Robben Island Research Articles

Sedimentological evidence for seiching in a swell-dominated headland-bay system: Table Bay, Western Cape, South Africa

Table Bay, South Africa, is a typical headland-bay system with a shoreline that can be described by a logarithmic spiral. A peculiarity and unique feature of Table Bay is the juxtaposition of Robben Island opposite its headland. As a consequence, the bathymetry defines an ellipsoidal basin which was postulated to potentially resonate in the form of long-period standing waves (seiches). One aim of this study, therefore, was to investigate whether any evidence for such resonant oscillations could be detected in the geomorphology and sediment distribution patterns. Indeed, the ellipsoidal shape of the basin can be framed by two converging log-spirals with their centres located opposite each other, one off Robben Island and the other on the Cape Town side of the bay. The so-called apex line, which divides the two spirals into equal parts is aligned SW–NE, i.e. more or less parallel to the direction of ocean wave propagation. The distribution patterns of all sedimentary parameters were found to be characterised by a strikingly similar trend to either side of the apex line. This supports the hypothesis that the basin of Table Bay appears to resonate in the form of a mode 1 standing wave, with the node positioned above the apex line in the centre of the bay. The maximum period of such a standing wave was calculated to be around 37 min. The study demonstrates that large-scale sediment distribution patterns can reveal the existence of specific hydrodynamic processes in coastal embayments. It is recommended that this phenomenon be investigated in greater detail aimed at verifying the existence of resonant oscillations in Table Bay and, in the event, at establishing its precise nature and trigger mechanism.

Jafta Masemola’s Master Key

Jafta Kgalabi Masemola is the longest serving (1963–1989) anti-apartheid political prisoner in South Africa’s notorious Robben Island. Although Masemola is well known in the struggle narratives, not much has been written about him and his practices as a political organiser beyond biographical and anecdotal narratives. This article considers, with a certain degree of detail, an even more unthought aspect of Masemola’s life, his creative productions; in particular, the aesthetic logic that underwrites the master key that he cloned from a bar of soap while jailed in Robben Island. Looking from the vantage point of aesthetic and critical discourse, the article attempts to open up new vistas and interests in Azanian cultural praxis.

Urofaecal glucocorticoid metabolite concentrations in African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) chick populations experiencing different levels of human disturbance.

Despite the importance of ecotourism in species conservation, little is known about the industry’s effects on wildlife. In South Africa, some African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) colonies have become tourist attractions. The species is globally endangered, with population sizes decreasing over the past 40 years. As African penguin chicks are altricial and unable to move away from anthropogenic stressors, it is important to evaluate the effect of tourist activities on baseline glucocorticoid levels as a measure of potential disturbance. Chicks at three study sites within two breeding colonies (Robben Island, Stony Point), with varying levels of exposure to tourism (low/moderate/high) were monitored. Urofaecal samples were collected to determine urofaecal glucocorticoid metabolite (ufGCM) concentrations as an indication of baseline stress physiology. Morphometric measurements were taken to compare body condition between sites. Penguin chicks experiencing low, infrequent human presence had significantly higher mean (± standard deviation) ufGCM levels [1.34 ± 1.70 μg/g dry weight (DW)] compared to chicks experiencing both medium (0.50 ± 0.40 μg/g DW, P = 0.001) and high levels of human presence (0.57 ± 0.47 μg/g DW, P = 0.003). There was no difference in chick body condition across sites. These results suggest that exposure to frequent human activity may induce habituation/desensitization in African penguin chicks. Acute, infrequent human presence was likely an important driver for comparatively higher ufGCM levels in chicks, though several other environmental stressors may also play an important role in driving adrenocortical activity. Nevertheless, as unhabituated chicks experiencing infrequent anthropogenic presence showed significantly higher ufGCM levels, managers and legislation should attempt to minimize all forms of activity around important breeding colonies that are not already exposed to regular tourism. Although the results of this study are crucial for developing enhanced conservation and management protocols, additional research on the long-term effect of anthropogenic activities on African penguin physiology is required.

Rising sea level and its implications on coastal tourism development in Cape Town, South Africa

While there is agreement among tourism role-players on tourism's potential to contribute to socio-economic and environmental development, the industry is under severe threat from the increased impact of climate variability and change. This study examines the implications of rising sea level on coastal tourism in Cape Town, South Africa. Making use of mean sea level data from permanent sea level markers, remote sensing and field observations, supported by key informant interviews, the study found that coastal tourism is under threat from rising sea level. Current and projected rising sea level, as well as other extreme weather events such as the increased storm intensity trigger massive waves and tides that result in storm surges, which overtop and encroach into the land surface area. At least 80% of the city's 2019/2020 Blue Flag beaches are now under threat from rising sea level and coastal erosion. The study also found that some of the iconic tourist attractions such as the Cape Point, V&A Waterfront, Robben Island and several beaches along the False Bay area are under the same threat. Other tourism facilities under threat of weather extremes from climate change include servitudes, coastal roads, railway facilities and tidal pools: all threatening the attractiveness of some resorts. Management implicationsRising sea level is a huge challenge that requires innovative solutions for the city of Cape Town. Given the threat that the industry is facing, there is a need for a public-private partnership aimed at ensuring that there are sufficient resources to help the tourism sector is capable of adapting to climate change. Increase insurance cover is a must to protect businesses from anticipated increased damage from rising sea levels and associated weather extreme events. Continued risk assessment is a must to ensure the industry is abreast with the continued changes which are threats to coastal tourism resorts and infrastructure.

Dreaming from the perspective of everyone

This paper offers a reading of Sharon Sliwinski’s Mandela’s Dark Years: A Political Theory of Dreaming. Sliwinski reflects on Nelson Mandela’s dream-life while he was incarcerated on Robben Island, and the ways in which his dreams, which staged for him the affect of racial oppression, may have contributed to his judgment of apartheid and his concept of freedom. While acknowledging the productivity of this framing of Mandela’s dream-life—it should interest anyone concerned with political subjectivity, sovereignty, and modes of resistance—the paper develops two lines of critique. The first underlines the political implications of two Kantian concepts Sliwinski utilises to characterise Mandela’s intellectual contribution to the world: the sublime and enlarged thought, both of which are part of a discourse on disinterested reflection and aesthetic judgment. The second offers a psychoanalytic formulation of Mandela’s dreams different to the one Sliwinski proposes, placing childhood wishes, the death drive, and the postal system more centrally than they are in Mandela’s Dark Years. Linking these two lines, the objectives here are: to reconsider a certain Kantianism within psychoanalysis, and to abide by what in Mandela’s thought might trouble disinterested reflection and implicate it, as well as any psychoanalytic approach to dreams of freedom, in the very violence against which Mandela fought. Ultimately, it is an argument for a postcolonial psychoanalysis that might learn from Mandela’s example.

‘Remember Sharpeville’: Radical Commemoration in the Poetry of the Exiled South African Poets, Dennis Brutus and Keorapetse Kgositsile

The Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 has been widely seen as a watershed moment, marking a fundamental shift in the nature of the resistance to apartheid. Its effect on cultural production was monumental: in the face of a massive government crackdown, almost every black writer and artist of note was forced into exile. The poets who write within the long shadow of the massacre must negotiate its legacy and the fraught question of its commemoration.This article takes as its point of focus two poems by Dennis Brutus and Keorapetse Kgositsile that address the place of Sharpeville in cultural memory. I consider the distinctiveness of the poetics of mourning and commemoration that they fashion in relation to South Africa’s most renowned elegy for the victims of Sharpeville, Ingrid Jonker’s “The Child.” I suggest that Brutus’ anti-poetic, subverted elegy “Sharpeville” re-stages commemoration as an act of resistance that is prospective rather than retrospective. In considering Kgositsile’s poem “When Brown is Black,” I examine Kgositsile’s transnational framing of Sharpeville and its location on a continuum of racial suffering, drawing attention to the significance of the links that Kgositsile forges between Malcolm X and “the brothers on Robben Island,” (42) and between Sharpeville and the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965. This paper suggests that for both Brutus and Kgositsile commemoration is framed as a mode of activism.
 Keywords: Sharpeville, Ingrid Jonker, Dennis Brutus, Keorapetse Kgositsile, cultural memory, commemoration, elegy

South African and Northern Irish Political Prison Writing Reimagining/Reconfiguring the Carceral Space

Without overplaying the convergences in the discriminatory and oppressive practices carried out during the twentieth century by the states of South Africa (1948–1994) and Northern Ireland (1921–1998), it is difficult not to see prisons as one of the spaces where the power of the state was hotly contested. Physically isolated either by the countryside or by the ocean, the notorious prisons of Long Kesh/H Blocks and Robben Island housed vast numbers of political prisoners whose resolve and resistance the prison and state regimes attempted to break, deploying a variety of brutal strategies to do so. These violent infringements on prisoners’ human rights also occurred in prisons situated in more central areas, but regardless of the physical situation of the prison, its inhabitants were (and of course still are today) rendered invisible and inaudible. This essay will focus on prose and poetry produced by political prisoners during incarceration and, in some cases, after their release. I would like to explore how the various aesthetics developed by both well-known and anonymous writers participate in a very political reconfiguration of both the carceral space and the wider biopolitics of the state. I suggest it is in the very stylistics of the texts that their implicit political message can be deciphered, and the prisoners’ agency asserted. Paradoxically, then, in spite of attempts to push the prisoners out of sight, their resistance becomes all the more visible and audible, and forces a redistribution of the sensible through dissensus.

Adebajo Adekeye. — Thabo Mbeki

For those who are old enough to remember, 1990 was the year that South African Prime Minister F. W. Klerk released Nelson Mandela from Robben Island, along with other ANC political prisoners like Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki. That last name may not be as familiar as the first. But Govan Mbeki was an important figure in the anti-apartheid struggle. In that same mythic year, Thabo Mbeki (Govan’s eldest son) returned to South Africa for the first time in nearly three decades. It was a reunion o...

Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary and Prison Writing from Africa

If the unvarnished power of the state has a face, then it is the prison. When the mask of cultural hegemony slips, we encounter the walls of the penal institution, its barbed wire, and its blankly functional architecture, mute and unseeing. A prison is one of the most concentrated modalities of state power. By definition, a prison is a zone of exclusion; it defines the normal, everyday civic sphere by defining a site of exception. A prison has its own distinctive logic and temporality, in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s words, “dull, mundane, monotonous, tortuous in its intended animal rhythm of eating, defecating, sleeping, eating, defecating, sleeping” (1981:116). It is a world of boredom, isolation, and fear. Nonetheless, because of its close proximity to state power, the prison also offers a sharp-edged reflection of the operation of power in a society. As Michael Hardt observes, “Those who are free, outside of prison looking in, might imagine their own freedom defined and reinforced in opposition to prison time. When you get close to prison, however, you realize that it is not really a site of exclusion, separate from society, but rather a focal point, the site of the highest concentration of a logic of power that is generally diffused throughout the world” (1997:66). Or as Robben Island prisoner Michael Dingake remarked in his 1987 autobiography, “Prison is the heart of oppression in any oppressive society” (1987:228).

Led through grief – Old Testament responses to crisis

n July 1989, together with my husband David Hunter, I arrived in Cape Town to undertake masters’ studies in the School of Religious Studies at the University of Cape Town. The programme was recommended to us by John de Gruchy whom we had met while students at an international Baptist seminary in Switzerland. The opportunity to live and study in South Africa at such a momentous time in its history was a great privilege, and an experience that significantly shaped our theological reflection and practice. We were able to participate in “the Struggle” in small ways: by attending protest rallies, funerals and prayer services; visiting prisoners on Robben Island and welcoming some upon their release; joining in Baptist Fellowship groups; and being present in the crowd welcoming Nelson Mandela in his first public appearance following his release (a notable highlight amongst my life’s experiences). We had deeply appreciated our studies, instructors and fellow students in the Baptist Seminary from which we had come to South Africa but studying in Switzerland had been a somewhat “ivory tower” experience, with very little interaction between our studies and the political and social context in our host country. Living and studying in Cape Town was an entirely different experience. There the context shaped both life and learning, and our lecturers and fellow students were exemplary models for theology engaging with the concerns of the day. We arrived not long after the release of the Kairos Document and were challenged by its expressed prophetic theology, where we found resonances with our own Australian context with its inherent disadvantage amongst its indigenous population. John de Gruchy’s writings on Bonhoeffer and the Anabaptist tradition were of particular interest for us as Baptist students and subsequently pastors. While in Cape Town we were involved with the Rondebosch Uniting Church where the De Gruchy family were members and we lived in a house belonging to John and Isobel. Although we only resided in Cape Town for 18 months, it was a time that made a huge impact on us, and the theological perspective embraced there continued to influence our life and work back in Australia in churches and theological institutions. In recent years I have shared another experience with John de Gruchy – that of grieving a loved one. Aside from the birth of our three sons, David’s death due to cancer in 2003 has been the event that has had the largest impact on my life. As so eloquently expressed in Led into Mystery, when one grieves the loss of a loved one, “the intellectual and existential dimensions of being human [are] brought together … in a new way.”1 Undoubtedly, sudden accidental death and slow deterioration due to disease affect those involved in different ways, yet there are universal dimensions to the death of a partner or close relative that create a sympathetic solidarity between those who have grieved such a loss. Moreover, watching someone one loves “struggle for the fullness of life” as they face the challenge of certain death gives a new dimension to the concept of “Humanity Fully Alive.” In the years that David lived with cancer he was also working on a PhD thesis entitled “Signs of Life” – a study of the sign narratives in the Gospel of John via the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. The title is indicative of his desire to find resources within the Scriptures for “living life well,” even when life was threatened by illness. My academic work has been focused on the Old Testament, so I have naturally turned to its pages to seek offerings from the intellect of our spiritual forebears in the light of my existential experience. As I have explored the various genres and perspectives offered by Old Testament writers another sentence from Led into Mystery has been the impetus for further reflection: “not everyone ‘owns grief’ in the same way.”2 It occurs to me that Old Testament responses to tragedy are examples of contextual theology at work, where each discrete theological perspective is a response to its own unique context.

Evaluating the jurisprudence of the African Commission on evidence obtained through human rights violations

The normative framework of the African Commission, which regulates the admission of evidence obtained through human rights violations, is largely based on a number of instruments. These include the Tunisian Resolution, the Dakar Declaration, the Robben Island Guidelines and the Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Fair Trial and Legal Representation in Africa. It is argued that the emerging jurisprudence on evidence obtained through human rights violations has a limited developmental framework, owing to the normative framework. This contribution discusses the normative framework, and qualifies the limited jurisprudence. The final step engages the jurisprudence of the Commission followed by a conclusion and recommendations.

What the marine geology of Table Bay, South Africa can inform about the western Saldania Belt, geological evolution and sedimentary dynamics of the region

Around the city of Cape Town, South Africa, the basal Neoproterozoic rocks are poorly exposed. There is however, historical evidence for good exposure of these rocks on the seafloor of Table Bay, although not mapped at sufficient resolution nor areal extent for significant conclusions. The Council for Geoscience therefore decided to commence their offshore mapping programme with this bay, mapping it at 1 m resolution using multibeam and sidescan sonar. The hope was that these data would help to unify the detailed sub-aerial investigations with offshore geological data.The seafloor outcrops are composed almost exclusively of rocks from the western branch of the Neoproterozoic Saldania Orogenic Belt and represent the largest exposure of the Tygerberg Formation regionally (~103 km2 under water compared to ~2 km2 exposed along the coastline). We demonstrate that the seafloor of Table Bay is an ideal locale to gain insight into the kinematics that have affected the rock mass on a regional scale. The outcrops display evidence of a shallow northwest-plunging anticline – syncline pair with associated smaller scale folds. The dip and strike of bedding planes delineate fold axial surface traces and fold type. The presence of lineaments and offset bedding suggest the presence of faults and/or fractures. The relative orientation of which is used to infer fault kinematics. Bedding truncation against a large northwest trending, linear, bathymetric low that is coincident with a weakly magnetic linear anomaly has led us to infer the presence of a regional Table Bay Fault zone. Lineaments interpreted as R1, R2 and P Riedel shears associated with this fault suggest sinistral strike-slip kinematics, similar to those recognised for other major fault zones on land with almost identical strike. The UNESCO world heritage site of Robben Island is located in the core of a syncline, its basal rocks composed of units marginally more arenaceous in character. The magnetic data acquired demonstrate the semi-continuous, anastomosing network of dolerite dykes within the Cretaceous False Bay Suite. Neogene features are absent in Table Bay, but as a result of Pleistocene sea level fluctuations, a complex palaeo-drainage network has incised into the seafloor during glacio-eustatically driven sea-level stillstands throughout the Quaternary Period.

News from Robben Island: Journalists’ Visits to Nelson Mandela during his Imprisonment

From 1952, when Nelson Mandela received his first banning order, the apartheid government attempted to remove the African National Congress leader from public life through issuing successive banning orders, censoring the publication of his words and image and finally sentencing him to life imprisonment in the maximum security prison, Robben Island. The notorious prison – a site of brutality, quarantine and resistance – was subject to the Prisons Act of 1959, which further shrouded it in secrecy. At the same time, the post-war growth of humanitarian and human rights law resulted in increasing global concern about conditions in prisons and, in turn, in the rise of activist organisations such as Southern Africa: The Imprisoned Society (SATIS), which advocated the release of apartheid’s political prisoners. In order to prove that its prisons were humane, the state was pressured to allow human rights organisations and, increasingly, the media to have access. It was also pressured to permit access to Mandela, the country’s most famous political prisoner.This article analyses four media visits to Mandela on the island (two in 1964, one in 1973 and one in 1977), when Mandela was interviewed and/or photographed, looking at the context that led to the authorisation of such visits, complex behind-the-scenes negotiations between journalists and the authorities, Mandela’s attempted curation of his image, and the subsequent framing, publication, censorship and dissemination of information. The article argues that the state’s attempts to control the discourse around Mandela and Robben Island grew increasingly less successful – particularly in overseas reports – and that Mandela’s incarceration on the mysterious island contributed to his mythologisation. Even from a position of imprisonment, Mandela was careful to anticipate his reception abroad, establishing an irrefutable moral authority from the confines of his prison cell. His comments reveal his consistent appeal to western democratic sensibilities, his utilisation of human rights discourse and his careful negotiation of the issue of prison conditions.

The Impossible Contract: The Political and Private Marriage of Nelson and Winnie Mandela

Winnie and Nelson Mandela had one of the most iconic political marriages in history. For most commentators, this was a one-sided marriage in which Nelson was by far the more significant actor and Winnie was the burden he had to bear. However, it is not possible to conceive of the public persona of Nelson Mandela after his imprisonment on Robben Island without also understanding Winnie’s role, not merely as upholder of the family name but also in terms of the ways in which she built an independent career out of her position as Nelson’s wife. This article reads the marriage at two levels. First, it argues that there were two actors in the marriage, both central to its narrations and both with political ideas and ambitions. Winnie Mandela was building a genealogy of heroic nationalism for herself from at least the 1960s, in parallel with that of her husband, and her rise to political status was both dependent on the marriage and at odds with its demands. Understanding Winnie as an actor, treating her own biography as seriously as that of Nelson, changes the way in which the marriage is read politically. Second, it draws on the small archive of letters between the spouses that are publicly available to show the ways in which Nelson’s benevolent, patriarchal (albeit loving and compassionate) approach to his wife contrasted with her increasing independence and political power. The separation caused by almost three decades of imprisonment had done more than impose a physical and emotional absence. Their politics, too, had taken extremely divergent paths in which she became a representative of radical politics while he was positioned as reconciliatory visionary.

William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises

William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor & Other Doubtful Enterprises

Governance and management challenges in establishing Robben Island as a National Museum and a World Heritage Institution in post-apartheid South Africa

This article focuses on the governance and management challenges in establishing Robben Island as a world class National Museum and a World Heritage Site. The first democratically elected government of South Africa identified it to be established as a National Museum and World Heritage site. Robben Island conjures in the minds of South Africans, images of the hardship and suffering brought about by the apartheid system of the previous regime. Over the past twenty-seven years, RIM had been beset with governance and management challenges and received continual bad publicity. The article provides an understanding of what the major governance and managerial challenges were and makes recommendations to improve the management of the museum, based on the findings that emanated from the study.

The Creation of Transnational Memory Spaces: Professionalization and Commercialization

In the age of globalization, local memories of past violence are often dislocated from their material places as remembrance is transpiring in transnational memory spaces. Historical events and commemorative memory practices increasingly transcend national boundaries and change the way memories of historical violence, atrocity, and genocide are represented in the transnational memoryscape. This article explores how the professionalization and commercialization of museums and memorials of genocide and crimes against humanity are modes of “making the past present” and “the local global”. Furthermore, professionalization and commercialization are processes through which local memories are translated into global discourses that are comprehensible to and recognizable by a global audience. In this article, we disentangle local memory places (understood as material, physical sites) from transnational memory spaces (understood as immaterial, ideational spaces) in order to investigate the transformation of local places of memory into transnational spaces of memory. At the same time, we show that, while these processes are often understood interchangeably, professionalization and commercialization are separate mechanisms and tend to be used strategically to translate memory discourses to specific audiences. These two processes can be seen as producing a standardized memorial site and a homogenization of memory in the transnational memory space. The article illustrates this theoretical reasoning with empirical findings from fieldwork in South Africa, where we zoom in on Robben Island outside Cape Town, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, where we focus on the Galerija 11/07/95 in Sarajevo, which commemorates the atrocities committed in Srebrenica in 1995.

Local forage fish abundance influences foraging effort and offspring condition in an endangered marine predator

Abstract Understanding the functional relationship between marine predators and their prey is vital to inform ecosystem‐based management. However, collecting concurrent data on predator behaviour and their prey at relevant scales is challenging. Moreover, opportunities to study these relationships in the absence of industrial fishing are extremely rare. We took advantage of an experimental fisheries closure to study how local prey abundance influences foraging success and chick condition of Endangered African penguins Spheniscus demersus in the Benguela ecosystem. We tracked 75 chick‐provisioning penguins with GPS–time–depth devices, measured body condition of 569 chicks, quantified the diet of 83 breeding penguins and conducted 12 forage fish hydro‐acoustic surveys within a 20 km radius of Robben Island, South Africa, over three years (2011–2013). Commercial fishing for the penguins' main prey, sardine Sardinops sagax and anchovy Engraulis encrasicolus, was prohibited within this 20 km radius during the study period. Local forage fish abundance explained 60% of the variation in time spent diving for 14 penguins at sea within 2 days of a hydro‐acoustic survey. Penguin foraging effort (time spent diving, number of wiggles per trip, number of foraging dives and the maximum distance travelled) increased and offspring body condition decreased as forage fish abundance declined. In addition, quantile regression revealed that variation in foraging effort increased as prey abundance around the colony declined. Policy implications. Our results demonstrate that local forage fish abundance influences seabird foraging and offspring fitness. They also highlight the potential for offspring condition and the mean–variance relationship in foraging behaviour to act as leading indicators of poor prey abundance. By rapidly indicating periods where forage resources are scarce, these metrics could help limit seabird fisheries competition and aid the implementation of dynamic ocean management.

Reading The Diary of Anne Frank on Robben Island: On the Role of Holocaust Memory in Ahmed Kathrada’s Struggle Against Apartheid

Reading The Diary of Anne Frank on Robben Island: On the Role of Holocaust Memory in Ahmed Kathrada’s Struggle Against Apartheid Roni Mikel Arieli (bio) Introduction On the morning of October 15, 1989, Ahmed Mohamad Kathrada was released from Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison near Cape Town, South Africa. A South-African Indian veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, Treason Trialist,1 and long-serving political prisoner, Kathrada had spent twenty-six years and three months in prison, eighteen years of which were on Robben Island. Leaving his prison cell, Kathrada carried with him some cardboard boxes containing his most prized possessions: a copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, nine hundred carbon copies of letters he had written, and an equivalent number of letters he had received. There were also seven notebooks in which Kathrada had secretly recorded inspiring passages he had encountered over the years.2 In his third notebook, Kathrada recorded thirteen entries from The Diary of Anne Frank, which was smuggled onto Robben Island in the late 1960s.3 What drove political prisoners of the racist apartheid regime to engage with a text written by a young Jewish girl in hiding from the Nazis? What stands behind Kathrada’s selection of entries from the Diary, and what makes his reading of Frank’s text so different from popular readings of the Diary in the post-war years? Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl was first issued in Dutch in 1947 and was translated into English in 1950. It was published in the United States and Great Britain in 1952, soon becoming a bestseller.4 When the Diary was smuggled onto Robben Island, Anne Frank was already considered the best-known victim of the Holocaust, due mainly to the dramatic adaptations of her text on Broadway and on film, in 1955 and 1959 respectively.5 However, as Sidra Ezrahi argues, while the adaptation of Frank’s text “brought the Holocaust to the forefront of mass consciousness, [it] did not really seek to dispel the curiously functional ‘amnesia’ toward the events themselves.”6 [End Page 175] As I explain elsewhere,7 this “amnesia” had to do with the consolidation of a homogenous American identity during the 1950s and 1960s. In the shadow of the Cold War, adaptations of the Diary conformed to constructs of universalized suffering, made palatable to an American audience by adopting a middle-of-the-road approach, as well as delivering a combined message on the virtues of American democracy. Universalism was the principal vehicle of this ideological agenda; in the adaption process, some of Anne Frank’s musings about Jewish suffering were omitted altogether, while others were transformed into declarations about the universal nature of suffering.8 The adapted versions were not circulated on Robben Island, yet the Diary in its original form served as an important source of inspiration for the prisoners. Shirli Gilbert’s in-depth article on Anne Frank in South Africa (2012) describes the significance of Frank’s text for some of the most prominent political prisoners imprisoned on Robben Island.9 Gilbert argues, however, that it was only after their release from prison, during the transition to democracy, that the former political prisoners who read the Diary on Robben Island incorporated the book into what she refers to as “Consensual Memory in the New South Africa,” situating Frank as a universal victim of discrimination.10 In 1994, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, in collaboration with the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and the Netherlands Royal Embassy in Pretoria, presented a traveling exhibition entitled “Anne Frank in the World: 1929–1945” in several South African cities. Given the national itinerary of the exhibition and its symbolic importance, the former political prisoners/newly minted national figureheads were among the key speakers at the various events launching the exhibition. 11 The first to testify to the Diary’s unique influence on political prisoners was Govan Mbeki, one of the nine activists sentenced to life imprisonment by the apartheid regime during the Rivonia Trial in 1964. Speaking shortly after the transition to democracy in South Africa, at the grand opening of the...

Strengthening the Preventive Role of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture in Africa

The article provides a critical insight into the legal framework for the prevention of torture in Africa, with specific reference to the Robben Island Guidelines (rig) and its special mechanism, the Committee for the Prevention of Torture in Africa (cpta). The Guidelines undoubtedly represent a milestone in the development of a torture preventive work in Africa. They bring together a number of provisions covering different aspects of the prohibition and prevention of torture. However they do not elaborate and clarify what is meant by prevention as a concept and what it entails as a legal obligation. Furthermore the cpta’s interpretative drive has largely focused on the other, normatively more robust, areas of intervention, namely the prohibition of torture and redress for victims, at times conflating prevention with the prohibition of torture. If it is to live up to its name, the cpta needs to expand its understanding of prevention of torture. This in turn will allow it to play an important role in detecting, collecting, analysing data and information on situations of risk in Africa, and formulating new and appropriate context-sensitive strategies for the effective prevention of torture.