HED: Memories of Madiba
SUBHED:
QUOTE: I’m not interested in kudos for artistry. I’m serious about this work because I understand the legacy - Matthew Willman, photographer
Photographer Matthew Willman stands before a photo of Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island prison cell key and says it’s easy for archivists to sometimes forget the personal experience behind the artefact.
“This picture is just a key, but it’s Mandela’s prison cell key”, Willman says.
“I’ve spent my life researching, documenting and telling stories, and even I forgot the personified story behind this key. This is the key that Nelson Mandela saw many times a day, opening and closing his prison cell. It was the key he heard hanging on chains. It had to be turned three times to open his cell door and it had to be turned three times to lock his cell.
“There was something else I didn’t appreciate about this image, until Madiba said: ‘I saw this key for many years, but I never touched it.’ So, the key that symbolises his incarceration — and the incarceration of all the people of South Africa — was the key that he saw every day but was not able to touch. I think it’s an incredible analogy and symbolism of what the key represents,” says the photographer.
Willman’s goal with his newly opened photographic exhibition, The Mandela Heritage Collection, is to keep Mandela’s legacy alive. It is housed in a gallery at the Nelson Mandela Capture Site in Howick, KwaZulu-Natal, and was officially opened on Saturday, December 17 in an event attended by uMngeni Local Municipality mayor Christopher Pappas.
The current exhibition forms the first phase of a larger display, which will include artefacts and mementos from Willman’s journey to and with Mandela. The photographer has chosen 16 prints to line the dark gallery walls. Fourteen of them are not on exhibition anywhere else. Each piece has been meticulously selected.
“The question was which is the most prominent, which will educate people the most; it’s a curated and creative exhibition but it’s education that we want at the end of the day. I’m not interested in kudos for artistry. I’m serious about this work because I understand the legacy,” says Willman.
The Nelson Mandela Capture Site commemorates the event and location of Mandela’s arrest in 1962, which was followed by his trial and 27-year incarceration. It is operated by the Apartheid Museum in partnership with Mandela House. The visitor centre opened in December 2019. Together with the indoor auditorium for conferences and events, the famous outdoor sculpture and the coffee shop which serves light meals and beverages, the Capture Site is a popular drawcard for Howick and the KZN Midlands, seeing between 2,500 and 4,800 visitors monthly.
Operations manager Thuli Mtolo says: “That is approximately 60,000 visitors annually. It’s a massive number considering the size of the site. The support from both local and international tourists is overwhelming.”
The display in the visitors’ centre is absorbing, according to Mtolo.
“The new immersive exhibition includes a 360-surround film, a dazzling display of historical artefacts and photographs, and a Replica of the Austin Westminster Mandela was driving in when he was arrested along the R103 on August 5, 1962.”
Due to the venue’s KZN location, the presentation informs visitors about localised and national liberation struggles.
“Starting with the 1906 Bambatha Rebellion, it traces decades of resistance to colonial rule and apartheid, culminating in the mass mobilisation of the 1980s. In this way, the place of Mandela’s capture becomes a gateway to understanding the history of this province and its contribution to the freedom of all South Africans. The Visitor Centre is complemented with a ‘Long Walk to Freedom’ through the landscaped garden to view the iconic sculpture entitled Release, featuring 50 steel columns that dramatically come into focus as Mandela’s face, from a particular vantage point,” says Mtolo.
The historically important destination is the ideal repository for a selection of the photographer’s work.
Willman says: “The Mandela Heritage Collection will be on display at the Capture Site for the foreseeable future. The collection will grow and develop over time, offering South Africans and international visitors the opportunity to come closer to the legacy and life of Nelson Mandela.”
Mtolo says: “The response we’ve received from our visitors is amazing. Not only is the collection a beautiful display of Madiba’s pictures but the story behind each picture leaves everlasting memories of Madiba’s legacy and what he fought for.”
The exhibition features large, emotive images of Mandela and items and places pertaining to his life. The fine-art photographic prints include pictures from Robben Island, artefacts of the Rivonia Trial and graffiti on a holding cell wall, which presumably record an early version of the Freedom Charter.
The photographer trained the visitor centre staff who’ll be leading tours through his exhibition, believing that guides should be able to convey not only information but also the personal stories behind each piece.
“Tour guides should not be only factual; they should personify the story and they should be able to tell the same stories I tell — the stories behind the hand that didn’t touch the key and the hand that held the cold iron bars, which was the hand that couldn’t love and hold his children for 27 years. Yet it was the same hand that reached out across the divide to shake the hand of his former enemy,” says Willman.
“If there's one photograph that tells the whole story, it’s the one of Mandela’s Rivonia Trial notes. It’s the only time the notes were photographed. They are handwritten by him, and the legacy of the resistance is in this image. He represented himself. If he chose to be represented by an advocate, he would have agreed to the legitimacy of the apartheid justice system in SA,” says Willman.
The photographer captured the front and back cover, which are arranged left and right of the image. Sandwiched between them lie pages of notes, which the photographer says symbolise many rooms of documents pertaining to the trial.
Willman says the Mona Lisa of the show is the Amandla fist, one of just five prints in the world, and the only one on the continent. It is one of two similar images, captured six years apart. Willman photographed the first in 2004 and the second in 2010 before Mandela died in 2013. Both images are of Mandela’s hand, but in one the hand is clenched into a fist, and in the other his palm is open.
“The two pictures symbolise two different periods in his life — he was the revolutionary, the Umkhonto, the Spear of the Nation, the Amandla fist which drove the movement, and yet in post-presidential years he was a man who wasn’t afraid to open his hands and say that it’s in your hands to make a difference and to bring peace,” says Willman.
Willman's career path has seen him photograph 48 presidents, 16 Nobel Peace Prize laureates, political and religious leaders, sports and arts celebrities, and musicians in 48 countries. He is an author and public speaker who assisted in narrating and co-producing a short film documentary that won an Emmy Award.
“As a 15-year-old, growing up in Pinetown, KwaZulu-Natal with no money and a dream to meet Mandela which took 10 years to come true, to finally stand here 25 years later, in the first phase of this exhibition, makes me feel humbled,” says Willman.
“I wrote approximately 72 letters to numerous entities during those years, from the Nelson Mandela Foundation to the office of the Presidency, the Robben Island Museum, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, asking to meet Mandela and it got me nowhere. I realised that if I wanted to achieve my goal, I’d need to do more than write letters, so I took my camera out.”
Willman lived on Robben Island over an 18-month period between 2002 and 2003 while on an assignment for the Robben Island Museum. He regularly compiled small ring-bound, jumbo prints of his best photographs and sent them to the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Eighteen images representing each year Mandela spent incarcerated on the island were chosen. The intimate collection helped launch the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory. Willman was commissioned as a photographic documenter for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, where he helped to build an extensive library of Mandela’s life. His work from this period recorded Mandela’s work, life and private moments, which are held by the Mandela Centre of Memory.
“During my time spent on Robben Island, I tried to understand how these men could come out of incarceration and work for reconciliation. My Robben Island images go deeply into this tragic time in our country’s history. How these men walked out of prison preaching forgiveness is beyond me. Archbishop Desmond Tutu used the phrase, ‘the magnanimity of the man’, and he was right,” says Willman.
“There’s a Welsh word hiraeth, meaning a longing for a space or place is a pull on the heart that conveys a distinct feeling of missing something that you can never return to. This is what this collection is — it’s memory-making that no-one else saw at the time,” says Willman.
For more information: info@thecapturesite.co.za or 072 351 0967
Nelson Mandela Capture Site operating hours: Monday to Sunday, 8.30am to 5pm
