The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

that the event and campaign carried the stamp of Mandela’s “moral stature”. 276 The NMF
gave its support for the naming of a new Johannesburg bridge after Mandela, as a means
of honouring him and identifying it as a “bridge of unity”. 277 It also gave permission for
Sandton Square at the wealthy, suburban Sandton City shopping mall to be renamed
Nelson Mandela Square. This renaming and the unveiling of a “specially donated 6‐metre
tall bronze statue” of a jiving Madiba enabled a “meaningful focus” to be added to a
“meeting place” of shops, theatres, restaurants and cafés, so that the mall could “celebrate
the future” while “saluting the past”. In exchange for Mandela’s aura, the NMF acquired a
shopfront facility on the square for the sale of 46664 concert CDs and other Mandela‐
related products. 278
While the work of the NMF seemed to involve the brand management and deployment of
Mandela’s name and image and the regulation of the reproduction and sale of Mandela
images, there is no doubt that it also took on the responsibilities of biographic
maintenance and narrative custodianship as part of “living the legacy”. This ensured that
philanthropy and biography were brought together into a single cultural economy. The
NMF engaged a prominent news photographer, Bennie Gool, to document Mandela’s
ongoing public activities as a means of ensuring the creation of a vivid, official,
documentary record. It took responsibility to ensure that Mandela’s interests were
represented on the Councils of the Nelson Mandela Museum (where the Mandela family
had four council seats out of thirteen) and the Robben Island Museum. In this regard,
Mandela’s fellow Rivonia trialist and Robben Islander, Ahmed Kathrada, who was the
chair of the Robben Island Museum council, was also deployed as one of the four Mandela
276 Jo‐Anne Smetherham, ‘Aids: world goes to war – Mandela leads the charge’, Cape Times, 1
December 2003. Mandela’s real Robben Island prison number was 466/64, but a source in the Robben
Island Museum management intimated that the dropping of the slash served not only to turn the
number into a chantable concert sound byte; this avoided any intellectual property concerns.
277 Pat Hopkins, ‘Bridge of Unity’, Sawubona, August 2003.
278 Cape Argus, 6 May 2004; ‘Nelson Mandela Square at Sandton City: Celebrating the Future’
(Advertisement), Mail and Guardian, 30 April – 6 May 2004.
287