By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Cape Town City Hall, which had stood for more than 100 years, was, once again, in dire need of renovation – the last had taken place in the mid-1940s. The main functions of the City Hall had been usurped some time before by the shift of city government to the Civic Centre in 1997. Brett Heron, the chairperson of the City's Naming and Nomination Committee, which was to be one of the principal drivers of the project described in this chapter, explained to me in an interview in 2019 that there was a sense that the City Hall needed to be revived as a place people had a reason to go to ‘other than to pay their traffic fines’. Stuart Diamond, a member of the Cape Town mayoral committee, who chaired the asset and facilities management portfolio, similarly referred to the City Hall as having lost its purpose. He was concerned, he told me in a 2019 interview, to recreate a sense of purpose and to get the building ‘to tell a story’.

The City decided to install a statue of Nelson Mandela to commemorate what would have been his hundredth birthday in 2018, as well as the first public speech he had made from the balcony of the City Hall on the day of his release after 27 years of incarceration. In his opening remarks, Mandela conveyed ‘special greetings to the people of Cape Town’, which he referred to as his ‘home for three decades’. On the face of it, this was a strange remark since throughout that period he had been in prison, first on Robben Island, and then in two different prisons on the mainland.

The City's plans have now been at least partially realised, and a bronze, life-size statue of a besuited Mandela stands on the balcony, waving amiably to an invisible crowd gathered on the square below known as the Grand Parade. The site was also intended to be part of the Liberation Heritage Route under the auspices of the National Heritage Council and the National Department of Tourism. A permanent exhibition, to be mounted in a newly refurbished space inside the City Hall, was commissioned and developed.