Cape Town’s Robben Island Museum is a powerful reminder of South Africa’s apartheid regime. But its future is less than certain, write Neo Lekgotla Laga Ramoupi and Andre Odendaal.
South Africa’s Robben Island Museum is an institution limping through a pandemic, and weighed down by its roller coaster history.
In our recently launched book, Robben Island Rainbow Dreams, we map out the making and breaking of an institution, with hard lessons and truths about the early years. We hope our insights can be some use to the future of the museum. And more broadly to the country.
For almost the entire span of 342 years of colonial conquest in South Africa, including the 46 years of formal apartheid, the island was a place of banishment, exile, imprisonment and pain. It became known for its institutional brutality. A hell hole, like other notorious prison islands such as Senegal’s slave island of Gorée... Keep reading on The Conversation.
South Africa’s Robben Island Museum is an institution limping through a pandemic, and weighed down by its roller coaster history.
In our recently launched book, Robben Island Rainbow Dreams, we map out the making and breaking of an institution, with hard lessons and truths about the early years. We hope our insights can be some use to the future of the museum. And more broadly to the country.
For almost the entire span of 342 years of colonial conquest in South Africa, including the 46 years of formal apartheid, the island was a place of banishment, exile, imprisonment and pain. It became known for its institutional brutality. A hell hole, like other notorious prison islands such as Senegal’s slave island of Gorée... Keep reading on The Conversation.