The Robben Island Invitational
The Robben Island Invitational begins from a simple but powerful idea: that Robben Island has always been more than a site of imprisonment. It has also been a university. Across generations, those held on the Island created what came to be known as Robben Island University—a space of learning without walls, where knowledge was shared, debated, and carried in memory when books were scarce. In the most restrictive of conditions, intellectual life not only survived; it flourished.
At the heart of this life was literature.
Before it was ever institutionalised, literature on the Island existed in fragments and forms: in letters written and smuggled, in poems remembered and recited, in stories told in cells and courtyards. Writing became a way of thinking, of resisting, of remaining human. Yet this literary inheritance—so central to the Island’s intellectual history—has often been overlooked. The Robben Island Invitational seeks to restore literature to its rightful place at the centre of this legacy.
It draws inspiration from generations of ex-political prisoners, scholars, and cultural workers—among them Mbulelo Mzamane—who imagined Robben Island not only as a site of memory, but as a continuing space of learning and cultural production. The Invitational extends this vision into the present, reanimating the Island as a living meeting place for writers, scholars, and artists.
Robben Island also carries a longer and more complex history: as a leper colony, a mental health institution, a place of exile for African kings, a colonial outpost, and later a maximum-security prison. These layered histories, often obscured by its most recent past, remain part of its deeper archive.
Today, the Island is a place of pilgrimage, drawing thousands of visitors from around the world. The Invitational seeks to deepen this encounter—moving beyond observation toward participation, dialogue, and creative exchange. It also recognises that for many South Africans, Robben Island carries a difficult emotional proximity, and that returning requires care as much as curiosity.
For four days, the Island becomes once again a university: not in the formal sense, but in its truest form—a place of encounter, exchange, and thought.
It is also part of a wider cultural geography, in conversation with sites across Cape Town—Government House, the Bo-Kaap, the Slave Lodge, Iziko Museums of South Africa, University of the Western Cape, and University of Fort Hare—and beyond.
This is not only a festival.
It is an invitation to return, to listen, and to imagine otherwise.
...a jailbreak from pre-existing frames, a gift enabling one to see the world differently, a strategy for inventing new points of departure, a practice of creating allegiances against social ills, a way of caring for humanity, a process of renewing one’s own subjectivity, a tactical move for reinventing life, a sensual practice of creating signification, a political tool outside of politics, a procedure to maintain a community together, a conspiracy against policies, the act of keeping a question alive, the energy of retaining a sense of fun, the device that helps to revisit history, the measures to create affects, the work of revealing ghosts, a plan to remain out-of-joint with time, an evolving method of keeping bodies and objects together, a sharing of understanding, an invitation for reflexivity, a choreographic mode of operation, a way of fighting against cultures injustice.
— Jean-Paul Martinon
