On 27 March 2004, in commemoration of ten years of democracy in South Africa, Cape Town Opera, in conjunction with the Norwegian National Opera, staged a performance of Beethoven's Fidelio in the main courtyard of the Robben Island prison museum. This was the first time a large theatrical production had been mounted on Robben Island, the prison island where apartheid South Africa's high-ranking black political prisoners were incarcerated from the 1960s to the 1990s. The prison had been decommissioned after the last apartheid-era political prisoners were released, and in 1997, three years after the first democratic elections which officially ended formal apartheid, Robben Island prisons and other infrastructure from the island's long colonial history as a place of banishment were transformed into a museum.

I begin with the staging of Beethoven's ‘liberation opera’ as a means of addressing the prison museum as a problem both of and for history. At the heart of the problem is the use of the prison as a scene of liberation and as a monument to apartheid, when the end of formal apartheid presaged an escalation in incarceration and an ongoing operation of criminalisation and racialised violence. The conversion of the famous prison into a museum, simultaneous with the ongoing-ness, the prolonging, of the prison as a mechanism of continued apartheid relations into the post-apartheid period, converge as anachronism, a contradiction in time and in politics. Leaning into a global politics of prison abolition, I seek to treat the prison museum as an open question about the decommissioning not of one particular infamous prison, but of prisons in general as institutions of the extended and ongoing history of racial capitalism.

The production of Fidelio was staged on one night only. Audience members included high-ranking government officials, glitterati of the Cape Town social circuit and opera lovers from South Africa and elsewhere, who were taken across the water in boats departing from Cape Town's Victoria and Albert Waterfront. After disembarking, the guests were taken by bus to the prison, through which they were led to the auditorium set up in one of the large maximum-security courtyards. Adjacent to the prison, a massive marquee had been erected, in which a buffet dinner was served to guests before the show. High heels, elegant suits and wine were at odds with the histories of the island emerging in autobiographies and circulating in political discourse.