'Bad Taste' Offer Involving Mandela's Cell Is Scrapped

Charity group wanted to auction off a night where he spent 18 years
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Jul 6, 2018 12:30 PM CDT
Group Apologizes, Scraps Offer for Night in Mandela's Cell
In this 1998 file photo, Nelson Mandela and former US president Bill Clinton look outside from Mandela's Robben Island prison cell in Cape Town, South Africa.   (AP Photo/Scott Applewhite, Pool, File)

The offer caused an outcry: The highest bidder in a South African charity event would get a "once-in-a-lifetime" chance to spend the night in Nelson Mandela's prison cell, where the anti-apartheid leader spent 18 years. "So brazenly in bad taste, there are no words," local photographer Victor Dlamini said on Twitter, while other South Africans cringed at the idea of corporate leaders competing to sleep where the Nobel Peace Prize winner once struggled to remain "undiminished," per the AP. Offering "sincere apologies," a company called the CEO SleepOut said it hadn't meant to cause offense and removed the event from its website. The bidding had begun at $250,000; one of the last bids listed was from a likely tongue-in-cheek "Robert Mugabe." Proceeds from the group's events, which often involve sleeping outdoors for a night, go to benefit the homeless.

A Robben Island Museum spokeswoman this week told local media there had been no agreement to use the cell, which in the years since Mandela's release from prison and his election in 1994 as South Africa's first black president has become a place of pilgrimage. Former US presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton are among those who have come to view the small, bleak concrete cell and remember the decades-long fight against the harsh system of white minority rule known as apartheid. Mandela died in 2013. Obama returns to South Africa this month for one of his most high-profile speeches since he left office. He will deliver the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Johannesburg on July 17.

(More Nelson Mandela stories.)

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