Introduction

The island and the bay of great beauty in which it nestles make Robben island museum ideal as a site museum. It is well placed to participate – even lead – in the broader contemporary worldwide move to transform museums from remote institutions into dynamic spaces of learning, engagement and relevance.

The Robben Island Museum (RIM) is also strong in a traditional museum sense: behind the visible Island operations and visits, the museum manages a collection of artefacts, historical documents, photographs, art works and audio-visual material that is on a par with any other institution of its kind.

These materials are housed in the UWC-Robben Island Mayibuye Archives, the official collections management unit of RIM. The Archives provide a unique and often fragile documentary record of South African history and culture, particularly with regard to the apartheid period, the freedom struggle and political imprisonment in South Africa.

The Archives are vast, comprising more than 100 000 photographs, 10 000 film and video recordings, 5 000 artefacts from the Island and elsewhere, 2 000 oral history tapes, 2 000 posters from the struggle, more than 300 collections of historical documents and an extensive art collection, including the UN-sponsored International Artists Against Apartheid Exhibition, and 10 000 political cartoons.

In many ways the Archives are an inside history of the struggle. People and organisations risked their lives to record the struggle against apartheid from within, at a time when repression and censorship were rampant, and Mandela’s name scratched on a coffee cup could get you four years in jail.

The story of how this Archives was built is an intriguing one (see pages 22–23). The initial core was collected during the years of exile by the London-based International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF). After the unbannings in 1990 and IDAF’s closure, the IDAF collection was relocated to South Africa to form the nucleus of the archives of the pioneering Mayibuye Centre for History and Culture in South Africa, based at the University of the Western Cape.

Then, in September 1996, when Cabinet decided on establishing the Robben Island Museum as the first official heritage institution of the new democracy, it also recommended that the IDAF/Mayibuye collections be incorporated into the museum. After intensive negotiations, this recommendation was implemented on 1 April 2000, as part of a comprehensive co-operation agreement between RIM and UWC. The Mayibuye Centre was disbanded and its collections and those of RIM were merged. Thus the new combined UWC-Robben Island Mayibuye Archives is part of RIM, but it is located on the UWC campus where the resources can be more safely preserved and more easily accessed by researchers, students and community groups.

RIM officially opened the new facilities of the new UWC-Robben Island Mayibuye Archives, housed in the Main Library at UWC, on 13 June 2001. The event took place, appropriately, on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the Soweto uprisings, with Deputy President Jacob Zuma as the Guest of Honour.

It is a concern that the history of the struggle should be recorded in detail and with accuracy. Journalists and historians can sometimes tell the story with a frightening superficiality and disregard for facts. And we have noticed that mistakes are often effortlessly reproduced in mainstream histories. Once, when we as Rivonia Trialists were in Pollsmoor Prison, we spotted 18 factual errors in a single report on the trial. Consequently, since our release from prison, it has been a priority for me to help with the preservation of the struggle’s history. It is with a sense of pride that the Robben Island Museum makes available to researchers, students, historians and community groups the unique collections of material in the UWC-Robben Island Mayibuye Archives. It is satisfying that RIM, as a national cultural institution, can finally provide a secure, official home for priceless fragments from the struggle for freedom, which were created and preserved at great cost during the dark years of apartheid, and thus complement other initiatives of this kind since 1994 in the process. We look forward to growing these collections in future, particularly with regard to the history of political imprisonment in South Africa. And we trust that the UWC-Robben Island Mayibuye Archives will help educate and enlighten the young people in our country for generations to come.