Reporting on Nelson Mandela’s Imprisonment at Robben Island

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Martha Evans, whose focus is on the reporting on Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment on Robben Island. Mandela came to personify the anti-apartheid struggle – also by becoming an absent signifier of the struggle, which enabled him to become the ultimate polysemic persona onto whom all sorts of perspectives were projected.

Robben Island had long been a prison camp and a dumping ground for political prisoners; Mandela’s incarceration there only added to Mandela’s almost mythical status. This also created pressures for his gaolers, however, and as a result he was not entirely cut off from the outside: from time to time he was able to engage with journalists. But such access was tightly controlled and subject to strict media laws.

The few journalists who gained access to Mandela appear a somewhat random choice, and they are separated by periods of years. In 1964, two early visits (staged partly in response to rumours that Mandela had died in prison) backfired as they generated more negative publicity for the government; all publications from the visits were repurposed for anti-apartheid propaganda, and the photographs circulated in anti-apartheid posters for decades to come.

In 1977, the government organised another secret visit to the island, again to counter negative stories about brutality in the prison. But this involved various censorial conditions: journalists were not told where they were going until the last minute; articles were subject to censorship; government ministers were given a right of reply; and no photos were to be taken. Prison officials and prisoners also did not know that they were coming.

This was experienced as a gross violation of the prisoners’ privacy; journalists were led into their cells without any opportunity for preparation, and this meant that prisoners including Mandela had no agency in how they presented themselves to the journalists. Local journalists felt compelled to report positively on the prisoners’ conditions, while international journalists continued to report highly critically about the island.

Censorship thus served only to enhance interest in what the apartheid government was trying to hide; it helped with the mythologisation of the prison and its prisoners.