Nelson Mandela, Robben Island and the Imagination of a New South Africa

The purpose of this article is to argue that the Robben Island prison experience between 1962 and the early 1990s makes an important contribution to the South African debate on the nature of belonging. In this article I focus on Nelson Mandela's imagination of belonging. I show how, through the process of formal study and the informal flowering of seminars, and particularly the debates and engagements that take place, Mr Mandela and his fellow prisoners work through, often with great personal difficulty and even contradiction, the questions of their individual and collective pasts and their subjectivities, and begin to delineate and even rehearse alternative visions of what a new South Africa might look like. This ‘working through’ involved, for Mandela, difficult questions of belonging – race, nation and the political economy to sustain belonging. Who and what is the nation, and what is its content?