Robben Island

Abstract

On “Robben Island”: letters home from political prisoners on Robben Island to family in mainland South Africa were usually heavily censored and sometimes “lost”. The place Robben Island connected for me with the collection’s idea of “letters home” because of its peculiar exilic status vis‐à‐vis the country: geographically within and yet outside; a place of incarceration for so‐called social pariahs, of suffering for potential political messiahs. The stories of Robben Island were anathema to a minority; an emerging national theme to a majority. This story emerges out of such associations. It reflects, too, on the commodification of history—of ideas of struggle, freedom and even home—that goes along with the formation of a transnational tourist industry. Robben Island is already South Africa’s most popular tourist site. In years to come very few will remember that its apparently anonymous prison walls were once scored across with its inmates’ writing: their slogans, expletives, favourite quotations, mottoes, drawings.