Safundi: The Journal of South African and American

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A Travel Paradise: Tourism Narratives of Robben

Island

Helen Kapstein

To cite this article: Helen Kapstein (2009) A Travel Paradise: Tourism Narratives of Robben
Island, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 10:4, 449-458, DOI:
10.1080/17533170903210947

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Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies
Vol. 10, No. 4, October 2009, 449–458

A Travel Paradise: Tourism Narratives

of Robben Island
Helen Kapstein

As it so often does in Cape Town, the weather had suddenly changed. The sea was
rough and the last ferry of the day back to the mainland was cancelled. I’d known
it might be a long day on the island so I’d grabbed a box of chocolate-flavored cereal
on the way out the door that morning. What I didn’t know was that it would have to
sustain me overnight. I was stranded on Robben Island, the notorious apartheid-era
political prison turned post-apartheid museum just the year before. It was 1998,
and since I was a young researcher and the Robben Island Museum (RIM) was
a young museum, no one knew any better than to allow me liberal access. I’d been
granted interviews with the director and given personal tours of the island. I’d been
driven around the perimeter, seeing the shipwrecks and the wildlife, the quarries and
the village first-hand, not just getting the flat panorama that the tourist bus provides.
Now the boat was docked until morning and the only other people on the island
were the few workers who lived there full-time. I slept that night (after procuring
some milk for my cereal from the canteen) alone in the guesthouse, the old British
Commissioner’s Residence, a place of vast, empty conference rooms and towers,
and also the place where academic and activist Nomboniso Gasa was raped the year
before. My room was beautiful—and creepy, with only a pair of French doors rattling
between the sea, the storm, the night, and me. It didn’t help that my blanket was
covered with glochids—hair-like cactus spines—that blew in from outside and
pricked whenever I rolled over. I felt an uncomfortable connection to E. M. Forster’s
Adela Quested. Wanting to see the ‘‘real India,’’ she fantasizes her own violation,
collides with the landscape, and ends up having to have hundreds of cactus spines
picked out of her flesh. When morning finally broke, the skies opened up like
the Sistine Chapel, beams of light streaming through the clouds, missing only the
finger of God. The ferries were running again, I was shuttled back to the harbor,
and it was eleven years before I returned to Robben Island.

Correspondence to: Helen Kapstein, Department of English, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 619 West 54th
Street, New York, NY 10019, USA. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1753-3171 (print)/ISSN 1543-1304 (online) ! 2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17533170903210947
450 H. Kapstein
I begin with this story to illustrate the connection between tourism and narrative.
This essay aims to contribute to our broader understanding of how tourism functions
in postcolonial literature and culture as a narrative through which the nation comes
to understand itself. By stressing themes of mobility, access, and leisure, tourism tells
the story of a nation’s emergence into the postcolonial as a kind of coming-of-age
narrative. As I’ve argued elsewhere, ‘‘nation-building through tourism is a global
proposition’’—a mode of translation (albeit a fraught one) for South Africa, the
region, and the world.1 With tourism a leading sector of its economy, South Africa
has come to understand itself, and it has come to be understood, through tourist
practices.
The push to ‘‘brand’’ South Africa is not just an economic strategy but a rhetorical
device that helps write a narrative about the availability of the nation as a product,
the placement of that product on the global market, and the potential producers and
consumers of that product. This is not an accidental but a conscious marketing
strategy by the industry. According to a recent article in The Journal of Strategic
Marketing, ‘‘within marketing management, tourism destinations are traditionally
framed as products to be marketed. However, we provide compelling evidence that
tourism destinations may be more usefully framed as narratives,’’ since narrative
‘‘relates the marketing of place to the consumption experience.’’2
However neatly pre-packaged a national product like ‘‘brand South Africa’’ might
seem, however, there are competing discourses at work that serve to call the integrity
of the brand—and the very idea of nation as consumer item—into question. For
instance, nine countries have recently launched a ‘‘Boundless Southern Africa’’
campaign, promising that ‘‘beyond boundaries we are free to connect—beyond
barriers we are free to explore—beyond frontiers there is so much more to
experience.’’3 ‘‘Boundless’’ ostensibly promotes a regional identity but as a
subsuming corporate brand is in tension with the state and social xenophobias
(electric border fences, necklacings of migrant workers) that unequivocally demarcate
nation from region. From these contradictions we see that tourism translates South
Africa very differently for different audiences and in fact sometimes does not
translate at all. It is vital to pay attention to how these national narratives are
constructed and for whom: What is omitted? What is outside narrative boundaries?
What exclusionary violences are committed? Just as my story did, these narratives
are crafted by shaping and distorting events, omitting and altering facts, making
and eliding textual and historical references, equating nature and culture, and so on.
The need to shape the sight-seeing experience into narrative form and the desire
to relate the experience as a story—what we might call the narrative imperative of
tourism—emerged very strongly in the interviews I conducted and the documentary
evidence I collected on my recent return to Robben Island.

1
See Kapstein, ‘‘A Culture of Tourism,’’ 115.
2
Lichrou, O’Malley, and Patterson, ‘‘Place-product or Place Narrative(s)?’’ 27, 35.
3
See http://www.boundlesssa.com/en
 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 451
In what follows, I read an official RIM publication—its 2007 Integrated
Conservation Management Plan—against visitor feedback reports from 2002 to
2006, collected and culled by RIM from visitor questionnaires. I read both as
narratives themselves, for how they construct and contest the Robben Island
narrative, for the narratives they produce, and for their expectations of and demands
for narrative.
The plan puts into narrative form for the first time the mission, practices, and
goals of RIM, or, in the words of the executive director, ‘‘[e]ven though we have
practiced many of the afore-mentioned elements it is only now that it [sic] is set in
a comprehensive document.’’4 To set in a document is not only to put down on
paper but to set in place. Almost immediately the document is fixed, and the
practices described in it made textual. This institutionalizes them in ways the same
document sometimes resists. The plan struggles at times to reconcile its own status as
official document with the need ‘‘to actively seek multiple narratives and not to
inhibit communication of contested memories and stories’’ (73). Even while
acknowledging the impossibility of comprehensively covering the ‘‘many and varied
layers of history that are at times contested’’ (66) the plan promptly comes up with
strategies to contain and control the excess that alternative narratives and histories
might produce. Both practical (Principle 1: Minimal Intervention) and textual
(Principle 2: Authenticity/Integrity), these strategies subsume to the main narrative
of universally held principles and values anything that might otherwise spill out of it.
In this way the document strives for the impossible comprehensive, speaking, for
instance, of ‘‘creat[ing] a space of contestation and dialogue that is the ingredient of a
democratic society’’ (23), where contestation and dialogue are within the imagined
civil society represented by the document rather than anywhere outside it, thus
creating narrative unity out of actual discord.
Still, there are moments of uncertainty as to whether a single narrative will be
convincing. Early on the authors take one of many stabs at summing up what the
island stands for. They write:
[Robben Island] is a politically and symbolically rich place where the leaders of free
South Africa were imprisoned, honed their political skills and leadership abilities,
and it has also now come to embrace and symbolise the spirit of forgiveness and
reconciliation; more or less representing the hearts and minds of South African
politics. (9)
The trouble with that ‘‘more or less’’ cannot entirely be attributed to the sentence’s
clumsy syntax. Instead, the phrase captures a number of qualms that the plan does
not particularly want to acknowledge—that some visitors to RIM are less aligned
with the hearts and minds of South African politics, that RIM can only ever more or
less represent South Africa, and that forgiveness and reconciliation themselves
only more or less represent South African hearts and minds. To explore any
one of these possibilities is to undermine RIM’s main message and main selling

4
‘‘Integrated Conservation Management Plan,’’ 2. Subsequent page references to this text will be included in
parentheses in the body of the article.
452 H. Kapstein
point: that Robben Island stands for universal values that will, properly narrated and
interpreted, transmute to tourist value.
Although the plan insists from the start on RIM’s universal value, it iterates the
notion so often and in so many ways as to undermine both value and universality.
RIM’s values span everything from the general to the particular, so that ‘‘heritage
values’’ (2) are divided up into historical value, social value (including symbolic,
spiritual, and sacred value), place value, educational value, and environmental value
(19–20), not to mention ‘‘experiential, sensory, and recreational values’’ (18), and
then further itemized into, among others, values of ‘‘nation building, human rights
and national reconciliation’’ (1), ‘‘the restoration of human dignity and pilgrimage’’
(19), and ‘‘value as a site of loss and trauma’’ (19). Everything on RIM has been
valued and been deemed valuable, from its memories (18) to its ‘‘underwater cultural
resources’’ (read shipwrecks) (14). In other words, value has been universally
assigned; it covers all of RIM. In the document’s attempt to be comprehensive,
though, value becomes so etiolated as to become almost meaningless. Take this
quotation from the statement of vision for example: ‘‘Robben Island World Heritage
Site . . . as a living museum aims to memorialize and promote its unique universal
symbolism of the triumph of the human spirit over adversity and injustice, using
both its tangible and intangible resources’’ (3). This reads like an exercise in binary
oppositions—living/museum, memorialize/promote, unique/universal, triumph/
adversity, tangible/intangible, symbolic/real—where the contradictions risk comple-
tely crossing each other out.
The Integrated Conservation Management Plan includes an Interpretation Plan
where ‘‘interpretation is understood as the articulation of the value or significance
of a site, object, and tangible and intangible heritage resources, to internal and
external audiences of RIM’’ (73) so that the main purpose of interpretation is to
communicate value. (Note that despite the supposed universality of the values,
we need them interpreted for us.) But narrative as transmitter of value is nothing
new, of course—consider Gauri Viswanathan’s important work on literature as a
technology of empire imputed to impart so-called universal values.5 Like colonial
values, the postcolonial values embraced by RIM’s plan—human rights, reconcilia-
tion, forgiveness—are equally unquestioned and assumed to be universally held but,
as we shall see from the visitor feedback reports, that is by no means always the case.
Perhaps the only value universally aspired to in both the official and unofficial RIM
documents is tourist value, evident in the way the plan conflates value as belief with
value as worth, easily rolling heritage value over into recreational value.
The plan itself highly values narrative, describing it as a key interpretive tool that
will flesh out the many themes that span the island’s history (5). Such is the
document’s investment in comprehensive textuality that it conceives of Robben
Island as a legible landscape on which a series of narratival moves can be made.
First, ‘‘the thread which ties all the sites and landscapes together’’ (73) is RIM’s
‘‘core message’’ of ‘‘the triumph of humankind in the face of adversity’’ (1). This core

5
Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest.
 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 453
message is then read back into the landscape so that the island ‘‘embodies’’ and
‘‘enshrines’’ it (2). Having established island as text, the plan can then manage RIM
through conveniently available narrative tropes and devices. It identifies layers
of landscapes on the island, including the precolonial, colonial, infirmary, WWII,
and environmental landscapes, grades them according to significance, and selects
as its one ‘‘priority area’’ for action the ‘‘Political Imprisonment Landscape’’ (4).
Organizing the multiple histories and geographies into these landscape narratives
enables the plan to sequence, name, manage, derive meaning from, and ultimately
sell the island.6 Although the plan shows an awareness that prioritizing one landscape
over the others risks subordinating other storylines of equal value, by making every
aspect of the landscape a narrative, it has, for all intents and purposes, managed the
other storylines into submission.
The plan does state that ideally RIM will take visitor input into consideration
by presenting ‘‘visitors [sic] variations of narratives which provide an inclusive story’’
(73), equipping itself with ‘‘proper channels through which ‘silences’ and/or silenced
narratives can emerge’’ (74), and ‘‘enabl[ing] efficient management of the growing
visitors’ demands’’ (75). To that end, visitors were asked to fill out questionnaires
after the tour but before they left the island about their experience, booking
procedures, staff, facilities, information provided, expectations, and suggestions.
That archive was then curated into the visitor feedback reports that offer snippets of
commentary and brief quotations from the questionnaires. With their uncorrected
grammar and spelling, the reports capture a sense of immediacy that might seem
transparent if we forget that the questionnaires were transcribed, abridged, and
quite possibly edited or censored. In other words, a process of translation has taken
place to make the feedback into the reports, and it is therefore appropriate to ask
what might have been lost in translation, gone missing, been mistaken or misread.
What language barriers, typographical errors, and omissions might have changed
meaning along the way? What failures of translation might the reports include and
how might those impact readings of them? Finally, to what extent was the feedback
selected for narrative cues? The comments go beyond the generic ‘‘Very Interesting!’’
of the standard guestbook. It is clear from them that a narrative imperative is at work
here too. Visitors to RIM want to be storytellers of tourism, to have their experiences
made sense of by narrative. One thing that becomes obvious when reading
the reports, though, is that tourist experiences do not always fall nicely into line
with RIM’s main narrative. It remains to be seen how efficiently RIM can ‘‘manage’’
other narratives through ‘‘proper channels’’ into a single ‘‘inclusive story.’’
The reports divide visitors’ ‘‘descriptions of the RIM experience’’ into positive
and negative, giving a breakdown by percentage and providing extracts from the
questionnaires. Overwhelmingly, the feedback is classified as positive, although what
constitutes positive seems open to discussion. For instance, ‘‘very positive terms’’

6
This is part of a larger theory of mine that argues for a strong correpondence between the founding acts of
tourism, story telling, and colonialism. They construct landscapes and make meaning of what they see through
shared exclusionary violences of surveying, possessing, and naming.
454 H. Kapstein
in a single report, like the one from June 2001, might include ‘‘painful,’’
‘‘marvelous,’’ ‘‘life changing,’’ ‘‘entertaining,’’ and ‘‘a devastating insight into the
horrors of the previous regime.’’7 This range of comments illuminates the difficulty
and delicacy of generating tourist pleasures in a place with a punitive past. RIM tries
to distance itself from other sites of what is sometimes called dark tourism or
thanotourism by playing up its message of ‘‘resistance, resilience, and the triumph
of the human spirit over hardship’’ (1), and the compilers of the feedback reports
have selected as positive comments that capture the oxymoron of being ‘‘depressing
and uplifting, all at the same time,’’ as one tourist put it.8 Tourists who feel uplifted
often extract a message of hope very like RIM’s. In keeping with the well-worn trope
of Robben Island as sacred space with Mandela’s cell as shrine, they call their
experiences ‘‘religious’’ and ‘‘like a pilgrimage.’’9 On the other hand, comments
deemed negative reflect a disaffection with the core message of RIM: ‘‘Too politically
based;’’ ‘‘did not like the preaching of the ex political prisoner;’’ ‘‘over politicized
with no future vision;’’ ‘‘too much [sic] speeches, too little sight seeing;’’ ‘‘a bit too
melodramatic;’’10 ‘‘too political, can’t we just move on!!’’11 For these tourists, RIM’s
teleological narrative reads not as uplifting and spiritual but as melodramatic and
preachy. Their comments qualify as negative not only because they are critical but
also because they refuse to participate in the master narrative. Similarly, those who
request ‘‘more nature and sea life less political’’12 under ‘‘Suggestions for experience
sought,’’ reject not just the politics of RIM but its prioritization of the political
imprisonment landscape over others. They would prefer not to read history and
heritage into the landscape at all.
Multiple, competing narratives come from both internal and external audiences.
Although RIM distinguishes itself from other comparable sites by employing as tour
guides a number of ex-political prisoners who frequently speak from and about
personal experience, it is currently in the process of developing a ‘‘common’’ or ‘‘core
narrative’’ for its guides. The move to a standardized narrative concerns the tour
guides, who, according to guide Toyer Smith, worry that RIM is trying to control
what they say. This deliberate process of ‘‘creating a document’’13 takes RIM’s
narratival tendencies to a new level, selecting and structuring the idiomatic and the
idiosyncratic into the generic and, despite promises to the guides that ‘‘the narrative
is not going to change [their] story but streamline it,’’14 inevitably destroying or
distorting something along the way. According to the visitor reports, which again
classify these comments as positive, tourists find it ‘‘excellent to have a former

7
Robben Island Musuem Tours Department, ‘‘Visitors Feedback Report,’’ June 2001, Robbin Island Museum,
3–4. Hereafter, the Visitors Feedback Reports (VFR) will be referenced by date and page number only.
8
Ibid., 3.
9
Ibid.
10
VFR, June 2004, 6.
11
VFR, June 2001, 5.
12
VFR, June 2005, 8.
13
Toyer Smith, personal interview, 16 February 2009.
14
Ibid.
 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 455
prisoner as a Guide’’15 and feel strongly about being privy to a ‘‘very moving personal
account’’16 and ‘‘heart breaking stories.’’17 Ironically, therefore, the development
of a common narrative threatens to undermine RIM’s main selling point and
distinguishing characteristic. It devalues RIM’s most valuable asset—personal
experience and memory—despite its own official stance that ‘‘the intangible
significance [of Robben Island] is held in memories’’ (18). It does this in keeping
with that urge to be comprehensive that we have already seen, wanting to translate,
collect, and conserve the personal as the ‘‘unique universal.’’18 Having said that, the
tourists themselves express the need for narration, enjoying guides who are ‘‘excellent
storytellers’’ and complaining if the tour sounds too scripted. Writes one, ‘‘I felt like
they were reading from a book.’’19 In fact, the demands of narrative seem to dictate
that the individual be written out of the story, at least to some extent, whether
because of content (for being ‘‘too political and involved in personal politics’’ and
‘‘unbelievable—too accusatory’’) or form (‘‘if only they could stick to facts and not
their own opinion;’’ ‘‘bus guide needs a script—digressed too much;’’ ‘‘sometimes
hard to follow because there was no sequence, only stream of consciousness’’).20
Much as the plan suggests they might, tourists perceive a historical narrative
written on the landscape, speaking of history as touchable, visible, and even audible
on the island. They speak of being shown the history, a ‘‘living history,’’ ‘‘a walk with
history,’’21 and how the ‘‘museum speaks for itself.’’22 Accessing history in this way
represents peak authenticity, something expected but impossible to achieve. Asked
about expectations versus actual experience, tourists speak in terms of obstructed
vision, wanting at the same time more depth (immediacy, contact, seeing things
closely) and breadth (coverage, perspective, seeing things whole). They want ‘‘to get
more often out of the bus, want to see things close and by touching’’23 and they want
to see the whole island.24 They want to be stranded, too. Despite persistent tourist
perceptions that they have not experienced RIM fully, tourist desires oddly reproduce
prisoner longings, bringing the two experiences closer than imagined. Tourists, like
prisoners, long for more freedom, mobility, and leisure on the island, often writing
that they ‘‘would like to have more choice of how I spend my time on the island.’’25
Many of the tourists’ suggestions address the desire for authenticity, and come
up with ways to access the real of history and experience, however impossible

15
VFR, June 2005, 6.
16
VFR, June 2002, 5.
17
VFR, June 2003, 6.
18
RIM’s plan promotes the conservation of oral histories and personal recollections alongside conserving the
built and natural environments. Ironically, it was (and is) the political prisoners’ work that makes and conserves
both (67).
19
VFR, July 2003, 6.
20
VFR, July 2002, 6.
21
VFR, June 2001, 1.
22
VFR, June 2006, 7.
23
VFR, July 2002, 8.
24
VFR, June 2001, 10.
25
Ibid., 8.
456 H. Kapstein
that may be. They suggest, among other things, that RIM could provide miniatures,
simulations, reenactments, and ‘‘mock role play[s].’’ They ask to ‘‘be allowed to
break some stones like the prisoners had to do’’26 and ‘‘to spend more time in
a cell.’’27 It would be more realistic, they say, if on arrival they could be treated ‘‘as it
was in the past’’ and wish they could hear ‘‘if possible the audio of the warder,
and prisoners [sic] anguish if ever recorded.’’28
The plan endorses tourist desire for the real, making authenticity and integrity its
second principle of conservation, defining ‘‘authentic fabric and meaning associated
with the site [as] that which is considered to be original and true’’ including ‘‘all the
layers of accumulated memory and fabric on the Island’’ (66). That this desire will
always be frustrated is made apparent by tourists’ complaints like the ‘‘ex political
prisoner was good but needed more bringing to life.’’29 Of course we know what this
visitor means—that the guide was less than expressive or animated—but we cannot
help but see the irony: how much more lifelike can you get than the ex-political
prisoner himself? Visitors find it ‘‘very authentic to be addressed by former
inmates’’30 and think the guides ‘‘were great and their presentation so natural,’’31
but the language of the authentic and the natural only calls attention to the gap
between narrative and experience.
South Africa has invested in domestic tourism through ad campaigns, promotions,
and television shows as a way to cement a new national identity as well as to boost its
economy, and South African tourists feel the need for access to RIM. As locals
they embody that dream of postcolonialism, the ability to tour one’s own nation.
By moving across geography from mainland to island they imagine that they have
moved through history and accessed the past, which in turn allows them access to
their emotions about national identity. Virtually signing their comments as citizens,
they write: ‘‘very moving as a South African,’’32 ‘‘very humbling as a South
African,’’33 ‘‘as a black South African it brought back bitter memories,’’34 and ‘‘Ja, dit
het my kennis verryk’’ [‘‘it enriched my knowledge’’].35 Achieving the moment
of catharsis, ‘‘I had a cry,’’36 would seem to serve not just the individual tourist but
the reconstitution of the nation. No anecdote better encapsulates this than the
one the guides like to tell about a former member of the security branch known as
The Eliminator. Already granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC), he stood up after the tour and apologized to his guide, an
ex-political prisoner. ‘‘Your name could have been on my list but I didn’t get to you,’’

26
VFR, May 2006, 9.
27
VFR, May 2003, 8.
28
VFR, June 2002, 7.
29
VFR, June 2001, 9.
30
VFR, June 2004, 6.
31
VFR, June 2002, 5.
32
VFR, May 2003, 3.
33
VFR, June 2003, 3.
34
Ibid., 6.
35
VFR, July 2005, 3.
36
VFR, June 2003, 6.
 Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 457
he wept. ‘‘South Africans want to come to terms with their past, the majority really
want to know,’’ says Toyer Smith.37 He speaks of the need for education: the older
generations know little about their own history and the younger, ‘‘freedom
generations,’’ need an understanding of what apartheid was like. To this end, RIM
has made universal access one of its goals. Some visitor comments, including ‘‘having
lived in Cape Town for 7 years, I think it’s a sacrilege I didn’t come earlier;’’38 ‘‘would
like to see more South Africans visiting;’’ ‘‘shame that it is so expensive for the South
Africans, the people who really should come,’’39 suggest that a trip to Robben Island
is almost a mandatory test of citizenship. Others, from the petty to the political, make
it clear that the new South Africa’s narrative of hope cannot bring together its divisive
realities—‘‘whites we were with were allowed to overbook while we were not;’’
‘‘Behind us two coloured guys arrived and after some begging they received tickets,
unfair discrimination;’’40 ‘‘too anti-white.’’41 They demand ‘‘the whole story—not
only from the side of black people.’’42
Despite the grand aspirations of truth and reconciliation through tourism, what
RIM calls the ‘‘points of contact between our consumers and our systems and
people’’ may be the real ‘‘moments of truth.’’43 In the tourist contact zone (to adjust
a phrase) through booking, embarkation, the boat trip, and the tour guides, tourism
itself emerges as RIM’s highest value. Some visitors want a more overt tourist
experience with ‘‘more site seeing [sic],’’44 restaurants, a hotel, and ‘‘more Mandela
souvenirs,’’45 and some want tourism made invisible, lamenting RIM as already
too touristy, too fake, and too clean. While they may not all agree on the values of
‘‘nation building, human rights and national reconciliation’’ they nevertheless do all
want RIM to be what one visitor called a kind of ‘‘travel paradise’’46 where the tourist
experience is made paramount, whether it’s communing with nature, mourning
the end of apartheid, or celebrating the victory over it.
RIM’s master narrative emphasizes the happy ending of South African
postcoloniality; it insists that Robben Island stands for the triumph of the human
spirit, rather than something more sinister. Moreover, the story goes, tourism itself
buoys the nation’s economy and its citizenry through universal access and
greater employment, contributing ‘‘to the alleviation of poverty through creating
opportunities for sustainable economic development and social empowerment’’ (2).
This is the doing well by doing good of postcolonial tourism and the suspect agency
of the tourist narrative that ultimately is in the service of selling a place.
As the authors of that strategic marketing article conclude, ‘‘the narrative frame

37
Toyer Smith, personal interview, 16 February 2009.
38
VFR, June 2001, 4.
39
VFR, May 2003, 3.
40
VFR, May 2006, 4.
41
VFR, June 2001, 9.
42
VFR, May 2003, 8.
43
Robben Island Museum Tours Department, ‘‘Consolidated Visitor Feedback,’’ January–March 2003, 3.
44
VFR, June 2003, 7.
45
VFR, June 2001, 10.
46
VFR, June 2002, 8.
458 H. Kapstein
makes possible the inclusion of ethical concerns in the marketing and consumption
of tourism destinations.’’47 For me, on my return to Robben Island eleven years
later, the tourist narrative as the postcolonial nation’s happy ending seems in
jeopardy. As Smith pointed out to me, there has been no real need to market RIM
so far, but the Nelson Mandela era will come to an end soon and, he said, ‘‘We’ll have
to start selling Robben Island.’’48

REFERENCES
Kapstein, Helen. ‘‘A Culture of Tourism: Branding the Nation in a Global Market.’’ Safundi:
The Journal of South African and American Studies 8, no.1 (January 2007): 109–15.
Lichrou, Maria, Lisa O’Malley and Maurice Patterson. ‘‘Place-product or Place Narrative(s)?
Perspectives in the Marketing of Tourism Destinations.’’ Journal of Strategic Marketing 16, no.1
(February 2008): 27–39.
Robben Island Museum, ‘‘Integrated Conservation Management Plan,’’ 23 June 2009, http://
island.org.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7&Itemid=8&eb391a9e1c57f5
afced2726a6cde8e03=2cc279296e576af4b9846d81fc100347
Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998.

47
Lichrou, O’Malley, and Patterson, ‘‘Place-product or Place Narrative(s)?’’ 36.
48
Toyer Smith, personal interview, 16 February 2009.