visit. While the ethos
of Cell Stories lived on in RIM’s ongoing prison memories project, 229 the theming of the
Robben Island experience around Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment was deepened with
the opening in December 2001 of the Nelson Mandela Gateway to Robben Island.
Mandela’s name became a brand through which the exhibitions in RIM’s mainland facility
would turn the Island visitor into a pilgrim before the ferry trip began. It was also hoped
that the Gateway would “in a physical way” put “the signature of Mandela and
democracy on to the urban face of Cape Town”. 230
Moreover, RIM’s early phase of being a new kind of museum without tangible, moveable
collections, and whose heritage strengths would lie in ongoing interpretation of intangible
memory and historic sites, ended when it acquired the collections of the Mayibuye Centre
on 99‐year lease from UWC after three years of negotiations. “At last we are a real
museum with real collections”, declared RIM director, André Odendaal, as the collections
of the newly named UWC‐Robben Island Mayibuye Archives were taken into the
Gateway’s exhibition. The acquisition by RIM of the Mayibuye Archive ensured that it
was the culminating point of a genealogy of resistance memory mediation and
information “counter‐offensive” work that had begun in the late 1950s in the Treason Trial
Defence Fund, that was continued in exile in IDAF from the 1960s, and which was taken
up in times of return and cultural rebuilding by the Mayibuye Centre in the early 1990s. 231
By 2003, with contests between the work of heritage interpretation and tourist commerce
229 Cell Stories lived on in a 2002 RIM Calendar, which explained the Museum’s plans to turn its Robben
Island Memories Project research into a “virtual memorial”. See 2002 RIM Calendar, produced by
Printing Concepts/Free Spirits and the Publications Unit of RIM’s Marketing Department.
230 Robben Island Museum Annual Report, 2001‐2002; ‘The Nelson Mandela Gateway to Robben Island’
(Brochure, RIM, 2001); RIM Director, André Odendaal, in Ilifa labantu, Vol. 6, No. 1, June 2002, p 2.
231 UWC‐Robben Island Mayibuye Archives: A Guide to the Collections of the Robben Island Museum (Booklet,
RIM, 2001), p 23.
271