MANDELA FIGHT OVER SHIRT AUCTION SPILLS TO COURT, DAUGHTER WANTS TO SELL
State wants heritage of personal belongings
For four years, 29 small objects belonging to Nelson Mandela have been locked in a legal limbo between Qunu and New York, and on Tuesday that limbo moved to the Constitutional Court.
The objects are ordinary until you know who held them. A green South African identity document, the one Mandela received in 1994 at the age of 76 when, for the first time, a black South African was given the same book as a white one
Three of his famous loose Madiba shirts, one with a faint ink stain from a leaking pen, shirts he wore because he hated the tight collar of a president’s suit. A battered hearing aid, worn down by thirteen years of breaking rocks in the limestone quarry on Robben Island.
Handwritten letters on lined prison paper. A small rusted Yale key, the key that locked his Robben Island cell for 18 of the 27 years he was in prison, handed back to him by a warder in 1994 as a gift. Gifts from Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
In 2021 New York auction house Guernsey’s put them in a glossy catalogue with an estimate of two to three million dollars.
The seller is Mandela’s eldest surviving daughter, Makaziwe Mandela-Amuah. She says she does not want the money for herself. She wants to build a memorial garden next to her father’s grave in Qunu village in the Eastern Cape, where he herded cattle as a boy, a place with shade and benches and books for the children who come to visit the grave in the dust.
The state says she cannot. The South African Heritage Resources Agency, together with the Robben Island Museum and the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture, filed to stop the sale. Their argument is that the 29 items form part of the country’s heritage and cannot leave South Africa without a permit under the National Heritage Resources Act. No permit was ever applied for, SAHRA says, and therefore the export is illegal.
Guernsey’s first advertised the sale in 2021. SAHRA managed to suspend it in 2022. Then the High Court in Pretoria allowed it to go ahead again. The auction house re-advertised in 2024 and the government lawyers ran back to court. In January this year the Supreme Court of Appeal rejected SAHRA’s objection, telling the heritage body it could not just claim everything was heritage because Mandela touched it, it had to prove, item by item, why each shirt, each letter, each hearing aid qualified.
Now the matter has been taken to the highest court in the land. On Tuesday, lawyers for the three state bodies asked the Constitutional Court in Braamfontein to declare the sale illegal and to prevent the collection from leaving the country. Guernsey’s and Makaziwe Mandela argue the items are private family property. Mandela died in December 2013 and his estate is yet to be wound up after thirteen years, a fact noted by the court itself. The will left personal effects to the family.
It leaves the country with an uncomfortable question. The same key that once locked Mandela up is now locked up itself in a climate-controlled vault in New York, not opening anything. The same identity book that finally proved he was a full South African citizen is being used in court to prove he can never leave South Africa. And while judges debate the legal definition of a heritage object, a garden in Qunu remains unplanted, waiting for the price of a shirt and a hearing aid and a prison key.