This composition is edited from The discussion under a Creative Commons license. Read the original composition, which was published September 22, 2021.South Africa’s Robben Island Museum is an institution limping through a epidemic, and counted down by its comber coaster history.
In our lately launched book, Robben Island Rainbow Dreams, we collude out the timber and breaking of an institution, with hard assignments and trueness about the early times. We hope our perceptivity can be some use to the future of the gallery. And more astronomically to the country.
For nearly the entire span of 342 times of social subjection in South Africa, including the 46 times of formal intolerance, the islet was a place of expulsion, exile, imprisonment and pain. It came given for its institutional brutality. A hell hole, like other notorious captivity islets similar as Senegal’s slave islet of Gorée.
At its height as a political captivity in the 1980s Oliver Tambo, who guided the ANC through the 30 times of its exile, reflected that
t} he tragedy of Africa, in ethnical and political terms,{ was} concentrated in the southern tip of the mainland – in South Africa, Namibia, and, in a special sense, Robben Island.
Great literal numbers have been banished to the islet through the centuries. They include Autshumato and Krotoa, the first indigenous Africans to be banished to, and locked on, Robben Island. In a veritably deep sense, Autshumato represents the first “ symbol of the endlessness ” of the expulsion and imprisonment of the African freedom fighter in the struggle for freedom and emancipation.
During British colonisation political captures included a long list of lights similar as Langalibalele, king of the amaHlubi in KwaZulu- Natal.
Among the islet’s more recent prestigious captures of the intolerance period were, to name a many, Mangaliso Robert Sobukwe, Dikgang Moseneke, Jacob Zuma, Nelson Mandela and Raymond Mhlaba. Namibian political captures included Helao Shityuwete and Andimba Toivo ja Toivo.
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The Robben Island Museum was started in the early 1990s as South Africa achieved political freedom and was setting out to resuscitate itself. It was a largely emblematic part of the formerly– by– generation process of public revitalization.
The first popular government decided that the islet should be developed as a place of memory, literacy and mending.
landing the spirit of the times, in the words of Ahmed Kathrada, politician andanti-apartheid activist who was locked on the islet, it was meant to represent
the triumph of the mortal spirit against the forces of wrong; a triumph of freedom and mortal quality over suppression and demotion; a triumph of wisdom and substantiality of spirit against small minds and insignificancy
Opening the gallery in September 1997, Nelson Mandela said in the colonizer and intolerance history,
utmost people had little or no say-so in the definition of their history in handbooks, libraries, or exploration institutions Our galleries and the heritage sector as a total are being restructured.
The gallery would ever remind South Africans that
moment’s concinnity is a triumph over history’s division and conflict.
In short, Robben Island Museum aspired to be part of the reconstruction and development of the public soul.
One of the purposes of this book is to contribute to a inadequately developed institutional memory of the Robben Island Museum, and to give an occasion for black heritage workers and intellectualists to be published and to have their different voices heard.
The morning
There were no black directors in South African galleries when the Robben Island Museum was being conceived. The part of the disenfranchised had been to be laboratory sidekicks, cleansers, security guard and the odd education officer.
The Robben Island Museum changed all that in terms of leadership, staff, operations, vision and hookups.
It was a formerly in a continuance experience. And a complex task. It involved running a 575- hectare piece of land in the middle of Table Bay – an area larger than the megacity centre of Cape city – and trying to open up and revise a place of expulsion and pain, with its centuries-old,multi-layered history.
No bone who was present will forget those first seminal moments. When we uncorked and threw open the captivity doors on 1 January 1997, Day One. Or when Nelson Mandela ate in the new renaissance with a candle in his cell.
In Rainbow Dreams, 22 of those who helped set up the first heritage institution after republic convey commodity of what it meant to make a new kind of gallery. They tell of the attempt to produce an innovative literacy institution and terrain. They used multiple voices, new kinds of programming, capacity structure, salutary business models and a participated vision of the triumph of the mortal spirit.
Seeking to immortalize the islet’s heritage of being “ The University ” of the struggle, the Robben Island Museum encouraged reflective knowledge, robust debates and contestations. One of its four core essentialities was to be a place of critical debate and lifelong literacy.
After five times the new gallery began to crop as a distinct point of the heritage and artistic geography in a country in transition. There had been some major achievements that put it on a platform for unborn growth. These included UNESCO World Heritage Site status and the transporting of one million callers to the islet.
In addition, the Robben Island Heritage Training Programme had been launched in tandem with original universities to prepare unborn heritage leaders. Andex-political captures had been hypercritically engaged with through the Robben Island Memories Project.
But could the dream continue in such a heady way? nearly inescapably the answer was no.
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Division and conflict set in. In 2002 there was a major rupture at the gallery. This led to the abdication of the director and steered in a period of organisational insecurity which changed the direction and character of the gallery.
Shady office break– sways, home burglaries, telephone tapping, the indecorous use of information from stolen computers all came part of apparently ‘ high road ’ attempts to save the islet from corruption and mismanagement.
The institution came paralysed by poisonous politics and schemes with private marketable interests setting out to change a operation that refused to do their bidding. The Robben Island Museum, we argue, came a airman case for state prisoner.
In a chapter on “ Curious concurrence ” connections are set up with the corruption and abuse of state institutions that surfaced a decade latterly.
guarding institutions
The Robben Island Museum’s current vulnerability is part of a bigger extremity facing institutions and the delivery of introductory services in South Africa. As in broader society, destructive geste and interventions – and binary authority systems – came part of the pattern of how effects were run.
Compounding the problems at the gallery have been long detainments in the appointment of councils and endless elderly functional staff, performing in leadership vacuums.
The case of Robben Island Museum has proved the validity of the saying that it takes a generation to make an institution and five twinkles to break it down and that, once the damage has been done, it takes further than a many organograms and some fresh faces to rebuild what has been broken.
The unfulfilled charge of Robben Island Museum invites us to go back to the fancies that led to its conformation, this time admitting the changed environment, and engaging with a new generation of imaginations, ideas, conduct, commitment and languages.
Acknowledgements to Noel Solani( Director of the Ditsong Museum of Cultural History in Pretoria) and Khwezi ka Mpumlwana( Director of Zenalia Consulting andco-founder of the Liberation Heritage Route action, which led to the first periodical nomination of emancipation heritage property for UNESCO’s World Heritage List), areco-editors of Robben Island Rainbow Dreams. All the editors worked at RIM in its early times, with Andre Odendaal being the first director.
Written by Neo Lekgotla laga Ramoupi, Senior Lecturer & Head of History in the School of Education, University of the Witwatersrand, and Andre Odendaal, pen in hearthstone at the Centre for Humanities Research and Honorary Professor in History and Heritage Studies, University of the Western Cape.
