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About

The Invitational is hosted in partnership with institutions that uphold memory, education, and literary excellence.

Robben Island Museum

The Robben Island Museum (RIM) is the custodian of one of the world's most significant heritage sites, preserving the layered histories of incarceration, resistance, and human resilience that unfolded on the island over centuries. As a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Robben Island stands as a global symbol of the triumph of the human spirit over injustice.

As the host and institutional partner of the Robben Island Invitational, the Museum provides not only the physical setting but the ethical and historical grounding of the festival. Its commitment to education, memory, and public engagement makes it an ideal home for a gathering dedicated to freedom, literature, and learning.

World Heritage Volunteers Initiative

The World Heritage Volunteers Initiative, led by UNESCO, brings young people from around the world to heritage sites to participate in conservation, education, and cultural exchange. It emphasises active citizenship, intercultural dialogue, and the transmission of heritage values to future generations.

The Robben Island Invitational is implemented as part of the 2026 UNESCO World Heritage Volunteers Initiative, aligning the festival with global standards of heritage stewardship, volunteerism, and learning. This partnership situates the Invitational within a worldwide network of sites and communities committed to protecting heritage while activating it for contemporary relevance.

Abantu Academy for Literature

The Abantu Academy for Literature is a literary institution dedicated to nurturing African and diasporic writing, thought, and public intellectual exchange. With over a decade of curatorial and programming experience, Abantu has consistently created platforms where literature meets history, innovation, and the wider public imagination.

Between 2016 and 2019, Abantu was actively activated in Johannesburg through live literary annual literary festival in Soweto. This was followed by commissioned international curatorial projects, including Days of Southern Africa in Zurich (2020), and a major pandemic-era pivot with The Ultimate Book Show (2021-2022), which reimagined literary engagement for broadcast audiences.

Returning now as a larger and more formally structured institution, Abantu Academy serves as the founding and curatorial partner of the Robben Island Invitational, shaping the festival's intellectual vision, literary programme, and long-term cultural legacy, while grounding the Invitational in artistic excellence, historical consciousness, and social meaning.

The Robben Island Invitational

The Robben Island Invitational is more than a festival, it is a recurring act of gathering at a place where ideas once sustained life under extreme conditions. Drawing on the legacy of political prisoners who described their collective study as the University of Robben Island, the Invitational frames literature as a practice of freedom, inquiry, and responsibility.

Each edition invites participants to read, listen, debate, and learn together across generations, disciplines, and borders. The festival honours the past without being confined by it, creating space for new voices, urgent questions, and shared futures.

“...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