A Place That Matters Yet: John Gubbins's MuseumAfrica in the Postcolonial World 9780226030449

Citation preview

A Place That Matters Yet

A Place That Matters Yet John Gubbins’s MuseumAfrica in the Postcolonial World

Sara Byala

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Sara Byala is a historian and senior writing fellow in the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2013 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2013. Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03027-2 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03030-2 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-03044-9 (e-book) Byala, Sara G.   A place that matters yet : John Gubbins’s MuseumAfrica in the postcolonial world / Sara Byala.     pages ; cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-226-03027-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-03030-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-03044-9 (e-book)  1. MuseumAfrica (Johannesburg, South Africa)—History.  2. Africana Museum (Johannesburg, South Africa)—History.  3. Anthropological museums and collections—South Africa—Johannesburg—History.  4. Gubbins, John Gaspard, 1877–1935.  5. South Africa—Study and teaching—South Africa—Johannesburg—History 20th century.  6. Johannesburg (South Africa)—History.  I. Title.   DT1006.J65B93 2013   069.096822'1—dc23 2012043144 a This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments / vii Introduction / 1 one

/ Two Worlds Collide: John Gaspard Gubbins in South Africa, 1902–1924 / 23

two

/ The Founding Vision: John Gaspard Gubbins and the Dream of a City’s Treasure, 1924–1935 / 63

three

/ Becoming “Treasures and Trash”: The Africana Museum in the Johannesburg Public Library, 1935–1977 / 109

four

/ “Determined to Be Relevant”: The Museum Reimagined, 1977–1994 / 149

five

/ On Display and in Storage: Museums and Archives in Postapartheid South Africa / 203 / The Enduring Struggle: The Utility of a Colonial Institution in the Postcolonial World / 237

Conclusion

Notes / 249 Bibliography / 297 Index / 319

Acknowledgments

In July 2010, I visited the Collectors Treasury, an old and remarkably vast warehouse of rare books in the central business district of Johannesburg. I went there in search of an obscure publication that I had long sought to purchase but was never able to find. Tentatively asking the eccentric proprietor if he happened to have heard of a book by one John Gaspard Gubbins, published in 1924, I was astonished that not only did he know the book, but that he was also able to locate a copy immediately, plucking it from one of the many overburdened shelves that fill this eight-story shop. Opening the book, I was further surprised to see a personal inscription from Gubbins, penned in the very handwriting that had become as familiar as my own during my years poring over it. Later that day, on a whim, I sent an e-mail to the Johannesburg Parks Department in the hopes of locating Gubbins’s grave, something I had been unable to do over the preceding years. To my amazement, I received a friendly phone call the next morning telling me the exact location of the long-dead man. Visiting the Brixton Cemetery in the gloaming of a Friday night, under the watchful eye of a panga-wielding guard, I was able to sit for the first time face-to-face, as it were, with the man who had inspired so much effort on my part. It was hard not to feel—during that twenty-four-hour period of happenstance—that something greater than me had aligned, that, though I was weary of this project that seemed to never end, somehow a force was impelling it to this, its completion. And so, as I move to acknowledge what it was that made this book happen, I tip my hat to John Gaspard Gubbins. For not only did he start something whose worth continues to merit investigation, but he also—unwittingly—taught me, the biographer “impossible-to-be-

viii / Acknowledgments

imagined,” both something about South Africa and something about how we spend our time on earth.1 My debt of gratitude extends to those who lived beyond 1935, on both sides of the Atlantic. I thank, firstly, the committee that oversaw this project when it began as a dissertation. From that first lunch at Emmanuel Akyeampong’s home until now, I have benefited from his insightful guidance, both with regard to this undertaking and to my graduate career in general. His insistence that I see South Africa as part of the African continent more generally has greatly impacted my perspective. I feel fortunate to have had him as an academic advisor. Pauline Peters similarly gave of her time and intellect in an effort to push my thinking as far as possible. On the other side of the world, Carolyn Hamilton generously extended her hospitality to make first the University of the Witwatersrand and now the University of Cape Town academic homes away from home. As a mentor and friend, she has shared her immense knowledge and sharp, critical mind with me. She has also brought me into productive dialogue with scholars interested in similar questions. For this and so much more, I thank her. Beyond my official committee, I extend my gratitude to various members of the Harvard community who, in one way or another, helped me reach this point. I am particularly grateful to Suzanne Blier, Rita Breen, Caroline Elkins, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, J. Lorand Matory, and Susan Pederson. Thanks also to those who were my fellow graduate students, for their critiques and support, including Jenny Davis, Carrie Endries, Ariane Liazos, Leora Maltz-Leca, Abena Osseo-Asare, Ruth Simbao, and Lauren Willig. Thanks are also due to the funding bodies that enabled my research: the Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, the Harvard History Department, and the Harvard African Studies Committee. I also had the privilege of working with exceptional Africanists in the greater Boston area. Diana Wylie was kind enough to share her wealth of knowledge about South Africa with me throughout my graduate career. Her input—as well as that of the Boston University Africanist community more generally—helped mold my thinking. Jeanne Penvenne—my undergraduate advisor—continues to be both a source of great support and a role model. On the other side of the Atlantic, in Johannesburg, my thanks goes firstly to my dear cousin Joni Brenner. Without her hospitality, intellectual engagement, and generosity this project would never have been born. I will not soon forget our nights spent talking about Gubbins in her Killarney kitchen. It is to her that I owe the greatest thanks. Many other members of

Acknowledgments / ix

the Johannesburg academia both challenged and encouraged me, and to them, too, I owe a debt of gratitude. In particular, thanks to Muff Anderson, Colin Bundy, David Bunn, Liz Burroughs, Jillian Carman, Liz Delmont, Nziswa Dlamini, David Fig, Verne Harris, Selo Hatang, Scott Hazelhurst, Isabel Hofmeyer, Simonne Horowitz, Jonathan Hyslop, Cynthia Kros, Nessa Leibhammer, Achille Mbembe, Karen Nel, Anitra Nettleton, Sarah Nuttall, Fiona Rankin-Smith, Ruth Sack, Steve Sack, and Ann Wanless. As a research affiliate—from afar—to the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life group at Wits University from 2006 to 2008 and a participant in its Life of Archive project thereafter, I benefited from the knowledge of this productive assemblage. Thanks in particular to Rory Bester, Lesley Cowling, Anthea Garman, Carolyn Hamilton, Rebecca Kahn, Litheko Modisane, Pascale Mwale, and Kylie Thomas for feedback on an early draft of this book’s introduction. For the past several years, as an honorary research affiliate to the Initiative in Archives and Public Culture at the University of Cape Town, I have similarly been in good intellectual company. Here, I would like to thank, specifically, Mbongiseni Buthelezi, Marcelle Faure, Megan Greenwood, Carolyn Hamilton, Saarah Jappie, Shamil Jeppie, Susana Molins Lliteras, Grant McNulty, Hedley Twidle, and John Wright. The support of this initiative, both fiscal and intellectual, enabled a wonderfully productive research trip toward the end of this project. Further afield in Cape Town, I extend my thanks to Leslie Witz for graciously sharing his knowledge with me over a seaside coffee. Most recently, as a cocontributor to the tentatively titled “Tribing and Un-tribing the Archive” project, I have once more entered into productive debate around questions relating to the possibilities and limits of this museum as an archive. Thanks here go to the project’s convenors, Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer, as well as my coauthor, Ann Wanless. I would be seriously remiss if I did not recognize the diligent and knowledgeable archivists and museum staff members who helped me access the data found in this work. At Wits, thanks to Kate Abbot, Carol Archibald, and Michelle Pickover (of the Department of Historical Papers), Margaret Northey (of the William Cullen Library), Verne Harris, Sello Hatang, and Olga Pickover (then of the South African History Archive), and Sulej Zophie (of the University Archives). At Iziko, thanks to Lindsay Hooper and Gerald Klinghardt for generously sharing their time and insight. Thanks also to M. Maamoe (of the Howard Pimm Library at the University of Fort Hare) and the staffs of the Johannesburg Public Library, the Johannesburg Local Government Library, and the National Archives in Pretoria. Most importantly,

 / Acknowledgments

at MuseumAfrica, I extend my gratitude to Cathy Brooks and Linda Chernis who, along with the museum staff generally, opened their doors and their records to me. Linda Chernis, Sandra de Wet, Ali Hlongwane, and Diana Wall, in particular, have made the final assemblage of this project easier. Since arriving in Philadelphia, I have found an intellectual base at the University of Pennsylvania. In particular, the Critical Writing Program at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing has become a welcomed space in which to teach writing and African history. I have found it to be immensely productive to write and teach writing simultaneously and to do so surrounded by an accomplished, supportive department. Among my many wonderful colleagues (past and present), I thank, in particular, Meredith Broussard, Kristin Doughty, John Gazvinian, Damon Linker, Val Ross, and Fayyaz Vellani for their encouragement and for making it a pleasure to come to work. Thinking about critical writing while doing it—all under Val Ross’s passionate probing—has, I hoped, helped me put together a stronger book than would otherwise have been possible. Outside of Critical Writing, I have been warmly welcomed by the Penn Africanist community. Thanks, in particular, to Cheikh Babou, Rita Barnard, Lee Cassanelli, and Audrey Mbeje. Even further afield at Penn, I extend my sincere gratitude to David Grazian, Sharrona Pearl, and Emily Steiner. Many thanks, as well, to the insightful, supportive folks at the University of Chicago Press, particularly T. David Brent, Susan Karani, Priya Nelson, and Ryo Yamaguchi. To my family, I am most grateful. In South Africa, my grandmother— Gogo—and the Sevels are a great source of support and beach-side respite. I am fortunate that my research brings me close to them. In Joburg, I am deeply indebted to the Brenner clan who, among other things, barely batted an eye when I crashed their car. The rest of my then Joburg family—fictive and otherwise—Jodi Ginsburg, Russell Kaplan, Dina Kraft, Pam Mfaxa, and Taya Weiss helped ensure that Joburg felt like home. On this side of the Atlantic, it is my parents, Pam and David Byala, who bolster me. I thank them dearly both for bringing us to this country and for understanding why I needed to go back to South Africa. It simply would not have been possible to complete this project without their untiring assistance, especially with my little ones. To my brother, Greg, who boldly accompanied me on my earliest research trips and who painstakingly edited this manuscript, I am deeply appreciative. His humor and intellect have, in equal measure, helped me reach this point. Finally, from the vantage of this book’s completion, I find myself needing to pay some respect to my now-deceased canine muse, Gubbins Cor-

Acknowledgments / xi

nelia—named in honor of John Gaspard—who devotedly sat by me during the early parts of the writing process. Though she was a terrible dog, I miss her still. Her successor, George, has likewise kept me in good company. For them, I am grateful. But I count myself among the truly lucky ones for my children, Benjamin, Sophie, and Vivienne, who bring immeasurable joy and perspective to my life, and for my darling husband, Chad, who dutifully endured my absences, who crossed the Atlantic to propose a joint life together, and without whose support none of this would have been possible. I dedicate this book to him. Sara Gene Byala Wayne, Pennsylvania

Introduction

On 6 August 1994, four months after the African National Congress (ANC) triumphantly won the first postapartheid election in South Africa, a cluster of celebratory balloons was released above Newtown, Johannesburg, to announce another local milestone. After more than a half century in temporary premises and once an estimated thirty-six million Rand had been spent, the former Africana Museum finally reopened under the inverted appellation, MuseumAfrica.1 Alongside Johannesburg Mayor Piet Pretorius, storyteller Gcina Mhlope, musical icon Dolly Rathebe, and other celebrity wellwishers, the ANC Minister of Art, Culture, Science, and Technology, Dr. Ben Ngubane, christened the new museum. No longer would it be known as the Africana Museum, a name that connoted, as then Acting Director Hillary Bruce put it, “a white Afrikaans speaking man in khaki shorts and jacket and a gun.”2 From this point forward, the establishment would be called MuseumAfrica, and by way of exhibiting squatter settlements, shebeen life, and domestic workers, it would foreground the black majority’s experiences. Owing its renovated form to years of research by a younger, imaginative generation of museum workers, the celebrated unveiling of MuseumAfrica paralleled South Africa’s hopeful rebirth. Nearly two decades later, the museum is easier to access than ever before. Since July 2003, the stunning Nelson Mandela Bridge has linked renovated Newtown to other parts of the city. Despite this, the museum is now a pale shadow of its opening self. Once a venue that boasted visitors like President Bill Clinton and Madame Pinochet and that hosted parts of the Johannesburg Biennales, the museum is now scarcely attended. Objects have been stolen. One-third of the building has never been completed. The collection suffers from inadequate storage space. Underfunded and understaffed, there

 / Introduction

is little incentive for enthusiasm. Scholarly literature, if it even mentions the museum, tends to gloss its history, painting it as either a decent—but not entirely successful—reincarnation or a static remnant of a thankfully dead order.3 While the government continues to pour resources generally into cultural development and while MuseumAfrica is fortuitously situated at the heart of an urban renewal campaign, the institution has been sidelined. In post-transition South Africa, few if any think or write about Museum­ Africa, let alone visit it. This book proposes that the climate of neglect that surrounds Museum­ Africa reflects larger ideas about the place of colonial institutions in the postcolonial, and in this case postapartheid, even post-transition, order. Cast as products of discredited worldviews, colonial relics—like museums, archives, and libraries (to name but a few)—are seen as being contaminated by the racist worlds that bore them. In the Africanist climate of present-day South Africa, these visual reminders of the past are further eschewed for being, as Leslie Witz puts it, at odds with “Africanness” itself.4 Undoubtedly, this position has the weight of history on its side; many if not all of these cultural institutions were created under the reign of undemocratic, oppressive regimes and were, in fact, technologies that helped sustain unequal rule. Many colonial bureaucrats understood the power of a museum (or archive, or library) both to legitimize and to reinforce the party line. And many institutions not only underscored the rhetoric that enabled them, but also barred from their doors the population that they deemed less than citizens—in this case, the majority of South Africans. Yes, much of what was created during the bad old days was ugly, much of it not worth a second look. And yet, not all. The principal argument of this book is that this museum matters. Perhaps not in its current guise. Perhaps not even as a museum. But it matters nonetheless, and for reasons that can be loosely parsed into conceptualizing the museum as an archive and understanding the museum in history. Making this argument, this book narrates a story, largely unknown even by those who toil within the institution. It is a good story—of one man’s passion, of worlds that might have been, of connections (ironic and obscure as they may at first seem) across the supposedly impenetrable temporal divide of the apartheid era. The story begins with the arrival of John Gas­ pard Gubbins in South Africa from England in 1902 and is firstly concerned with his metamorphosis from a typical imperialist to the founder of an antiracist museum in 1935, more than a decade before the advent of apartheid. After Gubbins’s untimely death, the narrative follows the museum as it was subsumed under the administrative and ideological control of the

Introduction / 

Johannesburg Public Library—where it remained until 1994—and where it became the place that many still imagine it to be: ineffective at best and racist at worst. It then charts the museum’s celebrated reinvention, which happened to coincide with the nation’s regeneration, and explores the parallels between this moment and that of Gubbins’s a half century earlier. The story then illuminates the museum’s postapartheid nadir before, in closing, examining its current, somewhat surprising signs of stabilization in the posttransition order. Providing the first institutional biography of the Africana Museum / MuseumAfrica from 1902 until the near present, this book thus spans the eras before, during, and after apartheid. Focused on understanding the ways in which Africana—or the cultural output of all Africans—was collected, categorized, and displayed, it asks what twentieth-century South Africa looks like through the doors of a cultural history museum. In telling this tale, this book delineates a set of tools capable of rendering colonial institutions germane to the postcolonial world.

The Museum as Archive This museum matters, in the first place, to the extent that it is understood as an archive. Here the museum is seen to be one of the often ignored “alternative[s] to public documentary archives” that Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, and Graeme Reid—in their introduction to Refiguring the Archive—note as being able to “offer archival possibilities capable of releasing different kinds of information about the past.”5 To conceptualize the museum as such, the institution is read as a heterotopia, a place motivated by, as Michel Foucault describes it, “the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time,” a project that, he reminds us, “belongs to our modernity.”6 This book argues that it is useful to envision this museum—and the compulsions to collect, to categorize, and to display that are seen within it—as a heterotopia—as an archive that reveals the cultural machinations of a decidedly modern South African institution. Recognizing, as Patricia Davison writes, that “objects held by museums constitute a material archive not only of preserved pasts but also the concerns that motivated museum practice over time,” this book explores both the physical annals of the museum—its vast contents—as well as its intellectual archive—the thought processes that shaped its collections.7 Understanding that the majority of the museum’s items are—like in similar institutions—kept in storage while, as Davison explains, “internal museum processes have specific

 / Introduction

histories, often taken for granted because they seem self-evident,” this book pulls back the curtain on both the museum’s contents and its practices in order to reveal what has long been shrouded.8 What comes to light is an archive that is, as they all are, incomplete. For, as Carolyn Steedman explains, the grand drive toward the heterotopia aside, in reality, “the Archive is made from the selected and consciously chosen documentation from the past” as much as it is the product of “the mad fragmentations that no one intended to preserve and that just ended up there.”9 The museum is thus an archive— of both objects and ideas—but it is necessarily a haphazard one. And this, in fact, is what makes it interesting. This book also conceptualizes the museum-as-archive in accordance with Foucault’s pronouncement of the archive as “the law of what can be said” or, as he restates the same point, “the system of enunciability” in which discourse is held together.10 Here Africana—or material objects of Africa—constitutes a discourse, an episteme within which and against which museum curators toiled. Recognizing, as Carol Duncan does, that the museum is “not the neutral and transparent sheltering space that it is often claimed to be,” the museum’s episteme is explored both for what is readily reveals and, more importantly, what ideological notions it masks.11 As a space both obviously and latently informative of larger social concerns, the museum’s episteme deserves inquiry. For, as Patricia Hayes, Jeremy Silvester, and Wolfram Hartmann argue with regard to Namibian photography, “it is important to historicise the very archive.”12 It is important, in other words, to seek out those practices that enabled the discourse, that gave life to its archive. In this case, a history of the Africana Museum / MuseumAfrica simultaneously sheds light on the archive of twentieth-century South Africa. Just as Jacques Derrida reminds us in Archive Fever, “There is no archive . . . without outside.”13 There is no Africana Museum without modern South Africa and, to a certain extent, the converse. Paying close attention to the interplay between the museum and the world beyond its doors, this book illuminates both. On another level, this book characterizes the museum as a tangible archive, a physical warehouse of relics from the past. Whatever may have been happening outside, from its founding in 1935, the museum never stopped collecting all types of Africana, assembling a remarkably varied assortment of items. From Zulu beer pots and Xhosa headrests to mineworkers’ clothes and Boer war medals, the museum collected the cultural remnants of any and all people in southern Africa. As of 2010, the museum estimated its total holdings at around eight hundred thousand items; this includes over three hundred thousand photographs, seventeen thousand geological specimens, ten thousand objects of black culture, and seventeen thousand items

Introduction / 

that fall within the broad category “history,” in addition to collections of weaponry, stamps, costumes, maps, and more.14 Containing what is argu­ ably one of the greatest assemblages of Africana in the world, this storehouse of the past is of immeasurable worth to scholars and the public alike. This import is made even greater when considered against other modern museums, places like—in Johannesburg—the celebrated Apartheid Museum and the famed Hector Pieterson Museum—neither of which, at this point, collects objects.15 The museum is significant, then, because it is made up of real items from the past. And—in spite of all indications to the contrary—this book contends that actual remnants of the past matter more now than before. Examining “authentic artifact[s]” in, what he terms, “the age of digital simulation,” Martin Hall argues persuasively that the “unexpected reappearance” of the real (in an era that no longer needs it) is, in fact, not a contradiction. Rather, Hall explains that the “authentic object serves to anchor the simulacrum” so that “for all the appeal of simulated environments, material things matter.”16 As Eileen Hooper-Greenhill similarly explains, “in contemporary culture, where contextualized and mediated messages surround us, and where reality and hyper-reality can barely be distinguished, the potential of a return to the concrete material evidence is of overriding importance.”17 Despite—and indeed because of—society’s ability to create simulated museum displays, artifacts are more important than ever. As the foil for simulation, the real makes the fake possible, and vice versa. Against created, embellished historical venues such as Gold Reef City and Shakaland, the significance of this collection of Africana is augmented. For no matter how real a simulated work of culture may appear, it will always lack what Walter Benjamin terms the “aura” of the authentic—the sense, from having been part of some ritual somewhere, that it is anchored in space—the feeling that the really real inspires in us.18 As Scott Paris concurs, “Being in the presence of original and famous objects has always been a vicarious thrill for people.”19 Faced with the possibility of simulation, these theorists all contend, the real taps into something innate in us, giving it more salience than ever. In that respect, too, the contents of this museum are important. On a different level, despite commonplace denunciation of the museum’s implausible scope (spanning all of Southern African history and culture and covering, among other topics, photography, rock art, costume, and transport), there is a strong argument to be made in favor of such a grand directive. According to Tony Bennett, the preponderance of global processes aside, “there are a number of ways in which museums are now arguably less globalised than their nineteenth-century counterparts.” In his view, this

 / Introduction

is because “the representational ambit of contemporary museums . . . is characterised by a post-modern modesty when compared with the totalising frameworks of representation characterising nineteenth-century museums.”20 Unlike museums of yesteryear that sought to showcase everything, museums today tend to be guided by far less ambitious directives. Today’s provincial museums that focus narrowly on either single segments of the population or solitary moments in time—while firmly situated within a postmodern celebration of the multiplicity of experience—nonetheless run the risk of, in Bennett’s words, “reinforc[ing] the divisions between differentiated communities as rigidly distinct enclaves.”21 Narrowly focused museums have the potential, Bennett suggests, to replicate inadvertently a kind of cultural apartheid. In a South Africa only recently emerging from de jure apartheid (cultural and otherwise), the implications of such polarization are dire. Given its situation in postapartheid South Africa, MuseumAfrica—with its broad focus and its expansive collection of Africana pertaining to all South Africans—thus has great potential. As Jacques Derrida reminds us, “The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge [gage], a token of the future.”22 Though often displayed as ahistorical, the classification systems employed by curators means that the provenance of items was often well documented, opening the possibility of entirely different showcases for the museum’s remnants. In other words, regardless of how they were collected or displayed in the past, objects within the museum-as-archive, once focused on the future, enable multiple possibilities. For, as Susan Pearce informs, objects themselves are neutral.23 Or, as Hooper-Greenhill likewise explains, “contrary to the views of some museum staff, objects do not speak for themselves.”24 As neutral, mute pieces, objects only make noise when someone makes it for them. Writing on oral history as archive, Carolyn Hamilton takes this argument further: The capacity for the material and physical to invite multiple historical interpretations, while constraining the extent of historical “invention,” when transported into the museums and monuments that house or preserve the material and the physical, questions the long-held authority of the heritage institutions without conceding a complete relativism.25

As archives of material culture, museums contain possibilities for multiple histories, some of which challenge, contradict, and overturn the racist narratives that underlay these very institutions. And this is what makes them important. As Hooper-Greenhill puts it, “the radical potential of material

Introduction / 

culture, of concrete objects, of real things, of primary sources, is the endless possibility of rereading.”26 As an archive in dual senses, this museum has the potential to illuminate the greater episteme of South Africa—what was knowable—just as its objects, once wrenched free from their old classifications, can shed light on historical narratives—or what is known. At the same time, no matter how much they are reread, the physicality of objects confines historical invention. This means that archives of material culture, such as MuseumAfrica, hold the stuff of refashioned historical narratives. The stories capable of being released by the museum-as-archive in turn have the ability to assist in a process at the core of the postapartheid project: the creation of a unified national identity, a directive that harkens back to Gubbins’s vision three-quarters of a century ago and that is still very much alive today. Realizing, as Derrida asserts, that “what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way,” the content, scope, and rich internal intellectual cache of MuseumAfrica retain utility—perhaps now more than ever.27 As Hooper-Greenhill writes, “the pedagogic power and potential of museums assumes a new urgency in a multicultural society, where questions of meaning, the character of interpretation, and the significance of the past become of increased importance.”28 In post-transition South Africa, a country—like so many other postcolonial spaces—in need of an inclusive historical narrative that is concretely anchored in objects of the past, a museum like this one is far more than the dead repository of discredited worldviews it is often assumed to be. Rather, and conversely, it is a space alive with possibilities, a place that matters yet.

The Museum in History While the museum-as-archive merits inquiry, its history likewise carries weight in its own right. To access this history, we must read the museum’s story archivally. This means that we must pay particular attention to the biographies of those who conceived of and governed the museum over time. The brainchild of the eccentric, expatriate Briton John Gaspard Gubbins, the museum was founded in 1935, thirteen years before the rise of the apartheid state, as a venue aimed explicitly against racism and toward creating a united sense of South Africa. The museum grew out of Gubbins’s personal collection of Africana, a term he used to encompass the books and objects of all inhabitants of southern Africa regardless of race, class, or creed. For him, a passion for Africana in this particularly broad-minded sense was sparked when he happened upon the weathered, buried headstone of the first white woman to die north of the Vaal River. That the woman was Amer-

 / Introduction

ican mattered little to Gubbins. Rather, the relic of her sad story gave new energy to his deep-seated drive to explore and recount the region’s history. Far from merely aged debris, in Gubbins’s mind, this gravestone, and other such items of Africana, were worth keeping. Borne out of a confluence of his late-Victorian need to understand his surroundings and a colonial desire to make the foreign local, collecting, and the study of region’s history that it quickly engendered, became Gubbins’s chief preoccupations. Though he had arrived in South Africa but a young lawyer looking for an adventure, and though he had traveled widely and tried his hand at everything from mining to farming to writing during his accidental permanence there, it was ultimately his collecting that earned him renown in the final years of his life. For it was then, after nearly three decades in his adopted home, that Gubbins established first a library and then, as his final accomplishment, a museum dedicated to Africana. While both the library and museum were outgrowths of Gubbins’s Africana collections, they were also direct manifestations of his personal ideology, which he laid bare in his 1924 metaphysical treatise, Three-Dimensional Thinking. The result of his transformation from a quintessential lateVictorian Englishman—educated in the church and libraries of  his day—to an English-speaking South African committed to finding an inclusive sense of national identity in his adopted home, Gubbins’s philosophy aimed to surpass the incongruity he perceived between the intellectual notions that he brought from home and the reality he found in South Africa. Though he had come to South Africa sure of what he would find there—a world that divided neatly into civilized and heathen, progressive and retrograde—that which he encountered confounded him. In this medley population, it was difficult to determine “us” from “them,” especially for a Briton who decided to settle in the veld in the precarious years after Union. There, Gubbins’s exchanges with Boers undermined his once secure sense of place, just as his interactions with black Africans further eroded his formerly certain belief systems. As a result, he was thrust into a prolonged period of crisis. Ultimately, Gubbins came to see the disconnect that crippled him not as a personal affliction, but rather as a product of the modern world itself, a position that was only strengthened once he witnessed the effects of World War I in Europe and Africa. Determining that all human suffering stemmed from faulty reasoning that demanded binary opposites—like “good” versus “evil” and “black” versus “white”—Gubbins aimed to transcend this conundrum with nothing less than a new manner of thinking. Three-dimensional thought, he called it. Putting this ideology into practice, he then founded a library before setting his sights on creating a museum. Both the Gubbins

Introduction / 

Library of Africana and the Africana Museum thus owe their births not only to Gubbins’s collection of Africana, but also to his personal understanding of how a novel manner of thought could—and should—be used to shape a fractured society. For all of their eccentricities, Gubbins and his endeavors resonated with, and were entwined in, several larger contemporaneous processes. As a Briton who decided to make the South African countryside his home—especially after his 1910 marriage to a local woman—Gubbins rendered himself an anomaly in a world where English speakers tended to remain in cities while Afrikaans speakers normally dwelt in the hinterland. Challenging this equation, Gubbins found himself something of an ambassador for a larger process then underway: the creation of a white identity that transcended the distinctions between these two groups—differences that went far deeper than language and that had only recently come to a bloody head in the prolonged Second South African War of 1899–1902. This process, termed South Africanism, sought to establish an inclusive, localized white South African identity and was taken up by a range of liberals in the years between Union and the advent of apartheid.29 By virtue of his location as well as his intellectual abhorrence of binaries, Gubbins adamantly tried to delineate an identity for himself and his compatriots that effaced cultural deviations. In so doing—and whether or not he was cognizant of this—his position resonated with that of other social advocates working toward similar ends. At the same time, though more deliberately, Gubbins’s efforts toward social betterment became entwined in the contemporaneous liberal movement. Here his friendship with J. D. Rheinallt Jones, founder of the South African Institute of Race Relations and arguably the embodiment of 1920s liberalism itself, was essential. While Gubbins had himself determined that binary opposites hindered holistic—and thus true—understandings of the world, he did not apply his notions to what was then called the “native question” until he became friends with Rheinallt Jones. Through this association, Gubbins came to see interracial interaction as the quintessential problem facing modern South Africa—the biggest and most glaring incarnation of binary thought. Like other liberals of the day, he became motivated by ideals of racial upliftment that, while conservative—if not downright racist—in hindsight, nevertheless envisioned a world counter to what was emerging. Falling in line with this movement and its champion, Rheinallt Jones, Gubbins started to imagine his collections of Africana books and objects as vehicles possible of broaching what seemed to be intractable social divides. Moreover, it was through this relationship that the very idea of making Gubbins’s collection of Africana books public was first raised,

10 / Introduction

a plan whose realization paved the way for the museum’s creation several years later. Aligning himself with the liberal agenda, Gubbins put his collections to work toward specific ideological ends. To the extent that many liberals were simultaneously engaged in developing South Africanism, Gubbins’s endeavors similarly endorsed this directive. Supporting both philosophies, Gubbins therefore found himself, his Africana, and his three-dimensional thought at the center of a movement far greater than any one of them: the deliberate fashioning of modern Johannesburg. In the early decades of the twentieth century, many within this still-young town were determined to establish the permanence and civility of their city in the eyes of both the nation and the world. Constructed against Cape Town (the south to its metaphoric north) and Pretoria (the supposedly provincial foil to its cosmopolitan sensibility), as well as in light of cultural markers abroad, young Johannesburg hoped to be at once a beacon of modernity on the African continent and a cultured city whose very institutions affirmed the permanence and sophistication of its citizens. Far from the gold-rush town many supposed it to be, those working to mold the city seemed to shout, Johannesburg was a world-class, urbane city. In order to affirm this position, social advocates worked tirelessly to render the city modern, a process that led to the creation of such venues as a new university, an art gallery, and a public library. Moving his assortment into these spaces—first transferring his collection of Africana books to the young University of the Witwatersrand before convincing the city council to pay for the construction and housing of his collection of Africana items in the top floor of the newly built Johannesburg Public Library, Gubbins ensured that Africana was central—both ideologically and physically—to modern Johannesburg. To the extent that Gubbins’s work reveals the connection between South Africanism and liberalism while exposing the construction of a city, his story unhinges some of what we think we know about the years immediately following Union. Thus, this story functions in much the same way as Ann Laura Stoler’s inquiry into Dutch colonial archives does against prevailing accounts of that time. She reminds that while “some would argue that the grand narratives of colonialism have been amply and excessively told. . . . Assuming we know those scripts rests too comfortably on predictable stories with familiar plots.”30 We cannot, in other words, let our understanding of the dominant colonial—and in this case, preapartheid—narrative override smaller, sometimes counterintuitive stories. Speaking of South Africa specifically, Saul Dubow, Alan Jeeves, and other contributors to the edited volume South Africa’s 1940s: Worlds of Possibilities make a similar case with

Introduction / 11

regard to the rise of apartheid at the end of that decade. “In no sense, other than in the minds of its adherents,” writes Dubow, “was the advent of apartheid preordained. Alternative worlds of possibilities were plausibly, if not equally, on offer.”31 “Thinking about these years as a whole,” he further maintains, “helps to counter the pronounced tendency to view the period in teleological terms, namely, as the period ‘leading up to apartheid.’”32 Sarah Nuttall expresses a resonant line of thought. “South African studies have, for a long time, been overdetermined by the reality of apartheid,” she writes, noting that it is “as if, in the historical trajectory of the country, apartheid was inevitable in terms of both its origins and its consequences; as if everything led to it and everything flows as a consequence of it.”33 Or, as Jonathan Hyslop writes with regard to Johannesburg in particular, there existed “possibilities and processes contained in the early city’s existence which we miss out when we simply read apartheid back into it.”34 Responding to these concerns in the earliest years of the century, Gubbins’s story and that of his Africana enable us to query what kinds of “alternate world of possibility” were being conceived, by whom, and to what end. And, as with many of the contributions to the edited collection on the 1940s, Gubbins’s story hints at the existence of another, largely unknown history. Concerned—in this time period—with Gubbins’s library and museum as manifestations of the liberal and South Africanist agendas as he understood them, this book refuses to cast aside these imperatives. Following Dubow’s lead, this book is predicated upon the notion that although students of South African history have readily explored the dual strains of Afrikaner and Africanist nationalism in this time period and beyond, this third strain of liberal South Africanism existed and therefore demands scrutiny. While, as Dubow puts it, “its weakness and ultimate political failure has more or less been taken as a given in many teleological readings of modern South African history,” this study works from the assumption, articulated again by Dubow, that “South Africanism, while always an ideology of compromise, was a major—even dominant—political force from the moment of Union to the advent of the Nationalists in 1948.”35 Reclaiming this story thus matters in and of itself. To this end, this book pays attention to Gubbins, just as Hyslop does for intellectual Guy Butler, noting that he “was a far more interesting and complex thinker than . . . [a simple] dismissal would imply” and proposing for the 1930s, just as he does for the following decade, “that the white intelligentsia . . . harboured non-Marxist strands of thinking which, though undoubtedly marked by racism, were considerably more egalitarian, democratic, and diverse than is generally recognized.”36 Just as Hyslop lauds what

12 / Introduction

he terms Butler’s “interesting engagement with the issue of what it means to be South African,” so this book examines the ways in which Gubbins’s ideology and practice both emerged from his South African surrounding and were trained upon creating a better nation.37 What is meant to be South African to Gubbins, and the ways in which this particular meaning was both influenced by larger currents and utilized in the construction of a modern Johannesburg, are probed precisely because this is a story that runs counter to what many believe the early years of this century to have engendered. Moreover, to the extent that Gubbins’s three-dimensional thinking—which avoids binaries in light of an inclusive vision of the world—resonates with contemporary notions of nonracialism, his story is held up in these pages as a foil for today’s intellectual climate. Thus, like Hyslop’s inquiry, this book is predicated on the notion that Gubbins’s “work is worth a second look” precisely because “he anticipated the debates of today.”38 It is based on the idea, in other words, that the story of this quirky collector-come-socialadvocate’s activities in South Africa from 1902 to 1935 has bearing on today. After Gubbins’s death in 1935, the museum’s narrative retains its relevance to the extent that it illuminates the ways in which a professedly liberal institution navigated the rise and solidification of the apartheid state. Brought under the control of its landlord, the Johannesburg Public Library, the museum’s struggles to adhere to Gubbins’s vision have as much to do with the larger social climate in which it dwelt as they do with the problems attendant to his plan. While the limits of liberalism to combat racism are rendered apparent, the uneasy slippage between liberalism and racism challenge simplistic ideas of what was then possible. By way of Africana, we are afforded an indirect—and thus intriguing—lens onto how apartheid functioned at the level of culture. It is here that we witness a change from the supposedly far-reaching space that Gubbins envisioned to one that came to display and therefore enforce racial separation. The usurpation—both deliberate and inadvertent—of the museum by apartheid ideologues appears as one more salient casualty of apartheid. That the late 1970s simultaneously witnessed the beginning of the end of apartheid and the beginning of the end of the Africana Museum as it had come to be known is similarly important. Reading the two processes against each other, both are thrown into new relief. For it was then that the museum was finally granted a new, permanent home—a space large enough to realize its longtime dreams. Unable to complete the building immediately, museum curators settled on a temporary solution. All objects of black Africana—the so-called ethnography collections—would be moved to the new space, which would open at once as the Africana Museum in Progress

Introduction / 13

(AMIP). Objects of white Africana would remain, temporarily, on the top floor of the public library. The older guard of the museum—those workers who believed wholeheartedly in a kind of ineffectual liberalism—would stay where they were, while a younger group of curators, intent on rendering their institution meaningful to a changing world, would move with the ethnography collection. While the world outside its doors erupted in flames with the youth calling for the end of apartheid, the museum fractured both physically and ideologically. Although this polarization implied a disconnect between the museum proper and the outside world, AMIP’s focus aligned with currents for change in larger society, making it a window onto these tumultuous years. Caught up in redressing past imbalances and making itself useful, AMIP opened its doors to the widest public the museum had ever seen, becoming both a vehicle for change and a receptacle for it during the heady days of 1980s South Africa. Just marginalized enough to act on its own accord while answering only sparingly to the museum’s central administrators, and thus the city council, the space became something of an experiment in museology. An adamant documenter of its own internal logic, AMIP provides, like the museum generally, an archive onto the recent past that contains entry points into the complex, difficult discussions of the day. Upon AMIP’s closure in 1988, both halves of the museum entered into a six-year period of debate surrounding the institution’s regeneration as a singular entity that is similarly illustrative of the era. As with the life of AMIP itself, these years of deliberation illuminate larger currents for change. Internal museum discussions—as painstaking and prolonged as they were—unpacked the strengths and limitation of culture, raising questions that were likewise being debated beyond its doors about how change is made in society. How and in what ways culture could affect the political environment were questions then being posed by both curators and politicians, suggesting that the ephemera of culture has—or at least, at that time, had—more weight than is often thought. Against contemporaneous discussions by the African National Congress, the United Democratic Front, and others, the museum’s own grappling with culture as both a weapon and a tool acquires new meaning. Beyond breathing new life into the years immediately preceding the advent of the postapartheid order, the museum’s rebirth continues to reflect South Africa today. Examining latter-day curators’ visions for the museum against Gubbins’s original schema, a wider temporal lens than either party ever had is brought to bear on the institution’s history. Viewed across the preapartheid, apartheid, and postapartheid eras, we are able to note the

14 / Introduction

differences between each climate in which the museum existed—disparities that are, on one level, rather obvious. At the same time, though far less evidently, the perspective granted by the museum in the longue durée allows us to see the similarities across what are often seen as the hard parameters set by apartheid’s duration. That Gubbins was asking questions in the early de­ cades of the twentieth century about what it means to be South African, about how the nation could create an identity that comfortably encompassed all of its inhabitants, and that the museum sought to address these challenges more than a decade before the advent of apartheid, appears significant in a twenty-first century South Africa that is both racked by xenophobia and still deeply fractured. The questions raised by Gubbins and cohort around identity, belonging, and citizenship echo postapartheid discussions of rainbow nationhood and what it means to be South African in much the same way that his belief in the power of culture resonates with directives—waning as they may be—toward an African Renaissance.39 In other words, the drive to create an inclusive, proud South African identity is as much a part of South Africa’s recent past as it is attendant to her distant history. And, undoubtedly, there is something salient—and sobering—about this. While this institutional biography opens onto larger questions of change and stasis, and thus of the utility of colonial spaces in the postcolonial world, the narrative found herein warrants attention in and of itself. Drawing upon the idea, as Verne Harris puts it, that “telling stories of our pasts is a quintessentially human activity” since “without story we are without soul,” this book resurrects a forgotten tale under the assumption that as humans we need stories to ground us in time and place. Recognizing that this process is never a neutral one, this book has been motivated to recount a story that resonates with South Africa today. For, again in Harris’s words, “what stories are told matters. How well they are told matters.”40 What we declare known about the past immediately and irrevocably shapes the knowable and hence carries weight. At the same time, this book responds to Ira Glass’s assertion that today’s nonfiction writing is dominated by banal, even demoralizing stories. Lauding the telling of “stories full of empathy and amusement and the sheer pleasure of discovering the world” as enriching by virtue of the fact that they leave their audiences “more awake and more aware and more appreciative of everything,” Glass pushes us to hold nonfiction to high stan­ dards.41 There is something to be said for a story, he persuades us, that has the capacity to introduce us to something new and that moves us, if only partially, closer toward understanding the world. Inspired by this directive, though likewise humbled by narrative and authorial limitations, this book seeks, via this museum’s story, to do just that: to awaken readers to some-

Introduction / 15

thing new, to shift, if ever so slightly, their view of, if not the world, then the place of this museum—its contents, its history—within it.

Method As a study about a museum, this book necessarily engages the wide range of museum theory that has emerged over the last three decades. During that time, an increasing number of scholars turned their attention to the ways in which museums function and how what they do both affects and reflects societies. The result has been a rich body of scholarship, much of which informs this study. The genesis of museums, their original and shifting missions, and their successes and failures have all been probed in relation to this particular space. But while this book tries to situate the Africana Museum / MuseumAfrica within the larger historical trajectories of museums, it also works from the assumption, articulated by Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, that each institution is unique, that, as she puts it, “there is no essential museum.”42 The biography of this institution is thus examined both in relation to other such spaces and on its own. At the same time, this study emerges from the notion, stated somewhat glibly by Donald Preziosi, that “everything of significance to museology has already been said.”43 Given the substantial body of extant work on how museums function, adding to this type of literature per se is relegated to a secondary concern in these pages. Alternately, this book utilizes the story of this one museum as a vehicle both to illuminate South African history and to address a central analytic concern: how colonial spaces can be rerendered useful in the postcolonial world. This book similarly draws upon a broad range of additional scholarship, utilizing each piece to the extent that it helps frame the central concern of the book. So while this study places the Africana Museum / MuseumAfrica in the context of trends such as liberalism, South Africanism, and nonracialism—and while these are all subsequently scrutinized—they are examined only in light of the primary narrative. Domestic and global discussions of modernity and postmodernity are likewise plumbed, just as questions of culture and commemoration are considered. This book also makes use of archival theory in order to engage, as Stoler puts it, “archiving-as-process rather than archives-as-things.”44 While the things—in this case the Africana—are indeed important, they are secondary to the processes by which the museum-as-archive was made. Finally, because it is centered on a collector and a collection, this book draws upon critical theory concerning both. In part, this emerges from the subject matter itself. But, additionally, the focus on collector/collecting comes from the realization, derived from Maya

16 / Introduction

Jasanoff, that “collectors make excellent guides” through history “because of their active, tangible engagement with other cultures, and their preoccupation with status and self-fashioning.”45 Collectors, those driven to amass and to categorize—and their collections, their would-be archives—provide the historian with unique vantages into the making, labeling, and prioritizing of material culture, itself reflective of what a society deems important. Centering on the creation of the archive, this book thus follows the move, articulated by Tom Griffiths as a general trend, of “turning from the objects to the subjects, from the collected to the collectors.”46 In so doing, it describes what Jean Baudrillard calls “the whole miracle of collecting,” the fact that “it is invariably oneself that one collects.”47 Itself a bricolage of my intellectual journey, this book is thus both about a collection and a collection of my own. This book emerges from my doctoral dissertation, completed at Harvard University in 2006, and thus its genesis lends insight into the final project. In July 2001, charged to define a dissertation topic, I returned to the country of my birth. By then, prior trips to South Africa and secondary research had already sparked my interest in culture’s role in the nation’s recent history. With the words of the African National Congress’s 1955 Freedom Charter demanding that “the doors of learning and of culture shall be open to all” ringing in my ears, I sought to determine the ways in which culture was being utilized in the postapartheid state. This broad directive brought me to MuseumAfrica in Newtown, Johannesburg. Situated in the old produce market, directly below the M1 highway, the museum’s shiny façade suggested that it was a modern, sophisticated museum of African culture. Yet, the interior presented a far different reality. Inside the building were vast open spaces, populated only by old-fashioned exhibits in various states of disrepair. The content of the museum covered such a wide and seemingly unrelated range of topics that I was left unsure of the institution’s overall scope. From displays on rock art and the history of photography to snapshots into the life of domestic workers and the history of Mahatma Gandhi’s life on the Rand, MuseumAfrica seemed to cover an impossibly broad assortment of subjects. Devoid of an obvious path, I encountered these exhibits haphazardly, adding to the overall sense of disjointedness. Entering this museum in 2001, I was bewildered. Yet, at the same time as I wondered about the museum’s overall mission and execution, I became intrigued. Here was an institution deliberately avoiding a singular narrative of African cultural history in a country then intent on celebrating its rainbow heritage. Through glimpses into the past, the museum endorsed the nonlinear, non-meta-narrative view of history

Introduction / 17

then being championed beyond its doors. While there were certainly gaps in the museum’s execution—demonstrated by its design and the poor public regard in which it was held—the basic attempt to illustrate the multiplicity of human experience seemed both timely and courageous. With my interest piqued, I began to investigate the museum’s genealogy. I learned that the institution, founded by one John Gaspard Gubbins, had been called the African Museum and had been housed in the Johannesburg Public Library from its creation in 1935 until its move and name change in 1994. But, beyond those basic facts, I observed that most people I encountered—from workers at the museum itself to university scholars and public officials—had little or no knowledge of MuseumAfrica’s past. While this lack of knowledge about the institution further captivated me, the topic remained simply one of passing interest until I discovered a cache of hitherto unused documents that spoke to the creation of the institution. With this fortuitous find, I began to see the topic change from a fleeting interest into a project worthy of extended scrutiny. As it turned out, I was not the first scholar to probe the history of this cultural history museum. In the 1970s, John Gubbins’s sole daughter, Elizabeth Duncan Rose, had commissioned Professor Paul Butterfield of the Education Department at the University of the Witwatersrand to write her father’s biography. While never completed, Butterfield spent a great deal of time and energy investigating Gubbins’s life.48 If nothing else, Butterfield succeeded in amassing—and convincing the University of the Witwatersrand to pay for—a superb collection of primary source material relating to Gubbins. The heart of the collection is a store of nearly one thousand letters from Gubbins to his older sister, Bertha Tufnell, which had been dutifully preserved by the Tufnell family in England. From his arrival in South Africa in 1902 to his death in 1935, Gubbins diligently documented his life, sending home weekly letters that often reached over twenty pages in length. Rich in detail and analysis, these dispatches breathe life into a unique character during a fascinating period in South African history. Included in this set are some of Bertha Tufnell’s reflections on her brother’s musings, all of which provide a window onto a captivating transatlantic conversation by two highly intelligent, deeply reflective social advocates. Together, this epistolary hoard reveals a wealth of information about South Africa and the relationship between metropole and colony, as well as the intricacies of Gubbins’s life.49 In addition to this set of correspondence, Butterfield uncovered over a hundred letters written by Gubbins’s older brother—who fought in the Second South African War of 1899–1902—as well as various scrapbooks, journals, newspaper cutout collections, and photographs that bear witness to the

18 / Introduction

Gubbins family’s interaction with South Africa. These Butterfield supplemented with further documentation of Gubbins’s life. Probing both public and private collections, Butterfield thus assembled a wealth of information on Gubbins. And there is no doubt that this treasure hunt inspired him. On the centenary of Gubbins’s birth in 1977, he proposed a four-part documentary on Gubbins’s life to the South African Broadcasting Company. Though the show was never executed, Butterfield’s obvious enthusiasm for both the Gubbins family generally and John Gubbins’s work in South Africa in particular was palpable. Similarly, it was with obvious passion that Butterfield convinced the University of the Witwatersrand to purchase the entire collection of Gubbins’s documentation, including Butterfield’s own research notes. All of these materials are now housed in the University of the Witwatersrand’s Department of Historical Papers in the William Cullen Library. Stumbling upon this amazingly rich and varied collection of sources, I knew that while I might never meet Professor Paul Butterfield, I would be forever grateful to him. The Gubbins Collection in Historical Papers, located in the same building as the namesake Gubbins’s Library of Africana, thus became the starting point for my research. Other collections held by the department of Historical Papers—such as those of J. D. Rheinallt Jones—provided contextual information for this project. The University Archives, housed in Senate House, similarly supplied a wealth of background information on the university and its personnel, as well as the specific circumstances surrounding the creation of the Gubbins Library of Africana. Beyond the university, the Johannesburg Public Library held an immense amount of relevant data, including ample information on the building of the modern public library and the early history of its longtime tenant, the Africana Museum. Fortuitously, all three archives contained collections of newspaper cutouts, important since the relevant newspaper archives were not, at the time of research, open to the public. For the period after Gubbins’s death, MuseumAfrica’s extensive archives revealed the kind of meticulous documentation that one would expect of library-trained professionals.50 From governing advisory committee minutes and directors’ reports to working documents on exhibitions and collection indexes, this archive exposed the inner workings of the museum. Of particular interest was a well-guarded, unpublished history of the museum, completed in the late 1970s by longtime museum director R. F. Kennedy. Full of personal reflections on the museum’s mission and character, this tome presented penetrating insight into administrative decisions during the museum’s first fifty years of existence. Published museum materials,

Introduction / 19

including exhibition catalogues, annual reports, and the institution’s quarterly journal, Africana Notes and News, supplied additional insight into the museum. In addition to data gathered at the university, museum, and public library, research for this project was derived from documentation found at the City of Johannesburg’s Local Government Library. There, town council minutes exposed the intricate processes by which the museum was and continues to be governed. The National Archives of South Africa in Pretoria also provided relevant information. The Archives of the African National Congress, located in Fort Hare, were plumbed for information regarding the uses and analyses of culture by the largest antiapartheid organization and now-governing party. Interviews with current and former museum workers, city and government officials, and library employees added another dimension to archival sources. Together, archival and personal research suggested something I suspected from my earliest forays into understanding the role of culture in postapartheid South Africa: despite the sense we have that culture matters, approaching such a topic head-on is difficult. Complication arises both because of the uneasy questions that the history of cultural uses raises—when viewed across the apartheid era—but also, and more simply, because it is difficult to talk about culture. Given this, the museum emerged as an apt vehicle to approach this subject, as one of the “not obviously ‘ideological’” spaces that Dubow writes about whose very “salience” lies in this categorization.51 The fact that the museum appears to exist above dogma makes it an inconspicuous lens onto highly emotive topics. To say you are researching the history of a museum seems benign. It does not appear to say that you are seeking to destabilize understandings of colonial South African history, or that you are investigating the ways in which the now-empowered African National Congress’s use of culture resonates with that of the preapartheid and apartheid states, or that you are demonstrating the uneasy slippage between liberalism and racism when in fact your project may be doing all of the above under the cloak of a simplistic history of an unimportant space. Far from a neutral institution, this museum—any museum—is actually a matrix of ideology, an archive of all that was and all that can ever be said. As Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe write, “the contradictory, ambivalent, position which museums are in makes them key cultural loci of our times.”52 This is precisely because, as Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago explain, museums house objects, endorsing, as they put it “the beliefs that have constituted the core of ‘modernity’ [and that] rest upon certain assumptions about the nature of meaningful relationships between subjects and objects, between individu-

20 / Introduction

als or communities and the worlds they weave about themselves.”53 Because they house remnants of the past, because they are both seen as being integral to society and peripheral to it, museums are thus powerful lenses onto change. Often overlooked as being tangential to ideological trends, museums provide insight into what people think and know precisely because they grow out of this very atmosphere. This museum, the Africana Museum / MuseumAfrica, is no different. Coming to this realization as an expatriate South African living in Johannesburg in the early twenty-first century where questions of rainbow nationhood and an African Renaissance loomed large, the following book was born. There will undoubtedly be complainants who posit, as Saul Dubow imagines would-be criticizers for his inquiry into the history of South Africanism, “that this is not an appropriate moment to write about white elites in South Africa.”54 There will certainly also be those who say that the posttransition era does not call for the history of a largely defunct cultural history museum. Indeed, the latter is part of the same logic that shuns the museum. And yet, should we avoid this topic outright, should we say that the history of colonizers only matters to the extent that it illuminates the struggle, that it affirms the present, in Dubow’s words, “important dimensions of South African history risk being occluded or lost if the role of whites is viewed too narrowly in terms of settler colonialism and exploitation, and if resistance to apartheid becomes our only frame of reference.”55 Without stories that trouble the simplistic binaries created by apartheid ideologues—that force us to query neat divisions into black and white, good and evil—the past is flattened in the service of an equally mythologized present. Of similar concern, should we overlook this museum out-and-out, continuing to pass it by on our way to flashier spaces, allowing it to be subsumed in the taint of the colonial and apartheid eras, we jeopardize the role of anything from before. And once put in the balance, who is to say where this will end? Though this museum is, like so many worldwide, “a building laden with associations, many negative,” to use Robert Lumley’s words, it and its history need to be reclaimed.56 And that, precisely, is what this book does.

Chapters This book consists of five chapters. The first, “Two Worlds Collide: John Gaspard Gubbins in South Africa, 1902–1924,” details the period from Gubbins’s arrival in South Africa in 1902 until the publication of his treatise in 1924. It argues that the disconnect between Gubbins’s late-Victorian education and the reality of the South Africa he encountered led both to

Introduction / 21

his breakdown and to his articulation of a new way of thought. More­ over, it posits that this transformation and its result shed light on the anxieties and possibilities of that particular moment of modernity. Chapter 2, “The Founding Vision: John Gaspard Gubbins and the Dream of a City’s Treasure, 1924–1935,” narrates first the genesis of the Gubbins Library of Africana at the University of the Witwatersrand and then the birth of the Africana Museum itself. Along the way, it troubles commonplace teleological readings of this era by exploring how South Africanism and liberalism were used to create a modern Johannesburg. The third chapter, “Becoming ‘Treasures and Trash’: The Africana Museum in the Johannesburg Public Library, 1935–1977,” details the process by which the museum moved, in these years, from a place motivated by three-dimensional ideals to one that supported the very binaries of apartheid. In so doing, it demonstrates the limits of liberalism to overcome racism. Chapter 4, “ ‘Determined to Be Relevant: The Museum Reimagined, 1977–1994,” documents the museum’s polarization and ultimate reunification, reading both periods against contemporary politics. It asserts that the manner by which the museum resolved its own bifurcation had ready parallels beyond its doors, suggesting both why the renovated museum was initially well-received and why its rebirth came with fault lines—hardly apparent at the time—that would quickly lead to its demise. In this way, the museum’s shining moment in 1994 stands as a metonym for the nation itself. The final chapter, “On Display and in Storage: Museums and Archives in Postapartheid South Africa,” uses the history of MuseumAfrica since 1994 to frame an overview of other spaces of commemoration in postapartheid South Africa. Mapping today’s engagement with the past, this chapter details contemporaneous tensions between remembering and forgetting and the pitfalls and challenges they engender for memory institutions. “The Enduring Struggle: The Utility of a Colonial Institution in the Postcolonial World,” the book’s conclusion, steps back from this particular museum, this minor history. Informed by the all too common stories of our times—of farms seized, statues toppled, and museums ransacked—of a world still unsure of how to deal with its own past, it offers its modest proposal: that without denying the real urge to purge ourselves of all remnants of the past that do not fit comfortably with our sense of the present, there remain places that deserve a second look both for what they can reveal about the long ago and, arguably more so, for what they illuminate about today. This museum is one such space. Without providing a schema to revitalize MuseumAfrica or, worse, offering an excuse for colonialism and its attendant institutions, this chapter synthesizes the argument laced throughout the

22 / Introduction

1.  John Gaspard Gubbins, undated.

book. This institution, as an archive and as a lens onto change over time, retains its salience. Detailing this assertion, this final chapter lays bear the set of tools capable of rendering colonial spaces useful to the postcolonial world utilized throughout the book, pulling together the project’s main thrust: an investigation into museum matters that argues that this one does just that.

one

Two Worlds Collide: John Gaspard Gubbins in South Africa, 1902–1924

Lived a woman wonderful, (May the Lord amend her!) Neither simple, kind, nor true, But her Pagan beauty drew Christian gentlemen a few Hotly to attend her. Christian gentlemen a few From Berwick unto Dover For she was South Africa. And she was South Africa, She was our South Africa, Africa all over! 1 —Rudyard Kipling, from South Africa, 1903

In December 1902, twenty-five-year-old adventure seeker John Gaspard Gubbins boarded the Union Castle Line RMS Kildonan Castle for Cape Town, never to return to England as anything but a visitor. From the boat, Gubbins described his fellow passengers, noting that “they consist[ed] chiefly of returning officers, people connected with various commercial and financial firms” and other bureaucrats.2 Traveling among the religious, financial, and administrative agents of imperialism who were busily taking up the white man’s burden in darkest Africa, Gubbins felt a part of a great historical moment. Yet, it was finding himself in the company of the quintessential proponent for empire that stirred Gubbins’s imagination most. “Rudyard Kipling his wife and children are on board,” he boasted, “and I have had several long gossips with him.”3 Beside his literary reputation,

24 / Chapter One

Kipling’s experiences as a perennial South African holiday-maker and journalist covering the Second South African War intrigued Gubbins, heightening Gubbins’s sense of timeliness.4 To be sure, Gubbins was like the men Kipling later immortalized in his poem South Africa: a Christian gentleman drawn to Africa. A rector’s son with Cambridge pedigree, Gubbins epitomized late Victorian sensibilities. On the other hand, and as Gubbins would soon find out, the South Africa that he was to encounter was just as Kipling would describe it: a land anything but simple. Only years later, when Gubbins thought about the distance he had come from the day he stepped off the Kildonan Castle, of all he had come to see and learn in South Africa, would he fully realize the profundity of Kipling’s pronouncement. In this chapter I detail the time period from Gubbins’s arrival in 1902 to the publication of his Three-Dimensional Thinking in 1924, tracing the arc of his intellectual breakdown and the concurrent birth of his novel manner of thought while highlighting the glimpses his story offers of South Africa along the way. I posit that Gubbins’s tale is at once unique—the product of an overly sensitive man—and representative of larger processes evident in this era of South African history that have become obscured in hindsight. Specifically, I assert that it was the disconnect between Gubbins’s lateVictorian education and the realities of South Africa in the early decades of the twentieth century that caused the very disintegration from which threedimensional thought sprung. In this reading, both the nature and content of Gubbins’s intellectual collapse shed light on the interplay between metropole and colony (and later fellow commonwealth members) in the years surrounding the Second South African War and World War I. At the same time, Gubbins’s passion for historical inquiry—also depicted in these pages—reveals his generation’s sense of the modern world and the embeddedness of colonial/metropolitan relations within it. Using Gubbins’s narrative as he recorded it as a guide, I illuminate South Africa in these precarious decades, setting the stage for the creation of Gubbins’s most important accomplishment—the Africana Museum.

From Where He Came When John Gaspard Gubbins disembarked in Cape Town at the end of 1902, he carried with him an intellectual trousseau far more important than any physical belongings he may have brought. Born on 6 January 1877 at Upham in Hampshire, England, to the local rector, Reverend Richard Shard Gubbins, and his wife Ellen Gubbins, née Rolls (of Rolls Royce fame), educated at Cambridge, and reared in late-Victorian England, Gubbins

Two Worlds Collide / 25

personified the Western world’s prevailing intellectual position.5 He was a God-fearing patriot, a proponent of science and rationality.6 Raised during an era when the chaos of the scramble for Africa was solidifying into a range of systematic colonial regimes, Gubbins was aware of the then-timely theories of social Darwinism and scientific racism. Educated while imperial Britain confronted its self-named Other around the globe, Gubbins learned of newly rationalized disciplines like history and anthropology. Constructed as being mutually exclusive, he understood that history addressed change over time and progress and that it was the domain of the white peoples of the earth. Anthropology or ethnology, on the other hand, was about black peoples’ worlds, those without change or progress, rationality or reason, those without history. Culture—to be cultivated—to progress through hard work over time toward something higher, something better—this was the goal of the era, the widespread metaphor.7 Culture was what distinguished those with history from those who were frozen in time. It was what justified colonialism. And Gubbins understood. He believed, above all, in the binaries that were laid out for him in church and library: us and them, heathen and saved, evolved and evolving.8 The late-Victorian society from which Gubbins arose was a world in which the notion of the intellectual had newly emerged, and this too affected him. Not only did, in T. W. Heyk’s words, “the dissemination of the scientific paradigm for intellectual activity” into the realms of emergent disciplines change the nature of what was knowable, but the sense that an educated person should know more than simply the classics and mathematics was coming into fashion.9 In particular, and again in Heyk’s words, the “growth in university circles of the concepts of culture as a rarified activity” was to have particular importance for Gubbins, especially as culture related to history.10 For, as Carolyn Steedman reminds, “‘History’ is one of the great narrative modes that are our legacy from the nineteenth century.”11 Or, as Michel Foucault puts the same point, “the great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world.”12 An outgrowth of the same logic of progress that concerned Darwin and Spencer, the notion of history as a story at once documenting progress and explaining the present achieved salience at this time. And it was this narrative structure—and the impact in had on intellectuals—that molded Gubbins’s sense of place. For Gubbins and many other similarly educated men of this time, history and culture found expression through the act of collecting. A way of, as

26 / Chapter One

Susan Pearce explains, controlling the universe in a general sense, collecting was also profoundly tied to the colonial endeavor.13 From the formalized study and collection of the Other that attended the emergence of anthropology to the haphazard accumulation of colonial agents, collecting and colonialism compelled each other.14 As Tom Griffiths explains in his work on the antiquarian imagination in Australia, just as “history became a central paradigm for knowledge in the nineteenth century,” so “the urge to classify and order the world of nature went hand in hand with the organisation and domination of far-flung human societies.”15 Saul Dubow aptly states a similar point in relation to colonial South Africa: The growth of expert knowledge about the land and its peoples was closely bound up with processes of colonial self-discovery and understanding. The urge to know about others was born of intellectual curiosity and the urge to constitute a sense of collective self. It also had a more instrumental dimension, namely the power to identify, pronounce upon, and control South Africa’s indigenous inhabitants.16

Under the banner of historical inquiry, collecting became a way to assert control over foreign environs, an expression of colonialism itself. It was a method to order the perceived chaos of colonialism, a manner to control the onward march of time and one’s place in it. And as Jean Baudrillard describes, by suspending the collector in a world of his creation, the act of collecting always provides refuge from the world outside: Doubtless this is the fundamental project of all collecting—to translate real time into the dimensions of a system. Taste, curiosity, prestige, social intercourse, all of these may draw the collector into a wider sphere of relationships (though never going beyond a circle of initiates): yet collecting remains first and foremost, and in the true sense, a pastime. For collecting simply abolishes time.17

And this was acceptable, because, in Griffiths’s words, “collecting was respectable.”18 Completing his education at the dawn of the twentieth century, Gubbins had specific ideas about progress and history and his own civilization’s place within it. Central to this position was a desire to collect what he encountered. The Gubbins family’s history of participating in British wars for empire suggested a ready outlet for young John to test his worldview. From the Crimean War to the War of New Orleans, the Gubbins name appeared on

Two Worlds Collide / 27

the rosters of those who proudly served the throne.19 But it was South Africa that caught the family’s attention. Richard Gubbins, grandfather to John, was a lieutenant colonel in the second British occupation of the South African Cape in the early nineteenth century. A hundred years later, Richard Gubbins, brother to John, followed in their grandfather’s footsteps and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel, this time serving the British in the Second South African War.20 Like his brother, John became enamored with South Africa through the elder Gubbins’s wartime souvenirs. Moira Farmer, then librarian at the Gubbins Library of Africana, wrote in 1974 of how, as “the grandson,” Gubbins “pored over the curios [his grandfather brought home] and immersed himself in books by Rider Haggard such as She and Allan Quartermain which were so popular at the time.”21 Growing up during the heyday of the British Empire, Gubbins was wooed by the romantic notions of otherness he read about in books, learned of in church, and perceived in his grandfather’s curios. Once called to the bar in 1901 after finishing his education at Haileybury and Clare College, Cambridge, Gubbins was able to fulfill his childhood dream and journey to South Africa.22

The South Africa Gubbins Encountered Gubbins arrived in South Africa at the beginning of the century with countless possibilities ahead of him. Directionless, he wandered through Cape Town and Durban before temporarily settling in Johannesburg. Arriving only seven months after the Peace of Vereeniging put an end to the prolonged, destructive Second South African War, he entered during the pinnacle of reconstruction, in which mining interests sought to resume making money while labor unrest grew and imperial Britain—by way of Lord Milner—attempted to institute a stable government.23 Gubbins thought about practicing law—his trained profession—or experimenting with mining. He questioned whether farming would be right for him. He vacillated, sending home long letters of uncertainty to his sister, Bertha Tufnell. But all along he noticed what was going on around him. He traveled, watched, and wrote about what he saw, and eventually the complexities of South African life began to erode his certain belief system. Johannesburg provided the first assault on his viewpoint. While Gubbins initially characterized the city as “not nearly so bad as it is painted”24 and “certainly the place to be at,” it was not long before his fervor was tempered by the harsh realities of the dusty young town.25 Not only was there a shortage of money available, but unproductive farming in the countryside and ravaged infrastructure also meant that services and goods were exorbitant.

28 / Chapter One

Aside from financial woes, the medley population of financiers, opportunists, and criminals distressed Gubbins, just as the predominantly male society made him long for home.26 And the situation did not appear to be getting any better. After a respite in the country, Gubbins wrote in 1905 that “in Johannesburg . . . the outlook is worse than ever.”27 Bitterly, he recorded how everyone he knew was either losing money or leaving the country; he likewise noted that suicides were not uncommon.28 He bemoaned the ongoing labor problems, now manifest in strikes and layoffs. On a different level, the fact that Johannesburg was a city in the making and not an established town like London or Cambridge—with their attendant manifestations of high culture—displeased Gubbins to no end. “People do not read much here,” he lamented, “and what they do is of the flimsiest and most sensational description. . . . [Moreover,] they never seem to talk of books. . . . This is a town of 70,000 or more and money to spend on pleasure is certainly not scarce yet there is no circulating library.”29 Characterizing Johannesburg as but a rough, uncivilized mining outpost, Gubbins echoed outsiders’ prevailing sense of the city just as he demonstrated the worldview with which he was raised.30 Unwilling to give up on South Africa, Gubbins set his sights farther afield. “Of course this is a town,” he told his sister, Bertha, “and I long to get away right into the country.”31 In the spring of 1903, Gubbins ventured to Marico District in the Western Transvaal. Unwilling to forego participating in what he termed “the biggest game going,” he used his sister’s financial backing to invest in a small mining syndicate.32 Seeking to take advantage of the release of digging restrictions that came with armistice, Gubbins and company focused their attention on the Malmani Goldfields in the region.33 Immediately, labor shortages and the obstacles facing small syndicates intruded themselves such that, by September 1903, Gubbins admitted, “our syndicate is practically broke.”34 Turning then to agriculture, Gubbins took advantage of the colonial government’s attempt to undermine the Boer stronghold on farming by doling out land to Britons. First renting a homestead and then purchasing his own land at Malmani Oog, twenty-two miles from the Zeerust and twenty-three miles from the Mafeking train stations, Gubbins settled into country life with fervor.35 Hiring twenty black Africans and one Boer, he began to live the life of a farmer—churning his own butter and going to town only to bid on cattle.36 While the idea of mining was never far from his mind, and while life in the countryside was just as, if not more difficult than that in town, Gubbins tried to acclimate himself. When, in the middle of 1910, he met and courted Mona Levey, daughter of the Colonel and Mrs. Levey, the resident magistrate of Zeerust, his decision to stay in

Two Worlds Collide / 29

Marico was all but certain.37 Accepting “a smaller income” than that which he could garner in town, John and Mona married, deciding to, in his words, “feed off all we grow.”38 And with that, Gubbins became a British farmer living in the Boer hinterland. Settling into life in the country, Gubbins was brought face-to-face with people and politics that had until then remained mere abstractions. As with mining, his eagerness to succeed was quickly mitigated by the contemporaneous problems of labor hunger and factional tensions.39 It was here in the veld that the struggle to control African labor first captured his attention. Partaking in the racist language of the day, he bemoaned the “thoroughly bad male boy” he was forced to keep at what he considered to be an outrageously high rate.40 Similarly, he echoed farming interests when he called for the importation of Chinese labor “under stringent indenture” to free Africans for farm work.41 As Gubbins was introduced to life as a South African farmer, he began to understand the need to compel a cheap labor force. Just as he became aware of the problems inherent in agricultural production at the time, Gubbins began to intermingle with fellow farmers, a group that was overwhelmingly comprised of Boers. Interacting with Boer farmers for the first time, Gubbins found that his British citizenship made him conspicuous, bringing deep-seated prejudices to the foreground. That the colonial government had helped him attain a farm did not serve his popularity.42 Reflecting on the prolonged wrangling that preceded the purchase of his land, Gubbins lamented what he saw as “back veld influence” that he felt was used against him.43 To the Boers around him, Gubbins would have represented all that they despised of the colonial government. They would have seen him as meant for urban life, inclined to progressive, and, hence, radical ways, an impermanent intruder in their land. By the same token, Gubbins’s early impressions of his Boer neighbors tended to be negative, reflecting prevailing British prejudices. In his estimation, rare “charming and really intelligent Dutchmen” aside, the bulk of the Boers he now knew were “sullen,” “ignorant,” and “lazy,” part of nothing less than “not a desirable race”44 that could not “be trusted in anyway whatsoever.”45 Gubbins’s early impressions of members of the other white race—as Anglo-Afrikaner interaction was understood in those days—bore out the binaries of his home country: while English speakers were refined, cultured, and progressive, Dutch speakers were uncouth, provincial, and inefficient. It was not long, though, before further interaction with the Boers around him challenged this stark polarization, causing Gubbins to rethink the simplistic rhetorical categories he had long employed. Over time, Gubbins

30 / Chapter One

began to perceive a changed reception—politically and socially—toward him in the veld, a transformation that in turn shifted his attitudes. In 1908, he reported that not only did the Dutch leader in the district publicly welcome him and his “progressive methods”46 to the area, but that he also entertained visits from General de la Rey and Colonial Secretary Smuts that year.47 Just a few years later, Gubbins’s acceptance by his neighbors was further demonstrated when he was elected to represent Marico along with one other delegate at the Transvaal Agricultural Union Congress in Pretoria.48 The following year, he was chosen to preside over a polling station during an election.49 Welcomed into the fold of rural life, Gubbins’s once stalwart position on Boers was unhinged. Starting to align himself and his interests with those of his neighbors, Gubbins began to question his hitherto unfailing national loyalty. He complained: “It annoys me to see the way English papers are trying to keep up the race feeling. . . . ‘Giving the country to the Boers’ ‘Replacement’ and so on. All we want is to be let alone.”50 Accusing the English-language press of enticing hatred between Afrikaners and English, Gubbins cast his lot with the “we” of the countryside, irrespective of language. The unending preoccupation with race in the newspapers and among the more radical political parties had begun to dishearten Gubbins. At the same time, “the character of the S African [by which he meant English-speaking South Africa] himself” also troubled Gubbins.51 According to Gubbins, that a large percentage of British-born people in South Africa were unwilling to commit to the nation only added to interracial tensions.52 Simultaneously, Gubbins deplored what he saw as both a product of English-speaking impermanence and a side effect of it, the notion, then dominant, “that in time everything will be Dutch,” something he termed, “a wide spread and very dangerous fallacy.” For Gubbins, popular conceptions aside, the veld had become a level playing field where one’s success depended solely upon will: “It is entirely up to the Englishman at home and out here to keep up his own end in the country, we have equal rights and if we cannot eventually be top dog by our own merit we ought to be taken out and lost.” Starting to see himself as simply a South African, and relying solely on his experience as evidence, Gubbins lamented the British role in persistent Anglo-Afrikaner tensions: “But one hopes that the race idea will die out. I think that the progressive men of both races only want to see general prosperity in the country.”53 Imagining himself to be one of the progressive men who could transcend interracial hatred between Britain and Afrikaner, Gubbins felt himself rising above narrow loyalties.

Two Worlds Collide / 31

To the extent that Gubbins engaged his Afrikaans-speaking neighbors as like-minded souls, he was participating in the growth of South Africanism, defined by Saul Dubow “as a political movement or sentiment which sought to build a white nation by developing a broadly based and locally centered form of political patriotism capable of transcending intra-white ethnic divisions.”54 “Proponents of South Africanism,” he further articulates, “sought to meliorate white struggles over language and cultural rights and to project a view of the country as possessing a distinctive national identity that was also compatible with a wider sense of international belonging.”55 South Africanism was about the creation of a white identity that transcended linguistic and historic barriers. It “emerged to inhabit the space left by a retreating imperialism and a temporarily broken republicanism,” Dubow notes. Elsewhere, he writes that since it was “geared to the needs of a unified white nation-state, it stressed virtues of moderation and conciliation.”56 In the aftermath of the destructive Second South African War, South Africanism arose as a vehicle by which an inclusive sense of whiteness could be defined. As a Briton living among Boers, Gubbins had an obvious stake in the creation of just such a definition of belonging.57 And, increasingly, he found himself working—and being impelled—toward just this end. The more Gubbins shifted from being an unqualified supporter of the throne, the more he was encouraged by Afrikaners. In 1909, he reported that Het Volk had asked him to be part of a committee that would welcome a visiting General Botha.58 By then, Het Volk garnered the majority of its support from Afrikaner farmers, while English speakers—who tended to live in urban areas—supported the Progressive Party. Later, the two parties would merge to form the first Union government. That Gubbins was approached by Het Volk in 1909 suggests that he was becoming increasingly included in country life. That same year, Gubbins sent home a newspaper cutting from, in his words, “the Volkstem which used to be a very anti-English paper.” In translation, the excerpt reads, “JGG one of the most progressive farmers in these parts known among his many friends as Farmer John has returned from Europe after 3 months holiday, he looks very fit.”59 Undoubtedly, that Gubbins was known locally and that his movements were recorded in the regional Afrikaans paper further demonstrated his incorporation into country life. At the same time, these instances point to the changing markers of Gubbins’s identity. Having lived in the countryside long enough to relate to its inhabi­ tants, Gubbins was no longer able to apply reductive terms to those around him, including himself. Yet, however much Gubbins sympathized with his

32 / Chapter One

neighbors, he remained unable to shed entirely his national loyalty. Regarding the political situation on the eve of Union, he vacillated. Unable to throw his lot in with either Het Volk and the “country people” or the Progressives and the “towns people,” Gubbins expressed his desire simply “to sit on the fence.”60 No doubt Gubbins’s newfound respect for Afrikaners had dislodged some of his once certain belief in the supremacy of the British Empire. Having found himself a Briton in the veld in a world where “British” meant “urban” and “Afrikaner” was equated with “rural,” Gubbins began to question the veracity of the easy categories that he himself had once employed. In the simplistic, dual terms of home, Gubbins now saw that he was an anomaly. One thing then became certain: South Africa had become his new home. For now, Gubbins decided to remain indecisive. Had he been content with stasis and irresolution, that may have been enough. But ever the seeking questioner, Gubbins would once more arrive at the problematics of duality. And next time, the answer he settled on would not be so easy.

Gubbins as Finder and Maker of History For all that Gubbins’s experiences in general and his dealings with his Boer neighbors in particular served to undermine the easy oppositional categories he had once employed to understand both intrawhite interaction and his own identity, his further exploration of South African life likewise challenged what he thought he knew about the world. As a gentleman of lateVictorian stock, Gubbins seems to have believed it was his duty to record all he could about the South Africa he encountered in a way that was part of the colonial endeavor itself. Driven to stand witness to the world around him, Gubbins made it his personal mission to document contemporaneous life. At the same time, Gubbins was animated by what Tom Griffiths calls “the antiquarian imagination,” which he defines as “a historical sensibility particularly attuned to the material evidence of the past, and possessing a powerful sense of place.”61 Determined, like Friedrich Nietzsche’s antiquarian, “to preserve what survives from ancient days,” Gubbins became a collector both of material objects of the South African past and of books relating to it.62 As Gubbins settled into South Africa, aware, as always, of his historical moment, he increasingly turned to explorations of the present and past as well as to accumulation as ways to assert control over his surroundings. Always drawn to the elite, Gubbins did not merely pass judgment on Johannesburg society from afar; he managed to encounter many of the most powerful men of the day, such as mining entrepreneurs and leading politi-

Two Worlds Collide / 33

cal figures Sammy Marks and Ernest Oppenheimer, along with dynamite tycoon William Cullen.63 Additionally, he made it his business to see firsthand what large-scale mining entailed, visiting the “big hole” in Kimberley from where diamonds were mined and various gold mines around Johannesburg as well.64 The ruthless, seemingly amoral characters he encountered and their chaotic state of affairs left him uneasy. He pronounced that while the financiers were “wonderful insider’s [sic] men . . . when it comes to a question of policy or ethics their ideas seem warped and they make an awful mess of things,” prodding one to “witness the cutting down of the native wage.”65 Guided by enlightenment ideals, Gubbins felt uneasy about the way money was made in South Africa. “I cannot help thinking that the best thing that could be done,” he charged, “would be to bust up this country altogether though it would cause much suffering and to start afresh from the beginning on a proper basis.”66 Observing the realities of advanced capitalism, Gubbins queried the basis of the modern world itself. Just as Gubbins mingled with the elite, he was also interested in how other members of society lived or were forced to live. Visiting the Zeerust Gaol and various mining compounds and accompanying colonial officers and policemen into the Moilos Location—home to over seven thousand Africans, situated twenty-five miles north of Zeerust—as well as the Bechuanaland Protectorate to the west of South Africa on self-imposed fact finding expeditions, Gubbins quickly learned that Africans were not simply peoples without culture and history.67 Here he saw African societies attempting to retain some continuity with the past while missionaries and colonial offi­ cers offered rationales and avenues for change. While Gubbins continued to understand the situation in terms of progress and upliftment, his surety was slipping when, for example, he refused to cast the whole missionary encounter in one light, saying, instead, that “it all depends on the man.”68 At the same time, his growing appreciation for Africans further impinged on his certainty about what he saw. Both “traditional” beer pots—which he praised for keeping water cool like nothing else—and the native’s “fashion” to “go about with a book” in the township, as opposed to the dire lack of reading in town, garnered his praise. Traveling further afield to assess the state of the region more broadly, Gubbins’s sense of modern Africa was complicated when, for instance, he described what he saw as the stifling effects of colonialism in the Portuguese East African city of Lorenzo Marques.69 In Southern Rhodesia, Gubbins was even more astounded to be met with, as he put it, “a great big bluff,” that is, that the stone ruins there were created not by Africans, but by outsiders, a fiction whose truth, he noted, “the Rhodesians do not like . . . mentioned.”70 The more Gubbins

34 / Chapter One

rendered himself a witness to the world around him, the less he understood what he saw, a process that was only amplified when he turned his attention to the past. While the African present undoubtedly captivated him, Gubbins had been enchanted by the region’s history since his earliest days there. In fact, the first time he ventured to Ottoshoop in the Western Transvaal he was thrilled to have, in his words, “followed the route Jameson took on his raid and slept in some places where he did.”71 Mimicking the path taken by Leander Starr Jameson on the failed coup attempt that shamed Cecil Rhodes and the British government in the late nineteenth century, history came alive for Gubbins. During his regional travels throughout eastern and central Africa, following in the footsteps of explorers like David Livingstone only further stimulated Gubbins’s awareness of the past. Like the scholars of the emergent discipline of history under whose tutelage he had matured, Gubbins saw the past as a resource, as a way to understand the present. At the same time, Gubbins’s historical inquiries were, as Saul Dubow explains about colonial knowledge more generally, “an assertion of acquired indigeneity.”72 Desperate to make South Africa his home, Gubbins did all he could to know about the origins of his adopted land. Returning to the South African veld and delving into her past, Gubbins indulged what was in fact a lifelong fascination with history. In so doing, he brought himself to yet another realm that would, unbeknownst to him, serve to unmoor his once secure sense of place. By early 1912, upon settling into the quiet rural existence in Marico he had desired, Gubbins began writing a column on the history of the district for the local paper, The Marico Chronicle. In this undertaking, Gubbins seemed to have been motivated by two concerns, to quote Heyk’s analysis of Victorian historical sensibilities, “first, [that] history is immensely important to the understanding of the present; and secondly, [that] it takes a good man rather than a specially trained expert to write good history.”73 The result was that “Notes on the History of Marico,” by John G. Gubbins (BA Cantab) appeared from 24 February 1912. Over the course of a year, Gubbins produced no less than twenty-two articles. In a continuous narrative that spanned the year, Gubbins recounted the history of Marico District during the nineteenth century. Using the memoirs of white travelers, he reconstructed the appearance of English, French, and American missionaries as well as the arrival of trekboers and the rise of tensions between English and Afrikaner. But he did not concern himself solely with white history. Beginning with the Bantu arrival in “Bushmen country” (dated by him as occurring in the sixteenth century), Gubbins told his readers of a vibrant

Two Worlds Collide / 35

land of contestation that produced praiseworthy stone structures and advanced metallurgy well before any white man stepped foot in it.74 Into this tale he traced the story of the Zulu expansion under Shaka—known as the Mfecane—and the displaced Ndebele’s ensuing settlement in Marico under Chief Mzilikazi.75 Focusing most of his attention on the period of contact among the missionaries, the Ndebele, and the Boers, Gubbins described a complex account of interaction between strangers. His was not simply a saga of white conquest of black. Rather, he wrote about exchanges that were alternately peaceful and problematic, casting all actors as rational beings. Without doubt, this was an amateur history, colored by some racist readings and devoid of the sort of evidentiary examples that would later characterize the discipline of history. Nevertheless, Gubbins’s work remains noteworthy to the extent that it eschewed simple narrative in favor of controversy. Contemporaneous with the birth of South African written history, Gubbins’s “Notes” challenged the trend to produce a clear-cut narrative.76 Seeking to tease out the origins of then-popular conceptions of the past and present, and seeking likewise to attract local attention, Gubbins drew upon written records, objects like engravings and paintings, and primary interviews with, for example, the Reverend J. S. Moffat, brother-in-law to David Livingstone. His product was more a series of snapshots from the past than a coherent story. Concerned with what was thought-provoking and counterintuitive, by presenting fragments from the past that arguably raised more questions than they answered, Gubbins’s column succeeded in doing just what he wanted it to accomplish. It got people interested. The inaugural edition of Gubbins’s “Notes” cheerfully reported that “Marico may pride herself on being the first district in the Transvaal to be visited by white men.”77 From the commencement, Gubbins was bent on discerning the first white person to enter Marico and on proving that Marico was the place Westerners first entered the Transvaal. Throughout the “Notes,” Gubbins traced meticulously the various foreigners who entered the area. In his second installation, he told the tale of Wilson, Lindley, and Venable—the American missionaries who entered the region at the same time as the Boers embarked on their Great Trek from the Cape—and of the tragic death of one of their wives, Jane Wilson, which quickly followed their arrival.78 Three weeks after its debut, the Wilsons’s story resurfaced in Gubbins’s column. This time, he used his pulpit not only to educate his neighbors, but also to beseech them to preserve whatever physical remnants were left from the Wilsons’s homestead.79 Gubbins’s entreaty did not prevent the razing of the syringa trees that lined the property, having grown from an original two “many hundred fold.”80 But, his enthusiastic, colorful columns

36 / Chapter One

continued to rouse local support. Several months into writing he rejoiced, “I am rather pleased at the interest people seem to take in the articles on the district.”81 On a different level, Gubbins’s histories revealed the growing collection of books of local interest he drew upon when writing. These included Algernon Methuen Marshall’s work, South Africa: Report on the Acts That Took Place near Tweebosch on 7th March, 1902, Sidney Mendelssohn’s South African Bibliography, and Captain Harris’s reminiscences. In part, the books came from his sister Bertha in England.82 Increasingly, though, Gubbins was taking it upon himself to purchase or barter for books relating to the region.83 As an outgrowth of the same longtime hobby of collecting that saw him sending home relics for inclusion in his niece and nephew’s homemade museum, Gubbins found immense stimulation in these tomes.84 In turn, his inclusion of long-forgotten remnants of the past heightened his column’s distinctiveness and popularity. Thus, Gubbins was generating a name for himself as an educated, civic-minded local who was intent on uncovering all sides of a story. Perhaps that is why, when a stone bearing strange marks was found by railway workmen, John Gaspard Gubbins was called to examine it. Little could the railway men have guessed that that stone would provide the impetus for the marriage of Gubbins’s historical writings and his collection of historical books. In April of that year, as Gubbins recounted in his 4 May column, “while unloading a cartload of stones and rubbish, which was probably intended for use in the foundation of the track of the new railway, one of the workmen noticed a slab with an inscription on it.” After careful examination, Gubbins determined “it to be a contemporary account of her death.” 85 “Her” was Jane Wilson, wife of the American missionary whom she accompanied to Mosega in 1836, only to die there. Gubbins excitedly wrote Bertha about finding what he termed “the most interesting historical record that could be found in either the district or the Transvaal,” namely the stone that had been placed inside Mrs. Wilson’s grave.86 In his column, Gubbins used the stone’s inscription to postulate about the history that bore it. In characteristically romantic prose, Gubbins brought the Americans’ plight to life: Generally the inscription is most neatly engraved. But here and there the hand of the engraver slips. Perhaps his eyes were dimmed with tears. At first I felt the writer thought perhaps more of himself than of his wife, when he wrote that at the resurrection she would rise to testify ye benevolent desires of her husband. But now I think it is a pathetic sort of explanation and apology for having brought her to die in the wilderness. Perhaps some one had written a

Two Worlds Collide / 37 letter to Dr. Wilson in the same form as Mrs. Moffat wrote to her son in law Dr. Livingstone remonstrating in the strongest terms against his plan of taking his wife with him on his journeys.

Demonstrating a keen imagination and a strong ability to empathize, Gubbins breathed life into what had hitherto been simply words on a rock. Over the course of his articles, Gubbins revisited the Wilson saga. When, for instance, the owners of Zendlingpost uncovered the remnants of the Wilson home, Gubbins was able to use the items found there—“broken crockery and relics from the house which was destroyed by fire in 1837”—to theorize about how the Wilsons had lived.87 Later, he drew upon J. S. Moffat’s recollections of visiting the area as a child as well as the account of an African woman who had worked for the Wilsons—as recorded by a missionary—to weave a complex tale.88 His was a narrative of struggle—against nature and against man. But it was also an account of cooperation borne of contact. As Gubbins uncovered fragments that detailed the history of Mosega, he was forced to dispel any simple-minded notions he may have still had about missionary work in Africa. Always in search of the truth, Gubbins found that simplistic explanations could not encompass the history he now sought to write. However much concern this notion would later cause him, for now he had at least determined not only who the first white man in the Transvaal had been, but, with the discovery of the stone, who “the first white lady to visit the Transvaal” had been as well, a lady who happened to have the unfortunate luck of being “the first to die there.”89 In addition to unearthing these facts, Gubbins’s successful historicization of the mark-strewn rock focused outside attention on his attempts to stimulate local historical interest.90 Suddenly, Gubbins became a public figure whose work warranted the consideration of not only missionary societies and museum authorities, but also eminent South African historians.91 Clearly the discovery of Jane Wilson’s headstone had meaning far beyond Marico District.92 The object and the story struck a resonant chord with many people in the then-new South Africa. In those early years after Union, the need to define South Africa was immense. All over the country, in a variety of forums, historical narratives were being employed to this end. As was so often the case in his life, Gubbins had been doing the right thing at the right time. And, as was also idiosyncratic, he was unwilling to stop with one great find. After the discovery of the Wilson tombstone, Gubbins set his sights higher—on none other than the famed missionary/explorer, David Livingstone.93 “I am hopeful that we shall find that the most interesting events in

38 / Chapter One

Livingstone’s early history took place in the Marico district,” he told Bertha.94 Indeed, his search was not in vain, for it was not long before Gubbins specified the exact location of the ruins of Livingstone’s first mission at Maloba. Using interviews with Africans, the recollections of J. S. Moffat, and the writings of Dr. and Mrs. Livingstone to confirm the ruins’ authenticity, Gubbins called upon his neighbors to save this historic sight. Appealing to everyone from General Smuts to local commissions, Gubbins did not rest until, through General Smuts’ support, the government provided the funds necessary to preserve the ruins.95 At the same time, Gubbins sustained his interest in Livingstone by searching for his second and third mission stations.96 That Livingstones’s ruins in Marico would be forever conserved heartened Gubbins to no end. Here was a validation of both his efforts and the historical importance of his new home. In an article in the Star newspaper dated 29 November 1913, Gubbins was feted for his work toward historical preservation: It is distinctly pleasing to know that the area of the Transvaal enriched by the possession of Livingstone relics has in its midst a resident whose enthusiasms have enabled him to secure Government recognition of the associations he has so painstakingly investigated. It was due to this same gentleman’s exertions, some twelve months back, that the memorial stone marking the burial place of the American lady missionary, Mrs. Wilson, the first white woman to be interred in the Transvaal, was rescued from oblivion. . . . The country . . . can count itself singularly fortunate in having at one and the same time, a citizen who is zealous for the cause of historical research and a Minister [Smuts] who is sufficiently devoted to the enduring reputation of his nation to see that due honour is done to those who, in their lives, did honour to South Africa.

The unnamed author of this celebratory article specified that Marico’s history was not simply the result of white people’s actions there, noting instead that “the district . . . abounds in evidence of native stone builders and workers in iron, copper and bronze.”97 To both this author and Gubbins, these facts, as much as those that pointed to Rider Haggard drawing inspiration from the region and to Captain Harris killing his first sable there, made Marico historically important. And all of these details were exposed by a Briton who had been in South Africa for a mere ten years. In January 1913, Gubbins acknowledged that since he unearthed the Wilson stone and Livingstone’s ruins and began writing his column, investi-

Two Worlds Collide / 39

gating history—once merely an infrequent pastime—had become his most sustained diversion. He recorded his progression: My chief amusement now is the study of the early history of this part of the world. Nobody knew anything about it, place names have changed, boundaries have been altered and so on so it is very fascinating trying to work everything into its place.98

Fancying himself something of a bygone explorer, Gubbins enjoyed the pursuit of truth that historical examination compelled. Undoubtedly, the recognition generated from his discoveries energized his sense of duty. His findings also suggested to him that any relic could potentially hold within it a story of great importance. Moreover, Gubbins was well aware that his prior reconstructions of the past were only made possible by the combined usage of objects and the written word. Thus, he felt assured that it was as important for him to amass all written material on the region as it was to search for tangible remains. Without disregarding his pursuit of historical remnants, Gubbins now focused more attention than ever on accumulating books relating to South Africa. By 1915, describing his acquisition of a cache of government blue books from the editor of a local paper, he happily penned, “My S African library grows.”99 While some of the books were, in Gubbins’s estimation, “of no interest,” all were “valuable” to the collection nevertheless.100 Rather than pass judgment on what he collected, Gubbins cast his net widely in the belief that every aspect of the past should be represented in his library. Later, Gubbins would come to trade potatoes for the editor’s blue books, displaying both an uncanny ability to use creative methods to reach his goals and an untiring sense of mission.101 This same compulsion would become evident whenever Gubbins happened to have some extra money. He boasted to fellow bibliophile Bertha, “The rarest book I have I got for L 2.10 earned when I was on commando at the time of the railway strike.”102 If there were surplus money in the Gubbins household, it would quickly be used to purchase books. After several years of persistent collecting, Gubbins was pleased with his results. He contentedly described his work to his sister: “You will be amused to hear how I work my pet extravagance—books. I am really getting together a fine African library and have nearly everything—bar the very expensive books—relating in any way to this part of the world.”103 Through correspondence and visits to bookstores, Gubbins now owned a remarkably

40 / Chapter One

broad collection of tomes relating to Southern Africa—a collection that was, in Baudrillard’s terms, becoming for Gubbins “the perfect pet.”104 Or, to put it another way, Gubbins had come to enact Walter Benjamin’s astute observation about the relationship between a book collector and his library: “Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.”105 Increasingly, Gubbins was becoming energized by his tomes, an effect that, in turn, spurred his collecting onward. But although he was certainly earnest, giving this pet as much attention as possible, there was one thing Gubbins was not: exceedingly wealthy.106 For all his grand plans, Gubbins was at best a mediocre farmer eking out a living for himself, his wife, and his daughter Elizabeth, born 1913. Though unable to spend with abandon, Gubbins collected as much as possible “regard[ing] the library . . . as an investment,” and noting that “as it grows it becomes more and more interesting.”107 Far from a mere flight of fancy, Gubbins’s library was his intellectual and economic storehouse. Energized by the notion that his work was pathbreaking and sustained by his view of the library as investment, Gubbins increasingly turned to scrutinizing and safeguarding objects of the past. Indeed, he could hardly have chosen a more suitable moment to indulge in a distraction. For, in the years surrounding the First World War (1914–1918) the fragile accord of South Africa’s Union would be challenged on multiple fronts. Instability and uncertainty would characterize these years. As mercurial economics fueled deep-seated tensions, Gubbins would have to reexamine his allegiances and those of his neighbors. For, as Saul Dubow explains in his inquiry into the history of South Africanism, “if the South African War opened the way for South Africanism to take root as a political ideology, the First World War put it to the test.”108 As South Africa entered the war on the British side, deep-seated hostilities between Briton and Boer reemerged. Again and again, the disarray around him would send Gubbins to seek refuge in his ordered world of objects and stories. But when the world of his internal ruminations also proved muddled, there would be no harbor from the tide of his own intellectual growth. But first, the war to end all wars.

World War I in South Africa Three years after Union, South Africa remained a volatile fusion of competing interests. Only one year following the formation of the precursor to the African National Congress (ANC), 1913 witnessed the passage of the Native Land Act, arguably the greatest assault on Africans to date. Relegating blacks to a mere 9 percent of the most infertile land, the act sought to compel

Two Worlds Collide / 41

working-age men to leave their families in the countryside and enter the urban workforce for bachelor’s wages.109 As journalist and founding member of the ANC Sol Plaatje famously penned, “awakening on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.”110 At the same time, working-class whites recognized this law for what it was, not solely an attack on Africans, but also an assault on them. At a time when the mechanization of farming was forcing desolate Boers to cities, in an era before upper-class Afrikaners considered these workers to be their brethren, white workers rightly perceived their precarious position. Thus, the workers went on strike, launching what would be a long, nationwide struggle between workers and an alliance of government and employers. Noting that South Africa was not an “ordinary country” 111 with many different industries, but one with two— mining and railway—Gubbins wrote as follows: “Hence the paralysis of only one of our industries would hold up the whole country.”112 He further described how “the industrial unrest has spread to the Transvaal,” causing him to muse: “It is difficult to see how it all will end.”113 When the uprisings were quelled, Gubbins cast the strike in a different light. After an initial period in which it looked as though labor may have overwhelmed the government, General Smuts rallied makeshift commando units to his side. In a letter to his nephew Carlie, whose “military mind” he sought to impress, Gubbins proudly recounted the speed with which the countryside mobilized: “Inside twenty four hours 80,000 men many armed and mounted were mobilized at the different centers and rifles were served to those who required them.” Of his participation as an assistant veld cornet, Gubbins delighted in telling that he “had an excellent time.”114 Above his personal satisfaction, what made Gubbins most proud was what he saw as the veld’s display of unity. Noting that more than half of the commandos had actually fought on the other side during the Second South African War, Gubbins recounted that the strike “had drawn the races together as of course the English farmers came out as well and fraternized with this Dutch neighbor in the commando.”115 No matter the level of cooperation between English and Afrikaner that Gubbins witnessed, the poststrike peace was short-lived. In 1914, European nation turned against European nation, initiating World War I. A part of the Commonwealth, South Africa was called upon to fight the enemy at its borders in German West Africa. Immediately, the historic lineal ties between Afrikaners and Germans called Boer patriotism into question. A mere twelve years after the Boers had demonstrated their overwhelming desire for autonomy in the prolonged Second South African War, 1899–1902, the

42 / Chapter One

topical question was whether or not the Boers in the Transvaal and Orange Free State could be trusted to serve the throne. Not simply a matter of dignity, an alliance of the Transvaal and German West Africa could potentially sever Johannesburg from outside contact. Exalted by his participation in the antistrike campaign, Gubbins now fancied himself part of “almost entirely a self contained little community,”116 which he elsewhere described as “We, the burgher forces!” 117 Gubbins was thus reluctant to lend credence to the notion that his neighbors may have dissented from his conviction that interracial unity prevailed. In August 1914 he wrote that, popular fears aside, “it seems that the Dutch are absolutely unanimous in keen support of the Empire.”118 Despite Gubbins’s sanguine reflections on Boer loyalties, dramatic evidence that some Afrikaners were in fact enemies of empire emerged. Into this taxing year of labor unrest, war, and drought came treasonous rebellion. The accidental shooting death of Afrikaner General De La Rey served as the immediate catalyst for Boer farmers to rebel openly.119 Though short-lived, the rebellion’s intensity necessitated that the government direct the might of the army against its own citizens. In the end, as Gubbins would later attest, “more people were killed in the rebellion than in the German West campaign.”120 The damage caused by the rebellion extended well beyond the body count. Any underlying tensions that had existed between citizens now bubbled to the surface. As Afrikaner poets likened the rebels to Boer War heroes,121 evidence of a Boer conspiracy with the kaiser surfaced, and the South African government was forced to question its decision to send all of its Anglo troops to Europe.122 In the early part of the rebellion, Gubbins maintained his support of his neighbors. “I live amongst the Dutch and a bad lot of them too,” he declared, “but I am quite convinced that the greater portion of them are loyal.”123 But by the end, even the eternal idealist was forced to concede that the situation did not appear promising. Within a long letter about farming in July 1915, Gubbins admitted that, while he remained “an optimist,” the “nasty rumblings of discontent” now heard “all over the country” saddened him. “I don’t quite know what to make of it or exactly how it will work out,” he confessed.124 Perplexed by the events around him, Gubbins’s once favorable estimation of his Boer neighbors was called into question. When the cessation of the German West campaign in 1915 did little to alleviate tensions, Gubbins became even more disheartened. And with this uncertainty, Gubbins once more felt his grasp on surety slipping. Having come to regard Anglo-Afrikaner tensions as mere constructs, the realization that others did not share his viewpoint was devastating. With this, Gubbins trod one step closer toward an intellectual crisis.

Two Worlds Collide / 43

While Gubbins felt the ramifications of World War I in price increases, mail shortages, and the worst internal instability since the Second South Africa War, it was the isolation engendered by the conflict that troubled him most.125 Before the war, Gubbins admitted to his nephew in England that, while he had “never seen a tango danced or ragtime either,” he enjoyed the “time to think” that accompanied his simple, agricultural life.126 Mythologizing rural ease, Gubbins welcomed the intellectual space afforded him. But during the war, severed communications with England left Gubbins feeling estranged.127 At the same time, Mona’s frequent absences from the farm meant that Gubbins was spending increasingly more time alone.128 Added to this was the new, nagging insecurity of the countryside. Together these factors further dislodged the certain beliefs Gubbins had held, eventually causing him to see the “time to think” as a double-edged sword. Seeking to fill the void caused by isolation, Gubbins devoted himself fully to the study of history. In search of sources, he beseeched the Johannesburg Library—then a subscription library—to ship books to him in the veld, noting that the closest library, some twenty miles away and open only one hour daily, made it “quite impossible for us to avail ourselves of library facilities.”129 At the same time, he continued his own historical endeavors. While some of his work, including his correspondence with the Martha Washington Club and the American Board of Commissions for Foreign Missions about a proposed monument to Jane Wilson, brought him great pleasure, just as often Gubbins felt himself troubled by the complexities of what he found.130 Without other distractions, Gubbins lost himself in books, engaging works by a wide range of theosophists and mystical writers such as Algernon Blackwood and Anna Kingsford.131 Gubbins was particularly taken with mysticism and theosophism—movements that arose during the late-Victorian era but that had seen renewal in the first decade of the twentieth century.132 As Alex Owen demonstrates, this kind of occultism “attracted an educated, usually middle-class clientele in search of answers to fundamental but nonetheless profound questions about the meaning of life and the spiritual dimensions of the universe.”133 Far from mere atavistic throwbacks, Owens argues, by addressing themselves to the ills of their contemporary world with a hodgepodge intellectual framework, mystical writings were part and parcel of modernity itself. Owen writes: The occult constituted a crucial enactment of the ambiguities of the modern. Committed to a rationalized understanding of the irrational, involved with the elaboration of a worldview that claimed allegiances to much older

44 / Chapter One religious and magical traditions, and caught up in some of the most avantgarde preoccupations of the day, fin-de-siècle occultism exemplified the spiritualized investments of modern disenchanted subjectivity.134

A product of his era’s modernity in the most timely sense—as a metropolitan living at the edge of empire—Gubbins turned to the occult for answers. From Kingsford, Gubbins admitted “getting many ideas,” though he had come to see himself, now but a farmer, as being outside of her intended, elite audience.135 Nevertheless, by engaging these and other writings, Gubbins began to ask himself profound philosophical questions. “The unfortunate thing is,” he narrated on one occasion, “that one talks about the prejudices of other people and one forgets that one is full of prejudices in other directions oneself.”136 Beginning to recognize all ideas as products of the times that bore them, Gubbins pondered whether anything was actually the truth. On a different, practical level, the midwar political situation confounded Gubbins, causing him to see “curious triangles and even quadrilateral contests.”137 After all he had recently witnessed, and informed by a rich, questioning body of literature, Gubbins was unsure of either where his allegiances lay or of his ability to read cogently the South African landscape. Inching closer to a full-blown breakdown, Gubbins was scared. Alone with his ideas, he dreamt of a break. “I rather wish I could get away somewhere for a little bit,” he reflected.138 Finally, when the demands of the farm allowed, he did just that. In the middle of the greatest war of his lifetime, Gubbins temporarily escaped from South Africa in order to clear his mind. Little could he have guessed that this respite would prove no relief, instead launching him into what would be a complete, years-long confrontation with his thoughts. But, in July 1916 it seemed to Gubbins that there was nowhere better to go than the place from which he came: England.

World War I in England Returning to England in the summer of 1916, South Africa—and the intellectual challenges he had faced there—were never far from Gubbins’s mind. Gubbins divided his time between family obligations, like giving his nephews “little lectures on South African history and geography,” and meetings with important players in the South African scene. These included William Cullen, the dynamite tycoon; Sir Lionel and Lady Phillips, part of the Eckstein mining syndicate; and Sidney Mendelssohn, author of Introduction to Africana, the long-held definitive work on books relating to Africa, originally published in 1910. Throughout, Gubbins’s experience of World War

Two Worlds Collide / 45

I in England was weighted by the academic uncertainty he brought from Africa. Witnessing the effects of war on England—seeing, in one instance, a zeppelin alight and plummet from the sky and hiring a driver to take him to the site of the wreckage the following day—Gubbins’s sense of intellectual crises achieved a new urgency.139 Thus, when Gubbins turned his attention to the cattle market while considering an offer to manage the Phillips’s Consolidated Lands Company’s farms in the Transvaal, the topic, though seemingly benign, served as the catalyst for his eventual breakdown. Wandering into the offices of the trades commissioner of South Africa out of sheer curiosity, Gubbins quickly found himself intrigued by what was described to him as the unproductive nature of South African meat sales, as opposed to those from somewhere like Argentina. Always the self-starter, Gubbins immediately took it upon himself to visit the Smithfield meat market and to learn about the sale and breakdown of meat. With both sides of the beef trade fresh in his mind—the cattle in the Transvaal and the market in Smithfield—Gubbins came up with a plan to link the two directly. Termed by him the “Open Road,” Gubbins believed that he had imagined a pathbreaking idea that would, in his sister’s words, ensure that “the Dutchman with the Englishman, together with the natives [were] all animated with the same controlling idea,” which would result in nothing less than “fair prices all the year round” for all.140 Moreover, Gubbins believed that his notion, again in his sister’s words, “would change the outlook entirely from the labour point of view” by “[ensuring] a fair living wage for everyone.”141 Always eager for the advice of his older, wiser sister, Gubbins excitedly shared his plan with his sister Bertha, “anxious to know how it struck us spiritually & psychically,” as she recalled in the unpublished article she later penned, “The Birth of an Idea.”142 She remembered the following: I told him that the idea appealed to me as the enlargement of the Roman idea to link their Empire together by long roads, Uccello’s143 discovery of the lines of perspective making it possible to put the similitude of three dimensions into two dimensions, about the time of the Renaissance—The discoveries of the 19th century, the railroads, steamship lines, telegraphs, cables under the sea, wireless messages and the like—In fact there were no end of vistas and possibilities opening out.144

Drawing upon a diverse intellectual cache, Bertha validated her brother’s notion. Her reference to Uccello was a particularly important one as it raised, for the first time, the possible metaphor of dimensions. As his spiritual

46 / Chapter One

and intellectual sounding board, it is impossible to overestimate the effect of Bertha’s approval, here or indeed at any time during Gubbins’s life.145 And apparent from the fact that she saved every letter written weekly over thirty years, she was equally enamored with her younger brother. Based on shared intellectual and financial pursuits, theirs was a relationship that transcended belonging to a common lineage. At no time in his life would Gubbins rely upon the strength of that union more than over the years following the birth of the Open Road idea.146 Energized by his notion, Gubbins could not keep it to himself and Bertha. He approached an ostrich feather trader he had known at Cambridge, Sir Lionel Phillips, and a new acquaintance, the editor of The Field newspaper, Sir Theodore Cook, among other people. Nonetheless, it was primarily with Bertha that Gubbins sought to flesh out the Open Road. On the eve of Gubbins’s departure from England, the siblings continued to struggle to reach an apt metaphor for what they believed to be a profound plan. Unable to articulate the many ideas that Gubbins’s Open Road plan had spawned, their conversation would continue over the following years by way of transatlantic correspondence. Together, they had seen the hint of a new path, for them, for their country, and for the commonwealth. Packing his bags to return to his adopted home, Gubbins could hardly contain his excitement. But before he could explore his ideas in the South African context, he faced an extended boat ride.

A Fated Boat Ride And indeed nothing is easier . . . than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of seas . . . Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they had all gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires. —Joseph Conrad, from Heart of Darkness147

On Saturday, 2 September 1916, Gubbins boarded the SS Balmoral Castle. “The Open Road to Prosperity for South Africa” was at the front of his mind as the boat wound its way into the sea, tracing the path of the many men of empire who had gone before him.148 Aboard the boat, Gubbins fur-

Two Worlds Collide / 47

ther honed his notions, drafting letters and writing notes on his proposed scheme to better link Transvaal cattle and British meat markets. Unlike in 1902, the South Africa that awaited Gubbins was no abstraction, just as Gubbins himself was no longer so ingenuous. In 1902, he had been merely an adventure seeker. This time, he fancied himself a self-appointed agent of empire whose duty it was to increase the productivity and prosperity of both the metropole and the former colony. Brimming with thoughts and energized by a sense of mission, Gubbins could scarcely sleep. One night, he later recalled, “about 1 a.m. I felt compelled to take a bath[,] an enormous sea bath up to the chin.” Though he could not have known it then, this bath was to prove fateful. For there, on the boat, something happened to Gubbins. He had a vision, or an epiphany, or maybe it was a dream. Whatever it was, something changed for him that night in the bath aboard the boat. For years, Gubbins tried to articulate what happened to him on the boat, drawing for explanation upon a diverse range of philosophies that included Greek mythology and Christianity. “I rather fancy that the boat experience,” he wrote in one instance, “in part concerned the same experiences as the old mystic who went down into hell and burrowed below the roots of all evil and there he found God.”149 Again and again, Gubbins came back to what he called the boat experience, seeing it, as theosophists are wont to do with experiences such as these, as a turning point in his life. After that night on the boat, Gubbins believed he had found “freedom,” writing that from it, “fear [was] banished.”150 While the details of that fateful night aboard the boat can never be known, it is certain that Gubbins’s experience—however described or understood—was the culmination of years of questioning, brought to the forefront by his journey to an England under siege. Undoubtedly, Gubbins’s concerns with the Open Road fed his frenzy; but his inquiry did not end with the beef market. Initiated by the boat experience, Gubbins entered into a meditative period where all he had once known came into question. It was a crisis of intellect, a breakdown of surety. Back in South Africa, Gubbins’s examination mushroomed, swelling in part because of his isolation. “Now I am thrown back entirely on myself,” Gubbins complained to Bertha; “there is no one in this country who is in sympathy with me personally so far as I know and I am living a very scratch life alone on the farm.” 151 While Gubbins quickly admitted that “though one always looks for help from outside it seems that it must in the end come from what is in oneself,” he longed for a nearby confidant.152 Most troubling was the growing evidence that Mona, his wife, could not be that person. Mona, he wrote, “naturally detests my working at these things which are

48 / Chapter One

a horror to her somehow or another.”153 Alone in the veld, Gubbins questioned his own sanity. “I wonder,” he wrote, “whether there was a great lesson in it or whether it was an overwrought brain” that started the spiral that night on the boat.154 And while he remained tentative, writing to Bertha that she was “getting the musings of one who wonders whether he is on the verge of infinite possibilities or of rather gracious hopelessness,” eventually a calm faith engulfed him.155 “Do not think I am getting queer or visionary,” he declared: “I am sure I am not. I am perfectly convinced that the ideas are sound and wholesome.”156 Believing that his life had moved him with cosmic inevitably to this physical and spiritual place, Gubbins surrendered to the future, focusing on untangling the mass of ideas that came to him that night. “I fancy the experiences,” he penned in May 1917, “mainly taught one the unity of everything.”157 Positing that the division between so-called diametric opposites was never complete, Gubbins pondered whether thinking in binaries was useful. Drawing upon his Open Road idea, he began to suggest that it was the unity of converses that impelled progress, not their separation. He started to use the analogy of two worlds, an upper one of intellect, and a lower one of instinct, and to ask whether the domains had something to teach each other. The answer he arrived at was yes. While the “process” of integrating knowledge “would be painful . . . pain would in time teach sympathy with others.”158 In other words, only by the union of the sacred and profane, the upper and lower worlds, could humanity better itself. No longer believing that one was better than the other, Gubbins began to see that both had much to learn from each other. It thus became clear to Gubbins that binary thinking—thought that relied upon dualities—failed to explain the world fully. Moreover, binary thought insisted on keeping opposites separated, hindering progress. To move forward, nothing less than a new way of thinking was needed. And, finally, that is exactly what Gubbins proclaimed he had uncovered. “I fancy I am beginning to think in 3 dimensions,” Gubbins cheerfully remarked in March 1917, claiming that he was using “the unused portion of one’s brain” to see beyond “the shadow” created by regular, two-dimensional thought.159 Again drawing upon a wide intellectual cache, Gubbins struggled to articulate three-dimensional thinking. But no matter what metaphors he employed, the message was ultimately the same: that which he had learned in church and school so many years earlier—to think in terms of good and evil, sacred and profane, upper and lower, us and them—was inadequate and stultifying. Insisting on maintaining separation only led to blockages and inertia. To move forward, to progress, mankind—by which

Two Worlds Collide / 49

he meant Western mankind—had to embrace the dualities it had so long insisted on keeping apart. According to him, three-dimensional thinking was just the way to do that. “Contrary to intellectual thinking which makes everything good or bad,” Gubbins explained, “this other form of thinking can embrace pairs of opposites at one and the same time,” noting that “this gives us something to go on.” Importantly, Gubbins now believed, it was precisely because he had journeyed from metropole to colony and because he lived at the edge of empire—informed by its logic—that he had arrived at this profoundly modern revelation.

A Product of Africa That his intellectual turning point grew out of his surroundings was increasingly apparent to Gubbins. “I think I told you of the curious idea I had,” he wrote Bertha, “that this thinking was in a way reflecting what was happening in the world.”160 Haunted by the war, wary of what peace would mean for Europe, devastated by the effects of the global influenza outbreak of 1918, and drawn to the then-prevalent millenarian movements, Gubbins saw manifestations of his own crisis all around him. Surrounded by tension, Gubbins felt his intellectual quagmire to be a direct outgrowth of both his contemporaneous life and his experiences since he arrived in South Africa in 1902. “As you know the whole thing is not of my seeking,” he pled to Bertha, “but everything I have done in the past fifteen years seems to have led up to it.”161 Elsewhere, he penned: I have several times had the very keen impression that the whole of this life here has been a continuous education and preparation and that the trip home was an essential part and the start of the end and that the . . . linking up and preservation of the Livingstone and Wilson ruins and the old cave implements etc. etc. all come in.162

Reflecting upon the past fifteen years, his historical endeavors, his marriage, and his fateful journey home, the plot became clear to Gubbins. All his life, his education, his pursuits, and his love had brought him to this moment in time in this place, the tip of the African continent, where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet in a furious, but beautiful union. As Gubbins strove to put three-dimensional thought into words, he drew upon intellectual traditions whose diversity again revealed the varied resources he mined to understand the world. From astronomy to biology, mathematics, and ancient civilizations, anything and everything became

50 / Chapter One

fodder for “putting” three-dimensional thinking “clearly.”163 Even gender came into play, as Gubbins plumbed his relationship with Mona for evidence of the problems created by two-dimensional thought. As the son of a rector, Gubbins also spent considerable time contemplating the relationship between three-dimensional thinking and Christianity. No longer convinced by the orthodoxies of his youth, by the early 1920s he appeared to be mimic­king the theosophists’ method of drawing inspiration from all doctrines. Declaring himself “interested in & largely sympathetic with all religions,” Gubbins proudly announced his status as a world citizen.164 “Personally,” he told Bertha, “I do not feel identification with any group or any particular body of teaching. The truth seems everywhere.”165 But while Gubbins continued to see veracity in a multitude of venues, it was ultimately his location in South Africa that proved the most fecund ground for both the problems borne of binary thinking and, likewise, the prospects of three-dimensional thought. Scanning his surrounding, Gubbins found ample grist for his intellectual mill. In figures of ancient Bushmen stone carvings that he saw in George Stow’s The Native Races of South Africa, Gubbins believed he found an illustration of the necessary unity of opposites.166 In his African and Boer workers’ mnemonic system for counting sheep, Gubbins saw an example of his nascent belief that the abstract must be linked to the tangible.167 Elsewhere, Gubbins compared African rights of passage to those with which he was raised in order to understand the ways in which societies ordered themselves. He observed that “Kaffir initiation ceremonies” showed “very little of the higher teaching,” instead focusing simply on “sex and nature” while his “confirmation on the other hand” was “purely spiritual.” But rather than see this in binary terms or as an illustration for racism, Gubbins concluded as follows: “Combine the two and you have the ideal.”168 Privileging neither African nor Western models, Gubbins envisioned a merging of both as an ultimate expression of three-dimensional thought. “As you can see,” he wrote to Bertha months after his return to Africa, “I have not been able to carry out the advice to drop the subject.” “But probably everything is for the best,” he continued: “If I had left it alone I should not have had the satisfaction of finding out that everything works in perfectly well.”169 For all that Gubbins’s examinations of his African environs sometimes transcended polarized interpretations, just as often his ruminations revealed the racism of his upbringing. Though we may wish him better than he was, the fact remains that Gubbins was a European man of his time, confined—like so many—by the rigid walls of racist rhetoric that bore his civilization. Referring to his mythologized Voortrekker, he praised his ability to remain uncontaminated: “The remarkable thing is that he did not mix

Two Worlds Collide / 51

or fall to the level of the native population.”170 Elsewhere, he admonished outsiders against quick judgment of the South African situation, saying, “It is not easy at a distance to realize all the difficulties [since] this not a settled country . . . some how or other this part of the world has not yet been discovered.”171 Like Joseph Conrad’s Marlow, for whom “there were many blank spaces on the earth,” Gubbins cast Africa as a blank slate.172 In still other instances, Gubbins wrote of “less developed forms of existence including savage man”173 and opined that “the native is a human child with full animal instincts.” 174 In these and other excerpts, Gubbins revealed himself to be clouded by contemporary forms of racism.175 Yet, unlike some of his compatriots, Gubbins was capable of appreciating the complexities of other societies, shown earlier, and of seeing the possibility for a better world in the mixture of cultural ways. Despite—or perhaps because of—his conception of contemporary Africa, Gubbins believed it to be fecund ground for the new world order that three-dimensional thought would create. Like many who lived through the First World War, Gubbins supposed that the world would never again be the same. And, like the dabbler in theosophism that he was, he shared some of the same attributes of its adherents, as described by Owen in the following passage: The sense that they were living in momentous times, witnessing the demise of the old world and the beginning of the new, was ever present. The “mystic revival” was apocalyptic in tone and its most serious adherents believed that they were promoting an ancient wisdom tradition that would be crucial to the establishment of a spiritually enlightened new age.176

Living on the tip of the African continent, Gubbins presumed that he was going to witness firsthand the birth of the changed world order. In other words, Gubbins argued that the new global system would emerge first in South Africa. Why South Africa? Firstly, Southern Africa was a place of ancient inhabitation, if not the original “source of human life.”177 In addition, Gubbins supposed that the region abounded with “electrical tensions” that caused heightened “psychic development.”178 He also felt certain that the moderate, Mediterranean climate made it suitable for innovation, a notion he got from an American book about how climate impacts progress.179 To Gubbins, that southern Africa was a fertile region on a continent predominantly covered with tropics was nothing less than cosmic proof of the region’s exceptionality. Additionally, there were social explanations for South Africa’s uniqueness. Referencing “the various religious phases in this country,” Gubbins

52 / Chapter One

suggested that the country was “perhaps a microcosm of what is going on elsewhere.”180 Borne of its extensive mix of peoples, South Africa displayed a wide range of social combinations, making it a miniature version of global human interaction. Besides being a mere coagulation of cultures, Gubbins pointed to the peaceful coexistence of different peoples in the young Union of South Africa. “Now S. Africa is really a very hopeful place,” he explained: You have two white races Dutch and English more or less coordinated yet distinct, there are the great mass of the black people hardly awake yet & not in any way bitter or hostile, they are certainly seething with [sic] desires they have not yet formulated but they are not so far in conflict with white ideals.

From this summary, Gubbins concluded that “race consciousness could come to S Africa probably more easily than anywhere.181 While the meaning of race consciousness here is open to question, and while Gubbins’s account of intragroup relations in South Africa is both reductive and racist, the perceived lack of solidified racial boundaries at this time is of utmost importance to both Gubbins’s theories and this story. “Really,” he exclaimed, “we have here most of the pairs of opposites working in reasonable harmony.”182 In the absence of hardened group divisions, different peoples and cultures coexisted in a joint, if wholly uneven power structure. To Gubbins, this was one more reason why South Africa was uniquely suited to lead the way into the new world order.183 So yet again, Gubbins felt himself to be in the right place, at the correct time. Falling back upon his farming and his historical endeavors, Gubbins found ever more support for his notions, just as his timeliness was once more affirmed—this time in a profitable way.

A Moment of Financial Freedom Forced by necessity to take a break from incessant philosophizing, Gubbins reverted to his life in the country, all the while hoping that an appropriate forum for his ideas would one day emerge. Indeed, the timing of Gubbins’s return to his farm was opportune. At the end of World War I, Gubbins found himself atop a figurative gold mine. While Gubbins had long been aware that his land at Malmani Oog contained a deposit of the soft calcium fluoride fluorspar, mining difficulties and weak demand had made its extraction and sale unviable.184 Now, things were changing. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the steel industry in America was booming. When turned into flux, fluorspar was integral to steel making. Seeing a consumer for his

Two Worlds Collide / 53

product, Gubbins rushed to mine his land. “I don’t think you quite realized from the first the magnitude of the thing,” Gubbins wrote in 1919: “I had actually developed ten thousand tons or more.”185 Indeed, as an outside article later affirmed, in one year alone Gubbins netted fourteen thousand pounds.186 Though the discovery of a similar column in California meant that Gubbins’s prosperity was short-lived, for a brief period of time Gubbins was able to live out his dream of being a mine owner.187 More importantly for this story, the money that Gubbins accumulated enabled him to indulge wholeheartedly in his pet hobby of collecting now informed by the need to articulate three-dimensional thought. With the desire and the knowledge already in place, the financial boost meant that Gubbins could become the full-fledged collector he had long imagined. Gubbins’s compilation of books and objects benefited greatly from his newfound wealth; at the same time, his intellectual growth owed itself to that which he now accumulated. “I enjoy the library more and more and feel we have got a good foundation,” he happily reported to fellow bibliophile, Bertha, after his fluorspar boom.188 Responding to the wealth of books he acquired, Gubbins narrowed his scope, restricting himself to Africa south of the Zambezi River and devoting extra attention to missionary items.189 By 1923, he was pleased with the unity of the collection. “I spend most of my spare time with the books,” he wrote, noting that “unlike many book collectors I largely know the contents of the library.”190 When he was not pondering the state of human thinking or overseeing his farm and mine, Gubbins had his nose in a book. That Gubbins was a voracious reader is clear from his letters. In them, he is often found mentioning a tome he had bartered for, bought, or acquired from his sister.191 At times, his letters merely allude to the topic of his current read, be it religion, nationalism, socialism, millennialism, or astrology.192 Elsewhere, a specific person is described—for example, Henry Ford, Father Bernard Vaughan, John Stuart Mill, and Adam Smith.193 At other times, Gubbins mentions the author of his book of choice. Here we see the names of contemporaneous South African historians like Theal and Walker and Africana collectors like Mendels­ sohn.194 We also see the names of then popular works of theory—like Alfred Russell Wallace’s Man’s Place in the Universe, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experiences, and Aaron Martin Crane’s Right and Wrong Thinking, among many others.195 It is thus certain that Gubbins read widely and that the literature and philosophy he consulted shaped his personal theories. Sharing his thoughts on his readings by way of the post with several close female confidants—in addition to the closest of all, his sister—Gubbins filled the voids of his lonely life.196 At the same time, and in no small part as

54 / Chapter One

a result of the books he acquired—he inched ever closer to bringing threedimensional thought into focus.

Gubbins Thoughts, Now Clear, Are Published In 1924, the mainstream house of Maskew Miller Limited of Cape Town published Gubbins’s short metaphysical essay Three-Dimensional Thinking, a compilation of his thoughts over the previous seven years.197 Choosing only the most essential points and using only pithy analogies, this characteristically long-winded author managed to produce a concise, thirty-four paged explanation of his theories. Its epigraph set the tone for the work: “Perhaps one of the greatest gifts which can be conferred upon a man is the capacity for seeing life steadily and seeing it whole without drifting into the easy cynicism of one who, seeing two sides of a problem, loses faith in both.”198 In his preface, Gubbins further explained the motivation behind his work: “The writer was always puzzled by the fact,” he wrote, “that really excellent and reliable people often held the most diverse views,” noting that “it seems obvious that we humans waste our energies in some way or another.”199 Having lived as a Briton in the veld, a metropolitan citizen in the colony, Gubbins was well aware of the false oppositions constructed by binary thought. Reminding his readers of the recent world war, he argued that “the chief characteristic of present-day life is the extreme strain in the individual societies themselves,” pointedly asserting that “this is due to racial, class or economic forces struggling for mastery.”200 Nothing less than modernity itself and its concomitant preoccupation with dualities and hierarchies had created the current state of global crisis. “In spite of our civilization,” Gubbins cried, “humanity has never been so miserable or so strained as it is to-day.” “The purpose of this paper is to suggest,” he made clear, “that the ills mankind suffers from are largely due to a certain limitation or lack of co-ordination in man’s powers of insight.”201 Believing that societies’ problems were products of a defunct system of thought, Gubbins put forward his new vision, in three dimensions. After years of examining the coexistence of opposites all around him, Gubbins had finally discerned the central component to three-dimensional thought. By envisioning the pivot point around which disparate forces spun as a kind of zero, or negated force, Gubbins’s many searches for metaphors and examinations of his surroundings finally made sense. At last, he was able to join his abstract intellectual musings with his worldly reflections. It was all so simple. The key was balance—of male and female, political parties, warring states, religious and profane ideas, of every duality.202 “The

Two Worlds Collide / 55

more one gets the idea of balance into one’s head,” he explained, “the easier it is to realize that people of totally different views may be perfectly right.”203 When oppositional notions came to be seen as both containing truth without contradiction, strife would be no more. Gubbins mused: “One dimly sees a world where everyone goes on with his particular views and work and yet is in harmony with the rest.” 204 Feeling himself grappling with the same “old mysteries” that troubled none other than Lao Tze, the seekers of wisdom in the Bhagavad Gita, and Moses—who he believed “caught the 3 dimensional idea” on “the mount” 205—Gubbins felt himself a part of a long lineage of thinkers attempting to transcend binary thought.206 Drawing upon a wide assortment of analogies—which included those of watch making, the League of Nations, and Christianity—Gubbins’s treatise laid bear his vision. According to Gubbins, all of mankind’s problems stemmed from its reliance on two-dimensional thought, which (by necessity) saw dualities as oppositional forces. Three-dimensional thinking, on the other hand, was capable of embracing binaries without contractions. Gubbins thus entreated his readers to transcend binaries along with him by charging that what man considered dichotomies were in fact dual facets of the same entity. In today’s world, he noted, we have opposed the views of consumer and producer, labour and capital, rural and urban, autocracy and democracy, involution and evolution, male and female, and so on; these are really the two sides of one unity, or the dual manifestations of one impulse.207

Accustomed to thinking in two dimensions or binaries, humankind was unable to see beyond opposites. According to three-dimensional thought, not only were oppositional forces not problematic, they were actually helpful at impelling progress, as witnessed by the wheels of a watch whose spinning in opposite directions necessitates its functioning. Focusing solely on small squabbles over religion, nationality, and race had only detracted from truly productive endeavors. By contrast, Gubbins attempted “to visualize a State permeated with three-dimensional thinking,” envisioning that “there would be a feeling of rest, activity and unity in the atmosphere. Rest from the absence of internal strain, and activity from the knowledge that all production was helpful.”208 Seeing applications for his theory in trade routes—as an outgrowth of the Open Road idea—education, and politics, Gubbins further opined that, in this land, everyone “would work to raise the standard of living of all the people, to level up and not to level down.”209

56 / Chapter One

A world created by three-dimensional thinking would be nothing less than harmonious since “respect and consideration to every member of the human family would be an essential,” as “each performs some function in relation to the whole.”210 Indeed, those who read Gubbins’s book were moved by his passionate vision. Despite his reliance on obscure mathematical equations to illustrate his arguments, Three-Dimensional Thinking was well received. Before he ever sent the book to the publisher, Gubbins widely circulated his ideas in England and South Africa, targeting among many others General Smuts, author of his own philosophical inquiry, Holism and Evolution (published in 1926).211 Many of the people to whom he wrote responded with bountiful comments that he always digested, even when they were negative.212 Given his self-selected audience of professors, librarians, and like-minded thinkers, the overwhelming response was positive. Happily reporting that the book’s introduction would be written by J. Clarke, professor of education at South African University—described by Gubbins as someone who, he was told, was “probably the weightiest intellectual here”—Gubbins supposed that the book would “lead to some discussion and criticism” on a far grander scale.213 In his introductory essay, Professor Clarke did laud Gubbins’s work for a wider audience. “Mr. Gubbins seems to me to be indubitably right,” he wrote, “when he finds the root cause of human ills in defects of human thinking.”214 Gubbins’s book was similarly extolled in Professor Edgar H. Brookes’s review, “Three Dimensional Thinking: A Brilliant South African Contribution to Practical Philosophy.” Published in the Rand Daily Mail, this review praised Gubbins’s work for its contribution to general philosophy and its tackling of specific problems. Three-Dimensional Thinking was, Brookes wrote, “a brilliant piece of philosophic research by a South African author,” and, “as a guide to the solution of many of our South African problems, it should appeal strongly to all who love and care for our country.”215 No doubt Professors Brookes’s and Clarke’s validation of Gubbins’s endeavor bolstered the book’s popularity. Certainly, stirring public debate was exactly what Gubbins had in mind. “I think my great hope,” Gubbins wrote Bertha, “is that the paper will help to hook some of these people who get quite fine ideas in the clouds on to solid earth.”216 No longer content to contemplate his philosophies alone, Gubbins sought a local cohort. Displaying his notions for all who wished to read them, this often reclusive farmer again found himself something of a public figure. Always willing to be an involved citizen, Gubbins was quick to take up the tasks his self-appointed role of beacon entailed. By the time his book was published, Gubbins was already lecturing on three-dimensional thinking and helping

Two Worlds Collide / 57

to showcase the “Arts, Science, and Industry of the British Empire” for the 1924 Empire exhibition.217 At the same time as Gubbins received acclaim for his philosophy, his library was once more garnering attention. Indeed, it seems that the two endeavors had become entwined in the public imagination. In the years following the publishing of Three-Dimensional Thinking, Gubbins often wrote of visits from and correspondences with eminent professors like historians Eric Walker and Rev. A Dreyer.218 The attention from South African intelligentsia encouraged Gubbins’s belief in his bibliophilic mission. “I think I am doing really useful work with the library,” he explained; “both the Cape (SA Library) Librarian and the State Librarian of Pretoria wrote recently that the specialist work I am doing is just what is required.”219 While he readily pointed out that “the three dimensional paper still wanders about,” even before its formal publishing, Gubbins was once more focused on his old love, collecting. “I get further and further acquainted with the books in the library,” he admitted.220 While Three-Dimensional Thinking brought Gubbins recognition, it was his collection of books that ultimately assured his renown. His donation of a portion of his books to form the core of the Transvaal Agricultural Union library was met with a laudatory article in the Farmer’s Gazette.221 Three years later, an article in Johannesburg’s major newspaper, the Star, celebrated Gubbins’s library in totality. Replete with a full page of pictures and entitled “Treasures in a Farmer’s Library,” the article revealed that deep in the Western Transvaal, “where thousands of fervent seekers after sudden wealth are still engaged in a frantic scramble for the buried treasure of nature, there is a little picturesque farmhouse” within which “is being harboured, cherished and multiplied a library of South African books whose value to the historian . . . is immeasurable.” Crooning over the more than ten thousand books whose range “comprehends all languages—even Chinese—so long as some reference is made to South Africa,” the article likewise celebrated the eccentric, passionate man behind the endeavor. Taking a break from praise only to mention the seeming absurdity of keeping such a collection so inaccessible, the article bemoaned the fact that “the existence of this collection on a farm remote from any big town is known only to the few historiographers.”222 In the years to come, Gubbins would often find himself contemplating his justification for keeping his library on the farm. But for now, despite the increasing attention this and other articles like it brought, the collection was still but a personal hobby. While complimentary press was indeed bringing Gubbins fame, his lecturing and sharing of his collection also ensured that all who were interested in South African history knew his name.223 For

58 / Chapter One

a man who had once longed for nearby confidants, this was an exciting period. But for one who had grown accustomed to solitary time, remaining alone on his farm for months at a time, this period was also deeply daunting. This uneasiness was made doubly worse by the deflation Gubbins felt after the publication of Three-Dimensional Thinking. While he could not have been disappointed in his book’s reception, in the years following its publication Gubbins increasingly voiced his unfulfilled dreams. It had been wonderful—indeed necessary—for him to circulate his thoughts on paper. But for all the praise he received, he did not see South Africa move any closer to being the kind of world he envisioned in Three-Dimensional Thinking. Thoughts alone begat other thoughts, he now realized. Earlier he had mused, “I have great hopes that in time I shall produce something really useful and constructive.”224 He was now starting to fear that those hopes had been in vain. Lamenting his incessant turmoil since the fated journey to England, he cried, “I rather feel that the only break I have had in ten years was the last trip home and that was only a prelude to much more strenuous times.” Lest he makes himself out to be too self-absorbed, he remarked, “I suppose we all want to see the road a little more clearly.”225 Luckily for him, Gubbins’s angst was to be short-lived. The answer to why he was not satiated by his book was closer than he thought. The road was right before him. “I fancy we shall find,” he penned to Bertha, “that everything is really quite simple & obvious, all big things are.”226 Thinking back to the original motive behind Three-Dimensional Thinking, his next move became obvious. Had he been able to reference his own prior correspondence, perhaps he would have cited this passage, written in late 1918. In it, Gubbins reflected on the purpose of his philosophical suffering: “I am inclined to think that all this is likely to end not in a theory or a book but in some actual change, that it will end in some form of action.”227 Gubbins now saw that his restlessness and lack of fulfillment were products of his unwillingness to accept the mere written word as the end to his suffering. He had worked hard to articulate three-dimensional thought, and, once done, he had managed to say something profound and to envision a better world, he believed. Now he could not permit his vision to remain but a blurred image on a page. It was time to put his theory to practice.

Conclusion So she filled their mouths with dust And their bones with fever; Greeted them with cruel lies;

Two Worlds Collide / 59 Treated them despiteful-wise; Meted them calamities Till they vowed to leave her! They took ship and they took sail, Raging from her borders In a little, none the less, They forgat their sore duresse, They forgave her waywardness And returned for orders! —Rudyard Kipling, from South Africa, 1903228

When John Gaspard Gubbins disembarked from the Kildonan Castle in 1902, he was a young man who believed in the rhetoric laid out for him in church and school in England. Fifteen years later, aboard another ship, mimicking the path of the one that had first transported him from metropole to colony, years of questioning culminated in an intellectual breakdown. Having lived and toiled in South Africa for fifteen years, at the end of a brief respite in England, Gubbins could no longer ignore the great and decidedly modern colonial lie that he had long suspected of being false: that good and evil, heathen and saved, evolved and evolving are mere products of a system of thought that demands binary opposites. They are not real. It was no coincidence that Gubbins arrived at this conclusion. Educated in the church and libraries of late-Victorian England at the height of empire, he was a man who went to Africa filled with certainty about what he would find there. But as a remarkably sensitive man who was always eager to grow, Gubbins was receptive to what life had to teach him. As his thirst for novelty brought him to diverse experiences, the surety of his homegrown convictions weakened. Through historical forays, collecting, farming, and mining, as well as witnessing the multiple effects of World War I in Europe and Africa, Gubbins was no longer able to rely upon the intellectual framework he had once held so dear. And it was no accident that Gubbins reached this watershed in South Africa. From the cessation of the violent, protracted Second South African War through the unstable achievement of Union, South Africa was an inflamed vortex of competing interests. Tensions between Boer and Briton, miners and farmers, urban and rural, polarized the loosely conceived country. Black Africans continued to oppose colonial onslaught in both domains, using rhetoric and rebellion in the face of increasingly severe attacks on their sovereignty. Nothing in this period was certain. Surrounded by wars

60 / Chapter One

for allegiance and identity construction, the lines of opposition were unclear. Discerning the purely good from the purely evil, the progressive from the retrograde, the right from the wrong, was a near impossibility, especially for a Briton living in the veld. In short, the duality of binary logic did not support the South African situation in these decades. With Gubbins as metonym for the civilization that bore him, this story thus becomes one about the dialectics of modernity, as laid out by John and Jean Comaroff. In their case study, the history of interaction between the southern Tswana and British Nonconformist missionary societies, they found that just as “the civilizing mission was no mere exporter of finished products and final truths. The frontier was also integral to the making of the new European metropole, to the rise of modernity at home.”229 Likewise, though on a far smaller scale—and indeed in reverse—this account reveals that not only did the logics of home fail to be applicable to the reality abroad, but that what became modern in the (former) colony was also a refraction of homegrown notions. Traveling between both spaces, intellectually—via correspondences and books—and physically, Gubbins articulated a new vision that was both trained on a realistic sense of his modernity and very much a product of it. His story is thus important because it endorses current undestandings of the colonial encounter that shy away from seeing only a one-dimensional transfer of knowledge and, instead, celebrate, as Saul Dubow writes, “fluidity, process, and webs of interlocking influence.”230 Gubbins’s was a world that transcended boundaries. And, as Homi Bhabha explains, this made it quintessentially modern. “If,” he writes, we are alive to the metaphoricity of the peoples of imagined communities— migrant or metropolitan—then we shall find that the space of the modern nation-people is never simply horizontal. Their metaphoric movement requires a kind of “doubleness” in writing; a temporality of representation that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a “centred” causal logic.231

The modern world for Gubbins was thus a product of both England and South Africa in conversation with each other. That this interaction was fraught is demonstrated by Gubbins’s urge to collect—both ideas about his place in the world and objects and books that helped him make sense of it. And while this pastime may have appeared, in Jean Baudrillard’s words, as “a form of escapism,” it was far more than that. “In our era of faltering religious and ideological authorities,” Baudrillard writes of the latetwentieth century in terms that easily reflect its early part as well, objects

Two Worlds Collide / 61

“are by way of becoming the consolation of consolations, an everyday myth capable of absorbing all our anxieties about time and death.”232 Imbuing objects with importance far beyond their use value, assembling them into ordered systems, and using them to stop the never-ending march of time is, as Baudrillard explains, part of modernity itself. It was no accident, then, that Gubbins became a collector. Nor would his collection be incidental to next chapter of his life. Thinking about his potential as a stock farmer, Gubbins reflected upon that first boat ride, so many years before. “As Kipling said to me years ago,” he wrote Mona, “a normal man is either a Cain or an Abel, he is naturally attracted to either stock or tillage.”233 While Gubbins continued to think fondly of Kipling, by the time this was written in 1920 he no longer believed in the utility of either-or binary thought. Having articulated threedimensional thinking as its replacement, as a way of thinking that would negate by transcendence the need for opposites, Gubbins felt he had found the key to a better South Africa, a better commonwealth, and a better world. Dissatisfied by the philosophical stasis he felt in the wake of publishing his book, he now trained his eyes on the tangible. Letting go of the internal ruminations that had for so long gripped him and turning his attention toward enacting three-dimensional thought, Gubbins was finally off the boat.

Two

The Founding Vision: John Gaspard Gubbins and the Dream of a City’s Treasure, 1924–1935 In 1935, thirteen years before the advent of apartheid, the Africana Museum opened on the top floor of the Johannesburg Public Library under a far different philosophy. While the world outside its doors focused attention and money on but a fraction of the populace, the museum pledged, in its founding charter’s words, “to represent every phase and factor of African life,” irrespective of race, language, or creed.1 Declaring that “controversial subjects would not be avoided but illustrated from every side,” the museum further avoided the simple-minded narratives that were coming to characterize the region.2 The brainchild of John Gaspard Gubbins, the Africana Museum was envisioned as a space that simultaneously illustrated and promoted an inclusive sense of national identity. Far from the racialized climate in which it dwelt, the Africana Museum imagined a different country. Just a few weeks after its opening, the museum’s founder and visionary, Gubbins, died. In this chapter I argue that although it had merely opened at the time of his passing, the Africana Museum was Gubbins’s final and most important intervention in a life aimed at bettering his surroundings. The pinnacle of years of philosophical ponderings, the museum was, this chapter shows, a physical incarnation of Gubbins’s metaphysical thoughts—much in the same way that his precursor library of Africana—housed at the University of the Witwatersrand—was. The birth of the library is likewise presented here as a tangible manifestation of Gubbins’s ideology whose creation, in fact, made possible the museum’s genesis. Centered around objects of Africana—or cultural objects of all who inhabit the land—the museum targeted a larger population than the library, making it the most far-reaching of Gubbins’s creations. Addressing itself to collecting, displaying, and celebrating culture, the museum dealt with a broad range of Africana. In so doing, it

64 / Chapter Two

engaged with a central problematic of South African history: to whom the area belonged. That the museum strove to celebrate the cultural outpourings of all South Africans in the years preceding the advent of apartheid counters commonplace teleological readings of the past. Rather than view the early decades of the twentieth century as necessarily ending in the rise of the apartheid state in 1948, I examine here, as Saul Dubow puts it, the “alternate worlds of possibilities” that—though never realized—were imagined at that time.3 Concerned specifically with Gubbins’s library and museum as manifestations of the liberal agenda as he understood it, I refuse to cast aside these imperatives as either inconsequential or abusive—as Jonathan Hyslop reminds that Marxist historians are wont to do for all liberal interventions.4 Instead, Gubbins’s creations are contextualized within the liberalism of the day and scrutinized not for what they failed to accomplish, but rather for what they attempted. Reading them thusly illuminates not only one man’s vision, but also an ideological movement whose import rests in the degree to which it informed the deliberate fashioning of a modern city. Narrating the birth of the Gubbins’s Library of Africana at the University of the Witwatersrand and the creation of the offshoot Africana Museum at the Johannesburg Public Library, I shall ultimately speak to the liberal creation of a modern Johannesburg, teasing out the anxieties and paradoxes that such a project engendered. Informed by notions of justice, equality, and goodwill to all, liberalism sought to create a city that both reified the permanence of whites in Africa and stood as a beacon for the upliftment of blacks. With their eyes trained on the future, the white liberals who stand at the center of this story similarly aimed their gazes at the West, forever looking for justification and validation therein. In detailing this story, I continue to map the growth of South Africanism, the white identity that transcended linguistic and cultural barriers, which accompanied liberalism at that time. Again, we watch this dynamic, and its attendant regional tensions, play a crucial role in Gubbins’s sense of himself and his place. Here, liberal South Africanism emerges as part and parcel of the growth of this young, but decidedly important city. As Gubbins moved from theorizing to practice, his actions were implicated in this larger movement—again marking his biography as at once unique and reflective of larger processes. This story—from the publication of Gubbins’s book until the opening of the Africana Museum eleven years later—throws into relief both the final years of Gubbins’s life and South Africa at this time.

Founding Vision / 65

Enacting His Vision Having published his book, Gubbins was now determined to find a practical enactment for his well-honed theory. Looking for a pragmatic test case, he focused initially on familiar topics. In the closed world of his beloved fraternal order the Freemasons, for instance, he found an apt metaphor for larger society that, he believed, exuded the principles of three-dimensional thought. “In a properly conducted Lodge,” Gubbins explained, “brethren representing labour and capital, members of different religious denominations or of none work together in harmony, their social and racial differences forgotten.”5 This cooperation, in addition to the Freemasons’ global networks, made the group both a powerful metaphor for Gubbins’s vision and a potential vehicle for spreading it. Looking beyond the Freemasons, Gubbins also used his theorem to tackle and publicize the problems of his fellow farmers. Addressing himself to the then topical so-called poor white problem, Gubbins advocated for educational reform in the name of threedimensionality.6 But, ultimately, both of these topics failed as arenas in which to implement his vision. By focusing on lower-class Boers in a country of diverse populations, Gubbins had been practicing the very form of sectionalism that he had previously criticized. To a certain extent the same was true of his attention to the Freemasons. Thus, Gubbins turned away from both of these domains, expanding his gaze to include the multitudes of black Africans struggling to exist on the small, infertile tracts of land to which the Native Land Act had relegated them. At the same time, Gubbins entered into what would be a cherished collaboration with John David Rheinallt Jones, Johannesburgbased advocate for higher education and native welfare, then busily creating the South African Institute of Race Relations. It was perhaps because of their interaction that Gubbins turned his attention to his black neighbors. Certainly by December 1928—by which time Gubbins was attuned to the socalled native question—the two men were in frequent contact about what they increasingly recognized to be shared interests. Rheinallt Jones—known to friends as simply “RJ”—was the archetypal liberal of his age, a term that itself demands definition. Though the liberal tradition was grounded in the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, in South Africa, more immediately—and as Saul Dubow writes—it “traced its lineage back to the anti-slavery and humanitarian movement, [and] celebrated the struggle for self-government and constitutionalism.”7 Associated with nineteenth-century missionaries, philanthropists, and

66 / Chapter Two

educationalists, South African liberalism was, as Butler, Elphick, and Welsh put it in their edited volume on the topic, “like liberalism elsewhere, centrally concerned with freedom,” seeing its pursuit as nothing less than a “a moral tradition.”8 Always a minority in South African politics, liberals suffered a severe setback with Union and the eventual repealing of the Cape Franchise. Moving into the twentieth century, liberals struggled to come to terms with segregation just as they, in Dubow’s words, “emphasized Anglo-Dutch cooperation” in an attempt to create a transcendent white identity, the aforementioned South Africanism.9 Part of the intellectual climate of the decades preceding the rise of apartheid, J. Lambert explains that “many white South Africans envisaged a future embodying a broad South Africanism embracing both white language groups, united in loyalty to the British Crown, and an integral part of the British Empire” during this era.10 Some of the most prominent advocates of this position were Jan Smuts, Jan H. Hofmeyr, E. G. Malherbe, Theo Haarhoff, Edgar H. Brookes, and Basil Schonland.11 Jeremy Foster rightly points out that it was not just men who advocated South Africanism. Alongside those listed above we find notable women advocates for this position, such as Lady Anne Barnard, Lucy Duff Gordon, and Florence Phillips, among others.12 South Africanism, or Dominion South Africanism, as Lambert terms it, was, in Dubow’s definition, “pre-eminently the expression of a developing settler society.”13 A kind of colonial nationalism, South Africanism was about asserting permanence. Importantly, this ideology was integral to the liberal movement of its day. Not only did it envision “parliamentary democracy and liberal freedom” for whites, but it also, in Dubow’s words, “took for granted the notion that Africans should be administered within the paternalistic framework of trustreeship and segregation.”14 Thus, the directive to form an overarching white identity was intimately entwined in the conflicting liberal program of its era. As Jeffrey Butler explains, by the interwar years, the murky liberal agenda meant that “most liberals failed . . . to define their liberalism clearly,” refusing to distinguish between “paternalist humanitarian on the one hand and a genuine democratic liberalism [that demanded a fully democratic nation] on the other.”15 As a result, the term “liberal” had vague connotations, often being used to define simply those whites who saw themselves as “friends of the native” and who, in Elphick’s assessment, simply “advocated policies toward Africans more generous than those of mainstream white South Africans.”16 In the interwar years, liberalism—again to quote Elphick—“concentrated on improving the social conditions of Africans, on encouraging dialogue between white and black, and on trying to influence ‘Native Policy’ through an appeal to enlightened whites, both in the civil service and in the

Founding Vision / 67

general public.” Its work was exemplified in the European-Bantu conferences so popular at the time and, increasingly, was associated with the scholarship and endeavors of the Institute of South African Race Relations.17 P. B. Rich explains how with the founding of the new University of the Witwatersrand (detailed below), Rheinallt Jones emerged as an important liberal advocate. First an editor for the journal The South African Quarterly that was focused on “an enlightened approach to native policy,” Rheinallt Jones was further immersed in interracial work with the founding of the Eclectic Club, a replacement for the then obsolete Johannesburg Native Welfare Society.18 A Welshman with distinctly conservative liberal tendencies, Rheinallt Jones was instrumental in the creation and then governance of the institute in 1929—right around the time he and Gubbins became friends. From 1936, Rich explains, white liberalism appeared increasingly “monolithic” as it seemed to be “more and more under the control of Rheinallt Jones and the Institute.”19 Phillis Lewsen concurs, noting that “though not politically aligned,” the institute’s “quest for individual freedoms and social advancement” enacted through welfare and the promotion of education made it “an important stimulus to the new liberalism” that was coming to prominence in the years before the rise of apartheid.20 By the end of the 1940s, World War II and the advent of apartheid would give way to more radical and fractured forms of liberalism. But before then, liberalism as practiced by RJ and his institute typified the totality of this ideology. Championing racial harmony by advocating uplifting blacks, the younger children to the wise old men on the racialized, gendered hierarchy of the day, this liberalism was conservative in hindsight, if not also at the time.21 Believing that education would enable different races to coexist peacefully, liberals called for enlightenment. Favoring the simultaneous preservation of so-called traditional African cultures and the integration of so-named westernized Africans into white society, this belief system left a complicated heritage. At times praiseworthy for the foresight it reveals, its racist suppositions belie liberal philosophy’s severe limitations. Nevertheless, in the late 1920s and early 1930s Rheinallt Jones and his notions embodied a movement within the country that called for racial cooperation and integration, as opposed to separation and oppression. While the strengths and weaknesses of this brand of liberalism will be explored later, suffice it to say that a strong professional and personal relationship arose between Rheinallt Jones and Gubbins at this time. Moreover, it was through this reciprocation of thoughts and dreams that something in Gubbins fell into place—he began to see the liberal ideal as the quintessential expression of three-dimensional thought.

68 / Chapter Two

Rheinallt Jones and Gubbins’s initial interaction centered around the state of agriculture in the countryside. Gubbins was an active participant in farming matters in his capacities as president of the Marico Agricultural Union and member of the Transvaal Agricultural Union. Thus, when Rheinallt Jones introduced the native advocacy work he was doing at the National European-Bantu Conference of 1927, he found a receptive audience in Gubbins. Though Gubbins could not attend the conference, he implored Rheinallt Jones to forward him relevant documents, which Gubbins found fascinating, particularly as they related to the economic position of the native. That the conference—and the liberal agenda generally—advocated the very kind of cooperation that Gubbins celebrated in the Freemasons while simultaneously addressing practical farming concerns made it, in Gubbins’s estimation, a suitable vehicle for putting his vision into practice. “So you see,” he happily wrote Rheinallt Jones, “your agenda is exactly along the lines I have been thinking.”22 Refocusing all of the energy he had expended on the poor white problem to now also include black Africans, Gubbins embraced the liberal vision with characteristic determination, calling for the establishment of native medical and agricultural schools in Farmer’s Weekly articles, offering the government portions of his own land to this end, and encouraging his sister to do the same.23 Merging his innate compassion and his love for the veld, no topic could have been better suited for him to champion. An agricultural initiative that could unify the bifurcated playing field clearly transcended small-minded binary thought. The fit was perfect. Gubbins’s partnership with Rheinallt Jones was fruitful on another level. Gubbins was able to access an entirely new body of objects relating to South Africa’s past through their association. After one meeting alone, Gubbins noted, he “took away 73 items many of extreme interest.”24 From their relationship, Gubbins accumulated innumerable historical relics associated with blacks, expanding this portion of his collection. And encouraged by his new friendship, Gubbins more actively sought objects and books relating to the majority of South Africans.25 Resulting from these labors, Gubbins moved away from focusing primarily on missionary items. Indeed, through his new relics, Gubbins’s old trust in equity was strengthened. “I believe in balancing up a library,” he affirmed in a letter to Bertha, “and in trying to avoid sectionalism of a too marked kind.”26 Now firmly asserting that Africana from all South Africans ought to be collected, Gubbins distinguished himself from the typical breed of colonial collectors who sought out only the exotic Other.27 Transcending sectionalism in both his personal collections and his public pursuits under the banner of liberalism, by the end of

Founding Vision / 69

the 1920s, John Gaspard Gubbins was putting his three-dimensional ideal to practice.

At Home in Johannesburg? At the end of the 1920s, the fluorspar boom was over, returning Gubbins to a humble farmer’s existence. Having seen the overlap between his and Rheinallt Jones’s missions, Gubbins was emboldened to devote himself further to three-dimensional activity despite his financial position. But no matter how involved he was, Gubbins continually questioned whether he was doing all he could to better South Africa. Ever one to ponder the heavens, he again cast his eyes upward, waiting for the clouds to clear and his next move to become obvious.28 With his head turned sky-wise, a new fear gripped Gubbins. As all who are familiar with the South African veld know, the heavens are not always kind. At times, they shoot violent flashes of lightening. Just as often they refuse to yield rainfall. Fire is an ever-present threat, not least of all for a storehouse of books. Gubbins began to see this. As visions of his collection going up in smoke haunted him, he started to query both the safety of his Africana assortment and whether he was justified in further augmenting his collection given his locale. If nothing else, Gubbins was not about to tempt fate. “The position with regard to the library is that it has quite outgrown the farm,” he wrote his friend Dunn in 1930. In greater detail, he admitted: “I am continually anxious about fire.”29 At the same time, Gubbins began to suspect that the library was not “functioning properly,” that the ever-expanding extent of his collection made it unwieldy.30 “The subject is getting too vast now for a private individual,” he wrote to Johannesburg librarian Samuel Asher in 1929, “but a specialist library is dull.”31 Though in the past he had wanted to limit the scope of his collection to ensure its completeness, Gubbins now realized that the collection’s importance depended upon its enactment of threedimensional thought. In other words, his Africana was only useful as a whole if it contained the entire, three-dimensional reality of South Africa’s past. Whether it was Rheinallt Jones’s influence or his personal epiphany that enabled this change in directive, none can say. What is certain is that by the end of the 1920s Gubbins was determined to collect objects and books that illustrated all sides to history’s debates. He was now convinced that he needed to merge his objects and his theoretical objectives so that his collection could be utilized for larger social directives. It was an obvious move, brilliant in its simplicity and organic in its evolution. But there

70 / Chapter Two

were problems: lack of money and the farm’s isolation being only the most glaring. Feeling compelled to put his beloved theory to practice in his most treasured domain—his Africana assortment—at the same time as he began to bemoan the breadth of his collection and to worry about its safety, Gubbins was unsure what to do. And then, Rheinallt Jones had an idea. Perhaps Gubbins should establish a relationship with Johannesburg’s newly founded University of the Witwatersrand, later known informally as simply, Wits. From its beginnings as the South African School of Mines (est. 1896) through the Parliamentary Act that rendered it a fully operational university in 1922, the institution’s early history was deeply embattled. The comprehensive tale of the school from 1896 to 1959 is ably recounted in Wits’s Professor Bruce K. Murray’s two-part history.32 For the purpose of this account, let the following brief summation suffice to suggest the meanings Rheinallt Jones’s proposition of this particular university would have had in 1930. Even before Union, whether the state was to support a university—rather than merely a technical institute—in the northern financial hub of Johannesburg aroused massive, conflicting public opinion. At the heart of the controversy was the very nature of Johannesburg, bearing out Saul Dubow’s pronouncement that “the history of tertiary education, so central to the politics of knowledge production, provides some of the most striking examples of regional, provincial, and political tensions” in South Africa at this time.33 While, Dubow reminds, “regionalism is a rather neglected aspect of the politics of unification,” nevertheless, he explains, it was important at the time: The hairline cracks that it left in the national edifice can be readily detected in the complex internal histories of institutions such as museums, botanical gardens, and especially universities, where conflict between “broad South Africanism” and Afrikaner nationalism became acute. References to the disparity between “northern” and “southern” political traditions was a common, if geographically misleading, way of expressing such tensions.34

This story was in fact no exception. On the one hand there were those who saw Johannesburg as little more than a mining outpost of rough-and-ready foreigners with no permanent stake in the country. Among this cohort were so-called southerners intent on maintaining the Cape’s hegemony over higher education. Joining the Cape in opposition to a full Johannesburg university were Pretoria residents bent on asserting their city’s relevance. Roughly fifty kilometers apart, Johannesburg and Pretoria vied for promi-

Founding Vision / 71

nence in the Transvaal and in South Africa. Facing each other in the early twentieth century, they self-consciously created themselves in the shadow of the other. Fancying themselves opposing beacons of civilization in South Africa, they declared their roles: Johannesburg was English-speaking, wholeheartedly commercial, cosmopolitan, and modern. Pretoria was Afrikaansspeaking and decidedly rooted in its provincial nineteenth-century history of pioneering, god-fearing Voortrekkers. Countering the negative attitudes toward them was an English-speaking group for whom Johannesburg had indeed become home. In response to the government’s attempt to divert a mining bequest that had been earmarked for a “Johannesburg University” to the Cape, Johannesburg residents rallied behind the Witwatersrand Council of Education to make their demands known. In heated tones they argued that the right to establish a full-fledged university was nothing less than the right to be white, Englishspeaking Johannesburg residents with full citizenship in the young Union of South Africa. At a public meeting held on 17 March 1916, “the people of the Rand” gathered “to demand adequate provision for Higher Education on the Witwatersrand” and to ask the following question: “Is the Witwatersrand to remain for ever the only European community of its size in the British Empire that is without means of giving university education to the younger generation?” Reminding that their industries “[paid] the bulk of the taxes in the Union,” these activists would not go unheard.35 The battle was fierce, the contest prolonged. Nothing less than citizenship and identity were at the heart of this struggle, ensuring that the resolution would have meaning far beyond the academy. Thus when Johannesburg finally won the right to govern its own complete university in 1922, it was no small occasion. Murray recounts that students commemorated the event by ceremonially burying the old school and thereby celebrating the birth of what they deemed to be a proper university.36 Providing only technical classes to Johannesburg citizens, the School of Mines had represented one vision of the city. As a complete, modern university, Wits embodied something else entirely. Seven years after its formation, when Rheinallt Jones visited Gubbins’s farm to suggest collaboration, this latter definition was exactly what he had in mind. When Rheinallt Jones traveled to Malmani Oog in late 1929, he suggested a partnership between Gubbins and Wits whereby the university would catalogue and house the library while Gubbins lectured on topics in his collection.37 In his capacities as a member of the Council of Education— which helped finance Johannesburg’s young university—and as an advisor to and later director of the South African Institute of Race Relations—which

72 / Chapter Two

was housed at the university—Rheinallt Jones acted as a liaison between Gubbins and these institutions. Hoping to see the invaluable collection made accessible to like-minded liberals in Johannesburg, RJ planted seeds in Gubbins’s fecund mind. That his proposition included financial gain and an esteemed role at the university suggested a solution to Gubbins’s financial woes as well as a vehicle by which he—and his three-dimensional ideal—could contribute tangibly to South Africa’s future. Rheinallt Jones’s plan, in other words, fell on willing ears. While Rheinallt Jones had suggested little more than Gubbins and the university establishing a mutually beneficial relationship, within two months, Gubbins had envisioned a forest from this one seed. On the one hand, the possibility of funding cheered Gubbins. “You know my financial position,” Gubbins wrote RJ. “I am not a rich benefactor[.] I am a man working a very difficult farming proposition & I have a wife & family[;] hence [I] cannot do anything ‘high falutin.’” “Anyhow,” Gubbins concluded, “the library is a great part of my life & I want it to be national so far as I can afford it without detriment to my belonging.”38 RJ did not think Gubbins’s requests greedy and readily endorsed his plan.39 In a March 1930 letter to Edith Jones, RJ’s wife, Gubbins confirmed the continual growth of his new notion. “Since Mr. Rheinallt Jones put a match into the tinder,” Gubbins penned, “ideas have been coming into my mind one after the other, how feasible they are remains to be seen. I can see a very big thing in front of us,” he dreamily concluded, “if only it is started right.”40 Indeed, that RJ had proposed the initiative mere weeks before his yearlong sabbatical in Europe meant that the plan would be delayed, especially once it became apparent that no one could fill his shoes as arbiter. Other factors equally slowed the process: the university’s insecure financial position amidst a global depression and the university’s principal H. R. Raikes’s personal and professional preoccupations being the most prominent. Given these factors, Gubbins could do no more than spend the interim period articulating exactly what he wanted his relationship with the university to entail.

Imagining the Africana Library The first and most obvious question that Gubbins had to answer—both for himself and for would-be critics—was why he had chosen to transfer his library to Johannesburg. To a certain extent this decision was based on personal relationships. But beyond friendships, Gubbins’s decision to move his library to Johannesburg rested upon his belief that, in so doing, he would play a deliberate role in the growing of a modern, liberal city.41

Founding Vision / 73

“I am wholeheartedly out to have a hand in developing a real centre of SA culture for the North,” he wrote Raikes. “I feel sure Johannesburg is the right centre,” Gubbins further espoused; “it is away from the political focus, the inhabitants have much more go & it is the most important press centre.”42 In the young city of Johannesburg, Gubbins imagined that his library would have a greater impact than in older areas like Cape Town. That there was a dearth of Africana available in Johannesburg further spurred Gubbins to action.43 On the margins of politics, he supposed that his library could retain greater autonomy. And in the young university, Gubbins perceived that the great thinkers of tomorrow could benefit from the wealth of historical material in his library. Indeed, that his library was heavily representative of Rand history further bolstered his faith in Johannesburg as its logical home. “I am most frightfully keen,” Gubbins cheered to Raikes, “and I believe you are the people to bring a great dream into form.”44 Gubbins’s decision to transfer his library to Johannesburg was also deeply influenced by his understanding of the state of liberal activity in South Africa at this time. “Now where is work being done now?,” he queried rhetorically, noting the prevalence of liberal thinkers in the Transvaal. He tallied: Dr. Doke, Professor Macmillan, the Hoernlés, Dr. Shapiro, Mr. Rheinallt Jones & the Institute of Race Relations all at Johannesburg University. Agar Hamilton, Lestrade, Prof Brookes & others at Pretoria University. Men like Dr. Dexter Taylor, Ray Phillips & others along the reef.45

Declaring Johannesburg and Pretoria to be the combined focal point of liberal, progressive activity in South Africa, Gubbins challenged the notion of Cape liberalism while emphasizing the veracity of his choice. Without doubt, the prospect of aiding in the communal growing of a liberal, modern African city energized Gubbins, making him feel as though he had finally discerned how to merge three-dimensional thought and his Africana collection in a manner that could profoundly better South Africa. Gubbins’s vision for his library was, more than anything, guided by three-dimensional thinking that sought to expose all South Africans to the contributions of all of their brethren. “People here,” he wrote his friend Dunn, “have no sense of proportion[;] they do not realize who has done the work of the country in the past.” Yet, he affirmed, “the library will show it.” To enact this broad-minded vision, Gubbins believed that the library had to be in Johannesburg. “So you see,” Gubbins further explained to Dunn, at Wits the library would have “no color bar & complete accessibility.”46 In more complete terms, he later explained his plan:

74 / Chapter Two Although the library will be housed at the Witwatersrand University it will be available for use by every responsible student regardless of colour. In fact I think it is essential for the native to know the extent of its useful work that has been done on his behalf and on the other hand very few white people know anything of the extent of Bantu literature.47

Beyond an open-door policy, Gubbins suggested that the library be metaphorically “owned” by all South Africans, that its comprehensive representation instill diverse sections of the population with proud feelings of possession. “I see something far beyond a section of a University Library,” Gubbins mused; “in fact I see something beyond even a National Library as Nationalism is constituted in S. Africa today in that it does not recognize large sections of the people.”48 With characteristic grandiosity, Gubbins supposed that his library could do no less than change the manner in which citizenship in the nation-state, or nationalism, was construed. Without doubt, Gubbins perceived national membership to be at the center of South Africa’s woes, and with good reason. By 1930, three hundred years of South African history had demonstrated the power of definition. Historically, opportunities for education and land ownership in South Africa, among other fruits of citizenship, were linked to membership in a certain race, class, or linguistic group. This meant that socially constructed definitions overdetermined access to change. Increasingly in the decades after Union, questions of identity dominated South African debate. At the heart of the logic of apartheid, identity boundaries would eventually become legally hardened in the years following the rise of the apartheid state in 1948. But, in the 1930s, this was not preordained. At that time, identity limits still retained some fluidity. Indeed, it was to these as yet unhardened domains that Gubbins turned when he thought about the purpose of his library. In them he observed the possibility of a South African future guided by cooperation and education, rather than one marked by antagonism between mutually distrustful, discreet entities. While Gubbins did not oppose people’s affiliation with a certain segment of society, it was the tendency to insist upon the supremacy of one’s group that worried him. For him, this hierarchization grew out of miseducation. In other words, groups supposed they were superior to others simply because they did not know what others had contributed to society. Here, Gubbins maintained, as Phillis Lewsen writes of the South African Institute of Race Relations itself, a “belief that accurate information can change attitudes.”49 Sincerely believing that South Africa’s future rested on its ability to envision itself as a singular, umbrella society, Gubbins sug-

Founding Vision / 75

gested that all South Africans declare themselves simply South Africans. He figured there was no better way to initiate this process than by making public a library whose contents displayed the mutual importance of all involved in the growing of the country. “What is needed more than anything in South Africa,” Gubbins cried, is a realization that the work of building a country up has been done not by one race but by a number of races working more or less in opposition. This library shows at a glance what each has done[;] in addition it shows both sides of every controversy so I hope in the end it will be a real microcosm of South African life.50

Believing that a small-scale enactment of South Africa’s past could generate good will, Gubbins envisioned his dream library. “I want to see the library as fully representative of S African life as possible,” he wrote, “so that no section of the community will feel left out,” noting further that “South African history does not start with the great trek nor was the only trek.”51 Contesting the notion of Afrikaner uniqueness specifically—emergent in the decade commemorating the centenary of the Great Trek—Gubbins called for a unified version of history to be upheld by his newly defined library aims: “to collect the material,” “to coordinate it,” and “to display it.”52 Central to Gubbins’s imagined institution was a fostered climate of social activism. “Libraries in the past have taken a passive attitude,” Gubbins regretfully reported. Calling for a different model, he wrote, “a forward policy should be initiated & the library should regard itself as the custodian of a living flame which its duty is to hand on as much as possible.”53 Gubbins’s library was to be animated, like a kind of changing social mirror. Importantly, it was not to be a neutral reflector. Indeed, after long months of waiting—during which he drew upon years of rumination—Gubbins now had a well-honed mission. His library would target the quintessential problematic of South Africa—the biggest and most glaring example of defined bound­ aries—the struggle between native Africans and those of settler descent. It would not solely address this one issue, but rather use illustrations of the ways in which this conflict permeated all other aspects of South Africa’s past to allude to it. “As I see things now,” Gubbins wrote to Edith Jones in August 1930, “the troubles S. Africa suffers from must be regarded as a whole, the native problem for example, while the greatest problem we have, interacts with every other South African problem[;] hence a purely native S.A. library would be incomplete & would only touch one aspect.”54 In a letter to her husband, Gubbins ranked interracial conflict even higher. “As you

76 / Chapter Two

know,” he penned, “I have always had in mind the native section as perhaps the most important but that of course intertwines with all the rest.” 55 While clearly drawing upon his belief in holistic thinking, Gubbins affirmed his position as a liberal for whom racial antagonism was the guiding principle of South African history.56 Seeking to change this, his mission was determined: “The obvious thing to do is to represent as fully as possible every factor in S African life, trace its history & vitalize it as much as possible by getting the people concerned to interest themselves in their own section.” “In the end,” he concluded, “one could make the library into a living organic whole” that, he added excitedly, “might have rather remarkable results.”57 Thus, nearly a year after RJ suggested that he might work with the university, Gubbins had drafted a complete design. “I see the plan I want to bring into form much more clearly,” he happily reported: 58 “I do hope some plan will be made by which I can really devote myself to this work.”59 While Gubbins’s proposal had undoubtedly benefited from the respite in activity, the year-long delay left him decidedly impatient. Referring to a newspaper article that cited university sources saying an arrangement had been reached with him, Gubbins was deeply upset. “I get annoyed,” he complained to Edith Jones, “by sloppy things in the paper about me being a sort of benevolent millionaire chucking about largesse when all I am is a keen bibliophile wanting to get on with the work.”60 Frustrated by a lack of communication from the university as well as by public representations of him, Gubbins was restless. At the same time, Gubbins began to receive overtures from the Transvaal University College—soon to be known as the University of Pretoria. Without a definitive decision from Wits, Gubbins began to explore the possibility of establishing a joint arrangement with both universities. Broaching the topic of intercity cooperation, Gubbins trod on dangerous ground, which would once more make him well aware of the enduring friction between the two cities. For all that there were forces working toward an overriding South Africanism at the time, tensions between the two white groups were still present. Gubbins was taken aback when he was first approached by Pretoria academics, suggesting that he had hitherto not considered Pretoria for his scheme. Nevertheless, he was open to what they had to say. “There is no doubt,” Gubbins surmised, “but that both Universities are extremely keen and really desire to know both sides of the various controversies.”61 Though he assured Pretoria’s Kaye that “Principal Raikes feels that the assistance of & cooperation with Pretoria is in the interest of scholarship & the country,”62 Gubbins suspected that the Wits folk did not really “want a point of contact” with Pretoria.63 And, when he was being absolutely truthful, Gubbins

Founding Vision / 77

himself remained inclined to favor the progressive attitude of Johannesburg over Pretoria. “I was offered an hon Professorship by the Pretoria University,” he detailed, “but feel generally that Johannesburg is the right centre.”64 Thus, when Raikes suggested that Wits retain possession of the library but that “ample provision for access” to Pretoria students be provided, Gubbins was interested. “It is my definite intention,” Raikes wrote Gubbins, “that any bona fide student shall have free access to the library. No sort of consideration of residence, politics or colour should be allowed to influence the maximum use being made of it.”65 Gubbins was placated by the strength of this compromise. Here was a way to ensure both liberal control of his library and its accessibility to all interested scholars. In a memorandum to both universities, Gubbins explained that bringing the “task” he had “initiated” into “a practical form” was “beyond any single individual or institution,” and, thus, that they “should be inspired to cooperate & the knowledge so obtained [be made] generally available.” “It is very much to be hoped,” Gubbins concluded, “that the Transvaal University College and the Witwatersrand University will see their way to cooperate in this as to my mind there are individuals at both Universities who are indispensable for the task.”66 While advocating that the library remain in Johannesburg, Gubbins proposed that the two centers commit to sharing resources. So you see, Gubbins wrote to Edith Jones, “the scheme seems to be shaping into a bigger thing than we thought.” Animatedly, he continued, “it will be the only big contact between the two Universities—not that they seem particularly keen on contact—but for the ends we are working for it may be of great value.”67 Once more focused on transcending binary divisions, Gubbins felt this plan ideal. And indeed, he attributed the expanded proposal to the delay in action. The lull was “all to the good,” he wrote, since if it had been rushed we should probably be tied up as a small University adjunct without much possibility of expansion while now Pretoria University, Dr. Hugenhort, the Education Dept & the Normal College are all sitting up & taking notice.

“I can see the possibility,” Gubbins envisaged, “of something much bigger & more useful.”68 Certain that cooperation between English and Afrikaans speakers would further his directives and appreciative of the goodwill from both universities, Gubbins waited for Wits to make the next move.69 But, despite Raikes’s assertion that his library would be invaluable “as the foundation . . . of a

78 / Chapter Two

great Northern centre of the culture of Southern Africa,” still no definitive action was taken.70 Gubbins thus stewed, anxious for closure and eager to undertake the lectures promised him. “By the time you receive this it will be over eight months since you made certain tentative proposals which fired me,” Gubbins began a frantic letter to Rheinallt Jones. “The proposals you made,” he bitterly reported, “have entirely been lost sight of.”71 A similarly impassioned letter from Professor of Philosophy R. F. Alfred Hoernlé confirmed to RJ that Gubbins was losing patience. Writing at the request of his wife, renowned anthropologist A. Winifred Hoernlé, who herself had received an anxious letter from Mona Gubbins, Alfred Hoernlé urged RJ to take action. “The whole library plan,” Hoernlé wrote, seems to have been hanging fire, with the result that the [Gubbinses] now talk of Raikes as suffering from a “superiority complex,” or, in other words, think that he is not sufficiently interested in the library and not pushing its transfer hard enough. Making every allowance for the fact that G. is a monomaniac on the subject of his library, and that Raikes has a great many other things on his mind, the truth still remains that G. is not being handled in the right way.

Readily admitting that Gubbins was overprotective of his beloved library, Hoernlé nonetheless felt that Wits was acting inappropriately. “Meanwhile,” he continued, G. is chafing and fretting, and lending his books here there and everywhere, with both the T.U.C. and Cape Town ready to take advantage of any slip on our part. You know yourself how impulsive G. is, and how great the danger that he may take some precipitate action which will lose us the library for good and all. If he gets it into his head that we are not keen, he will certainly bestow the library elsewhere; and if he does, it will serve us jolly well right, for we shall have had a chance and failed to avail ourselves of it.72

Warning RJ that Wits risked losing access to Gubbins’s library, Hoernlé urged action. Shortly after receiving this letter, more troubling news arrived at RJ’s doorstep by way of his wife. “I have had some sad news,” Gubbins had written Edith: “My sister Mrs. Tufnell passed away suddenly on Tuesday, it is a great break, we have kept up a weekly correspondence since 1902, nearly 30 years.” “She was the best friend I ever had,” Gubbins dolefully continued; “she took an extreme interest in all our doings” and “was always helping me with the library.”73 Well aware of the gravity of this loss as well as the urgency of Hoernlé’s letter, RJ quickly refocused his energy on formal-

Founding Vision / 79

izing an agreement between Gubbins and Wits, especially after his return to South Africa in the spring of 1930. Working behind the scenes, Rheinallt Jones did all he could to hasten the agreement process. At the same time, Wits appeared more willing to act. And at last, on 25 September 1930, John Gaspard Gubbins and the University of the Witwatersrand entered into a legal agreement according to which the university would pay for the transfer, valuation, and cataloguing of Gubbins’s collection. Committing 250 pounds sterling per annum to further grow the library, the university retained Gubbins as an advisor. In return, Gubbins would receive one thousand pounds at once and another at the close of valuation. Ten years later, he would receive the balance that, it was agreed, would not exceed eight thousand pounds. Later, when the valuation of Gubbins’s collection marked its worth at around ten thousand pounds, that the university had gotten a good deal became obvious. Beyond these lump payments, Gubbins would receive an annual honorarium of 250 pounds over the course of ten years. In addition to financial remuneration, Gubbins would give a series of lectures on topics pertaining to Africana. Finally, the document ensured that while Gubbins’s library would move to the university, Gubbins would maintain de facto control over the body.74 Beyond enshrining his authority and providing him ample compensation—both of which he applauded—the agreement met Gubbins’s most essential requirement: the ability to enact his three-dimensional vision. “As to the agreement,” Gubbins penned to RJ, “the clause 4 is particularly satisfactory ‘The Gubbins library shall forever be maintained by the University as an independent unit, shall be accessible to all members of the community & shall be enlarged & developed.’” “Hence,” Gubbins cheerfully concluded, “the use by non Europeans is definitely secured & the library becomes a National & not a sectional institution.” This, he assured RJ, was “what I was particularly driving at.”75 With guaranteed access for all concerned as well as continued influence, Gubbins knew he had found the right home for his treasured books.

Gubbins Receives National Attention Without doubt, that his books would finally be housed away from the wildfires of the veld only heightened Gubbins’s pleasure. Eager to move them to this new locale—university librarian Percy Freer later recalled, “as soon as possible” after his agreement with Wits was reached—Gubbins began to ship “books, papers, pamphlets and periodicals, none secured with tape, unwrapped, unsorted and all off-loaded like a load of coal at the University.”76 In his fury to move the books to safety, Gubbins scarcely paused to

80 / Chapter Two

package them properly. Still, the process was a slow one. Gubbins’s library housed somewhere in the vicinity of fifteen thousand printed items and five thousand manuscripts, whose weight and girth meant the move was to be carried out little by little.77 Thus, during periodic trips over the course of a year, the library was transferred to the university, arriving always as space there became available. As his library moved from the veld to the city, Gubbins began lecturing at the varsity on everything from “the aims and history of the Gubbins library” to “Agricultural Literature on South Africa” and “Zoological and Hunting Literature of South Africa.”78 Illustrating his lectures with original pieces of Africana, Gubbins sought to stimulate interest in the past. Certainly the amount and type of press his library and talks garnered suggested that he was succeeding. In May 1931, the Star lauded this “munificent gift by farmer miner” that was to augment the prestige of Wits University.79 The following September, a Pretoria News feature similarly admired the quixotic tale of “the man and his ideal.” “It may be doubted,” the author of this piece reflected, “whether a more lasting service is being rendered to South Africa by any other individual.” In greater detail, the piece focused on Gubbins’s plan. “His ambition,” it read, “is to orchestrate, as he expresses it, the separate contributions of the rival elements, and produce one harmonious symphony. In other words he is assembling the raw materials of our common history, which in too many cases are lying neglected if not indeed forgotten.” Pondering this noble dream, the author cheered: “It is really a work of national salvage.” “Whatever happens,” the author concluded, “South Africa will be the richer for his endeavors.”80 In another instance, a Rand Daily Mail article from March 1931 similarly extolled Gubbins’s plan, this time focusing upon Gubbins’s contribution to enhancing the culture of the so-called north. Applauding the fact that the Gubbins Library “would remove the reproach that up-country students have to come to the Cape for research work,” this laudatory article surmised: “When this collection is available, it will be seen that there is not much available at the Cape which will not also be accessible in the Transvaal.”81 Unashamedly giving in to north/south rivalry, this piece cheered the coup that securing Gubbins’s library was seen to be. Indeed, by the end of 1931 things were looking up for both Johannesburg and John Gaspard Gubbins. Having arrived at a mutually beneficial agreement, the city acquired a prized collection of homegrown culture for its young university. At the same time, Gubbins was endowed with the means to devote himself fully to his cherished collection at the very moment when he needed the money most. All appeared to be going well for both a city intent on becoming a powerful hub of culture and a man en-

Founding Vision / 81

deavoring to focus solely on his three-dimensional passion. Until, that is, disaster struck. At 3 a.m. on Christmas Eve 1931, once nearly half of Gubbins’s books had arrived in Johannesburg, a massive fire engulfed the central block of the University of the Witwatersrand. Instantly, years of hard work and precious pieces of Africana literally went up in smoke. It was Gubbins’s worst fear realized. “Disastrous Fire in Central Block of Rand University,” “priceless Africana vanishes in a few minutes,” “walls alone left standing,” the Star screamed that Christmas morning. Though the principal cause was unknown, the scenario was not difficult to imagine. A fire began in the central, temporary portion of the main block, located just behind its entrance. Stocked with wooden building materials and housing the libraries and the photography department’s chemicals, the place was a tinderbox. Amazingly, the registrar’s exam records—located nearby—were among the few items that remained unscathed.82 “A round sum of L 20,000 will cover all the material damage,” the Star reported, “but no money can possibly replace the libraries.” Working in the shadow of what was described as “gorgeous” nearly supernatural “colours” generated by the enflamed photographic chemicals, it took firefighters more than two hours to subdue the blaze. By then, the damage had been done. “I feel terribly upset at the news,” the Star quoted Gubbins saying: “To myself it is a great loss and to the University the loss must be very severe.” With deep sadness he lamented, “what has been built up in the course of many years has been destroyed in very few minutes.”83 In the final days of 1931, Gubbins’s fate must have seemed ironic, if not downright cursed, to one so accustomed to looking upward for explanations. Having long feared that a veld fire would destroy his collection, Gubbins had finally moved his books to the city, only to have them meet the same end. It was a dark Christmas in 1931 Johannesburg. But, it was also about to be Gubbins’s finest moment. His fiery energy was not yet extinguished.

The Phoenix The bird perished in the flames; but from the red egg in the nest there fluttered aloft a new one—the one solitary Phoenix bird. —The Phoenix Bird, Hans Christian Andersen, 185084

In a February 1932 interview with the journal South Africa, Gubbins was asked what he had lost in the Christmas Eve fire. “Literally thousands of irreplaceable documents,” he frankly recounted, listing entire sets of

82 / Chapter Two

correspondences, newspapers, missionary records, and journals. But with characteristic optimism, he continued: “Now as to the other side; what has been left?” Describing the rump collection as an ample “nucleus” for rebuilding, he pleasantly concluded, “so we are by no means dead.”85 Refusing to focus on anything but the possibilities ahead, Gubbins’s attitude was exemplary. “The individual who has sustained the most severe losses . . . was Mr. Gubbins,” Johannesburg Mayor D. F. Corlett explained to a crowd of listeners: “Yet he is the least despondent man I have met since the Union reached the decision to remain on the gold standard.” “Instead of lamenting what has been lost,” Corlett cheered, “he is looking only to the future,” noting to applause that “If he can accept the loss in that spirit, surely the rest of the community can too.”86 Years later, F. R. Paver of the Star similarly reflected on Gubbins’s astounding actions in the aftermath of the fire: Undeterred by what appeared to others as a tragic loss—for he appears to have anticipated the sequel—Gubbins announced his intention of making the library a better one than before in spite of the disappearance of many unique items and a mass of material which in the interim had greatly increased in market value.87

If anyone was able to judge Gubbins’s reaction to the tragedy, it was Paver. As R. F. Kennedy recalled in his history of the Africana Museum, “Paver records that it fell to him to telephone to Malamni Oog to report the tragic occurrence.”88 “I can almost hear now the answer which came back in Gubbins’ usual hearty tones,” Paver himself later recorded: “‘That’s bad, but not as bad as it seems. This is where we hatch the Phoenix’s egg.’”89 Rightly perceiving that the famed fire would give the collection more publicity than ever, Gubbins imagined a bigger, better assortment triumphantly rising from the ashes of its predecessor. “We shall get lots of help,” Gubbins assured Paver three days after the fire. But “I feel I should devote myself now entirely to the rebuilding.”90 Indeed, this is what Gubbins did. In what can only be described as a furious frenzy of activity, Gubbins now applied himself fully to the task of regrowing his precious collection. He cabled missionary societies asking for duplicate records, entreated wealthy patrons to bequeath their treasures to him, and took advantage of every personal connection possible to secure material. Turning to his own family, he asked his nephew to donate money in memory of his mother—Gubbins’s beloved sister, Bertha Tufnell. No contact was beyond exploiting. The stakes, as Gubbins saw them, were simply too high. He had before him the task of restocking a collection of obscurities that had

Founding Vision / 83

taken him over twenty years to assemble in the first place. Moreover, he was determined to make the new collection better than before. In his fortitude, Gubbins became a symbol of the university’s own efforts toward renewal. Frantically focused on regeneration—for both himself and the university— Gubbins began to see Africana objects as potentially stronger vehicles than books for his demonstration of three-dimensional thought. And all of this was to take place during the final four years of his life. Paver recalled how Gubbins’s announcement that he intended to rebuild “created a wave of enthusiasm which brought in quantities of gifts many of them a most valuable order” to the university.91 Like its newfound talisman, Wits used the momentum generated by the fire to further its endeavors—now articulated as a desire to make the new library not only “equal to the old collection, since” as Principal Raikes noted, “the latter was not adequate,” but rather to “surpass it.”92 In the wake of the fire, the university launched a public appeal—in English and Afrikaans—for eighty thousand pounds to this end.93 The response from the white public was overwhelmingly positive, demonstrating, in Raikes’s assessment, the degree to which the Rand public “takes a pride in its University.”94 Beyond South Africa’s borders, an English group of concerned citizens—some of whom already fundraised for Wits—now energetically took up the task of restocking its library from abroad. Here, Gubbins’s personal loss also served as a mascot for the university’s larger appeal. “Certainly we have had a great loss but I believe the public will make it up,” Gubbins praised his supporters at home and abroad: “They are getting keen and very friendly to me.”95 In another letter he penned, “we have had misfortune in the shape of a fire on Xmas eve & good fortune in connection with good friends & good replacements,” happily concluding that “in some ways we are stronger than ever.”96 Indeed, Gubbins admitted, “I am getting chances which would have been quite unattainable but for the fire.”97 Perhaps the greatest of all those opportunities was the chance to embark on a six-month-long, around-the-world search for Africana. Whether it was at the university’s request or simply at his own initiative, six months after the fire, Gubbins and family boarded the T. S. S. Ulysses for a journey of epic proportions. Seeking written material relating to South Africa’s past, the family rode the open seas from England to France, Egypt, Singapore, Ceylon, Java, and Australia before returning to the tip of Africa with their spoils.98 Before they left South Africa, Gubbins assured Raikes that they were “getting very keen on the Ulysses trip.”99 From correspon­ dences kept throughout the journey, it is apparent that Gubbins remained enthused the entire time. Having been insured on the gold standard in South

84 / Chapter Two

Africa, Gubbins’s loss yielded a considerable amount of money to spend on his tour.100 Gubbins was thus able to go on a veritable collecting spree across continents. And while Gubbins initially sought out written material, it was not long before he came into contact with objects of Africana. Unable to turn these down, he took them, even though he was unsure of what he would do with them upon his return. All in all, the pursuit was pleasurable. “Personally,” Gubbins penned his friend and Rhodesian museum worker Hiller from aboard the ship, “I am getting infinitely more fun out of my collection since I have lost it.”101 Wherever he went, Gubbins was warmly received. Without doubt, his personal tragedy aroused considerable sympathy and interest. As a South African journalist wrote after the fire, none could deny that “the Gubbins collection is concrete romance.”102 At the same time, Gubbins’s overwhelming enthusiasm was palpable. Here was a man who wholeheartedly believed in his mission, in whose presence only the most stoic of people could remain aloof. With what seemed to be untiring energy, Gubbins pursued every possible avenue toward Africana in a whirlwind of activities that left him rather breathless. While in London, Gubbins accumulated, in his words, “over 5,000 books, besides thousands of manuscripts, documents, letters, bluebooks, portraits, pictures, and sketches, all dealing with South Africa in one way or another.”103 Besides collecting, Gubbins met with London-based advocates for the Witwatersrand Library Appeal, including the president of the committee, Lord Athlone, and Wits’s representative, William Cullen, both of whom helped to establish a process by which donated objects would be sent back to South Africa. Simultaneously, through talks, displays, and meetings, Gubbins helped publicize the university’s larger mission. Indeed, by the end of his stay in London, Gubbins could only write that “it has been one ceaseless rush.”104 While Gubbins had assembled an astonishingly varied assortment of Africana in England, his directive in Batavia was narrower. There, Gubbins anticipated finding documents and relics from the Dutch East India Company. If he was truly fortunate, he mused, he may be able to locate and unearth the grave of Jan van Riebeck, head of the first Dutch settlement at the Cape of Good Hope.105 “I was hoping that the remains of van Riebeeck might be brought to S. Africa,” Gubbins later recalled: “However on arrival in Batavia I found that the site of the grave is unknown.” While the complete memorial could not be located, several portions of the gravestone were discovered. Excitedly, Gubbins promptly secured “the permission of the Government both here & at the Hague & the approval of the Archives Dept, for . . . removal to South Africa.” When news of this acquisition surfaced in South

Founding Vision / 85

Africa, support and admiration for Gubbins’s mission heightened. The public was similarly impressed by the fact that, although Gubbins wanted a model of the tombstone for Johannesburg, he had no intention of offending Capetonians by keeping the remnants up north. “As this is unquestionably a Cape of Good Hope ‘relic’ of the highest traditional importance,” Gubbins wrote to the head of the South African Museum in Cape Town, “I could not properly ask for its transfer to Johannesburg.” “I hope you will realize,” he proffered, “that we are acting in the interests of S. Africa in doing this work on your behalf & that it will have your approval.”106 Characterizing his motives as national in scope and demonstrating his goodwill toward the south, this move similarly raised Gubbins’s esteem, especially among Afrikaners.107 With political savvy, Gubbins continued to establish global networks while generating patriotic enthusiasm for his work back home. While in Australia, Gubbins continued to focus himself on the work at hand, contacting historical societies and public libraries while searching for Africana.108 In the end, Gubbins was thrilled to have amassed, as he put it, “not only most of the literature connecting Australia & S. Africa, but the basic material that will enable the S. African student to compare such happenings as the development of the Freedom of the Press, growth of representative institutions & so on with his own S. African history with advantage to both states.”109 Gubbins called for the assembly of materials that would enable students at his library to hold South Africa up to alternate countries. In doing so, he underscored the strength of comparative inquiry. Just as Gubbins was ahead of his time in supporting comparative studies, his belief in a globalized world further separated him from his contemporaries. For Gubbins, the world in 1933 was an integrated whole where local narratives were implicated in larger movements. Indeed, this premise underlay his very attempt to search for evidence of African history beyond the African continent. While it could be reasonably argued that this endeavor relied on Eurocentric notions of what constituted historical evidence, a close reading of Gubbins’s theories reputes this assumption. Gubbins did not suppose that the African continent was devoid of historical remnants, as his collection proves. Rather, reflecting on the integration of peoples from time immemorial, he asserted that no society could be justly regarded as hermetic. Acknowledging the human tendency toward keepsakes, Gubbins believed that evidence of Africa rested in each land that had been in contact with her. Above being pragmatic, this suggested that Africa was not merely a blank antithesis of the West. Rather, it was a land of diverse and important cultural products that were in fact entwined in larger, global movements. Always striving to envision a better tomorrow, Gubbins posited that the future

86 / Chapter Two

scholar would thus necessarily have to draw upon knowledge from all parts of the world. Of utmost importance, he believed, was what was anomalous and counterintuitive—that which challenged simple-minded, binary logic. Indeed, few things would have seemed as obscure to his fellow travelers as the haul of Africana that Gubbins accumulated aboard the Ulysses. In the spring of 1932, the Gubbins family reached a South African port for the first time in nearly half a year. A local newspaper heralded the fruit of their mission: Manuscripts from Singapore, letters from Malay [sic], pictures from Batavia, documents from Australia, and every available print relating to South Africa in London have been recovered by Mr. J.G. Gubbins, who returned by the Ulys­ses this morning from one of the most fascinating treasure hunts a man has ever undertaken.110

“I think I can now quite justifiably say,” Gubbins wrote Raikes on arrival, “that between us we have secured the finest collection ever brought together of S. African portraits, pictures, [and] prints of an historical nature.” Well aware that the strength of the assemblage rested in its function, Gubbins remarked: “It only remains to handle it to the best advantage of every one concerned.”111 Of particular concern to Gubbins was the vast assortment of objects of Africana that he now possessed that appeared to be beyond the scope of his library. Two years after a voracious fire laid waste to half of his assortment, the Gubbins collection was in fact reborn, better and bigger than ever.

Wits Reborn, Gubbins Praised While Gubbins was scouring the earth for Africana to exalt his collection, the University of the Witwatersrand was focusing on erecting a bibliophilic monument to its modern ivory tower. Of no small importance was the directive that the new library be on par with the most acclaimed European and American traditions. As in other aspects of Johannesburg’s modeling, citizens were determined to mimic successfully the great institutions of the West. Refusing to see themselves as inhabiting a temporary colonial backwater, Johannesburgers insisted that the modernity of the new Wits library prove their community’s permanence. In this desire, South Africans now had the assistance of the Carnegie Corporation of the United States. After a study revealed the dire state of libraries in South Africa, this philanthropic corporation provided the university librarian with the means to undertake a

Founding Vision / 87

survey of modern library notions in Europe and America in order to put the newest ideas to practice at Wits. And, indeed, this is just what was done— and to great effect. The Sunday Times of 25 February 1934 lauded the “approved British style” and “modern design” of the new library in an article boasting “Rand University Library Reborn.”112 The Star similarly extolled the new library, noting its up-to-date fire precautions and air conditioners. “The whole building,” the article cheered, “is a model of suitability to the great purpose of encouraging the pursuit of knowledge in the healthiest and most perfect surroundings.”113 Without doubt, when the new Wits Library was opened by Prince George, the Duke of Kent, the building was feted as a modern marvel that rivaled anything found in Europe or America. Replete with “local celebrities” and British royalty, the finely orchestrated opening on 12 March 1934 stressed the university’s modernity.114 “Although young,” Chancellor H. R. H. Prince Arthur of Connaught, KG, wrote in his message for the occasion, “your University has achieved much for the good of South Africa and the Empire.” “It is my belief,” he concluded, “that a great future lies ahead of you.”115 In his opening speech, principal Raikes likewise looked to the future by paying tribute to those responsible for the library funds, graciously thanking institutions such as the Johannesburg City Council, the Chamber of Mines, the Council of Education, and the Carnegie Corporation. He then focused on individuals such as the late Sir Otto Beit, Dr. Cullen, and, of course, Gubbins, to all of whom, he stated, “we owe more than it is easy to express.”116 Indeed, as an earlier newspaper article exclaimed, “the glory of the Witwatersrand University Library will, of course, be the Gubbins Collection of Africana.”117 Without doubt, the University of the Witwatersrand was grateful to Gubbins for both his collection and for his energetic campaigning on its behalf. Largely thanks to his efforts, just over two years after the disastrous Christmas Eve fire, the University of the Witwatersrand announced that it too had arrived. F. R. Paver later recalled how the opening of the library was “in keeping with one of his [Gubbins’s] principal purposes,” described as “provid[ing] the northern, inland, portion of the Union with an equivalent of the fine intellectual institutions and founts of tradition which the Cape had so far monopolized.”118 The new library certainly bore the mark of Gubbins’s influence. But it was not solely his brainchild. University, city, national, and even international interests impinged on the library, distinctly marking it as a product of its day. For example, a newspaper article from February 1934 noted that “1arge gangs of white men” were furiously working to move the 750,000 books into the premises, underlining that “this is an all-white job.”119 Suggesting that the usage of white laborers ensured the civility of the

88 / Chapter Two

endeavor, the piece revealed the extent to which racism was part of South African modernity. In a similar vein, the murals that were chosen to adorn the new library walls firmly demarcated the space as colonial. One was titled “Colonists, 1826” and depicted settlers en route to a new world. The other, entitled “Vasco de Gama: Departure for the Cape,” honored Portuguese exploration.120 When all was said and done, the university and the citizens of Johannesburg had gotten what they wanted: an impressive monument to Western civilization that paid little attention to its African surroundings. If Gubbins minded the library’s alignment with Western ideals, he left no record of his disapproval, instead enjoying the fruits of his labor. When, for instance, he received a letter from undergraduates asking permission to form a Gubbins society for the study of history with himself as honorary life president, Gubbins was elated.121 More than anything, he felt he had succeeded simply by interesting people in history.122 Gubbins was further flattered when the university offered him an honorary doctorate. At the award ceremony, mere weeks after the library’s opening, Gubbins’s friend, Professor L. F. Maingard, whimsically praised him and his work: “Through good weather and bad, but somehow always just getting in before the professionals, Mr. Gubbins has continued his life-work, until we now have in this city one of the principal collections in South Africa.”123 “I am deeply touched by and appreciate” the honorary doctorate, Gubbins penned to Raikes, venerating that “the University of the Witwatersrand has been to me somewhat of a fairy godmother as through its backing I have been able to do things which would otherwise have remained a dream.”124 Without doubt, Gubbins understood just how much he had gotten out of the relationship with Wits, initiated all those years earlier by Rheinallt Jones. And so it seems the adoration was mutual. While Gubbins was feted in South Africa for his heroic efforts to restock the Wits library, his tireless endeavors to promote Africana in En­ gland had earned him considerable praise there as well, largely because of an exhibit—mounted in the summer of 1933 at the South African House in Trafalgar Square—of books and objects that he had collected there. Visitors to the exhibition, the attendant catalog explained, saw books that illustrated the colonial “opening up” of India, Australia, and Africa. Also on display were Thomas Baines’s paintings depicting “the primitive life of the Natives,” the papers of former Cape Governor Lord Macartney, and a book of letters kept by missionary Thomas Morgan Thomas for Ndebele King Lobengula, among many other treasures.125 Rare and precious coins, medals, and artworks alongside mundane artifacts celebrated each segment of society’s contribution to South Africa, a local article announced.126

Founding Vision / 89

Accompanying the exhibit was a series of afternoon talks on Africana topics given by such figures as William Cullen.127 Together, the display and the discussions it spawned praised the acquisition of cultural objects whose housing in South Africa, they boldly argued, would emphasize the durability of that society. At the opening of the exhibition—presided over by the Earl of Athlone, former governor general of the Union of South Africa, chancellor of Wits, and head of the Library Appeal Committee—the notion of South African permanence was underscored.128 Also present at the event was General Smuts, who recalled fondly his early interactions with Gubbins, the eccentric man behind the mission: “He begged, bought, borrowed, and resorted to every means legitimate and illegitimate to rescue our national treasures from oblivion.” “We in South Africa, are a young community, very raw,” Smuts explained to the metropole audience. He continued his assessment of the collection’s value, noting that it helped give substance to an emerging community: “In a word, we lack culture, and nothing better could have been done for us than the amassing of this collection. . . . We needed a man with the vision of Gubbins to give us eyes.”129 Reminding listeners that Cape Town and New York were both settled in the seventeenth century, Smuts called for nothing less than the commemoration of South African culture as proof of the country’s permanence and modernity. Showcasing objects that were both inherently worthy and unassumingly ordinary, the exhibit emphasized the historical contributions of more than just “great men” and “great events,” illustrating not just South African dura­ bility, but also Gubbins’s particular, three-dimensional take on history. Here was tangible evidence of social history’s ability to create an inclusive national identity. As but a small percentage of Gubbins’s assortment of Africana objects—a collection that began, we may recall, with Jane Wilson’s tombstone—the rump display implied that Gubbins’s larger assemblage of objects could be the most profound, living version of three-dimensional thought yet enacted. “The collection which is being formed is no mere haphazard aggregation of anything which may be labeled ‘Africana,’” a newspaper article affirmed: “A great idea lies behind the project: the belief that the South African people may be helped toward achieving a national unity by taking a common interest in their very diverse origins.”130 Lord Athlone further stressed the significance of Gubbins’s work to South Africa in his speech opening the exhibit. “May I say,” Athlone offered, that I feel it is something more than a merely fanciful idea to see in this new Gubbins collection the germ of, and also the opportunity of helping on, the

90 / Chapter Two much more far reaching project of a necessary educational and cultural institution truly national in scope and character?

“I mean, of course,” Athlone clarified, “the creation at Johannesburg of a great folk-museum for all South Africa.” Boldly endorsing what was until then an unknown scheme, Athlone gave his weight to Gubbins’s new endeavor. “Such a museum,” Athlone said, echoing Gubbins’s aspirations, “would focus and illustrate through the centuries all the tradition, culture, and historical achievements of the South African peoples.”131 And with this very public declaration, the world was made aware that John Gaspard Gubbins was not content simply to show the library portion of his collection. Faithfully following a three-dimensional ideal and by way of Lord Athlone’s pronouncement, Gubbins announced to all that the time had come for him to display publicly his Africana objects.132 The Phoenix, in fact, was still rising.

The Birth of a New Idea Lord Athlone’s speech was merely the first public notice of a museum scheme that had long preoccupied Gubbins. “During my stay in England,” Gubbins recalled, “I came in touch with so much material of Museum interest.”133 Gubbins had written Raikes from England describing the predicament this caused. “In dealing with the historical material relating to South Africa,” he penned, “it is difficult to draw the line between library material & museum material.” Yet, Gubbins acknowledged, sometimes the distinction was obvious. “I would not accept such things for the library,” Gubbins wrote, “but they are excellent basic things for a museum.”134 From the abundant donations of objects other than printed items, Gubbins was reminded of the broad scope of his collecting interests. “Africana,” he thus declared, “is really material which related to S African history and tradition,” and therefore it “contains much more than books and manuscripts.”135 Recognizing that collecting objects was beyond the reach of his Wits-endorsed mission, Gubbins began scheming. “Obviously,” he wrote his friend Hiller, “I am far beyond the scope of a University Library and so many objects are coming in that an historical or volk museum is indicated.” “To this end,” Gubbins now declared, “I am trying to influence the J’burg municipality who have the funds and no museum as yet. But I am aiming at a National thing beyond the Union and including at least the whole subcontinent.”136 Refusing to turn down Africana simply because it was beyond the range of his bibliophilic mission, Gubbins sought to broaden his mandate. “So you

Founding Vision / 91

see,” he cheerfully announced to his nephew, “I am building many castles in the air.”137 Having moved from theoretical clouds back down to earth long enough to transfer his library to Wits, Gubbins once more indulged in lofty ponderings. In a published interview describing his world trip, Gubbins suggested what this museum might look like: There could be included something about everybody who has had a hand in building up South Africa as she is to-day—tools and trophies of the native races, handicrafts of the Huguenot refugees, relics of the Great Trek, the Bibles of Livingstone and his fellow missionaries, various evidences of the increasing commerce and shipping—all could be now illustrated by tangible objects.

“No important element in the country’s make-up need be omitted,” Gubbins boldly offered: “With pictures and photographs and relics of all kinds a balanced view of her history would be obtained.”138 Cognizant of the potential benefits of such a historical depiction, Gubbins suggested nothing less than a way to change South African society. The museum, Gubbins anticipated in a letter to fellow Johannesburger William Dalrymple, “would be something quite unique in the world & might be the means not only of bringing more mutual tolerance & understanding into South Africa but,” he strategically proffered, “it might have even international repercussions as showing how a state like S Africa is intimately connected with everyone else.”139 With that, Gubbins once more affirmed his belief in an interconnected world. And with these interviews and letters, Gubbins again imagined something far greater than his initial idea. Beginning to see the vast potential to spread his message in objects—as items that transcend linguistic differences—Gubbins was emboldened. The museum, Gubbins mused, could be his greatest accomplishment yet. In a sprawling letter to Raikes, Gubbins explained why the university should endorse his new endeavor. “Now the University has on hand all it can carry,” he explained, but “I feel certain that a cooperation between the Municipality & University to establish a S. A. Historical Museum or a S African Institute would be of the greatest value not only to the parties concerned but to S Africa as a whole.”140 Partnering with the city of Johannesburg, Gubbins suggested, Wits would be able to further enhance its regional and national environs. Moreover, Gubbins argued, the museum would compliment his library at Wits. “To make it [the library] complete,” Gubbins explained to would-be donor Mrs. Baden Powell, “we want something in the nature of a Museum, to illustrate with Things and Pictures the same idea,”

92 / Chapter Two

namely “every phase and factor in South African history.”141 “So the core of the idea,” Gubbins summarized for Raikes, “boils down to an exhibition of things backed by pictures & documents to illustrate every phase of S. African life.” Far from impinging on the library’s domain, Gubbins assured, “it is a perfectly natural extension of the library idea,” proudly declaring his goal: “The University attends to the scholarship[;] the municipality provides the exhibition facilities.”142 The two would be entwined. Elaborating, Gubbins told Dalrymple that the Museum “will act as a sieve separating the elementary student & the mere sightseer from the serious student who naturally gravitates to the library.”143 Providing a visual, easily accessible version of history, the museum would attract a more casual audience. In turn, the library would be free to concentrate on academic scholarship. Convinced that the museum needed to be tied to his library, Gubbins asserted: “I have the most complete confidence . . . in the University authorities & feel that the whole scheme should be regarded & handled as one unit.” Imploring Wits to invest in his museum plan, Gubbins demonstrated his considerable political savvy. The university was a powerful force in Johannesburg, able to see his new vision become a reality if it so desired. Additionally, Gubbins had already secured Wits’ endorsement of the principles that underlay his library and now museum—namely, threedimensional ideals. If the “Exhibition functions” of his collection “can be undertaken in the same ‘University spirit’ by the Municipality,” he detailed, “a great step forward will be made.”144 With greater drama, Gubbins dreamily envisioned what the museum could be: “a place of pilgrimage for everyone interested in South Africa. They will each see their own things and will see the other fellow’s things at the same time and so get a better understanding.”145 With characteristic enthusiasm and far-reaching vision, Gubbins projected that the museum would serve a much-needed purpose in stratified South African society. Moved by these appeals, Raikes, Dalrymple, and others backed Gubbins’s new directive.146 Reiterating the confidence in Johannesburg that compelled him to transfer his library there, Gubbins penned to Raikes that the city was “the one place in South Africa without any marked prejudices” where “its temperament would allow justice to be done to every section of the community,” once more suggesting that “Johannesburg should be the real cultural centre for the whole of the subcontinent.”147 In creating a new museum, Gubbins advised his Rhodesian friend Hiller, “we have a splendid chance to work a coordinated scheme between the Northern Centres which will then lead and the Cape will have to follow willy nilly.”148 Again clearly appealing to regional rivalry, Gubbins called on northerners to found a museum far

Founding Vision / 93

greater than anything at the Cape. Referring to a remnant of a Portuguese ship, Gubbins described his desire to secure it for his collection. “If Johannesburg could save this for South Africa,” he told Cape Town curator Gill, “she would deserve well of the country & show that she is not so barbaric as the Cape thinks.”149 Elsewhere, Gubbins explained to Gill that while he believed the north needed his collections, he ultimately hoped to form something national, not provincial: “The whole idea I have in mind is cooperative & noncompetitive & I would love to see some circulation of the historical treasures of S Africa so that we could build up a common tradition.”150 Offering northerners a manner to exalt themselves and southerners a chance to feel a part of a common national goal, Gubbins demonstrated his trademark political expediency. Besides appealing to regional antagonism, Gubbins presented Johannesburg with several affirmative reasons for endorsing his museum, once more displaying his tactical aptitude. “I am now attempting,” Gubbins wrote to Gill, “to stimulate the Town Council by visions of Johannesburg, founded on gold, becoming the Athens, founded on the silver mines of Larium of S. Africa.”151 Elsewhere he explained his reasoning to his nephew Dick Tufnell: “If people think things,” Gubbins pronounced, “they try to become it.”152 Imploring Johannesburgers to see their young city as nothing less than the next global cultural focal point, Gubbins urged his fellow citizens to invest their mineral wealth in a cultural museum, demonstrating the extent to which South Africa—and the Transvaal specifically—had firmly become his home.153 On a different level, Gubbins appealed to the same local initiative toward improving educational facilities that impelled the growth of Wits. “Our teachers,” Gubbins proclaimed to the Rotary Club of Johannesburg, “through no fault of their own, teach such a dull history of South Africa that most of their pupils dislike it,” declaring as a solution: “It is only by making South African history human that we are going to make much of it.”154 A colorful and lively museum of history, Gubbins proffered, would excite young minds, in addition to stimulating local culture. Publicizing his new scheme wherever he could, Gubbins quickly amassed a broad support base among white South Africans.155 With distinctive powers of persuasion, Gubbins secured additional devotees to his new endeavor with each day. In another attempt to garner patronage, Gubbins looked ahead to the fiftieth anniversary of the city, which was to take place in 1936. Certainly the attention of the entire empire, if not world, would be upon Johannesburg on that occasion. Noting that “the town will make a great effort” for the “jubilee” anniversary, Gubbins told Dick, “I am proposing that we should hold a great loan exhibition of Africana from all over the world.”156 At the same

94 / Chapter Two

time as he called for an exhibition, Gubbins noted the absence of museums in Johannesburg, reminding his countrymen that the Western world was well aware of this shortcoming. Pointing to the recent Carnegie Corporation report that bemoaned the lack of museums in South Africa, Gubbins underscored his argument for a Johannesburg cultural museum.157 “As Sir Henry Miers points out” in that report, Gubbins paraphrased: The Johannesburg area is the one area in the world with an equivalent white population without proper Museum facilities. So the position is a unique one[;] there is the possibility of starting on virgin soil something really worth while.158

Unmistakably playing upon white South Africans’ intense desire to be seen as cultured and supposing that Carnegie funding may be forthcoming, Gubbins pled, “the moment seems to be absolutely psychological.”159 Indeed, Gubbins’s petitions fell on receptive ears and, in an astonishingly short amount of time, the process to create a museum was under way. The most glaring obstacle facing Gubbins was how to convince the city council to finance a museum amidst a strained economy. As luck would have it, a concurrence of events suggested a simple solution. It just so happened that while Gubbins was searching for a home for his museum, the City Council of Johannesburg was building a modern public library in the center of town, the account of which is explored in the following chapter. Important for now is the fact that the city council was considering sanctioning the construction of a second story for its new building. Impeding its decision, library employee R. F. Kennedy recalled, was the question of what would be housed there. On this, the council was uncertain.160 Until, that is, John Gaspard Gubbins arrived. On 30 March 1933, Gubbins headed a delegation that included prominent Johannesburg citizens H. J. Crocker, L. Andersson, and H. R. Raikes to the Library Committee of the City Council of Johannesburg to present a proposal for the Africana Museum. First and foremost, they made known the museum’s mission statement: “The essential aim of the Collection is to represent every phase and factor of African life, to show these in sections and to vitalize them by securing the co-operation of the living entities they represent.” Underscoring both the years of hard work and expertise that en­ abled this vast collection and “the remarkable opportunity that is offered to the City of Johannesburg” by Gubbins’s scheme, the committee attempted to sell the collection. A memorandum created for the occasion extolled the collection:

Founding Vision / 95 It is probably correct to say that, in no existing collection and in no single place in Africa, is there gathered together material which affords a comprehensive picture of African development and of the contributions made by the various racial groups which have, at one time and another, played their part in the evolution of the continent.

Suggesting that the collection be divided into eight broad categories that included the main historical gallery, the geographical divisions of South Africa, the racial divisions of South Africa, religion, occupation, culture, women, and the South African national portrait gallery, Gubbins and friends ensured that nothing would be ignored. Through these broad fields, the self-appointed ambassadors proposed that the complete, unbiased picture of South Africa’s past that would emerge “would in course of time make Johannesburg the world centre for African studies.” The city council, in other words, had the chance to do no less than fashion Johannesburg into the African Athens. “The design,” the memorandum read, is to build up a Museum collection, graphically and permanently illustrating the story of the African continent, which will draw to it, from all parts of the world, everyone who is interested in Africa, and, at the same time, provide for South Africa an institution of enduring educational value.161

Inviting the city council to assume ownership of the Africana objects collected by Gubbins over the course of a lifetime, the delegates felt themselves extremely generous. In return, they expected the city to house, staff, and fund the museum. Though they did not say so then, the delegates also intended to participate actively in future museum administration. Responding favorably to the proposal, the Library Committee turned the matter over to chief librarian Asher who recommended that the collection inhabit all 22,000 feet of the proposed second floor, noting that the museum would compliment the Harold Strange collection of Africana books already in the public library’s possession. Once the plan was endorsed by the town council, its future was assured. An undated brochure issued by the Johannesburg Publicity Association explained the city council’s reasoning. Given the obvious historical and social importance of the collection, the council, it recorded, had decided “to take over and develop the exhibition side of the [Gubbins] Collection and to house it permanently in spacious and beautiful galleries constructed for the purpose in the new Johannesburg Public Library building.”162 This document also confirmed that a close relationship with Wits would be ongoing. At the same time it assured readers of

96 / Chapter Two

the museum’s commitment to Gubbins’s ideals, attesting that “controversial subjects would not be avoided but illustrated from every side.” Providing the “Outline of the Scheme” for the “Gubbins Africana Collection,” the public was once more introduced to Gubbins’s comprehensive plan. Unlike the earlier draft outline, the fields of government and Johannesburg City were added to the list, while the occupation category was expanded to include all human activity.163 Despite these changes, the overall endeavor remained the same—to provide a three-dimensional, visual account of South Africa’s past. At the time of transfer, Paver later narrated, the Gubbins’s collection was large enough to warrant the expanse afforded it: The Gubbins Museum of Africana, which in addition to a mass of pictorial and photographic records contains objects as far apart in provenance and size as the carved doorway from the Arab house in Tanganyika which was occupied by Livingstone and Stanley and a set of old paste shoe and kneebreeches’ buckles which belonged to the father of the first Speaker of the Cape Parliament.164

An inventory of Africana transferred to the city from Wits and dated 20 Feb­ ruary 1934 revealed that the city received a wealth of paintings, prints, aquataints, sketches, miniatures, lithographs, and engravings by such famed South African artists as Baines and Bowler, in addition to coins, tokens, and medals.165 The remainder of the Africana objects came directly from Gubbins. While no complete record of transfer was kept, it is certain that the bulk of Gubbins’s Africana went to the city around this time. Judging from the handwritten indexes he haphazardly maintained as well as later museum documents, the consignment was both extensive and diverse.166 Immediately, questions about how to administer the enormous collection emerged. When the museum was formed, an advisory committee was elected and charged to make recommendations to the Library Committee, under whose control the museum fell. The original advisory committee was comprised of Gubbins, H. R. Raikes, L. Andersson, H. J. Crocker, W. Dalrymple, and Councilor J. F. Hilson as chair.167 After several months, Gubbins was made honorary director of the museum. Despite this title, the fact that the museum fell under the Library Committee of the city council and that S. B. Asher was the chief librarian meant that he was technically in charge of the museum. This was not simply a nominal issue. According to city bureaucracy, Gubbins had no direct access to the Library Committee, the body that governed his museum. His only avenue was by way of Asher.

Founding Vision / 97

2.  Africana Museum Galleries, ca. 1950

This convoluted chain of command could only function smoothly if the players involved cooperated. This was not the case. As R. F. Kennedy, sublibrarian at the time, reflected, Asher had “the reputation of being a very difficult man,” while Gubbins, “was trusting, with faith in the goodness of mankind.”168 Gubbins was a dreamer and a visionary who rarely dwelled upon details. He was a lousy record keeper and did not care much for rules. Asher, on the other hand, was wholly pragmatic, possessing a librarian’s eye for detail and documentation. Resultantly, a deeply tense relationship was born between Gubbins, who carried his spirited museum staff and advisory committee in tow, and Asher, the only person with access to the Library Committee. Gubbins bitterly recounted one argument to Raikes. Asher, Gubbins wrote, wanted to separate the Africana collection from the recently acquired geological collection and the Johannesburg relics by disallowing a connecting staircase. “I see the Africana Collection as the hub & the other two as spokes to be developed,” Gubbins explained his position: “My idea is to turn that magnificent room into a living thing.”169 For his part, Asher saw the situation differently. Rather than a living museum that sought to represent the entirety of South Africa’s past, Asher wanted a neatly defined mandate for a manageable museum:

98 / Chapter Two Dr. Gubbins’ prospectus envisages the purchase of an heterogeneous mass of material, much of which is and will be specially and exhaustively covered in the Voortrekkers’ Museum, the Archaeological Department’s Collection, the McGregor Museum, and the National Museums.170

Criticizing Gubbins’s schema as absurdly broad in scope, Asher proposed a limited reach that avoided impinging on other museums’ domains. In brief, Asher wanted nothing less than a decidedly two-dimensional museum. Disagreements like this one spawned a dreadful climate of inefficiency within the young museum. “Things progress slowly, terribly slowly,” Gubbins grumbled to his nephew in February 1934.171 In his history of the museum, Kennedy recorded other similar incidents between the two camps that quickly ensured that “tension became antagonism.”172 According to his account, the inertia caused by Asher and Gubbins’s mutual animosity was violently disturbed when Gubbins and the advisory committee called for the removal of the museum from library control. This was nothing less than a blatant attempt to free the museum from Asher’s management. Reacting to this initiative, Asher “ridiculed Gubbins’s ‘scheme’” and demanded the appointment of a professional curator.173 But despite Asher’s fervent attempts to assert his influence over the entire contents of the library building, his pragmatism was no match for Gubbins’s charismatic enthusiasm. On 9 September 1935, one month after the new public library opened, the Africana Museum emerged as an independent city council body. “Apparently all Asher’s machinations are defeated,” Gubbins cheered: “I get full control of the Africana collection which is made into a new Department.”174 Unashamedly celebrating his success, Gubbins felt his supreme authority over the collection intact. Though in this instance Gubbins prevailed, Asher was by no means Gubbins’s sole criticizer. “I was suddenly attacked that I was an amateur in the Museum world,” Gubbins incredulously informed his nephew in early 1934.175 In August of 1935, the Rand Daily Mail reported on a heated city council debate over whether or not Gubbins should be appointed director of the museum. “Valuable as the Africana collection may be,” the paper quoted Councilor M. J. Harris as saying, “it is nothing more than a glorified curiosity shop.”176 In these and other occasions, Gubbins came under attack for being a mere dilettante. Part of this critique arose in reaction to the high regard with which Gubbins was held in the Johannesburg City Council. “It was of course nonsense to say in the nineteen-thirties, as was so often repeated in Johannesburg Council committee meetings,” librarian Kennedy later penned, “that the only people in South Africa with a thorough knowl-

Founding Vision / 99

edge of Africana were Gubbins and Morrison,” Gubbins’s successor, mentioned further in the next chapter. “They were both in the first rank but there were others of equal stature,”177 Kennedy noted, pointing to librarian of the South African Public Library and cofounder of the Van Riebeck Society, A. C. G. Lloyd, archivist C. Graham Botha, and zoologist and employee of the South African Museum, W. F. W. Purcell, among other contemporaneous collectors throughout the nation.178 By the time Gubbins created his museum in 1935, the accumulation and study of Africana had become an established pursuit for a wide range of enthusiasts. The collection of Africana, understood broadly as books and objects from or about Africa—and detailed further in the following chapter—began in the Cape. According to Africana enthusiast Denis Godfrey, the earliest Africana collector was Joseph Suasso de Lima, a Dutch immigrant who came to South Africa in 1818 and who went on to collect—and write—widely, eventually opening the city’s first Dutch bookshop.179 Reflecting on the history of Africana collecting in 1962, then museum director Anna Smith dated the field’s beginnings at around the same time. In particular, she highlighted the work of German linguist W. H. I. Bleek who had helped catalogue and augment George Grey’s collection of Africana books, specifically those that related to African languages. Like Bleek, Grey, who was governor of the Cape from 1854 to 1861, was an Africana collector of note. His bequest of over 3,500 volumes to the South Africa Library and his tireless efforts to secure the creation of new homes for both the library and the South African Museum earned him the reputation of being an important early contributor to Africana at the Cape.180 Though the South African Museum—which owes so much to Grey—dates its opening to 1825, staking its claim as the oldest Africana museum in the country, John Mackenzie has argued that it did not really become established until 1855.181 Shortly thereafter, he records, a wealth of museums arose. He tallies the near contemporaneous establishment of the Port Elizabeth Museum (1857), the Bloemfontein Museum (1877), the Kaffrarian Museum in King William’s Town (1884), the Durban Natural History Museum (1887), and the Transvaal Museum (1892), among others farther afield in what was then Southern Rhodesia.182 Thus, the second half of the nineteenth century can rightly be regarded as the time in which Africana gained public support in South Africa starting in the Cape.183 Up north, Africana collecting became entwined with the rise of Randlord culture in young Johannesburg at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Men like Cecil Rhodes, perhaps the most influential magnate of the era, and, on a smaller scale, Sidney Mendelssohn, financed their collecting with wealth accumulated from mining.184 Besides them,

100 / Chapter Two

Sir Abe Bailey stands out as the most prominent collector among the few rich enough to fit this category.185 A diamond tycoon who lived from 1864 to 1940, Bailey made two notable bequests in his lifetime, both of which, it should be noted, went to the Cape. To the South African National Gallery in Cape Town he left the Bailey collection as part of his will. This collection contains over four hundred paintings, drawings, and prints, the bulk of which were made in Britain from 1750 to 1850 and are thus not Africana at all.186 To the South African Library in Cape Town, he presented the Fairbridge Collection of roughly fifteen thousand volumes of Africana, funding a special wing in which to contain it in 1925.187 Like Bailey, but to a lesser extent, Harold Fairbrother Strange made his money on the mines in the late nineteenth century. He too indulged in Africana collecting, purchasing the bulk of the many books that made up his collection by way of catalogue from London or Amsterdam. Strange dutifully worked to catalogue his Africana tomes, leaving a collection that, after this death, was purchased in 1913 from his widow by the Johannesburg Public Library, funded in part by the Witwatersrand Council of Education.188 The Harold Strange Library of Africana Studies (formerly called the Strange Collection) was the first Africana the Johannesburg Public Library contained. In many ways, its acquisition paved the way for Gubbins’s collection of objects—seen by some to be a compliment to Strange—in later years. While Strange, Mendelssohn, and Bailey—like Grey before them—were wealthy men who left large bequests or fully organized collections, the bulk of Africana collectors in the late nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century operated on smaller budgets and with less renown during their lifetimes. As Kennedy wrote in 1954, “There has never been a dearth of Africana collectors,” referring to the scores of private individuals who built up personal collectors in the first half of the twentieth century.189 D. H. Varley, librarian of the South African Library, made the same point in his 1949 book of speeches, Adventures in Africana. Celebrating the long list of amateur historians who created the field of Africana, Varley enumerated—among others—George McCall Theal, Ian Colvin (who penned the introduction to Mendelssohn bibliography), and Gubbins himself, who Varley deferentially referred to as “that prince of Africana collectors.”190 Denis Godfrey similarly listed the earliest Africana collectors and dealers in his 1963 The Enchanted Door.191 Here, Godfrey extolled the virtues of the many collectors who en­ abled the field of Africana, among them Killie Campbell, Frank Thorold, and, again, John Gubbins, to whom he devoted an entire chapter, calling him “The Haunted Collector.”192 These collectors—and others like them—were largely unlike both the Randlords and the government folks who preceded

Founding Vision / 101

them. They were, rather, individuals of modest to high means who were driven to collect Africana for deeply personal reasons. Contemporaneous with Gubbins was Killie Campbell, who lived from 1881 to 1965. Campbell spent a lifetime in Durban growing her collection of more than twenty thousand books, as she put it, “specialized chiefly in history and Bantu life.” Although in 1945 she had hoped this would form the nucleus of a library of Africana studies, such an arrangement was not reached until after her death, nearly two decades later.193 Likewise, Estelle Hamilton-Welsh was also born in 1881, in the Transkei. She too spent much of her life amassing a collection of seven thousand items of African arts and crafts, as it was categorized in 1964. In 1936, these were displayed at the Empire exhibition in Johannesburg; two years later, the South African government sent her to the Glasgow Exhibition to show them again. Upon return, her items were displayed at the Johannesburg Public Library. But, again, while she received some acclaim in her lifetime, her items—like those belonging to Campbell—did not find a permanent home until they were donated by her daughter to the University of Fort Hare in 1963.194 While Campbell and Welsh-Hamilton’s collections do form important nuclei of study in institutions of higher education, neither woman was able to create such a situation during her lifetime. Neither, in other words, did what Gubbins—that so-called haunted prince—did. In all of his abundant correspondence, Gubbins left no indication that he knew either Campbell or Hamilton-Welsh personally, much less some of the other Africana enthusiasts of his day. It is clear, however, that he was in touch with folks at the South African Museum after his trip around the world.195 It is also clear that he had known Sidney Mendelssohn, whose 1910 South African Bibliography remained the preeminent work on Africana collecting.196 Looking back on this era, it is difficult to determine webs of interconnectivity, especially among people who were, largely, collecting on their own in isolation. At that time, venues by which Africana devotees could meet—in person or virtually—were only just emerging. Thus, it is hard not to see the criticism that Gubbins faced in the mid-1930s with some degree of skepticism. If he was not a professional, it was only because he was neither a librarian nor a trained museum worker, neither of which discipline (but especially the latter) was fully professionalized at the time. Gubbins was, for better or worse, a collector. Viewed against those who came before him as much as his peers, he was certainly neither the richest nor the most organized. Nor did he necessarily leave the best collection. Yet, his distinctive combination of drive and charisma helped him achieve what no one else with his means did at the same time. As Denis Godfrey affirmed,

102 / Chapter Two

“Gubbins . . . was unique among collectors if only for one reason—his uncanny ability to make historical associations; to tie up the loose ends of history.”197 It is thus perhaps not surprising that, in the end, Gubbins received far more support than condemnation from his fellow citizens. A month after he was dubbed an amateur museologist, Gubbins recounted, he was asked to serve on the National Archives Commission, in his words, “probably the greatest honor of its type.”198 Certainly, the fact that Gubbins could now look upon a library and museum bearing his name was evidence of his unique capability to garner tangible support for his lofty visions.

The Toll Refusing, as always, to pause to note his endeavors’ progress, Gubbins did what only he would do: envision yet another grand plan. “The library will store the Africana material, [and] the gallery will exhibit the pictorial side,” Gubbins explained, “hence what might be called the National bureau of SA Illustration seems to be indicated to store & circulate the picture side of SA history & tradition.”199 Ready to visualize the next logical step, Gubbins now argued that it was not enough to collect and display historical pictures. If the end goal was truly the education of South Africans, then those pictorial works collected must be made available for reproduction to all interested persons. Securing the cooperation of the Star and the collections of Duggan and Elliot photographs, Gubbins was well on his way to assembling a vast database of South African illustrations.200 It was a scheme that Gubbins would not see realized. Though Gubbins was undoubtedly a born persuader, years of frenzied activity had begun to take their toll. “I shall have to take some sort of a change,” Gubbins had told his nephew at the close of 1933, “as I cannot get rid of my colds.”201 But as has been described, the pace of Gubbins’s life only increased after his world tour. Though one would hardly guess from his accomplishments, Gubbins struggled with ill health throughout 1934. In January 1935, his old optimism reemerged. “1934 has gone,” Gubbins wrote: “On the 6th of January I passed into a new year myself. 58 I think. So I hope and believe the luck has changed.”202 Yet, the fortune of good health continued to elude the Gubbins family. In June 1935, Gubbins reported that between them, he and his daughter Elizabeth had had twenty surgeries.203 As ceaseless doctors bills arrived, Gubbins was forced to sell portions of his Africana collection for cash.204 Despite whatever setbacks he faced, Gubbins continued to believe in the future. “I am writing this the first letter to be written in my new office at the new City Library,” Gubbins happily reported

Founding Vision / 103

in June 1935. Musing at the new museum around him, he pronounced: “I feel we shall turn out something quite outstanding in the end.”205 With offices and salaries provided by both the University of the Witwatersrand and the Johannesburg Public Library, Gubbins must have felt a triumphant sense of accomplishment. By creating a library and a museum solidly built on three-dimensional ideals, he had managed to turn his theoretical musings into practical applications. And he had been able to do so by indulging his most beloved activity, the study and collection of Africana books and objects. Though he now had the Bureau of Illustrations to think about, Gubbins was unsure where his next move would take him. “It is difficult to see the future,” he confided from his new office in the public library; “in fact it is impossible to make any plans.”206 No doubt his continued sickness impinged on his energy. “I wish I was fitter and the farm was not going so badly,” he ruefully told his friend Hiller in September 1935. “Still,” the consummate optimist concluded, “things have a way of coming right.”207 This time, however, things were not to come right. While in Johannesburg on business, Gubbins’s ongoing battle with colds got the better of him. He called for a doctor, but none was available. Rather than risk missing the following day’s meetings, he suffered through the night alone until, in the morning, he found himself with full-blown pneumonia.208 On 12 November 1935, mere weeks after the Africana Museum opened, John Gaspard Gubbins departed South Africa and this world. He was fifty-eight years old.209

The Tribute And the sun set, and all the journeying ways were darkened. —From Homer’s Odyssey 210

“There was still so much he wanted to do,” Mona lamented in the wake of Gubbins’s sudden passing, “and things were just beginning.” “I do believe he was going to do the most valuable work for the country,” she penned despondently to her nephew and niece in England, bitterly accusing, “of course he literally gave his life for his work.” Turning her attention to her late husband’s legacy, she charged: “Now the whole country is realizing what an amazing work he has done . . . and they also realize that he is irreplaceable.”211 Indeed, in the dark days following Gubbins’s death, a flurry of tributes celebrated the fiery energy within this remarkable man.

104 / Chapter Two

“The name of John Gaspard Gubbins had become familiar in many lands beyond that to which, in sober literalness, he has given his life,” Professor J. P. R. Wallis of Pretoria University began his eulogy, published the day after news of Gubbins’s death rocked liberal white South Africa: “But only those who had the privilege of knowing him intimately can feel what his death means for the country of his adoption.” Lauding the initiative toward betterment that actuated Gubbins’s every move, Wallis wrote: In the midst of clamour and strife about and within the vexed question of “Union,” “Fusion” and the rest, he followed the light of his own flaming spirit along paths that swept above the murk of parties and bigotry. He looked upward to a shining goal, to a South Africa one and indivisible, not through stifling and repressing, but through a fine enthusiasm that made frank and full knowledge and recognition of the past, the steps that led upward to a common pride in a common heritage, and a joyful cooperation in its life.

“It was a quickening experience,” Wallis continued for the benefit of those who had never known the pleasure of his company, to hear him talk in his vivid, glowing way of how all sections, white, brown and black, European and Asiatic and African, Portuguese, Dutch, English, German, Malay and kafir, had played their parts in the building up of the country, and how there might arise out of this strange turmoil a great nation made one in open and unshadowed comradeship.212

Celebrating both the farsighted vision that imagined a world beyond binary opposites and the charismatic charm that confidently enticed adherents, Wallis bemoaned this personal and national loss. Echoing this sentiment were the words of J. du Berry of the University of the Witwatersrand who exclaimed to the Star “that in the passing of such a man the whole of Southern Africa is the poorer.” Du Berry continued, sadly noting that this “deep debt of gratitude . . . will only be fully recognized as the years pass.” Further intellectualizing this gloomy moment, du Berry pronounced: “‘Ars longa. Vita brevis.’” 213 Undoubtedly, this had been one of Gubbins’s central messages to his countrymen: Though life is fleeting, art and culture survive. Reflecting upon the endeavors that brought him fame, South Africans celebrated both his guiding rationale and the practical aspects of his work.214 Without doubt, when John Gaspard Gubbins passed from this world, he left his adopted country with abundant evidence of his thirty-three years there.

Founding Vision / 105

His printed words lived on for posterity. In the countryside, his farm stood as a monument to the profuse industrial, educational, and civic work that he had undertaken. In the region’s heart, in Johannesburg—at its center of education, the University of the Witwatersrand—the Gubbins’s Library of Africana showcased his impressive collection of books relating to Africa, guaranteeing the university’s ongoing commitment to African studies. The portion of Gubbins’s collection that became the Africana Museum was similarly integrated into the city’s self-image. Housed in the new public library across from the town hall in central Johannesburg, the museum stood as a living reminder of the city’s surroundings. For his part, Gubbins had undoubtedly benefited from his efforts in South Africa. Beyond recognition, he had received an estimated thirteen thousand pounds from the University of the Witwatersrand in fees and honorariums and, in addition to the sevenhundred-pound annual salary the city council afforded him, a museum costing over thirty thousand pounds was built at the town’s discretion entirely for his collection of Africana.215 Gubbins’s work was thus intimately entwined in the growing of a modern university, museum, and public library in Johannesburg in what was truly a mutually beneficial arrangement. Both the Gubbins Library and the Africana Museum sought to ensure that Johannesburg citizens appreciated the gravity of their context, that of being a beacon of Western civilization that was integrated into the African continent. Both wanted to provide South Africans with a new way to envision themselves, one that was based not on oppositional notions of worth, but on a celebration of the many different forces that enabled modern South Africa. “It remains for those who reverence the man and appreciate the lofty purpose that inspired him,” Wallis challenged, “to see to it that what he began so splendidly shall not fail through indifference, nor be perverted through betrayal of the idealism that begot them.”216 Without the charismatic visionary who spawned these institutions, Wallis noted, it fell upon his heirs to uphold the distinguished ideals for which Gubbins gave his life. The phoenix had risen. It was up to future generations to ensure that it did not again perish.

Conclusion On 14 November 1935 in St. Mary’s Cathedral, Johannesburg, a veritable who’s who of South Africa’s elite paid their final respects to Dr. John Gas­ pard Gubbins. Among the pallbearers were H. R. Raikes, principal of the University of the Witwatersrand; eminent professors of ethnology F. A. Hoernlé

106 / Chapter Two

and L. F. Maingard; F. R. Paver, editor-in-chief of the Star newspaper; and J. D. Rheinallt Jones, founder of the South African Institute for Race Relations. Amid the crowd in attendance were the mayor of Johannesburg, the town clerk, the assistant British trade commissioner, and the public librarian. Wreaths were sent from the city councillors of Johannesburg, the Apollo Lodge of Freemasons, the Transvaal Agricultural Union, and the wife of Jan Hendrick Hofmeyr, former deputy prime minister of South Africa, alongside others.217 Eulogizing his friend for the Rand Daily Mail, Raikes wrote, “Johannesburg and, in fact, the whole of Southern Africa has suffered a grievous loss in the death of Dr. Gubbins.”218 It was an honorable farewell for anyone, least of all a man who had journeyed to South Africa for an adventure thirty-three years earlier and never left. And it was an impressive display from a city that was little more than a dusty, makeshift camp of gold-rush madness when Gubbins arrived there in 1902. Far from a mere witness to the world around him—though he was certainly that—to the extent that he was involved in a liberal South Africanist movement, Gubbins helped enable the growth of the Johannesburg in which he rests. Thus, his endeavors to create a library and museum speak to the often overlooked importance of South Africanism and liberalism in this era. At the same time, the larger story told here—of which Gubbins’s actions were but a part—counters common teleological readings of the time period. It does so first by providing a glimpse of an alternate reality that was then being imagined. Simultaneously, by exploring the ways in which liberal South Africanism maintained what Dubow calls an “unquestioned adherence to the principles of ‘western civilisation’” while “rooting such a civilization in an African context,” we are privy to the ways in which Western modernity was here made local.219 Not only does this further inform our sense of the interplay between Africa and the West, but it also reveals what nationalism meant to some in South Africa at this time. For, as Dubow reminds elsewhere, “the story of belonging is of course profoundly historical.”220 What it meant to be South African in the early decades of the twentieth century, to belong, was—as always—a product of its age. And while historians have, as Lambert and Dubow both explain, been largely “blinded” by the strong narratives of either African and Afrikaner nationalism so prevalent in the decades preceding 1948, that this third strain of South Africanism existed has importance for our understanding both of this era—and the kinds of nationalisms that were then being imagined—and of South African history more broadly.221 Though ultimately overshadowed by the currents of history, the import of liberal South Africanism resides in

Founding Vision / 107

its vision and—perhaps even more importantly—in the tangible manifestations of its point of view. That the physical incarnations of Gubbins’s schema—his library and museum—focused on objects of culture was no accident. Here as elsewhere, culture was central to the colonial endeavor, even as it extended here beyond the temporal confines of colonialism proper. As Nicholas Dirks explains, “although colonial conquest was predicated on the power of superior arms, military organization, political power, and economic wealth, it was also based on a complexly related variety of cultural technologies.”222 John Mackenzie concurs, describing that when read as such, museums of culture stand as yet another implement of imperialism. “There is a sense in which the museum,” he writes, “as much as weaponry, the steam engine, the tele­ graph, and medical and pharmaceutical developments, represented a tool of empire.”223 Again and again, spaces of culture—including libraries and museums—were intimately entwined in imperial endeavors to transpose a way of life on a new environment. Yet, for as much as culture was an apparatus of subjugation, so too was it one of resistance and imagined counternationalisms. When displayed in libraries and museums, culture was a central component for the expression of Western modernity, if not one of the factors impelling and, at times, challenging it.224 Gubbins’s sense that culture could influence, define, and shift national membership—an idea that in our time is taken as a given—prefigured later conversations to this same end. In the 1940s, after Gubbins’s passing, Dubow explains, “‘citizenship’ became a keyword of the wartime era” as this was “an era in which rival notions of citizenship, linked to identity, were developed.”225 Certainly, culture was integral to both the articulation and maintenance of apartheid and the related movements aimed at its demise. Envisioning cultural objects—Africana— to be the vehicles most suited to see his three-dimensional ideal come to fruition in the early 1930s, Gubbins displayed a far-reaching sense of how the construction of identity occurs. At the time of his death, Gubbins had seen the triumph of South Africanism with an inclusive sense of white identity. That this would be short-lived was beyond his purview. But, neither at his passing nor afterward had the goals of liberals been realized. Nevertheless, and to use Elphick’s keen pronouncement, liberalism of this age “was not entirely impotent.” Nor was it, again in his words, “at all disreputable. Quite the contrary,” he writes; “it inspired men and women of admirable character and dedication,” ultimately leaving “a record of sheer decency amidst sorrow which future generations may honor more wholeheartedly than we are able to do.”226 As tempting as

108 / Chapter Two

it is to write off the years preceding the rise of apartheid as necessarily doing so, to see all white-driven cultural and civic endeavors born in these years as being irreparably implicated in their eventual failures, it is worth pausing to remember—and perhaps even laud—what could have been. John Gaspard Gubbins did little more than get his Africana Museum off the ground. As a manifestation of his three-dimensional ideal, its mandate was inspired. In 1935, whether this vision could be enacted remained to be seen.

Three

Becoming “Treasures and Trash”: The Africana Museum in the Johannesburg Public Library, 1935–1977 On 6 January 1977, the institutions to which John Gaspard Gubbins devoted his life honored the centenary of his birth with displays, lectures, and scholarship. In the main hall of the Johannesburg Public Library, the Africana Museum launched an exhibition of objects collected by Gubbins personally. There, Jane Wilson’s tombstone stood beside a signed letter by British colonial officer Benjamin D’Urban, a drawing by Zulu king Cetewayo, and a bishop’s headdress that Gubbins famously talked the man out of wearing and into donating to the museum.1 These varied objects of African culture evidenced and celebrated the broad definition of Africana to which Gubbins had subscribed. At the University of the Witwatersrand, Librarian Moira Farmer lectured on the importance of Gubbins’s vision in the rebuilding of the university’s library to a new generation of learners, describing him as an “Englishman of energy and enterprise of guts of gumption.”2 Nearby, Wits Professor of Education Paul Butterfield explored the wealth of historical sources that research for a biography of Gubbins had fortuitously exposed, excitedly convincing the university to purchase the entire collection of Gubbins’s correspondences.3 Indeed, on the hundredyear anniversary of Gubbins’s birth, the Johannesburg Public Library, the Africana Museum, and the University of the Witwatersrand each commemo­ rated the man who helped give them life, suggesting that Gubbins’s broadminded legacy lived on. Without doubt, much of what his endeavors had become would have pleased Gubbins. At the University of the Witwatersrand, his library continued to serve as the nucleus for an ever-expanding collection of Africana books. Yet, it was the tremendous growth of his final creation—the Africana Museum—that would have astounded Gubbins most. Little more than a series of adjoining rooms at the time of his death, the Africana Museum

110 / Chapter Three

in 1977 boasted four branch museums. Whereas the central location of the museum had attracted an estimated one thousand visitors monthly in 1936, by the late 1970s the museum calculated its monthly attendance at eight to ten thousand.4 In addition to display, the museum had become a leader in Africana scholarship, issuing innumerable books and, since 1943, publishing a quarterly journal to a global audience. Though still housed in the public library, 1977 witnessed the first sustained movement toward new premises for the museum.5 Outside of the museum, Johannesburg’s continued interest in Africana would have further impressed Gubbins. Not only was the city council willingly funding the museum, but librarians had also been lecturing publicly on Africana to packed audiences, while the Star newspaper ran a weekly column on “Collecting Africana” for nearly twenty years.6 Clearly, Africana remained central to Johannesburg’s conception of itself. And indeed this would have contented Gubbins. But scanning the landscape of 1977 Johannesburg more closely, Gubbins most likely would have been deeply troubled. 7 While the institutions he helped found had indeed flourished since his death—and while their celebrations of his legacy suggested a sustained faith in his ideal—deeper investigation would have revealed a different reality. Because its mandate was narrow and its housing in the University of the Witwatersrand rendered it safely secluded, the Gubbins Library was more or less able to follow the path that Gubbins had chartered. But circumstances coalesced to ensure that the Africana Museum’s journey be less straightforward. Rather than promote a three-dimensional ideal, the Africana Museum in 1977 reinforced the very kind of binary logic that Gubbins had deplored. Moreover, this ugly, polarized system of thought had, since the 1948 ascension of the apartheid state, been enshrined in law. In the late 1970s, when struggles for citizenship and identity erupted into nationwide riots, South Africa’s failure to conceive of an inclusive national identity was once more brutally apparent. And without doubt this would have deeply saddened Gubbins. In this chapter, I chart the history of the Africana Museum from its founder’s death until its attainment of a permanent home in order to trace the museum’s transformation from a space structured around threedimensional ideals to one that supported binaries. I argue that this metamorphosis turned the Africana Museum into an institution that actually supported the logic of racism and then apartheid. Further, I reveal that this conversion took place not under the auspices of overtly racist bureaucracy. Rather, and ironically, the Africana Museum’s morphing into an engine for racist ends happened under the guise of liberalism. By detailing this process, I demonstrate that there are limitations to liberalism’s ability to counter racism.8

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 111

At Home in the Johannesburg Public Library At the time of Gubbins’s death, members of the Africana Museum Advisory Committee9—a group consisting of his close friends and associates—quickly stepped in to assure the public that they were, in their words, “prepared to carry the work . . . in the spirit so far as this is possible, which Dr. Gubbins intended.”10 Appointing Gubbins’s assistant W. R. Morrison acting director and later director, the advisory committee made known its commitment to continuity in the young institution. Along with Gubbins’s typist Hermia Gifford Oliver and assistant Dr. Hendrick Gerhardus Luttig, Morrison worked with the enthusiasm of one who had known Gubbins and his scheme personally. When, upon Morrison’s death in 1938, the museum fell under the auspices of head librarian R. F. Kennedy, the fact that he too had toiled alongside Gubbins as one-time sub-librarian meant that he also understood the vision upon which the museum stood. For the first twentyfive years of its life, then, the Africana Museum remained under the control of folks who not only knew Gubbins the man, but who also subscribed to the same liberalism as he did. Yet, in the years following Gubbins’s death, the tenor and thrust of South African liberalism was to shift in ways that Gubbins doubtfully would have anticipated. It is thus difficult to ascribe the term “liberalism” across the decades. As the political climate became increasingly polarized between Afrikaner and African nationalisms in the 1930s and 1940s, and as South Africanism began to fall by the wayside, a mood of pessimism gripped liberals. In the words of P. B. Rich, “faith in the inherent beneficence of a white ‘civilising mission’ ” began to recede.11 Other scholars have long noted this process—what Janet Phillips termed the “decline and eclipse” of liberal principles that occurred by the end of the 1930s.12 Certainly, by the rise of the apartheid state at the end of the following decade the impotency of liberalism seemed assured. Despite the waning optimism that attended it, liberalism nevertheless continued to contain a core set of moral beliefs trained on equality—even if that meant an eventual and not immediate equality—in the years after World War II, as displayed in spaces like the Johannesburg Public Library and in the person of Kennedy. That the understanding and practice of these latter-day liberals differed substantively from Gubbins’s illustrates the evolution of the ideology and is, in fact, the very point worth noting. Indeed, a commitment to librarianship played no small part in determining how liberalism was enacted by both Kennedy and his parent institution. When Kennedy assumed the mantle of control from Morrison just three years after Gubbins’s death, starting what would be more than three

112 / Chapter Three

decades’ worth of engagement with the museum, he contributed to continuity in his capacity as someone who had known Gubbins personally and who was, like him, a liberal—despite the different meaning this term now had. But as chief librarian of the Johannesburg Public Library, Kennedy’s rise to the head of the museum signaled a dramatic change in the museum’s administration that Gubbins would not have foreseen. Indeed, Gubbins had worked hard to ensure his museum’s autonomy during his lifetime. In his absence, Gubbins’s friends, his widow Mona, and other Africana enthusiasts unconnected to the museum similarly campaigned to maintain the museum’s independence.13 While they all liked Kennedy personally, they worried that if brought under the library’s control the museum’s mandate would be subsumed by that of its landlord. Moreover, they speculated that Kennedy’s bibliophilic training made him ill-suited to lead a museum.14 Endorsing Hermia Oliver instead, the committee pitted itself against a bureaucracy that was, at that point, unwilling to hire a woman—and an unmarried woman to boot—to such a post. Their best efforts notwithstanding, idealism gave way to administrative expediency when Kennedy took control. While Kennedy initially allowed Oliver to steer the museum’s daily functioning, it was not long before he began to concern himself with the museum’s inner workings. First and foremost a librarian, Kennedy increasingly brought a particular outlook to bear on the museum that, while professedly liberal, differed in degree if not kind from Gubbins’s ideology. Throughout his life, Reginald Frank Kennedy famously quipped that he was a 1920 Settler, having arrived in South Africa from England that year, a century after the entrance of a mass of Britons had changed South African demographics forever. Born in Ireland and educated in England, Kennedy came to South Africa at the age of twenty-three—single and schooled in the burgeoning art of librarianship—after an acquaintance piqued his interest in the fledgling nation. Following a brief stint as sub-librarian at the Port Elizabeth Public Library, he was appointed sub-librarian of the growing Johannesburg Public Library in 1921. With S. B. Asher’s 1936 resignation, Kennedy ascended to the role of librarian. According to the head of the Port Elizabeth Library under whom Kennedy had toiled, Kennedy excelled at “classification and cataloguing,” the core of library work; he was likewise noted to perform ably the managerial roles of supervisor and disciplinarian. Moreover, as this referee attested, by 1921 Kennedy had “shown himself thoroughly conversant with every feature of library work and acquainted with every movement in the literary and political world.”15 Kennedy was without doubt the best that the British library system had to offer. He pos-

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 113

sessed all of the relevant certificates and, more importantly, displayed the sort of passion for books and eye for detail that successful librarianship demands.16 This practicality, so counter to Gubbins’s idealism, was to have weighty implications for the museum. Kennedy’s outlook, itself a product of his profession, was echoed by the institutional vision of his employer, the Johannesburg Public Library (often known by its initials, JPL). Even more important than its commitment to details, though, the way in which the library enacted its professed liberalism, like that of its staff, was to have a profound effect on the young museum. A remarkably old institution by Johannesburg standards, the JPL boasts a colorful history worthy of extended scrutiny.17 Its history, like that of other components of the city’s “urban infrastructures,” such as “its parks, its streets, the engineering of its water supply, storm-water drainage, and sewers, its monuments, its electric tramway and electric lighting, its structures of consumption and spectacle, its cultural life, and economy”—to use Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe’s words—is intriguing precisely because, unlike in older cities that merely modernized, here it emerged without precedent. As Nuttall and Mbembe put it, these and other aspects of city life, “had to be built from scratch, without any of the constraints that usually bind other cities so tightly to their ancient pasts.”18 This is just one reason why the history of the JPL invites investigation. Still, in the interest of space and judicious inquiry, the library’s past will be explored only to the extent that it elucidates the primary account being explored here. On 20 March 1899, less than three years after the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand, a group of “prominent citizens” resolved to establish a local library in what was then little more than a makeshift industrial camp. Initially opened as a small subscription library meant to provide mine workers with a wholesome venue for their leisure time, the JPL grew swiftly, continually demanding larger facilities.19 As early as 1904, the town council of young Johannesburg declared that the JPL “meets a great public want.”20 By 1923, the council was compelled to assume control of the ever-expanding library, rendering it free to “all Europeans.”21 Influenced by the Carnegie Corporation’s 1928 abysmal assessment of libraries in Africa, the JPL actively endeavored to augment its collection by beseeching local experts to oversee the acquisition of books relating to their specialties.22 Of equal importance in determining acquisitions were specialinterest groups who vocally ensured that their populations would be well represented in the collection.23 By the 1920s, the JPL was thus a tangible accumulation of all that white (and most often male) Johannesburgers fancied themselves. Regarded from the start as evidence of Johannesburg’s

114 / Chapter Three

permanence and civility, the JPL embodied the anxieties and aspirations of young Johannesburg, prompting Kennedy to later dub it “the heart” of the city. When the library came under town council control it quickly became evident that a new home was needed for the growing annals. But when the council attempted to devise a straightforward competition for the new building’s design, Johannesburgers’ deep-seated fears about both their national standing and their international reputation surfaced, delaying the process by nearly two years.24 The council ignited the first flames of public anger when it announced a plan to import a foreign expert to supervise the new building. Calling the proposal nothing less than “Unpatriotic and a Slur,” newspaper headlines demanded that the city “Protect Local Products” and defend the honor of young South Africa.25 Acquiescing to petitions to support local architects, the town council reversed its position, further promising to rely on South African building materials, a guarantee that led to using more expensive, all-white labor despite the economic depression.26 Eager to have their city seen as a permanent beacon of Western civilization, white South Africans’ vociferous demands for local goods masked profound apprehensions about legitimacy. At a more basic level, the very question of what sort of institution the new public library would be polarized Johannesburg citizens. The town council put forward one view. In addition to its particular interest in mining and metallurgy, the JPL would aim to be like other “modern Public Libraries,” that were, in its estimation, “elaborate organizations for the circulation of literature and for the provision of information on all subjects . . . and also [there] to make provision for lecture and other public utilities.”27 The library was to be like Foucault’s heterotopia. Writing about the creation of the South African library in Cape Town, Saul Dubow similarly underscores the importance of that library to the creation of modern South Africa, calling its creation an example of “the imperial civilizing mission . . . directed towards white colonial society, in order to nourish the belief of colonists in their historic role as agents of progress and enlightenment.”28 In the case of Johannesburg, certain members of the white public held oppositional views. For instance, in a heated letter to the editor of the Rand Daily Mail, one Mrs. Catherine Blomefield insisted upon having a say in how her taxes were spent, querying whether “something so academic as to be widely divorced from the homely surroundings we South Africans prefer” was warranted in Johannesburg. Echoing the sentiments of one section of the population, Blomefield dramatically queried, “the new library will be thrust upon and by whom?”29

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 115

Without doubt, the controversies surrounding the new JPL aroused histrionics on both sides, revealing that the issues at stake were far greater than they initially appeared. As far as the white English-speaking public was concerned, erecting a Western-style monument to literature was nothing short of a triumphant declaration of legitimate citizenship. For their part, Afrikaans-speaking intellectuals (many of whom were involved in the contemporaneous movement to arouse a sense of Afrikaner ethnicity at this time) vehemently insisted that Afrikaans—not Dutch—be represented in the new JPL. Above being an assertion of the language’s maturity, this movement revealed Afrikaners’ claim to Johannesburg.30 Resonating with the earlier call to establish a university, the problems encircling the JPL in the early 1930s revealed fault lines in Johannesburg’s citizenry as much as they exposed the young city council’s lack of certainty in decision-making. Surely, none of this failed to garner attention. “The library question,” the Rand Daily Mail reported in May 1930, “is one of the liveliest civic topics at the moment.”31 In the end, after nearly two years’ delay engendered by incessant arguments, the foundation stones for the new Johannesburg Public Library were laid in Market Square to the west of city hall in 1932.32 “The site was an ideal one,” chair of the Library Committee J. F. Hilson proffered: “It would be an advertisement to the whole of Johannesburg and was the most prominent site in the city.”33 Situated in the center of Johannesburg, the JPL was to echo the city’s cultural pulse, a vibe that owed itself in part to the recent contests over the library’s construction, collection, and policy.34 Special interest groups—be they Afrikaner or English, miners, doctors, clergy, or Jewish advocates—had successfully struggled to achieve a tenuous, loosely conceived amalgamated identity called “whiteness” or, to continue using the term, a sense of “South Africanism.” While perhaps unsurprising in retrospect, the creation of an inclusive white identity in these years was something of an accomplishment. As chapter 2 illustrated, struggles between ethnic groups that would later become known as white abounded around the turn of the century. While this white identity was far from stable or free of internal contestation, that South Africans of immigrant populations conceived themselves as distinct from the indigenous, black “them” was crucially important to both the nature of the city and the library within it. When they were finally interned for the new JPL, the foundation stones demonstrated this self-serving, racist conception of South African citizenry. Two foundation stones were laid in 1932—one inscribed in Afrikaans, one in English. Both contained caskets in which “miniatures of the Union Jack and the Union flag” were stored alongside a set of South African coinage, a roster of city council members and library staff, as well as current issues of the

116 / Chapter Three

Star, the Rand Daily Mail, and the Afrikaans newspaper Die Volkste, among other timely mementos.35 Together, the stones and their contents verified the dual pillars on which South African citizenship now rested.36 At the ceremonial laying of the stones, Mayor Corlett heralded the coming of “The Poor Man’s’ or ‘Every Man’s University,’” unequivocally naming the new JPL the “city’s most important building” and observing that in the modern world, “a city without one would be incomplete.” This assertion echoes Carol Duncan’s keen pronouncement about art museums that “such public institutions made (and still make) the state look good: progressive, concerned about the spiritual life of its citizens, a preserver of past achievements and a provider for the common good.”37 Drawing a direct causal relationship between the JPL and the city’s future prosperity, the mayor declared that indeed the building was created with these ends in mind. The library was made, he stated, “not as a gesture of civic pride, nor the mere ostentation of a parvenu city. It is intended as a contribution to the prosperity and permanence of the city, at once an investment and an insurance against the chances of time.”38 Far from affectation, the educational component of the JPL would help ensure the continued affluence and durability of this one-time gold-rush town. The Star of May 1933 similarly confirmed that Johannesburg had acquired a “Building for Posterity,” celebrating the Italian architecture “adapted in construction to modern ideals” as no less than a “solace” from “modern life.” Noting that “every library is . . . a monument to the world’s greatest thinkers,” this account paid homage to the great Western intellectuals whose names were now engraved in the building’s walls.39 Two years later, when the JPL was opened to the public, news accounts continued to dote, calling it “a library commensurate with its [Johannesburg’s] dignity as the largest city in the Union” and “a possession which its citizens can regard with pride.”40 At the opening ceremony on 6 June 1935, the governor general, mayoress, members of the Library Committee, and director of the Africana Museum, John Gaspard Gubbins, were among those who applauded the mayor’s assessment that “the intellectual value of a city could be assessed by its library.” For this reason, the physical building aimed to convey the intellectual pillars on which white South African society rested, to which the inscription above the main entrance (Libri thesaurus animi, “books are the treasure house of the mind”) attested. Encased in the building were eight sculptures “symbolizing history, medicine, philosophy, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature,” while each of the rondels referenced a great Western thinker, including Goethe, Dante, Virgil, and Einstein.41 With these secular gods guarding the building, Mayor Freeman noted the vast distance traveled between 1890 when the

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 117

one-year-old library had one thousand volumes and forty subscribers and the present, in which the library could boast 150,000 volumes and eigh­ teen thousand readers. In observing this growth, he celebrated what young Johannesburg had become.42 In the following years, the JPL continued to stand as a symbol for all that Johannesburg was as well as all that it could be. The Star of 21 September 1936 endorsed this when it commemorated the “men who gave the Town its first Library.” Observing that “a taste for good literature is not usually a characteristic of a mining camp,” this account sought to confirm Johannesburg’s exceptionality. Further expressing that “both British and Dutch co-operated to make the new [library] movement a success,” this article expressed the nascent view that modern Johannesburg owed itself to the combined efforts of these populations—a perspective grounded in South Africanism.43 Far from the violent enemies of the Second South African War or the feuding antagonists of Gubbins’s early correspondences, as far as institutions like the JPL were concerned, both English and Afrikaans speakers had begun to see themselves as jointly comprising South Africa’s citizens—a group explicitly defined as white. Importantly, this movement owed itself to liberal theory that called for transcending narrow loyalties, the very philosophy upon which the JPL was based. In other words, the very liberalism that folks like Gubbins and Rheinallt Jones used to fight for racial equality was also utilized to construct a transcendent, but nonetheless exclusive white identity. Unsurprisingly, these dual motives aroused considerable friction within liberal circles. Arguably, nowhere was this tension more evident than in the newborn Johannesburg Public Library—an institution of the city that was decidedly apolitical. In the years surrounding the 1948 rise of the apartheid state, the JPL was marked by its ambiguous liberalism. Importantly for this story, not only was the Africana Museum housed in the JPL, but from 1938 onward it was also under the control of its deeply conflicted ideology. As the museum struggled in these years to put Gubbins’s vision into practice, the library and its ethos would determine what that would mean.

Turning a Vision into Reality While Gubbins left his heirs an idea, how to enact three-dimensional thought in a museum was a question he never explicitly answered. As a result, it fell to those who followed him to determine what a threedimensionally inspired museum would actually entail, a question, it would turn out, that was far from simple. While the initial, daunting task of cataloguing, classifying, and displaying Gubbins’s haphazard Africana collection

118 / Chapter Three

fell to Morrison, his immediate successor, it was not until 1938 that the museum began to think critically about its appearance and policies. These questions about acquisition, policies, and display—questions, in other words, of museology—would continue to trouble the institution throughout the following decades. In attempting to answer them, the museum would continually look outward—seeking guidance from the West—again displaying its and larger society’s anxieties. On at least two occasions, museum personnel traveled abroad with the explicit task of comparing the museum to would-be Western counterparts in order to determine a practical plan for putting Gubbins’s theories to work. In early 1938, Gubbins’s one-time typist and de facto museum head, Hermia Oliver, was granted several months’ leave to examine current methods of museum work overseas. From February to May 1939, Oliver journeyed through Great Britain and Europe, visiting more than fifty museums in five different countries. According to her report, the rationale for her journey was to “study . . . the latest methods of Museum display,” to record, “only such aspects of Museum technique as seemed applicable to the Africana Museum,” and to offer “a critical examination of the Africana Museum in the light of what was seen overseas.”44 As the first assessment of the museum since Gubbins’s death, Oliver’s 1939 report was, in Kennedy’s words, “in fact a blue print for the future development of the museum.” With over four hundred copies printed in English and Afrikaans, Oliver’s document influenced South African museum theory generally, in addition to steering the Africana Museum in particular. Rewarding her efforts, the city council upgraded Oliver’s post.45 Broadly assessing the state of museums, Oliver noted a global trend away from viewing museums as mere curiosity cabinets. Having emerged in the late nineteenth century as a component of the scientific rationalism and racism that accompanied Europe’s empire building, history museums once served as curiosity cabinets that purported to expose dispassionately human difference.46 Appealing to science’s neutrality, these museums did not organize objects so much as display them. Drawing upon the theories of contemporary museologists Mr. A. C. Parker (of the United States) and Mr. S. F. Markham (of Great Britain), Oliver asserted that, far from their pre­ decessors, modern museums ought to illustrate “noble,” “accurate” ideas that could be used in the education of citizenry. Oliver entreated the Africana Museum to follow the global trend of imparting greater hierarchical value by, firstly, using “1abels which answer, by implication, the question why an exhibit or group of exhibits is worth study.”47 The importance of objects no longer rested on age or type alone, but was now determined by the

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 119

degree to which they supported the museum’s definition of history. Looking around her home institution, Oliver noted that while Gubbins’s collection contained wonderful pieces and his schema a strong vision behind it, the museum lacked a practical blueprint. Determining the need for a definitive plan to support the museum’s well-stated philosophy, Oliver rightly observed that classification was the first necessity. But understanding that any form of categorization necessarily revealed power and judgment, Oliver warned against what she perceived as most museums’ arbitrary schemes, concluding, quite strangely, “that it is unnecessary for Museum authorities to try to work out their own classifications since the expert classifications of all knowledge which are being used in libraries are at hand.”48 Rather than undertake the organization of all historical knowledge, Oliver argued that museum workers should simply borrow from the domain of librarians, a position that arguably came from her own background in librarianship as well as Kennedy’s adoration for the Dewey Decimal System. Perceiving most classificatory systems to be arbitrary and thus useless, Oliver found solace in what she saw as the rational, neutral system of libraries.49 In so doing, she failed to comprehend, as Foucault does, the extent to which any system of classification predetermines what is knowable within it.50 Ironically, Oliver’s assessment of the library schema refused to recognize that, in the JPL as elsewhere, the rigid categories of analysis employed were based upon oppositional notions. Where there was history, there was tradition. Where there was the Western world, there was the Other. Both ordained their opposites. Failing to see that the library system was not only biased like all other frameworks, but that it also rested on the same reductive thought that opposed history and tradition, Oliver endorsed an organizing rationale that relied on binary thought. Though she denounced the simple-minded logic of curiosity cabinets, Oliver’s inability to conceive of a way to implement Gubbins’s vision led her to the paradoxical solution of using binary thought under the guise of scientific objectivity. Laying out a “Proposed Re-Arrangement of the Museum” at the close of her report, Oliver offered a logical “skeleton” outline meant to better present the museum’s view of history to the public. In her plan, the central corridor connecting the museum’s two galleries would remain, as it was, an exhibit of Johannesburg’s development. The older, North Gallery would continue to showcase history, here described as “A ‘Run Through’ of Principal Events,” in addition to aspects of “Social and Political Life” such as “slavery” and evidence of culture like “Pure Science . . . Furniture and Interior Decoration,” among other topics. In other words, the North Gallery

120 / Chapter Three

would celebrate the historical and cultural outpourings of the white peoples of South Africa. Across the divide, visitors would enter the South Gallery to see exhibits on “Prehistory Archaeology,” “Ethnology,” “Agriculture and Industry.”51 Divorced from the historical account, this gallery exposed material evidence of indigenous peoples, unmistakably correlating natives with the natural, wild earth.52 And, with this, the bifurcation between black and white, and history and tradition, was more or less complete. Despite its affront to Gubbins’s three-dimensional notion, Oliver’s scheme met with success because it resonated with Kennedy’s understanding of what constituted “Africana”—a term whose blurry definition was only just beginning to come into focus in the years after Gubbins’s death. In later years, the Africana Museum, by way of the scholarly journal it would come to publish, would devote considerable attention to articulating the definition of Africana and to establishing the term’s etymology. It is worth pausing to lay bare exactly what this term was coming to mean. In the 1943 inaugural edition of Africana Notes and News, Kennedy defined “Africana,” acknowledging that the term was not self-evident. “Africana is a word of many different meanings,” he wrote: To one it means books and other printed or manuscript material, to another it means objects other than books. For Africana Notes and News it is used in the widest sense, covering prints, maps, coins, postage stamps, books, pamphlets, periodicals, autograph letters, pottery and porcelain, furniture, weapons, pictures and by-gones of all kinds—it is restricted only from a geographical point of view; it denotes not the whole of Africa but only Southern Africa.53

By 1950, at least, this had become the journal’s—and by extension, the museum’s—working definition of Africana: books and objects of southern Africa. Moreover, by this time, this particular definition was spreading to enthusiasts and collectors in South Africa and elsewhere, in no small part by way of the museum’s own journal.54 In 1949, D. H. Varley, an Africana expert who put great stock in the Africana Museum as a bastion of Africana expertise, affirmed its definition of the term in a series of lectures later compiled as Adventures in Africana: When we speak of Africana we mean to imply all those objects large and small, natural and man-made, that relate to the history of Africa and of Southern Africa in particular, from Table Mountain—shall we say—to a piece of old Cape furniture, a Cape pamphlet or a Bowler print. More specifically, we

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 121 think of Africana in terms of human settlement in the sub-Continent—but always in terms of history and the living past.55

In 1963, Denis Godfrey offered his definition of Africana, which also resonated with that of the museum and its journal. “All Africana is part of our history,” he penned: “It is anything showing how and why people came to South Africa, and how they lived after they arrived here.”56 This echoed a similar definition offered by Frank Thorold, one of the preeminent Africana dealers in the middle of the twentieth century. “I take it [Africana] to mean,” Thorold narrated, books, artistic items, statues, pictures, and other objects relating to Africa— primarily, we in South Africa consider it to relate to Africa south of the Sahara, but I think the whole of Africa can rightly now be included, although such items in Rhodesia are now called Rhodesiana.57

By 1963 at least, Africana had come to mean all manner of objects found and made in southern Africa, though some, like Thorold, continued to acknowledge that the rest of the continent could or perhaps should be subsumed under its umbrella. By the 1960s, the pursuit of Africana had become a common activity among a remarkably broad assortment of people, in some instances because, again according to Godfrey, it offered the potential for greater financial returns than either gold or diamond shares.58 Seeking to validate Africana collecting, Godfrey and others worked hard to enumerate the challenges and pitfalls of their passion. Likewise, the Africana Museum, understood to be the preeminent repository of Africana, also worked to prove the importance of Africana as a field. From 1953, the museum’s journal repeatedly called upon its readers to help locate the first usage of the term “Africana,” seeking to date definitively the advent of this field of study in order to further validate it. This date was regularly revised with new information until, in 1969, the discovery of a letter to the editor of a journal containing the word “Africana” settled the contest, fixing the first usage at 1902. In spite of this discovery, most dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) included, continue to point to 1908 as the date of first usage.59 Either way, museum workers noted, in the years before World War I, the early bibliographers of Africana—men like Sidney Mendelssohn and Ian Colvin—did not regularly use the term “Africana,” instead referring to “Africana books,” “works relating to South Africa,” or “African literature.”60 Somehow, though, the word “Africana”

122 / Chapter Three

emerged as a counterpoint to “Americana,” a term that encompasses the books and objects of American history and tradition. Yet, while Americana made it into the 1933 supplement of the OED, as museum workers noted in their journal in 1958, Africana had not yet entered into this anointed realm of lexicon.61 The following year—and to rectify this—the museum, by way of its journal, began to chart “Africanderisms,” words of Afrikaans and Bantu origin that had passed into common usage for inclusion in the next OED. Included among the first lot was “Africana,” which was defined as “books etc. relating to Southern Africa”—and dated at 1908—as well as the still new term “apartheid.”62 Thus, while Oliver was drafting her scheme, the term “Africana” was solidifying into a catchall for those books and objects of southern Africa sought and preserved by collectors. While this definition of Africana resonated with Gubbins’s own usage of the term, in practice Africana was being employed rather differently than what its value-free definition implied. As head of both the library and the museum, Kennedy parsed Africana for each of his institutions. For Kennedy, Africana that the public library would concern itself with included “books, maps, the theatre, and SA literary manuscripts.” On the other hand, Kennedy declared that the museum would specialize in original pictures, prints, photographs, Cape silver, brass and copper, costume, postage stamps, military medals and decorations, commemorative medals, coins and tokens, paper money, pictorial maps, and ex libris (or bookplates). For certain subjects, Kennedy noted that “the Museum would only acquire enough material to build up general exhibits.” These included items of “ethnology, archaeology, furniture, china and glass, family Bibles, autograph letters and MS. Documents, and SA military history since Union.”63 While Gubbins had undoubtedly understood that different types of Africana were better suited to different venues, his separation was not born of bias, as was Kennedy’s. “Generally speaking,” Kennedy declared, “books are the most important type of Africana, followed by pictures,” revealing his sustained literary bent. “Whenever possible,” he pronounced, “the Museum tries to obtain objects to supplement books and pictures.”64 Unapologetically denoting objects as less worthy remnants than either books or pictures, Kennedy proved himself to be a true bibliophile. At the same time, his determination to supplement pictures and objects with evidence contained in books exposed his sustained belief in the museum and library’s interconnectedness. This entanglement became even more apparent after 1950. That year, Hermia Oliver, the sole surviving member of the original Africana Museum staff, announced her intention to remain in England at the end of a sanctioned study leave there.65 Mona Gubbins, John Gaspard’s widow, had followed

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 123

her husband from this world in early 1950 as well.66 With her passing, the museum lost another single-minded advocate of Gubbins’s original initiative as well as a direct link to his legacy. At the same time, Kennedy had become increasingly interested in the daily administration of the museum as the war years halted the library’s expansion. With Oliver’s resignation, Kennedy turned to the library staff to fill her position, appointing librarian Anna Hester Smith to her role and further obfuscating the library/museum divide. Indeed, by the time the decade ended, the once concrete division between the Johannesburg Public Library and the Africana Museum existed in name only.67 And, by the close of the same decade, the very binaries that Gubbins had once deplored now existed both in the layout of the museum and in its overarching vision that saw objects as polarized from books. Yet, when, in the early 1960s, the museum yet again looked for validation to the West, it found its form comparing favorably with what it saw elsewhere. In anticipation of a soon-to-be-built original home for the Africana Museum in the proposed new Civic Centre, the city council sent then director of the museum Anna Smith abroad to study modern Western museums in 1961. Only once she was aware of what was en vogue elsewhere, the council reasoned, would Smith be capable of making worthwhile recommendations for the new building.68 Over the course of four and a half months in Europe, the United States, and Africa, Smith visited nearly two hundred museums and fifty libraries in twelve countries,69 paying particular attention—in her words—to “modern trends in museum buildings, organization and display methods in the light of her knowledge of Johannesburg conditions.”70 Drawing upon the expertise of the American and British Museum Associations, Smith acquainted herself with modern museum practice, as defined elsewhere. Mimicking Oliver’s tour two decades earlier, Smith’s journey helped solidify her conception of what a museum ought to do, setting the stage for the next chapter in the Africana Museum’s history. Her “Report on the Overseas Study Tour of the Director of the Africana Museum, June–October 1961” alternately extolled and criticized the many museums she visited, providing her assessment of her home institution along the way. Eliding the obvious differences in racial politics between 1961 South Africa and elsewhere, Smith avoided defining South African citizenry and delineating the unique challenges facing the Africana Museum in apartheid South Africa. Determining the goals of the Africana Museum by charting its past progress, Smith reflected on Gubbins’s original plan to collect all objects of the past, unlimited by “any restricted period, or . . . a single district, or to aspects of either city or country life, or to the accessories or products of any one social or economic class.” Clearly reiterating Gubbins’s

124 / Chapter Three

plan, Smith revealed a solid understanding of the museum’s beginnings. But Smith’s theoretical grasp of Gubbins’s notion was belied by her analysis of the museum’s successful adherence to his proposal. Acknowledging the limiting factors imposed by the JPL, Smith assessed the museum’s layout. She wrote: It is probable that the existence of three galleries on the top floor of the Johannesburg Public Library building had something to do with the three main divisions of the public exhibitions into (a) the contributions by the nonwhite races to the development of South Africa[,] (b) the contribution by the white races to the development of South Africa[, and] (c) the story of Johannesburg.

Aware that the present division owed itself to circumstance, Smith nonetheless concluded, “there seems to be no reason to depart radically from this tripartite division in the proposed new building for the Africana Museum.”71 In other words, Smith—like Kennedy and Oliver before her—failed to see that the polarization of white objects as historical and black objects as traditional flew in the face of all that Gubbins had envisioned. Proudly declaring that Gubbins’s scheme had “not proved too ambitious for Johannesburg,” Smith unmasked her own inability to envision a better way to enact Gubbins’s dream. Far from revealing a lack of faith in three-dimensional thought, Smith’s report showcased her inability to enact Gubbins’s lofty plan, a shortcoming displayed by Oliver and Kennedy as well. Clearly, it was far easier to understand Gubbins’s idea than to implement it, something Gubbins himself may have found had he lived long enough. The irony of the story, of course, is that in their inability to make a three-dimensionally inspired museum, the librarians at the museum’s helm fell back upon binary divisions—both those between white and black and those between objects and books—that actually endorsed three-dimensional thought’s logical antithesis. Unable to see this paradox, the museum—much like its landlord library—continued to fancy itself a beacon of progressive thought. The “Municipal Library is Johannesburg’s Mecca of Culture,” the Rand Daily Mail announced in February 1949, reiterating the white, rate-paying public’s sustained pride in this liberal Western institution. The JPL, the article boasted, “provides a complete refutation of the frequently made assertion that the city has no interest in culture and no soul above the worship of Mammon.” Smugly describing, “so many cultural activities are carried on at the library that . . . the building

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 125

3.  Display of black Africana, Africana Museum, undated.

is, in fact, something of a ‘post-graduate’ university,” the piece concluded that the public library and its tenant did no less than evince “an enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual recreation of which any city might be proud.”72 Despite the impression produced by the 1948 election of the National Party on a platform of apartheid that South Africa was a reactionary backwater, liberal Johannesburg upheld its city’s progressiveness with reference to institutions like the JPL and Africana Museum, while folks within those institutions did the same. When, on 21 March 1960 the South African police force opened fire on a crowd of black Africans peacefully protesting despised apartheid passes in the township of Sharpeville, approximately thirty miles from Johannesburg, this shocking display of brutality presaged a new era in South African history. After this massacre, both the objectives of the apartheid state and the lengths to which the government would go to achieve them were more harshly apparent than ever before. Declaring a state of emergency, the government banned all resistance organizations and held a whites-only referendum to form the South African Republic, thus exiting the British Commonwealth. Responding to the government’s illegitimate strategies,

126 / Chapter Three

organized African resistance suspended fifty years of peaceful tactics and met the state’s violence with might. Though the apartheid state had arisen in 1948, with these deeds a defined epoch of violent contestation and oppression had truly begun. And yet, during the preceding years, as the government promulgated a multitude of repressive, barbaric laws in the face of well-articulated black resistance, some white South Africans continued to look to the Johannesburg Public Library and the Africana Museum as evidence of their civility. The “City Library [Was] a Focus of Culture,” the Star proclaimed in the late 1940s.73 The Africana Museum, its tenant, was “a magic window on the world of yesterday,” a similarly laudatory piece declared.74 In 1950, the Star declared that because of the city’s commitment to memorializing the present, “citizens of 2000 AD will know all about citizens of 1950.”75 In 1955, another article boasted that Johannesburg’s “city library is busier than its London counterpart.”76 Refusing to evaluate their society’s civility by its laws or actions, white Johannesburg contented itself by admiring its modern, efficient library and picturesque museum. At the same time as white citizens subsumed their political critique to self-congratulatory notions of cultural status, an impassioned battle between Elizabeth Gubbins (John Gaspard’s daughter), the University of the Witwatersrand, and the town council over Gubbins’s estate revealed tensions within the Africana Museum.77 Amid furious wrangling over what objects and books belonged to whom, a latent question could be discerned: Would Gubbins be pleased with what his endeavors had become? Following the Gubbins’s dispute, former Wits principal H. R. Raikes died on 13 April 1955. Raikes had served on the museum’s advisory committee since his appointment by Gubbins in 1934, a fact that Kennedy noted in his eulogy: “With the passing of Dr. Humphrey Rivaz Raikes . . . there died the last of those most intimately associated with Dr. Gubbins in creating the Museum.”78 With Elizabeth estranged from the museum and with no original museum members remaining on the advisory committee, by 1960—as the country entered into its darkest epoch—the Africana Museum’s connection to John Gaspard Gubbins was tenuous at best. In addition to its vague attachment to its founder, under the JPL’s management the museum’s ideology bore little resemblance to what was laid out by Gubbins nearly thirty years earlier. In part, this failure owed itself to the limitations inherent in Gubbins’s incomplete plan. The complex nature of culture did not make the situation easier. Of equal importance, if not more, was the powerful influence of the library. Under the control of librarian Kennedy from 1938 to 1960, the Africana Museum was moved

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 127

increasingly closer in principle and policy to the JPL. Of this fact, Kennedy made no apologies, declaring the two spaces to be “complimentary.”79 White South Africa’s response to Kennedy’s 1960 retirement showed that his pride in the library and museum had been well-founded. Applauded by members of his institutions, the South African Libraries Association, the press, and the University of Cape Town—who bestowed upon him an honorary masters degree—Kennedy was celebrated as an embodiment of all that white South Africans fancied themselves to be.80 Feeding into this romantic vision, Kennedy declared: “If the degree of civilization of a community is reflected by the kind of books its members read, Johannesburg is a very highly civilized place.”81 In the wake of Sharpeville, as Johannesburg and South Africa descended into a civil war borne of violent white supremacism, virulent greed, and cowardly fear, some people continued to believe that well-ordered liberal monuments to Western culture meant that society had reached its pinnacle. While South African society became legally polarized into binaries, the JPL and Africana Museum turned inward, focusing on their civility and culture in their continued attempts to put Gubbins’s plan to work. But in their myopia, the spaces became affirmations of a kind of ironic liberalism that found expression but not action. Retreating inward, the JPL and Africana Museum fell in line with liberals across the country who, deeming their role in larger politics to be untenable, instead focused on small-scale change. Richard Elphick writes that, faced with a changing political landscape that seemed to preordain their failure, liberal activity became marked by what he calls “endemic caution” in these years. Characterizing liberals themselves, he explains that “few were natural politicians.” Rather, he writes, “they were organizers, administrators, publicists, fund-raisers—closer in spirit to Rotarians than to revolutionaries”—workers informed by the very “detached, benign tone of their discourse.” 82 This sentiment was echoed by past president of the Southern African Museums Association, R. H. Compton, when he said of museum workers (himself among them), “many of us have a streak of puritanism in our natures.”83 Yet, far from a mere personality trait, this chapter argues that the caution and attention to detail that came to characterize liberalism as it was practiced in the JPL and Africana Museum was actually a response to larger political forces. Speaking of liberalism in the interwar years, Jeffrey Butler makes several assessments germane to this study as well. For him, liberal “moderation was largely resistance to uncontrollably rapid and violent change.” “Theirs was,” in his mind, “an embattled, defensive stance, not a confident, crusading one; they were essentially cautious, trying to

128 / Chapter Three

conserve what little liberalism existed.” Confronted with the seeming futility of their work, he explains, “they adopted what were essentially administrative strategies, a line of action parallel to that followed by South African liberals at the national level.”84 In the same vein, the professedly liberal Johannesburg Public Library and its tenant Africana Museum moved increasingly away from larger politics and toward their own administration. Turning now to the museum at work, this chapter will flesh out the ends to which this ironic liberalism was put.

The Museum at Work With Kennedy’s retirement in 1960, the Africana Museum fell under the direction of Anna Hester Smith. Under Smith, the museum became the space that many continue to envision it to be—a place that, while guided by a professed liberalism, actually enacted (and in some cases endorsed) the logic and reality of apartheid. A qualified bilingual librarian who held an MA from the University of Stellenbosch as well as the honor of being, in Kennedy’s words, “the first student to obtain the South African Library Association diploma,” Smith had been at the JPL since 1938, primarily working with the branch libraries and the Harold Strange collection of Africana books.85 Despite an appreciation for Africana imparted from her father, who was himself an Africana collector, Kennedy had to compel Smith to serve the museum—in addition to her post at the library—for more than a de­ cade before appointing her to run both. In 1960, upon her ascension, Smith became the first female head of a Johannesburg municipal department.86 Humorously recalling the sexist climate that pervaded city government in those years, librarian Blanche Nagelgast later quipped, “I remember so-andso once said that Anna Smith . . . thinks like a man.”87 Gender politics aside, Smith’s rise to power solidified the interdependence of the library and museum. Moreover, it ensured the continuation of the Kennedy-style library ethos under the control of his appointed heir and fellow librarian. Importantly, Kennedy’s retirement did not mean that he exited the library or museum’s scene. Kept on as a member of the advisory council and charged with both cataloguing the museum’s images and penning its history, Kennedy, and his philosophy that both endorsed the separation of Africana into black and white domains and that ranked books above all else, continued to play a prominent role in the museum’s life. This particular view of Africana found expression in the museum’s practice—be it in acquisitions, display, scholarship, education, or public commemoration—in these years. It is to each of these domains that we now turn.

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 129

Display First and foremost, a museum is its display. As outlined above, in the Africana Museum, this meant a separation into three distinct areas. One room depicted the history of South Africa, from the arrival of the Portuguese to the climax of the Second South African War. This told the story of white conquest over black, making history the purview of whites alone. Across the foyer—which celebrated the history of Johannesburg—was a room of those objects designated as black Africana, organized not by any relationship to time, but by ethnicity. This space showcased ahistorical, petrified cultures. While both objects labeled black and white were deemed cultural, the meaning given to the two differed significantly. With regard to objects of white South Africa—such as porcelain, oil paintings, and Victorian dress—culture signified progress and development and was decidedly singular. For objects of black Africans there was no one culture, but rather many, each explicitly removed from the next. These cultural objects—such as headdresses, spears, and cooking utensils—denoted tribalism and exemption from history. The message, though neither deliberate nor in keeping with Gubbins’s founding vision, was nonetheless clear. In the Africana Museum, apartheid—or the logical and necessary separation of races and ethnicities—was both ordained and explained. Museum workers continually asserted that this division owed itself to nothing more than circumstance as when Kennedy argued that it was “for reasons concerned solely with the lay-out of the galleries, [that] the nonEuropean has been separated from the European history.” Despite this contention of impartiality, further reading reveals that it was not space alone that determined the bifurcation between white and black along the familiar lines of history versus tradition. “No effort has ever been made to build up special selections devoted to different [white] races and nations,” Kennedy recalled, arguing by way of an explanation that this could not be done without seriously interfering with the main chronological sequence and the special subject exhibits such as missions. The Portuguese cannot be taken out of the chronological sequence and David Livingstone could not be moved from the mission section to a Scottish section.

Unable to conceive of a manner in which the museum would separate individual white nations without destroying the chronological account of South Africa’s past, Kennedy concluded that racially specific investiga­ tions should be limited to black populations. According to this logic, having

130 / Chapter Three

little input in the main sequence of historical events, their isolation to ethnology would hardly be noticed. “I recommend,” Kennedy summarized, “(a) that no special effort be made to collect items relating to European nations as such . . . (b) that special effort be made to obtain objects relating to the Malays, the Hottentots and the Coloured People.”88 Revealing that the museum did in fact view chronology—the backbone of history—as determined by processes initiated by white peoples alone, Kennedy endorsed the very kind of binary logic that the museum had initially sought to counter. Not simply a matter of spatial constraints, the inability to conceive of a metanarrative capable of dealing with both historical progression and the multiplicity of human experience revealed an essential, racialized ideology. As the museum worked to augment its contents, the same underlying logic affected its procurement.

Acquisition While the Africana Museum professed to illustrate the entire history of southern Africa, from its inception the institution lacked the kind of budget necessary to make that dream a reality. Dependent on the Johannesburg City Council for funds, the museum cobbled together an acquisition policy over the years that ordained the polarizations inscribed by Kennedy. Broadly speaking, the museum aimed to acquire “things used in the past or illustrative of South African history,” most of which would simply be catalogued and stored. Without a large purse, especially during its early war years, the museum came quickly to rely upon gifts. By 1952, Kennedy noted that over two thousand gifts had been received in the previous two years.89 Accepted unequivocally, donations more often than not brought random, often worthless objects into the museum. Beyond simply accepting what happened to come its way, under Smith the museum also actively entreated the public to donate its Africana. On Springbok Radio in 1961, for example, Smith asked listeners to help fill museum gaps by posing the following questions: “Who can let the Museum have a dress actually worn by a Huguenot at the Cape?” and “Can anyone let the Africana Museum have everyday objects used by our great-grandparents?”90 Indeed, requests such as these enticed the white public to continue donating both family heirlooms and items that would have otherwise done little else than clutter attics. Smith’s tenure thus saw the acquisition by gifts of such pieces as “tram tickets,” a “pair of white silk stockings,” a “mesh bag,” a “wooden washing machine from 1898,” “Christmas seals,” and a “butter dish and pickle jars awarded to men in mines for lowest fatality rates,” among other ephemera.91 Offerings

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 131

such as these enabled the museum to enhance its collection of objects that illustrated the colonial history of the region. For as much as the museum depended upon gifts, it also maintained the practice of targeted procurements, often deferring to the advisory committee’s judgment before acquiring a new item. This process yielded such stan­ dard purchases as illustrative pictures, Cape Silver, badges, and coins, among other items considered to be archetypal Africana.92 As before, the Africana Museum Advisory Committee (AMAC) remained filled with experts in various subfields of Africana, described on one occasion by the then chairman as “almost embarrassingly erudite” with “profound antiquarian knowledge.”93 Undertaken as a labor of love, a position on the AMAC nevertheless entailed power. As collectors of the raw material of history in Johannesburg’s premier cultural history museum, the committee members were assembling the stuff from which future histories would be written. Thus, special interest groups continued to vie for positions on the AMAC in order to ensure the representation of their field of interest in the museum collection—be they related to stamps, Christianity, pictures, or mining.94 The selection of experts determined the nature of the assemblage, making it far from neutral. Despite this, the AMAC continued to pride itself on its exemption from current biases in its ongoing attempt to illustrate the entirety of southern African life. While the vast majority of bequests brought objects of white Africana into the museum, the museum did endeavor—through its purchases—to collect objects related to all South Africans from its inception. From the early 1960s, the museum’s commitment to this aspect of Gubbins’s broadminded vision was reaffirmed with the establishment of the museum’s first ethnology post. Initially filled by M. M. de Lange in 1964 and then by Hillary Bruce in 1970, the role of the museum ethnologist quickly grew in importance. The ethnologist was originally charged to utilize “specialized knowledge of the way of life of South African tribes” to categorize the “extensive and important collection of ethnological material collected years ago by authorities such as Junod, Jaques, Roberts and Webb” already in the museum’s possession.95 Bringing anthropological knowledge to bear on black Africans’ objects, the ethnologist was entrusted to order diverse material pieces in a manner that made sense within the overall museum framework. Having sorted the museum’s existing collections, the ethnologist was then asked to assess items upon their inspection by the AMAC, like the Fourie collection of ethnographic items from South West Africa and the world famous Kirby collection of African musical instruments, both of which came before the committee in the 1970s.96 By determining worth as well as providing an illustrative structure derived from prevailing South

132 / Chapter Three

African anthropological thought, the ethnologist made sure that each item of black culture had its proper place in the museum. Importantly, the mode of thought in which the ethnologist toiled was South Africa-specific. Anthropology in South Africa, in other words, was wholly out of step with anthropological inquiry then taking place in Europe and the United States. Far from the social-cultural anthropology of the Western world that was then focused on the way culture is implicated in larger political and social matrixes of power, South African anthropology—as played out in museums—remained mired in an old-fashioned mode where culture was naively assumed to exist independently. And this disconnect was not new. In Reinventing Africa, Annie Coombes’s examination of the redefinition of African artifacts that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she describes how the ethnographical collections amassed at this time revealed more about society than the field of anthropology—a “disjuncture” that for her illuminates “the material intersection and negotiation of the state, institutional and professional politics and policy.”97 Anthropology in South Africa, in other words, owed much to its context. P. B. Rich further explains how contemporary anthropological thought moved in tandem with predominant political currents such that “with the rise of various forms of segregationist ideology . . . anthropology increasingly emphasised the cultural differences between ‘western civilisation’ and African society in South Africa, and the continuing links, even in the urban context, of firstgeneration African city dwellers with their pastoral and rural background.”98 Inadvertently or not, South African anthropology provided the scientific basis for racist policies. Saul Dubow gives further support for this assertion in his discussion of volkekunde, or a homegrown version of cultural anthropology that pitted itself against larger prevailing disciplinary notions by endorsing apartheid.99 Creating a rigid categorization cloaked in scientific authority, the Africana Museum ethnologist thus replicated the assumptions about social hierarchies and hermetic societies that pervaded both the discipline of South African anthropology and larger white society in those years.100 The museum ethnologist also assumed the role of collecting items made and used by indigenous peoples. For example, in 1972, Hillary Bruce was given leave to travel to KwaZulu to procure Zulu items for the South Gallery. With both a government permit to enter this so-called homeland and a Zulu-speaking constable to assist her, Bruce purchased clothing, woodwork, mats, and baskets, among other items. Smith responded to Bruce’s success: The Museum was very fortunate to obtain these pieces as they are becoming increasingly scarce. Even in the Reserve, European dress was worn by nearly

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 133 all the people, while customary dress was kept only for feast days. In the case of the leather kilts worn by married women, which have always been costly to produce and difficult to preserve, plastic ones, much cheaper and requiring no care, have entered the market.101

Noting that limited financial means and the availability of cheaper products like plastic had changed the nature of married women’s skirts, the museum celebrated its good fortune for finding what it deemed to be authentic, oldfashioned pieces of the past. While the museum was clearly interested in historic relics, it also sought to acquire contemporaneous evidence of African life. A near decade before Bruce’s trip, the AMAC had sanctioned a shopping excursion by Smith to the Mai Mai Bazaar in the township of Soweto, where she aimed to purchase “items . . . fit for the collection of the Museum relating to the life of the Bantu on the mines and in the town.”102 In the same vein, when Dr. Thelma Gutsche—Wits Professor and then a member of the AMAC—“showed the committee an example of a Ndebele rug made by a member of the tribe who had been taught the technique of rug making by a Persian,” the minutes recorded that “it was agreed that the Museum should acquire a representative set of work done by Bantu which showed how their material culture was being influenced by Western civilization.”103 At the same time, Gutsche advocated the purchase of an audio-recorded interview with ANC Chief Albert Luthuli, then in the possession of Nadine Gordimer, to which the committee responded with equal favor. The policy beneath these decisions was clear; the AMAC was interested in three types of black African objects: those that revealed some mythic period of stasis that was fast disappearing, those that showed Western influence, and—least often—those bits of contemporary South Africana that, it was thought, might one day become important. Anna Smith stated this explicitly when she declared the following: The ethnological collection in the Africana Museum is growing in importance as the years go by, because the African way of life is changing rapidly, and many objects which were in daily use, have almost disappeared. Students of the future will, without any doubt, be largely dependent on museum collections for their study material.104

While none would doubt that African culture—like all culture—was changing at the time this was written, the presumption that it had remained both stagnant and free of outside influence until the mid-twentieth century reeked of racist assumptions. That these presumptions formed the basis of

134 / Chapter Three

modern South African anthropology served only to bolster their apparent veracity. Thus, while the Africana Museum collected objects of black African culture with increasing attention during the period under review, the pointed separation of so-called authentic, tribal pieces from contemporary, mutated ones served only to reify the notion that black societies were hitherto frozen in time. Antithetical to the movement that characterized history and progress, this viewpoint suggested that black South African societies were radically different from Western, white societies. The two, the logic continued, were diametrically opposed. It is important to note that in dealing with black objects differently from white ones, the museum was not intentionally trying to put forward a racist view of society. If anything, the AMAC considered itself to be progressive—if not radical—for trying to document indigenous societies and their changing ways. Certainly the expertise under which its ethnologists toiled was the most up-to-date conception of anthropological difference. And indeed, the museum’s lack of intention is the very point worth highlighting. Despite its extensive efforts at collecting and documenting items of indigenous cultures, the Africana Museum’s insistent separation of both black items from white items and its periodization of black objects around interaction with the Western world reinforced the very binary logic at the heart of apartheid separation. To the extent that the museum periodically showed evidence of understanding its shortcomings, it always chalked them up to dearth of space. For instance, Smith began her annual report for 1965 with the following typical comment: Because a new building has seemed to be just round the corner for so many years, it has been the policy to retain the existing display methods rather than to incur the expense of modernizing the galleries when everything would in any case have to be done over again in the new building.105

Again and again, the museum looked to the receding horizon where it would occupy its own, specially designed building, refusing or claiming an inability to change its policies in the meantime.106 Without its envisioned new home, under Anna Smith’s direction, the Africana Museum continued to augment its storehouse of South Africa’s past, as ideologically ordered as before.

Education While the museum’s storerooms reflected its ideology, its displays and educational outreach did likewise with a far more public face. From his ear-

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 135

liest interaction with the museum, Kennedy affirmed his commitment to working with the educational system.107 By providing teachers with ways to utilize the museum in their lessons and students with guided lectures, the Africana Museum quickly rendered itself integral to Johannesburg’s education system.108 Noting as early as 1944 that “2,812 school children from 35 Rand and Johannesburg schools were taught in the Museum by members of the staff” during the year, Kennedy proudly quoted a scholarly article that claimed that “more real history can be learnt in a few lessons taken at the Africana Museum, than in months of text-book teaching.”109 Well beyond Kennedy’s tenure, the museum remained committed to its self-appointed role of public educator. In 1963, Smith happily tallied that, during the previous year, of the 79,656 visitors to the museum 4,657 were children, figures that are representative for her entire tenure.110 Beyond regular school-time visits, the museum provided independent English and Afrikaans language “tours of the Museum” during school holidays to children as well as lectures aimed at adults.111 Combined, these endeavors made the museum a powerful educational force. The framework of the museum’s exhibitions predetermined the type of educational message that the museum was capable of imparting. While the diverse contents of the museum could have been interpreted in a multitude of ways, the overall division into separate spaces of black and white objects underscored the message that South African society was polarized firstly by race. Kept outside of historical sequence, objects of black South Africans were frozen in the viewer’s mind. At the same time, the reliance on ethnic subdivisions in the black section alone suggested further societal divisions that no amount of time or contact had broached. Viewed in relation to the so-called white nations of the world—those that were lumped together as one—the so-called black ethnicities were marked as even more different from the modern norm. Given this, the museum’s message appeared to be that, with infrequent exception, only white South Africans were capable of producing historicized, cultural products. These, the viewer was told, were highly prized and demanding of scrutiny. Added to this framework was an endless parade of temporary exhibitions that showcased either the rarities of collector’s Africana—such as stamps or bookplates—or the narrow interests of one social group. The latter included displays such as “Aspects of Jewish Life” (1969) and “Arts and Crafts of the Southern Transvaal Ndebele” (1973), whose presentation of segments of the museum’s collection reified the notion that ethnic groups had rigid boundaries. Though perhaps unintentional, the paradigm of analysis implied by the Africana Museum’s physical space and strengthened by its temporary exhibitions as well as

136 / Chapter Three

its explanatory descriptions provided one vision of South Africa, past and present. Only white people possessed history, while black Africans dwelt in timeless tradition, visitors were told. Moreover, viewers learned, South Africa intrinsically cleaved along racial lines, a process that was mimicked in the further subdivision of black South Africans. The lesson then was clear: while black Africans existed alongside whites in South Africa, their lack of history and continued tribalism prevented them from deserving full citizenship. Taking on the task of displaying—and explaining—the interplay between the West and the rest by way of anthropology, the Africana Museum fell in line with other modern museums worldwide. Indeed, museum theorist Tony Bennett argues that “it was arguably the employment of anthropology within the exhibitionary complex which proved most central to its [the museum’s] ideological functioning.” Bringing a Foucauldian analysis to bear on museums’ engagement with the Other—specifically through what he terms the “exhibitionary complex,” or the way in which display connects with power—Bennett describes how this process worked. The use of anthropology, he writes, played the crucial role of connecting the histories of Western nations and civilizations to those of other peoples, but only by separating the two in providing for an interrupted continuity in the order of peoples and races—one in which “primitive peoples” dropped out of history altogether in order to occupy a twilight zone between nature and culture.112

The result of such a process, Bennett explains, was “a temporally organized order of things and peoples” that was a totalizing one, metonymically encompassing all things and all peoples in their interactions through time. And an order which organized the implied public—the white citizenries of the imperialist powers—into a unity, representationally effacing divisions within the body politic in constructing a “we” conceived as the realization, and therefore just beneficiaries, of the processes of evolution and identified as a unity in opposition to the primitive otherness of conquered peoples.113

The polarization of black and white into history and tradition, in the Africana Museum and elsewhere, both illustrated and endorsed racial politics in the world at large. And, it was these very politics that, in fact, underlay the entire exhibitionary complex in the first place. Modern museums were,

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 137

by virtue of their modernity, reflections and endorsements of modern inequality. As John Mackenzie puts the same point, “the museum revealed its modernity through its organization of the pre-modern.”114 And, as always, like their fellow technologies of progress—spaces that include, not insignificantly, public libraries—museums were encharged with “the cultural governance of the populace.”115 While the Africana Museum was intent to educate all who entered its doors, adult and child alike, the vast majority of its educational energy—its cultural governance—was aimed at white children, especially since black South Africans were technically barred from the public library until the late 1970s.116 As a result, the museum’s message reached the very South Africans who would soon be empowered to mold society. And, as has already been noted, since white South African schoolchildren visited the Africana Museum regularly and in droves throughout the sixties and seventies, the gravity of the museum’s message is clear. Clearly proud of its service to education, the Africana Museum used its role as an inadvertent platform for what had become racialized knowledge. While it has since become common to assert, as Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine did in 1991, that “decisions about how cultures are presented reflect deeper judgments of power and authority,” the fact is worth restating.117 So too is it productive to remember, as museum theorists such as Nicholas Dirks, Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, Susan Crane, Flora Kaplan, and Tony Bennett all explain, that museums teach people how to be citizens.118 Under apartheid, the Africana Museum’s organization and ideological framework meant that the lesson it taught its students was one that explicitly—if inadvertently—supported the state. In this sense, the museum was evidence of Verne Harris’s astute pronouncement that “by their silences and their narratives of power, their constructions of experience, apartheid’s memory institutions legitimised apartheid rule.”119 Or, as Susan Sleeper-Smith puts the same point—in terms that, though not specifically about apartheid South Africa, might as well be—“museums functioned as powerful rhetorical devices that created dominant and often pathological allegiances to a cultural ideal.”120 Given the enormous number of school-age visitors the museum both courted and received, the implications of its message cannot be underestimated. For while it was not a classroom, what students were taught in the museum mattered nonetheless. Indeed, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds, “Long before average citizens read the historians who set the standards of the day for colleagues and students, they access history through celebrations, site and museum visits, movies, national holidays,

138 / Chapter Three

and primary school books.”121 Before—if ever—“average citizens” access academic history, they receive it from places of memorialization, places just like the Africana Museum.

Scholarship Just as public education allowed museum workers to feel themselves essential in the development of schoolchildren, these staff members increasingly produced scholarship aimed at spreading their love of Africana to other audiences. This outreach, curators believed, reflected favorably upon their institution and was, in fact, a central component of modern museum work. “The esteem in which the Museum is held,” Kennedy penned in 1953, “depends largely on the work done on special groups and on the publication, usually in the form of catalogues, of the results.”122 Inspired by this notion, museum personnel concerned themselves with writing and publishing scores of catalogues beginning with Pirie’s 1951 World’s Rarest Group of Stamps, which described the museum’s beloved Curle collection. Following this publication, Johannesburg pioneer and longtime benefactor Frank Connock endowed the museum with a publishing fund.123 The first publication of the Frank Connock Publications series was a catalogue of botanical and zoological pictures by Hendrick Claudius that were created during an expedition to Namaqualand in 1685.124 Following the success of that publication, 1953 saw the arrival of the second in the Frank Conock series: Africana enthusiast Major Tylden’s catalogue on the Armed Forces of South Africa.125 These descriptive catalogues met with immense success, eventually becoming a museum trademark. Under Smith’s tenure, the Africana Museum continued to publish catalogues and commentaries that fast became authoritative reference works for serious collectors. These included Some Africana Coloured Prints and the Originals from which They May Have Been Made: Catalogue of an Exhibition of Pictures from the Africana Museum Held in the Johannesburg Public Library 1–14 July 1963, Tokens Of Southern Africa: A Catalogue based on the Collection in the Africana Museum (ca. 1966), and Africana Curiosities (1973).126 Other books were published to accompany local celebrations, such as Johannesburg Firsts, coinciding with the city’s ninetieth birthday, and the Chronology of Johannesburg that arrived to mark the town’s following anniversary.127 Still other works grew out of talks given by library and museum staff, such as the edited collection Africana Byways that evolved from a series of lectures to the Institute of Adult Studies in Johannesburg.128 In addition, works written by former or current museum personnel added to the museum’s production.

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 139

Here Kennedy’s five-volume annotated index of Africana prints and pictures held in the museum and library collections was particularly important. The result of five years of contracted work, this impressive set details over six thousand pictures and prints and remains the only reference work for Africana pictures in both collections.129 Heralding the arrival of the work, Percy Baneshik entreated readers of his weekly newspaper column on Africana to overlook the pricey eighty Rand cost, remarking, “I can see it being casually displayed on many a handsome coffee table in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg as a status symbol.”130 Taken together, these tomes ensured that the Africana Museum retained the esteemed position of being the preeminent articulator and descriptor of Africana among its ever-growing peer set of Africana enthusiasts. Beyond the museum’s books, there was arguably no publication as beloved by Africana connoisseurs as Africana Notes and News, the museum’s quarterly journal, first published in 1943, mentioned earlier. The periodical was an outgrowth of the Friends of the Africana Museum, formed the same year. Like the museum itself, the group concerned itself with “the collection and preservation of objects illustrating the life and history of Southern Africa.”131 When the cohort (whose membership had swelled to 460 people in one year) saw the first issue of Notes and News published in December 1943, the journal contained laudatory remarks from local celebrities, suggesting that a willing public awaited its publication. Johannesburg Mayor Councillor Lionel Leveson celebrated the coming of such a journal. “I am confident,” Leveson penned, “that Africana Notes and News will succeed . . . in spreading and extending interest in and respect for the literature and relics of the founders, trekkers, settlers and pioneers, no matter to what race they may have belonged.”132 In his mind, the quarterly aimed to do no less than spread Gubbins’s progressive vision of a world beyond binaries. The Rt. Hon. N. J. de Wet, Officer Administering the Government, similarly demonstrated his alliance with the society’s mission in his epigraph to the journal, published alongside Levenson’s. But unlike his predecessor’s broad sense of Africana, de Wet offered a narrower vision. “I specifically trust,” he wrote, “that it [the journal] may lead to the unearthing of some more copies of those early Afrikaans books which have become so exceedingly rare.”133 Far from a mouthpiece for Gubbins’s ideological vision, de Wet foresaw a periodical that highlighted the existence of collectible rarities about but one segment of society. In his first editorial, Kennedy proffered his plan for the journal, revealing the exaltation of the mundane that guided the museum in these years: “Africana Notes and News will deal with the materials of South African

140 / Chapter Three

history rather than with the history itself.” Further defining its objective, Kennedy wrote, it will deal with the objects of historical significance in South Africa, rather than with the history of ideas and movements; it is intended for the Africana collector rather than the historian, although the historian, too, should find much to interest him.

In Kennedy’s mind, Africana was the vast assortment of objects that comprised the raw material of history to which collectors devoted themselves, as elucidated earlier. Divorced from debate, Kennedy suggested that objects contained no inherent bias. Not the engagement of controversy that Gubbins had anticipated, Kennedy’s vision of Africana was banal. Elsewhere, and conversely, Kennedy affirmed Gubbins’s notions: It is believed that the collection, preservation and intelligent display of Africana leads to a better understanding of the past history of our country and that from a true understanding of the past will grow tolerance and good-will in the future.134

Resting on the precarious idea that “intelligent display” could be free of partiality, Kennedy belied his museum’s wholehearted commitment to Gubbins’s ideals. Put more gently, in its premier edition of Notes and News, the museum again disclosed its ambiguous position with regard to its forbearer: while claiming an adherence to his ideals, inability to carry them out required what in retrospect appears to be compromise. Throughout the 1940s and beyond, Africana Notes and News served as a gauge for the museum’s ideological thrust. In thirty-some pages, the booklet provided its growing readership with editorials, book reviews, notes and queries, and specialty articles. Individual collections, such as those belonging to Killie Campbell and Sidney Mendelssohn, were described and celebrated.135 As the pursuit of Africana became more specialized, so did the journal’s entries. There were articles on classifying firearms, extant hunting prints, individual manuscripts, and historical relics from events such as the Grosvenor sinking. A preoccupation with dubbing something “Africana” threaded through the pages, indicating the society’s intense desire to prove the worth of both its endeavor and its home country. Rudyard Kipling’s writings were Africana, the journal argued, because he traveled to South Africa. Even the Bible could not escape claim, as its translation into African languages rendered it Africana as well.136 Similarly, the quarterly exhibited

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 141

a fixation with “historical firsts” that suggested the society’s need to prove that South Africa had a worthy history.137 Having become professedly for and about collectors and collections, Africana Notes and News focused increasingly on minutiae, especially after the 1960 crackdown of the apartheid state. Wittingly or not, it is from this time that the journal began to eschew topics even mildly political. From VOC glass and triangular stamps to Lobengula’s seals and the rise of so-called Africanderisms, Notes and News provided a forum for arcane ruminations on history’s raw materials. In sum, Africana Notes and News provided readers with detailed explorations of history’s desiderata divorced from any engagement with ideology. Ignoring the tumultuous world outside its covers, Notes and News concentrated solely on the joys of Africana collecting in what was increasingly a labor of love for museum workers. Unable or unwilling to comment on the outside world, the journal turned inward. Taking its place alongside the museum’s other scholarship, Notes and News was like everything else the museum did in these years—adept enough at its narrow task to garner acclaim for the museum without saying anything important to larger society. At the same time as the museum turned its back on the outside world, it continued broadening its reach, opening ever more specialized branch museums fragmented by Africana type. During the 1960s and 1970s, the museum opened four branch museums—dealing with transport, photography, rock art, and costume, respectively—in addition to taking over the Museum of Man and Science.138 Just as these endeavors served to widen rather than deepen the museum’s engagement with society, they also deflected attention from the larger questions facing the institution. Here again, the museum was able to dwell in the details. In all of these ways, the museum came, from 1935 to 1977, to both underscore and actualize the logic of racism and then apartheid, in some cases, like the realm of education, to ends that we can never fully gauge. While in its scholarship, its acquisition, and its display, the museum’s vacillation between risk aversion and an inability to enact its own liberal ideals made it difficult to describe the ends to which its work was put, in other instances the museum purposefully availed itself of the state—making the outcome of its endeavors far more transparent. And always, the museum’s engagement with the state took place under a banner of publicity.

In Search of the Limelight “Unless the aims and objects of a museum are known to the public,” Smith wrote in her annual report for 1966, “they will not make use of its resources,

142 / Chapter Three

visit, or make gifts to it.”139 Dependent upon an audience, museum staff members increasingly participated in regional cultural activities, publicizing their endeavors. For its part, the local Johannesburg press devoted considerable attention to the museum, regularly recording acquisitions and exhibitions. In addition to serving as a notice board for the museum’s calendar, Johannesburg newspapers often ran columns that evaluated Africana topics. For instance, a 1961 Star article ran under the headline “Bushmen Women, Too, Powdered Their Noses,” supporting this assertion with evidence from the Africana Museum.140 But perhaps the most notable column in this category would be Denis Godfrey’s “Collecting Africana,” which chronicled Africana acquisitions, trends, and news. In weekly installments in the Star from 1969 to 1975, Godfrey detailed such important events in the world of Africana collecting as the opening of a Sotheby office in Johannesburg and the issuance of Africana Museum’s publications, in addition to providing regular discussions of particular collections and artists.141 Taken together, these columns ensured that the Africana aficionado and the casual collector alike were well-informed of Africana events. Besides publicizing what it collected and what it displayed, this publicity focused upon the museum’s increasing participation in commemorations. Meant to augment pride and patriotism, civic celebrations underscored white South Africa’s self-image, making the Africana Museum’s involvement in them significant. Positioning itself as the national repository of Africana, the museum was often asked to participate in cultural events. When the quintessential tribute to apartheid—the Voortrekker Monument—was unveiled in 1949 Pretoria, the Africana Museum helped to create the opening exhibition, later moving it into its premises.142 In 1952, the museum mounted an exhibition of the world in 1652 to coincide with the tercentenary celebrations of Jan Van Riebeck’s landing at the Cape that year.143 Several years later, the museum helped celebrate Johannesburg’s seventieth birthday, this time in collaboration with the Johannesburg Publicity Association.144 Repeatedly, the museum assisted in the commemoration of a narrowly defined notion of South African history. At the same time, museum personnel were regularly asked to lecture on Africana topics. From 1962, the museum was also asked to assume the responsibilities of the Johannesburg Historic Sites Committee by determining locations of historical importance.145 Together, these activities portrayed and celebrated a single Johannesburg—cosmopolitan, sophisticated, permanent, and white. Far from its humble origins, they seemed to shout, Johannesburg had risen to become a mecca of culture.

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 143

For as much as the Africana Museum garnered local awareness, the museum was similarly a focus of national attention, primarily through the engine of the state-run South African Broadcasting Company (SABC). Museum records abound with references to radio programs given by staff members, important in a country that did not have television until 1976.146 Besides spreading its message on the state radio, Smith noted in 1960 that the Africana Museum participated in that year’s Union Festival, one of many recorded instances of the museum partaking in national celebrations.147 In addition to events aimed at South Africans generally, the Africana Museum also continued to be an active member of the Southern African Museums Association. Whether hosting meetings, presenting papers, or writing articles for its journal, museum staff maintained a high profile in this national professional forum.148 On a different level, the Africana Museum made itself available to state inspection on at least one instance, despite the fact that the museum was city-run and received no financing from the central government. Documenting this 1961 visit, Smith wrote that the “Director was closely questioned on the administration of the Museum, and the Committee seemed impressed with what was being done by the City Council of Johannesburg.”149 Smith’s records do not indicate to what extent she was honest about the museum’s mission, suggesting that she told the commission the truth: that though the museum professed a potentially radical goal, in practice it served to bolster the logic of apartheid. That the government commission did not call for the museum’s closure certainly suggests that it was pleased with what it witnessed. That the central apartheid government understood the Africana Museum’s message to be furthering its racist goals is further evident in its deliberate usage of the museum. In 1964, for example, Smith proudly noted that “information about the Africana Museum was given by the Director . . . to the Department of State Information . . . to be broadcast in the U.S.A.”150 Whether asked or compelled to be a part of apartheid era propaganda, the Africana Museum’s message certainly appealed to the central government’s ideologues. Clearly illustrating the immutable differences between white and black Africans, the Africana Museum explained the need for racial separation. A decade later, museum curator Louise de Wet confirmed that this process continued when she wrote that her Afrikaans radio broadcasts were simultaneously recorded in English for a targeted overseas audience.151 In a similar vein, when outsiders visited South Africa, the Africana Museum was a regular stop on their countrywide tour, often at the request of government agencies.152 In these instances and others like them, the degree to which the

144 / Chapter Three

apartheid state made use of the Africana Museum in its self-justification was revealed. Museum records yield no indication that participation in local, regional, and international cultural endeavors was anything but voluntary. While fear of government reprisal may have left museum authorities risk averse and while these same liberals may have thought that involvement in government activities need not necessarily equal state endorsement, the reality is that it did.153 Whether helping to decide what constituted history in Johannesburg or broadcasting evidence of white South Africans’ culture internally and abroad, the Africana Museum rendered itself valuable to the state. In addition, the museum’s reification of binary logic borne of its inability to enact Gubbins’s vision made it of further use to the racist state. In other words, the liberalism that both the museum and the library exuded differed from racist logic in degree rather than kind. Both calling for the separation of peoples into supposedly obvious, discreet groups, the line between the two rhetorical frameworks was slippery. That this outcome was not intentional merely suggests the inability of liberalism to overcome apartheid racism in any meaningful way. Reifying the racial binaries and the boastful white identity that formed the basic premises of apartheid through its display, its educational practices, its scholarship, and its participation in commemoration, by the time change was at hand for it, the liberal Africana Museum had come to bolster the cultural logic of apartheid.

Change Is at Hand “Next year in January when it is the centenary of your father’s birth,” museum curator de Wet wrote to Elizabeth Duncan Rose (née Gubbins) in June 1976, “the Africana Museum would like to mount an exhibition in his honour.”154 Beseeching Gubbins’s sole heir to lend any available personal items for this show, the Africana Museum promised a celebratory look at John Gaspard Gubbins’s life half a century after his untimely passing. That the hundred-year anniversary of her father’s birth was fast approaching had not failed to garner Elizabeth’s attention. In anticipation, she had recently invited Dr. Paul Butterfield, professor of education at the University of the Witwatersrand, to pen her father’s biography.155 Although never completed, the energy with which Butterfield embraced the story of Gubbins’s life was palpable to all around him. Enamored with the romance of Gubbins’s tale, Butterfield proposed a television documentary on him to the South African Broadcasting Company.156 Additionally, he convinced university authorities to purchase the thirty years’ worth of correspondences between Gubbins

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 145

and his sister that his research had exposed, this acquisition itself generating national news coverage.157 Butterfield’s enthusiasm was echoed in 1977 at both university and library-sponsored events to commemorate Gubbins’s life. In short, on the centenary of his birth, John Gaspard Gubbins’s forwardthinking legacy was receiving ample attention throughout South Africa. On 25 August 1977, the Star announced the opening of the University of the Witwatersrand commemoratory exhibition on Gubbins.158 To mark the occasion, the university asked Elizabeth Duncan Rose, Louise de Wet, Paul Butterfield, and Moira Farmer to honor Gubbins’s legacy. In her speech, Wits librarian Farmer attested that those who worked in the Gubbins Library at the University had stridently upheld Gubbins’s dream. “In the years since the death of Dr. Gubbins,” Farmer recounted, “we have endeavored to follow his high ideals and maintain the collection and add new material to it as he would have wished.”159 At the same time, an exhibition of objects collected by Gubbins personally filled the central foyer of the JPL, suggesting—in its array—that the founder’s wide conception of Africana lived on.160 Over forty years after his death, the institutions to which Gubbins devoted himself claimed to have stayed true to his vision. Ideals aside, in practice the Africana Museum looked like a far different place than Gubbins could have imagined when, in the late 1970s, change was afoot for it. Upon her retirement in 1975, Anna Smith was succeeded by curator Blanche Nagelgast. At the same time, after decades of pleading for a larger, permanent home, the museum had finally been offered a token—the dilapidated produce market in Newtown. This solution was meant to free the top floor of the public library to meet the needs of the increasing numbers of black South Africans who—with the repealing of petty apartheid laws and the effects of the Soweto riots on branch libraries—now flooded its doors. Though none could have known it then, with the eruption of the children’s uprising in 1976, South Africa was changing; it was the beginning of the end of apartheid. Blind to this, in its effort to take quick occupancy of the new premises, museum curators decided upon a temporary plan (documented in greater detail in the following chapter). Under the direction of Nagelgast, curators agreed that they would move all of the objects of black Africana—or ethnology—to the new space and leave objects of white Africana in place. And with this, the bifurcation between black and white and history and tradition that had come to characterize the space was complete. Smith’s retirement and the subsequent reordering of the library and museum also coincided with the completion of R. F. Kennedy’s most personal task—a history of the Africana Museum. Titled Treasures and Trash

146 / Chapter Three

and comprising several loose-leaf binders of hand-pasted and handwritten pages at the time it was finished, the book contains thirteen chapters, each of which addresses one aspect of the museum’s past—like Gubbins’s mission, Kennedy’s own tenure, and museum publications. With painstaking attention to detail, the book unpacks masses of museum and city documents to recreate how the institution had arrived at its current state. Heavily weighted with arcane biographical blurbs, the work would be slanderous if it was not so dated. At the same time, and conversely, the history’s reliance on minute details renders it somewhat dull. Rather than provide a coherent analysis of the museum, Treasures and Trash laboriously records the meandering bureaucratic avenues through which objects were collected, exhibitions mounted, and staff promoted. To date, Treasures and Trash had never been published.161 While Treasures and Trash refused to offer an articulated argument about the Africana Museum or culture in South Africa more generally, the work’s title revealed an embedded bifurcated judgment. In choosing an oppositional title, Kennedy displayed that by the late 1970s, he and the institution he did so much to mold had come to regard Africana as cleaving in two— those worthy pieces that were treasures, opposed by those objects deemed little more than trash. It was an either/or dyad, the likes of which Gubbins had founded the museum to counter. Moreover, it was a value-laden pronouncement that flew in the face of Gubbins’s decidedly judgment-free classification. Rather than simply amass the outpourings of all social groups regardless of inherent worth, Kennedy’s positional title suggested the hierarchization of cultural items that was by that time clearly evident in the museum itself. Drawing his history to a close, Kennedy turned his attention to the seemingly ever-present question of a permanent museum home. Since its very beginnings in 1935, he recalled, “the Advisory Committee made valiant efforts to persuade the City Council to provide a site and erect a building worthy of the collections,” noting, with sadness, “but something always went wrong.” Until, that is, they were offered the old market on the eve of Smith’s retirement just over four decades later. “Plans have been drawn for the conversion,” “money has been voted and work has been started,” Kennedy tallied, optimistically declaring that “surely nothing can now go wrong.” Nearly a half-century after its founder secured what was meant to be temporary quarters for the collection, the Africana Museum was finally poised to receive its own home. As the country outside its doors erupted in flames, as its collection was polarized into treasures and trash and old and

Becoming “Treasures and Trash” / 147

new in a final reification of binary thought, Kennedy concluded: “The future looks bright.” “The Gubbins ideal will live on.”162

Conclusion The story of this museum’s transformation from a place driven by threedimensional ideals in 1935 to one that endorsed binary logic in 1977 represents white South African fears and fantasies in the years surrounding the birth and intensification of the apartheid state. The incessant preoccupation with civility, permanency, and cultural significance laced throughout this narrative exposes deep-seated liberal anxieties about legitimacy. Indeed, this disquiet seemed only to heighten as the world outside became increasingly divided into binaries—black and white—and as the polarized nationalist movements of Afrikaners and Africans rendered the middle ground of South Africanism and of liberalism obsolete. Faced with their own seeming futility, the liberal South Africanists at the heart of this tale retreated behind a wall of administration, wholeheartedly embracing the mundane in order to avoid tackling the profound. Turning inward, the museum focused on expansion and scholarship into ever more arcane avenues of Africana, becoming—far from the space of social change once envisioned by Gubbins—a place that came to, in Calin Dan and Josif Kiraly’s words, “embody the mystique of boredom” so often ascribed to modern archives.163 At the same time, and conversely, the museum increasingly came in these years to avail itself of the state, despite the supposed contradiction between it and the government’s missions. This confluence provides a lens onto how apartheid functioned at the level of culture by demonstrating the hegemony of the dogma, here manifest through the ideological usage of an institution that was, at its base, counter to its logic. Not only does this speak to the limitations of any form of classification—as Foucault reminds us—but it better helps us understand the creation and power of the Foucauldian archive of apartheid South Africa—“the law of what can be said.”164 What was said and what it was possible to say in colonial and then apartheid South Africa, in other words, both determined what the Africana Museum would look like and to what ends it would be put. In delineating the limits of liberalism to counter racism within this archive, this story thus raises the question of the limitations of any classificatory system, of any collection. For, as Jean Baudrillard reminds us in his masterful inquiry into collecting, all collections—and the contents of the Africana Museum being no different—originate in closed systems. Here that

148 / Chapter Three

system was the world of John Gaspard Gubbins’s imagination—a world he hoped could be understood in three-dimensional terms. Yet, what that meant in practice was never clear. As well-intentioned, but misguided museum workers took on the task of giving substance to the ether of Gubbins’s vision, as the collection entered the real world, as it was, it faltered, ultimately producing a product that jarred with its goal. And while the uncertainty that attended three-dimensionality was arguably due to the impracticality of Gubbins’s vision, it also rested upon the very nature of moving the collection from one man’s farm into the heart of a modern city. “It remains characteristic of the collection,” Baudrillard explains, “that there comes a point when the self-absorption of the system is interrupted and the collection is enrolled within some external project or exigency (whether associated with prestige, culture or commerce makes no odds . . . ).” However certain this transition is, Baudrillard explains, with it the collection “is condemned to failure.” For in “transposing its open, objective discontinuity” of the world outside “into a closed, subjective discontinuity” of the world of the collection, “the idiom he [the collector] invents forfeits all value for others.” The circumscribed world of the collection—in other words, the internal logic that gave it its meaning—will always be paralyzed once opened up to the incoherent world of outside. “Indeed we are bound to ask,” Baudrillard summarizes, “can objects ever institute themselves as a viable language? Can they ever be fashioned into a discourse oriented otherwise than toward oneself?”165 As the centenary of Gubbins’s birth came and passed in 1977, as the country entered into what would be its most violent era yet, the museum split itself physically and ideologically in an attempt to retain relevance in a quickly shifting landscape, training its focus—as always—against Baudrillard’s query. Driven, as always, by the belief that Africana can and should affect what was known and what was knowable, the museum continued to believe in its bright future. Turning to the museum’s era of bifurcation and then ultimate reunification under a new name, the possibility for cultural objects to both reflect and affect social change would remain central to museum workers’ concerns.

four

“Determined to Be Relevant”: The Museum Reimagined, 1977–1994

On 9 March 1993, a year before South Africa’s first democratic election, Elizabeth Duncan Rose—John Gaspard Gubbins’s sole heir—succeeded in restoring her father’s name to the library he helped build at the University of the Witwatersrand. No longer would it be known as simply the Africana Li­ brary, the name it had assumed upon incorporating the Africana bequest of J. C. M. Humphrey.1 Using newspaper cuttings from the 1930s to convince university officials of the important role her father played in the creation of the library, Mrs. Duncan Rose compelled the university to reexamine its understanding of the past. Bowing to pressure to honor properly Gubbins’s legacy—perhaps in an effort to secure the remainder of his Africana—the collection within the William Cullen Library was rechristened the John G. Gubbins Africana Library.2 At the same time, Gubbins’s other brainchild—the Africana Museum— was similarly, if less obviously, trained on its founder in the early 1990s. While the museum worked to reinvent itself as MuseumAfrica in time for the emerging country, curators reflected on their institution’s origins. In an article titled “From Mausoleum to Museum: Revisiting Public History in the Inauguration of MuseumAfrica, Newtown,” for instance, curator Deon van Tonder provided what was then considered to be the official line on Gub­ bins and his role in founding the museum. Cast as “a collector of old books and manuscripts [and] objects such as pictures, prints, coins and medals” who “had only a peripheral interest in indigenous African artifacts and cul­ ture,” a simplistic Gubbins emerged. While there was some suggestion of complexity in Gubbins’s legacy when van Tonder wrote that in its original incarnation, “displays were mainly of interest to whites, despite the fact that the Museum acquired material relating to the culture of indigenous societies

150 / Chapter Four

from the late 1930s onwards,” on the whole his portrayal was of a colonial­ ist whose collection was intended to support racism.3 Unsurprisingly, in an interview with the author, van Tonder readily admitted that he did not “actually know that much about Gubbins” and that he viewed his reference to Gubbins as little more than a “small component” of his argument.4 No slight on van Tonder, this statement reflects the shallow pool of knowl­ edge about Gubbins—and about the provenance of his institution—that the museum and Johannesburg more generally had access to at the end of the apartheid era. In this chapter, I am concerned specifically with the museum during the final act of apartheid, from 1977 to 1994, and the ways in which the museum sought to position and understand itself in time and space. “De­ termined,” in the words of its marketing strategist, “to be relevant” to a changing landscape, these seventeen years were nothing if not tumultuous for the institution. During the bulk of this period, from 1977 to 1988, not only was the museum’s collection divided between two spaces, but the mu­ seum’s leadership was also increasingly separated into opposing camps. While the so-called old guard of the museum remained in the public library after acquiring the Market in 1976, a younger, upbeat staff took occupation of the new building. Once the entrance was completed in 1979, this venue opened under the name Africana Museum in Progress, or AMIP. Character­ ized by creative energy and novel ideas, AMIP barely interacted with its library-based other half, a distancing that resulted in skepticism and hostil­ ity from the library-centered leadership. Acrimony aside, the main actors at AMIP persevered in creating a museum that reflected a changing South Africa. Without immediate funding to transform the entire building, the Africana Museum in Progress stayed—quite literally—in progress for a full decade until an influx of funds signaled that the time for the museum’s reunification had arrived. From 1988—when the Africana Museum in Progress was razed—to its 1994 reopening as a unified MuseumAfrica in the Market venue, the bulk of the Africana Museum was closed to the public. Behind doors, curators, ethnologists, and historians participated in prolonged meetings about the museum’s future. They thought and wrote and argued. Marketing consul­ tants were brought in. Academics from the University of the Witwatersrand were approached. Questions were voiced concerning the ideal cultural his­ tory museum at the end of the twentieth century, target audiences, and ideo­ logical messages. Progressive political theories of the day, specifically those of the African National Congress, were heeded. The museum staff—a group of predominantly white South Africans—struggled to determine a way to

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 151

convey a story beyond the triumph of white over black. The task was over­ whelming, the stakes high. If the museum could not successfully reimagine itself, it stood little chance in the new South Africa, whatever that was going to be. In this chapter, I assert that the museum’s protracted, fraught period of polarization and regeneration offers unique insight into the theoretical problems manifest in late apartheid South Africa. By telling the story of the in-depth struggle to reimagine the Africana Museum for the new South Africa, I tease out years of debate, highlighting crucial sticking points as illustrations of contemporaneous problems. I then couch the museum’s discourse among that of the Southern African Museums Association, the African National Congress, the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) His­ tory Workshop, and others bodies involved in national reinvention. In so doing, I posit the museum as metonymic for South Africa during what were arguably the country’s most dramatic years.

Building the African Museum in Progress (AMIP) Hillary Bruce recalled that it was in the late 1970s when the museum was under the short-lived directorship of Louise de Wet (1975–1980) that she first learned of the plan to move to the Market premise on Bree Street. “I was charging out somewhere,” Bruce remembered, when de Wet asked her if she, as museum ethnologist, could take occupation quickly of the Market. Wary of losing the premise to other bidders—including those who wanted to turn the building into a parking garage or homeless hostel—de Wet sought reas­ surance from Bruce. In her capacity as museum ethnologist, Bruce replied that, yes, she could fast make use of the Market, thus sealing the muse­ um’s fate. “So [the new venue] had been my project,” from the very start, Bruce explained. “And Mrs. Nagelgast,” when she took over from de Wet in 1980, thus, “left the running of the new museum to me and she did the old one. And so we divided it between us.”5 By the time Blanche Nagelgast—or Mrs. N as she was known—took control of the museum in 1980 from Lou­ ise de Wet, the institution’s bifurcation had been set in motion. E. Blanche Nagelgast is an interesting figure who defies easy classifica­ tion. Entering the Johannesburg Public Library in 1962 as a cataloguer, she became a librarian in 1975. The following year, she joined the staff of the Africana Museum, filling the role of chief curator from 1980 until her 1993 retirement. Reared alongside Lucy Kennedy Rallis in the Kennedy house­ hold, Mrs. N was both ideologically and personally aligned with the senior Kennedy, whom she depended upon for professional advice well beyond

152 / Chapter Four

his official tenure at the library.6 Herself simply a trained librarian like both Kennedys, Mrs. N approached Africana as her forbearers had, elevating white objects—particularly books—above all other forms of material culture. And yet, Mrs. N does not fully fit the mold of her predecessors. Speaking with her in 2003, her progressive political leanings were readily apparent. Indeed, this is exactly how her coworkers perceived her—as a forward-looking lib­ eral. It is for this very reason that her unwillingness to embrace the changes brought about by the acquisition of the new building was met with such surprise by fellow museum workers. Between the opening of AMIP and its razing ten years later, the staff of the Africana Museum was increasingly polarized between the old guard (personified by Mrs. N) and the new guard (based mostly at AMIP), causing Hillary Bruce to characterize this period as “very strange.” While it was not clear to her—the second in command to Mrs. N—exactly “what she disap­ proved of” in the new space, Mrs. N removed herself from this aspect of the museum’s work, holing herself up in the library as long as possible. “She’d always said that the new building was my project,” Bruce remarked, “and it was.” As a result, Bruce recalled, Mrs. N “said she would never move into that new building. And she didn’t.”7 Opting for early retirement in lieu of leaving the flagship Africana Museum in the Johannesburg Public Library in 1993, Mrs. N never embraced the changes that the new space epitomized. Interviews with museum employees revealed an inability to understand Mrs. N’s motives during this time period. Yet, in light of the analysis found in the previous chapter, Mrs. N’s stance seems straightforward: Rather than align herself with an uncertain future, Mrs. N chose to hold down the fort as the last supporter of a particular, Kennedy-inspired school of thought. As has been described, this mindset was notable both for its liberalism and for its ability to support inadvertently racism. It was a viewpoint that be­ lieved—in equal measure—in uplifting the natives and in the obvious supe­ riority of high, white, material culture. This was the mindset that celebrated the minutiae of Africana, delighting in the intricacies of postage stamps, tokens, and paintings. This was the world of Africana a la R. F. Kennedy, and it was one that Mrs. N was slow to forsake. Delegating control of the new space to her second in command, Hillary Bruce, Mrs. N kept her attention on the old Africana Museum in the public library, glancing only haltingly and skeptically in the direction of Bree Street. “When they gave us the old Newtown Market,” Mrs. N quipped, “it was right in the middle of nowhere. It was dilapidated and not very pleasant.”8 Similarly voicing her distaste of Newtown, Louise de Wet called the region “a ghastly area.”9 Members of the museum’s Geological Advisory Commit­

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 153

4.  Market building just after completion, view from southeast, September 9, 1913.

tee echoed these sentiments when they heartily opposed the move on the grounds that “access for the ordinary public to Newtown at present time is very poor” and only possible by a walk from downtown that they de­ scribed as “drab, lengthy and indeed dangerous.”10 Despite these and other condemnations, the JPL’s persistent pleas for more space as well as the mu­ seum’s own long-term demands for a new home meant that, in de Wet’s memory, “the decision [to move there] was forced upon us” by the city council.11 While Mrs. N remained in the JPL, museum workers—led by now deputy curator Hillary Bruce—set about the daunting task of turning an old, decaying market into a functioning museum. Immediate, logistical impediments to change were overwhelming. Erected more than a half century earlier as a produce market, the Market bore architectural signs of its initial design. These included floors that were slanted for easy hose-down and massive windows that ensured adequate ventilation, neither of which were appropriate for a modern cultural his­ tory museum. In addition, the building was itself in an advanced state of

154 / Chapter Four

disrepair. Thus, it demanded basic electrical work, window repairs, and the replacement of plumbing. Turning the Market into a museum also ne­ cessitated such disparate tasks as the erection of pigeon barriers and the employment of security guards. Complicating matters was the dual real­ ity—articulated here in a management committee report—that “because of the limited funds available and the small number of staff in the Museum, work on this vast project is very slow.”12 In the end, all of these factors led Bruce to characterize the task at hand as nothing less than “a nightmare.”13 Yet, despite these and other obstacles, museum workers succeeded in refurbishing the entrance display area and mezzanine between 1977 and 1979. Starting in 1979, these sections were open to the public, allowing curious onlookers to watch the museum’s progression. From 1981, the east wing, meant to house temporary displays, was also opened.14 Internal mu­ seum records indicate that the initial plan upon opening was as follows: To enable the public to be admitted to see a condensed version of what the museum will be, complete with plans, pictures and artifacts. Visitors will also be given access to the mezzanine balcony from which the work in progress may be watched.15

Providing visitors with a microcosm of what the museum would suppos­ edly become, the Africana Museum in Progress purported to foreshadow the museum’s future, a path clearly dictated by the predominance of black cultural objects. Evident both in the management by former museum ethnologist Hillary Bruce and in the decision to house the ethnographic collection there, AMIP was immediately understood to be the home of nonwhite cultural objects. This image was only strengthened when the Africana Museum formally acquired the Museum of Man and Science in Africa.16 This archeologicalanthropological collection concerned itself with the scientific origins of humankind. Its incorporation meant—in the words of Mrs. N’s report to the museum’s advisory committee—that “for the first time the Africana Museum’s displays will reflect the prehistoric, as well as the historic peoples of the sub-continent.”17 Expanding the temporal reach of the museum, this acquisition further broadened the museum’s scope. Once absorbed by the Africana Museum, the collection was slated for transfer to AMIP. While the massive size of this collection no doubt influenced the museum’s decision to move it to AMIP, the inclusion of the Museum of Man in AMIP also sug­ gested a correlation between prehistory and black South African peoples,

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 155

further reifying the polarization of history and culture evident in the distinc­ tion of AMIP from the Africana Museum proper. Guided by the directive to showcase black culture, AMIP slowly assem­ bled a range of exhibitions. “With regard to the historic peoples of Southern Africa,” Mrs. N reported to the advisory committee, “the theme of the tem­ porary display is the interaction of man with his environment: the influ­ ence of the latter upon basic aspects of culture in the case of the Bushmen (San), Khoikhoi (Hottentots) and Bantu-speaking Negroes.” To this end, curved screens and display cases showcasing Hottentot and Bantu life were erected. Here, objects of cultural significance, such as headrests and fur­ nishings, complimented illustrations of homestead construction and eco­ nomic subsistence to yield a holistic view of several categories of indigenous life. Additionally, large dioramas of Bushmen and witchdoctors—replete with realistic-looking life casts—adorned the walls. Behind these, visitors encountered a full-size Ndebele homestead comprised of four life-sized huts. Based on the plans of Peter Rich from the Architecture Department at the University of the Witwatersrand who—it was reported—“measured and photographed the homestead in the Loskop Dam area at the end of 1977,” the huts were only “slightly compressed to fit into the Market.”18 The combination of true artifacts and recreated cultural objects set a precedent for the museum and gave the venue an outward aura of authenticity and, hence, authority. Importantly, the curators most responsible for AMIP—namely Hillary Bruce and the newly hired Ann Wanless—made use of the most up-to-date information on indigenous peoples in constructing their displays. This level of supposed accuracy was attained in part through dialogue with members of the academy, particularly anthropologists.19 Out of consultation with other experts, AMIP curators mounted exhibitions that verified what was then considered to be the most accurate ethnographic information avail­ able. Central to this conception was the notion that black history was un­ derstandable merely as two unproblematized periods: timeless tradition and corruption by modernity. Speaking of their new displays, museum members proudly endorsed this notion. Reflecting on the Ndebele home­ stead, Mrs. N explained that they had included both kinds of houses, round traditional homes and “Westernised, iron-roofed types” that were far more common in the late 1970s.20 Elsewhere, Mrs. N documented that among those exhibits still to be erected was one “on traditional and modern cloth­ ing of the Black peoples.”21 In the same vein, Ann Wanless described one exhibit to a New York–based tour company, writing that “the showcases

156 / Chapter Four

contain displays depicting various aspects of traditional tribal lifestyles which are fast disappearing.”22 In these descriptions, curators made known their faith that black peoples did not dwell in history in the same sense that white peoples did. Another contemporaneous notion concerning indigenous peoples that was illustrated in AMIP was the idea that all blacks were divisible into dis­ creet, hermetically sealed tribal units. When the acquisition of the Museum of Man necessitated a reorganization of storage units, for instance, Mrs. N reported, “the principle of storing like specimens together has been main­ tained but within these large groupings items are now to be stored in nu­ merical order by tribe.” “This will assist us enormously,” Mrs. N continued, “in finding material for display in the tribal setting at the Market.” Divid­ ing groupings such as “headrests” into subcategories like “headrests—Zulu” and “headrests—Xhosa” was seen as a rationalizing move aimed at mak­ ing tribal displays easier that was devoid of ideological ramifications. In the same report, Mrs. N noted the erection of a new display “on physical anthropology showing facial types of Africa.”23 Borne of the same colonial scientific inquiry that had yielded such a dubious field of study as eugenics, this display of “facial types” virtually endorsed the notion of separate and inherently different types of humans. In line with the other exhibits men­ tioned—though to a greater extent—the display of phenotypes supported the then-decaying idea of apartheid. Once more, the ironic similarity be­ tween progressive, liberal “knowledge” and contemporary racism was ren­ dered apparent. And again, museum curators were unaware that their new creations were anything but benignly accurate. As in the insistent separation of tradition and modernity, the overreliance on tribes as analytic categories signaled the extent to which those curators running AMIP were products of their time and place. And here again, the distance between South African anthropological thought and Western social-cultural anthropologists then focused on culture as being embedded in larger power dynamics is made apparent.

Running AMIP Although Mrs. N’s name appeared on all internal museum reports, she re­ mained distant from the daily workings of AMIP. Left to Hillary Bruce and her cohort—notably Ann Wanless—the creation of AMIP followed a some­ what capricious path. In part, this spontaneity owed itself to the fact that, besides Bruce, all other AMIP workers received their training on the job. For instance, when she joined AMIP in 1980 as museum ethnologist, Wanless

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 157

humorously reflected, “I was sort of totally unqualified for the job.”24 With a degree in English and speech and drama, a library diploma, and minimal museum experience, Wanless felt herself unprepared for the task of building a cultural history museum. Similarly, curator Diana Wall recalled that when she started at AMIP in 1986, she came with the “weird” educational back­ ground of an honors undergraduate degree in botany and zoology, as well as a library diploma. Yet, “traditionally,” Wall explained, “the museum had taken on board librarians because of the storing and recording and whatnot aspect of the museum work. So they figured that those kinds of skills were transferable to museum, documentation, storage, and all the rest.”25 Ever since Kennedy had secured the close cooperation of museum and library in the 1940s, museum workers had been culled from librarians, as previously documented. Thus, it is unsurprising that the staff of AMIP would follow the same trend. In addition, the lack of a refined field of museologists in South Africa severely limited the available pool of curatorial candidates. While AMIP curators may have come to their new jobs somewhat un­ prepared, they were quick to educate themselves.26 Enamored with her job, Ann Wanless, for instance, enrolled in the University of South Africa to study anthropology and joined the Southern African Museums’ Association (SAMA), the leading regional forum for museum work. By June of 1981, Wanless was feeling sufficiently confident in her knowledge of her subject matter to speak on it. That month, she lectured at the South African Insti­ tute of Race Relations on “The Cultural Importance of Beadwork Among the Southern Transvaal Ndebele” as part of a larger program describing the creation of AMIP. At the 1986 meeting of SAMA, Wanless participated in a discussion on “ethnicity in displays.”27 The following year, she addressed the anthropology section of SAMA on the topic of “Preservation of Our Cultural Heritage and the Problems of the Jaques Collection” of African headrests.28 By 1989—and AMIP’s dénouement—Wanless was engaged in a self-directed inquiry into the history and nature of Alexandra Township, proving that, while she was may have begun at AMIP without training, she quickly embraced the challenges and possibilities that emerged from this cultural history museum.29 Self-education awakened AMIP curators to the potential import of muse­ ums. As a result, the curators began both to question and to distance them­ selves from the ways in which the museum had functioned in the past. Unlike the old guard of the museum, who continued to be shackled by risk aversion and timidity toward the governing city council, the new guard saw itself and its relationship to the city much differently. Thus, a new era marked by a self-conscious understanding of the importance of museums

158 / Chapter Four

to society—not evident since Gubbins’s time—was initiated. Whether from youthful passion, distance from the library, or the times, the energetic de­ termination to make AMIP relevant to contemporary Johannesburg society distinguished it from its library-based flagship. Spurred onward by ideals rather than protocol, AMIP curators thus grasped whatever opportunities presented themselves, regardless of precedent or procedure. “We were just opportunists,” Ann Wanless mused: “Whenever we spied an opportunity or met somebody who had the expertise we would make a plan and get them in.” Beyond relying simply on the knowledge of academ­ ics and fellow curators, AMIP staff turned to ordinary black South Africans to help them illustrate tribal cultures. Here, the museum’s setting was im­ portant. Located between the Oriental Plaza and the Bree Street Taxi Rank, thousands of people walked by its doors daily. It was not uncommon in those days for curious passersby to drop in to the free museum to see what was materializing. People used to wander by, Wanless recalled, and we used to grab them and take photographs. There were often women in traditional clothes and things like that . . . It was actually wonderful. There was all this sort of sense of recognition and a kind of pride that there had been that recognition.30

Keenly interested in ordinary folks’ response to the displays, AMIP staff of­ ten asked visitors for guidance. “In the ’80s,” Hillary Bruce similarly remem­ bered, blacks would come in off the street and see ethnology going up on display and want to give is advice about it. So we used to sit down with them and they’d say look you’ve got the wrong beads there. I’m a sangoma, I’ll get you the right beads. They’d go along and come back with baskets and things. It was lovely, we loved that sort of contact with people on the street.31

Suggestive of the racist beliefs that all black Africans were schooled in tribal customs and that all customs remained unchanged, this process referenced the extent to which South African ethnologists refused to see cultural objects as being implicated in larger social and political matrixes of power. Never­ theless, this type of activity broadened the pool of knowledge from which curators drew. Desperate for accurate knowledge about black cultures that would help entice ordinary South Africans to visit the museum, curators also turned to

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 159

their own staff for help. One carpenter’s assistant, Livingstone Mzwakhe, came “from a rural background and is Mpondo,” making him well suited to construct an Mpondo hut for AMIP, museum curators noted.32 Another carpenter’s assistant, Dyson Baloyi, was a Shangaan, immediately making him the obvious choice for erecting a Shangaan hut. To give his hut the authenticity that curators craved, Baloyi imported cow dung and created drums out of leather and tin, illustrating their use with photographs he had taken at his village home in the Phalaborwa district.33 To these he added a rattrap of wood and wire, a sling of leather, and a small bow and arrow.34 Over time, Baloyi proved so useful to the museum that he was promoted to the rank of assistant, in which capacity, it was thought, his “enthusiasm and initiative” would benefit the museum, “especially with Black visitors.”35 Making full use of his knowledge of multiple African languages, AMIP cura­ tors taught Baloyi to lead indigenous-language tours. “Anybody and every­ body who worked [at AMIP] got drawn into whatever program was there,” Wanless summarized: So our cleaners and attendants—you know—whoever—and they all loved it. We just had this fantastic kind of team spirit and real sense of purpose. Every­ body who worked there had a sense that they were contributing to something important and that they were useful.

Harnessing the knowledge of all AMIP workers in a decidedly democratic way, curators sought to erect a lively, temporary display that quickly as­ serted their right over the Market while inviting ordinary South Africans to visit it. “It was not so easy,” Wanless cheerfully concluded, “but it was fantastic fun. It really was.”36 Besides utilizing the knowledge of passersby and museum staff, AMIP curators sought to engage larger society through interactive educational pro­ grams. These included lectures where members of the public were invited to listen to curators and outside guests speak on a range of topics relating to black cultures.37 Cognizant of the fact that the topic of black culture was inherently controversial in late apartheid South Africa and taking advantage of its newfound authoritative role, the museum created an environment where interested people could tackle the question of culture and the larger issues it exposed. Yet, these forums were not without lightheartedness. Of­ ten accompanying talks was the beer of one Mrs. Nkosi, a Swazi woman who initially attempted to sell pots to the museum and who later helped to build its Swazi hut. Having discovered Mrs. Nkosi’s acumen as a brewer, the

160 / Chapter Four

museum provided her with the materials necessary for brewing each time she came to Johannesburg, later serving her beer in clay pots to the diverse range of South Africans who had come to attend talks, such as one in 1982 on “The Importance of Traditional Beer-Making in the Lives of the BantuSpeaking Tribes of South Africa.”38 Educational and enjoyable at once, beer brewing served to further entice interested adults to make use of AMIP. While lectures and brewing undoubtedly attracted an older population, AMIP continued the museum’s long-held tradition of youth education. Through frequent prearranged tours for school groups, secondary and col­ lege teachers, and guests of the Department of National Education, AMIP curators aimed to reach a wide audience of learners.39 In their school tours, AMIP curators continued to lecture on such traditional Africana topics as “early Johannesburg,” “1820 settlers,” “gold rush,” and “fashion fun.”40 Yet, in addition to these, curators now introduced lectures on such subjects as “African tribes,” “Bantu Arts and Crafts,” and “Art of the Bushmen.”41 In fact, those subject matters relating to black culture became increasingly popular, leading AMIP to foreground them during, for example, the Five Roses Festival in 1983. Organized by the Market Theatre as a drama festi­ val meant to rival the annual Grahamstown cultural event, AMIP—as the theater’s neighbor—was entreated to run a program for top standard nine and ten pupils culled from a variety of black and white schools. Here, the museum offered activities on weaving, ostrich eggshell painting, bead mak­ ing, and clay pot creation.42 In fact, black cultural activities such as these were so popular that they also became a mainstay of the museum’s annual school holiday programs. Aimed at providing vacationing students with an educational outlet, AMIP continued the museum’s time-tested tradition of holding programs for schoolchildren over school recesses. Given the nature of late apartheid Johannesburg—wherein black cultures were slowly being embraced by the population at large—as well as the paucity of school-sanctioned education on black cultures—for all learners—AMIP’s progressive programs gained wide support. Describing the holiday program from the winter of 1987, for example, one museum document noted that “the programme’s aim was to introduce the Johannesburg schoolchild to the music, art and traditions of the black people of South Africa.” Boasting that all enjoyed it “immensely,” this document attested that “each aspect of the course opened their eyes to something new and exciting.”43 Revealing the sad fact that, in apartheid South Africa, knowledge of the majority of the population was so limited, this and other programs like it nevertheless served to enlighten portions of the population just as it broke down—however temporarily—the strict

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 161

5.  Workshop on traditional South African pottery during school festival, Africana Museum in Progress, 1983.

boundaries of apartheid. Importantly, lessons like these were by no means restricted to white learners. Indeed, in AMIP, students and adults of all racial backgrounds were “introduced” to cultural heritages in an enclosed, circum­ scribed environment. Again, while the venue may have been constructed, the fact that black cultures were at last receiving attention in a city-funded museum had profound implications. “An enormous amount of publicity was received in the press for the Africana Museum’s school holiday pro­ gramme,” Mrs. N reported in 1989.44 Abundant press and high participation numbers suggested the broad reach of the museum’s attempts to educate South Africans on black culture. Reflecting on AMIP, Ann Wanless—who after leaving the museum in 1994 attained a PhD in anthropology from Wits—clearly articulated the museum’s strengths and weaknesses.45 She noted that its capricious start meant that curators had little more than a “sort of general plan” to docu­ ment individual tribal cultures—almost arbitrarily—through the display of

162 / Chapter Four

6.  Boipelo Primary School visits the Africana Museum in Progress, June 1984.

houses. “It was that classificatory thing where architecture helps to establish the classification of a group,” Wanless said of the rationale. “And then you would classify the different kinds of architecture . . . [as] beehive, cone, cylinder, rectangular,” and others. From this, she elaborated, “we were try­ ing to represent all the different kinds of architecture from what we thought were the most traditional through transitional phases.” Clearly based on contemporaneous ethnology—that stressed the existence of highly differ­ entiated tribes and that linked modes of architecture to stages of develop­ ment—AMIP was largely a product of its time and place. Unashamedly admitting that AMIP “was in the old-fashioned mold,” Wanless nonethe­ less stressed the fact that “it was living and it was vibrant and there was a lot going on,” making the vibe of the space “really great.”46 Speaking of AMIP, Hillary Bruce concurred. “We felt that at last we’ve got a building in New­ town where blacks used to come off the street,” she stated, heartily noting that the museum’s engagement with larger society “was super.”47 Despite its intellectual shortcomings, AMIP had finally rendered at least one portion of the museum relevant to larger society, in no small part because of its atten­ tion to the majority’s experiences.

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 163

While AMIP was increasingly focused on black culture, it was never able to devote itself fully to this domain of Africana, in part because it continued to be governed by the Africana Museum proper. This meant that amid the tribal homes and beer brewing, AMIP ran incongruous programs on Euro­ pean musical instruments and lace making. Entreating visitors to try their hands at playing finger pianos and xylophones and providing a home for weekly two-hour demonstrations by the Johannesburg Lace Making Guild, AMIP acknowledged the wider domain of traditional Africana.48 Besides re­ vealing a lack of cohesion, programs like these suggested the very blurriness that obscured the full polarization of culture between AMIP and its librarybased leadership. AMIP was never entirely about black cultures, though its leadership increasingly steered it this way. At the same time, much as the Africana Museum remained rooted in the past, it too did not present racially exclusive material. Turning our attention now to the Africana Museum, I explore the ways in which this flagship branch of the museum attempted to remain relevant from 1977 to 1988, a period during which it was increas­ ingly eclipsed by its progressive offshoot.

The Africana Museum, 1977–1988 Whereas AMIP increasingly engaged in activities that could be categorized as progressive, the old Africana Museum continued to launch traditional Africana programs throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. Unsurprisingly, these perpetuated the museum’s image as an old-fashioned, dull institu­ tion. However, like its younger counterpart, the Africana Museum was un­ able to exist in a vacuum. Forced by larger social circumstances to recognize that change—in the museum and in society more generally—was coming one way or another, the Africana Museum found itself haltingly making adjustments. The haphazard manner in which the institution dealt with alterations suggests both its uncertainty and the lack of a clear-cut division between the museum’s halves. While AMIP was undertaking innovative work, the Africana Museum maintained its status quo operations. One museum report noted, for ex­ ample, that at the same time that Ann Wanless spoke on preserving cultural heritage at SAMA, Mrs. N attended the launch of a classic Africana book The Strubens and Gold.49 Another report recorded that, while Wanless was speak­ ing on “ethnicity in displays,” Mrs. N was talking on the founding of Johan­ nesburg.50 Both of these instances support the contention that one part of the museum was focused on the future while the other remained mired in the past. Other museum records confirm Mrs. N’s continued participation

164 / Chapter Four

in classic Africana events. From attending the annual luncheon of the Rand Pioneers Club and cocktail parties with antique dealers to entertaining members of the Transvaal Numismatic Society, Mrs. N upheld the Africana Museum’s hard-earned image as a patron of classical Africana.51 The museum’s temporary exhibitions—held in the main foyer of the public library—similarly revealed continuity in museum practice. From standard Africana exhibits like those on the “Centenary of the Anglo Zulu War” and Thomas Baines’s “Bird Paintings” to examinations of local life evident in shows such as Physiotherapy Makes the Disabled Able, The South African Red Cross, and Grandma’s Kitchen, to whimsical shows such as Fashion Plates, the museum’s eclectic, all-encompassing domain was reinforced.52 As a result, members of the public and government officials continued to view the museum as a supporter of the ethos—if not the politics—of apartheid.53 Yet, added to these types of exhibitions were an increasing number of shows focused on black South Africans. Some of these grew out of the work of AMIP, such as the 1982 Sakha Indlu: We Are Building a House, which show­ cased pictures of the team who helped erect a Zulu homestead at AMIP and the Sangoma exhibit from the same year, which displayed diviner Mashayelo Maseko’s personal donations to AMIP.54 Other exhibitions seem to have been borne out of the Africana Museum’s own initiative. These include the 1981 paternalistically named Our People I, the Bushmen, the 1982 look at African Eating Customs, and the 1986 exploration of E-goli (Zulu for “Johan­ nesburg”).55 In shows such as these, the Africana Museum seemed to cater to the very population that now made use of the public library it continued to call home. Yet, there is evidence that in at least one instance the Africana Museum’s effort to change its persona did not meet with success. As part of the city coun­ cil’s desire to revamp its image in time for Johannesburg’s 1986 centenary and in line with the larger state initiatives to extend some tokens of power to nonwhite South Africans, the council petitioned the rump Africana Museum in the public library to foreground black South African history for the occa­ sion.56 Since the bulk of the museum’s efforts were then concentrated on the Newtown venue, the result was feeble, at best. “We took this old showcase and had it re-erected at huge expense,” Ann Wanless recalled: And I was back peddling and saying, “I don’t want to do an ethnology dis­ play. It’s inappropriate. Anyway, we shouldn’t do it.” But I had to do it. They wanted something in there so we sort of tried and it was a rather half-hearted event. It was a terrible display, I have to say. . . . We had a little bit on rock art,

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 165 we had a little bit on the Stone Age. . . . We cobbled together bits and pieces that had been sort of been left over from the other displays and put them in.

Given the museum staff ’s focus on the new space, Wanless admitted, this hodgepodge display in the old location “was a real afterthought,” grimly concluding that “it looked like it.”57 Hillary Bruce remembered the overall reception of the 1986 centenary celebrations. Ostensibly meant to reach “the masses,” meaning black South Africans, Bruce lamented, “the black people in Soweto or whatever said ‘it’s not our history you’re celebrating, you’re celebrating enslavement, etc., etc.’ And it blew up in everybody’s face and the council was oblivious that this was going to happen and it exploded and it was most unpleasant.”58 Paralleling larger society’s repudiations of mere mirages of change, black South Africans rejected the haphazardly re­ vamped Africana Museum. Concurrent with the larger population’s dismay with the exhibit was condemnation from University of the Witwatersrand academics. As Bruce later recalled, when arts historians from Wits viewed the refurbished dis­ play, they “slated it.” “We sat there—we were in the gallery—and they came along and told us our fortune, and we just shriveled,” Bruce described.59 Denouncing the a-historicized version of black history, revisionist Wits scholars made known their distaste for this apartheid-era type of history. Nevertheless, the exhibition remained up into the early 1990s as part of the old guard’s reluctance to change. Not only did this signal the old guard of the museum’s unwillingness to respond to condemnation, but it also highlighted the degree to which the institution remained governed by the kind of stifling bureaucracy that had made attaining a permanent home a half-century-long endeavor. Allowing bureaucracy and self-censorship to curtail possibilities, the Af­ ricana Museum leadership based in the public library relied largely on the way things used to be done. And yet, as the museum’s display of exhibits relating to black South Africans suggests, the institution was attempting— however grudgingly and unsuccessfully—to respond to the times. Another aspect of museum work that revealed the institution’s tentative transforma­ tion was the behind the scenes task of acquiring objects. As in the past, the museum’s advisory committee sanctioned purchases, while some objects continued to arrive as donations and loans. During the period under scru­ tiny—from the late 1970s to the late 1980s—the museum saw a notable rise in acquisitions relating to black South Africans. To be sure, the institu­ tion continued to purchase traditional pieces of Africana such as medallions

166 / Chapter Four

commemorating the tercentenary of Cape Town and twenty years of Union, ceremonial scissors presented to Jan Smuts in 1947, a watercolor of the Stock Exchange, a nineteenth-century sausage filler, and a pencil sketch of the Orange Free State done by John Tenniel, the original illustrator of Alice in Wonderland.60 However, by far the majority of acquisitions at this time related to what were once considered mere subsets of Africana. Museum records increasingly noted the purchase of items depicting black South Africans, such as artworks by Barbara Tyrell and Esme Berman, pictures of Saartjie Bartman—the infamous Hottentot Venus—and an audio-visual col­ lection on scarification, marriage, and birth among the Transkei people.61 Di­ alogue surrounding proposed purchases illuminates the museum’s thought process. Speaking on a series of anthropological photographs depicting a Swazi boy, the curator recorded, “the childhood of black communities liv­ ing a traditional way of life is not well documented, and this photograph shows a phase as yet unseen in the collections.”62 Hoping to capture the fast disappearing traditional lives of black Africans, purchases like these reflected contemporary notions of ethnology. Importantly, these items all depict black South Africans through the eyes of white people, signaling continuity with repre­ sentations acquired in earlier decades. The veracity with which these types of objects were accepted supports art historian Anitra Nettleton’s assertion that the Africana Museum was historically blind to the importance of interpreta­ tion—and hence bias—inherent in work such as these.63 Yet, alongside these acquisitions, the museum progressively purchased more items directly from black South Africans, indicating a new trend. Not only did this suggest increasing public knowledge about the museum and savvy on the part of those willing to sell personal items to a museum for a profit, but it also marked the museum’s first attempt to purchase eth­ nographic items directly from the groups it purported to represent. For instance, this decade witnessed the acquirement of three clay pots from Mrs. Nkosi (of beer-brewing fame), two “much-used wooden spoons [dat­ ing to the last century] which belonged to the vendor’s mother,” museum cleaner, Mrs. Ruth Maseko, and sepia photographs of township scenes taken by one Mr. Jephrey Mthembu, in addition to innumerable purchases of eth­ nographic items recorded simply by ethnicity and price.64 Importantly, a significant number of ethnographic items began arriving by way of galleries specializing in such subject matter, marking the rise in the commercializa­ tion of black culture in late apartheid South Africa.65 Another trend evident in the acquisition of black objects at this time was the museum’s growing interest in modern black culture. For example, the acquisition of a Xhosa purse was thus suggested in one museum report:

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 167 The item is of much interest to the Museum because the Museum has no other item made by mine workers, and taken home to be worn. The materi­ als used are of interest, because the brass beads clasped around the leather thongs are of the type made and used by the Ndebele and other groups from the Transvaal, and they are unusual on a Xhosa piece.66

Reflecting the changing nature of African life brought on specifically by in­ dustrialization and intergroup interaction, this purse was understood to sig­ nify both change and historical connectivity. Therefore, the mere attempt to purchase it suggests that the museum was moving—however slowly—away from the binary divisions that had once made “modern” and “black” decid­ edly antithetical. A further illustration of this process was evident in the proposed acquirement of a wooden Ndebele headrest and painted figurines from their creator, one Glen Mabele of Soweto. “These were made in an urban setting by a young man who bought the paint in Johannesburg,” an internal museum document recorded, noting, “it is interesting to see how he has used traditional ideas and ‘modernized’ them.”67 Once more seeking to document black Africans’ engagement with change, the influence of the more progressive ideals of the Africana Museum in Progress appears evident on the museum proper. Yet, on the whole, despite whatever changes seemed apparent in the Africana Museum’s attitude by way of either its acquisitions or its tempo­ rary displays, the museum’s older leadership remained wary of change. To the near point of denial, the old guard refused to accept that the days of the museum in the public library were limited. Rather than spend the final years of the museum’s occupation of the top floor focused on the future in Newtown, the old guard continued to exist there as though no end was in sight. From installing new glass display units and spotlights to mount­ ing new permanent exhibitions on Johannesburg’s sporting history and the history of coinage, Mrs. N and cohort paid little attention to the fact that, since the acquisition of the Newtown premises in 1976, the Africana Museum’s days in the library were numbered.68 While certain practices on the part of the Africana Museum suggest a grudging willingness to change with the times, the practice of renovating a dying venue clearly signaled denial. Most likely, this defiance reflected distrust in the future, personified by AMIP. The Africana Museum was hesitant to change since this—it was felt—would entail being subsumed by its cheeky offshoot, the Africana Mu­ seum in Progress. Turning to the deep animosity that persisted between mu­ seum halves, I will shed light on the reasons behind the Africana Museum’s intransigence.

168 / Chapter Four

Distrust between the Museum Halves Given their different locations and dissimilar outlooks, it is unsurprising that ill will arose between the Africana Museum and the Africana Museum in Progress. From the perspective of AMIP, the Africana Museum proper was inefficient, deeply risk-averse, and wholly out of touch with larger society. These traits, curators at AMIP believed, sprung from the museum’s adher­ ence to and replication of both the city’s and the JPL’s overly complicated bureaucracy. Strictly hierarchical and heavily reliant on such managerial mainstays as timetables and forms, the Africana Museum precluded decen­ tralized innovation. At the same time, the museum’s stasis appeared to be the product of staff exhaustion, of museum workers who, because of time and experience, were no longer willing to go up against what was increas­ ingly seen as an unsupportive city council. These factors were all manifest, in their worst, in the museum’s selfcensorship. On one occasion, Wanless recollected, she petitioned Mrs. N for the go-ahead to erect a shack home as part of AMIP’s overall display of African housing types. The impetus for this proposal came from a researcher working on the Sofasonke Party, the first organized group to demand ade­ quate black housing on the Rand in the 1930s. Offering to donate uniforms and artifacts, in addition to suggesting remaining Sofasonke Party mem­ bers who would be able to construct a replica Hessian tent in AMIP, the researcher quickly caught Wanless’s attention. Here was a way to represent modern, politically rooted African life through the display of another kind of house. “So I got very excited,” Wanless remembered, and I went to the boss [Mrs. N] and I said “Look, this is what we want to do.” And she said, “Write a proposal.” And she was nervous, and in the end it was censored because the protest was against the Johannesburg municipality because they were the ones who were providing housing—or not providing housing—as the case may be.69

Enacting self-censorship to avoid a potential quarrel with its funding body, the Africana Museum once more displayed the very kind of gutlessness that had long ago rendered the institution obsolete in the eyes of AMIP curators. On the other hand, for their part, Africana Museum workers considered AMIP to be managerially sloppy, viewing it with suspicion at best. Through weekly (later, monthly) meetings and written reports—both of which AMIP staff dreaded—the Africana Museum attempted to maintain firm control

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 169

over what it considered to be its unruly offshoot, engendering friction be­ tween the halves. Undoubtedly, this tension arose from ideological devia­ tions that only grew the more independent AMIP became. “Of course we were doing things differently, which she [Mrs. N and cohort] didn’t like,” Hillary Bruce confirmed. “It was a different way of looking at things,” at AMIP. At the Africana Museum, “we always took a top down view of history in a very bland way, which I think museums all over did.” While the new group of curators strove to reinterpret the past as it had been portrayed in the Africana Museum, to move toward seeing the past from the bottom up, the old guard still based at the Africana Museum, in Bruce’s words, “didn’t see that there was anything odd about” the museum in the context of the late 1970s.70 Resultantly, deep-seated intellectual differences were at play. Added to the Africana Museum’s managerial paranoia, this tension created nothing short of a hostile internal climate. To be fair, Wanless admitted, “I think Mrs. N’s suspicions of what went on down at the market were justified, because we did actually tend to break the rules quite often.” The Africana Museum in Progress, she reflected, used to be for me just a step—just a zip—outside of that bureaucracy and it was because of the opportunities that it offered for you to work with the ob­ jects and to work with people and then have some sort of dynamic interplay between them and you.

Free of the stifling bureaucracy that had long characterized the library building, AMIP employees created their own loose work system that did, technically, confound many of the Africana Museum’s strict rules. Working flexible hours and cutting bureaucratic edges by, for instance, manipulat­ ing the required three quotes necessary for any council-funded purchases, AMIP workers put their tasks ahead of the rules. “Yes, we did those kinds of things,” Wanless admitted, “but there was no doubt that we worked—we really did. But it was just . . . much more relaxed.” As a result, she noted, “we kind of escaped a lot of the drudgery of that bureaucracy,” suggesting that “if you speak to a lot of people who worked at the market they’ll say it was fun.” “We in the museum” in progress, Wanless humorously concluded, “we had a real sense of excitement and adventure because we were doing something extraordinary. We always felt slightly above the muck. . . . Librar­ ians were very boring and dull and that we weren’t! We were imaginative and creative.” For Mrs. N’s part, given the ideological and managerial ten­ sions, Wanless offered, “I suppose she was quite right to feel a bit offended by us.”71

170 / Chapter Four

In spite of whatever corners were cut or rules were bent, what was going on at AMIP worked. The museum’s attendance figures—when examined across the decade—reveal a dramatic increase over time. Whereas AMIP recorded around 290 monthly visitors in 1979, by 1988 that figure had reached over 4,200. At the same time, the Africana Museum’s attendance figures plummeted from more than five thousand in one month in 1979 to a mere sixteen hundred in 1988.72 Besides sheer numbers, museum records indicate that AMIP received the bulk of important visitors during this pe­ riod. Everyone from the curator of anthropology from Denver’s Museum of Natural History to American tour guides and British librarians came to AMIP for personalized tours.73 While these visitors came on their own, AMIP also continued the museum’s long-held tradition of welcoming guests of the state. Entertaining an American family sent at the mayor’s appeal and a professor from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies introduced as a guest of the National Department of Education, AMIP usurped the Afri­ cana Museum’s former position as the quintessential Johannesburg cultural history museum.74 In addition to surpassing the Africana Museum in attendance, the Af­ ricana Museum in Progress became the recipient of far more press than its flagship during this period. Articles in local publications praising the museum became so commonplace that by 1986 a museum report noted simply that the museum was routinely mentioned as a good place to visit.75 In 1984, another museum report boasted that AMIP had received favorable publicity from a tutorial letter sent by students of the University of South Africa’s Department of Anthropology and Indigenous Law. “Four museums were listed as worthy of visits by students,” the museum recorded, “and the ‘well-organized display of San (Bushmen) artefacts in the Africana Museum in Progress’ was singled out for mention.”76 By February 1988, the “Wel­ come Johannesburg” column of the Star newspaper announcing important cultural events recommended a visit to AMIP as a worthy activity.77 Having shone in both attendance and public reception, on the eve of its destruction in the late 1980s, the Africana Museum in Progress had all but eclipsed the Africana Museum. Of course, the Africana Museum in Progress was not the only institution attempting to redress the cultural imbalances of the past in the 1980s. The Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), for example, began launching exhibits spe­ cifically aimed at showcasing previously ignored African art in these years. Perhaps the most important of these exhibitions was the landmark 1989 Neglected Tradition: Towards a New History of South African Art, 1930–1988.78 While the Africana Museum—under Mrs. N—lent multiple objects to JAG

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 171

for the occasion (including clay figurines and wooden mats) and attended the opening, the main wing of the museum refused to follow JAG’s lead.79 As JAG, SAMA, and its own branch AMIP increasingly embraced the cul­ tural heritage of black South Africans, the Africana Museum remained in­ flexible. Ignoring abundant signs that it was fast becoming obsolete, the Africana Museum in the public library remained in place until the bitter end. In fact, as was noted earlier, Mrs. N opted for early retirement in 1993, allowing her to fade away while the museum was in the library premises, thereby pre­ venting her from ever having to work in the Market space. Reflecting on the tenacity with which Mrs. N and other members of the old guard clung to the past, Wanless attributed this phenomenon to the persistence of Kennedy’s legacy. She opined that the old Africana Museum was characterized by that whole Kennedy philosophy of collecting [and celebrating] . . . the minu­ tiae of Africana and the little quirky things about it. And you know basically he was a collector’s collector. And if you look at Africana Notes and News it was a journal for collectors. And if you look at the publications, they were publications for collectors.

Noting that these publications and their governing attitudes “weren’t for school kids coming in [off the street] or the Shangaan women walking past or for anything like that,” Wanless exposed just how extraneous the Africana Museum was to 1980s Johannesburg. For her part, Wanless continued, Mrs. N “was completely immersed in that [world]. She was the expert” who knew “a huge amount on those topics” of classical Africana and who “reveled in having that expertise and being the one that people referred to and deferred to.” That was, Wanless admitted, until “all this new stuff” at the Africana Museum in Progress and in South Africa more generally began “turning all of [what she believed] right on its head.” “So I suppose you can under­ stand,” Wanless kindly offered, “how really difficult that must have been” for Mrs. N and the old, Kennedy-inspired guard.80 Despite however much the old leadership wanted to maintain the status quo, time marched on. In the late 1980s, the Africana Museum’s days in the public library were coming to an end. Then, in 1989, the Africana Museum in Progress shut its doors for the last time. The makeshift museum had been “forever in progress,” Hillary Bruce chuckled. Recalling that the lack of promised funds continually delayed the museum’s completion, Bruce lamented that it was not until “we’d built up half of the museum” that the city council decided “it would be cheaper if we gutted the whole thing and

172 / Chapter Four

built it up from the ground,” grimly recalling, “so we had to gut the space.”81 After more than a decade “in progress” during which AMIP had become an energized, interactive venue, the whole enterprise was scrapped. This razing, as an internal museum document sadly recorded, was widely publicized in Johannesburg.82 With the end of AMIP and the Africana Museum’s eviction from the public library pending, the era of the bifurcated museum drew to a close.

Tearing Down the Old Reflecting on the end of the Africana Museum in Progress, curator Ann Wanless remarked, “They’d always told me it was temporary, but I mean after about four years I thought, no, this can’t be temporary.” As a result, she lamented the ultimate destruction: “It was the most sort of devastating thing. It took me years, actually, to get over it.” Although AMIP was theoreti­ cally envisioned as a mere springboard, its drawn-out existence suggested permanence. Additionally, its contents constituted nothing less than a labor of love for those involved. “So there were parts of us that were sort of buried in that whole thing,” Wanless bemoaned, declaring that its demise “was horrifying.”83 Long stalled by a dearth of funding as well as administra­ tive hurdles, AMIP had evolved independently.84 Then, in the late 1980s, the private corporation Nedbank offered seed money to undertake the next phase in converting the old market into a modern museum. This, in turn, impelled the city council to make good on its promises. By 30 June 1989, the demolition of AMIP was complete. “After over fifty years in ‘temporary premises’ in the Public Library building,” Mrs. N reported, “the Museum will shortly have its own building.”85 Despite the labor of loves that were both the Africana Museum and AMIP, by the time of the latter’s demise the museum as a whole was en­ tering into an unprecedented period of uncertainty. Firstly, local politics in late apartheid Johannesburg reflected larger society’s sense of insecurity. Vacillating from party to party, the city administration was constantly re­ structured during this time period. In this jumble, the Africana Museum found itself under different departments of unequally suited leadership with differing degrees of sympathy for the museum. In one sense at least, the general thrust of change was the same. Museums, the city council had decided, now needed to be profitable. No longer would the changing city be able to dole out money for such services. Fundamentally at odds with all that the old guard believed, the institution of business plans that con­ centrated on bottom lines contradicted precedent. When Christopher Till,

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 173

former director of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, became deputy director of museums and library services in 1991, further change was at hand. With a career rooted in museum work, Till believed wholeheartedly that the Afri­ cana Museum needed to be wrenched from the control of the Johannesburg Public Library and the museum staff professionalized. The directives of the two institutions were necessarily different, he argued. Librarians did not know how to run museums, he charged. These critiques were in no small part aimed at Mrs. N, who was but a trained librarian like Smith and both Kennedys before her.86 At the same time, members of the community—notably academics from the University of the Witwatersrand—were increasingly critical of the old Af­ ricana Museum. When, in 1992, participants in the Wits History Workshop “Myths, Monuments, and Museums” asked for a tour of the old Africana Museum, they were incredibly displeased with the hodgepodge ethnicity display mentioned earlier that had been erected to commemorate the 1986 centenary of Johannesburg.87 “I got the sense,” Wanless laughed, “that it was actually almost so bad that they weren’t as critical as they should have been . . . and that they kind of held back in some ways because they just felt that their criticisms would not be understood.”88 Despite their nega­ tive assessments, both Bruce and Wanless applauded these conversations with Wits academics for assisting the museum’s process of reinvention, a discussion fleshed out further in the next section of this chapter. Important at this point is the fact that, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the oldfashioned Africana Museum and its leadership were facing attacks on mul­ tiple fronts. Critiquing the outdated Africana Museum, detractors affirmed the African National Congress’s (ANC) contemporaneous analysis of culture’s role in the oppression of the majority of South Africans. Marrying Amilcar Cabral’s notion that culture was central to any national liberation movement with Marxist analyses of the South African struggle in particular, ANC members formed a multifaceted understanding of the somewhat amorphous term “culture.” 89 And, this definition was meant for more than just analysis; it was part of the organization’s larger effort to use culture as a weapon in the antiapartheid struggle. The ANC’s theoretical understanding of culture is important since this stance, echoed as it was by museum criticizers, exem­ plifies the degree to which the Africana Museum stood at odds with forces for progressive change in late apartheid South Africa. According to the ANC, culture was decidedly antielitist, reflecting what art historian Annie Coombes has rightly deemed a preoccupation with “community” and, one could add, “the people.”90 “Our view of culture,”

174 / Chapter Four

ANC delegates to the 1982 “Culture and Resistance” conference wrote, is “an all-embracing one, not the narrow concept which sees culture in terms of symphony concerts, operas and Shakespearean plays.”91 Far from be­ ing the purview of a privileged few, culture belonged to all South Africans. Secondly, activists noted, “in Apartheid South Africa culture is constantly employed to serve someone’s interest.”92 Reflecting on the degree to which the apartheid state utilized culture as a means of oppression, activists pro­ claimed that culture could not be regarded as neutral, inexorably linking it to social and political circumstances. The ANC perceived several ways in which the apartheid state used cul­ ture to further the majority’s oppression. Reflecting on the past, ANC cul­ tural worker Mongane Wally Serote eloquently penned the following: The imperialists came to a land where people lived; they smashed our king­ doms and raped our economy under the banner of so-called “Christian civi­ lisation.” Our culture, from dance to dress to medicine to agriculture, was labeled “tribal;” we were told we were too ignorant to appreciate proper hous­ ing or enough food; we were told we were barely “civilised” enough to work in their mines and gardens and factories and kitchens and certainly not civi­ lised enough to appreciate higher wages. When the people resisted, they were called “savages,” and they were savagely suppressed.

Serote condemned the imperialists for denying the existence of African cul­ ture and civilization at the same time as they, in his words, “show us ‘African culture,’ a perverted ‘traditional’ culture, cut off from its societal foundations which colonialism destroyed; petrified [sic] into something weird and won­ derful; mystified until it fails to interact at any level with the real world we live in.”93 In equally scathing terms, ANC activist Z. Pallo Jordan attacked the manner in which African heritage had been suppressed: “Pursuance of [white domination] has required the successive White regimes to corrupt, distort and suppress the cultural heritage of the oppressed for purposes of domination.” Apartheid apologists claimed that African culture was inferior to that of Europeans while asserting that only an ahistorical, frozen version of African culture was authentic. Just as they denounced African culture, the oppressors, Jordan wrote, “have been compelled to denude the cultural traditions deriving from Europe of what is best in them and reduce them to parochial horizons as the exclusive property of persons of European de­ scent.” 94 Bastardizing cultural theory by relegating “high culture” to Euro­ peans alone and condemning Africans to stagnant tribalism, South African

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 175

oppressors wielded culture to further their materialist and ideological ends, a process strengthened by the state’s monopoly on cultural resources. Delegates to the second ANC Conference on Women leveled another charge at cultural institutions deemed to support the apartheid state. “It has often been argued by many,” they wrote, “especially the racists that control our country as well as tribalists or ethnic chauvinists that there is not one culture but many cultures in South Africa.”95 Practicing the typical colonial tactic of divide and rule, the oppressors insisted that South Africa was com­ prised not of one black people, but of many fragmented tribes, a notion supported by some South Africans. Denouncing both the state and de facto state endorsers, the ANC made it clear that the leading resistance movement did not distinguish between the two. Any institution, individual, or state body that supported the logic of apartheid—by, for instance, polarizing the histories of black and white South Africans—was marked an enemy of those who labored for another South Africa. Besides promulgating rhetoric around culture, the ANC spearheaded three cultural campaigns to overturn apartheid. From the late 1970s, the organization entreated artists to join the movement as cultural workers. While culture had clearly been used to oppress the majority, this move indi­ cated the ANC’s equally passionate belief that “culture of the oppressed is a strong weapon of resistance against the system to forge unity among various groups and to work towards the building of the democratic society.”96 At the same time, the ANC sent a cultural ensemble Amandla (meaning “power”) to spread the message of what South African culture really entailed to a world accustomed to apartheid-funded images of naive tribalism. Through music, poetry, resistance songs, and dance, Amandla put forward a people’s history of South Africa whose construction and content stood in marked contrast to apartheid-era histories. Thus, Amandla represented the stated position of youthful activists that whoever carries a guitar, a trumpet, a paint-brush, a pen to write, is no different from a member of Umkhonto We Sizwe who carries and AK47, a mortar or a Bazooka; he is no different from a comrade who barricades our embattled townships to create a no-go area.97

Celebrating the mixture of cultural practices that categorized South Africa, Amandla refuted the notion of a country comprised of polarized tribal units. Simultaneously, the ANC also endeavored to render apartheid South Africa a global pariah by inviting an international academic and cultural boycott

176 / Chapter Four

from 1989.98 Seeking to shame the exploitative, racist state by calling upon other countries to stay away from South Africa and to bar South Africans from entering their lands, this boycott was an integral component of the ANC’s assault on the government.99 Calling upon cultural workers to assist in overthrowing the regime while inciting international condemnation of apartheid South Africa through Amandla and the cultural boycott, the ANC made known its stance on how culture had been used to further oppression. In conversation with other arms of the resistance movement such as the Trade Unions and the United Demo­ cratic Front, the ANC’s broad message spread throughout 1980s South Africa by way of vehicles like posters, pins, and songs. The proximity between ANC rhetoric and charges leveled against the Africana Museum by Wits academ­ ics, younger bureaucrats, and others only strengthened the mounting attacks against the way museum work had been conducted. Reflecting on the fiery criticism, internal and external, that was being showered upon the old guard, and Mrs. N in particular, Wanless surmised the following: I think that hurt her quite a lot. Because she had presided over it [the mu­ seum] for many years. And when we were doing the planning of the new museum, she was quite obstructionist. I think that it was from her sense of vulnerability and hurt and that things were running out of control now. She was losing control.100

Faced by challengers at every turn, Mrs. N balked, refusing to accept the changes at hand and even, at times, attempting to prevent them. Nowhere was her tenacity for the past more evident than in her relationship with Africana Notes and News, the museum’s beloved journal, fifty years old in 1993. Even though the bulk of the museum’s energies were focused on the new venue,101 Mrs. N persisted in keeping old museum functions—such as the journal—open until, Bruce recollected, “we had to make decisions, hard decisions, about services that had to be stopped, because we had a small staff and we were planning this huge museum.” Notes and News had been Mrs. N’s baby, demanding at least two weeks’ worth of work each month. Making a journal devoted to Africana’s minutiae available to a global audi­ ence was, in Bruce’s words, “a great pleasure for all of us” that evoked deep feelings of pride. Nonetheless, the museum was changing and, ultimately, Bruce admitted, “Mrs. N had to sacrifice that” journal.102 In the final edition of the journal, dated June 1993, Mrs. N editorialized the transformations at hand:

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 177 It has been decided that the full thrust of the very limited staff is to be directed to the opening of the new museum in the Old Newtown Market building in Bree Street. The name of the Museum will probably change and it is to be­ come more relevant to the “new” South Africa. Imbalances in holdings will be addressed and efforts will be made to attract another sort of public.

Clearly enumerating the museum’s transition, Mrs. N kept private whatever sense of loss she may have been feeling. “I shall retire as soon as I have seen this issue through the press,” she announced.103 “It was a very weird period,” Bruce reflected on the years between the AMIP’s 1988 closing and the 1994 opening of MuseumAfrica. In the end, it appeared “there was something of a palace revolution,” she concluded.104 Driven by new thinkers—ones who were decidedly against both the tradi­ tional unity of the museum and the public library and the old-fashioned manner of displaying history—the young guard of the Africana Museum overturned the icons of the past. Yet in debating how to construct the new museum, these same revolutionaries found that it was far easier to decon­ struct than it was to build. Turning to the museum’s internal debates around rebirth, I will highlight the practical obstacles to theoretical change.

Debating How to Build the New Early in its process of rebirth the Africana Museum put forward a revised mission statement. The institution now saw that its purpose was “to serve the community by using the Africana Museum’s resources to communi­ cate an understanding of the history of Southern Africa.” The museum in­ sisted that its new understanding of the past resonate with the majority of South Africans. No longer would it serve as a mouthpiece—wittingly or not—for the near defunct racist state. The museum—now under the con­ trol of curators who understood the political importance of a cultural his­ tory museum—would now turn itself over to “the people.” The “tentative moves towards majority rule,” museum curators Hillary Bruce and David Saks reflected, “have had the effect of rendering obsolete the way South Africans, particularly the ruling white group, have seen their country, its citizens and its history.” “The challenge of the present,” they surmised, “is now to begin building new structures on the ruins of the discredited old, fostering a genuinely South African identity based on a common patriot­ ism and citizenship.” Noting that the renewal of the Africana Museum was happening “at a most appropriate time in the country’s history,” Bruce and Saks assured would-be skeptics that the newfangled “slogan of the Africana

178 / Chapter Four

Museum—‘A New Museum for a New South Africa’—[was] more than a neat catch-phrase.” Reenvisioning the public presentation of the region’s past, the Africana Museum was boldly taking “a step into the unknown,” which though “challenging and exciting” was similarly “fraught with risks and pitfalls.” 105 Far easier said than done, reinvention immediately proved challenging. Firstly, there were logistical impediments to change. The museum’s re­ birth would require a substantial amount of funding, none of which was immediately available in the early 1990s. At the same time, the historical importance of the market demanded that any plans for renovation were sen­ sitive to preservation.106 Spurring the museum to action, on the other hand, was the revelation that the institution had fallen considerably in local and international esteem. Long regarded by insiders as one of if not the greatest museum in Africa, Africana Museum enthusiasts were troubled to see that the museum did not appear in the 1990 UNESCO Directories of Museums in Africa.107 Admittedly absent because it was housed in South Africa—which, for political reasons, was not included in the study—the Africana Museum and governing Johannesburg City Council perceived this omission as a fur­ ther stimulus for change.108 Besides technical hurdles that competed with the city’s insistence on change, intellectual conundrums presented themselves as museum staff as­ sessed the state of their institution. While it was noted in 1993 that “the general aims of the founders of the Africana Museum are still valid today,” several major deficiencies were recognized.109 The museum, it was felt, privi­ leged a colonial, liberal viewpoint of history—one that silenced alternative stories and relegated the majority of South Africans to timeless tradition.110 That which did represent black life was almost universally rural, reflect­ ing the apartheid-inspired myth that blacks were inherently antiurban. Si­ multaneously, the very starting point for South African history implied a white-centric paradigm. Even within this framework, there were conspicu­ ous gaps in the collection of objects, black and white. Given the historical dominance of white collection committees as well as the original manifes­ to’s implausible scope, the Africana Museum—in the context of the early 1990s—was deeply flawed. As Bruce, Saks, and others turned a critical eye to the museum, the image they described was brutally honest. Bruce and Saks observed: The realities of race politics and the prominent place museums have held in Western European (as opposed to Black African) culture have served to ensure that most South African museums are heavily Eurocentric—in the composi­

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 179 tion of their staff, their collection policies and the manner in which they have sought to portray South African history in their displays. Moreover, the depic­ tions of Black South Africans have tended to be largely ahistorical, that is to say static rather than dynamic, dealing with traditions and customs which are themselves often portrayed in a unconsciously patronising manner, as curi­ osities to be contrasted with the sophisticated European tradition.111

Clearly identifying the forced separation of black and white objects and the concurrent privileging of white culture as the museum’s fundamental shortcomings, Bruce and Saks demonstrated an unusual capacity for selfcritique. The separation between black and white objects, Bruce and Saks con­ firmed, “would be singularly inappropriate today,” pledging that the mu­ seum “consider[s] it essential that the artificial ethnic/cultural division be eliminated.” Nevertheless, they noted, “integrating the ethnological and cultural history collections is easy to decide but difficult to put into prac­ tice.” Hindering facile amalgamation was the fact that objects of white South Africans had been acquired based on their uncommonness, while objects of black South Africans were chosen according to their illustration of the everyday. As a result, white objects tended to illuminate particular moments in history and notable cultural accomplishments. Black objects, conversely, reflected the mundane or—on rare occasion—major historical moments as they related to white South Africans. Merging the two defied a simple plan. “We gave careful consideration to integrating chronologi­ cal and cultural history,” Bruce and Saks announced, but, “though feasible, [it] would have been wearisome to visitor and staff alike, as the floor area would have totaled 5300 square metres!” Simply integrating the two realms into one narrative would have yielded a lengthy, haphazard museum. As a result, museum theorists fell back upon a revamped, but nevertheless fa­ miliar binary. The new museum, they announced, would be divided into chronological and cultural halves.112 The chronological section would illustrate, in the curators’ words, a “macro” level understanding of the region’s past, something museum theo­ rists described as “a view of the major political events and personalities that shaped this land.” The cultural section, on the other hand, would expose the “micro” histories of the area, focusing on, in official terms, “individu­ als, their lives and livelihoods, indeed all the aspects which we think of in terms of ‘culture’—religion, systems of belief, arts and crafts, currency and exchange, education, social values, and so forth.”113 Later, chief curator Deon van Tonder clearly assessed the weakness of this plan. “Such a division

180 / Chapter Four

was artificial, and would have perpetuated the racial and cultural differen­ tiation so characteristic of the apartheid era, and in particular of previous Africana Museum exhibitions,” since, he wrote, “for ‘history’ read whites, and for ‘culture’ read blacks.”114 Aware of this potential critique, history curator David Saks offered an explicit rebuttal. “Solely from the point of view of museological accessibility,” he pronounced, “it is vital that there be a distinction between major and minor events and personalities, between the dynamic and the static and the unusual and commonplace.” Practically speaking, Saks argued, an unsystematic combination of all objects would result in a jumbled, incoherent museum. Though not inherently flawed, the realities of the museum’s collection meant that this chronological/cultural division would reintroduce the history/culture and, thus, white/black di­ vide. Unable to foresee a way to weave together the disparate objects housed in the museum, curators returned to the very division that had undermined the institution’s credibility in the first place.115 At the same time, museum workers realized that they were not alone in their conundrum. “This imbalance” between black and white objects and culture and history, curators wrote, “is . . . heavily reflected in school history syllabi, the proclamation and maintenance of national monuments, public holidays, centenary and other commemorative celebrations and in numer­ ous other ways.”116 Seeking to overhaul public presentations of the past, the museum staff recognized that their struggles mirrored those beyond the walls of the museum. During this time of political transition, the need to redress public understandings of history and culture presented itself in a wide variety of arenas. Acknowledging both the magnitude of the problem and their limitations as a group of predominantly white South Africans, the museum staff turned to experts for guidance. Some of their more fruitful ideas came from the Southern African Museum’s Association (SAMA). Run­ ning conferences and workshops in the late 1980s and early 1990s around such pertinent topics as “History: A Re-Assessment of Its Role in South Af­ rican Museums” and “New Initiatives: Museums for a Future South Africa,” the guiding body on museums reassessed their role in a changing South Africa.117 Unsurprisingly, it was members of the younger generation who readily engaged in these debates, bringing them into contact with international cultural theorists like James Deetz and Tony Bennett in addition to other South African museologists.118 In 1989, Ann Wanless presented on the pro­ cess of reinvention to members of the local SAMA chapter. That same year, at the main SAMA conference, entitled, “Towards 2000: Visions for the Fu­ ture,” Christopher Till was elected president of the umbrella organization,

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 181

a notable accolade for both Johannesburg and the Africana Museum.119 The following year, at the regional conference, participants drafted a new mis­ sion statement for the organization. According to the Africana Museum’s internal records, “this was a most worthwhile exercise as the Africana Mu­ seum is itself drawing up a mission statement” such that “Mrs. Bruce and Mrs. Wanless found the Conference proceedings very relevant to the future planning of the museum displays.”120 At the same time, younger members of the museum continued to fo­ cus themselves on timely artifacts, even beyond the confines of SAMA. For instance, in 1989 Wanless began to gather objects, photographs, and inter­ views that spoke to the history of Alexandra Township.121 Displaying creative aquisition policies and an interest in redressing the collection’s imbalances of the past, Wanless’s activities spoke to the museum’s new direction. In the same vein, in 1992, several curators watched a televised program enti­ tled Serving the People: Museums in a Multicultural Society where the guest of honor was a director from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC.122 Similarly, in 1989, Wanless attended a seminar on rock art at Wits.123 At activities like these, the younger generation of museum workers debated the proposed reinvention of their museum. Africana Museum personnel also entered into productive dialogue on a much larger scale with Wits academics. Here, the 1992 history workshop, “Myths, Monuments, and Museums,” was particularly important.124 Assem­ bling a range of interested parties—museologists, teachers, and heri­tage workers—this conference broadened local conceptions of apartheid-era cultural practices. The papers and presentations deconstructed a wide range of topics—from the quintessential apartheid shrine, the Voortrekker Monu­ ment; to the ethnic theme park, Shakaland; and the commercial complex, the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront.125 The issues raised were similarly wideranging. From the nature of how viewers “read” exhibitions to the deliber­ ate fashioning of the country’s past, participants demonstrated the necessity and profitability of revisionist histories.126 The Africana Museum itself came under considerable attack when Wits Professor of Art History Anitra Nettle­ ton challenged the museum’s supposed objectivity and called for a reassess­ ment of what she saw as the false divide between it and the Johannesburg Art Gallery.127 Active at the Wits symposium, Africana Museum employees were well aware of these criticisms, posing some of their own lingering reservations as well. David Saks, for example, raised questions over “Coping with Bias in Museums and the Historical Record.” In this paper, he highlighted several important areas where misconceptions of the past predominated, such as

182 / Chapter Four

the commonplace reading of the Mfecane, or nineteenth-century era of Zulu expansion, as evidence of black barbarity. Saks also charged that South Afri­ can histories tended to stress interracial negotiation and European civilizing missions in a manner that skewed conceptions of the past. With pictorial illustrations, Saks clearly enumerated some of the more egregious decep­ tions inherent in orthodox South African historiography. Without a plan of action, his work revealed that while he and other museum employees understood the problems faced by the Africana Museum, the solutions con­ tinued to be elusive.128 In addition to Saks, other Africana Museum curators sought resolutions to their difficulties at this conference. Ann Wanless—along with several SAMA members and Wits academics—used the opportunity created by the workshop to run a trial exhibition from whose feedback, it was hoped, some of the museum’s more troubling curatorial issues could be resolved. Entitled “Fractions of a Truth,” this exhibition showcased multiple interpretations of the same object, a set of divining bones collected by Swiss missionary Reverend H. A. Junod in the early twentieth century. In addition to Junod’s personal analysis, the museum petitioned multiple outside examinations, including those by an archaeologist, an art historian, a zoologist, and a tra­ ditional healer. Assembled together, these disparate expert readings spoke to the main point of the exhibition, namely, that interpretation rests at the heart of any scrutiny. Explicitly positioned against the notion of any one truth, “Fractions of a Truth” endeavored to publicize internal museum de­ bates.129 The exhibition—held in the main foyer of the Johannesburg Public Library—received considerable local press.130 Spotlighting the museum’s co­ nundrum over how to represent the past in the context of a present in which multiple realities abounded, this exhibition captured the essential thrust of the Wits conference. Reflecting on a range of venues, processes, and motives, the history workshop “Myths, Monuments, and Museums” asserted the necessity of reframing historical narratives in a postapartheid world. Of central concern to many authors was how to balance the need for one narrative with the obvious prevalence of multiple interpretations of the past. While noticeably a product of a society in transition from totalitarian rule, this theoretical problem was also a result of postmodern thought that negated the pos­ sibility of one truth. Clearly, this quandary presented no simple solutions. Nevertheless, it was hoped that the enunciation of challenges borne of mul­ tiple truths would instigate important conversations. According to Carolyn Hamilton, the conference did indeed denote two important developments

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 183

for South African historians and museologists. First of all, the symposium signified the onset of revisionist academic interest in museum practice. Secondly, the workshop highlighted the close relationship between com­ mercial enterprises and heritage sites, hitherto overlooked by scholars.131 For the Africana Museum, the conference had even more practical ramifica­ tions. Drawing upon strategies generated at Wits, Africana Museum curators were able to identify several areas requiring immediate change. In the new museum, more attention would be focused on terminology in an effort to efface apparent biases. Labels would be written simply and in multiple Af­ rican languages. Simultaneously, the museum would seek to present atypi­ cal perspectives of the past that confounded prevailing, apartheid-inspired understandings of history. The museum would also try to fill the dearth of objects relating to black South Africans with illustrations.132 These and other proposals promised to remake the institution in important ways. Yet, coming as they did from academic bodies, these suggestions failed to spur the museum into action. Deciding they needed to hear what ordinary South Africans wanted in a new museum, curators focused their attention on the public. It is to this outreach campaign that we now turn.

Strategic Outreach In addition to Wits and SAMA, the Africana Museum attempted to plot its future path by asking its target audience what was expected from a modern cultural history museum. As institutions, both Wits and SAMA endorsed this type of so-called people’s history, conceived from below. For its 1990 confer­ ence, for instance, SAMA sent questionnaires to determine public perceptions of museums. Museum curators Bruce, Wanless, Ben-Guri (of the education department) and Saks (of the history department) reported favorably on that methodology’s reception: “The prevailing feeling” at the conference, they explained, “was that history museums should be more directed to social his­ tory and to the common man, embracing all peoples in our community. This was of direct relevance to what the Africana Museum is doing in plan­ ning its new displays.” In the end, they reported, the conference “stressed the need to go to the community to find out what they want in a museum rather than to decide in isolation.”133 Following this precedent, the Africana Museum undertook its own, professionally driven marketing campaign. In the brief describing its proposed campaign, the company that the Africana Museum eventually hired to conduct its research, Integrated Marketing Re­ search (IMR), outlined what it perceived to be the museum’s goals:

184 / Chapter Four The Africana Museum is determined to be relevant in the emerging new South Africa, and to play a meaningful role in the education, and cultural develop­ ment of all the country’s people. The Museum is concerned however that it’s name might have predominantly or exclusively “Afrikaner” associations, which could represent a stumbling block, or “barrier to entry” for the majority of Black South Africans. To establish the validity of this concerns [sic], and to identify a name which is acceptable to all communities, the Museum intends to conduct strategic marketing research.134

According to town council minutes, IMR’s purpose was to evaluate the mu­ seum’s name, suggest alternate names that would resonate with specified audiences, and provide guidance on the museum’s new brand image.135 Supposing that the name Africana was assumed to denote Afrikaner, mu­ seum personnel employed this strategic marketing company to test the va­ lidity of its anxieties among the people it sought to attract. The plan carried out by IMR was multifold. In the first place, the com­ pany held what it termed “link tanks.” Means of gathering qualitative data, these brainstorming sessions were conducted behind two-way mirrors. On one side would be members of the population that the museum sought to target, on the other, museum employees. At some point during the session, the museum curators would join the focus group. According to IMR’s pro­ posal, participating community members were selected for being “literate, creative, eloquent individuals who are able to articulate their feelings with self-confidence.”136 Once there, members of this control group undertook a series of exercises including vocalizing free associations from words like “Af­ ricana” and “museum” and describing the museum as a person. They were also asked to listen to and comment on the museum’s self-descriptions. Through these and other marketing strategies, the public’s perception of the museum was gleaned. In addition to the link tanks, the museum also funded a professional survey. A total of two thousand questionnaires were sent to important com­ munity members such as those in “political parties, headmasters of schools, representatives of major private companies, donors, [and] cultural leaders (countrywide).”137 Attached to the museum’s 1991 brochure was a cover let­ ter that told recipients that their name was on a list of key community lead­ ers. The survey asked respondents to answer questions about whether they had been to the Africana Museum, and, if so, to whom they thought the museum was addressed. It also petitioned responses regarding whether or not the museum was suitable for the new South Africa and how much they would readily pay to visit it. A draft version of the questionnaire also asked

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 185

responders to rank the museum’s priorities, from publishing Africana Notes and News to housing performances and workshops for the community and expanding its collection. Given staff and fiscal limitations, the museum was certain that it could not please everyone.138 Phone calls followed 20 percent of the postal surveys. Conducted by trained interviewers in five different languages—Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, and South Sotho—the serious­ ness with which the museum faced this project was undeniable.139 The results of the combined link tank-survey process provided consen­ sus. “The majority” of participants, the town council recorded, “felt that the Africana Museum gave a distorted view of history and did not reflect Black history accurately. They associated it with conservative Afrikaner males.” Unanimously, they felt that the name must be changed.140 Responses to the present name, IMR reported, included the following: “Eurocentric, Misinterpreted as Afrikaner, Elitist, classisist [sic], Old fashioned, Dull.”141 On the flip side, the name Africana Museum had the advantage of being known worldwide. Yet this hardly outweighed the downsides to the name. Thus, in 1993, late into its internal transformation, the Africana Museum committed to changing its name. “The matter has to be treated with some urgency,” IMR relayed to museum curators in August of that year, “as you have now definitively decided to change your name, and the new name must be chosen and agreed on, and visually developed to the point that it can be launched, from 1 October.”142 While the museum’s opening was later pushed back into 1994, the institution was nonetheless under considerable pressure to construct its new image. Together, museum curators and marketing consultants outlined their vision for the new museum. The institution’s physical scope remained “Af­ rica, south of the Zambesi, including South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Lesotho and Zimbabwe.” Its collection continued to “embrace all aspects of the history of the peoples of Southern Africa and so includes natural history” as well as “the History of European settlement in South Africa, [the] History of Johannesburg, [and] South African ethnology.” Ad­ ditionally responsible for the administration of the Bensusan Photographic Museum, the Bernberg Museum of Costume, the James Hall Museum of Transport, the Museum of Rock Art, the Geological Museum, as well as the historic George Harrison Park, the museum provided an all-inclusive pic­ ture of the white South Africans’ past. For its new mission statement, the team agreed that this was not sufficient, declaring as its new aim “to be a dynamic museum of the community where the diverse history and heri­ tage of Southern Africa is explored and presented to be an educational force for unity and reconciliation.”143 Now committed to displaying the “diverse

186 / Chapter Four

history” of the region to unite a fractured South African society, the museum pledged to broaden its presentation of the past. Other museum priorities were to “provide an indispensable educational, cultural and community re­ source, become a tourist attraction, [and] represent the entire South African community.”144 With this clear sense both of what the museum entailed and what it aimed to be, a new name was sought. Recommendations for the new name varied greatly. From narrow re­ gional suggestions such as “Market Museum,” “The Bridge Museum,” and “Museum of Johannesburg,” to broader ones, including, “Museum of Southern Africa” and the “African Museum,” a multitude of names was proposed.145 Here again the input of marketing consultants was invaluable. According to IMR, local names would serve only to alienate part of the pro­ posed audience. At the same time, the name ought to embody the museum’s target audiences, specifically “educational institutions, the tourist industry, the media, other museums, potential sponsors, [and] international bod­ ies/museums (both in neighbouring countries in Africa and farther afield).” In addition, IMR reiterated, the name “must be in keeping with the ‘new’ South Africa, and be a name that in years to come will remain relevant.” In short, the new name needed to connote nothing less than a brand, “a strong, totally ‘stand alone’ identity” that could be easily represented in print. Importantly, the museum once more agreed, as IMR wrote, “the name should not be seen to be imposed, so re-enforcing any arguments about an ‘ivory tower’ mentality.” Now, research would be joined with instigated media debate and a public competition to create a new logo in an effort to portray an organic name.146 In the end, after more than fifty thousand Rand were spent, it is not en­ tirely apparent how the museum reached its new name. According to town council minutes from 1994, “after a further brainstorming with the Afri­ cana Museum staff and the Museum Project Management team the name MuseumAfrica was arrived at by general consensus.”147 Interviews with mu­ seum personnel suggest that not all employees were involved in the deci­ sion, reached incredibly late in the process. Regardless, the fact that the name MuseumAfrica expressed the same sentiments as Africana Museum, but in modern English, pleased all involved. Here was a way to denote both the change and the continuity between the old and the new museum. Cho­ sen on the eve of the museum’s opening, the inverted appellation Museum­ Africa reflected both the museum’s determination to reinvent itself and its equally gripping slow decision process. While the museum finally chose a new name by the end of 1993, the content of the exhibits persisted in raising problems well into that year.

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 187

Given the information garnered from SAMA, Wits, and IMR, as well as local political realities, the projected separation between chronological and cul­ tural history continued to present itself as a fundamental impasse. Speaking of the lengthy process of deliberations borne of this conundrum, Ann Wan­ less admitted, “it used to drive me mad. . . . We’d have these discussions and everyone would just talk, talk, talk.”148 Bombarded with information from all sides, Africana Museum personnel found themselves, in 1993, gripped by inertia. Still, while museum workers were unable to move forward with plan­ ning the new museum, they continued to acquire objects for the institution that reflected larger currents of change. Though the museum still received— through gift and purchase—classic pieces of Africana, such as the gold key used to open city hall in 1915, homemade Boer bullets, and a black silk hat and veil, by far the majority of the museum’s budget was now focused on what was once considered objects of black South Africans.149 Arguably this was due to the presence—for the first time—of more diverse members of the advisory committee.150 Whatever the reason, historical purchases such as beer bottles from 1879 that had belonged to the Zulu King Ceteswayo, a 1920s watercolor of a mine dance, and a Shangaan shoulder cloth from 1935 were now common.151 Widespread too were contemporaneous objects of black culture like a toy wire car, a Batlokwa married women’s outfit, and Weya artwork from Zimbabwe.152 Also prevalent in greater numbers were objects of political resistance, such as a jigsaw puzzle depicting SWAPO sup­ porters, a Black Sash calendar, and artist George Pemba’s portraits of famed South African authors S. Plaatje, H. E. I. Dhlomo, and Ezekiel Mphalele, the last of whom once publicly condemned the Johannesburg City Library and, by association, its tenant Africana Museum.153 Additionally, ordinary black South Africans were now offering objects to the museum in significant numbers.154 At the same time, museum employees continued the long-held tradition of personally donating objects to augment the collection.155 In total, these processes ensured that the museum’s collection was changing to fit the times. Reflecting on some ethnological purchases in 1988, Mrs. N narrated to the advisory committee “that items were purchased to fill gaps in the col­ lection” and that this was “in line with the Africana Museum’s collecting policy of keeping pace with developments in Black crafts and of having examples of works produced in the townships.”156 Signifying the museum’s determination to even out its collection, purchases like these revealed the institution’s engagement with larger society. In the same vein, when report­ ing on the proposed purchase of the Pemba portraits, Mrs. N argued—or

188 / Chapter Four

included someone else’s argument—for their importance in the new mu­ seum since, in the report’s words, “the approach to black culture in the Museum cannot be confined to the tribal but must include modern, crosscultural elements.” Clearly recognizing the need both to collect and to treat black objects differently, the museum demonstrated progressiveness. Yet, logistical difficulties once again obtruded themselves. “How such concepts [such as presenting black life as modern] are to be conveyed in a museum poses problems,” the museum reported.157 Certainly, implementation re­ mained a concern. Nevertheless, as this brief summary of the museum’s collection policy reveals, in at least one regard—that of acquisitions—the museum did appear to embrace societal changes. In some ways, it would have been nearly impossible for the museum not to have embraced change in those years. By the early 1990s, the museum’s cohort, members of the Southern African Museum Association, University of the Witwatersrand academics, JAG workers, and others were all concerned with considering the role of culture in a new South Africa. In no small part, this was due to the work of the ANC and other arms of the resistance move­ ment’s continued proposal of strategies meant to remake understandings and expressions of South African culture. For as much as culture was re­ garded as a valuable weapon against apartheid during the struggle, in latterday apartheid South Africa activists focused themselves on using culture as a tool to build a new country. Turning to the ANC-driven cultural policies of the early 1990s, I will foreground contemporaneous cultural concerns. In so doing, I will characterize further the intellectual climate in which the Africana Museum and South Africa were being simultaneously reborn.

ANC and Africana Museum, Early 1990s In its message to the National Cultural Conference of 1990, the ANC’s De­ partment of Arts and Culture (DAC) pronounced, “The current political cli­ mate should introduce into our deliberations a sense of mission, an urgency regarding the road to the future.” With the specter of a new South Africa on the horizon, the ANC’s cultural offices prepared for “the final push for freedom.” A 1992 Bulletin issued by the ANC thus commanded, “Like all sectors of South African life, the arts and culture sphere demand transforma­ tion now!”158 Given apartheid’s legacy on the cultural front—where only state-sponsored Performing Arts Councils received funding and where dif­ ferent ethnic groups were relegated to separate cultural departments called “own and general affairs”—the organization charged that the country’s cul­ tural sphere required immediate attention. Seeking to make itself relevant

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 189

for the new South Africa, the museum paid close attention to the ANC’s position on culture, rightly believing that that organization would play a major role in a democratic South Africa. In the South Africa that the ANC envisioned, government-run cultural apparatuses would no longer cater to a mere fraction of the population. To this end, one policy document pledged that the ANC would “do away with the racist, own and general affairs departments and establish a special government department to ensure the practical realisation of its cultural policies.”159 Focusing attention on educational policies, heritage sites, and bureaucratic structures, the ANC aimed to overhaul completely the previ­ ous regime’s cultural projects. “The mission of the ANC Department of Arts and Culture” an internal document elaborated, “is, therefore, to facilitate the total eradication of the system of apartheid which comparmentalises humanity according to race, creed and even culture” in an effort to ensure the fulfillment of clause seven of the Freedom Charter, which charged that the doors of learning and of culture shall be open to all. 160 “Without any apology,” another impassioned document pledged, we firmly say that we are against and will continue to fight against what the apartheid system sought to achieve in the area of culture—the attempt to close the doors of learning and of culture to millions of people, to impose the racial and ethnic exclusivity to the development of the individual, to ossify forms of cultural expression within a supposed traditional mould, to discriminate in the allocation of resources dedicated to culture and arts and so on.161

Refusing to atomize people by race or ethnicity the way they had been in the old Africana Museum, the ANC promised that its cultural structures would promote a single South African culture, the very likes of which confounded apartheid ideology. This national identity would merge the narratives of all South Africans—hitherto separated in places like the old Africana Mu­ seum—thus joining the destruction of segregated cultural apparatuses to ensure that a new country would emerge. “A flourishing cultural life is vital to the well-being of South Africa,” an­ other policy document attested. As a result, the piece continued, “the ANC recognises that through arts and culture a sense of national identity and pride can be cultivated [since] [a]rts and culture are . . . a unifying force in a country divided along ethnic and cultural lines by apartheid.” Calling for free thinking, “thriving, thought-provoking artistic and cultural practices” to “contribute to a democratic and tolerant socio-political environment,” the ANC entreated cultural workers to continue their work.162 While the

190 / Chapter Four

ANC petitioned a range of artistic expressions, the organization was most interested in spotlighting one transcendent South African cultural identity, the very likes of which jarred with apartheid ideology. Importantly, the ANC believed that this patriotic sense of self would ema­ nate firstly from museums, among other places. Thus, the organization de­ manded several pointed changes be made to these repositories. In addition to administrative modifications, like the need for “democratic accountability” and “internationally accepted standards,” the ANC insisted that museums re­ furbish themselves to highlight “themes of reconciliation that foster the val­ ues and ideals of the broad masses and counteract the legacy of division and exploitation presently expressed in apartheid institutions and legislation.” The content of displays, in other words, was under attack. At the same time, the ANC emphasized that “close integration with the educational system” would be a prerequisite for funding in the new South Africa.163 Promising affirmative action procedures and the spotlighting of neglected history, the ANC envisioned a different South African museum culture. Without doubt, these ANC positions were formulated in response to MUSA, or Museums for South Africa, and its report, published in 1994 as Museums for South Africa: Intersectoral Investigation for National Policy. A committee formed in 1991 of two dozen experts, including members of SAMA, heritage workers, and government officials, MUSA was charged with examining and proposing national museum policies for a changing South Africa. Immediately controversial, the final MUSA account was considered by detractors to be the museum establishment’s last attempt to entrench its power.164 “As far as the African National Congress is concerned,” spokesper­ son for the ANC Commission for Reconstruction and Transformation of the Arts and Culture Andre Odendaal derided, “MUSA does not even get out of the starting blocks.” Failing, in his words, “to reconcile the views of a muse­ ums sector rooted in colonial and apartheid past with a democratic vision of the liberation movement and impending democratic state structures,” MUSA reified the way culture was understood in the old South Africa.165 “At best,” Deon van Tonder more generously noted, “the [MUSA] report has been considered an interim document.”166 Though the Africana Museum did not participate in MUSA, the museum’s proposed renovations—which included a continued polarization of black and white objects—mimicked the very sorts of schemes for which MUSA was drawing criticism. Given these protests, it is unsurprising that Africana Museum curators decided—at the last minute—to rethink their proposed renovations. Synthesizing the resistance movement’s critique of MUSA with lessons learned from SAMA, Wits, and their own marketing campaign, some Af­

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 191

ricana Museum personnel understood that their original plan to divide the new museum into chronological and cultural halves would render the institution ill-suited for the new South Africa, whatever form the country took. Nevertheless, the curators remained frozen with uncertainty, locked in endless debates about what to do. Christopher Till, who became director of culture for the City of Johannesburg after leaving his post at the Afri­ cana Museum, recollected, “I came back one day completely irritated by the whole thing [at the Africana Museum] and I said ‘this thing [museum] is a dinosaur that just won’t get up.’. . . . It was that fight to break the years and years of entrenched ways of doing something and project it into a new way of doing” that was ultimately so difficult, he remarked.167 Importantly for the museum, the temporary election of Rochelle Keene—from the Johan­ nesburg Art Gallery—as acting director of libraries and museums for Johan­ nesburg in 1993, served as the catalyst to action. Keene recalled that, although she came to MuseumAfrica late in the transformation process, she had long been aware of its situation. Not only did the art gallery and MuseumAfrica fall under the same local governmen­ tal department, but their members were both active in SAMA and other professional organizations. “From the late ’80s and early ’90s,” Keene sum­ marized, “I was involved in various groupings that were looking at muse­ ums in this country and saying what do museums look like, how should they change, what direction should they be going in.” In greater detail she elaborated on the state of affairs with regard to museums: There was a lot of thinking going on at the time in the South African Mu­ seum’s Association with some of our office-bearers involved with what was called the MUSA commission . . . and others involved with grouping that were sort of broadly [arranged] around looking at government in waiting, with an expectation that the government was going to change and what were museums going to look like if and when we had a new government in this country. A lot of issues had been raised through the South African Museum’s Association, a lot through groupings like the National Arts Coalition.

While Keene remembered the National Arts Coalition and other bodies as “progressive,” she nevertheless admitted that there was considerable tension within the museum world in the years leading up to the first democratic elections, a point underscored by the ANC’s response to MUSA. Paraphras­ ing the topics of concern, she noted, “museums shouldn’t be politicized. Museums should remain neutral. Museums are fine, you know. We trust our research. We trust our collections,” concluding “there was quite a split in the

192 / Chapter Four

Museum’s Association.” Taking the helm of MuseumAfrica at a crucial time in its rebirth, Keene was fast aware that this division was exemplified within this one institution.168 When Rochelle Keene entered MuseumAfrica in 1993, she found the curators virtually deadlocked. On the one hand there were those museum members who understood that the cultural/historical divide would render the museum obsolete for the new South Africa. These folks faced staunch opposition from those who continued to think in terms of outdated para­ digms. Even amid the group intent on change, divergent backgrounds in history—often ascribed to different institutional bases—led to conflict. When “I was asked to take over the MuseumAfrica project,” Keene recalled, “I found it quite scary.” Reflecting on the proposed organization of the new museum, Keene remembered, “I was absolutely convinced that that was not the way to go.” 169 For some, her objections fell on willing ears. Others felt as though too much energy had been invested in the plan to abandon it conscionably. Luckily for those intent on change, time was on their side. Having been paralyzed by internal debate for so long, the museum was now pressed to throw together its opening exhibition. The chronological/cultural plan—which sought to include a tremendous amount of information—was by then simply impractical. Keene “said I’ll tell you what,” Wanless para­ phrased, “you’ve left it so late now, there’s no time to do that display. It’s just too big.”170 Forcing curators to think in new ways that could be im­ plemented quickly, Keene spurred the long stagnant museum into action. Calling for change, Keene considered, “caused really quite a considerable amount of conflict and tension,” echoing Christopher Till’s assessment of the museum that “it wasn’t easy trying to steer people’s thinking in a dif­ ferent direction.”171 Nevertheless, Ann Wanless praised her compatriot; “if it hadn’t been for her, I can tell you there wouldn’t have been a display.”172 Filled with energy and certainty, Keene impelled the final decision-making process in the museum. It is to this that we now turn.173

Final Museum Plan In November 1993, the Africana Museum on the top floor of the public library closed forever. Nine months later, the museum reemerged as Museum­ Africa in Newtown. Wits historian Carolyn Hamilton—a key participant in the 1992 “Myths, Monuments, and Museums” workshop—recalled that “to outsiders it appears that something of a coup took place within the Mu­ seum administration at this time” such that “by September 1993, the staff of the Africana Museum were proposing a radically different scenario” for the

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 193

new museum than they had before.174 Indeed, the Wits conference played an important part in impelling this change, as did the arrival of Rochelle Keene, current politics, and internal deadlines. In sum, the final months of deliberations and construction were nothing if not hectic for the new MuseumAfrica. Then Acting Director Hillary Bruce recollected that skeptics questioned whether the last minute alterations could be implemented. “They said to me,” Bruce paraphrased, “ ‘are you now suggesting that after you’ve planned all this, you are going to can all of it?’ And I said ‘we will do those displays one day, but not now. We now think it’s inappropriate.’”175 Arriving at a new plan so late in the game, curator Sandra de Wet remembered, “was terrifying. . . . We had no notion that what we were doing was going to succeed.” 176 Nevertheless, if the museum was going to reinvent itself as a singular entity, it had no choice but to move quickly. Using the lessons learned from Wits, SAMA, and contemporary political debates, the younger museum generation—now fully in charge—sought to create methodically a radically different museum. In terms of target audi­ ences, de Wet remembered, “we deliberately said that we were going for a black, un-museumed, low level of education, low income grouping.” 177 “We reckoned,” Bruce further explained, “they were the least likely people to go into the museum and that if we aimed at them, we’d be making some difference.”178 Antithetical to the museum’s traditional audience, this socalled lost generation became the museum’s focus. With regard to content, the museum decided to highlight the history— rather than the frozen culture—of black South Africans, thus further estrang­ ing its traditional base of supporters. “We know that we alienated our old white audience,” de Wet explained: But it was done knowingly. It was done also knowing that at that stage it wasn’t possible to do a collaborative history. It wasn’t possible to do a holistic or a more inclusive [display]. One story, one South African story kind of his­ tory. Because the thing didn’t exist. And there were just too many hurts that still had to be faced up to. Too much forgiveness to be asked. Many confes­ sions to be made.

Deciding to “do neglected history,” de Wet recalled, meant, in her words, that we were going to do a very small portion of history, that we were going to do the kind of history that would concentrate on Johannesburg, a thematic kind of a history. A transformation. One that was really going to try to be

194 / Chapter Four in tune with the state of the country in 1994 rather than being too forward looking or trying to stick to the backward looking story. That we were now going to allow controversy. We were going to allow questions. We were go­ ing to allow “I don’t knows.” You know, that kind of story. We were going to try to be multi-voiced without having answers, which was really the kind of transformation situation that we found ourselves in in ’94.

Rather than attempt to tell the entire story of South Africa’s past, curators settled on a partial, politically crucial segment of the region’s history. Es­ chewing a linear metanarrative, they allowed for controversies and confu­ sions, pointedly mirroring the state of larger society. Working under the premise—again in de Wet’s words—that “a museum is always a work in progress,” staff now attempted the precarious task of situating themselves in a changing country.179 Bruce gave context to the fast-changing times in which they were work­ ing. “When we started planning those displays Mandela was locked up and we thought we were going to be one of the first far-sighted people—ha, ha, ha—to propose that he might be the first president,” she quipped: “Ye, gods he was released before we had opened the museum, you know. It all changed.”180 In retrospect, Bruce continued, “it looks as if we [suddenly] became political” “to curry favor with the new regime.” “But in fact,” she reminded, “they weren’t even in power” at the time the museum was plan­ ning its final displays. “We felt we were very very chancy by what we were putting up,” she continued, admitting, “We weren’t sure it was going to work. Nobody else had done it.”181 In unchartered territory, the museum strove to find a way to reach its newly defined target audience. The final push toward completing its opening exhibitions was by no means a smooth one. Curators needed to overcome internal squabbles, just as logistical problems once more arose. Not only was the final architectural plan for the space already in place, precluding alterations, but curators strug­ gled to find designers capable of enacting their visions, once they articulated them. At the same time, curators needed to devote some portion of their limited time to bringing the museum’s other activities in line with it new mission. This meant giving time and energy to community outreach pro­ grams such as the museum’s novel traveling exhibition and poster contest, as well as its revised educational program.182 Yet, curators were emboldened by their newfound appreciation for the multiplicity of human experience. Bolstered by the knowledge that a wide variety of people involved in historymaking were avoiding metanarratives, museum employees embraced the possibilities of nonlinearity. Without the directive to present one true story

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 195

of the past, museum employees no longer attempted to institute a chrono­ logical/cultural divide. Instead, the curators chose to create a nonlinear, the­ matically integrated opening exhibition. Focusing on the museum’s physical locale, curators settled on the theme of “Johannesburg Transformation,” each choosing from the subthemes of politics, home, work, and recreation, to create a display about which they were passionate. Charting the growth of South Africa’s largest city through the lives of the ordinary workers who enabled development, the new exhi­ bition positioned itself against old-fashioned top-down historical presenta­ tions. “The choice of each theme was based on various criteria,” curator Deon van Tonder enumerated: “Would it appeal to the immediate com­ munity; and could Johannesburg be used as a microcosm for the history and heritage of South Africa as a whole?” At the same time, he noted, “in the period of change, both in the country and in the Museum, the theme of ‘transformations’ seemed appropriated.” 183 Fulfilling these criterions, each of the four museum curators crafted a unique exhibition. The first, entitled What about the Workers, explored the importance of ordinary laborers to the country’s growth. The display included an under­ ground mineshaft that simulated the arduous working conditions on the gold and diamond mines of South Africa. The exhibition then juxtaposed a recreated workers’ hostel against a wealthy Randlord’s—or mine manag­ er’s—home, revealing the great disparity of wealth that characterizes the country. The presentation, assembled by Ann Wanless, also showcased a restored, authentic domestic worker’s room, bought wholesale by the mu­ seum from one Martha Papa of Yeoville. Giving viewers a sense of the small quarters in which most domestic workers live, this piece underscored the illegitimacy of apartheid. At the same time, Papa’s room—restored with her original belongings—showcased her resilience and dignity. Immaculate and proudly displaying her church uniform, the room spoke to the ways in which people make the most of their situations. In the second display, the Road to Democracy, David Saks used multime­ dia installations to illustrate the country’s political move beyond apartheid. Foregrounding objects such pass books, voting ballots, and campaign post­ ers, this exhibition chronicled both the legacy of apartheid and the con­ temporaneous run-up to the first free elections. Using television recordings, the display showed the famed release of Nelson Mandela and well as other momentous historical events. Displaying the death record of Hector Pieter­ son, the first child to die in the Soweto Uprising of 1976, alongside other evidence from that fateful day, the exhibit illustrated that democracy was borne of personal sacrifice. Overall, the Road to Democracy accentuated just

196 / Chapter Four

how treacherous the path to democratic freedom had been for the majority of South Africans. In Birds in a Cornfield, the third exhibit, curator Kerry Nkosi recounted the black majority’s struggle for adequate housing on the Rand. This dis­ play took its title from the famed statement by 1940s squatter-movement leader Oriel Monongoaha that Africans seeking housing near Johannesburg were like birds in a cornfield who, though frequently chased away by the farmer, would continually land in another spot. Since then, this metaphor of battling wills has been employed by scholars to illustrate one of black South Africans’ most poignant struggles in modern history—the struggle to occupy land in the vicinity of urban areas with employment opportunities. The apartheid state bolstered white privilege by dispossessing black Afri­ cans of land while simultaneously making it illegal for them to be in urban areas without secured employment. This translated into nothing less than an attack on the black family, since it impelled women and men to ven­ ture to the cities and leave their children and elders in rural impoverished “homelands.” In addition, the absence of married housing facilities made living together in permanent conditions impossible. Squatting became the only option for many families. Birds in a Cornfield was thus not only about the history of squatting movements and the perversity of racism, but also about the strength of the human spirit and the triumph of black South Africans. Visitors to the exhibit entered a Hessian tent—a replica of those erected in Orlando in the 1940s by the Sofasonke Party under James Mpanza, mentioned earlier in this chapter. This type of housing was the earliest kind of shanty dwellings on the Rand. Next to that stood the actual shack homes of two museum employees, Charles Mbubana and Sam Nyambose. These homes were purchased by the museum and then erected as they ex­ isted in their respective townships. The curator did everything possible to heighten the visitor’s sense of reality: life size mannequins were situated in the shacks, the floor of the exhibit was built up to look like mud, and a recording piped in the sound of a mother soothing her crying baby with the familiar lullaby,“Thula, Thula,” while taxis buzzed by in the distance. As real shack dwellings, the cardboard boxes, corrugated iron pieces, and magazine pages were all kept together by makeshift joints that indicated a history of frequent repairs.184 Overall, Birds in a Cornfield provided viewers with a display that was at once reconstructed and authentic to illustrate the importance of housing to human dignity. Interestingly, the decision to utilize the actual artifacts of real live people was not taken lightly, Hillary Bruce remembered:

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 197 I think it was the first time somebody had ever taken something like that. We took a shack—somebody’s home—and we put it in a museum and we treated it as an artifact. It’s an ethical thing and we weren’t at all sure that we were doing the right thing or not.

Nevertheless, Bruce reminded, the display was put up just as the Group Areas Act, which legislated housing according to race, was being abolished. At that time, Bruce noted, “whites were terrified [of] what was going to hap­ pen.”185 Thus, from one point of view, these exhibits were important in that they showed white South Africans how the majority lived. Yet, whites were no longer the museum’s target audience. On the other side, the curators had begun to believe that the majority of South Africans would welcome showcasing a nonidealized portrait of black history.186 Sandra de Wet re­ called “the enthusiasm with which the people were happy to participate and to let us have their shacks” as well as their willingness to “interact with the museum visitors afterwards.” In her memory, family members who had lived in the shacks as well as the domestic worker whose room was show­ cased—on hand during the museum opening—were far from embarrassed by how they lived. Rather, in de Wet’s words, “it was a time when blacks were very hopeful that the situation was going to change, that this was a stepping-stone.”187 Making artifacts of contemporary objects, museum cura­ tors labeled these items as belonging to the past. In the final display, Sounds of the City, Deon van Tonder traced the history of local popular music. The exhibition marked the evolution from Marabi culture of the 1920s to township jazz of the 1940s that famously grew out of the few multiracial western areas of the city like Sophiatown that persisted into the 1950s. Situated in a shebeen (or township bar) and replete with music, this exhibit sought to recreate the atmosphere of the hard-earned lei­ sure time of the working class. Life-size mannequins gestured to the scores of people that would typically fill such a venue, while recreated signs of dis­ repair reminded the viewer of the poverty of the situation. Complete with a wall of covers from the famed 1950s publication Drum magazine—known for its shots of pinup girls and tales of gangsterism—the exhibition exalted savvy, urban black culture. Suggesting a connection between music and politics, this display was at once lighthearted and poignant. On an exterior wall of the shebeen, for instance, was scribbled the graffiti message, “We won’t move: Hands off the western areas.” Scrawled in dripping red paint that evoked spilled blood, this message alluded to the fierce opposition to forced removals from places like Sophiatown that characterized the 1950s. Though all multiracial townships were eventually razed, the memory of that

198 / Chapter Four

7.  Sounds of the City display, part of Johannesburg Transformations, MuseumAfrica, 1994.

era lived on in, perhaps most importantly, song. Sounds of the City thus cel­ ebrated the creativity of those people forced to live and work in and around Johannesburg over the century. Using the geological collection and a display on gold as introductions, “Johannesburg Transformations” established the revamped Africana Mu­ seum—now known by the modern name MuseumAfrica—as a significantly different version of its predecessor. Indeed, the museum was notably dif­ ferent from its forbearer. Firstly, the museum now housed—under one roof—the Bensusan Museum of Photography and the South African Mu­ seum of Rock Art, in addition to its temporary displays. New exhibitions highlighted the authoring of each display, revealing the museum’s quest for transparency. Deon van Tonder explained the motivation for this move. The curators, he recalled, wanted to spotlight the fact “that each display was curated by someone,” and, moreover, to introduce visitors to “the curator who did this [particular] display.”188 Labeling in simple wording and in multiple languages (beyond English and Afrikaans), museum curators also made certain their desire to reach the broadest possible audience. At the level of ideology, by showcasing the lives of the black majority—at times

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 199

through actual artifacts—MuseumAfrica boldly declared that black objects were no longer regarded as frozen in time. Indeed, with the inclusion of real items of contemporaneous black South Africa, the museum suggested that the divided, racialized country was a thing of the past. At the 6 August opening of the museum, the public and 750 “special guests”—including politicians, activists, and local celebrities—enjoyed a concert featuring such icons of South African jazz as Dolly Rathebe, Dorothy Masuku, and the Elite Swingsters. Famed storyteller Gcina Mhlope treated visitors to tales of South Africa’s past, while the Sofasonke Choir—named for the Sofasonke Party—was also showcased. “It was indeed a marvellous opening weekend,” Acting Director Hillary Bruce recorded.189 During the weekends immediately following the opening, the South African Domestic Workers Union performed their play “Emakhishini” (or “in the kitchen”) at the museum as well. In total, the new MuseumAfrica established itself early on as a center for South African culture—past and present—that resonated with the majority population.190 As such, the museum bore out Bruce’s 1993 statement: “The Africana Museum aims to position itself as central to the teaching of history in schools, to reflect the culture of all its citizens and to be a lively and entertaining place to visit.”191 With a new mission and new exhibits, MuseumAfrica announced its arrival. Reflecting on the enthusiasm with which the museum opened, Ann Wanless mused, “it was fantastic, actually.”192 “People cared so much about the museum and what we were doing,” Bruce echoed of that time, recalling of the responses to the final display: People were moved to tears. That was the thing . . . we wanted . . . people to come away different. We wanted people to be disturbed by it, angered maybe. It didn’t matter as long as they didn’t come out just having had a beautiful afternoon.

Positioning itself against the old Africana Museum—and the notion that museums should simply uplift and entertain people—MuseumAfrica sought to move people emotionally. “I suppose we were all feeling passion­ ate that it was everybody’s history” at that time, Bruce summarized; South Africa was seen to be “everybody’s country,” such that “everybody should be shown” in the museum since “we all have a stake in it” and “we all make history.” At the same time, curators firmly believed, in Bruce’s words, that “museums can do things—they can make people come to terms with change and embrace change.” Believing in their ability to help mold the changing South Africa, MuseumAfrica employees passionately displayed

200 / Chapter Four

their new institution. “I suppose that is really what the palace revolution was about,” Bruce concluded: People felt . . . that you needed somebody from above to drive this project rather than holding it back. Which is why in the end you have to embrace change. Otherwise one might as well be dead. This is one of those things about living in South Africa, and particularly Johannesburg. It’s edgy isn’t it. It’s exciting.193

Echoing John Gubbins’s views that museums had the power to change so­ ciety and that the energy of Johannesburg made it the perfect venue for just such change, the newly empowered young guard of MuseumAfrica ges­ tured—if unknowingly—to their institution’s roots. In the hopeful months following the April 1994 democratic election, the museum opened to wide acclaim. “The response to MuseumAfrica has been overwhelming,” Deon van Tonder recorded in late 1994. “In August alone, it had 25,275 visitors, averaging 1,500 per day on weekends.”194 “In­ terest in the Museum Africa has been phenomenal since the opening,” an extramuseum document affirmed. 195 Reporting on the opening for the Mail and Guardian, Ivor Powell announced that despite the dubious exhibition of real black artifacts, in general, “it is hard not to be enthusiastic” about the new museum: “What we have is an attempt to create something that will be serviceable in the new South Africa, to look at history through new eyes and to suggest it through tokens and traces in the spaces of the museum,” he celebrated.196 “Sporting more than just a fresh coat of paint,” van Tonder summarized, the Museum has embarked on a completely new direction hoping to trans­ form itself into a dynamic community space where the diverse history of southern Africa can be explored and presented. It seeks to break away from its past reputation as a boring, static and largely irrelevant display space for predominantly white, colonial artifacts.197

Having completely overhauled itself in line with the ANC’s theoretical as­ sertions, a new museum was born alongside a new country. While, in van Tonder’s eloquent words, “providence seldom allows for the union of great historical events with the fashioning of an important instrument of their perpetuation and record . . . fortune has smiled on the new Africana Mu­ seum.”198 Concurring on the state of the museum in 1994, curator San­ dra de Wet asserted, “in 1994 it was a success,” quantifying that statement

“Determined to Be Relevant” / 201

by noting, “I suppose largely you can judge the success from the audience change. Just the numbers and the different people who came through the door. In other words a younger audience, a black audience.”199 Celebrating the museum’s successful reception by its target audience, de Wet expressed pride in the new institution. Promising that the curators had further plans, van Tonder asserted optimistically, “This is only the beginning.”200

Conclusion In 1994, in tandem with the new nation’s emergence, “Johannesburg Trans­ formations” signaled the regeneration of its host venue, now as a unified entity. The decade and a half that preceded this moment—during which the museum’s collection was polarized between black and white, with sup­ porters of the old and new ways of doing museum work taking up sides as members of guards old and new—all enabled this moment. Unlike its activities while in the public library, during this time period the museum— guided by a new generation of workers—took full heed of the moment in which it found itself. That this moment was itself fraught with uncertainty was evident in the museum’s halting decision-making process. In the end, though, the museum’s opening exhibition was well received, making the wait worthwhile. The museum’s celebration of the multiplicity of human experience, its foregrounding of the majority’s experiences, and its attempt at transparency all resonated with South Africa in that particular instant. Emerging from decades of racist totalitarianism and riding the wave of Afro-optimism spearheaded by an empowered ANC and, in no small part, Nelson Mandela, the nation appeared hungry for just the sort of cultural expression that MuseumAfrica now offered. The fit, in fact, was perfect. And yet, there were fault lines in the fabric of the young nation and in the museum. For the country, practical demands for housing, for electricity, for a viable health system, lay just below the shiny surface. For the mu­ seum, the need for a metanarrative, so long a preoccupation that was, in some sense, just swept aside in the final moment—pragmatically but also conveniently—would soon reassert itself. So too would other museological demands—for changing exhibitions, changing ideas, for change, in other words, simply to remain relevant. For both, reality would soon obtrude on the unreal moment of their (re)genesis. But all of this was in the future. In 1994, MuseumAfrica had its shining moment in a then glowing country. Little could its optimistic curators have guessed how fleeting it would be.

FIVE

On Display and in Storage: Museums and Archives in Postapartheid South Africa

In one of her final editorials for Africana Notes and News, Blanche Nagelgast marked the passing of former librarian and museum head Anna Hester Smith, whose death just happened to precede the end of the Africana Museum itself.1 Shortly thereafter, the prestigious Anna Smith Trophy for excellence in South African librarianship was awarded to the Johannesburg Public Library.2 In the context of the new South Africa, where libraries and museums had ever-increasing tariffs and where theft of city property in both venues had become commonplace, one wonders what Smith—and other members of the old guard like her—would have thought of their beloved library and museum.3 Louise de Wet, who began at the public library in 1953 and who ran the Africana Museum from 1975 to 1980, offered one view from this school of thought. Assessing MuseumAfrica nine years into its existence in 2003, she curtly remarked, “I didn’t like it, obviously.” Though she praised the display on rock art, she mused, “I missed the other lovely collections,” such as cape silver and costume. “I knew that they had to swing the whole thing to be in keeping with the new South Africa,” de Wet pronounced. Noting that she “didn’t like the Soweto [shanty display] at all” and that she “couldn’t see the point of making a museum of something that exists,” she effectively revealed the gulf that existed between the old and new guard, now fully in control of the revamped and renamed Museum­ Africa.4 Without doubt, in 1994, MuseumAfrica announced itself as being fundamentally different from its predecessor—and with great acclaim in a nation ready for a new depiction of its past. In 1994, the museum stood ready to suffer the consequences of its change, good and bad. In this chapter, I examine the successes and failures of MuseumAfrica over the last eighteen years, through its first postapartheid decade and

204 / Chapter Five

8.  Museum Africa exterior, February 2012.

beyond. This narrative is, on one level, about who liked the museum and who did not, and why, taking on the idea that a museum is only as good as the regard with which it is held. During this time period, the museum followed a distinctive trajectory. After its initial high point in 1994, it faltered, slowly depreciating over the next ten or so years. This descent is fleshed out here. In some ways, the museum’s decline mirrored what was happening in the country generally and with regard to museums and archives in particular. But in other ways, MuseumAfrica’s deterioration was precisely its own, for a variety of reasons, also enumerated here. At the same time, MuseumAfrica’s slow demise echoed currents in the global world of museology, another topic broached in these pages. While the museum’s nadir could provide an easy ending point to this study, I trace the museum’s story to the near present, during which the museum, under new management, has shown the first signs of stabilization. Developments from the last few years are probed to see how this happened and, more importantly, what this might forebode for the museum’s place in the new order. In sum, I situate MuseumAfrica within a narrative of postapartheid and post-transition South Africa in order to ask what place sites of commemoration—storehouses as they are of the past and thus present—hold.

On Display and in Storage / 205

MuseumAfrica’s First Decade During the first postapartheid decade, MuseumAfrica worked to remain in the cultural spotlight. In those years, the museum dramatically augmented its permanent exhibitions with the inclusion of the Geological Museum and large-scale displays, such as Frascati’s Bar, a reassembled version of the famed Johannesburg pub, open from 1902 to 1967. The museum also housed a string of noteworthy shows during its first ten years. Chief among these were photographer Peter Magubane’s portrait collection, Women of South Africa, opened by Winnie Mandela in 1996 to commemorate women’s resistance to apartheid, Ricky Burnett’s Tributaries, launched in 1985 and heralded as a landmark shift in the treatment of black artists, and the celebrated interdisciplinary examination of the built environment, blank_ Architecture, Apartheid, and After, opened in 2000.5 At the same time, the museum accommodated portions of the feted Johannesburg Biennales of 1995 and 1997 that sought to position the city at the center of the continent’s art scene.6 Allowing itself to be used as a venue for important cultural interventions, MuseumAfrica attempted to retain the prestige that attended its 1994 opening. In addition to these external events, the museum launched its own temporary exhibitions (many of which remain up to this day) during its first decade. Gandhi’s Johannesburg, which was opened by former president Nelson Mandela, was among the most impressive. The outgrowth of now Deputy Director of Immovable Heritage for the City of Johannesburg Eric Itzkin’s research into the same topic, this exhibition documented the life and legacy of Mahatma Gandhi in the very part of Johannesburg where the earliest Indian immigrants once settled. Funded by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations of New Delhi, this popular exhibition, at first temporary, quickly became permanent. Likewise, the museum’s show Tried for Treason, a multimedia examination of the renowned Treason Trial of antiapartheid activists, followed a similar path. Opened by ANC stalwart Walter Sisulu in 1996, it drew more than five hundred guests to its premiere.7 Centered around sixty-five drawings made by I. O. Horvitch (one of the accused) during the four and a half year long trial of antiapartheid activists, the display also included videotaped interviews with some of the 156 accused, evidence on the police and the media, and interactive components.8 Both exhibitions illustrated the museum’s continued attempts to make itself relevant to the new South Africa. Concurrent with these shows and others like them, the renovation of Newtown—begun under the last democratic city government of the

206 / Chapter Five

apartheid era—started to remake the museum’s immediate surroundings. Capitalizing on the presence of important cultural venues like the Market Theater (attached to the museum), which was the nonracial home of anti­ apartheid theater since 1974, and the jazz club Kippies, named after famed saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi, the town council continued to sanction efforts to turn what was considered to be a rough area into a cultural hub. In March 1996, the council recorded its view of Newtown in its minutes: Newtown has always been envisaged as a microcosm of what is happening in the changing urban environment and indeed of where public and private sector interventions can be seen to be put in place and what effect they can have in the regeneration of massive land holdings in the Central Business District.

As a symbol of greater Johannesburg with particular cultural significance, Newtown continued to be a focus of the postapartheid council. Anticipating that the proposed Constitutional Court of the new South Africa could reside in Newtown, the committee designated 8.13 million Rand for the Newtown Cultural Precinct (which may or may not have been spent).9 Though the names and directives of the various projects aimed at cultural development changed as the physical scope of Johannesburg was itself refined, Newtown remained on the agenda. Thus, when the City of Johannesburg established the Proprietary Limited Company the Johannesburg Development Agency (or JDA) based on international models of development in 2000, the organization immediately looked to Newtown. Given an initial mandate of five years and a budget of 19.54 million Rand, the JDA made the Newtown Cultural Precinct one of its top priorities.10 By 2004, the presence of the JDA and its partner, Blue IQ, was heavily felt in Newtown, just as it was at other local sites of development, such as Constitution Hill, the location of the actual Constitutional Court and site of the notorious Old Fort Prison complex, and Kliptown, the part of Soweto where the ANC’s 1955 Freedom Charter was signed.11 Like at these other places, the energy aimed at transformation was palpable in Newtown. With the erection of small skull sculptures surrounding the museum to designate the region as a cultural hub, Newtown came alive. Over the following years, the opening of the Workers’ Museum (a spin-off of MuseumAfrica) and the Bus Factory (a renovated warehouse now used as a business cooperative for African crafts) further enlivened the area. The refurbishment of the Market Theatre, including the opening of the “Afro-chic” restaurant Moyo to compliment the already well-attended Gramadoelas, only added to Newtown’s ambience. To top it all off, beginning in July 2003, the Nelson Man-

On Display and in Storage / 207

dela Bridge made reaching Newtown—and thus, MuseumAfrica—from the north far easier than ever before. Yet, despite all of the efforts toward making Newtown into a cultural focal spot, by 2004 the museum had floundered. In part, this was because by then museum workers barely interacted with either the JDA or Blue IQ, something then chief curator Deon van Tonder bemoaned.12 While this lack of coordination did not help the museum’s efforts, it was not the only reason for the space’s stagnation. According to Steven Sack, director of the Department of Arts, Culture, and Heritage for the City of Johannesburg, this dwindling was also reflective of the fact that “the process of transformation in the heritage sector [was] extremely slow . . . in the macro context.”13 Charged with overhauling public presentations of culture without simply effacing the past and burdened by a slew of other crucial tasks, government-initiated processes of cultural transformation were slow to reach fruition. At the same time, the frequent bureaucratic restructuring that occurred during the transitional period that surrounded the implementation of the constitution in 1997 crippled both the museum’s and the city’s attempts at revitalization. Richard Tomlinson, Robert A. Beauregard, Lindsay Bremner, and Xolela Mangcu enumerate the following changes: Between 1990, when the Chamber came into being, 1995, when the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council and four Metropolitan Local Councils were established, and 2001, when a single metropolitan government was established, the City of Johannesburg endured an extended period of uncertainty and political dispute, financial difficulties, and cycles of centralization, decentralization, and then centralization again.14

Amid all of this change, MuseumAfrica repeatedly petitioned the city for support. In an illustrative example, the museum articulated its concerns. The necessity of prioritising the demands on the Greater Johannesburg Transitional Metropolitan Council’s finite budget is acknowledged and the fact that essential provisions in the field of health, fresh water, solid waste, etc. might seem more urgent. Nevertheless the need for the cultural enrichment of the Greater Johannesburg Transitional Metropolitan Council community is also essential and MuseuMAfricA regards itself as a key player in this regard.15

Though it detailed its impediments to success—such as lack of funds and easy accessibility for visitors—the museum’s pleas fell on deaf ears. Unwilling or unable to follow its predecessors’ precedent of providing fiscal

208 / Chapter Five

support, the city government ceased funding cultural activities to the extent that it once had. Postapartheid realities, in other words, had caught up with the city and, by default, MuseumAfrica. Remarking on the museum’s stagnation a decade into its existence, former museum head Hillary Bruce gloomily concluded, “Now we have no money.”16 Having watched the slow erosion of its budget for years, by the early postapartheid period, MuseumAfrica found itself working with fewer funds than ever before. As a result, those exhibitions with which the museum opened—then meant to be temporary—remained up, in disarray. Then chief curator van Tonder illustrated how the museum arrived at its 2003 state, using the Treason Trial exhibit as an example. “The Treason Trial was . . . going to stay there for two years at most,” he explained: “But . . . it got a momentum of its own. It turned out to be quite popular with visitors and has now actually just stayed. Because now if we take it down we don’t have the money or anything to replace it with something different.”17 Though the original plan had supposed that the opening exhibitions and the one on the Treason Trial would be combined to form part of a general history of South Africa, lack of funds stymied this. At the same time, since schools quickly wrote these exhibits into their curriculums—desperate as they were for progressive illustrations of the country’s past—dismantling the shows became counterproductive. The inadvertent permanency of the museum rendered it disjointed within a decade. At the same time, the museum’s lack of a linear thread further undermined its credibility. Addressing this problem, van Tonder admitted that the haphazard accumulation of shows left visitors in 2003 unsure of how the Treason Trial exhibit, for instance, “fit in with everything else.”18 Speaking to the same topic, curator Sandra de Wet noted that the museum desperately needed a historical “framework” because, ten years after apartheid ended, most visitors did not “have a good idea of the whole timeline of South African history and the cause-effect thing into which to put these bits and pieces.” Expanding on the problem of contextualizing history within the present, de Wet noted the following: That’s one thing that we strongly realized with this thematic approach. It became much more evident with [the] Treason Trial, in fact, where people didn’t know where . . . this history slotted in. They didn’t know what bit it was, what came before or after or how it related to anything else.

Without an overarching explanation of how the snapshots from the past were interrelated in the context of a country emerging from a totalitarian,

On Display and in Storage / 209

history-silencing regime, the museum failed to make much sense to many viewers. “I’m not trying to make excuses” de Wet began, but, she asserted, “the reason why it hasn’t changed has largely been not ideological but staff and funding and just the general city of Johannesburg chaos in which we find ourselves working.”19 Admitting that the museum should have been “a whole lot more purposeful” about its actions since 1994—especially in light of the bureaucracy in which it found itself—de Wet nonetheless recognized that the lack of a guiding framework undermined the public’s ability to understand the museum’s shows. Just as exhibits ossified within a decade, by 2004, staff salaries had been frozen for years, with an increasing number of positions going unfilled each year. Former ethnologist Ann Wanless characterized such circumstances as nothing short of “soul destroying.”20 Arguably because of this situation, many of the innovative thinkers who helped create the new museum left. Interviews with museum employees—past and present—revealed a general sense of disgruntlement within the decade-old space. From a place gripped by inertia to a racially polarized environment, insiders characterized the museum as being rife with tensions. One regrettable outcome of such a working environment was the rise in corruption. From vacuum cleaners and the copper wiring that enabled the air conditioners to function to irre­ placeable geological specimens and antique maps, a vast amount of museum property went missing in the early years in ways that suggested insider collusion, at the very least.21 Moreover, the museum’s physical location— under the highway overpass in Newtown—continued to present problems. Not only does the freeway cause the building to vibrate and accumulate dust, but it also renders the building something of an extension of the road. This translated into the rooftop arrival of everything from rubbish to a human body (the unfortunate result of a police chase). Simultaneously, the assumption that Newtown was an unsafe part of town persisted well into the twenty-first century, in spite of all efforts to suggest otherwise. Without adequate funds to address problems relating to maintenance, staffing, and public perception, the museum—ten years on—had few options. Evaluating the state of MuseumAfrica in 2003, past employees expressed profound disappointment with the institution’s first decade. Former director of the Johannesburg Art Gallery and former acting director of Museum­ Africa, Rochelle Keene, summarized: “Those initial temporary exhibitions, I thought were reasonable. I thought they did something new in cultural history museums in this county at the time they happened. I think they’re now hopelessly out of date.”22 Echoing Keene’s diagnosis, Director of the Apartheid Museum Christopher Till said the following of the museum’s

210 / Chapter Five

1994 mission: “The basis of it was put in place [and] the momentum was put in place, [but] it was never realized.” Without the planned exhibitions that would link the episodic displays, Till remarked, “it looks bitty and it feels bitty.”23 “I’m often amazed that it manages to limp on the way that it does,” Ann Wanless similarly reflected on the then state of decay: “I feel sad because I think that it’s just got so much potential and I just think it’s just such a waste that it’s not being given the opportunity to shine.”24 Likewise voicing her regret, Hillary Bruce noted, “I’m sorry it’s frozen in time. It is and it’s very sad.”25 Devoid of ample funding, adequate staff, and a solid government mandate, MuseumAfrica, in 2004, barely lurched on.

MuseumAfrica in Johannesburg Before probing the causes and consequences of MuseumAfrica’s stagnation, it is worth pausing to situate the space in the context of larger Johannesburg. During the museum’s first decade, its physical surrounding underwent rapid and dramatic changes, some of which—relating to bureaucracy—have been gestured to above. At this time, the city itself became the focal point for an abundance of writing—some scholarly, some literary—aimed at capturing and analyzing its transformation from a singular, late apartheid Johannesburg to a complex and fractured space, alternately called—among other nicknames—Jozi, Joburg, or iGoli. Part of the attention that attached to Johannesburg may have derived from the fact that, as Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe recall, “until very recently, Johannesburg described itself as the largest and most modern European city in Africa.”26 The very way in which locals cast Johannesburg as extra-African primed interest in the metropolis’s transformation—in Nuttall and Mbembe’s lexicon—into an Afropolis, a city that is decidedly African. AbdouMaliq Simone has suggested that the changes in Johannesburg—transformations that were, arguably, first seen in the move of the central business district out of the city and into the northern suburbs—deserve attention not simply because they happened, but rather because of how they happened. “What is perhaps most significant about the transformation of the inner city,” Simone writes, “is not so much its character but the speed with which it has come about.”27 Perhaps unsurprisingly for a city that was born virtually overnight, the new Johannesburg—however termed—itself materialized in early the postapartheid years with astounding speed. This resurrection and all that it entailed (good and bad) in the end served to render the city an embodiment of the larger, new era. As André P. Czeglédy puts it, “what has emerged is an understanding of Johannesburg as the quintessential postapartheid city.”28

On Display and in Storage / 211

For Rian Malan, this metonymy is seen in the juxtaposition of ancient and modern, Western and African, black and white, which define the city, making it, as he writes, at once an outpost of western “civilisation” and a point of entry into another reality, a parallel kingdom of African consciousness. Prophets dance around fires in the shadow of skyscrapers. Ancestral cattle sacrifices are conducted in suburban gardens. Mud huts and nuclear power stations occur in the same landscape.29

Today, Johannesburg stands in for the times in which it finds itself, as an Afropolis with much to teach us about the South African now and African modernity at large. As a result, scholars, artists, and authors have found ample grist for their mills on its streets, under its grounds, in its malls, and behind its walls. Even a brief overview of what has been written recently about the city will help us locate the place—if any—that MuseumAfrica holds within it. A significant amount of late twentieth-century writing on Johannesburg reads the city via its structures. This is most notable in Clive Chipkin’s landmark Johannesburg Style: Architecture and Society, 1880s–1960s, which explores the medley architecture of the city, dating and contextualizing various design eras within it.30 Like Chipkin’s work—and likewise trained on the first part of the twentieth century—Jeremy Foster’s postapartheid inquiry Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa uses understandings of geographical place—in this case that of greater South Africa—to illuminate South African identity.31 For both Chipkin and Foster, physical space is inexorably linked to identity, power, and politics. The exhibition and catalogue blank___Architecture, Apartheid, and After speaks to similar concerns. In it, scholars, artists, and other public intellectuals investigate the ways in which apartheid—and its legacy—are inscribed in the physical terrain of South Africa generally.32 In recent years, scholars have extended the paradigm established here with regard to architecture to the many different structures that undergird Johannesburg, whether they relate to AIDS, civics, or service delivery, among others.33 A focus on the structure of Johannesburg necessarily entails an examination of its geography, broadly conceived. Those who write on this topic make much of the early postapartheid fracturing of the city, which saw the flight of white commercial enterprise from downtown and the simulta­ neous explosion of new suburbs, particularly those to the north, where power relocated. As Alan Lipman quips, gesturing to both this trend and

212 / Chapter Five

that of the built environment, “if it’s authentic local architecture you’re after, you won’t find it in the middle-class suburbs of Johannesburg.”34 Lindsay Bremner builds on the hollowness of the suburbs and their tangential relationship to the city proper when she notes that “many of its [Johannesburg’s] citizens no longer have a sense of belonging in Johannesburg at all.” Rather, she writes, they live, work and play in the suburbs. While they still speak fondly of Jozi, it is no longer a central or important figure in their collective landscape. Their experience of the city is shadowy, masked by a disdain for the urban (and love of the suburbs), a deep fear of the heterogeneous and a horror of middle age—all qualities of downtown Johannesburg. The Johannesburg to which most people aspire is the homogeneous shopping malls and Tuscan styled villas in the city’s northern suburbs. Downtown lies outside the frame.35

Speaking of that portion of the citizenry that is empowered to choose where to live, Bremner describes how many Johannesburgers have opted out of the city. Bongani Madondo—like other observers—gives voice to the flip side of Bremner’s coin, namely, the withering of Johannesburg’s downtown that went hand in hand with the suburban explosion. Lamenting “something long ago died inside me about Johannesburg,” Madondo chronicles the chaos, crime, and overall demise that have come to mark the inner city, a topic equally traversed in Ivan Vladislavic´’s masterful fiction.36 From all of these inquiries, postapartheid Johannesburg emerges as a fractured, inauthentic space. It seems to be a place that embodies Achille Mbembe’s notion of mimicry, a sprawling city that succeeds primarily in miming other regions’ architecture and style, a pastiche of all that had come before and all that exists elsewhere.37 It is for this reason, Marlene van Niekerk writes, that “belief in its [Johannesburg’s] ‘integrity’ seems to be lacking.” Calling the city but a “sprawling placeless place where glittering affluence and abject wretchedness are chained together like dead and living bodies,” van Niekerk paints a bleak image of the postapartheid city.38 Yet, a more generous reading of the city might suggest, as Mbembe does, that it is the very amalgamation of all that it mimes that makes Johannesburg what it is, the quintessential—if elusive—African metropolis. Mbembe reminds us that “even cities born out of mimicry are capable of mimesis,” their own sort of invention. To this end, he notes, just as “Johannesburg has evidenced this capacity to mime. In the process, the city has developed an aura of its own, its uniqueness.”39 In the end, it is ultimately the very amalgamation of images and identities, many competing, all “entangled”—to use Sarah

On Display and in Storage / 213

Nuttall’s apt term—that makes postapartheid Johannesburg the mad, mad place that it is for those who dwell there.40 Just as analyses of Johannesburg’s structures and geography are revealing, scholars have recently focused attention on reading the city via its inhabitants. This trend is well encapsulated by Nuttall and Mbembe when they write that “[a] city . . . is not simply a string of infrastructures, technologies, and legal entities, however networked these are. It also comprises actual bodies, images, forms, footprints, memories.”41 A city, in other words, is not purely defined by either its architecture or its geography. Rather, it is the sum of its human parts. Accessing this humanity has brought scholars to examine, as AbdouMaliq Simone puts it, “people as infrastructure.” In Simone’s inquiry, the very economic networks that people establish form a kind of framework for their lives.42 Likewise, Frédéric Le Marcis has asked what the city looks like through the eyes of those who are suffering from AIDS, what their movements reveal about the generosity and limitations of the urban space.43 Other scholars focusing on people have come to examine the sources and outcomes of xeonophobia and migration, among other topical elements of contemporary Johannesburg.44 Lastly, and not insignificantly, those wanting to see what Johannesburg looks and feels like for the individual have trained themselves on what has become the city’s most notorious attribute: its crime. Personal narratives of crime abound, giving voice to the choking fear with which many Johannesburgers now live.45 As Justice Malala poignantly confesses in his brutally honest essay “Losing My Mind,” “I am constantly afraid, so very afraid, of everyone and everything,” since violent crime “has happened to so many people I know.”46 Crime is largely what has made Johannesburgers feel as though they live constantly “at risk,” to use Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall’s phrase. It has led to the ubiquitous erection of walls, to the proliferation of the security industry, to the sense that citizens now live without power—both real and metaphoric.47 It is, sadly, much of what defines life in and around the city today. Reflecting on just this chaos, Rian Malan notes, “foreigners think we’re nuts, coming back to a doomed city on a damned continent.” And yet, he counters to the imaginary “you” of outside, “there’s something you don’t understand: it’s boring where you are.”48 Indeed, if there is one thing Johannesburg is decidedly not, it is boring. So where, we can ask, can we locate MuseumAfrica in this new, post­ apartheid city? Situated in Newtown, firmly within Johannesburg proper, MuseumAfrica continues to suffer the taint of its environs. As the editors to Emerging Johannesburg penned in 2003, “despite the city’s efforts, the perception of the city as dangerous and the economy as unstable persisted. . . .

214 / Chapter Five

Although Johannesburg discarded one off-putting image, it seemed to attract another, an image of a crime-ridden and deteriorating city, an inner city in decline.”49 As Jillian Carman has written about the Johannesburg Art Gallery, a cultural institution akin to MuseumAfrica that is likewise located downtown, efforts at revitalizing the space have continually come up against the reality that visitors are not comfortable traveling to, in that case, Joubert Park.50 MuseumAfrica’s other counterpart—and longtime home—the Johannesburg Public Library has followed a similar trajectory. Lizeka Mda wrote in 1998 about how the city council’s ten million Rand attempt to revamp the library gardens and create what it called a “Civic Spine” yielded disastrous, unintended effects. Instead of revitalizing the area, the council succeeded only in creating infrastructure that enabled further crime and loitering. Still, Mda praised, “there is no doubt that Johannesburg’s soul, if it still exists, has sought refuge in the Public Library.”51 Stephen Gray, longtime member of the Johannesburg Public Library Consultative Committee, painted a harsher picture of the institution itself in 2002. Concurring with Mda—and, one could note, longtime librarian Kennedy—that “the greatness of every city’s intellectual life depends on its library,” Gray bemoaned the slow demise of the space.52 As crime, filth, and, finally, lack of funds curtailed possibilities, the library’s ability to function was thwarted until, in 2001, the committee voted itself out of existence. Ivan Vladislavic´ presents a similarly dismal picture of the library under siege when he writes of finding himself in the face of a strike on the gardens while trying to do research there.53 “Take it as read,” Gray writes mournfully, “that I understand my city’s greatness has moved elsewhere.”54 Despite all of these negative pronouncements, there remains a pull to inner city Johannesburg. The recently opened Arts on Main is evidence of just this kind of hope.55 Rom Odhiambo writes lovingly—and in stark contrast to the accounts above—about downtown Johannesburg and, in particular, about Newtown itself. Connected to other parts of the city by the post­ apartheid creation, the Nelson Mandela Bridge, and heralded as the cultural heart of the city, Odhiambo articulates one point of view that refuses to cast aside the city entirely. “There is something alluring about the Mandela Bridge,” he pens, questioning, “is it the sheer size of the bridge? Or is it the promise of something ‘new’ to be experienced in Newtown?”56 He elaborates on what one finds on the other side: “In Newtown, one senses, among the artists, actors, theatergoers, even vagabonds, some kind of excitement about the energies of cross-racial cultural renewal and cohabitation that the new South Africa possesses.”57 For Odhiambo, Newtown functions as it was meant to: as the space around which all of Johannesburg’s best creative en-

On Display and in Storage / 215

ergies coalesce. Still, neither here nor elsewhere in the literature mentioned, do we find MuseumAfrica itself. Somehow, this space—its architecture, its promise, even its failure—has escaped postapartheid scrutiny. Here, it seems, almost, invisible. Perhaps that is because its narrative resonates with that of so many others in the fledgling nation.

MuseumAfrica’s Nadir Contextualized within Larger South African Trends For all that MuseumAfrica’s story—like that of any biography—is distinctly its own, the nadir it reached in 2004, ten years into both its and the post­ apartheid nation’s existence, reflected larger trends within the fragile nation. The fact that the museum found itself strapped for cash in 2004 was unsurprising to onlookers familiar with the state of the nation generally at that time. For then, ten years after Nelson Mandela’s triumphant rise to power, the country had yet to achieve the ends imagined on that hopeful day: many remained homeless, without running water or electricity; the bulk of wealth and power still resided in the hands of a few; and much of the country’s history-making sector continued to honor but minority experiences. Change, in short, had come slowly to the country. Despite the heroic attempts of the new government to enact its promises, the reality was that there was simply too much to do in the early postapartheid years. And it was precisely in places like MuseumAfrica—funded, as it was, by the municipal government—that the results of living under an overburdened government were felt most acutely. In part, the crisis MuseumAfrica found itself in was also reflective of a general shift, begun even before the end of apartheid, in how museums were regarded. Out of the Victorian world from which they sprung, museums (and other such civic places) were long seen as existing above the fray of economics. As former museum head Hillary Bruce explained, “we were brought up . . . to believe that museums and libraries were a service. They were something that was given that we [the people] were entitled to.” Yet, from the late 1970s onwards, in South Africa—and elsewhere—a distinct shift in reception could be felt. Again, in Bruce’s words, even “before we became democratic” in 1994, “there was a whole new sweep through the council and a change of attitude that we [as museums] had to become profit making enterprises.”58 At that time, the notion that museums had to be lucrative—and that they had to adhere to generally accepted business practices to do so—came into fashion, and with great effect.59 For with this transformation, museums found themselves needing to contribute not

216 / Chapter Five

simply to civil society, but also to the city’s coffers. With this change, museums had to reevaluate their programs and procedures. They also had to fight for money like never before. According to Jane Duncan’s analysis, from 1996, the Ministry of Arts, Culture, Science, and Technology has seen its budget gradually reduced, reflecting the new sense of museums as moneymakers as much as the government’s own fiscal crisis.60 MuseumAfrica, it seems, was not alone in its struggle ten years into the postapartheid era. And yet, taking a broader look at funding opportunities, it appears that money for the arts—and museums included—actually increased in the postapartheid era.61 In the 1990s, the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology designated some museums and collections “DCIs” or declared cultural institutions. These corporate bodies then received annual funding from the department.62 DCIs quickly came to include the newly established flagship institutions.63 Modeled after the American Smithsonian Institute, the northern and southern flagships, as they are known, each contains a cluster of museums brought together under an umbrella for funding and marketing purposes. So, for instance, the southern flagship—called Iziko—includes what was the South African Museum, the South African National Gallery, the Michaelis Collection, and more.64 While each museum has to jockey for funds within the flagship itself, the fact is that money was and continues to be forthcoming.65 Likewise, the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology established, in the postapartheid era, a Legacy Project to sanction the creation—and funding—of new museums. Its principal project was the Robben Island Museum, opened on 24 September 1997.66 Other projects have included the Ncome Museum, which marks the site of the 1838 Zulu Boer War in KwaZulu Natal, and the Nelson Mandela Museum in Umtata, Eastern Cape. For these museums—old and new—funds have been available even if the overall department budget has been shrinking. Still other museums, like the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, found postapartheid support from the gambling industry. In Johannesburg generally, in fact, available money for museums has risen postapartheid. Director of Arts, Culture and Heritage in the City of Johannesburg Steven Sack estimated that, in 1994, the budget he then controlled was around two hundred million Rand. Nine years later, it had more than quadrupled to just under a billion Rand.67 All in all, it appears that, ten years into the new nation, there was money available for cultural institutions. So what then, we can ask, happened to MuseumAfrica?68 By 2004, MuseumAfrica had fallen victim to the perception that, in the postapartheid era, museums generally were a mess. The availability of funding for museums during this period thus indicates not an acceptance of the

On Display and in Storage / 217

state of museums in the country, but rather, and importantly, profound unhappiness with places of commemoration. In a 1996 White Paper, an Arts and Culture Task Group bemoaned the fact that “the provision of museum services has lacked co-ordination, there having been no national museum policy. Planning has been fragmented, many communities do not have access to museums, and cultural collections are often biased.”69 Committing itself to reevaluating the state of DCIs, the group “encouraged” state-funded institutions “to redirect their outputs to new activities which reflect the overall goals of the Government,” cautioning that “allocations will become subject to performance measures.”70 In total, the White Paper called for a complete overhaul of museums. “Like other aspects of our society,” the paper pronounced, “arts, culture and heritage must undergo a fundamental transformation if they are to achieve the vision embodied in our commitment to human dignity, the achievement of equality, and advancement of human rights and freedoms.” By so doing, nothing less than “the nature of our democracy [would be] enhanced and a better quality of life for all . . . attained.”71 While affirming the importance of arts and culture to a viable democracy, this paper simultaneously served as a warning to museums, old and new: either change or get left behind. In much the same way, then President Nelson Mandela’s speech marking the opening of the Robben Island Museum in 1997 exposed the low regard for museums then found within government circles. During the apartheid years, Mandela reported, most museums “represented the kind of heritage which glorified mainly white and colonial history” with “the small glimpse of black history in the others . . . largely fixed in the grip of racist and other stereotypes.” “Unfortunately,” he continued, casting aspersions at many in the museum industry, “the redressing of this situation has barely begun.” It is hard to imagine that, in a place like MuseumAfrica, which had spent the better part of a decade reinventing itself, words like these would be taken lightly. Calling for an overhaul of past ways of commemoration in order to, in his words, “strengthen our attachment to human rights, mutual respect and democracy,” Mandela, like the authors of the White Paper before him, affirmed the importance of culture to civil society.72 At the same time, he too made his distaste for the then current state of museums clear. In the years since the White Paper and Mandela’s speech, the general sense among educated onlookers is that politicians—the holders of government purse strings—pay little, if any, attention to museums. Steven Dubin has quoted sources saying that, while politicians use museums to enhance their images, they do not actually value these spaces.73 Likewise, at a 2010 talk at Iziko on the future of museums, Andrew Lamprecht noted how

218 / Chapter Five

commonplace it had become for stories to surface about ministers trying to close exhibitions, without actually engaging with them. Maybe, he offered, it was actually good that government officials weighed in on museum work under apartheid; for this, he suggested, at least showed that they had cared enough to get involved.74 Rightly or not, in post-transition South Africa, if this is a term we can apply to the country more than ten years after the end of apartheid, there is a general sense that museums are ignored and have been for some time.75 Certainly, this is the case with MuseumAfrica. And, without doubt, here the fact that MuseumAfrica—though reinvented in 1994—is actually just the new face on an old institution is particularly important. For if South Africans fail to pay adequate attention to museums—as observers would have us believe—then they particularly ignore old museums, of which MuseumAfrica is one. Despite the fact that MuseumAfrica changed its name, its face, and its identity in 1994, and regardless of the warm reception it received upon its reemergence, the museum continues to suffer the taint of its colonial and apartheid history, as it has for some time. This is because it, like other longstanding museums, is still regarded as a bastion of the old South Africa. “We are battling against a perception that it’s only [places like] the Robben Island Museum [and] the Nelson Mandela museum that are transformed,” Rochelle Keene explained in 2003: “And there’s a very real perception that any museum established before 1994 is not transformed.” “An unspoken thing, also,” she continued, venturing into the muddy territory of racism, “is that if you are a white heading an institution, it is sine qua non untransformed, even if you were appointed post 1994.”76 Drawing upon her personal experience at the helms of both MuseumAfrica and the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Keene expressed, without bitterness, her impression as a white museum worker in the postapartheid era. “I suppose then with the transformation of this place, it hasn’t completely worked,” MuseumAfrica curator Sandra De Wet concurred: “There is still a perception in minds that it’s an old institution.”77 And this problem is not localized to MuseumAfrica. According to Khwezi ka Mpumlwana, Gerard Corsane, Juanita PastorMakhurane, and Ciraj Rassool, despite some changes made to museums in the 1980s and 1990s, not enough has been done to change how they are viewed: For the majority of South Africans, museums, at best, had little or no value for them. At worst, these institutions were seen as agents that helped to reproduce and maintain the status quo of inequalities controlled by, and in the service of, dominant cultures.78

On Display and in Storage / 219

Despite whatever alterations have been made, these authors assert, the general public continues to see old museums as “agents” of a discredited world order. This position is endorsed by Julie McGee who writes that, whatever changes came to museums notwithstanding, “legitimacy is [still] maintained by those who have always been in power” in the transformation period.79 As a result, museums have floundered. Using the South African National Gallery (SANG) as her example, McGee explains the arc it followed, one which mimics beautifully that of MuseumAfrica: “Prior to 1994 the SANG had already begun its transformation process: this beginning brought optimism, hope for the future, and some tangible changes. Today, however, much of this optimism has been tempered if not lost.”80 By this reasoning, since change was only skin deep—at MuseumAfrica as much as at the SANG—it could not in fact be called change at all. For many, these old spaces, despite their efforts toward transformation, do little more than harken to the bad old days. Another part of what has sullied MuseumAfrica’s reputation is that, as a cultural history museum, a visible portion of its contents falls within the domain of ethnographic items. That it holds a large store of objects of nonwhite South Africans brings into sharp relief the ways in which objects of black and white South Africans were collected and treated differently—and indeed unequally—during the colonial and apartheid eras. The nature of the museum’s holdings also stands in contrast to the fact that unlike in the Johannesburg Art Gallery, this topic has not, in and of itself, been the focus of much of the museum’s attention.81 And, yet, how objects of black South Africans have been handled remains a highly controversial topic. The emotion surrounding the treatment of objects of black Africana generally was made abundantly clear in the storm surrounding the 1996 exhibition Miscast: Negotiating Khoisan History and Material Culture, that, while attempting to problematize the treatment of Bushmen life casts in the SANG ended up fueling the debate itself.82 As multiple observers have espoused upon, how objects of black life were collected, preserved, and displayed—not to mention how and why full-sized body casts were made—continues to matter well into the postapartheid and now post-transition era.83 Mandela, too, weighed in on the complex treatment of ethnography in his speech at the opening of the Robben Island Museum. Referencing the once common portrayal of black people within “natural history museums usually reserved for the depiction of animals,” he argued that these “degrading forms of representation inhibit our children’s appreciation of the value and strength of our democracy, of tolerance and of human rights. They demean the victims and warp the minds of the perpetrators.”84 The unjust representation

220 / Chapter Five

of blacks, in other words, has ramifications far beyond the walls of the museum, Mandela and others have argued, echoing similar charges that have been leveled at MuseumAfrica over the years. While most of the accusations that it treated black culture incorrectly attached to the institution as the African Museum or AMIP, MuseumAfrica continues to face claims like these in its revamped form. To some onlookers, for example, problematic museum acquisition procedures preclude any meaningful use for the objects within its ethnography collection. Those objects—or at least those that are deemed worthy—should rather be subsumed within the Johannesburg Art Gallery, they argue, thereby overcoming what is often considered to be a false division between art and artifact.85 In short, that MuseumAfrica is largely comprised of ethnographic items adds to the poor regard with which it is held. As an old space filled with ethnographic items, MuseumAfrica is up against those currents within the nation that look unfavorably at this particular kind of museum, calling it irrevocably unchanged.86 Facing this mindset, by 2004 MuseumAfrica had largely balked. Ignored by politicians, stripped of funds and fame, its existence was perilous at best. In these ways, its narrative echoed some of what was going on beyond its doors: stretched thin financially, many government funded bodies suffered in these years. And yet, a whole other narrative could be discerned at this time, a story of new museums being built, opened, and attended, of a new kind of historymaking going on—some of which has been gestured to above. Ten years after the apartheid era ended, many believed that only new or newly reconfigured museums had a place in the new nation. These spaces were thus being made and celebrated. It is worth pausing at this point to flesh out why and how this came to be. For in the shadows, we find MuseumAfrica. By 2004, in spite—or perhaps because—of the way that the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission had done its work, the nation remained suspended between forgetting and remembering.87 In this climate, new museums, ones supposedly free of the shackles of the past, gained considerable importance. For these museums had the power, it was believed, not only to shed light on history and the present, but also to reveal what was fast becoming a catchword of the new order: heritage. As Ben Ngubane, then Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology affirmed through naming it as such at a 2000 visit to the flagship institutions, while the “new context of broad social transformation is officially under way in all sectors of our society . . . The heritage sector is not going to be an exception.”88 What had hitherto been ascribed to the flighty world of arts and culture now became a weighty sounding “heritage sector.” Heritage, or the accumulation of a past legacy, connoted something that had long been denied, something

On Display and in Storage / 221

that was being reclaimed, something that demanded attention in a nation intent on remaking itself. Heritage became a foil for the way things had been done in the past. It was a powerful term, and one that the government quickly rallied behind. Under the rubric of heritage, a new crop of institutions was quickly fashioned. Legacy museums were established, as noted above. Describing two of these earliest places—the museum at Ncome and the Nelson Mandela Museum—Ngubane provided some insight into how a heritage museum differed from what people previously understood a museum to be. He described the purpose of Ncome thusly: It is going to function as a museum/art gallery/community centre/language and cultural centre as well as a resources centre—all-in-one (a one-stop centre, if you may call it that). The emphasis will be on bringing vibrancy, creativity, community participation and a total departure from the static view of museums as places where you will find all dead things.

The Mandela museum, he likewise affirmed, was to be presented as a three-pronged project, consisting of a conventional museum, a cultural village and a community centre in three different places around Umtata. Again this Museum is going to mark a complete departure from the notion of a static view of museums, to the one that prioritises accessibility, broad participation, tourism promotion, and community ownership.89

Unlike museums of yesteryear, the argument went, these new heritage spaces would be alive. They would be inviting, entertaining, and serve not simply as static temples, but also as vibrant forums in which people could interact and live.90 Far from the enclosures of disempowerment museums once were, these new spaces would be loci of empowerment. Parallel to these legacy projects, the postapartheid period saw the creation of other museums that considered themselves to be “people centered,” as opposed to the long-held formula that regarded museums as being necessarily “object-centered,” to use Mpumlwana, Corsane, Pastor-Makhurane, and Rassool’s phrases.91 Thus, spaces like the District Six Museum, named for the area razed by apartheid ideologues in Cape Town, arose to wide acclaim.92 In Johannesburg, places like the Hector Pieterson Museum (commemorating the Children’s War of 1976) and the Apartheid Museum (focusing on the twentieth-century struggle) likewise became fast darlings of the new South Africa. Interestingly, both of these Johannesburg institutions

222 / Chapter Five

owe their beginnings and large portions of their collections to Museum­ Africa. The Hector Pieterson Museum grew out of photographer Peter Magubane’s display Never, Never Again, opened at MuseumAfrica in 1996 by the premier of Gauteng, Tokyo Sexwale.93 Central to this display was the official death register containing Pieterson’s name, collected earlier by the Africana Museum.94 The museum was championed by the deceased’s sister, Antoinette Pieterson, who received training at MuseumAfrica in preparation for the erection of the Soweto-based venue. In keeping with making it a people- rather than object-based museum, the physical venue of the museum was integrated into the surrounding township in a way that denotes outside—and the folks who live there—as being as important as what is stored inside. The famed Apartheid Museum, another people-centric space, similarly traces its genesis to MuseumAfrica. Director of the Apartheid Museum Christopher Till was intimately involved in the creation of MuseumAfrica, documented herein. It turns out that many of the ideas that were enacted in the commercially funded Apartheid Museum mirror those raised during the museum’s six years of debate. At the same time, a large portion of the objects found in the Apartheid Museum came from MuseumAfrica. As a result, for many years MuseumAfrica personnel viewed both this and the Hector Pieterson Museum with a certain amount of dismay. Among other points of contention were the facts that MuseumAfrica preceded these other museums and that MuseumAfrica is the only one—of the three—that engages in the time-consuming and expensive task of collecting objects. Christopher Till readily concedes this point: “The resource of MuseumAfrica is absolutely amazing. If there’s a strength of the museum, it’s its collection, there’s no question about it.”95 Today—to the extent that it is able—MuseumAfrica continues to collect objects, something that was once considered to be a prerequisite for any museum.96 Yet, this is no longer thought to be integral to museums. Now, new museums are tasked not with amassing physical remnants of the past (though they may do this) since, it is felt, such a mission necessarily privileges a Eurocentric model. Rather, these new spaces are charged to “collect, preserve and access memories, stories, ideas, concepts, music, oral testimonies.”97 They are empowered to reclaim and protect the histories of those whose stories may or may not be documentable via artifacts. It is people, their lives, their memories, their histories, that matter here. Today it is believed that this in fact constitutes the nation’s heritage. To a certain extent, new museums that emerged after 1994 also targeted heritage’s counterpoint: tourism. Eager to meet the needs of an emergent population of folks wanting to visit the postapartheid nation, new muse-

On Display and in Storage / 223

ums arose with an eye toward satisfying global customers. When heritage became a commodity, as Leslie Witz, Ciraj Rassool, and Gary Minkley describe, township tours, cultural villages, and African theme parks emerged.98 Here visitors were given a view of either a timeless world, in the case of the cultural villages, or a world very much gripped by contemporary history, such as townships. Either way, tourists were able to partake in “authentic Africa,” getting to know the native so they might better know themselves. Investigating this area, Carolyn Hamilton has unpacked the implications of the movie-set-come-tourist attraction, Shakaland, which similarly offers up supposedly “real” tribal life for consumption.99 In a related vein, David Bunn has explored how this mindset has translated beyond the walls of a physical museum, in his case to the game park, its own kind of “museum outdoors,” to use his terminology.100 These and other stops on the tourist route of the new South Africa—the “world in one country,” as the slogan went—were about the commodification of heritage, about selling the nation’s past.101 Leslie Witz has pointed out that not all postapartheid heritage interventions met with success by examining the SANG, after its Bushmen diorama was taken down, and the newly constructed, townshipbased Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum. These particular instances—that is, the removal of a much-visited, if dated, exhibition and the construction of a physical museum in a township—actually failed to meet the expectations of tourists. In the case of the SANG, people still wanted to see the life casts, as problematic as scholars may have found them. And when it came to a township, tourists simply did not want to find a physical museum present. Neither, it seemed, fit with their expectations of authenticity.102 In the end, it appears that what matters most in post-transition South Africa is that the needs of heritage and tourism are met. From township tours to people-centered museums—heritage interventions that consumed MuseumAfrica’s spotlight and then some—a single, discerning feature emerges: all of these places ultimately disregard institutions as being the sole keepers of memory. As a result of emerging from a half century of totalitarian rule, which was marked in no small part by an overly bureaucratic regime, a lack of faith in cultural institutions can be felt around the country. Verne Harris speaks to this process with regard to archives. “If archives were indeed so central to social memory,” Harris writes, using archive to subsume other places of commemoration like museums and libraries, then archival institutions would be powerful, well-resourced, and controlled tightly by the state. The contrary, of course, is true. . . . My point, simply, is

224 / Chapter Five this: none of these institutions is as central to social memory as professional practitioners like to believe.103

For Harris, though archivists cling to a sense of themselves as guardians of what is knowable, when it comes to social memory—a term as slippery as any—they are far less important than imagined. This, it seems, is a point of view that attaches not simply to archives, but also to museums and other places of memory in the new South Africa: they just are not that important.104 And no doubt this has hampered MuseumAfrica’s position in the new nation as well. In spite of the fact that the demand to celebrate the variety of human experiences has led to the feeling that institutions are no longer the sole caretakers of memory, there is a fault line that all spaces of commemoration, new and old, must contend: the need for a singular narrative. In the old days, of course, all museums—the Africana Museum included—presented clear-cut narratives. These were the very stories that got these museums into trouble in the waning years of the apartheid regime.105 Upon reopening in 1994, MuseumAfrica shied away from offering a single story.106 In part, the move was deliberate. But it also grew out of the institution’s inability to conceive of a way to integrate chronological and cultural history—code, as has been shown, for black and white cultural objects. Unable to articulate one narrative, MuseumAfrica was simply reflecting society’s inability to envision an inclusive metanarrative. As has been documented, MuseumAfrica overcame this impasse by avoiding it altogether with a thematic, nonlinear display. The museum was successful upon opening because it captured the timely moment of a society in flux. Yet, as this moment passed, the need for a new national narrative reasserted itself. In this context, the museum’s inability to offer one—reflective of both society’s shortcomings and larger museological trends—rendered the institution irrelevant. For keen observers, the fissures were readily discernible. As early as 1994, Carolyn Hamilton offered a critique of the newly revamped institution. While praising the speed and energy with which MuseumAfrica was born, Hamilton wrote that the incompleteness of the story told, the emphasis on popular culture, the use of the picturesque in evocative ways, is open to a reading which suggests that “people’s history” is a pastiche of experiences which is not driven by the same logic of cause and effect in powerful sequence, as are the histories of the powerful.107

On Display and in Storage / 225

The absence of a metanarrative, in other words, placed the museum at risk of reifying the long-held divide between black and white, between culture and history. As much a criticism of people’s history as an assault on this particular space, Hamilton’s words brought attention to a problem whose urgency would only continue to grow in the postapartheid period: despite the longtime wish to replace a singular dogma with multifaceted truths, all people crave some sort of national narrative. As Ingrid De Kok observed in 1998, “there is a strong impulse in the country, supported and sustained by the media, for a grand concluding narrative, which will accompany entry into a globalized economy and international interaction with the world.”108 Once the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had laid waste to the old national myth, the need for a new governing story grew. The problem, of course, was what that narrative would entail. A unitary story of South Africa could not be displayed in 1994 because it had not yet been written. In part, the directive for such a history constituted part of the problem. For in the new, ANC-governed South Africa, the history needed to be nonracial. In other words, it had to encompass successfully the narratives of all South Africans. And this was no small feat. Speaking specifically of the history of Robben Island, Mandela posed rhetorical questions that could easily apply to the history of the nation at large: “How do we look at the histories of different people who lived here, through various ages. . . . How do we give expression to these diverse histories as a collective heri­ tage?”109 There were and are no easy answers to these questions. As an ideology, nonracialism is as difficult to imagine in practice as three-dimensional thought. What does it mean to privilege no one race, to see all sides of all stories simultaneously? In the museum world—or, at least, in Museum­ Africa in 1994—a nonracial display was too much to ask. At that moment in time, the public was forgiving. But as that hopeful moment slipped away, the public once more demanded a narrative. Without a ready nonracial narrative that would satisfy all people, the struggle narrative achieved prominence in the postapartheid period, and with good reason. To the victors goes the ability to write history, as the trope goes. As Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee explained, by 1988 “the struggle against apartheid [was] seen as the most significant and important lens through which to view the past. The result for museum practice is that narratives of resistance [were] often foregrounded, with exhibitions thereby serving the aims of nation building.”110 Today, post-transition, the story of the struggle continues to drown out all other competing narratives, witness the success of spaces like the Apartheid Museum and the new Freedom Park,

226 / Chapter Five

the memorial to the creation of democracy, located in Pretoria. Clearly, it is important to tell this story. But in its telling, a new metanarrative is born, one that silences other tales, some of which equally have the power to illuminate our understanding of the past and present. For places of commemoration, this creates a dangerous environment. As described by archivist Michelle Pickover in 2010, “the archive now, if it is not showing the lineal national narrative, it becomes superfluous” in the minds of those who control purse strings.111 Ingrid De Kok similarly warns that, as sound as it may be for the nation “to erase the fouler accretions of its past, the physical signs, totems, and fetishes,” without these, amnesia can arise.112 Cognizant of these and other practical concerns, museum workers are at a loss. Reflecting on the pitfalls that surround the need for a narrative, Andrew Lamprecht noted that while curators were “telling stories” through their work, he felt that the museum world remained, in 2010, crippled without having a “clear expression on what our national heritage is.”113 Without a wholly encompassing story of how the nation got to where it is, museum workers—like people generally—either fall back upon the struggle narrative (cognizant though they may be of what this occludes) or remain in the realm of deliberately incomplete and partial stories. Clearly, the absence of a governing national metanarrative derives from the nation’s recent emergency from apartheid and colonial rule. But there is also a way in which this problem extends beyond South Africa to global museological trends. Broadening our gaze, we see that South Africa’s problem—MuseumAfrica’s problem—is not entirely nation specific.

MuseumAfrica’s Nadir Contextualized within Global Trends Reflecting in 2003 on the state of MuseumAfrica, Sandra de Wet admitted, “We had a real high point in 1994,” grimly adding, “we’ve been gradually losing ground since then.”114 MuseumAfrica’s nadir ten years into its revamped existence was at once the product of its specific narrative and a reflection of larger South African processes. But it also echoed global museological problems. All over the world, museums are in crisis, and have been for some time. In part, this derives from the fact that, since the 1980s at least, all manner of museum work has come under scrutiny, resulting in a plethora of studies on museums.115 Because—or as a result—of this, museums have changed their focus, sometimes willingly, sometimes grudgingly. No longer trained on simply the world inside their doors—on preserving, interrogating, and displaying objects—they are now concerned with engaging the world outside.116 As a result, museums—or at least those museums

On Display and in Storage / 227

interested in staying relevant to audience demands—have transformed, in Duncan Cameron’s now well-used phrase, from temples to forums. As he put it, “the temple is where the victors rest” while “the forum is where the battles are fought;” one “is product” while one “is process.”117 For Cameron, writing in 1971, the old, well-worn model of museums-as-temples no longer served the needs of the audience. In his mind, the exaltation of one definitive story was at odds with people’s lived experiences. For through it the museum became just another technology of rule. He thus called for the birth of museums-as-forums, as places where debate—not dogma—reigned. Forty some years later, this call has largely been heeded, but not without much angst. As Eileen Hooper-Greenhill put it in 1992, The last few years have seen a major shifting and reorganisation of museums. Change has been extreme and rapid, and, to many people who loved museums as they were, this change has seemed unprecedented, unexpected, and unacceptable. It has thrown previous assumptions about the nature of museums into disarray. The recent changes have shocked most those who felt that they knew what museums were, how they should be, and what they should be doing.118

In MuseumAfrica and museums the world over, change was hard earned. If museums worldwide have faced criticism from the museum world and the academy, prompting a global overhauling of their methods, then they have also felt a growing emphasis on economic prerogatives. No longer is it sufficient for a museum to contain merely a collection; now it must also house shops and cafés. It must now be, as Robert Lumley writes, “no longer a building at all, but a site.”119 By becoming a destination, the museum meets the new criteria expected of it: it feeds the bottom line. Undoubtedly—and just as in MuseumAfrica—this change in focus did not come easily. Nor did it come without a price. As Robert Janes notes, “the majority of museums, as social institutions, have largely eschewed, on both moral and practical grounds, a broader commitment to the world in which they operate” since “they have allowed themselves to be held increasingly captive by the economic imperatives of the marketplace and their own internallydriven agendas.”120 In a world where museums’ import rests squarely on their fiscal performance, other, older museological concerns necessarily fall by the wayside. And this phenomenon is happening all over. The crisis that many museums find themselves in also owes itself, in part, to the rise of television, media, and other forms of simulation. While new media has not necessarily eclipsed museums—as some observers

228 / Chapter Five

suggest—it has pushed museums toward enacting their own multimedia displays—another dramatic shift museologically.121 At the same time, the rise of what Jean Baudrillard calls the “hyperreal,” or the place where simulacra precedes the real, has greatly affected museum work. For we live now in an age when anything can be simulated, where anything can be made to look like something else. Baudrillard uses the example of the caves of Lascaux. There, he writes, “under the pretext of saving the original . . . the caves . . . have been forbidden to visitors and an exact replica constructed 500 metres away, so that everyone can see them.” Probing the near absurdity of this—a practice now mimicked at outdoor site museums worldwide— Baudrillard muses that while “it is possible that the very memory of the original caves will fade in the mind of future generations . . . from now on there is no longer any difference: the duplication is sufficient to render both artificial.”122 While there is a distinct way in which the real is actually exalted by simulacra—as touched on in the introduction and conclusion to this book—there is also a way in which museum practices like these threaten the entire museum process. If everything can be created, if the whole world can be “museumised,” again in Baudrillard’s words, then what purpose does a physical museum serve?123 In much the same vein, the rise of postmodern concerns has threatened museums in general and museums of cultural history in particular. For it was not only in South Africa that the need for a singular narrative competed with the exaltation of the multiplicity of human experience; rather, the move away from metanarratives can be found worldwide as part and parcel of postmodern thought. For museums, longtime purveyors of a singular narrative, this shift has been particularly difficult to reconcile. How to promote multiple histories is tricky in any context, not just in the South African one. Concurrently, problems arose around how ethnographic items, in particular, ought to be displayed, which again reflects the strain of postmodern thought that exalts the subaltern and that problematizes hitherto accepted categories. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett investigates these questions and others that surround them in her 1998 Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. In an essay on “Objects of Ethnography,” specifically, she raises the central point that surrounds these items inside South Africa and out: “Why save, let alone display, things that are of little visual interest? Why ask the museum visitor to look closely at something whose value lies somewhere other than in its appearance?”124 Why and how, in other words, do musty relics that hold no aesthetic value per se matter? Wrestling with this and other difficult questions engendered by ethnographic collections, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett engages with what she terms the “new” world

On Display and in Storage / 229

of heritage.125 Globally, we are told, heritage arose as “a way of producing “hereness,” as a manner to become a tourist destination.”126 Yet this did not happen easily. As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett reveals, the commodification of heritage and the exaltation of the ethnographic, which sometimes requires the display of nonbeautiful objects, necessarily entails difficulties. When it comes to the pitfalls and the prerequisites that surround ethnography as it relates to the rise in heritage, South African institutions are not alone. In South Africa and elsewhere in the early twenty-first century, two seemingly contradictory processes can thus be found: museums “are growing at an unprecedented rate” at the very moment that “this increase does not indicate security,” to use Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe’s words.127 All over, museums are proliferating. Mostly, these new spaces are narrow in their interest: museums to particular ethnicities or tribes, places commemorating single events or regions. But still they grow. And yet as they do so, their existences are far from certain. Devoted, as they are, to the bottom line, made to answer, as they must be, to educational standards, museums struggle to find a place in a world that may not be interested in these spaces as temples but may not be willing to engage them as forums. For older museums, those whose narratives reach back beyond this present era of concern, recent years have seen redirection, reimagining, and recreation, none of which was easy, just as it was not in MuseumAfrica’s case. And for those museums still—like MuseumAfrica—whose legacy reaches back to the colonial period, even more problems attach themselves. Writing of British colonial archives abroad, Tim Barringer acutely notes the following: Today, the empire has gone, but the archives still remain, fluctuating as ever between the popular and the scholarly, desperately starved of that funding which the empire was supposed to supply, and awaiting a fundamental reassessment of the role of imperial institutions in the post-colonial period.128

In recent years, postcolonialism, postapartheid, the colonial archive’s future—like that of the museum proper, the library, and other spaces once considered to be technologies of rule—is imperiled. In 2007, an Open Report to the Minister of Arts and Culture from the Archival Conference “National System, Public Interest” affirmed that archives—used here, as in this book, to encompass places that store all manner of the past, museums included—were “under severe strain.” As heritage was “valorised,” the document attested, the archive was “neglected.”129 That its place ten years into the new order was precarious was painfully obvious to any observer of MuseumAfrica as a clear reflection of the complex world in which it found itself. But it was

230 / Chapter Five

also, very really, an indication of the state of colonial institutions generally in the postcolonial world. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the future of archives—monuments, as they are, to the past—did not look bright.

Coda: MuseumAfrica Stabilizes In 2006, it would have been safe to end this narrative with the museum’s failure, simply to close by bemoaning the stagnant state of MuseumAfrica. But a funny thing has started to happen in the last few years: the museum, under new management, is slowly starting to stabilize. Undoubtedly, there are many who continue to look askance at the place; one particularly strong directive from above calls for turning the museum into a conference center.130 And, there are still major problems in the museum. As of 2010, the museum was down to nineteen employees from forty; there was no cleaning contract, no education officer, and—perhaps most disturbingly for a cultural history museum—no history curator; the institution still suffered from what one curator called a “legacy of chaos.”131 Still, unexpected developments in the last few years demand mention. For while these changes do not indicate a magical transformation, they do suggest ways in which this museum can potentially function in the post-transition world. And this, in turn, provides inroads into the methodology for rendering this colonial institution relevant to the postcolonial order. Just as the history of the museum often correlated to its leadership, so the museum’s present state owes much to its current chief curator. Ali Hlongwane, former head of the Hector Pieterson Museum, joined the museum in 2008 after Dawn Robertson’s short-lived stewardship. Hlongwane began his professional career in the performing arts, training as an actor and working on the technical side of theater before entering the city’s arts and culture bureaucracy. Eventually, he followed the tide and began engaging with heritage both professionally and as a student at Wits University; he is currently a doctoral candidate in heritage studies. Hlongwane admits that, while he did not know much about the museum growing up Johannesburg, he nonetheless did his homework before taking over the helm of MuseumAfrica. Having manned successfully the Hector Pieterson Museum, which deals primarily with memories of the liberation struggle, Hlongwane was interested in working with tangible objects. Particularly, he welcomed the challenge of working at an institution that had a collection of objects that was, as he stated, “put together under different political conditions.” This would allow him to work against what he saw as an “assumption” that “these collections, once they were in the storerooms, would just disap-

On Display and in Storage / 231

pear.”132 It would allow him, in other words, to take on the challenge of making these old objects matter in the post-1994 world. Without doubt, heading MuseumAfrica since 2008 has been a challenge, for all of the aforementioned reasons. But it is one that Hlongwane has faced head-on, in ways that stand him apart from his predecessors. Having researched the museum, Hlongwane came in well aware of the museum’s practical concerns; he thus immediately took on problems around maintenance, security, and staffing. Given his history in theater—and his work experience at the Market Theatre in particular—Hlongwane readily became involved in Newtown’s development schemes. As an academic, Hlongwane is keenly aware of the reemergence of the authentic and the implications this holds for the nation generally and for ethnographic items in particular. He has thus devoted time and energy to rethinking the possibilities for this portion of the museum’s collection, addressing the question, in one instance, of what is African about MuseumAfrica.133 As a student of heri­ tage, Hlongwane also understands the history of museology in the country. Thus, while he has participated in the Southern African Museums Association—like virtually all of the museum’s chief curators and directors before him—he also maintains a relationship with the International Coalition of Historic Sites of Conscience, an organization he joined while at the Hector Pieterson Museum, which (he explains) is more attuned to the questions that plague museums today. Keenly interested in heritage—both academically and practically—as deliberately opposed to what he sees as the stodgy old world of museology, Hlongwane has also made a point of reaching out to “the people,” reinvigorating the museum’s society of Friends and holding weekend forums in the space to discuss various exhibitions. In these ways and others like them, Hlongwane has brought new energy and new direction to the museum. Most significantly, Hlongwane has attempted to reclaim MuseumAfrica’s role as a museum. Prior to his arrival, lack of funds and interest in the space meant that it was being used mostly as a venue for other events. Hlongwane has tried to counteract this. He has done this, primarily, by being highly strategic about funds, either using existing money in new ways or joining forces with external organizations to mount new exhibitions. Under his governance, the museum has thus revealed several large-scale changes to its permanent displays. The first is the new satellite museum, the Workers’ Museum, opened in 2010. Situated in the old Worker’s Compound in Newtown, the Workers’ Museum explores the history of migrant labor to the region. The result of combined efforts between the city’s Arts, Culture, and Heritage Department, the Johannesburg Development Agency, and Khanya

232 / Chapter Five

College—an independent NGO that assists working class communities— the Workers’ Museum honors the lived experiences of those who toiled in the City of Gold.134 Separate from MuseumAfrica, the Workers’ Museum nonetheless brings visitors and accolades to Newtown and its parent institution. Within its walls, MuseumAfrica also erected a new geology display in 2010. Beautifully showcasing the museum’s collection of around seventeen thousand rocks, gems, and minerals in new, modern ways, the multiple displays educate as much as they awe.135 Alongside these permanent interventions, Hlongwane has overseen the mounting of a string of new exhibitions. Again, this has only been possible through the strategic manipulation of funds. In at least one instance, the museum’s reliance on outside funding has led to what could be called an old-fashioned exhibition of Africana. Alongside the Joburg 2010 International Stamp Show, the museum displayed its famed Curle Collection of Transvaal Stamps, in storage since 1992.136 Put together by an outside volunteer, the display of this collection, which dates to Gubbins’s time, harkened back to the kind of exhibitions that emanated from the museum when it was the Africana Museum. Nonetheless, the show brought the museum some attention while celebrating one of the institution’s rarest collections. But while the display of the Curle Collection undoubtedly brought in an older kind of Africana enthusiast, the last few years have also seen a series of exhibitions aimed at a new kind of audience. Under Hlongwane’s direction, the museum has mounted several exhibitions that attempt to court controversy in a deliberate move to resituate the space within public intellectual debate, broadly conceived. So, for example, the museum put up the beautiful long-term exhibition L’Afrique with funding from the estate of the collector on whom it is based. Curated by the Johannesburg Art Gallery’s Nessa Leibhammer, the show celebrates the art and artifacts of Maria Stein-Lessing and Leopold Spiegel, academic immigrants who pioneered the collection and study of African art in the midtwentieth century. Curated by an art historian but situated in a museum of cultural history, Hlongwane explains, the exhibition gets at the fundamental question surrounding many ethnographic items: are they art or artifact? Similarly, the museum’s show Joburg Tracks, erected and funded by GALA, a gay and lesbian organization based at Wits University, likewise sought to incite public debate.137 The show highlighted what its curators deemed as sites within the city that are important for gay and lesbian communities, opening the museum up to new kinds of discussions. My Culture, another recent exhibition, also broached a topical concern. Displaying museum artifacts alongside commissioned artworks, it asked viewers to consider the

On Display and in Storage / 233

weight of naming ethnographic items both in terms of what they are (their use) and their origin (their ethnic designation). Not only did this call into question museum work, but it also pushed the audience to ponder how cultural groups change over time. In each of these shows, MuseumAfrica deliberately put itself at the center of a topical discussion. Attempting to make itself relevant again to the changing nation, the museum—under Hlongwane’s leadership—has used temporary exhibitions to draw upon its best asset: its collection. Unlike the old-fashioned, uncritical display of Africana of yesteryear, these shows plumb the museum’s contents in new ways, using them to read against the historical grain. One such show that did this was titled History Recorded through Portraiture Past and Present: Public and Personal. In it, the museum’s rich portraiture collection was mined in an effort to tell stories other than the Eurocentric ones for which many of the paintings were once intended. Here Reshada Crouse, an outside artist who works with portraiture, was given access to the museum’s vast collection of paintings, the overwhelming majority of which are Eurocentric in content. These she paired with portraits from a private collection as well as contemporary pieces done by her students. One-hundred and thirty paintings spanning over one hundred years of history made a point: portraiture matters and has meanings across time and ethnicity. The exhibition What Is Your Dress Heritage? echoed this sentiment. In it, current images of how Johannesburgers dress—taken by fashion students—were paired with ensembles from the museum’s vast collection of costume, formerly housed within the branch Bernberg Museum, closed in 2010. Again, the coupling of old and new, Euro- and Afro-centric, raised perhaps the quintessential question of the post-transition era: what does it mean to be South African? Cartoons and Context, opened in 2011, asked similar questions. Curated by the museum’s Linda Chernis, the show grew out the museum’s collaboration with the Sowetan newspaper’s cartoonist Sifiso Yalo. Juxtaposing contemporary cartoons from the Sowetan with vintage cartoons from the museum’s storerooms that date back to the early nineteenth century, the exhibit unhinged preconceived definitions. In these shows and others like them, the museum played to its strengths by trotting out parts of its vast collections. In so doing, it worked against the assumption articulated by Hlongwane earlier: not only do these shows prove that the museum’s contents will not “just disappear,” but they also make a strong case for why they should not. Reframed and reimagined, introduced to irony and critique, the museum’s collection starts to make sense again in shows like these. The move to render itself meaningful again reflects Hlongwane’s belief in history as a social construct, created always in light of the present. It is

234 / Chapter Five

not one truth with which the museum needs to concern itself, but rather the exposing of multiple, often competing truths, as far as its current leadership is concerned. That there were—and continue to be—a breadth of ways that South Africans express themselves through dress (or portrait, or cartoons) is itself what matters. The parallels and the disconnects have much to teach us. For looking at them, as Hlongwane notes, you do pick up, it’s not history repeating itself, but you do pick up similarities with the past. And sometimes you think what you are doing is new and you discover that there are other people that actually did what you are doing before.138

The revelation of unoriginality that the past holds within it is as humbling as it is freeing. Ultimately it reassures us that we exist tethered to the past, even if it were unknown to us. And this, in fact, is the point that Hlongwane hopes the museum can now make: positioning its vast collections against objects of contemporary concern can, he hopes, illuminate the present as much as the past. And this, of course, is precisely what the best cultural history museums should do. Responses to the museum’s changes have been promising. Whereas the museum attracted 1,586 visitors in January 2008, two years later the same month brought in 2,361 visitors, reflecting an overall increase in museum attendance over the intervening years.139 As mentioned earlier, the Friends of MuseumAfrica, a group that was all but defunct in 2008, has been reenergized. Perhaps most importantly, the public use of the museum’s stores has risen over the last few years. Former photography curator Linda Chernis recorded filling 184 orders for digital images throughout 2009. During the first half of 2011 alone, she had already filled 142 requests, a near 50 percent increase. In both instances, the numbers reflected about half of the total requests made on this particular department.140 From local and international researchers to interior decorators and advertisers, a significant portion of people make use of MuseumAfrica’s vast collection of images. This number is sure to grow once the negative collections donated from Times Media, which include the Sunday Times and Rand Daily Mail, are made available to the public.141 If the number of requests to the museum’s other departments—like geology and the Bensusan—are further taken into account, the figures for the overall use of the museum’s collections are even greater.142 That the public’s use of MuseumAfrica’s resources has grown may reflect a growing sense of what exactly the museum has and what precisely it does. At the same time, it is likely that people are taking increasing advantage of

On Display and in Storage / 235

the museum’s image collection, for instance, because unlike other archives in the nation, some of which barely function at all, this one actually works. As Chernis explained, all budgetary and other problems aside, researchers who came through her doors could attain reasonably priced high resolution photographs to suit their needs. And their needs are many: from pictures of old Johannesburg to illustrations of long-forgotten stamps, tribal life, and old cartoons, images from MuseumAfrica’s collection of nearly 350,000 photographs; 3,300 stamps; and 27,000 paintings, drawings, and prints have turned up in dissertations and documentaries the world over.143 Clearly, there is a need for the service MuseumAfrica provides; Chernis received an average of six requests a week to this end.144 And, clearly, the two hundred or so folks who contacted the research department in 2010 understand something crucial: what is held in the musty storerooms of this old museum still matters a great deal.

Conclusion When MuseumAfrica was opened in 1994, the degree to which it would have a meaningful place in the new nation was uncertain. For some oldschool Africana enthusiasts, the new museum signaled a loss. Reflecting on just this sentiment, Sandra de Wet mused that “from a visitor’s perspective,” the old Africana Museum “was easily grasped, that kind of layout. It didn’t require you to think too hard. . . . And it was good to look at. It gave you some notion of otherness.”145 As a result, some longtime supporters missed the old space. Hillary Bruce likewise recounted that some people lamented the changes in the space: “The old people missed . . . seeing the beautiful things [and the] feeling of upliftment that you get when you go into the museum.” Responding to this sense of loss, Bruce explained that curators still felt that “there was room for that” old type of Africana in the new MuseumAfrica. “We were going to have that” in the final museum plan, Bruce explained. “We were going to have a Gubbins painting Gallery on top with some of the paintings he collected—some of the Baineses”—but for reasons described earlier, she bemoaned, that “has never happened.”146 Though intending to show the museum’s deep regard for its founder, this statement suggests that at the start of the twenty-first century, the institution Gubbins formed thought it best to commemorate him with a small, out-ofthe-way gallery of Western paintings. While there is no doubt that Gubbins prided himself on his collection of illustrations, an extensive reading of the man’s vision—provided earlier—renders this sort of tribute inappropriate in its narrowness and in its persistent linkage between Gubbins and the “old

236 / Chapter Five

museum.” Ironically, Gubbins’s vision was more closely enacted at AMIP than it ever was at the Africana Museum proper. Still, at the dawn of the new South Africa, it appeared that circumstances had coalesced to ensure that the new Africana Museum—now MuseumAfrica—in Ann Wanless’s words, simply “paid lip service to Gubbins,” a man who had become little more than a ghost to those who lived to see the end of apartheid.147 The plan for a Gubbins’s gallery jars with a close reading with his life. It also reveals the lack of a coherent vision for the new museum, something that the last eighteen years has seen borne out. MuseumAfrica’s 1994 opening captured exquisitely the timely moment of a city and nation in flux, in many ways activating the best of what Gubbins had once wanted for his museum. The rebirth was beautiful. But for all of the reasons enumerated here, the museum simply could not maintain the momentum it gained from its initial reception. Standing as a metonym for the young nation’s contests about culture, heritage, and identity—questions that matter still—the museum suffered from bureaucratic neglect.148 To a certain extent, the absence of charismatic and visionary leadership also crippled the institution. Before long, it became a space that few if any regarded at all. As much by its actions as by its reactions to the shifting world around it, MuseumAfrica failed, prompting the question of whether the museum, as a museum, was in fact dead.149 Recent years have, somewhat surprisingly, seen a change, both in the museum’s outward persona as well as in its internal identity. It is difficult to make of where it stands now, after its lowest low and at what may just be the start of its upturn. A museum—any museum—is ultimately made up of what it puts forward for public consumption as much as what it holds from view. In terms of its display, the museum has seen improvements of late. Still, its battles for funds and personnel temper whatever optimism we may feel in this regard. Deep in its recesses, though, the collection is still there: musty, yes; disorganized and in some cases uncataloged, yes; but still there, in all its wonderful abundance. In the end, it thus appears that Museum­Africa’s strength remains in what it holds in storage and, out of that, perhaps, what is yet in store.

Conclusion

The Enduring Struggle: The Utility of a Colonial Institution in the Postcolonial World In September 1940, a bronze plaque was hung above the entrance to the then five-year-old Africana Museum. Responding to requests from the public and museum staff alike to honor the museum’s late founder, the plaque paid simple deference to the man who had, by some accounts, worked himself to death in order to see the museum come into being. “John Gaspard Gubbins 1877–1935,” it read: “By his vision and energy this Museum was founded.”1 Three-quarters of a century later, in a far different South Africa, this relic lies forgotten, dust-covered, and upside down in a dank storeroom of what is now called MuseumAfrica. Though perhaps unintentional, this shunting suggests that the museum’s genesis is of little interest to those who visit Johannesburg’s oldest cultural history museum. At the same time, this dismissal implies that the museum’s leadership—though more attuned than ever to the institution’s roots—still struggles to give contemporary relevance to the museum’s past. The sad state of Gubbins’s plaque speaks to a global phenomenon. For we live today unsure of whether to adore, ignore, or expunge the remnants of old orders. This is a world, postcolonialism, where colonial and imperial remnants—be they institutions, laws, even land allocations—are tainted, many understandably, most irreparably. At the same time, it is a world in which that which is old, authentic, and in some cases tribal is more exalted than ever. Museums hold a particularly fraught position in this equation. Having arisen from a nineteenth-century worldview, museums are often regarded as little more than outmoded Eurocentric impositions. Yet, a central argument of this study is that museums hold the potential to be reanimated if they are envisioned as archives. Museums, of course, are not synonymous with archives, though some do contain archives. No, museums are meant to do something different. Cultural history museums—our main topic of

238 / Conclusion

concern here—are supposed to be representations of history, plain and simple. All of the ambiguity that attaches to archives—the history, the complexity—does not relate to museums as they are generally understood. Ironically, perhaps, the fact that MuseumAfrica is not principally regarded as an archive has probably saved the institution from the kind of sanitation that many archives have faced in the new nation.2 But, regardless of how this museum—or any museum—is seen by the powers that be, it is fruitful nonetheless to bring the tools afforded by archives to bear on it. By envisioning a museum as an archive, we are able to historicize both the institution and its contents. We are able to probe, in particular, the biographies of the folks that manned its helm and to query how and why their idiosyncratic pasts informed the place. In the case of MuseumAfrica, this process—documented in the previous pages—brings us to the conclusion that the space’s worth is actually its accumulated intellectual heritage as much as its physical holdings. Seen as an archive in both senses, we can imagine this museum to be something permanent in a shifting landscape, something tethered to its surroundings and, out of this longstanding position, something profoundly informative.

On one level, the museum’s intellectual archive derives from its narrative, an idea that animated this study just as it informed current chief curator Ali Hlongwane’s sense of the place. In order to understand the potential of the institution he had taken over, Hlongwane explained, he had to first engage with its history, as has been done here. Freed from the personal ties that had so long shackled its leadership, of ego and of history, Hlongwane was able to look back soberly at MuseumAfrica’s narrative and to ask what its biography revealed and what it shrouded. In the end, he noted with no small amount of surprise, what he found out about the past: “It’s not as though the people [in the museum leadership] did not reflect on the challenges. They did. They also kept a good record of their debates and discussions. That is very useful.”3 Within the museum, in other words, Hlongwane recognized a wealth of debates about the place of culture in South Africa over a near century, some of which echo those very same conversations being heard today, in a very different country. These discussions illuminate both what people once thought and how the museum came to be the way it is. And all are only made understandable via the museum’s biography. Besides using these past conversations to illuminate the present, Hlongwane has pledged that, under him, the institution would, in his words,

Enduring Struggle / 239 continue to look at the historical collection as an important source of knowledge about the history of this country as well as the contradictions that this country continues to grapple with and a source of reference for where people want to go in the future.

In addition to the internal debates held within the museum’s archive, Hlongwane recognizes that the institution’s physical archive also opens onto larger public intellectual debates within the nation. And these too are tremendously important for the museum to understand both where it came from and how it might continue to exist. In sum, and though Hlongwane might not put it this way himself, there exists in the museum an intellectual archive that speaks not only to internal museum processes, but also to the life of the institution—and country—in which it dwells. This information is only accessible through the museum’s narrative. That the museum now recognizes its intellectual archive is a heartening development. For, ultimately, MuseumAfrica’s rich archive has the potential to do more than simply inform its present; it has the power to alter some of what we think we know about South African history. If we use this museum’s narrative—its intellectual archive—to guide us through the twentieth century in South Africa, we bring nuances to our understanding of the periods before, during, and after apartheid. Through Gubbins’s biography, we are made privy to a world counter to what many imagined to have existed, a world trained on creating a very different kind of nation in the decades before the rise of apartheid. South Africanism—a movement animated elsewhere—is further fleshed out through this study, as is our understanding of how liberalism functioned in the first half of the twentieth century. Moving into the museum’s era within the Johannesburg Public Library, we are able to historicize liberalism itself, to understand how the ideology shifted both in theory and practice. Turning then to the eve of the new South Africa, the museum’s efforts at regeneration illuminate the multiple contests that characterized that time period. In much the same vein, the museum’s history postapartheid sheds light on the nation’s recent history, part triumphant, part wanting. As we journey ever farther away from apartheid, the museum’s practices today, post-transition, will come to be seen as indicators whose import we can only now imagine. Finally— and arguably most importantly—the museum’s story over this longue durée, its total story, invites comparisons across these disparate epochs. What becomes apparent are the uneasy similarities between then and now, the ways in which culture—that slippery term—seems to constrain possibilities,

240 / Conclusion

how nonracialism appears as elusive today as three-dimensional thought did then. This story—this minor history—serves in the end not simply as a metonym, but rather as a means to refract the past, to render it newly recognizable from a new angle. That is the strength of the intellectual archive of this museum. That is why this narrative continues to resonate. The museum’s physicality—its tangible archive—similarly adds to the institution’s enduring significance. Here the fact that the museum is made up of real items of the past has great import. When speaking of the persis­ tence of long lines of tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of the Mona Lisa, Robert Lumley underscores the problematic relationship between the real thing and its reproduction. “Paradoxically, the very explosion of reproductions (postcards, posters, advertising, television programmes) has reinforced the aura of authenticity surrounding the original,” he writes.4 The weight of the real has grown not in spite, but rather because of the proliferation of simulations. While there is undoubtedly a way in which recreations debase originals, sometimes rendering little difference between a theme park and a place of historical importance, there is an even stronger way in which the preponderance of fakes increases the worth of the real. For in a world where everyone with means can own an image of the Mona Lisa—however distorted or inferior—only one person—or one institution—can own the real one. This distinction matters insofar as only the real one contains Walter Benjamin’s “aura,” the force that, our growing societal numbness aside, still retains its power.5 So despite the fierce debate between museum professionals and scholars about whether museums need to house collections—witness Elaine Heumann Gurian’s argument that objects alone do not constitute a museum—the fact that MuseumAfrica is filled with roughly three-quarters of a million real items of the past matters enormously.6 In South Africa, a country gripped by the reemergence of the authentic, the real has arguably more salience than ever. Besides opening onto multiple readings of the past while constraining historical invention, real items like these afford people the chance to engage firsthand with true historical remnants.7 More than anything, real objects allow for physical interactions with the past. As Stephen Weill puts it, “what museums have that is distinctive is objects, and what gives most museums their unique advantage is the awesome power of those objects to trigger an almost infinite diversity of profound experiences among their viewers.”8 Even if—or perhaps because—the era of the unconditionally exalted museum is gone, he explains that objects ensure the possibility of a wide range of meaningful responses. David Carr muses on what some of those responses can be, capturing what many see

Enduring Struggle / 241

as the poetry of museum visits. At its best, Carr tells us, a “museum creates the situation of difference,” feeding into what he terms our “hunger” not for “different information” but rather for “different perspectives.”9 “A museum object can rock us,” he explains, “can rock our assumptions and expectations.”10 For through examining it, through seeing it explained in multiple ways and contextualized in a narrative, “we learn to ask; we learn to act. . . . In a museum, we are always at work on ourselves.”11 For Lois Silverman, going to a museum is nothing short of therapeutic. As she explains, “visitors to museums can experience a wide range of benefits, including learning, reflecting on the humanities, restoring oneself, affirming one’s sense of self, and feeling connected to community and culture.”12 For Carr, Silverman, and others, the museum is ultimately a place of great potential, educational and otherwise. And while it is not the physical archive alone that makes this possible, this learning and healing would not be possible without it. In South Africa, a country still fractured, still unhealed, the idea that a place could both educate and palliate is particularly enticing.

MuseumAfrica’s intellectual archive—the debates it contains, the larger discussions it illuminates—and its tangible archive of objects thus form an endowed legacy for the new nation. Together, they underscore the institution’s potential utility in the new world order, a latent usefulness that derives precisely from thinking of the museum as an archive. I have argued that it is necessary to understand an institution’s biography—and that of its primary players—in order to understand its worth, that to read a museum archivally begins firstly with its story. MuseumAfrica today, I suggest, only makes sense in light of its past. Moreover, I assert, the accumulated history of the institution undergirds its potential relevance. The past, in other words, matters. This is what seeing the museum archivally is all about. But there is another way in which archival tools can inform our sense of this institution’s worth. If we bring our powers of historical inquiry to bear on the museum’s contents, the possibilities they afford multiply. Typically, a museum—its collection, its display—is about static objects. Normally, the Xhosa pipe in a museum is just a Xhosa pipe. But the archived Xhosa pipe is so much more: it is a Xhosa pipe from a given region, acquired at a certain time, and by a particular person. And it can be used—in an archive—not simply to stand as a generic Xhosa pipe, but also as an item with history. Here provenance, where something came from, is central. So too is what Carolyn Hamilton has termed, in reference firstly to the James Stuart

242 / Conclusion

archive, the “backstory” of items.13 The term backstory derives from the world of acting and references the imagined lives designated to fictional characters before they meet the audience. It is about the time that precedes a character’s entrance onto a stage or television set, about the motivations, feelings, and history of a made-up person. Armed with the knowledge of a backstory, the theory goes, an actor is able to enact appropriate responses. Transposed into the world of archival studies, backstory has great intellectual traction. For through it we are able to reach beyond the object’s biography—which Hamilton tells us begins at the moment preservation begins—to get at its very thing-ness. Through the pursuit of backstory, we can ask of each item not simply what its provenance is—though that is clearly important—but deeper questions, questions about what it was used for, by whom, and why, before it was removed from its original milieu and placed into an archive. If we bring the quest for backstory and provenance to bear on the rich contents of MuseumAfrica, we are able to understand another way in which we can read the museum archivally. This further augments our sense of the museum’s potential use value. It is true, of course, that accessing the backstory of items collected decades ago can be elusive, if not downright impossible. Acquisition practices did not mandate the kind of documentation necessary to capture this data readily.14 Nor did museum practitioners regularly find it important to record information about objects outside of what the prevailing knowledge of the day deemed to be the objects’ type. What remains instead in places like MuseumAfrica are index cards keyed to items with labels such as “Zulu beer pot” and “cigarette papers.” Normally, this will be accompanied by an acquisition date. Less regularly, a place of acquisition is recorded. Even less frequently, a donor or seller is named. And almost never do we see what one museum worker termed “the ghost”—the person to whom the object originally belonged, the object’s maker.15 In the early twenty-first century, trying to mine the archives of this collection— whose temporal reach takes us back centuries—can be daunting at best. And, yet, it is possible. In keeping with Gubbins’s wish for a museum that represented “every phase and factor of South African life,” the advisory committee that he established to vet museum acquisitions sought a broad range of items whose stories necessarily illustrated this particular view of Africana. In the museum’s early years, acquisitions tended to be of items that had belonged to or referenced the history of white people. While some undoubtedly made it into the museum with little more known about them than references like “cricket ball” and “commemorative coin,” others ar-

Enduring Struggle / 243

rived endowed with narratives that were sought out by the committee. For instance, in 1969 the museum acquired a knapsack from one Mrs. Roberts of Potchefstroom. In the report endorsing this gift, the director records that it was “made from the whole skin of a small” animal of some sort “in which Mr. F. J. Bezuidenhout, Senior, of Bezuidenhout Valley Farm, used to keep his money.”16 In another instance, the museum purchased from the Africana purveyor Frank Thorold Ltd. ivory miniatures attributed to Thomas Bowler that depict multiple homes of the Mosenthal family. Drawing upon information on the Mosenthal family published in both the Dictionary of South African Biography and A History of Jews in South Africa, the story of the Mosenthals, their homes, and indeed the miniatures themselves, is rounded out.17 Still elsewhere, the museum acquired a nineteenth-century riempie bench/day bed. Given the paucity of Transvaal furniture that survived the Second South African War, the museum noted the rarity of this piece. Yet, rather than leave it as simply a bench of a given size and type of wood, the committee report provides a glimpse into its backstory. “This bench,” we are told, “with unusual flaring arms and interesting detail in the carving and decoration is from the Cullinan family of Olifantsforntein. The former owner of this item was a Mrs. de Villiers (born Cullinan) who died recently. Sir Thomas Cullinan was the founder of Premier Mine and a large brick and cremains industry at Olifantsforntein.”18 While there are undoubtedly pieces to the story that are yet missing, in these instances and others like them, a hint of backstory shines through. The museum’s acquisition by gift or purchase of items of Africana belonging to or coming from nonwhite South Africans followed a similar trend. As early as 1953, the museum acquired from a Mrs. Darroch of Johannesburg a decorative piece of satin embroidered with the images of two Chinese people that, we are told, was “given by a Chinese mineworker to the donor’s cousin.”19 While that mineworker and cousin both exist beyond our grasp, our understanding of the fabric gains something with this knowledge. In a later case from 1980, one Mrs. Mashayelo Maseko of Moroka offered the museum a collection of ethnological artifacts that she had made. The curator’s report on the collection notes three pouches as being the most “interesting” of the lot. “One” we learn, “is made from grey seeds, white beads and string and was used to hold the set of divining bones made by the vendor for the spirit of his great-grandfather.” We are also told that “this man bore the same name as the vendor and it is his spirit that speaks through the vendor.”20 Beyond a physical description, this blurb breathes life into the pouch. Still elsewhere, in 1986, the curator described the

244 / Conclusion

purchase of a Southern Ndebele beaded veil with the word “Helly” on it. Again, instead of simply leaving it at that—as we might if we only encountered the item in the storeroom—the report pushes further. In it, we learn that the veil “was made by a married woman, Letty Masilela of  Volburgrand B who wore it for special occasions, such as the female initiation ceremony which she attended in 1985.” Even more interesting, we learn what the strange word means: it “commemorates Halley’s Comet.”21 By understanding the kind of museum that Gubbins created, by grasping the sort of institution he set in motion as well as its history since then, a whole world of information is opened up to us. Not only does the current museum make more sense, but the objects within its vast collection attain new meaning as we contemplate their provenance and backstories. For through this method—through thinking of the museum archivally— an item moves from the generic to the specific. Through it, we are able to glimpse something of what happened to the specimen before it ended up archived. Without doubt, there will always be that which exists beyond our vision—the ghosts will be there. That is the burden of all historical recovery. Nevertheless, the closer we get to that moment of origin, the more we are able to piece together, two processes are set in motion: what we know about the inanimate and their varied pasts grows just as the objects themselves are reanimated. And it is precisely out of this reanimation that new possibilities arise. Whether it be for research or display, once we know an object’s provenance and backstory, what had hitherto appeared as little more than useless stuff is given new purpose.

Of course, there will remain naysayers who argue, as was fleshed out in chapter 5, that museums are irreparably Western, eclipsing their potential in post-transition South Africa, part of the postcolonial south. No matter how endowed they are, this thinking goes, the fact that they were born and, more importantly, that they arrived in Africa as part of the imperial encounter forever taints them. While there is a kind of commonsense logic to this position—anything extra-African should be discarded from a proudly African nation—many dangers attend it. Besides the obvious question of when and where one stops once such a purge begins, this position fails to make adequate sense of what constitutes “Western” and “African” and how one distinguishes when something became one or the other. Was not this particular museum—envisioned, born, and celebrated in Africa—always African? Surely it was to Gubbins. Besides this point—throwing out the question of whether or not MuseumAfrica was or is African enough—we are faced with

Enduring Struggle / 245

the fact that, the world over, many postcolonial countries have found utility in claiming or reclaiming what were once seen as being Western/northern creations. As Brian Durran writes, the concept of the museum may come from the west, but its appeal cannot be explained only in terms of any prestige that western values may possess: on the contrary, it is attractive to many Third World countries precisely because it offers a means of recapturing, elaborating, or inventing their own distinctive cultural traditions as a countermeasure to past or present domination.22

In this reading, it is because—and not despite—the fact that museums were Western constructs that they retain their strength in the postcolonial world. Exactly because of their history, precisely because their genesis grew out of now outmoded ways of thinking, old institutions in new world orders offer a particular set of possibilities. Here they stand as archives in yet another sense: archives of worlds that no longer exist. And in this designation they offer, just like Ann Laura Stoler’s Dutch colonial archives, the possibility of being reused in entirely new ways.23 As Dragan Kujundzic so aptly writes, “to the capacity to produce the worst also belongs the capacity of the promise and a future.” 24 Though once monuments to different—in many cases, racist, hateful—world orders, museum as archives can be reimagined as a way to usurp their former prestige. And indeed this is important. For, as Foucault tells us, The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them; controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules.25

The very success of history, we are told, comes not from eschewing remnants of past dominations, as onerous as they may be. Rather, and importantly, it comes from seizing them, reinterpreting them, and using them to put forward new meaning. Through this process, old prestige is reclaimed in a new manner. And this is important since all power requires prestige. Yet esteem is not the only function of a reanimated museum-come-archive. Reclaimed and reimagined, the new museum can now meaningfully speak to the world in which it finds itself. The reimagined museum—the museum that has been plumbed, as archive, to put forward a new face entirely—contains the possibility of serving

246 / Conclusion

the nation by showcasing what Krzysztof Pomian calls “semiophores,” or items valuable for their meaning rather than worth, to which all can relate. Semiophores are objects that have been imbued with meaning free of their pedestrian use value. Their worth is neither inherent nor obvious; it has been subjectively decided. Since one group may find one semiophore important while another denounces the same item as worthless, Pomian explains, “in order for the various subsets of society to be able to communicate between each other, they must, among other things, all have potential access to semiophores of the same kind.”26 In his writing, opposing portions of society come to relate when they all agree that the same semiophores “represent . . . reality and not a fiction.” Not only does this mean that all of society must have access to the same museums, but it also suggests the power that museums’ narratives—arising from their objects-turned-semiophores—can hold over people. Once everyone agrees on the same semiophores, everyone can subscribe to the same sense of the past and, by extension, the present. Because of this, semiophores—or the objects that can potentially become them—are weighty items, particularly in fractured societies. “It is precisely because a museum is the repository of everything which is closely or loosely linked with its nation’s history that its contents should be accessible to all. This is also why they should be conserved,” Pomian argues. Museum objects—understood as semiophores—have the potential to create a singular narrative to which all can ascribe. And this is important not just for the nation today, but also for the nation to come. “By placing objects in museums one puts them on display not only to present,” Pomian writes, “but also to future generations, just as, in the past, other objects were displayed to the gods.”27 As offerings to a country yet unknowable, museum objects, their physical archives, stand as potentially powerful semiophores. And because of this they matter a great deal. In today’s South Africa, a country still—and some might argue, increasingly—fractured along racial, tribal, and national lines, objects of Africa, Africana, have the potential to do more than fill musty storerooms. They could serve as semiophores and be endowed with meaning that resonates with all South Africans at once. They could be used to promote new forms of research into the country’s past—research that cuts across rigid temporal and racial categories and upends more of what we think we know. They could also be used to showcase the past in new ways, a process as important to the present as it is to the future. As Tony Bennett explains, far more “is at stake in how the past is represented” than the simple strength or weakness of a museum: “The shape of the thinkable future depends on how the past is represented.”28 What is deemed known shapes what is knowable. And,

Enduring Struggle / 247

at the base of it, what is known grows principally out of that which we have from the past. All movements to the contrary aside, there is still a use for these objects and for the archive they comprise.

In 2012, more than a century after John Gubbins’s arrival in South Africa and eighteen years after apartheid ended, there is a timeliness to the story found herein worth pointing out, in closing. While the narrative that most South Africans cling to goes something like this—hundreds of years of racial oppression led to apartheid, whose end presaged a radically new order— multiple scholars have begun to trouble this teleological and heroic account in recent years. Saul Dubow, for one, explains “that the official demise of apartheid, far from solving the problem of race, instead opened up new avenues for its expression;” after “Nelson Mandela’s politics of forgiveness and reconciliation . . . [faded] overtly nationalist and Africanist sentiments were soon to be heard.”29 John and Jean Comaroff similarly point out the irony that “‘tradition’ and ‘tribalism’ enjoy a renewed salience” in the new, supposedly nonracial nation. In the era of Jacob Zuma—whose exalted Zulu-ness signals the reemergence of authentic tribal idenitity, often in troubling ways—there are conclusions to be drawn in light of the account found here. “Our own material suggests,” the Comaroffs pen, “some surprising and complex continuities between the time of great imperial outreach and the late twentieth-century era of global expansion.”30 Or, as John Lambert writes about the 1910s and 1920s, just like today, “then, too, questions of national identity obsessed many people.”31 Far from anything as trite as “history repeating itself”—as the baseless trope goes—what we witness instead when thinking about how today relates to the early twentieth century are echoes of the past that suggest, at their root, something fundamentally South African. And for a country that continues to imagine itself as being fractured along multiple lines, this singularity has great import. In the end, the history made possible by this largely overlooked and wholly undervalued museum—from its founder’s arrival in South Africa to the near present—installs the renewed potential of the space. This does not mean that this account proves that the museum will or should function as a museum; nor does it blindly validate the museum’s contents per se.32 Rather, it asserts why and what this narrative does to our understanding of the past, present, and even future just as it opens onto the latent worth of the museum’s holdings. Seen as an archive, some of the museum’s objects become imaginable semiophores with possibilities. They can create a “visible past,” something Jean Baudrillard reminds us that we all need as “a visible myth

248 / Conclusion

of origin to reassure us as to our ends.”33 According to Baudrillard, humans crave a concrete sense of the past, a need that takes us, more often than not, to the doors of an institution devoted to just such an endeavor. And semiophores become the tools out of which a visible past can arise. But it is not just any visible past. Semiophores contain the possibility of enacting a singular South Africa narrative, something the empowered African National Congress has long called for, but never created, something that eluded Gubbins then as much as it does us today. If, as Eileen Hooper-Greenhill writes, “the end of the modern age [can] be glimpsed in the contradictions revealed by contemporary museums,” then perhaps the future for the postcolonial and in this case postapartheid, even post-transitional age, lies here too. 34 John Gaspard Gubbins believed in 1935 that a storehouse of Africana had the power to change South African society. Perhaps it still does.

NOTES

a c k no w l e d g m ents

1.

Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 150. I ntro d u c tion

1.

Deon van Tonder, “From Mausoleum to Museum: Revisiting Public History in the Inauguration of MuseumAfrica, Newtown,” South African Historical Journal 31 (1994): 167. 2. Hillary Bruce, interview with the author, 25 February 2003. 3. While there is a dearth of scholarly work on MuseumAfrica and while most of it is not nearly as vitriolic as people’s spoken views of the space, some examples of how the institution’s history has been understood and misunderstood include Annie E. Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Steven Dubin, Transforming Museums: Mounting Queen Victoria in a Democratic South Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Carolyn Hamilton, “Against the Museum as Chameleon,” South African Historical Journal 31 (1994): 184–90; and Anitra Nettleton, “Arts and Africana: Hierarchies of Material Culture,” South African Historical Journal 29 (1993): 61–75. 4. Leslie Witz, “Transforming Museums on the Postapartheid Tourist Routes,” in Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp et. al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 128. 5. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, and Graeme Reid, introduction to Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton et al. (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 10. 6. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 26. 7. Patricia Davison, “Museums and the Reshaping of Memory,” in Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, eds. Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998), 146. 8. Ibid., 147. 9. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 68. 10. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 129.

250 / Notes to Pages 4–11 11. Carol Duncan, “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1991), 90. 12. Patricia Hayes, Jeremy Silvester, and Wolfram Hartmann, “ ’Picturing the Past’ in Namibia: The Visual Archive and Its Energies,” in Refiguring the Archive, 105. 13. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. E. Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 11. 14. Diana Wall, interview with the author, 27 July 2010. See also internal museum document titled “Museum Africa collections: Number of items,” 3 March 2010. 15. Interestingly, both of these spaces owe their creations to MuesumAfrica, a story detailed in chapter 5. 16. Martin Hall, “The Reappearance of the Authentic,” in Museum Frictions, 71, 81, 93. 17. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (New York: Rout­ ledge, 1992), 215. 18. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 221. 19. Scott G. Paris, “How Can Museums Attract Visitors in the Twenty-First Century,” in Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Hugh H. Genoways (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006), 236. 20. Tony Bennett, “Exhibition, Difference, and the Logic of Culture,” in Museum Frictions, 48. 21. Ibid., 66. 22. Derrida, Archive Fever, 18. 23. Susan M. Pearce, ed., Museum Studies in Material Culture (London: Leicester University Press, 1989), 8. 24. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 236. 25. Carolyn Hamilton, “‘Living by Fluidities’: Oral Histories, Material Custodies, and the Politics of Archiving,” in Refiguring the archive, 225. 26. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 215. 27. Derrida, Archive Fever, 18. 28. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, “The Power of Museum Pedagogy,” in Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, 235. 29. While this topic is discussed in greater depth in chapters 1 and 2, see Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa, 1820–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Saul Dubow and Alan Jeeves, eds., South Africa’s 1940s: Worlds of Possibilities (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2005); Saul Dubow, “Scientism, Social Research and the Limits of South Africanism: The Case of Ernst Gideon Malherbe,” South African Historical Journal 44 (2001): 99–142; Michael Cardo “’Fighting a Worse Imperialism’: White South African Loyalism and the Army Education Service during the Second World War,” South African Historical Journal 46 (2002): 141–74; and John Lambert “South African or British? Or Dominion South Africans? The Evolution of an Identity in the 1910s and 1920s,” South African Historical Journal 43 (2000): 197–222. 30. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 50. 31. Dubow, Introduction to South Africa’s 1940s, 2. 32. Ibid., 1. 33. Sarah Nuttall, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009), 19.

Notes to Pages 11–23 / 251 34. Jonathan Hyslop, “Global Imagination before Globalization: The Worlds of International Labour Activists on the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914,” unpublished seminar paper presented at Wits Institution for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, June 24, 2003. Quoted in Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, “Introduction: Afropolis,” in Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, eds. Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe with an afterword by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008), 15. 35. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge, 1820–2000, vii. 36. Jonathan Hyslop, “An Anglo-South African Intellectual, the Second World War, and the Coming of Apartheid: Guy Butler in the 1940s,” in South Africa’s 1940s, 212. 37. Ibid., 213. 38. Ibid., 214. 39. Sarah Nuttall makes the point that catchphrases of the late struggle have fallen by the wayside. “Since 1994,” she writes, “what used to be called ‘non-racialism’ is seldom heard in political discourse.” Nuttall, Entanglement, 28. 40. Verne Harris, “Postmodernism and Archival Appraisal: Seven Theses,” South African Archives Journal 40 (1998): 48–49. 41. Ira Glass, introduction to The New Kings of Nonfiction, ed. Ira Glass (New York: Riverhead Books, 2007), 14. 42. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 191. 43. Donald Preziosi, “Philosophy and the Ends of the Museum,” in Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, 69. 44. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 20. 45. Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York: Knopf Publishers, 2005), 8. 46. Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4. 47. Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 12. 48. Margaret Northey, interview with the author, 26 July 2010. 49. For more on this, see Sara Byala, A Vision in Three Dimensions: An Edited Collection of John Gaspard Gubbins’s Letters (forthcoming). 50. As this book will explain, until the 1980s most museum personnel were trained librarians. 51. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge, 165. 52. Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe, eds., Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 2. 53. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, eds., Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 1. 54. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge, vii. 55. Ibid., 10. 56. Robert Lumley, ed., The Museum Time Machine: Putting Cultures on Display (New York: Routledge, 1988), 9. Ch a pter one

1. 2.

Rudyard Kipling, “South Africa,” The Five Nations, 4th ed. (London: Methuen & Co., 1908), 149–51. John Gaspard Gubbins (hereafter JGG) to Bertha Tufnell (hereafter BT), 30 December

252 / Notes to Pages 23–26

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

1902, John Gaspard Gubbins Papers 1872, A1134, University of the Witwatersrand Department of Historical Papers (hereafter WHP). Ibid. For more on Kipling in South Africa, see Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself and other Autobiographical Writings, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Herbert Butterfield (hereafter Butterfield) to Knox-Grant of SABC, 15 May 1977, John Gaspard Gubbins Collection, A1479 2.3, WHP; Butterfield, Notes on Gubbins’s family Royal Descent, A1479 2.3, WHP. JGG to BT, 26 December 1903, A1134, WHP. For more on metaphor, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). In it, the authors explain that “metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action” (3) and that “The essence of metaphor is understanding one kind of thing in terms of another” (5). A product of our language itself, metaphor is how we understand the world and our place in it. In Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (New York: Routledge, 1995), she writes that “embedded in the European consciousness is the idea of duality, of ‘this and that,’ of ‘now and then,’ which . . . draws a large part of its strength from the oath/ordeal nature of European social practice and has profound implications for our rational, classificatory, and ‘scientific’ approach to life” (160). For more information on the dichotomy between history and anthropology/ethnology, see Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11. See also Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); and Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). T. W. Heyk, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (Chicago: Ly­ ceum Books, 1982), 82. This book offers a detailed description of late Victorian life and its divergence from that of its predecessors. Ibid., 190. Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 75. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22. Pearce, On Collecting, 178. There is a rich and varied literature on collecting. For other explanations of what compels collectors, see Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 7–24; Mieke Bal, “Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting,” in Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, ed. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 84–101; Richard Wendorf, The Literature of Collecting & Other Essays (Boston: Boston Anthenaeum and Oak Knoll Press, 2008); and Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 59–68. This process is well documented. For some examples, see Helen Tilley and Robert Gordon, eds., Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007); John L. Comaroff,

Notes to Pages 26–28 / 253

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Jean Comaroff, and Deborah James eds., Picturing a Colonial Past: The African Photographs of Isaac Schapera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, 11, 19. Saul Dubow, Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa, 1820–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4. Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” 16. Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, 17. Butterfield, notes on Gubbins’s family royal descent, A1479 2.3, WHP; Butterfield, notes on pedigree of Gubbins’s family, A1479 2.3, WHP. Richard Gubbins, diary kept by Lt. Col. Richard Gubbins during Boer War, Richard Rolls Gubbins, A1351, WHP. The South African War is alternately known as the Boer War or the Second South African War. As Saul Dubow explains, the appellation used here is currently the preferred one since it alludes to the fact that the war was, as he states it, “more than a grand showdown between the forces of British imperialism and Boer republicanism,” that it was more than a “white man’s war.” Dubow, Commonwealth of Knowledge, 158. Moira Farmer, “John Gaspard Gubbins: Talk given to Friends of the University Library,” 26 November 1977, John Gaspard Gubbins, 1928–1977, A1150, WHP. R. F. Kennedy, Treasures and Trash, chapter 1, p. 1, MAA; Butterfield to C. H. Lemon of Union-Castle Lines, 17 June 1977, A1479 2.3, WHP. For more on antebellum Johannesburg, see Charles Van Onselen, New Babylon, New Nineveh: Everyday Life on the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg: Jonathan Bell, 2001); and Jillian Carman, Uplifting the Colonial Philistine: Florence Philips and the Making of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 2006), 33–51. JGG to BT, 21 January 1903, A1134, WHP. JGG to BT, 30 December 1902, A1134, WHP. JGG to BT, 10 September 1903, A1134, WHP; JGG to BT, 31 October 1905, A1134, WHP. JGG to BT, 20 January 1905, A1134, WHP. JGG to BT, 23 June 1907; JGG to BT, 22 July 1905; JGG to BT, 20 January 1905; all A1134, WHP. JGG to BT, 30 March 1903, A1134, WHP. As Jeremy Foster explains, around the turn of the twentieth century, an antiurban movement had emerged in Britain wherein, as he puts it, “the city was being demonized as a place of rampant capitalism, corruption, vice, vanity, ill health, and un-English cosmopolitanism.” This mindset may have influenced Gubbins. Jeremy Foster, Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 22. JGG to BT, 30 March 1903, A1134, WHP. JGG to BT, 30 January 1903; JGG to BT, 30 November 1903; and JGG to BT, 31 August 1903, all A1134, WHP. JGG to BT, 20 February 2003, A1134, WHP. JGG to BT, 10 September 1903, A1134, WHP. See also JGG to BT, 31 August 1903, A1134, WHP; JGG to BT, 10 September 1903, A1134, WHP. JGG to BT, 22 November 1903, A1134, WHP.

254 / Notes to Pages 28–34 36. JGG to BT, 26 March 1908, A1134, WHP. 37. F. R. Paver, “John Gaspard Gubbins: Origin and Early Days of the Africana Museum,” Africana Notes and News 15, no. 8 (1963): 319–25. 38. JGG to Mona, 21 July 1910, A1134, WHP. 39. JGG to BT, 14 March 1904; JGG to BT, 31 October 1903; and JGG to BT, 26 December 1903, all A1134, WHP. 40. JGG to BT, 31 August 1903, A1134, WHP. 41. JGG to BT, 26 December 1903, A1134, WHP. See also JGG to BT, 14 March 1904; JGG to BT, 31 August 1903; and JGG to BT, 26 November 1903, all A1134, WHP. 42. For more on how the government planned to attract Britons to the countryside, see Foster, Washed with Sun, 23. 43. JGG to BT, 9 November 1907, A1134, WHP. 44. JGG to BT, 7 April 1903, A1134, WHP. 45. JGG to BT, 26 December 1903, A1134, WHP. 46. JGG to BT, 30 May 1908, A1134, WHP. 47. JGG to BT, 14 January 1908, A1134, WHP. 48. JGG to BT, 3 March 1914, A1134, WHP. 49. JGG to BT, 31 August 1915, A1134, WHP. 50. Ibid. 51. JGG to BT, 23 September 1904, A1134, WHP. 52. JGG to BT, 17 December 1905, A1134, WHP. 53. JGG to BT, 17 September 1908, A1134, WHP. 54. Saul Dubow, “Scientism, Social Research and the Limits of South Africanism: The Case of Ernst Gideon Malherbe,” South African Historical Journal 44 (2001): 100. 55. Ibid., 101. 56. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge, 5. 57. Chapter 2 explores South Africanism in more depth. 58. JGG to BT, 12 March 1909, A1134, WHP. 59. JGG to BT, 18 September 1909, A1134, WHP. 60. JGG to BT, 25 September 1909, A1134, WHP. 61. Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, 1. 62. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thoughts Out of Season, pt. 2 (New York: Gordon Press, 1974), 24, quoted in Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, 2. 63. JGG to BT, 10 September 1903; JGG to BT, 17 February 1904; and JGG to BT, 24 July 1903, all A1134, WHP. 64. JGG to BT, 6 February 1903; JGG to BT, 10 September 1902, all A1134, WHP. 65. JGG to BT, 20 February 2003, A1134, WHP. 66. JGG to BT, 8 February 1906; JGG to BT, 8 July 1905, all A1134, WHP. 67. JGG to BT, 3 February 1906; JGG to BT, 16 May 1906; JGG to BT, 3 February 1906; JGG to BT, 23 December 1903, all A1134, WHP. 68. JGG to BT, 3 February 1906, A1134, WHP. 69. JGG to BT, 4 December 1905, A1134, WHP. 70. JGG to BT, 12 January 1906, A1134, WHP. 71. JGG to BT, 7 April 1903, A1134, WHP. 72. Dubow, Commonwealth of Knowledge, 14. 73. Heyk, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England, 131. While Heyk points out that these two ideas were superseded by the professionalization of the discipline of history that occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century, they

Notes to Pages 35–40 / 255 still seem to apply to the kind of amateur historiography being done at the periphery. Indeed, as Griffiths explains, when the professionalization of history occurred it did not in fact override the amateur impulse. If anything, the two have coexisted since then, with the latter showing especial tenacity. 74. JGG, “Notes on the History of Marico,” no. 13, 29 June 1912, A1479 9.2, WHP. 75. Gubbins uses old-fashioned spellings of Tshaka and Mosilikatse. 76. JGG, “Notes on the History of Marico,” no. 10, A1479 9.2, WHP. 77. JGG, “Notes on the History of Marico,” no. 1, A1479 9.2, WHP. 78. JGG, “Notes on the History of Marico,” no. 2, 2 March 1912, A1479 9.2, WHP. 79. JGG, “Notes on History of Marico,” 30 March 1912, A1479 9.2, WHP. 80. JGG, “Notes on History of Marico,” 4 May 1912, A1479 9.2, WHP. 81. JGG to BT, 24 May 1912, A1134, WHP. 82. JGG to BT, 7 February 1908; JGG to BT, 28 December 1912; JGG to BT 22 January 1916, all A1134, WHP. 83. JGG to BT, 6 July 1913, A1134, WHP. 84. JGG to BT, 8 March 1906, A1134, WHP. On the museum, see JGG to BT, 25 April 1903, A1134, WHP. 85. JGG, “Notes on History of Marico,” 4 May 1912, A1479 9.2, WHP. 86. JGG to BT, 20 April 1912, A1134, WHP. 87. Ibid. 88. JGG, “Notes on the History of Marico,” no. 12, A1479 9.2, WHP; JGG, “Notes on the History of Marico,” no. 20, A1479 9.2, WHP; “Letter to the Editor,” 16 March 1912 (Attached to “Notes” photocopies), John Gaspard Gubbins, 1916–1934, A205, WHP. 89. JGG to BT, 20 April 1912, A1134, WHP. 90. JGG to BT, 8 June 1912, A1134, WHP. 91. JGG to BT, 24 March 1914, A1134, WHP; Mr. Colson, “Chapter on the Baharutse,” 1922, A 205, WHP; JGG to BT, 5 June 1922, A1134, WHP. 92. JGG to BT, 28 December 1912, A1134, WHP. 93. Not only did Gubbins fancy himself an explorer like Livingstone, but his accumulation also mimicked Livingstone’s own predilection for collecting. See Jeanne Cannizzo’s examination of David Livingstone and Walter T. Currie as missionary collectors: Jeanne Cannizzo, “Gathering Souls and Objects: Missionary Collections,” in Colo­ nialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture, and the Museum, ed. Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (London: Routledge, 1998), 153–66. 94. JGG to BT, 12 June 1912, A1134, WHP. 95. “Livingstone in the Transvaal: Ruins preserved,” Star, 29 November 1913, A1134, WHP. 96. JGG to BT, 14 February 1913, WHP A1134; JGG to BT, 21 September 1915, A1134, WHP. 97. Star, untitled, 29 November 1913, A1134, WHP. 98. JGG to Carlie Tufnell, 7 January 1913, A1134, WHP. 99. JGG to BT, 3 May 1915, A1134, WHP. 100. Ibid. 101. JGG to BT, 22 January 1916, A1134, WHP. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid. 104. Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” 11. 105. Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” 67.

256 / Notes to Pages 40–44 106. JGG to BT, 27 May 1922, A1134, WHP; JGG to BT, 23 April 1921, A1134, WHP; “Dr. Gubbins’s Fluorspar,” date and publication unknown, Vyvian William Hiller, A1146, WHP. 107. JGG to BT, 26 July 1923, A1134, WHP. 108. Dubow, Commonwealth of Knowledge, 7. 109. This was later raised to 13 percent. 110. Sol T. Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa: Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), 186. 111. JGG to BT, 2 August, 1913, A1134, WHP. 112. JGG to BT, 20 January 1914, A1134, WHP. 113. JGG to BT 26 July 1913, A1134, WHP. 114. JGG to Carlie, 17 February 1914, A1134, WHP. 115. JGG to BT, 20 January 1914, A1134, WHP. 116. JGG to Carlie Tufnell, 17 February 1914, A1134, WHP. 117. JGG to BT, 17 August 1914, A1134, WHP. 118. JGG to BT, 2 August 1914, A1134, WHP. 119. The Farmer’s Weekly, “The Year in Retrospect,” The Homestead Supplement, date unknown, A1134, WHP; JGG to BT, 28 September 1914, A1134, WHP. For more on the rebellion, see T. R. H. Davenport, “The South African Rebellion, 1914,” English Historical Review 78 (1963), 73–94. 120. JGG to BT, 4 August 1915, A1134, WHP. 121. J. D. Omer-Cooper, A History of Southern Africa (Cape Town, South Africa: David Phillip, 1994), 166. 122. JGG to BT, 4 August 1915; JGG to BT, 5 July 1915, both A1134, WHP. 123. JGG to BT, 28 September 1914; JGG to BT, 6 October 1914; JGG to BT, 3 March 15, all A1134, WHP. 124. JGG to BT, 5 July 1915, A1134, WHP. 125. JGG to BT, 2 August 1914; JGG to BT, 14 September 1914; JGG to Richard, 16 May 1915, all A1134, WHP. 126. JGG to Carlie Tufnell, 17 February 1914, A1134, WHP. 127. JGG to BT, 29 March 1916; JGG to BT 24 August 1915; JGG to BT, 7 December 1916, all A1134, WHP. 128. JGG to BT, 14 December 1915; JGG to BT, 22 January 1916, both A1134, WHP. 129. JGG to Librarian, 11 March 1917, Gubbins correspondence, University of the Witwatersrand Archives. 130. JGG to BT, 1 September 1914; JGG to BT, 28 September 1914, both A1134, WHP. 131. JGG to BT, 23 March 1915; JGG to BT, 16 June 1915, both A1134, WHP. Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) was a British author who wrote many books of supernatural fiction. Anna Kingsford (1846–88) was a physician who established the Hermetic Society in England. Her spiritual revelations were collected and published posthumously in the book Clothed with the Sun. Though during her lifetime she saw her work as an offshoot of the theosophist movement, founded in 1875 by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in New York City, after her death her work was co-opted by the theosophists, whose movement was the largest and most widespread of contemporaneous occult societies. For more, see Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 132. Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 49. 133. Ibid., 5. 134. Ibid., 257.

Notes to Pages 44–50 / 257 135. JGG to BT, 31 August 1915, A1134, WHP. As an intriguing aside, Jonathan Hyslop has detailed that like Gubbins, Gandhi became intrigued by the theosophist movement during his time in Johannesburg. See Jonathan Hyslop, “Gandhi, Mandela, and the African Modern,” in Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, ed. Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, with an afterword by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008), 119–36 136. JGG to BT, 31 August 1915, A1134, WHP. 137. Ibid. 138. Ibid. 139. BT, “The Birth of an Idea,” 1916, A1134, WHP, 1, 4. 140. Ibid, 4. 141. Ibid., 10. 142. Ibid., 8. 143. This is probably a reference to the fourteenth-century Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello. 144. BT, “Birth of an Idea,” 8. 145. For more on BT’s intellectual standpoint, see BT, “Thoughts on the Meaning of the creation of the world and man’s place in it,” 1916, A1134, WHP. 146. See, for example, JGG to BT, 28 April 1917, A1134, WHP. 147. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Dover, 1990), 2. Originally published as Joseph Conrad, Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories (William Blackwood and Sons: Edinburgh and London, 1902). 148. Unaddressed letter with title, “The Open Road to Prosperity for South Africa,” 2 September 1916; see also JGG, “Notes on the Open Rd,” and BT, “Thoughts on the Meaning of the Creation of the World and Man’s Place in It,” all A1134, WHP. 149. JGG to BT, 29 December 1918, A1134, WHP. 150. JGG to BT, 22 May 1917, A1134, WHP. 151. JGG to BT, 28 October 1916; see also JGG to BT, 17 December 1916 and JGG to BT, 21 March 1917, all A1134, WHP. 152. JGG to BT, 28 October 1916, A1134, WHP. 153. Notes attached to JGG to BT, 17 February 1917, A1134, WHP. 154. JGG to BT, 28 October 1916, A1134, WHP. 155. Ibid. 156. JGG to BT, 21 March 1917, A1134, WHP. 157. JGG to BT, 13 May 1917, A1134, WHP. 158. JGG to BT, 22 May 1917, A1134, WHP. 159. JGG to BT, 10 March 1917; JGG to BT 21 March 1917, both A1134, WHP. 160. JGG to BT, 6 June 1917, A1134, WHP. 161. JGG to BT, 21 March 1917, A1134, WHP. 162. JGG to BT, 6 June 1917, A1134, WHP. 163. JGG to BT, 17 December 1916, A1134, WHP. 164. JGG to BT, 14 June 1923, A1134, WHP. 165. JGG to BT, 29 May 1921, A1134, WHP. 166. George William Stow, The Native Races of South Africa: A History of the Intrusion of the Hottentots and Bantu into the Hunting Grounds of the Bushmen, the Aborigines of the Country, ed. George McCall Theal (New York: Macmillan, 1905), 28. See also JGG to BT, 7 December 1916, A1134, WHP. 167. JGG to BT, 7 December 1916, A1134, WHP. 168. JGG to BT, 11 January 1917, A1134, WHP.

258 / Notes to Pages 50–54 169. JGG to BT, 17 December 1916, A1134, WHP. 170. JGG, Notes, 1917, A1134, WHP. 171. JGG to BT, 7 October 1917, A1134, WHP. 172. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 5. 173. JGG to BT, 27 May 1917, A1134, WHP. 174. JGG to BT, 7 July 1917, A1134, WHP. 175. See also JGG, “Draft of Three Dimensional Thinking,” articles by JGG and BT, A1134, WHP. 176. Owen, The Place of Enchantment, 23. 177. JGG to BT, 5 October 1923, A1134, WHP. 178. JGG to BT, 5 February 1919, A1134, WHP. 179. JGG to BT, 7 July 1917, A1134, WHP. 180. JGG to BT, 5 January 1919, A1134, WHP. 181. JGG to BT, 29 October 1921, A1134, WHP. 182. JGG to BT, 15 December 1922, A1134, WHP. 183. JGG to BT, 5 January 1919, A1134, WHP. 184. See, for example, JGG to BT, 14 September 1914, A1134, WHP. 185. JGG to BT, 20 May 1919, A1134, WHP. 186. “Dr. Gubbins’s Fluorspar,” date and publication unknown, A1146, WHP. 187. JGG to government mining engineer, 29 October 1923, National Archives of South Africa, source URU, vol. 221, ref. 3970; See also JGG to BT, 8 July 1918; JGG to BT, 16 July 1918; JGG to BT, 9 September 1918; JGG to BT, 26 July 1923; and JGG to BT, 1 October 1917, all A1134, WHP. 188. JGG to BT, 29 October 1922, A1134, WHP. 189. JGG, Notes, 1921; JGG to BT, 23 July 1922, both A1134, WHP. 190. JGG to BT, 19 November 1923, A1134, WHP. 191. JGG to BT, 29 October 1922; JGG to BT, 23 May 1922; JGG to BT, 26 July 1923; and JGG to BT, 29 August 1922, all A1134, WHP. 192. On Christianity, JGG to BT, 21 March 1917; on nationality, JGG to BT, 21 March 1917; on socialism, JGG to BT, 19 March 1919; on millennialism, JGG to BT, 24 March 1919; on economics, JGG to BT, 31 March 1919 and JGG to BT, 27 July 1921, all A1134, WHP. 193. JGG to BT 31 March 1919; JGG to BT, 27 July 1921; and JGG to BT, 29 October 1922, all A1134, WHP. 194. On Theal, JGG to BT, 24 September 1917; on Walker, JGG to BT, 17 July 1924, both A1134, WHP. 195. JGG to BT, 1 January 1919; JGG to BT, 22 September 1914, both A1134, WHP. 196. Mirroring his profound relationship with his elder sister, Gubbins found female mentors in whom he could confide his deepest concerns. In the medium of the day, Gubbins poured out his soul in long letters to a Mrs. Wybergh, Mrs. Henderson, and Mrs. Webb. That he was most comfortable discussing arcane notions with female audiences hints to his character. See JGG to Mrs. Wybergh, 11 January 1917; JGG to Mrs. Henderson, 10 March 1917; and JGG to Mrs. Webb, in JGG, Notes, 19 March 1919, all A1134, WHP. 197. In a letter to Bertha, Gubbins expressed satisfaction at having his work published by a proper house, as he wrote, “under auspices entirely outside mystical or theosophical influences.” This perhaps reflects some discord between him and members of this movement. JGG to BT, 28 March 1922, A1134, WHP.

Notes to Pages 54–58 / 259 198. Unattributed epigraph from Headway, April 1922, 61, quoted in John Gaspard Gubbins, Three-Dimensional Thinking (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Ltd, 1924). 199. Gubbins, Three-Dimensional Thinking, v. 200. Ibid., 10. 201. Ibid., 1. 202. See JGG to BT, 1 January 1919; JGG to BT 22 September 1921; and JGG to BT 19 June 1924, all A1134, WHP. 203. JGG, Notes, 1917, A1134, WHP. 204. Ibid. 205. JGG to BT, 24 November 1918, A1134, WHP. 206. JGG to BT, 1 January 1919; See also JGG to BT, 24 November 1918, both A1134, WHP. 207. Gubbins, Three-Dimensional Thinking, 11. 208. Ibid., 28. 209. Ibid., 30. 210. Ibid., 31. 211. JGG to BT, 5 September 1920. See also JGG to BT, 12 September 1920, both A1134, WHP. See also Jan C. Smuts, Holism and Evolution (New York: MacMillan, 1926). In his book—Smuts’s first published work on philosophy—he expanded on what appears to have been a driving life goal, evident in his support for the League of Nations, United Nations, and, indeed, union of South Africa (all of which he helped orchestrate). Seeing mankind’s problems as products of the system of thought from which they sprung, Smuts wrote, “Our problem is to break away from the hard and narrow conceptions of the Victorian age, to see Nature once more in her fluid and creative plasticity, and to formulate our conceptions afresh from this deeper point of view” (23). Aligned with Gubbins’s ideals, Smuts coined the word “holism.” For more on Smuts and holism, see D. W. Kruger, ed., Dictionary of South African Biography, vol. 1 (Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council, 1972), 737–58; F. S. Crafford, Jan Smuts: A Biography (Garden City, NY: The Country Life Press, 1943), 140 and 223–24; and Dubow, Commonwealth of Knowledge, 8. 212. See JGG to BT, 14 August 1921; JGG to BT, 2 September 1921; JGG to BT, 7 July 1922; JGG to BT, 23 July 1922; and JGG to BT, 24 October 1923, all A1134, WHP. 213. JGG to BT, 28 March 1922, A1134, WHP. 214. Gubbins, Three-Dimensional Thinking, vii. 215. Edgar H. Brookes of Transvaal University College, “Review of Three-Dimensional Thinking,” Rand Daily Mail, 15 September 1924. 216. JGG to BT, 19 June 1924, A1134, WHP. 217. Diploma, British Empire Exhibition, signed by Professor Clarke, chief administrator, 1924, A1479 1, WHP. See also JGG to BT, 15 December 1923, A1134, WHP. 218. JGG to BT, 30 October 1923; See also JGG to BT, 17 July 1924; JGG to BT, 14 February 1926; and JGG to BT, 24 June 1927, all A1134, WHP. 219. JGG to BT, 7 January 1924, A1134, WHP. 220. JGG to BT, 9 November 1923, A1134, WHP. 221. Ibid. 222. “Treasures in a Farmer’s Library,” Star, 26 June 1926, A1479 29/1374, WHP. 223. JGG to BT, 7 August 1931; JGG to BT, 19 September 1931, both A1134, WHP. 224. JGG to BT, 22 September 1921. See also JGG to BT, 12 December 1922, both A1134, WHP. 225. JGG to BT, 5 February 1919, A1134, WHP.

260 / Notes to Pages 58–66 226. JGG to BT, 17 December 1916, A1134, WHP. 227. JGG to BT, 26 October 1918, A1134, WHP. 228. Kipling, “South Africa,” 149–51. 229. John L. and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), xvi. 230. Dubow, Commonwealth of Knowledge, 15. 231. Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 293. 232. Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” 17. 233. JGG to Mona Gubbins, 12 September 1920, A1134, WHP. Ch a pter t w o

1.

Memorandum on “The Africana Museum,” presented by deputation to the Library Committee of City Council, 30 March 1933, various binders containing Advisory Committee Documents, Minutes, and Reports (hereafter Reports), MuseumAfrica Archive (hereafter MAA). 2. Johannesburg Publicity Association, “Gubbins Africana: Collection Outline of the Scheme,” date unknown, John Gaspard Gubbins Papers, 1872, A1134, University of the Witwatersrand Department of Historical Papers (hereafter WHP). 3. Saul Dubow and Alan Jeeves, eds., South Africa’s 1940s: Worlds of Possibilities (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2005), 2. 4. Jonathan Hyslop, “An Anglo-South African Intellectual, the Second World War, and the Coming of Apartheid: Guy Butler in the 1940s,” in South Africa’s 1940s: Worlds of Possibilities, 212. 5. John Gaspard Gubbins, “Three Dimensional Thinking,” Masonic World, A1134, WHP. For more on the Freemasons, see A. A. Cooper, The Freemasons of South Africa (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1986). 6. For more on Gubbins’s work on the behalf of the poor white problem, see “Rural Education: Programme of the T.A.U.”; “Pledges from Legislators,” 19 September 1923; “The Poor Whites: Farmer’s Propose Plan to the Government,” 13 October 1923; John Gaspard Gubbins (hereafter JGG) to Bertha Tufnell (hereafter BT), 15 December 1923; JGG to BT, 15 December 1923; and JGG to BT, 20 December 1928, all A1134, WHP. 7. Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa, 1820–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 139. 8. Jeffrey Butler, Richard Elphick, and David Welsh, eds., Democratic Liberalism in South Africa: Its History and Prospect (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 3 and 5. See also P. B. Rich, White Power and the Liberal Conscience: Racial Segregation and South African Liberalism, 1921–1960 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984). 9. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge, 139. 10. J. Lambert, “South African or British? Or Dominion South Africans? The Evolution of an Identity in the 1910s and 1920s,” South African Historical Journal 43 (2000): 198. 11. South Africanism was espoused by a wide range of social advocates and found expression in everything from politics, debates about bilingual education, and science in, for example, the South African Association for the Advancement of Science, whose history Dubow adeptly traces in A Commonwealth of Knowledge. For more, see Ernst Gideon Malherbe, The Bilingual School: A Study of Bilingualism in South Africa (New York: Arno Press, 1978); Alan Paton, South African Tragedy: The Life and Times

Notes to Pages 66–70 / 261

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

of Jan Hofmeyr (New York: Scribner, ca. 1965); and Brian Austin, Schonland: Scientist and Soldier (Bristol, UK: IOP Pub, ca. 2001). Jeremy Foster, Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 42–43. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge, vi. Saul Dubow, “Scientism, Social Research and the Limits of South Africanism: The Case of Ernst Gideon Malherbe,” South African Historical Journal 44 (2001): 101. Jeffrey Butler, “Interwar Liberalism and Local Activism,” in Democratic Liberalism in South Africa, 81. Richard Elphick, “Mission Christianity and Interwar Liberalism,” in Democratic Liberalism in South Africa, 66. Ibid. Rich, White Power and the Liberal Conscience, 13. Ibid., 50. Phillis Lewsen, “Liberals in Politics and Administration, 1936–1948,” in Democratic Liberalism in South Africa, 101. Elphick, “Mission Christianity and Interwar Liberalism,” 78. Here he notes that “even in the context of their own time they were rather outmoded.” See JGG to Rheinallt Jones (hereafter RJ), 20 December 1928, John Gaspard Gubbins, 1916–1934, A205, WHP. See JGG to RJ, 20 December 1928; JGG to RJ, 23 April 1929, both A205, WHP; JGG to Jan Smuts, 18 March 1929, Gubbins Correspondence, University of the Witwatersrand Archives (hereafter WA); and JG to BT, 23 July 1922, A1134, WHP. At this time Bertha presented members of the Swedish New Church usage of her farm at a nominal price so that they could establish an agricultural training college for natives to honor an African Christian farmer called simply Mooki. JGG to RJ, 23 April 1929, A205, WHP. JGG to RJ, 26 September 1929, South African Institute of Race Relations, pt. 1, AD843 B86.2.1, WHP; JGG to RJ, 1 September 1933, South African Institute of Race Relations, pt. 1, AD843 SA2.6, WHP. “Treasures in a Farmer’s Library,” Star, 26 June 1926, John Gaspard Gubbins, 1877– 1981, A1479 29/1374, WHP. For example, see Ann Wanless, “The Silence of Colonial Melancholy: The Fourie Collection of Khoisan Ethnologica” (PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2007); and Jeanne Cannizzo, “Gathering Souls and Objects: Missionary Collections,” in Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture, and the Museum, ed. Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (London: Routledge, 1998), 153–66. Paraphrase from JGG to BT, 24 April 1920, A1134, WHP. JGG to Dunn, 27 April 1930, John Gaspard Gubbins, 1877–1981, A1479 2.1, WHP. See also Dr. Percy Freer to Miss Moira Farmer, 3 December 1974, John Gaspard Gubbins, 1928–1977, 1150, WHP. JGG to Dunn , 27 April 1930, A1479 2.1, WHP. JGG to S. B. Asher, 4 March 1929, Gubbins correspondence, WA. For more information on the university, see Bruce K. Murray, Wits: The Early Years: A History of the University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg and Its Precursors (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1982); and Bruce K. Murray, Wits: The “Open” Years: A History of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1939–1959 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1997). Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge, 197.

262 / Notes to Pages 70–77 34. Ibid., 7. 35. Brochure for Public Meeting of Citizens of Johannesburg in Town Hall, 17 March 16, Library Building, WA. See also, Brochure on the History of Education, Library Building, WA. 36. Murray, Wits: The Early Years, 368. 37. JGG to H. R. Raikes (hereafter HRR), 20 June 30, A1479 2.1, WHP. 38. JGG to RJ, 26 November 1929, A1479 2.1, WHP. 39. RJ to JGG, 22 December 1929, AD843 B86.2.1, WHP. Gubbins’s plan was also endorsed by Smuts. See Jan Smuts to JGG, 25 February 1930, A1479 2.1, WHP. 40. JGG to Mrs. Rheinallt Jones (hereafter MRJ), 1 March 1930, AD843 B86.2.1, WHP. 41. JGG to RJ, 26 September 1929, AD843 B86.2.1, WHP. 42. JGG to HRR, 7 March 1930, A1479 2.1, WHP. By playing into north/south rivalry, Gubbins employed a metaphor that Dubow explains was “a distinction that was to become a convenient (if misleading) political shorthand for opposing political ‘traditions’—liberal versus reactionary, or English versus Afrikaner, respectively.” Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge, 193. 43. JGG to Dunn, 22 January 1931, A205, WHP. 44. JGG to HRR, 7 March 1930, A1479 2.1, WHP. 45. JGG to Dunn, 22 January 1931, A205, WHP. 46. Ibid. 47. JGG to Dunn, 27 April 1930, A205, WHP. 48. JGG to MRJ, 1 March 1930, AD843 B86.2.1, WHP. 49. Lewsen, “Liberals in Politics and Administration, 1936–1948,” 101. 50. JGG to Dunn, 27 April 1930, A205, WHP. 51. JGG to Peter Kaye, 27 March 1930, Photography files, MuseumAfrica Archives (hereafter MAA). 52. JGG to HRR, 17 May 1930, A1479 2.1, WHP. 53. Ibid. 54. JGG to MRJ, 21 August 1930, AD843 B86.2.1, WHP. 55. JGG to RJ, 28 August 1930, AD843 B86.2.1, WHP. 56. In general, the liberal view of South African history posits that race is the determining factor of the past, whereas radical or Marxist views of history stress economics. For more on the liberal tradition, see in Democratic Liberalism in South Africa, Christopher Saunders, “Liberal Historiography Before 1945,” 137–47, and Jeffrey Butler and Deryk Schreuder, “Liberal Historiography Since 1945,” 148–65. 57. JGG to MRJ, 21 August 1930, AD843 B86.2.1, WHP. 58. Ibid. 59. JGG to RJ, 28 August 1930, AD843 B86.2.1, WHP. 60. JGG to MRJ, 12 June 1930, AD843 B86.2.1, WHP. 61. Ibid. 62. JGG to Peter Kaye, 27 March 1930, photography files, MAA. 63. JGG to RJ, 16 June 1930, AD843 B86.2.1, WHP. 64. JGG to Dunn, 27 April 1930, A1479 2.1, WHP. 65. HRR to JGG, 12 May 1930, A 1479/2.1, WHP. 66. JGG to HRR, 17 May 1930, A1479/2.1, WHP. 67. JGG to MRJ, 19 July 1930, AD843 B86.2.1, WHP. 68. JGG to MRJ, 30 July 1930, AD843 B86.2.1, WHP. 69. While I have chosen to use the term “English speakers” here and elsewhere, it is worth noting, as Lambert does, that prior to 1950 no one used this term. Instead,

Notes to Pages 78–84 / 263 they said simply “British” or “English.” Lambert “South African or British? Or Dominion South Africans?,” 203. 70. HRR to JGG, 12 May 1930, A1479 2.1, WHP. 71. JGG to RJ, 16 June 1930, AD843 B86.2.1, WHP. 72. R. F. Alfred Hoernlé to RJ, 13 July 1930, AD843 B86.2.1, WHP. 73. JGG to MRJ, 21 August 1930, AD843 B86.2.1, WHP. 74. Agreement among JGG, Sir William Dalrymple, and HRR, 25 September 1930, A1479 2.1, WHP. 75. JGG to RJ, 10 December 1930, AD843 B86.2.1, WHP. 76. Dr. Percy Freer to Miss Moira Farmer, 3 December 1974, 1150, WHP. 77. Pretoria News, “A Man and His ideal,” 19 September 1931, A1479 7.1, WHP. 78. Rand Daily Mail, “Gubbins Library at Ottoshoop,” 23 September 1930, A1479 7.1, WHP. 79. “Unique Library for City: Early History of South Africa: Munificent Gift by Farmer Miner,” Star, 13 May 1931, A1479 7.1, WHP. 80. Pretoria News, “A Man and His Ideal.” 81. Rand Daily Mail, “Collectors and Collecting: Sidelines on Africana,” 10 March 31, A1479 7.1, WHP. 82. “Rare Books Destroyed in Fire,” Star, 24 December 1931, A1479, WHP. 83. Ibid. 84. Hans Christian Andersen, The Phoenix Bird, in H. C. Andersen, The Complete Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales, ed. Lily Owens (New York: Gramercy Books, 1984 [originally published 1850]), 629. 85. South Africa (1932), 173 and 177, quoted in R. F. Kennedy (hereafter RFK), Treasures and Trash (hereafter TT) chapter 1, p. 10, MAA. 86. Rand University Appeal, 1479 29.1350, WHP. 87. F. R. Paver, “John Gaspard Gubbins,” Africana Notes and News 3 (1946), 75. 88. RFK, TT, chapter 1, p. 11, MAA. 89. F. R. Paver, “John Gaspard Gubbins: Origins and Early Day s of the Africana Museum,” Africana Notes and News 15 (1963): 322. 90. JGG to Freer, 28 December 1931, Gubbins correspondence, WA. 91. Paver, “John Gaspard Gubbins,” 75. 92. HRR to Sir, 7 January 1932, A1479 2.5, WHP. 93. “Rand University Appeal,” 1479 29.1350, WHP. 94. HRR to Sir, 7 January 1932, A1479 2.5, WHP. 95. JGG to Dick Tufnell (hereafter DT), 10 February 1931, A1134, WHP. 96. JGG to Gill, 6 October 1932, 1479 2.1, WHP. 97. JGG to DT, 10 February 1931, A1134, WHP. 98. Scrapbook of Gubbins’s journey on the T. S. S. Ulysses, compiled by Miss Phyllis Gubbins, A1479 5, WHP. 99. JGG to HRR, 16 April 1932, A1479 2.1, WHP. 100. HRR to Times, 7 December 1935, A1479 7.1, WHP. 101. JGG to Hiller, 23 July 1932, A1146, WHP. 102. Mrs. Max Drennan, “The Romance and Tragedy of the Gubbins Collection,” Outspan, 12 February 1932, A1479 7.1, WHP. 103. The African World, “The Gubbins Library of Africana at the Witwatersrand University: Fruits of Mr. Gubbins’s Mission,” 3 September 1932, A1479 7.1, WHP. 104. JGG to HRR, 27 September 1931, A1479 2.1, WHP.

264 / Notes to Pages 84–90 105. JGG to HRR, 16 October 1932, A 1479 2.1, WHP. 106. JGG to Gill, 6 October 1932, A 1479 2.1, WHP. 107. JGG to HRR, 17 December 1932, A 1479 2.1, WHP. 108. For Gubbins in Australia, see JGG to HRR, 27 November 1932, Gubbins correspon­ dence, WA; and The West Australian, 23 November 1932, A1479 7.3, WHP. 109. JGG to HRR, 27 November 1932, Gubbins correspondence, WA. 110. “Treasure Hunt Successful: Links with History of South Africa: Valuable Manuscripts Recovered; Mr. J.G. Gubbins’ Long Search,” scrapbook of Gubbins’s journey on the T. S. S. Ulysses, compiled by Miss Phyllis Gubbins, A1479 5, WHP. 111. JGG to HRR, 17 December 1932, A 1479 2.1, WHP. 112. Eric Rosenthal, “Rand University Library Reborn,” Sunday Times, 25 February 1934, A1479 7.1, WHP. 113. Star, 8 February 1934, A1479 7.1, WHP. 114. Ibid. 115. Message from Chancellor H. R. H. Prince Arthur of Connaught, KG, 7 February 1934, Library Building, WA. 116. Chancellor H. R. H. Prince Arthur of Connaught, KG , speech for opening of library, 12 February 1934, Library Building, WA. 117. Eric Rosenthal, “Rand University Library Reborn.” 118. Paver, “John Gaspard Gubbins: Origin and Early Days of the Africana Museum,” 323. 119. Paver, “John Gaspard Gubbins,” 76. 120. Untitled working document on artwork, Library Building, WA. 121. Daphne Trevor to JGG, 14 May 1933, A1479 2.1 WHP; JGG to DT, 18 May 1933, A1134, WHP. 122. JGG to DT, 18 May 1933, A1134, WHP. 123. L. F. Maingard, Honorary Doctorate conferred on John Gubbins, reprinted as “John Gaspard Gubbins,” Africana Notes & News 15 (1963): 348. 124. JGG to HRR, 10 November 1933, A1479 2.1, WHP. 125. “An Exhibition of Africana Consisting of Pictures, Books, Maps, Manuscripts and Coins from the Gubbins Collection, South African House: Trafalgar Square, London,” A1479 3.1, WHP. 126. “Africana: Rare Items for the Rand: What Mr. Gubbins Found in England,” n.d., A1479 7.1, WHP. 127. “Exhibition of Africana at the New South African House” reprinted from The African World, 10 June 1933, A1479 7.1, WHP. 128. “An Exhibition of Africana Consisting.” 129. W. R. B., “Topics and Tameletjies,” 7 July 1933, South Africa, A1134, WHP. See also “Exhibition of Africana,” Star, 2 August 1933, A1479 29.1345, WHP. 130. “Exhibition of Africana at the New South African House.” 131. “Folk Museum for South Africa,” Times, A1479 7.1, WHP. 132. Gubbins’s desire to use his museum to affect local senses of citizenship resonates with Saul Dubow’s analysis of how South Africanism enabled the creation of such institutions as museums and the Botanical Garden at Kirstenbosch. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge, 6. 133. JGG to Gill, 6 October 1932, A1479 2.1, WHP. 134. JGG to HRR, 30 June 1932, A1479 2.1, WHP. 135. JGG to William Dalrymple, 1 February 1933, A1479 2.1, WHP. 136. JGG to Hiller, 23 July 1932, A1146, WHP.

Notes to Pages 91–95 / 265 137. JGG to DT, 18 April 1933, A1134, WHP. 138. “Treasure Hunt Successful.” 139. JGG to William Dalrymple, 6 February 1933, A1479 2.1, WHP. 140. JGG to HRR, 30 June 1932, A1479 2.1, WHP. 141. Extract of letter from JGG to Mrs. Baden-Powel attached to JGG to HRR, 30 June 1932, A1479 2.1, WHP. 142. JGG to HRR, 30 June 1932, A1479 2.1, WHP. 143. JGG to William Dalrymple, 6 February 1933, A1479 2.1, WHP. 144. JGG to William Dalrymple, 1 February 1933, A1479 2.1, WHP. 145. Extract of letter from JGG to Mrs. Baden-Powel attached to JGG to HRR, 30 June 1932, A1479 2.1, WHP. 146. See, for example, JGG to HRR, 27 September 1931, A1479 2.1, WHP, in which JGG thanks HRR for his offer to put the museum on the university grounds. 147. JGG to HRR, 30 June 1932, A1479 2.1, WHP. 148. JGG to Hiller, 7 October 1933, A1146, WHP. 149. JGG to Gill, 13 April 1934, A1479 2.1, WHP. 150. Ibid. 151. Ibid. 152. JGG to DT, 14 December 1933, A1134. 153. Here Gubbins’s sense of permanence stands in contrast to the early curators of the older South Africa Museum in Cape Town. Describing them, Mackenzie writes that they “were essentially expatriates with little desire to commit themselves to the colony; they remained strongly Anglophone and their role in the creation of colonial and Union identities, limited largely to whites, was more shaky than might be expected.” John Mackenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures, and Colonial Identities (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009), 116. 154. “Dr. JGG Addresses Rotary Club,” Rand Daily Mail, 3 July 1935, A1479 7.1, WHP. 155. For example, Gubbins gave a talk and made “friends for his scheme” at the Rotary Club. JGG to DT, 14 December 1933, A1134, WHP. 156. JGG to DT 19 June 1934, A1134, WHP. 157. Henry A. Miers and Mr. S. F. Markham, Report on the Museums and Art Galleries of British Africa Together with a Report on the Museums of Malta, Cyprus and Gibralta by Aldeman Chas, Squire and D. W. Herdman to the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Which Is Accompanied by a Directory of the Museums and Art Galleries of British Africa and the British Mediterranean (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable Ltd., 1932). This report was undertaken at the request of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust. For more on this process and the ramifications it had for museum work in South Africa, see Mackenzie, Museums and Empire, 12. Mackenzie explains that this report emerged from the assumption that progress was evidenced in the empire by the presence of museums. See also C. K. Brain and M. C. Erasmus, The Making of The Museum Professionals in Southern Africa (Cape Town: CTP Book Printers, 1986). 158. JGG to HRR, 30 June 1932, A1479 2.1, WHP. 159. Extract of letter from JGG to Mrs. Baden-Powel attached to JGG to HRR, 30 June 1932, A1479 2.1, WHP. 160. RFK, TT, chapter 1, p. 15, MAA. 161. Memorandum on “The Africana Museum,” presented by deputation to the Library Committee of City Council, 30 March 1933, Reports, MAA. 162. Johannesburg Publicity Association, “Gubbins Africana: Collection Outline of the Scheme.” Interestingly, while this document declared the city’s intention to

266 / Notes to Pages 96–99 “permanently” house the collection in the public library, from the start museum personnel assumed that this space was meant to be a temporary solution until the city found a more suitable home for the museum. 163. Johannesburg Publicity Association, “Gubbins Africana: Collection Outline of the Scheme.” 164. Paver, “John Gaspard Gubbins,” 75. 165. Inventory of the “Gubbins” Africana Material to be handed over to the corporation of the City of Johannesburg by the University of the Witwatersrand with attached letters from E. A. Borland, Librarian, to JGG, 20 February 1934, Africana Museum Pam 0690968221, Miscellaneous Documents, MAA. 166. For a listing of books, for example, see three untitled Scholastic Exercise books with handwritten lists, A1150, WHP. 167. “Minutes of the First Meeting of the Advisory Committee of the Africana Museum Held on the 21st May, 1934,” Reports, MAA. 168. RFK, TT, chapter 2, p. 4, MAA. 169. JGG to HRR, 15 August 1933, A1479 2.1, WHP. 170. Asher to Library Committee, quoted in RFK, TT, chapter 2, p. 26, MAA. 171. JGG to DT, 10 February 1934, A1134, WHP. 172. RFK, TT, chapter 2, pp. 12–13, MAA. 173. RFK, TT, chapter 2, p. 5, MAA. 174. JGG to Hiller, 8 September 1935, A1146, WHP. 175. JGG to DT, 4 March 1934, A1134, WHP. 176. “Gubbins Africana a ‘Glorified Curiosity Shop’ Said City Councilor: Inconclusive Debate on Appointment to Directorship,” Rand Daily Mail, 30 August 1935, A1479 7.1, WHP. 177. RFK, Treasures and Trash, chapter 3, p. 7, MAA. 178. For more, see Vivian Bickford-Smith, Elizabeth van Heyningen, and Nigel Worden, Cape Town in the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated Social History (Claremont, South Africa: D. Philip Publishers, 1999); C. Pama, ed., The South African Library, Its History, Collections, and Librarians 1818–1968: Papers Contributed on the Occasion of Its One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1968); and R.F.H. Summers, A History of The South African Museum 1825–1975, Compiled from Museum Records by Summers and Published for the Trustees of the South African Museum (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1975). 179. Denis Godfrey, The Enchanted Door: A Discourse on Africana Book-Collecting, with Notes on Famous Collectors, Collections and Books (Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1963), 24. 180. Anna Smith, “A Book on the Collecting of Africana,” Africana Notes and News 15 (1962): 49–50; see also William Lee Rees, The Life and Times of Sir George Grey, KCB (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1892) and MacKenzie, Museums and Empire. 181. MacKenzie, Museums and Empire, 80. 182. Ibid., 79. 183. This period coincides with what has been called the “museum age” of anthropology, spanning from about 1880 to 1920, during when material culture—or Africana—was collected and housed in institutions where it would be kept and studied by emergent professionals. For more on the early years of anthropology, see W. D. HammondTooke, Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa’s Anthropologists 1920–1990 (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1997); and G. W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1991.). 184. On Mendelssohn, see Godfrey, The Enchanted Door, 27. On Rhodes, see Robert Rot-

Notes to Pages 100–104 / 267 berg, with the collaboration of Miles F. Shore, The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 185. For more on the connection between mining and accumulation, see Jillian Carman, Uplifting the Colonial Philistine: Florence Phillips and the Making of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2006). 186. http://www.abebailey.org/view.asp?pg=biography, Accessed 4 February 2012. 187. http://media1.mweb.co.za/iziko/sang/conservation/view.asp?pg=catalogue&pgsub= cat_reapp2, accessed 4 February 2012. 188. RFK, “Harold Strange and the Strange Collection,” Africana Notes and News 7 (1950): 62–64. 189. RFK, “Private Collectors and Public Museums,” Africana Notes and News 1 (1954): 102. 190. D. H. Varley, Adventures in Africana (Cape Town: University of Cape Town and the Trustees of the South African Library, 1949), 12. 191. Godfrey, The Enchanted Door. 192. Ibid., 27. 193. Killie Campbell, “My Africana Collection,” Africana Notes and News 2 (1945): 119– 21. For more on Campbell, see Godfrey, The Enchanted Door, 94–102. 194. E. J. De Jager, “The Estelle Hamilton-Welsh Collection of African Arts and Crafts,” Africana Notes and News 16 (1964): 171–74. 195. See, for instance, JGG to Gill, 6 October 1932, A 1479 2.1, WHP. 196. BT, “The Birth of an Idea,” 1916, A1134, WHP, 1, 4. Mendelssohn reveals in his bibliography that while he only began collecting in 1899, his tireless work on his bibliography, published in 1910 to coincide with Union, sought to be a definitive list of all works of written Africana extant at that time. See Sidney Mendelssohn, Mendelssohn’s South African Bibliography: Being the Catalogue Raissoné of the Mendelssohn Library of Works Relating to South Africa . . . etc., etc., etc. (1910; repr. London: Holland Press, 1957), x. 197. Godfrey, The Enchanted Door, 103. 198. JGG to DT, 4 March 1934, A1134, WHP. 199. JGG to HRR, 4 September 1933, A1479 2.1, WHP. See also Paver, “John Gaspard Gubbins,” 77. 200. JGG to HRR, 4 September 1933, A1479 2.1, WHP. 201. JGG to DT, 14 December 1933, A1134, WHP. 202. JGG to DT, 8 January 1935, A1134, WHP. 203. JGG to DT, 5 June 1935, A1134, WHP. 204. JGG to DT, December 1934, A1134, WHP. 205. JGG to DT, c. June 1935, A1134, WHP. 206. Ibid. 207. JGG to Hiller, 8 September 1935, A1146, WHP. 208. Mona Gubbins to Dick and Eleanor Tufnell, 15 December 1935, 1479 2.1, WHP. 209. For Gubbins’s death certificate, will, and estate information, see National Archives of South Africa, 91201. 210. Richard Lattimore, trans., The Odyssey of Homer (New York: Harper, 1991), 27. 211. Mona Gubbins to Dick and Eleanor Tufnell, 15 December 1935, 1479 2.1, WHP. 212. J. P. R. Wallis, “The Late Dr. Gubbins,” Star, 13 November 1935, A1479 7.1., WHP. 213. J. du Berry, “Dr. JG Gubbins,” Star, 27 November 1935, A1479 7.1., WHP. 214. “John Gaspard Gubbins: Life with a Purpose,” Star, 14 November 1935, A1479 7.1, WHP.

268 / Notes to Pages 105–110 215. HRR to Times, 7 December 1935, A1479 7.1, WHP. 216. J. P. R. Wallis, “The Late Dr. Gubbins.” 217. “Distinguished Gathering at Funeral of Dr. JG Gubbins,” Rand Daily Mail, 15 November 1935, John Gubbins File, WA. 218. H. R. Raikes, eulogy attached to letter dated 14 November 1935, from Rand Daily Mail, John Gubbins File, WA. 219. Dubow, “Scientism, Social Research and the Limits of South Africanism,” 101. 220. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge, v. 221. Lambert, “South African or British? Or Dominion South Africans?,” 197. See also Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge; and Dubow and Jeeves, eds., South Africa’s 1940s. 222. Nicholas B. Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 3. For more on the relationship between colonialism and culture, see Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993) and James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 223. Mackenzie, Museums and Empire, 7. 224. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 10. See also Mackenzie, Museums and Empire, 4. 225. Dubow and Jeeves, eds., South Africa’s 1940s, 13–14. 226. Elphick, “Mission Christianity and Interwar Liberalism,” 80. Ch a pter three

1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

“Gubbins Centenary,” Africana Notes and News 22 (1977): 219. See also Mrs. L. J. De Wet to Miss E. Gubbins, 30 June 1976, John Gaspard Gubbins, 1877–1981, A1479, University of the Witwatersrand Department of Historical Papers (hereafter WHP). Moira Farmer, “John Gaspard Gubbins: Talk Given to Friends of the University Library,” 26 November 1977, John Gaspard Gubbins, 1928–1977, A1150, WHP. Herbert Butterfield to Dr. Freer, 12 October 1976, John Gaspard Gubbins, 1877– 1981, A1479 2.3, WHP. Also see miscellaneous documents in Gubbins correspondence, University of the Witwatersrand Archives. “Minutes of Africana Museum Consultative Committee,” 26 March 1936; L. J. de Wet, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee and Minutes of meeting,” 7 February 1980, both various binders containing Advisory Committee Documents, Minutes, and Reports (hereafter Reports), MuseumAfrica Archive (hereafter MAA). “Health and Amenities Committee Report,” 4 May 1977, Reports, MAA. Dennis Godfrey’s “Collecting Africana” column ran in the Star from 1969–75, Denis Godfrey, A2255, WHP. While it is, admittedly, tricky work to suppose what someone long since dead would have thought and felt, this supposition and others like it stem from a close study of Gubbins’s thoughts, derived primarily from my readings of more than three decade’s worth of his correspondence. Like many biographers, I readily admit to getting too close to Gubbins; still, it is precisely from the intimacy borne of an extended study of his life that I am able to stand, with as much surety as any biographer, behind pronouncements like this. For more on biography—its rewards, its dangers—see Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88 (2001): 129–44. While liberalism’s impotence has been argued vigorously—especially by Marxist his-

Notes to Pages 111–114 / 269

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

torians—that this chapter provides a case study via Africana offers a fresh perspective on this assertion. The Africana Museum Advisory Committee was formed in 1934 to advise the governing Library Council. In the late thirties the name was changed to the Africana Museum Consultative Committee. It was changed back to Advisory Committee in the 1940s. C. L. Andersson, H. J. Crocker, H. R. Raikes, G. Preller, and J.P.R. Wallis, letter to the editor, “The Africana Museum: Hopes of a National Institution; Carrying on Dr. Gubbins’s Work,” Cape Argus, 28 November 1935, Gubbins File, University of the Witwatersrand Archives (hereafter WA). P. B. Rich, White Power and the Liberal Conscience: Racial Segregation and South African Liberalism, 1921–1960 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984), 69. Janet M. Phillips, Liberalism in South Africa, 1948–1963 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 11. See also P. B. Rich, White Power and the Liberal Conscience, 58. Richard Currie, letter to the editor, Rand Daily Mail, 20 August 1935, A1479 7.1, WHP. H. R. Raikes (hereafter HRR) letter in “Minutes of the Ordinary Meeting of the Library Committee held on Thursday 30th June 1938,” Reports, MAA. Mona Gubbins to Hiller, 24 June 1936, Vyvian William Hiller, A1146, WHP. Letter of recommendation from F. W. Cooper, Librarian and Secretary of the Port Elizabeth Public Library, 28 June 1921, photography file on R. F. Kennedy (hereafter RFK), MAA. For RFK’s certificates, see his application to the Johannesburg Public Library (here­ after JPL) in RFK to Sir, 20 October 1919, photography file on RFK, MAA. For more on the library, see RFK, The Heart of a City: A History of the Johannesburg Public Library (Cape Town: Juta & Company, Ltd, 1970). Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, “Introduction: Afropolis,” in Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, ed. Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, with an afterword by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008), 18. “A Few Facts about the Johannesburg Public Library and the Africana Museum,” March 1964, Spam 027.4 (J)JOH, Pamphlets, JPL. “Minutes of the General Purposes Committee re: Public Library,” 12 October 1904, town council minutes, Local Government Library (hereafter LGL). “Minutes of General Purposes Committee re: Public Library and Empire Exhibition,” 2 October 1923 and “Minutes of General Purposes Committee re: Public Library,” 18 December 1923, town council minutes, LGL. “A Few Facts about the Johannesburg Public Library and the Africana Museum.” See also on the appointment as an advisor of Dr. le Roux, professor of Afrikaans, “Report of the Library Committee re: Public Library,” 20 July 1926, and on the appointment as an advisor of Dr. Hoernlé, “Report of the Library Committee re: Public Library,” 1 July 1924, both town council minutes, LGL. “Report of the Library Committee re: Public Library,” 15 December 1925, town council minutes, LGL; and Rand Daily Mail, title unknown, 14 May 1930, library newspaper clippings, JPL. On the competition, see “Report of Library Committee re: Public Library,” 9 May 1930, town council minutes, LGL. Rand Daily Mail, title unknown, 25 February 1930, library newspaper clippings, JPL; See also Star, title unknown, 22 September 1932; Rand Daily Mail, title unknown,

270 / Notes to Pages 114–117

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

7 February 1930; Star, title unknown, 9 May 1930; and Rand Daily Mail, title unknown, 18 February 1930, all library newspaper clippings, JPL. The Rand Daily Mail, title unknown, 13 November 1931, library newspaper clippings, JPL, reported: “South African timber is to be used as far as possible in the flooring and paneling of the new Johannesburg Public Library;” Star, title unknown, 6 June 1930, library newspaper clippings, JPL, reported that the competition was decided to be between South African architects but to be judged by Englishman. See also T. Gutsche, “JPL: A tribute to 26 years of service,” 2 July 1961, museum newspaper clippings, JPL. Note also that the completion of a new library at Wits, documented in the previous chapter, was also completed with all white labor. “Minutes of the General Purposes Committee re: Public Library,” 25 February 1930, town council minutes, LGL. Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa, 1820–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 66. Rand Daily Mail, title unknown, 16 September 1931, library newspaper clippings, JPL. Star, title unknown, 17 May 1930, library newspaper clippings, JPL, reported that “steps are being considered for bringing the Afrikaans section of the City Municipal Library up to date.” See also the Rand Daily Mail, title unknown, 28 May 1930, library newspaper clippings, JPL, on the appointment as an advisor of J. Erasmus, an expert on Afrikaans literature. Rand Daily Mail, title unknown, 15 May 1930, library newspaper clippings, JPL. Architect John Perry of Cape Town had won the competition and it was his design that was followed. See “Minutes of General Purposes Committee,” 13 March 1931, town council minutes, LGL. Rand Daily Mail, title unknown, 10 July 1932, library newspaper clippings, JPL. Interestingly, Tony Bennett has noted that powerful cultural spaces like museums and libraries tended to be situated in the center of modern cities. He writes, “Museums were also typically located at the centre of cities where they stood as embodiments, both material and symbolic, of a power to ‘show and tell’ which, in being deployed in a newly constituted open and public space, sought rhetorically to incorporate the people within the processes of the state.” Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 87. Star, title unknown, 10 May 1932, library newspaper clippings, JPL. Here the library can be understood as an archive of Western civilization. For more on the archive as a place of religious-like meaning, see Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Hamilton et al. (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 19. Carol Duncan, “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1991), 93. Rand Daily Mail, title unknown, 10 July 1932, library newspaper clippings, JPL. “A Building for Posterity,” Star, 8 May 1933, library newspaper clippings, JPL. Star, title unknown, 6 May 1935, library newspaper clippings, JPL. Dennis Godfrey, “Checkered History of City Library,” Star, 15 January 1972, library newspaper clippings, JPL. Paraphrase of Mayor Mr. M. Freeman’s speech in Rand Daily Mail, title unknown, 7 July 1935, library newspaper clippings, JPL.

Notes to Pages 117–122 / 271 43. “Men Who Gave the Town Its First Library,” Star, 21 September 1936, library newspaper clippings, JPL. 44. H. G. Oliver, “The Africana Museum: An Examination in the Light of Observations on Museum Practice in Britain and Europe,” introduction (Johannesburg: 1939), AM Pam 06909682210LI, miscellaneous files, MAA. 45. RFK, Treasures and Trash (hereafter TT) chapter 5, MAA. 46. For more, see Bennett, The Birth of the Museum. 47. Oliver, “The Africana Museum,” 15. 48. Ibid., 5. 49. For more on the logic of library classification as a display of power, see Jane Taylor, “Holdings: Refiguring the Archive,” in Refiguring the Archive, 249. 50. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Science (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xv. For more on Foucault’s application to museum studies, see Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1992). 51. The South Gallery was opened at a gala event for three hundred people, including the mayor of Johannesburg, in 1939. According to RFK, “Annual Report of the Acting Director, Africana Museum for the year ended 30th June, 1939,” Reports, MAA, “this gallery contains ethnographical material, and the sequel to the historical story told in the North Gallery, beginning with the Voortrekkers and Two Republics. The official opening happily co-incided with the Voortrekker centenary celebrations, making these exhibit of special interest.” 52. Oliver, “The Africana Museum,” 17–22. 53. RFK, editorial, Africana Notes and News 1 (1943): 4. 54. Interestingly, the Oxford English Dictionary quotes this passage from Africana Notes and News in its definition of the term, which it puts as “books, documents, or the like, relating to objects peculiar to, or connected with, Africa, in particular Southern Africa, especially those of value or interest to collectors.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989; online version December 2011. ; accessed 11 March 2012. First published in A Supplement to the OED I, 1972. 55. D. H. Varley, Adventures in Africana (Cape Town: University of Cape Town and the Trustees of the South African Library, 1949), 5. 56. Denis Godfrey, The Enchanted Door: A Discourse on Africana Book-Collecting, with Notes on Famous Collectors, Collections and Books (Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1963), 19. 57. Ibid., 20. 58. Ibid., v. 59. “Earliest Use of the Term Africana,” Africana Notes and News 7 (1969): 274. 60. “Notes and Queries,” Africana Notes and News 13 (1958), 117. See also Sidney Mendelssohn, Mendelssohn’s South African Bibliography: Being the Catalogue Raissoné of the Mendelssohn Library of Works Relating to South Africa . . . etc., etc., etc. (London: Holland Press, 1957). First published 1910 by K. Paul, Trench, Trubner. Mendelssohn’s work contains a descriptive introduction by I. D. Colvin, also of interest here. 61. “Notes and Queries,” Africana Notes and News 13 (1958): 117. 62. “Notes and Queries,” Africana Notes and News 13 (1959): 202. 63. RFK, “Acting Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 11 March 1953, Reports, MAA. 64. RFK, TT, chapter 5, p. 48, MAA.

272 / Notes to Pages 122–128 65. RFK, “Supplementary Report of Acting Director for Arts and Culture Committee,” 3 January 1949, Reports, MAA. See also RFK, TT, chapter 5, pp. 110–11. 66. “Minutes of the Africana Museum Consultative Committee Meeting,” 28 June 1950, Reports, MAA. 67. On RFK’s contribution to this, see C. K. Brain and M. C. Erasmus, The Making of the Museum Professionals in Southern Africa (Cape Town: CTP Book Printers, 1986), 11. 68. See Anna Hester Smith (hereafter AHS), “Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 7 July 1960; and AHS, “Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 April 1961, both Reports, MAA. 69. AHS visited museums in the following cities in the United States: New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Williamsburg, Charleston, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, San Marino, San Francisco, Berkeley, Salt Lake City, Helena (Montana), Lincoln (Nebraska), Chicago, Brookfield, Dearborn, Detroit, Cleveland, Albany, Cooperstown, Boston, Cambridge, and Salem. In Europe she visited museums in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, England, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, and Greece. In Africa she visited colonial museums in Nairobi, Mombasa, and Dar es Salaam. 70. AHS, “Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 7 July 1960, Reports, MAA. 71. Ibid. 72. “Municipal Library is Johannesburg’s Mecca of Culture,” Rand Daily Mail, 14 February 1949, museum newspaper clippings, JPL. 73. “City Library a Focus of Culture: Accommodation at a Premium,” Star, 6 June 1947, museum newspaper clippings, JPL. 74. “A Magic Window on the World of Yesterday,” Star, 12 August 1947, museum newspaper clippings, JPL. 75. “Citizens of 2000 AD Will Know All About Citizens of 1950: Johannesburg’s Paper Mine Satisfies the Most Curious,” Star, 6 May 1950, museum newspaper clippings, JPL. 76. “City Library Is Busier than Its London Counterpart,” Star, 4 April 1955, museum newspaper clippings, JPL. 77. Elizabeth Gubbins to J. D. Rheinallt Jones, 10 June 1951, A1479 2.2, WHP; see also RFK “Acting Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 13 February 1952; “Minutes of the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 18 February 1953, both Reports, MAA. 78. RFK, “The Founders of the Africana Museum,” 233. 79. RFK, TT, chapter 7, p. 65, MAA. 80. AHS, “R. F. Kennedy,” Africana Notes and News 14 (1960): 81–82. See also, copy of speech from Kennedy’s honorary M.A., “Every Educated Man Owes Respect to Nooks,” 30 June 1961, photography file on RFK, MAA; and AHS, “Annual Report of the Director for the year ended 30th June 1960,” Reports, MAA. 81. “From Its Reading Habits: Johannesburg Is Very Highly Civilized, Says Retiring Librarian,” Star, 5 August 1959, library newspaper clippings, JPL. 82. Richard Elphick, “Mission Christianity and Interwar Liberalism,” in Democratic Liberalism in South Africa: Its History and Prospect, ed. Jeffrey Butler, et al. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 72. 83. Brain and Erasmus, The Making of The Museum Professionals in Southern Africa, 41. 84. Jeffrey Butler, “Interwar Liberalism and Local Activism,” in Democratic Liberalism in South Africa, 97. 85. M. M. W., “Library that Grew Up with Johannesburg,” Sunday Times, 25 April 1971,

Notes to Pages 128–133 / 273 library newspaper clippings, JPL. Note that this is now called the Harold Strange Library of Africana Studies. 86. AHS was appointed at a meeting of the Africana Museum Consultative Committee dated 27 October 1959 to begin her term on 3 June 1960. “Minutes of the Africana Museum Consultative Committee Meeting, 27 October 1959,” Reports, MAA. 87. Lucy Rallis (née Kennedy), Hillary Bruce, and Blanche Nagelgast, interview with author, 6 February 2003. 88. RFK, “Survey of the Collection with Proposals on Future Acquisitions” circulated to Advisory Committee in January 1952 and discussed in February 1952, Reports, MAA; RFK, TT, chapter 7, pp. 18–21, MAA. See also RFK, “Acting Director’s Report to Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 18 March 1953, Reports, MAA. 89. RFK, “Annual Report of the Acting Director for Year Ended 30 June 1951,” Reports, MAA; RFK, TT, chapter 7, p. 21, MAA. 90. AHS, talk on Springbok Radio quoted in Cape Times, “Africana Queries,” 2 June 1961, miscellaneous files, MAA. See also “Africana” column, Star, 6 July 1961, museum newspaper clippings, JPL. 91. See AHS, “Annual Report of Director for Year Ended 30 June 1961;” AHS, “Annual Report of Director for Year Ended 30 June 1963;” and AHS, “Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 12 October 1972, all Reports, MAA. 92. See, for examples, AHS, “Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 April 1973; and L. J. de Wet, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee Meeting,” 13 November 1975, both Reports, MAA. 93. Harold MacCarthy (Chairman of the Africana Museum Advisory Committee), “The Africana Museum: A Valuable Collection Built Up Over 25 Years,” Rand Daily Mail, 20 November 1961, museum newspaper clippings, JPL. 94. See, for example, AHS to Technical Advisor of Transvaal and OFS Mines, 24 November 1966, Reports, MAA. In it, AHS was writing on behalf of City Council of Johannesburg asking for the nomination of no more than three experts on mining to sit on Africana Museum Advisory Committee. See also “Health and Amenities Committee and Management Committee Minutes,” January 1978, Reports, MAA, in which Prof. D. Hammond-Tooke was nominated by the Institute for the Study of Man to represent it on Africana Museum Advisory Committee. 95. AHS, “Annual Report of Director for Year Ended 30 June 1962,” Reports, MAA. 96. “Minutes of Africana Museum Advisory Committee Meeting Confirmed by the Chairman,” 11 November 1971; AHS, “Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 14 April 1972; and “Management and Sport and Amenities Committee Minutes re: Fourie Collection,” 9 March 1979, all Reports, MAA. 97. Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 4. 98. Rich, White Power and the Liberal Conscience, 1921–1960, 55. 99. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge, 266. 100. For more on the disjuncture between ethnology and predominate, Western anthropological thought see Coombes, Reinventing Africa. 101. AHS, “Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 12 October 1972, Reports, MAA. 102. “Minutes of a Meeting of the Africana Museum Advisory Committee, Confirmed by the Chairman,” 9 August 1963, Reports, MAA. 103. “Minutes of a Meeting of the Africana Museum Advisory Committee, Confirmed by the Chairman,” 11 March 1971, Reports, MAA.

274 / Notes to Pages 133–138 104. AHS, “Annual Report of Director for Year Ended 30 June 1961,” Reports, MAA. 105. AHS, “Annual Report of Director for Year Ended 30 June 1965,” Reports, MAA. 106. See, for example, AHS, “Annual Report of Director for Year Ended 30 June 1965,” Reports, MAA.; and MacCarthy, “The Africana Museum: A Valuable Collection Built Up over 25 years.” 107. RFK, “Annual Report of the Acting Director for Year Ended 30 June 1941,” Reports, MAA. 108. See RFK, “Report of Acting Director to Consultative Committee,” 13 September 1938; RFK, “Report of Acting Director to Consultative Committee,” 23 May 1939; Africana Museum Annual Report, 1946; and Africana Museum Annual Report, 1947, all Reports, MAA. 109. Mrs. Phyllis Lewsen, The Journal of the Transvaal Teacher’s Association, cited in RFK, “Annual Report of Acting Director for Year Ended 30th June 1944,” Reports, MAA. 110. AHS, “Annual Report of Director for Year Ended 30 June 1963,” Reports, MAA. 111. See, for example, AHS, “Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 7 July 1960; and AHS, “Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 August 1960, both Reports, MAA. On adults, see AHS, “Annual Report of Director for Year Ended 30 June 1970,” Reports, MAA. 112. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 77. 113. Ibid., 79. 114. John Mackenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures, and Colonial Identities (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009), 4. 115. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, 21. 116. The museum only allowed black visitors to enter after attaining specific permission, hindering accessibility. While no absolute figures exist for how many black visitors entered the museum in these years, it is highly likely that this number was far lower than the number of white visitors. 117. Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, eds. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1991), 2. 118. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum; Susan A. Crane, ed., Museums and Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Nicholas Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1992); Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge; Flora E. S. Kaplan, ed., Museums and the Making of “Ourselves”: The Role of Objects in National Identity (London: Leicester University Press, 1994). 119. Verne Harris, “The Archival Sliver: A Perspective on the Construction of Social Memory in Archives and the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy,” in Refiguring the Archive, 137. 120. Susan Sleeper-Smith, “Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives,” in Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives, ed. Susan SleeperSmith (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 2. 121. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 20. 122. RFK, “Acting Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 11 March 1953, Reports, MAA. 123. RFK, “Acting Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 16 August 1951, Reports, MAA. 124. RFK, “Acting Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 28 December 1950, Reports, MAA.

Notes to Pages 138–142 / 275 125. RFK, “Acting Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 13 August 1953, Reports, MAA. 126. RFK, compiler, Some Africana Coloured Prints and the Originals from which They May Have Been Made: Catalogue of an Exhibition of Pictures from the Africana Museum held in the Johannesburg Public Library 1–14 July 1963 (Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1963); E. J. Maynard, compiler, Tokens of Southern Africa: A Catalogue Based on the Collection in the Africana Museum (Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1966); and AHS, ed., Africana Curiosities (Johannesburg: AD Donker, 1973). 127. AHS, Chronology of Johannesburg (Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1977); AHS, compiler, Johannesburg Firsts (Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1976); AHS, “Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 6 January 1961, Reports, MAA, noted, “to mark the 75th birthday of the City this year, the Public Library intends issuing a booklet giving the history of the names of the streets and suburbs within the present municipal boundaries of Johannesburg.” 128. AHS, ed., Africana Byways (Johannesburg: AD Donker, 1976). 129. “Town Council Minutes re: Kennedy’s Catalogue,” 19 April 1960, Reports, MAA. See also RFK, TT, chapter 11, 28. On its completion see AHS, “Annual Report of Director for Year Ended 30 June 1966,” Reports, MAA. 130. Percy Baneshik, “In My Good Books,” Rand Daily Mail, n.d., museum newspaper clippings, JPL. 131. RFK, “Report of the Acting Director to be considered at Consultative Committee Meeting,” 22 April 1943, Reports, MAA. This was approved according to “Minutes of the Consultative Committee Meeting,” 20 May 1943, Reports, MAA. The details are discussed in RFK, “Report to Consultative Committee,” 4 June 43, and RFK, “Report to Consultative Committee,” 29 June 1943, both Reports MAA. The Advisory Committee adopted the constitution of the Africana Society on 22 July 1943 (RFK, TT, chapter 11, p. 3). 132. Councillor Lionel Leveson, note, Africana Notes and News 1 (1943): 2. 133. N. J. de Wet, note, Africana Notes and News 1 (1943): 1. 134. RFK, editorial, Africana Notes and News 1 (1943): 3–4. 135. Killie Campbell, “My Africana Collection,” Africana Notes and News 2 (1945): 119– 22.; See also Evans Lewin, M. B. E., “The Mendelssohn Library and Bibliography,” Africana Notes and News 3 (1946): 99–107. 136. Major G. Tylden, “Kipling Africana,” Africana Notes and News 2 (1945): 58–60; and AHS, “The Bible as Africana,” Africana Notes and News 4 (1946): 21–23. 137. See, for instance, Africana Notes and News 2 (1945). 138. The museum established the following branch museums on the following dates: James Hall Museum of Transport, 1964; Bensusan Photographic Museum and Library, 1969; Museum of South African Rock Art, 1969; and Bernberg Museum of Costume, 1973. In 1978, it took over the Museum of Man and Science. 139. AHS, “Annual Report of Director for Year Ended 30 June 1966,” Reports, MAA. 140. Staff Reporter, “Bushmen Women, Too Powdered Their Noses,” Star, 19 January 1961, museum newspaper clippings, JPL. 141. “Collecting Africana” with Dennis Godfrey, Star, A2255, WHP. 142. “Minutes of Art and Culture Committee: re: Voortrekker celebrations,” 18 October 1949, town council minutes, LGL; RFK, TT, chapter 7. 143. RFK, quoted in “Minutes of the Africana Museum Consultative Committee Meeting,” 21 March 1951, Reports, MAA. For more on the importance of the tercentenary

276 / Notes to Pages 142–147 celebrations in the creation of settler identity, see Ciraj Rassool and Lesley Wits, “The 1952 Jan Van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival: Constructing and Contesting Public National History,” Journal of African History 34 (1993), 447–68. See also, Leslie Witz, Apartheid’s Festival: Contesting South Africa’s National Pasts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). 144. RFK, “Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 9 February 1955, Reports, MAA. So much effort went into the latter exhibition that the museum later turned it into a publication. See Anna Smith, ed., Pictorial History of Johannesburg (Johannesburg: Juta and Co. Ltd for the Africana Museum, 1956). 145. AHS, “Annual Report of Director for Year Ended 30 June 1962,” Reports, MAA. 146. RFK, TT, chapter 11, p. 36, MAA. 147. AHS, “Annual Report of Director for Year Ended 30 June 1960,” Reports, MAA. 148. See, for example, AHS, “Annual Report of Director for Year Ended 30 June 1969”; and AHS, “Annual Report of Director for Year Ended 30 June 1961,” both Reports, MAA. See also Brain and Erasmus, The Making of the Museum Professionals in Southern Africa. 149. AHS, “Annual Report of Director for Year Ended 30 June 1961,” Reports, MAA. 150. AHS, “Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 26 March 1964; see also AHS, “Annual Report of Director for year ended 30 June 1964,” both Reports, MAA. 151. L. J. de Wet, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee Meeting,” 13 November 1975, Reports, MAA. 152. AHS, “Annual Report of Director for Year Ended 30 June 1970,” Reports, MAA. 153. The Africana Museum, like the public library, was administered and funded by the City Council, though the committee under which its administration fell changed over the years. Importantly, while the museum was not in fact subsidized by the province or the central government, it took on a climate of risk aversion and neutrality. RFK, TT, chapter 7, p. 103, MAA. 154. Mrs. L. J. De Wet to Miss E. Gubbins, 30 June 1976, A1479 2.5, WHP. 155. Herbert Butterfield (hereafter Butterfield) to Dr. Freer, 12 October 1976; Butterfield to Miss Oliver, 14 October 1976, both A1479 2.3, WHP. 156. Butterfield’s proposed television documentary on John Gubbins was rejected by the South African Broadcasting Company. See Don Briscoe of SABC to Butterfield, 15 July 1976, A1479 2.3, WHP. 157. Butterfield to Musiker of Wartenweiler Library, 12 March 1981, A1479 2.3, WHP. See also “A Chunk of History Found in an Attic,” Star, 2 May 1977, A1479 2.3, WHP. 158. “Weekend Diary,” Star, with attached invitation, 25 August 1977, A1150, WHP. 159. Moira Farmer, “John Gaspard Gubbins: Talk Given to Friends of the University Library.” 160. “Gubbins Centenary.” 161. With the completion of Treasures and Trash, Kennedy’s city-sponsored work was accomplished. In June 1978, he formally resigned from the Africana Museum Advisory Committee, retaining the position of honorary member. Six months later, Kennedy passed from this world. 162. RFK, TT, chapter 14, pp. 40–43, MAA. 163. Calin Dan and Josif Kiraly, “subREAL: Politics of Cultural Heritage,” in The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Charles Merewether (London: Whitechapel, 2006), 115.

Notes to Pages 147–155 / 277 164. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 129. 165. Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 24. Ch a pter four

1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

The John G. Gubbins Africana Library contains, in addition to the bequests of Gubbins and Humphreys, Africana bequests from Batemen and Jeffreys. “Renaming of the Africana Library as the John G. Gubbins Africana Library,” internal file, Africana Library, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. See also E. Blanche Nagelgast (hereafter EBN), “Excerpt from Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” ca. April 1993, various binders containing Advisory Committee Documents, Minutes, and Reports (hereafter Reports), Museum­ Africa Archives (hereafter MAA); see also Colin Jackson to Elizabeth Duncan Rose, 12 October 1985, John Gaspard Gubbins, 1877–1981, A1479 2.5, University of the Witwatersrand Department of Historical Papers (hereafter WHP); and Margaret Northey, interview with author, 19 November 2003. Deon van Tonder (hereafter DVT), “From Mausoleum to Museum: Revisiting Public History in the Inauguration of MuseumAfrica, Newtown,” South African Historical Journal 31 (1994): 165–83. DV T, interview with author, 10 April 2003. Hillary Bruce (hereafter HB), interview with author, 25 February 2003. Lucy Rallis (née Kennedy), HB, and EBN, interview with author, 6 February 2003. HB, interview with author. Lucy Rallis, HB, and EBN, interview with author. Louise de Wet, interview with author (by telephone), 29 April 2003. “Geological Management Committee Minutes,” 15 January 1979, Reports, MAA. Louise de Wet, interview with author. “Management and Health and Amenities Committee re: Newtown Building Progress,” 2 December 1979 [This should be 1978], Reports, MAA. Lucy Rallis, HB, and EBN, interview with author. On temporary displays see, for example, EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 February 1984 (on Barbara Tyrell exhibition); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 October 1984 (on gold African bead collection and BMW exhibit “Contemporary Art”), both Reports, MAA. Progress Report included in EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 19 June 1978, Reports, MAA. “Health and Amenities Committee: Public Library and Africana Museum Departments,” 4 May 1977, Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 August 1979, Reports, MAA. Ibid. On input from experts see, for example, EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 7 May 1981, which noted that Chris van Vuuren from the University of Pretoria, an expert in Ndebele architecture, praised the museum’s homestead; EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 1 April 1982, noted that Mr. H. Woodhouse, author of books on rock art and

278 / Notes to Pages 155–160

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

curator of the Roberts Collection of Rock Art, gave advice on display to be made; and EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 7 February 1985, reported that Mr. Fourie, presenter of the Louis Fourie collection of Bushmen artifacts, visited and approved of the museum, all Reports, MAA. Importantly, these experts were all ethnologists and not social-cultural anthropologists. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 August 1979, Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 June 1980, Reports, MAA. Ann Wanless (hereafter AW) to SATOURS, NYC, 14 July 1983, miscellaneous files, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 June 1980, Reports, MAA. AW, interview with author, 15 April 2003. Diana Wall, interview with author, 5 May 2003. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 1 September 1982, notes that AW went to a seminar on material culture with international and local anthropologists; EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 June 1983, records that AW wrote on AMIP for the Southern African Museums Association Bulletin; and EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” August 1987, notes that AW investigated Kone huts in Pietersburg with idea of building one in AMIP, all Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 6 August 1981, Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 March 1987, Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 1 June 1989, Reports, MAA. Ibid. HB, interview with author. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 1 April 1982, Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 3 June 1982, Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 1 July 1982, Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 7 June 1984, Reports, MAA. AW, interview with author. See, for example, EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 6 August 1981, Reports, MAA, which notes AW’s talk on the cultural significance of beadwork. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 December 1982, Reports, MAA. For examples, see the following: EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 August 1979. It notes that in the last year, Miss Waters gave 96 lessons to 3,028 children; EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 3 May 1984, records that 15 teachers from Soweto visited; EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 April 1985, records that

Notes to Pages 160–164 / 279

40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

52.

“on 1 February Mrs. Wanless gave a short tour of the new premises to Dr. Dee Chateau of Austria who was a special guest of the Department of National Education;” HB, Acting Curator, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 7 May 1981, details that students from RAU’s department of Anthropology were guided through AMIP by AW; EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 November 1982, records that fine arts students from the University of the Witwatersrand visited; and EBN “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 December 1982, records visit by Standard 5 pupils, all Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 June 1980 (on 1820 settlers); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 January 1989 (on gold rush and fashion fun), both Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 June 1980 (on African tribes); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 6 August 1986 (on Bantu Arts and Crafts); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 January 1989 (on art of Bushmen), all Reports, MAA. AW, interview with author. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” August 1987, Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 January 1989, Reports, MAA. Wanless completed her PhD at Wits in 2007 on the Fourie Collection within Museum­ Africa. Ann Wanless, “The Silence of Colonial Melancholy: The Fourie Collection of Khoisan Ethnologica” (PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2007). EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 January 1989, Reports, MAA. HB, interview with author. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 7 February 1985 (on musical instruments); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 February 1981, (on lace); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 6 August 1981 (on lace), all Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 March 1987, Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 6 August 1986, Reports, MAA. It records that AW and EBN both attended the Southern African Museums Association meeting. While EBN was the official representative of museum, AW gave a talk on the planning and philosophy of AMIP and participated in a discussion on “Ethnicity in displays.” It also records that EBN gave a talk on the founding of JHB at the beacon on the corner of Commissioner and West streets as part of a ceremony arranged by the mayor of the city to commemorate the upgrading of the three beacons marking the Randjeslaagte triangle. She also drafted a leaflet, “The Story of the Randjeslaagte Triangle,” as part of this event. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 October 1986 (on Rand Pioneers Annual Luncheon and EBN at the Transvaal Numismatic Society); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 November 1987 (on cocktail parties with antique dealers), both Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 1 March 1979 (on Anglo Zulu War); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory

280 / Notes to Pages 164–166

53.

54.

55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64.

Committee,” 7 February 1980 (on physiotherapy); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 November 1982 (on the South African Red Cross); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 April 1985 (on Baines); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 January 1989 (on Kitchen); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 3 March 1988 (on Fashion), all Reports, MAA. See, for instance, EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 August 1988, Reports, MAA, noting the request by the Johannesburg Festival Association for help commemorating the 150-year anniversary of the Great Trek to be done under the auspices of the mayor of Johannesburg. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 7 January 1982 (on Sakha Indlu); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 1 April 1982 (on sangoma exhibit), both Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 6 August 1981 (on “Our People I, the Bushmen”); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 1 July 1982 (on African eating customs); and EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 7 August 1986 (on Johannesburg authors and E-goli), all Reports, MAA. In addition to this exhibit, the Africana Museum devoted the September issue of Africana Notes and News to Johannesburg. See “Minutes of the Africana Museum Advisory Committee Meeting held at AMIP,” 7 November 1985, Reports, MAA. The town council also tried to ready George Harrison Park as a site for these festivities. See “Town Council Minutes re: George Harrison Park,” 23 June 1981, town council minutes, Local Government Library (hereafter LGL). AW, interview with author. HB, interview with author. Ibid. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 7 May 1981 (on medallion); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 7 January 1982 (on watercolor of stock exchange); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 December 1982 (on sketch by John Tenniel); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 October 1984 (on scissors); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 May 1988, (on mid-nineteenth-century sausage filler), all Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 1 March 1979 (on B. Tyrell portfolios); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 7 February 1980 (on pictures of Saartjie Bartman); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 March 1981 (on Esme Berman drawings of the Ndebele); and EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 1 July 1982 (on audio visual of life of Transkei people), all Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 June 1983, Reports, MAA. Anitra Nettleton, “Arts and Africana: Hierarchies of Material Culture,” South African Historical Journal 29 (1993): 61–75. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 June 1980 (on Mrs. Nkosi and Mrs. Maseko); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum

Notes to Pages 166–171 / 281

65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

74.

75.

76. 77. 78.

79. 80.

Advisory Committee,” 1 September 1982 (on Jephrey Mthembu), both Reports, MAA. See, for example, EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 3 May 1984; EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 3 September 1981, both Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 September 1985, Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 August 1988. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 October 1984 (on new glass display and new desk on JHB sporting history); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 7 February 1985 (on new display on history of coinage); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 September 1985 (on new spotlights in North Gallery), all Reports, MAA. AW, interview with author. HB, interview with author. AW, interview with author, 15 April 2003. See “Africana Museum Advisory Committee Reports” for the following dates: 2 August 1979, 2 February 1984, 3 May 1984, 4 April 1985, August 1987, 5 November 1987, and 3 March 1988, among many others (all Reports, MAA). See also “Note for [sic] to speak on behalf of AM,” June 1984, miscellaneous files, MAA, which states that “by March 1984 the month’s attendance of 3,575 outstripped all other branches of the Africana Museum.” EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 3 September 1981 (on curator from Denver Museum); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 1 July 1982 (on guides from America); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 October 1984 (on British head of library/museum), all Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 October 1986 (on tour to family visiting from the States); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 3 March 1988 (on tour for guest of the National Dept of Education), both Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 October 1986. See also EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 1 April 1982; and EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 19 February 1982, all Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 October 1984, Reports, MAA. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 3 August 1988, Reports, MAA. See Steve Sack, The Neglected Tradition: Towards a New History of South African Art (1930–1988), Johannesburg Art Gallery, 23 November 1988–8 January 1989 (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, c. 1988). For more on this and other landmark JAG exhibitions of African art, see Nessa Leibhammer, “Filling the spaces/ Contesting the Canons,” in One Hundred Years of Collecting: The Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1910–2010, Jillian Carman, ed. (Pretoria: Design > Magazine, 2010), 83–87. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 January 1989, Reports, MAA. AW, interview with author.

282 / Notes to Pages 172–176 81. HB, interview with author. 82. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 January 1989, Reports, MAA. 83. AW, interview with author. 84. For information on the building side, see “Town Council Minutes re: Library and Africana Museum,” 30 May 1989; “Town Council Minutes re: Library and Africana Museum,” 27 November 1990; and “Town Council Minutes re: Africana Museum— Newtown,” 26 May 1992, all town council minutes, LGL. 85. EBN, “Curator’s Annual Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee for the Year Ended 30 June 1989,” Reports, MAA. 86. Christopher Till, interview with author, 7 May 2003, corroborated by AW, HB, and Diana Wall, all in interviews with author. 87. For more on this, see chapter 3. 88. AW, interview with author. 89. Amilcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” in Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral, ed. Africa Information Service (New York: Monthly Review Press, ca. 1974). 90. Annie E. Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 91. “Art and Conflict in South Africa,” reprinted from Social Review (paper presented at “Culture and Resistance Symposium,” Gaborone, November 5–9, 1982), Culture and Resistance Symposium, AL2596, WHP. 92. Dikobe WaMogale Martins, “Art Is Not Neutral: Whom Does It Serve?,” Staffrider, July/August 1981, 30–31, Bonn, Box 1, 4: Arts and Culture 1983–1988, Archives of the African National Congress (hereafter ANC Archives), Liberation Archives, University of Fort Hare. 93. M. W. Serote, “Paper Presented on Behalf of Medu Editorial Board at Foundation for Education with Production ‘Cultural Studies’ Workshop in Gaborone,” 12–14 (1983); first appeared in Medu Art Ensemble News Letter 5 (1983): 26–34. 94. Z. Pallo Jordan, speech at the Culture in Another South Africa Conference (Amsterdam, 12–19 December 1987), ANC Lusaka Mission, Box 2, “Reports and Speeches, 1983–89,” ANC archives. Reprinted in Culture in Another South Africa: proceedings from the CASA Conference, ed. Willem Campschreur and Joost Divendall (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1989), 261. 95. Second African National Congress Women’s Conference, “National Preparatory Committee Papers,” September 1987, Bonn, Box 1, 6: On Culture 1989, ANC archives. 96. “Reports of the Lusaka Regional Cultural Workshop,” 4–5 December 1989, Bonn, Box 1, 6: On Culture 1989. 97. “Culture as a Weapon and the Involvement of the Youth in Cultural Work,” Senegal, Box 7: 1987, ANC archives. 98. ANC, “Internal Memo on the Cultural Boycott: DAC,” Johannesburg, 4 November 1990, ANC Luthuli House, Box 5: ANC DAC, 1991, ANC archives. 99. Barbara Masakele, “Speech by Ms. Barbara Masakele, Secretary, Department of Art and Culture of the African National Congress (in Lusaka, Zambia) delivered at the opening session of the Workshop on Culture and Apartheid by the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement on Friday 25 April 1986 at Trinity College, Dublin,” ANC Lusaka Mission, Box 2: reports and speeches, 1983–89, ANC archives. 100. AW, interview with author.

Notes to Pages 176–181 / 283 101. EBN, “Curator’s Annual Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee for the year ended 30 June 1990,” Reports, MAA. 102. HB, interview with author. 103. EBN, “Closure of this Journal,” editorial, Africana Notes and News 30 (1993): 217. 104. HB, interview with author. 105. HB and D. Y. Saks, “A Step into the Unknown: Planning a New Museum for a New South Africa,” ca. late 1980s, Papers by Staff, MAA. 106. Ibid. 107. EBN, “Directories of Museums in Africa,” Notes and Queries, Africana Notes and News 29 (1991): 279. See also Susanne Peters, ed., Directory of Museums in Africa for Unesco-ICOM Documentation Centre (New York: Kegan Paul International, 1990). 108. “Town Council Minutes re: Africana Museum,” 23 February 1993, town council minutes, LGL. 109. “Africana Museum Collecting Policy: Revision,” 1993, AOL Policy, MAA. 110. HB, “A New Museum for a New South Africa,” paper delivered at the Southern Africa Museums Association, Durban, June 1991, papers by staff, MAA. 111. HB and D. Y. Saks, “A Step into the Unknown.” 112. HB, “A New Museum for a New South Africa.” 113. Ibid. 114. DV T, “From Mausoleum to Museum,” 174. 115. D. Y. Saks, “Introduction to the Chronological History Displays for the New Museum Building,” internal memorandum (April 1993), quoted in DVT, “From Mausoleum to Museum: Revisiting Public History in the Inauguration of MuseumAfrica, Newtown,” 174. 116. HB and D. Y. Saks, “A Step into the Unknown.” 117. EBN, “Curator’s Annual Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee for the year ended 30 June 1990”; EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 1 August 1991; and EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 April 1990, all Reports, MAA. 118. EBN, “Curator’s Annual Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee for the year ended 30 June 1988” (on J. Deetz); HB, “Acting Chief Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 October 1996 (on T. Bennett), both Reports, MAA. 119. EBN, “Curator’s Annual Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee for the Year nded 30 June 1989,” Reports, MAA. 120. EBN, “Curator’s Annual Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee for the Year Ended 30 June 1990,” Reports, MAA. 121. EBN, “Curator’s Annual Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee for the Year Ended 30 June 1989,” Reports, MAA. 122. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 April 1992, Reports, MAA. 123. EBN, “Curator’s Annual Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee for the Year Ended 30 June 1989,” Reports, MAA. 124. For more on this conference, see Patricia Davison, “Museums and the Reshaping of Memory,” in Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, ed. Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998), 143–60. 125. Liz Delmont, “ The Voortrekker Monument: Monolith to Myth;” Carolyn Hamilton, “The Real Goat: Identity and Authenticity in Shakaland;” and Nigel Worden,

284 / Notes to Pages 181–187 “Unmapping History at the Cape Town Waterfront,” papers presented at the University of the Witwatersrand History Workshop, “Myths, Monuments, and Museums,” 16–18 July 1992, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. 126. See, from the above conference, Patricia Davison, “Reading Exhibitions: Towards an Understanding of Popular Responses to Museum Representations of Other Cultures;” and Ciraj Rassool and Leslie Witz, “The 1952 Jan Van Riebeck Tercentenary Festival: Constructing and Contesting Public National History.” 127. Anitra Nettleton, “Arts and Africana: Hierarchies of Material Culture,” paper presented at “Myths, Monuments, and Museums,” republished in South African Historical Journal 29 (1993): 61–75. 128. D. Y. Saks, “Changing the Subtext: Coping with Bias in Museums and the Historical Record in South Africa Today,” paper presented at “Myths, Monuments, and Museums.” 129. Andy Brown, Ann Wanless, and Rayda Becker, “Museum Display—Fractions of a Truth,” paper presented at “Myths, Monuments, and Museums.” 130. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 April 1993, Reports, MAA. 131. Carolyn Hamilton, “Against the Museum as Chameleon,” South African Historical Journal 31 (1994): 184–90. 132. HB and D. Y. Saks, “A Step into the Unknown.” 133. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 April 1990, Reports, MAA. 134. Integrated Marketing Research for Jeremy Sampson, “Africana Museum Research Proposal: Private and Confidential,” 30 November 1993, A092 1993–11–30, MAA. 135. “Town Council Minutes re: Africana Museum Name Change,” 24 May 1994, town council minutes, LGL. 136. Integrated Marketing Research for Jeremy Sampson, “Africana Museum Research Proposal.” 137. Mari Harris for Markinor to Jeremy Sampson, “Africana Museum—fax re: Marketing Research,” 30 November 1993, A092 1993–11–30, MAA. 138. Africana Museum Project Committee, “Handwritten Draft Questionnaire and typed letter re: Marketing research,” date unknown, A 092 1174, MAA. 139. Mari Harris for Markinor to Jeremy Sampson, “Africana Museum—fax re: Marketing Research.” 140. “Town Council Minutes re: Africana Museum Name Change,” 24 May 1994, town council minutes, LGL. 141. “Name and Logo Report back,” 11 August 1993, Transition File, MAA. 142. Jeremy Sampson for Integrated Marketing Research, “Africana Museum: Marketing/ Corporate Communications Proposals (First Draft),” 16 August 1993, A092 1993– 8–16, MAA. 143. “Name and Logo Report Back.” 144. Jeremy Sampson for Integrated Marketing Research, “Africana Museum: Marketing/ Corporate Communications Proposals (First Draft).” 145. “Name and Logo Report Back.” See also “Town Council Minutes re: Africana Museum Name Change,” 24 May 1994. 146. Jeremy Sampson for Integrated Marketing Research, “Africana Museum: Marketing/ Corporate Communications Proposals (First Draft).” 147. “Town Council Minutes re: Africana Museum Name Change,” 24 May 1994. 148. AW, interview with author.

Notes to Pages 187–190 / 285 149. EBN, “Curator’s Annual Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee for the year ended 30 June 1988” (on key); HB, “Acting Chief Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 October 1996 (on home made bullets); and EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 March 1993 (on hat and veil), all Reports, MAA. 150. For instance, J. S. Mohlamme of Vista University in Soweto joined the Africana Museum Advisory Committee in the early 1990s. 151. EBN, “Curator’s Annual Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee for the year ended 30 June 1988” (on beer bottles); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 April 1992 (on mine dance); and EBN, “Curator’s Annual Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee for the Year Ended 30 June 1990 (on cloth),” all Reports, MAA. 152. HB, “Acting Metropolitan Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 April 1997 (on wire car); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 October 1990 (on women’s outfit); and HB, “Acting Metropolitan Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 February 1993 (on Weya), all Reports, MAA. 153. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 April 1990 (on SWAPO); HB, “Acting Metropolitan Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 February 1993 (on Black Sash); and EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 April 1992 (on Pemba), all Reports, MAA. 154. See, for example, HB, “Acting Metropolitan Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 February 1993; HB, “Acting Metropolitan Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 4 June 1992; and “Minutes of the Africana Museum Advisory Committee Meeting,” 6 May 1993, all Reports, MAA. 155. HB, “Acting Metropolitan Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 October 1995 (on D. Saks); EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 April 1990, (on A. Wanless and E. Blanche Nagelgast); and EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 6 September 1990 (on C. Till), all Reports, MAA. 156. EBN, “Curator’s Annual Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee for the Year Ended 30 June 1988,” Reports, MAA. 157. EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 April 1992, Reports, MAA. 158. ANC, “DAC Message to the National Cultural Conference,” 25–27 May 1990, Johannesburg, ANC Lusaka Mission, Box 2: Arts and Culture Department, 1988–1990, ANC Archives. 159. ANC, “Policy for the Promotion and Preservation of the Arts Culture and Languages in a Democratic South Africa,” ANC Luthuli House, Box 5, Policy Docs 5: ANC DAC, 1989–1992, ANC Archives. 160. ANC, Department of Arts and Culture Newsletter 1, no. 1, (1992), ANC Archives. 161. ANC, “The ANC and Arts and Culture,” Department of Arts and Culture Negotiations Bulletin, September—October 1993, Bonn, Box 1, 7: ANC DAC, ANC Archives. This article was submitted to Mail and Guardian but was never published. 162. ANC, “Draft Policy Document on Arts and Culture for a Democratic South Africa,” ANC Luthuli House, Box 5: ANC DAC, 1990–1993, ANC archives. 163. Graham Dominy, Gillian Berning, Iain Edwards, Andrew Hall, Aron Mazel, and Mewa Ramgobin, “Heritage Management Structure Flow Chart with ANC Commission

286 / Notes to Pages 190–200 for Museums, Monuments, Archives and Heraldry Position Paper on Cultural Conservation and Commemoration in a Democratic South Africa,” 28 February 1993, ANC Luthuli House, Box 5, Policy Docs 5: ANC DAC, 1989–1992, ANC Archives. 164. See DVT, “From Mausoleum to Museum,” 168. See also Coombes, History after Apartheid, 15. 165. Odendaal, Andre, “ ’Giving Life to Learning’: The Way Ahead for Museums in a Democratic South Africa” (paper presented on behalf of CREATE at the Southern African Museums Association meeting, East London, May 23, 1994), quoted in Coombes, History After Apartheid, 15. 166. DVT, “From Mausoleum to Museum,” 169. 167. Christopher Till, interview with author. 168. Rochelle Keene, interview with author, 24 April 2003. 169. Ibid. 170. AW, interview with author. 171. Rochelle Keene, interview with author. 172. AW, interview with author. 173. Interestingly, one of the reasons Keene faced opposition was that when she was appointed to head JAG and MuseumAfrica, there was talk of merging the administration of both museums. This led to tension as each carved out its own terrain. 174. Hamilton, “Against the Museum as Chameleon,” 185. 175. Lucy Rallis, HB, and EBN, interview with author. 176. Sandra de Wet (hereafter SDW), interview with author, 22 April 2003. 177. Ibid. 178. HB, interview with author. 179. SDW, interview with author. 180. Lucy Rallis, HB, and EBN, interview with author. 181. HB, interview with author. 182. See, on outreach, for instance, EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 2 May 1991, Reports, MAA. On education, see “Worksheet: Project Literacy, English Matters, Level 4, Module 8,” transition file, MAA. 183. DVT, “From Mausoleum to Museum,” 177. 184. DVT, “From Mausoleum to Museum,” 182; AW, interview with author. 185. HB, interview with author. 186. In Sara Byala, “ ‘Birds in a Cornfield’: Historical Narratives in Syllabi and Museums in Post-Apartheid Johannesburg” (paper presented at the African Studies Association Conference, Boston, October 30–November 2, 2003), I discuss the responses of twenty underprivileged first-year Wits art students—all of whom had either lived in a shack or had a family member who did—to this exhibit. At the time, I was surprised by the fact that all felt empowered and pleased to see this type of dwelling represented in a museum. 187. SDW, interview with author. 188. DVT, interview with author. 189. HB, “Acting Chief Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 29 September 1994, Reports, MAA. 190. DVT, “From Mausoleum to Museum,” 182. 191. HB, “Acting Chief Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 30 September 1993, Reports, MAA. 192. AW, interview with author. 193. HB, interview with author.

Notes to Pages 200–207 / 287 194. DVT, “From Mausoleum to Museum,” 182. 195. Chris Buchanan, “Museum Africa: Ready in time for the New South Africa,” Public Buildings Project Review, transition file, MAA. 196. Ivor Powell, “Something New Something Old,” Mail and Guardian, 12 August 1994, http://mg.co.za/article/1994–08–12-something-new-something-old, accessed 21 March 2012. 197. DVT, “From Mausoleum to Museum,” 168. 198. HB, “A New Museum for a New South Africa.” 199. SDW, interview with author. 200. DVT, “From Mausoleum to Museum,” 182. Ch a pter five

1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

E. Blanche Nagelgast (hereafter EBN), editorial, Africana Notes and News 30 (1992): 1. “Town Council Minutes re: Library,” 29 November 1994, town council minutes, Local Government Library (hereafter LGL). “Town Council Minutes re: Library/ Africana Museum,” 22 April 1994, town council minutes, LGL; EBN, “Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 6 September 1990, various binders containing Advisory Committee Documents, Minutes, and Reports (hereafter Reports), MuseumAfrica Archives (hereafter MAA). Louise de Wet, interview with author (by telephone), 29 April 2003. For more, see Peter Magubane, Women of South Africa: Their Fight for Freedom. Photographs by Peter Magubane, text by Carol Lazar, introduction by Nadine Gordimer (Boston: Little Brown, 1993); Ricky Burnett, Tributaries: A View of Contemporary South African Art; Quellen und Strömungen: Eine Ausstellung zeitgenössische suidafrikanischer Kunst (Johannesburg: Communication Department, BMW South Africa, 1985); and Hilton Judin and Ivan Vladislavic´, eds., blank___Architecture, apartheid, and after (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1998). “Town Council Minutes re: GJMC [Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council] Sport, Art, Culture, and Economic Development,” 19 March 1998, LGL. See also Anonymous, Johannesburg Biennale Catalogue “Inside Outside.” (Johannesburg: Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, 1995); and Okwui Enwezor, Trade Routes: History and Geography: 2nd Johannesburg Biennale. Text by Gerardo Mosquera. (Johannesburg: Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, 1977). Hilary Bruce (hereafter HB), “Acting Chief Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 3 April 1996, Reports, MAA. HB, “Acting Chief Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 5 October 1995, Reports, MAA. “Town Council Minutes re: Newtown,” 7 March 1996, town council minutes, LGL. “Town Council Minutes re: JDA,” 15 February 2001; “Town Council Minutes re: Newtown and Cultural Precinct,” 20 September 2001; “Town Council Minutes re: JDA Business Plan,” 20 September 2001, all town council minutes, LGL. For more on these spaces, see David Bunn, “Art Johannesburg and its Objects,” in Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, eds. with an afterword by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008), 163; Mark Gevisser “From the Ruins: The Constitution Hill Project,” in Johannesburg, 317–36; and Lindsay Bremner, “Reframing Township Space: The Kliptown Project,” in Johannesburg, 337–47. Deon van Tonder, interview with author, 10 April 2003. Steve Sack, interview with author, 29 April 2003.

288 / Notes to Pages 207–213 14. Richard Tomlinson, Robert A. Beauregard, Lindsay Bremner, and Xolela Mangcu, “The Postapartheid Struggle for an Integrated Johannesburg,” in Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Postapartheid City, ed. Tomlinson et. al., 10. 15. “Museum Africa and Service Delivery,” 1996 AOL Policy 2, MAA. 16. Lucy Rallis, HB, and EBN, interview with author, 6 February 2003. 17. van Tonder, interview with author. 18. Ibid. 19. Sandra de Wet (hereafter SDW), interview with author, 22 April 2003. 20. Ann Wanless (hereafter AW), interview with author, 15 April 2003. 21. AW, interview with author; Diana Wall (hereafter DW), interview with author, 5 May 2003; and HB, interview with author, 25 February 2003. 22. Rochelle Keene, interview with author, 24 April 2003. 23. Christopher Till (hereafter CT), interview with author, 7 May 2003. 24. AW, interview with author. 25. HB, interview with author. 26. Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, “Introduction: Afropolis,” in Johannesburg, 18. 27. AbdouMaliq Simone, “Globalization and the Identity of African Urban Practices,” in blank, 8D. 28. André P. Czeglédy, “Villas of the Highveld: A Cultural Perspective on Johannesburg and Its ‘Northern Suburbs,’” in Emerging Johannesburg, 22. 29. Rian Malan, “Jo’burg Lovesong” in From Jo’burg to Jozi: Stories about Africa’s Infamous City, ed. Heidi Holland and Adam Roberts (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 156. 30. Clive M. Chipkin, Johannesburg Style: Architecture and Society, 1880s-1960s (Cape Town: David Philip, 1993). 31. Jeremy Foster, Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). 32. Judin and Vladislavic´, eds., blank. 33. See, in Emerging Johannesburg, the following chapters: Patrick Heller, “Reclaiming Democratic Spaces: Civics and Politics in Posttransition Johannesburg,” 155–84; Elizabeth Thomas, “HIV/AIDS: Implications for Local Governance, Housing, and Delivery of Services,” 185–96; and Erica Emdon, “The Limits of the Law: Social Rights and Urban Development,” 215–30. 34. Alan Lipman, “Beyond Our Urban Mishaps,” in From Jo’burg to Jozi, 133. 35. Lindsay Bremner, “A Quick Tour around Contemporary Johannesburg,” in From Jo’burg to Jozi, 54. 36. Bongani Madondo, “Tatty Whore with a Heart of Gold,” in From Jo’burg to Jozi, 129. See also Ivan Vladislavic´, The Restless Supermarket (Cape Town: David Philip, 2001); Ivan Vladislavic´, The Exploded View (New York: Random House, 2004); and Ivan Vladislavic´, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009). For other penetrating portraits of downtown Johannesburg, see Phaswame Mpe, Welcome to our Hillbrow (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2000); and Alan Morris, Bleakness and Light: Inner-City Transition in Hillbrow, Johannesburg (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1999). 37. Achille Mbembe, “Aesthetics of Superfluity,” in Johannesburg, 38. 38. Marlene van Niekerk, “Take Your Body Where It Has Never Been Before,” in blank, 4F. 39. Mbembe, “Aesthetics of Superfluity,” 39. 40. Sarah Nuttall, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009). 41. Nuttall and Mbembe, “Introduction: Afropolis,” 8.

Notes to Pages 213–216 / 289 42. AbdouMaliq Simone, “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg,” in Johannesburg, 68–90. 43. Frédéric Le Marcis, “The Suffering Body of the City,” in Johannesburg, 170–94. 44. See, for instance, Ingrid Palmary, Janine Rauch, and Graeme Simpson, “Violent Crime in Johannesburg,” in Emerging Johannesburg, 101–22. 45. See Heidi Holland, “Getting Even,” in From Jo’burg to Jozi, 107–11; Makhosazana Xaba, “Neighbours,” in At Risk: Writing On and Over the Edge of South Africa, Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall, eds., 90–103 (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2007); Liz McGregor, “If Only There Was a God,” in Load Shedding: Writing on and over the edge of South Africa, ed. Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall, 13–30 (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2009); Rita Barnard, “Risky Returns,” in Load Shedding, 92–106; and Nuttall, “Girl Bodies,” in Entanglement, 132–50. 46. Justice Malala, “Losing My Mind,” in At Risk, 174. 47. On walls, see Frank Lewinberg, “In Celebration of Walls,” in From Jo’burg to Jozi, 129–32; and Vladislavic´, Portrait with Keys, 185. On power, see Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall’s introduction to Load Shedding. 48. Rian Malan, “Jo’burg Lovesong,” in From Jo’Burg to Jozi, 157. 49. Tomlinson et. al., eds., “Introduction,” in Emerging Johannesburg, xii. 50. Jillian Carman, “Johannesburg Art Gallery and the Urban Future,” in Emerging Johannesburg, 233. For more, see Jillian Carman, Uplifting the Colonial Philistine: Florence Philips and the Making of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (Johannesburg: Wits Press, 2006). 51. Lizeka Mda, “City Quarters: Civic Spine, Farady Station, KwaMayiMayi and Ponte City,” in blank, 10D. 52. Stephen Gray, “Tea and Cake at the Johannesburg Public Library,” in From Jo’burg to Jozi, 99. 53. Vladislavic´, Portrait with Keys, 191–95. 54. Gray, “Tea and Cake at the Johannesburg Public Library,” 101. In 2012, the JPL underwent a massive renovation. It is too soon to tell what outcome this will have for the space and its surrounding area. 55. See http://www.mabonengprecinct.com/. Accessed April 14, 2012. 56. Rom Odhiambo, “De Korte Street,” in At Risk, 112. 57. Ibid., 113. 58. HB, interview with author. 59. HB, interview with author; CT, interview with author; and AW, interview with author. See also Jane Duncan, “How Cultural Policy Creates Inequality: The Case of the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council and Its Biennale Project,” in Culture in the New South Africa, Volume Two, ed. Robert Kriger and Abede Zegeye (Colorado Springs: International Academic Publishers Ltd., 2001), 292. 60. Ibid., 291. 61. Steven C. Dubin Transforming Museums: Mounting Queen Victoria in a Democratic South Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 212–13, 228. 62. Declared Cultural Institutions grew out of the Cultural Institutions Act, 1998 (Act No. 119 of 1998). These corporate bodies receive an annual subsidy from the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. http://www.dac.gov.za/projects /heritage/geographical_names/decrlared_cultural_inst.htm. Accessed July 5, 2011. 63. For more on flagships, see “Speech by the Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, Dr. B. S. Ngubane, Visit to Flagship Institutions,” 27 January 2000. http:// www.info.gov.za/speeches/2000/000202929a1005.htm. Accessed July 5, 2011.

290 / Notes to Pages 216–218 64. For more on Iziko in particular, see Ciraj Rassool, “Ethnographic Elaborations, Indigenous Contestations, and the Cultural Politics of Imagining Community: A View from the District Six Museum in South Africa,” in Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives, ed. Susan Sleeper-Smith, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 106–26. On correcting the history/tradition divide within Iziko, see Patricia Davison, “Redressing the Past: Integrating Social History Collections at Iziko,” South African Museums Association Bulletin (2005): 101–4. 65. Lindsay Hooper and Gerald Klinghardt, interview with author, 9 February 2011, Iziko, Cape Town. Here they expressed that, from their point of view, there is no crisis. 66. Khwezi ka Mpumlwana, Gerard Corsane, Juanita Pastor-Makhurane, and Ciraj Rassool, “Inclusion and the Power of Representation: South African Museums and the Cultural Politics of Social Transformation,” in Museums, Society, Inequality, ed. Richard Sandell (London: Routledge, 2002), 251. 67. Steve Sack, interview with author. 68. It should be noted that MuseumAfrica is not the only museum that faltered post­ apartheid. The sense of ineptness felt across the museum world was discussed at the Cape Town Book Fair 2011 Workshop, “Dinosaurs or Dynamos: Is There a Future for Museums in South Africa? South African Museums: Challenges; Opportunities,” 1 August 2011, South African National Gallery. Speakers present were Steven Dubin, Andrew Lamprecht, Riason Naidoo, Pippa Skotnes, and Sue Williamson. There, Sue Williamson pointed out that the Department of Arts and Culture had 1.6 million Rand supposed to be used for arts and the World Cup that was never spent. Pippa Skotnes further noted that a large American funder offered money to any museum for development that went unclaimed since no museum could give a complete sense of how the money would be used. 69. White Paper on Arts, Culture, and Heritage, Chapter 5: Heritage: http://www.dac .gov.za/white_paper.htm. Accessed July 5, 2011. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., chapter 7: All our futures. 72. Address by President Mandela on Heritage Day, 24 September 1997. http://www.anc .org.za/show.php?id=4215. Accessed June 16 2011. 73. Dubin, Transforming Museums, 213. 74. Cape Town Book Fair 2011 Workshop, “Dinosaurs or Dynamos: Is There a Future for Museums in South Africa? South African Museums: Challenges; Opportunities,” 1 August 2011. John Mackenzie begins to trouble this position by suggesting, in a footnote, that “the nationalists probably never regarded museums or art galleries as particularly important or potentially subversive.” John Mackenzie, Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures, and Colonial Identities (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009), 98. 75. The term “post-transition,” which seems to be slowly infiltrating the lexicon about today’s South Africa, works well as a response to Sarah Nuttall’s astute pronouncement on the end of the postapartheid era, named as such: “Although we still invoke, as a kind of shorthand, the ‘post-apartheid’ to describe the South African present,” she writes, “it is almost certainly time to forego this particular teleology in favour of a different theory of social time.” Nuttall, Entanglement, 155. 76. Rochelle Keene, interview with author, 24 April 2003. 77. SDW, interview with author. 78. Mpumlwana, et. al., “Inclusion and the Power of Representation,” 247.

Notes to Pages 219–222 / 291 79. Julie McGee, “Restructuring South African Museums: Reality and Rhetoric within Cape Town” in New Museum Theory and practice, ed. Janet Marstine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 184. 80. Ibid., 195. 81. From the late 1980s into the twenty-first century, the Johannesburg Art Gallery put up a series of exhibitions trained exactly on questions surrounding the acquisition and display of artifacts of black South Africa. For more on these, see Nessa Leibhammer, “Filling the Spaces/ Contesting the Canons,” in One Hundred Years of Collecting: The Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1910–2010, ed. Jillian Carman (Pretoria: Design > Magazine, 2010), 83–87. 82. Pippa Skotnes, ed., Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1996). See also Pippa Skotnes, “The Politics of Bushmen Representations,” in Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, ed. Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 253–54. 83. See, among many other studies on this, Annie E. Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 84. Address by President Mandela on Heritage Day. 85. Anitra Nettleton, in discussion with author, 15 May 2003. See also Anitra Nettleton, “Arts and Africana: Hierarchies of Material Culture,” South African Historical Journal 29 (1993): 61–75. 86. Mpumlwana et. al., “Inclusion and the Power of Representation,” 245. 87. There is a significant body of material on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s shortcomings. To get at some of the theoretical insights raised by it, see Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, eds., Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998). 88. “Speech by the Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, Dr. B. S. Ngubane, Visit to Flagship Institutions,” 27 January 2000. 89. Ibid. 90. The notions of the museum as temple and forum come from Duncan Cameron, “The Museum, a Temple or the Forum,” Curator: the Museum Journal 14 (1971): 61–73. 91. Mpumlwana et. al., “Inclusion and the Power of Representation,” 258. 92. For more on District Six, see, for instance, Rassool, “Ethnographic Elaborations, Indigenous Contestations, and the Cultural Politics of Imagining Community: A View from the District Six Museum in South Africa.” 93. HB, “Acting Chief Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 7 August 1996, Reports, MAA. See also Peter Magubane, June 16, 1976: Never, Never Again: Twentieth Anniversary (Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1996). 94. HB, “Acting Chief Curator’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee,” 3 February 1994, Reports, MAA. 95. CT, interview with author, 7 May 2003. 96. Presenting an old-fashioned view of museum practice in 1986, a South African Museum’s Association publication asked, “In what respect is a museum different from any other cultural or scientific organization? Simply in this: a museum is built around a permanent collection of items having cultural or scientific significance in the community. Were a museum to lose its collection, it would become an institution of a different kind.” C. K. Brain and M. C. Erasmus, The Making of The Museum Professionals in Southern Africa (Cape Town: CTP Book Printers, 1986), 1.

292 / Notes to Pages 222–227 97. Mpumlwana, et. al., “Inclusion and the Power of Representation,” 258. 98. Leslie Witz, Ciraj Rassool, Gary Minkley, “Repackaging the Past for South African Tourism,” Daedelus 130 (Winter 2001): 277–96. 99. Carolyn Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), chapter 5. 100. David Bunn, “The Museum Outdoors: Heritage, Cattle, and Permeable Borders in the Southwestern Kruger National Park,” in Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp et. al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 357–91. 101. For an extensive look at this imagery, see Ciraj Rassool and Leslie Witz, “‘South Africa: A World in One Country’: Moments in International Tourist Encounters with Wildlife, the Primitive and the Modern,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 143 (1996): xxxvi–3. 102. Leslie Witz, “Transforming Museums on Postapartheid Tourist Routes,” in Museum Frictions, 107–34. 103. Verne Harris, “Claiming Less, Delivering More: A Critique of Positive Formulations on Archives in South Africa,” Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997): 138. 104. Michele Pickover, interview with author, 26 July 2010. This attitude is similarly borne out in Jillian Carman’s work on the Johannesburg Art Gallery. See, Carman, “Johannesburg Art Gallery and the Urban Future,” 231–58. 105. Concurrently, the museum has found its contents and ideology under scrutiny. At the 1992 “Myths, Monuments, and Museums” seminar, Wits art historian Anitra Nettleton took issue with the fact that the old-fashioned museum presented its holdings as objective truths. Nettleton, “Arts and Africana,” 61–75. 106. Dubin talks about how common it is to see tentativeness and museums shying from telling one truth. Dubin, Transforming Museums, 256. 107. Carolyn Hamilton, “Against the Museum as Chameleon,” South African Historical Journal 31 (1994): 185. 108. Ingrid De Kok, “Cracked Heirlooms: Memory and Exhibition,” in Negotiating the Past, 61. 109. Address by President Mandela on Heritage Day. 110. Nuttall and Coetzee, eds., Negotiating the Past, 10. 111. Michele Pickover, interview with author. 112. De Kok, “Cracked Heirlooms,” 71. 113. Cape Town Book Fair 2011 Workshop, “Dinosaurs or Dynamos.” 114. SDW, interview with author, 22 April 2003. 115. See, for example, the three edited collections that grew out of the Smithsonian Institute initiated research: Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992); and Karp et. al., eds., Museum Frictions. 116. Stephen E. Weill, Making Museums Matter (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 81. 117. Duncan Cameron, “The Museum, a Temple or the Forum,” 70. 118. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1. 119. Robert Lumley, ed., The Museum Time Machine: Putting Cultures on Display (New York: Routledge, 1988), 1.

Notes to Pages 227–234 / 293 120. Robert Janes, Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance, or Collapse? (London: Routledge, 2009), 13. 121. Lumley, The Museum Time Machine, 3. 122. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext[e], Inc., 1983), 18. 123. Ibid., 15. 124. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkley: University of California Press, 1998), 17. 125. Ibid., 7. 126. Ibid., 153. 127. Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe, eds., Theorizing Museums: Representing identity and Diversity in a Changing World (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 1. 128. Tim Barringer, “The South Kensington Museum and the Colonial Project” in Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture, and the Museum, ed. Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (London: Routledge, 1998), 27. 129. Archives at the Crossroads: Open Report to the Minister of Arts and Culture from the Archival Conference, “National System, Public Interest” held April 2007 and coconvened by the National Archives, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Research Project. http://www.nelsonmandela.org/index .php/publications/full/archives_at_the_crossroads_2007_booklet/. Accessed July 5, 2011. 130. Ali Hlongwane, interview with author, 27 July 2010. DW, interview with the author, 27 July 2010. 131. DW, interview with author, 27 July 2010. Linda Chernis, interview with the author, 27 July 2010. 132. Hlongwane, interview with author. 133. This question was posed to Ali Hlongwane in an interview with SABC in 2010. 134. Romaana Naidoo, “Workers’ Museum Opens” Archival Platform Newsletter 14 (2010). http://www.archivalplatform.org/news/entry/workers_museum_opens/. Accessed 14 July 2011. 135. Ibid. See also DW, “Museum Africa Collections: Number of Items 3 March 2010,” internal museum document. 136. Clive Carr, “Rarest Stamp Collection of Show,” http://www.joburg.org.za/culture /guest-columns/236-rarest-stamp-collection-on-show. Accessed 5 July 2011. 137. Ali Hlongwane, interview with author. 138. Ibid. 139. Internal document, Museum Africa Visitor Figures1 January 2008–28 February 2011. See also internal museum documents: “Museums and Galleries: Number of Visitors During 2010 FIFA World Cup,” “Museum Africa Visitor Stats for the Month of October 2010,” and “Visitors Stats for the month of May 2011.” Note that the closing of Mary Fitzgerald Square deflated attendance figures while the FIFA World Cup temporarily inflated them. 140. See internal museum documents: “Digital Image Order Schedules for 2009, 2010, and 2011.” The rest of the requests do not end in orders being filled. 141. Linda Chernis, “Public Research—Museum Africa.” This provides a description of museum holdings and what the research department does. 142. Dudu Madonsela, Curator of the Bensusan Museum & Library of Photography, reports that attendance has risen over the last few years to his particular department to about 300–400 people per month. The department also fields about ten research requests a month (Dudu Madonsela, personal email, 14 July 2011).

294 / Notes to Pages 235–242 143. DW, “Museum Africa Collections: Number of Items 3 March 2010.” See also Digital Order Form 2011. Interestingly, this service made up over 75 percent of Museum­ Africa’s total revenue for 2010–2011. See internal document, “Digital Imaging Statistics, 2010/2011.” 144. Personal e-mail with Linda Chernis, 11 July 2011. 145. SDW, interview with author. 146. HB, interview with author. 147. AW, interview with author. 148. Sara Byala, MuseumAfrica as Metonymic for the ‘New’ South Africa: 1988–2004, discussion paper in the African Humanities, Boston University, AH Number 37 (2005). 149. Sara Byala, “The Museum Becomes Archive: Reassessing Johannesburg’s Museum Africa,” Social Dymanics 36 (2010): 11–23. Con c l usion

1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

See, for a description, R. F. Kennedy, “The Founders of the Africana Museum,” Africana Notes and News 11 (1955): 233–35. Archives at the Crossroads: Open Report to the Minister of Arts and Culture from the Archival Conference, “National System, Public Interest” held April 2007 and coconvened by the National Archives, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Research Project. http://www.nelsonmandela.org/index .php/publications/full/archives_at_the_crossroads_2007_booklet/. Accessed July 5, 2011. Ali Hlongwane, interview with author, 27 July 2010. Robert Lumley, ed., The Museum Time Machine (New York: Routledge, 1988), 15. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 221. Elaine Heumann Gurian, “What Is the Object of this Exercise? A Meandering Exploration of the Many Meanings of Objects in Museums,” Daedelus 128 (1999): 163–83. For more on the debate about whether museums require objects, see Scott G. Paris, “How Can Museums Attract Visitors in the Twenty-First Century,” in Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-first Century, ed. Hugh H. Genoways (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2006), 255–66. Carolyn Hamilton, “‘Living by Fluidities’: Oral Histories, Material Custodies, and the Politics of Archiving,” in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton et. al. (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 225. Stephen E. Weill, Making Museums Matter (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), 71. David Carr, “Mind as Verb,” in Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, 13. Ibid., 15. Ibid. Lois H. Silverman “The Therapeutic Potential of Museums as Pathways to Inclusion,” in Museums, Society, Inequality, ed. Richard Sandell (New York: Routledge, 2002), 69–83. Carolyn Hamilton, “Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive,” History in Africa (forthcoming). See also Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer, “Ethnologised Pasts and Their Archival Futures: Construing the Archive of Pre—and Early Colonial Southern KwaZulu-Natal,” paper presented to the colloquium organized by SAVAH under the aegis of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA)

Notes to Pages 242–247 / 295

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

hosted by the Wits School of Arts and the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 12–15 January 2011, 10. See Ella Margaret Shaw’s A System for Cataloguing Ethnographic Material in Museums (1958), written for the South African Museum, where she held the post of ethnologist (the only one in the country). This schema was circulated and used widely, including at the Africana Museum. This document establishes the types by which ethnographic items should be categorized and labeled and reflects anthropological knowledge of the time. Shaw’s attempt to create a universal method for organizing ethnographic collections was a result of discussions within the newly created South African Museums Association as well as conversations with Nicholas Jacobus Van Warmelo, Government Anthropologist, whose Preliminary Survey of the Bantu Tribes of South Africa, published in 1935, sought the same ends as Shaw’s work. For more on this, including Africana Museum assistant Hermia Oliver’s correspondence with Shaw, see Ann Wanless and Sara Byala, “Getting to Know the Zulu in Museum Africa,” paper presented at “Tribing and Untribing the Archive” Workshop, Wits University, 24–25 March 2012. See also N. J. Van Warmelo, A Preliminary Survey of the Bantu Tribes of South Africa (Pretoria: The Government Printer, 1935). Lindsay Hooper, interview the author, 9 February 2011. Director’s Report to the Africana Museum Advisory Committee Meeting (hereafter AMAC), 8 May 1969, MuseumAfrica Archives (hereafter MAA). Curator’s Report to the AMAC Meeting, 7 June 1984, MAA. Curator’s Report to the AMAC Meeting, 3 May 1984, MAA. Report of acting director to the AMAC Meeting, 19 August 1953, MAA. Curator’s Report to the AMAC Meeting, 7 February 1980, MAA. Curator’s Report to the AMAC Meeting, 7 August 1986, MAA. Brian Durrans, “The Future of the Other: Changing Cultures on Display in Ethnographic Museums,” in Museum Time Machine, 153. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 3. Dragan Kujundzic, “Archigraphia: On the Future of Testimony and the Archive to Come 2002,” in The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Charles Merewether (London: Whitechapel, 2006), 175. Michel Foucault, “Nietzche, Geneology, History” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and trans. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 151. Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 43. Ibid., 44. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995), 162. Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa, 1820–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 269. John L. and Jean Comaroff: Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), xv. John Lambert, “South African or British? Or Dominion South Africans? The Evolution of an Identity in the 1910s and 1920s,” South African Historical Journal 43 (2000): 197.

296 / Notes to Pages 247–248 32. Leslie Witz, in conversation with author, suggested that not all museums necessarily should be saved just because they contain items from the past, 2 February 2011. 33. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext[e], Inc., 1983), 19. 34. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 215.

Bibliography

Sources

Abe Bailey Collection. “Abe Bailey Biography.” http://www.abebailey.org/view.asp?pg =biography. Accessed 4 February 2012. Africana Museum. Artists’ Impressions of Johannesburg, 1886–1956: An Exhibition of Original Pictures. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1958. ——— —. Catalogue of an Exhibition of Cape “Silver” 14 July–1 August, 1953. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1953. ——— —. Catalogue of an Exhibition of South African Book-Plates, 18–30 September 1950. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1950. ——— —. Claudius Water-Colours in the Africana Museum, with Notes by Anna H. Smith. Frank Connock Publication no. 1. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1952. ——— —. Exhibition of Decorative Maps of Africa up to 1800, 4–6 August 1952. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1952. ——— —. Important Pictures Added to the Africana Museum in 1955. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1956. ——— —. Military Medals of South African Interest: An Exhibition of the Collections in the Africana Museum and the South African National War Museum, Johannesburg, Augmented by Special Loans, 22 July–10 August, 1957. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1957. ——— —. Pictorial Record of Some Works by John Thomas Baines 1822–1875. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1975. ——— —. South African Paper Money, 1782–1921. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1953. African National Congress. “The ANC and Arts and Culture,” Department of Arts and Culture Negotiations Bulletin. September–October 1993. ——— —. DAC Message to the National Cultural Conference. 25–27 May 1990. Johannesburg. ——— —. DAC Message to the National Cultural Conference. 25–27 May 1990. Johannesburg. ——— —. Department of Arts and Culture Newsletter 1 (1992). ——— —. “Draft Policy Document on Arts and Culture for a Democratic South Africa.” ——— —. “Internal Memo on the Cultural Boycott: DAC.” Johannesburg, 4 November 1990. ——— —. “Policy for the Promotion and Preservation of the Arts Culture and Languages in a Democratic South Africa.” ANC Luthuli House, Box 5, Policy Docs 5: ANC DAC, 1982–1992, ANC Archives.

298 / Bibliography ——— —. Reports of the Lusaka Regional Cultural Workshop. 4–5 December 1989. Akyeampong, Emmanuel. Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-Social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana, c1850 to Recent Times. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001. Alubafi, Mathias Fubah. “Redefining the ‘African’ in MuseumAfrica: MuseumAfrica and the African Renaissance.” MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2002. Andersson, C. L., H. J. Crocker, H. R. Raikes, G. Preller, and J. P. R. Wallis. “The Africana Museum: Hopes of a National Institution; Carrying on Dr. Gubbins’s Work.” The Cape Argus. 28 November 1935. Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Phoenix Bird” (originally published 1850). In The Complete Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales, edited by Lily Owens. New York: Gramercy Books, 1984. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Archives at the Crossroads: Open Report to the Minister of Arts and Culture from the Archival Conference, “National System, Public Interest” held April 2007 and co-convened by the National Archives, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Research Project. http://www.nelsonmandela.org/index.php /publications/full/archives_at_the_crossroads_2007_booklet/. Accessed July 5, 2011. Arnoldi, Mary Jo, Christaud M. Geary, and Kris L. Hardin, eds. African Material Culture. Bloomington: Indian University Press, ca. 1996. “Art and Conflict in South Africa,” reprinted from Social Review. Paper presented at Culture and Resistance Symposium, Gaborone, November 5–9, 1982. Ashforth, Adam. The Politics of Officialized Discourse in Twentieth Century South Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Atkinson, Brenda, and Candice Breitz, eds. Grey Areas: Representation, Identity and Politics in Contemporary South African Art. Johannesburg: Chalkham Hill Press, Ltd., 1999. Austin, Brian. Schonland: Scientist and Soldier. Briston: IOP Pub, ca. 2001. B., W. R. “Topics and Tameletjies.” South Africa. 7 July 1933. Baker, Malcolm, and Brenda Richardson, eds. A Grand Design: The Art of the Victoria and Albert Museum. New York: Henry N. Abrams and Baltimore Museum of Art, 1997. Bal, Mieke. “Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting.” In Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, edited by Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, 84–101. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Barnard, Rita. “Risky Returns.” In Load Shedding: Writing on and over the Edge of South Africa, edited by Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall, 92–106. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2009. Barringer, Tim. “The South Kensington Museum and the Colonial Project.” In Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture, and the Museum, edited by Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, 11–27. London: Routledge, 1998. Bates, Robert, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O’Barr, eds. Africa and the Disciplines: The Contribution of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), Inc., 1983. ——— —. “The System of Collecting.” In The Cultures of Collecting, edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, 7–24. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Beall, Jo, Owen Crankshaw, and Susan Parnell. Uniting a Divided City: Governance and Social Exclusion in Johannesburg. London: Earthscam Publishers, 2002.

Bibliography / 299 Becker, Rayda. “The New Monument to the Women of South Africa.” African Arts 33 (2000): 1–6. Ben-Guri, Ronit. “Progress Report on Travelling Exhibition.” MuseumAfrica, 18 October 1990. ——— —. “Shaping the Museum of the Future: A Community Project.” MuseumAfrica, September 1990. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited and introduced by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 1995. ——— —. “Exhibition, Difference, and the Logic of Culture.” In Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, edited by Ivan Karp et al., 46–69. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. ——— —. Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism. London: Routledge, 2004. Bhabha, Homi. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” In Nation and Narration, edited by Homi Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. Bickford-Smith, Vivian, Elizabeth van Heyningen, and Nigel Worden. Cape Town in the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated Social History. Claremont, South Africa: D. Philip Publishers, 1999. Black, Barbara J. On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000 Blackwood, Algernon. Episodes Before Thirty. London: E. P. Dutton & Company, ca. 1924. Bolton, Michael Charles. “The Johannesburg Africana Museum.” B. Arch. diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 1968. Bonner, Philip. “New Nation, New History: The History Workshop in South Africa, 1977– 1994.” Journal of American History 81 (1994): 977–85. Boonzaier, Emile, and John Sharp, eds. South African Keywords: The Uses and Abuses of Political Concepts. Cape Town: David Philip, 1988. Brah, Avtar, and Annie E. Coombes, eds. Hybridity and Its Discontents: Politics, Science, and Culture. London: Routledge, 2000. Brain, C. K., and M. C. Erasmus. The Making of The Museum Professionals in Southern Africa. Cape Town: CTP Book Printers, 1986. Bremner, Lindsay. “Reframing Township Space: The Kliptown Project.” In Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, with an afterword by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge, 337–47. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008. ——— —. “A Quick Tour around Contemporary Johannesburg.” In From Jo’burg to Jozi: Stories about Africa’s Infamous City, edited by Heidi Holland and Adam Roberts, 53–56. London: Penguin, 2002. Brink, Elsabe. Newtown—Old Town. Pamphlet. S Pam J 518 Bri. Johannesburg Public Library. Brookes, Edgar H. “Review of Three-Dimensional Thinking.” Rand Daily Mail, 15 September 1924. Brown, A. C., ed. A History of Scientific Endeavour in South Africa: A Collection of Essays Published on the Occasion of the Centenary of the Royal Society of South Africa. Cape Town: Royal Society of South Africa, 1977. Brown, Andy, Ann Wanless, and Rayda Becker. “Museum Display: Fractions of a Truth.” Paper presented at the University of the Witwatersrand History Workshop, “Myths, Monuments, & Museums,” 16–18 July 1992.

300 / Bibliography Bruce, Hillary J. The Museum of South African Rock Art: A Descriptive Guide. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1976. ——— —. “A New Museum for a New South Africa,” Paper delivered at the Southern Africa Museums Association, Durban, June 1991. Bruce, Hillary, and D. Y. Saks. “Frankly Speaking.” Museum 44 (1992): 238–41. ——— —. “A Step into the Unknown: Planning a New Museum for a New South Africa.” ca. late 1980s. Buchanan, Chris. “Museum Africa: Ready in Time for the New South Africa.” Public Buildings Project Review. “A Building for Posterity.” Star. 8 May 1933. Bundy, Colin. Re-Making the Past: New Perspectives in South African History. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1986. Bunn, David. “Art Johannesburg and Its Objects.” In Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, with an afterword by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge, 137–69. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008. ——— —. “The Museum Outdoors: Heritage, Cattle, and Permeable Borders in the Southwestern Kruger National Park.” In Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, edited by Ivan Karp et al., 357–91. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Burnett, Ricky. Tributaries: A View of Contemporary South African Art; Quellen und Strömungen: Eine Ausstellung zeitgenössische suidafrikanischer Kunst. Johannesburg: Communication Department, BMW South Africa, 1985. Butler, Jeffrey. “Interwar Liberalism and Local Activism.” In Democratic Liberalism in South Africa: Its History and Prospect, 81–97, edited by Jeffrey Butler, Richard Elphick, and David Welsh. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987. Butler, Jeffrey and Deryk Schreuder. “Liberal Historiography Since 1945.” In Democratic Liberalism in South Africa: Its History and Prospect, 148–65, edited by Jeffrey Butler, Richard Elphick, and David Welsh. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987. Butler, Jeffrey, Richard Elphick, and David Welsh, eds. Democratic Liberalism in South Africa: Its History and Prospect. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987. Byala, Sara G. “‘Birds in a Cornfield’: Historical Narratives in Syllabi and Museums in PostApartheid Johannesburg.” Paper presented at the African Studies Association Conference, Boston, October 30–November 2, 2003. ——— —. “MuseumAfrica: Colonial Past, Postcolonial Present,” article under review, South African Historical Journal. ——— —. MuseumAfrica as Metonymic for the ‘New’ South Africa: 1988–2004. Discussion Paper in the African Humanities, Boston University, AH Number 37 (2005). ——— —. “The Museum Becomes Archive: Reassessing Johannesburg’s MuseumAfrica.” Social Dymanics 36 (2010): 11–23. ——— —. Review of Tomlinson, Richard, et al., eds., Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Postapartheid City, African Studies Review 48, no. 3 (December 2005): 162–64. ——— —. “Review of Mbembe, Achille, and Sarah Nuttall eds., Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis,” H-SAfrica, H-Net Reviews, April 2005. http://www.h-net.org/reviews /showrev.cgi?path= 47291119641634. ——— —. A Vision in Three Dimensions: An Edited Collection of John Gaspard Gubbins’s Letters (forthcoming). Byrne, Errol. The First Liberal: Rheinallt Jones. Johannesburg: Angel Press, ca. 1990. Cabral, Amilcar. “National Liberation and Culture.” In Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral, edited by Africa Information Service. New York: Monthly Review Press, ca. 1974.

Bibliography / 301 Cameron, Duncan. “The Museum, a Temple or the Forum.” Curator: The Museum Journal 14 (1971): 61–73. Campbell, Killie. “My Africana Collection.” Africana Notes and News 2 (1945): 119–21. Campschreur, Willem, and Joost Divendall, eds. Culture in Another South Africa: Proceedings from the CASA Conference. New York: Olive Branch Press, 1989. Cannizzo, Jeanne. “Gathering Souls and Objects: Missionary Collections.” In Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture, and the Museum, edited by Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, 153–66. London: Routledge, 1998. Cardo, Michael. “‘Fighting a Worse Imperialism’: White South African Loyalism and the Army Education Service during the Second World War.” South African Historical Journal 46 (2002): 141–74. Carman, Jillian. “Johannesburg Art Gallery and the Urban Future.” In Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Postapartheid City, edited by Richard Tomlinson et al., 231–58. New York: Routledge, 2003. ——— —. “Modern Art for South Africa: The Founding of the Johannesburg Art Gallery,” PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2002. ——— —. Uplifting the Colonial Philistine: Florence Philips and the Making of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Johannesburg: Wits Press, 2006. Carr, Clive. “Rarest Stamp Collection of Show.” http://www.joburg.org.za/culture /guest-columns/236-rarest-stamp-collection-on-show Accessed 5 July 2011. Carr, David. “Mind as Verb.” In Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Hugh Genoways, 11–18. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006. Chipkin, Clive M. Johannesburg Style: Architecture and Society, 1880s–1960s. Cape Town: David Philip, 1993. “Citizens of 2000 AD Will Know All About Citizens of 1950: Johannesburg’s Paper Mine Satisfies the Most Curious.” Star. 6 May 1950. “City Library a Focus of Culture: Accommodation at a Premium.” Star. 6 June 1947. “City Library Is Busier than Its London Counterpart.” Star. 4 April 1955. City of Johannesburg. “Guide to the Africana Museum: Top Floor of the Public Library.” 1936. Clarke, James, ed. Like It Was: The Star: 100 Years in Johannesburg. Johannesburg: Star, 1987. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Cohen, Karen, compiler. South African English Poetry, 1937–1970: In the Johannesburg Public Library and the Gubbins Collection of Africana in the University of the Witwatersrand Library. Honours Diploma Librarianship thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1973. “Collectors and Collecting: Sidelines on Africana.” Rand Daily Mail. 10 March 31. Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. ——— —. Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier. Vol. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Comaroff, John L., Jean Comaroff, and Deborah James, eds. Picturing a Colonial Past: The African Photographs of Isaac Schapera. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Dover, 1990. Coombes, Annie E. History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. ——— —. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,1995.

302 / Bibliography Cooper, A. A. The Freemasons of South Africa. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1986. Council of the City of Johannesburg. City of Johannesburg, Official Guide, Second Edition. Cape Town: R. Beerman Publishers, 1956. Crafford, F. S. Jan Smuts: A Biography. Garden City, NY: The Country Life Press, 1943. Crane, Aaron Martin. Right and Wrong Thinking, and Their Results: The Undreamed of Possibilities which Man May Achieve through His Own Mental Control. 24th ed. New York: Exposition Press, 1953. Crane, Susan A., ed. Museums and Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Currie, Richard. Letter to the Editor. Rand Daily Mail. 20 August 1935. Czeglédy, André P. “Villas of the Highveld: A Cultural Perspective on Johannesburg and Its ‘Northern Suburbs.’” In Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Postapartheid City, edited by Richard Tomlinson et al., 21–42. New York: Routledge, 2003. Dan, Calin, and Josif Kiraly. “subREAL: Politics of Cultural Heritage.” In The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Charles Merewether, 113–16. London: Whitechapel, 2006. Darian-Smith, Kate, Liz Gunner, and Sarah Nuttall, eds. Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia. London: Routledge, 1996. Davenport, T. R. H. “The South African Rebellion, 1914.” English Historical Review 78 (1963): 73–94. Davison, Patricia. “Human Subjects as Museum Objects: A Project to Make Life-Casts of ‘Bushmen’ and ‘Hottentots,’ 1907–1924.” Annals of the South African Museum 102 (1993): 165–83. ——— —. “Museums and the Reshaping of Memory.” In Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, 143–60. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998. ——— —. “Reading Exhibitions: Towards an Understanding of Popular Responses to Museum Representations of Other Cultures.” Paper presented at the University of the Witwatersrand History Workshop, “Myths, Monuments, & Museums,” 16–18 July 1992. ——— —. “Redressing the Past: Integrating Social History Collections at Iziko.” South African Museums Association Bulletin (2005): 101–4. De Jager, E. J. “The Estelle Hamilton-Welsh Collection of African Arts and Crafts.” Africana Notes and News 16 (1964): 171–74. De Kok, Ingrid. “Cracked Heirlooms: Memory and Exhibition.” In Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, 57–71. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998. Dell, Elizabeth, Sandy Shoolman, and Elizabeth Burroughs, eds. Evocations of the Child: Fertility Figures of the Southern African Region. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, ca. 1999. Delmont, Liz. “ The Voortrekker Monument: Monolith to Myth.” Paper presented at the University of the Witwatersrand History Workshop, “Myths, Monuments, & Museums,” 16–18 July 1992. The Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology. Cultural Institutions Act, 1998 (Act No. 119 of 1998), http://www.dac.gov.za/projects/heritage/geographical_names /decrlared_cultural_inst.htm. Accessed July 5, 2011. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Dirks, Nicholas B., ed., Colonialism and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. “Distinguished Gathering at Funeral of Dr. JG Gubbins.” Rand Daily Mail. 15 November 1935.

Bibliography / 303 Dominy, Graham, et al. “Heritage Management Structure Flow Chart with ANC Commission for Museums, Monuments, Archives and Heraldry.” Position Paper on Cultural Conservation and Commemoration in a democratic South Africa, February 28, 1993. Drennan, Mrs. Max. “The Romance and Tragedy of the Gubbins Collection.” Outspan. 12 February 1932. “Dr. JGG Addresses Rotary Club.” Rand Daily Mail. 3 July 1935. du Berry, J. “Dr. JG Gubbins.” Star. 27 November 1935. Dubin, Steven. Transforming Museums: Mounting Queen Victoria in a Democratic South Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Dubin, Steven, et al., speakers. “Dinosaurs or Dynamos: Is There a Future for Museums in South Africa? South African Museums: Challenges; Opportunities.” Cape Town Book Fair Panel, Cape Town, 1 August 2011, South African National Gallery. Dubow, Saul. A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa, 1820–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. ——— —. Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ——— —. “Scientism, Social Research and the Limits of South Africanism: The Case of Ernst Gideon Malherbe.” South African Historical Journal 44 (2001): 99–142. Dubow, Saul and Alan Jeeves, eds. South Africa’s 1940s: Worlds of Possibilities. Cape Town: Double Storey, 2005. Duncan, Carol. “Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship.” In Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, 88–103. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1991. Duncan, Jane. “How Cultural Policy Creates Inequality: The Case of the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council and Its Biennale Project.” In Culture in the New South Africa, vol. 2, edited by Robert Kriger and Abede Zegeye, 281–313. Colorado Springs, CO: International Academic Publishers Ltd., 2001. Durrans, Brian. “The Future of the Other: Changing Cultures on Display in Ethnographic Museums.” In The Museum Time Machine, edited by Robert Lumley, 144–69. London: Routledge, 1988. Elphick, Richard. “Mission Christianity and Interwar Liberalism.” In Democratic Liberalism in South Africa: Its History and Prospect, 64–80, edited by Jeffrey Butler, Richard Elphick, and David Welsh. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987. Elsner, John and Roger Cardinal, eds. The Cultures of Collecting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Emdon, Erica. “The Limits of the Law: Social Rights and Urban Development.” In Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Postapartheid City, edited by Richard Tomlinson et al., 215–30. New York: Routledge, 2003. Enwezor, Okwui. Trade Routes: History and Geography: 2nd Johannesburg Biennale. Text by Gerardo Mosquera. Johannesburg: Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, 1997. Ernst, Wolfgang. “Archi(ve)textures of Museology.” In Museums and Memory, edited by Susan Crane, 18–20. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. “Exhibition of Africana.” Star. 2 August 1933. “Exhibition of Africana at the New South African House.” African World. 10 June 1933. Fabian, Johannes. Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire. Berkeley: University of California Press, ca. 1996. A Few Facts about the Johannesburg Public Library and the Africana Museum. March 1964. SPam 027.4 (J)JOH. Johannesburg Public Library.

304 / Bibliography Foster, Jeremy. Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, 1989. ——— —. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. ——— —. “Nietzche, Geneology, History.” In Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited and translated by Donald F. Bouchard, 139–64. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. ——— —. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–27. ——— —. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Science. New York: Vintage, 1994. “From Its Reading Habits: Johannesburg Is Very Highly Civilized, Says Retiring Librarian.” Star. 5 August 1959. Garson, Ivonne, compiler. From Myth to Reality in the Cartography of the Colonial Era: Historical Maps of Southern Africa and the Islands Off Its Coast in the John G. Gubbins Africana Library, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Library, 2003. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Gevisser, Mark. “From the Ruins: The Constitution Hill Project.” In Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, with an afterword by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge, 317–36. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008. Glass, Ira, “Introduction.” In The New Kings of Nonfiction, edited by Ira Glass. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. Godfrey, Denis. “Checkered History of City Library.” Star. 15 January 1972. ——— —. The Enchanted Door: A Discourse on Africana Book-Collecting, with Notes on Famous Collectors, Collections and Books. Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1963. Gonzalez Echevarria, Roberto. Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Goodwin, Eric. “A Hall of Cultural History.” Discussion Paper. MuseumAfrica. 25 October 1991. ——— —. “A New Direction for Cultural History.” Discussion Paper. MuseumAfrica. 14 Octo­ ber 1991. Gray, Stephen. “Tea and Cake at the Johannesburg Public Library.” In From Jo’burg to Jozi: Stories about Africa’s Infamous City, edited by Heidi Holland and Adam Roberts, 98–101. London: Penguin, 2002. Greenberg, Reesa, Bruce Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, eds. Thinking about Exhibitions. London: Routledge, 1996. Griffiths, Tom. Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Gubbins, John Gaspard. Three-Dimensional Thinking. Cape Town: Maskew Miller, Ltd., ca. 1924. Gubbins, Richard Rolls. The 85th King’s Light Infantry. London: Spottiswoode, 1913. “Gubbins Africana a ‘Glorified Curiosity Shop’ said City Councilor: Inconclusive Debate on Appointment to Directorship.” Rand Daily Mail. 30 August 1935. “Gubbins Centenary.” Africana Notes and News 22 (1977): 219. “Gubbins Library at Ottoshoop.” Rand Daily Mail. 23 September 1930. “The Gubbins Library of Africana at the Witwatersrand University: Fruits of Mr. Gubbins’s Mission.” African World. 3 September 1932.

Bibliography / 305 Gutsche, Thelma. No Ordinary Woman: The Life and Times of Florence Phillips. Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1966. Hall, Martin. “The Reappearance of the Authentic.” In Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/ Global Transformations, edited by Ivan Karp et al., 70–101. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Hamilton, Carolyn. “Against the Museum as Chameleon.” South African Historical Journal 31 (1994): 184–90. ——— —. “Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive.” History in Africa (forthcoming). —. “ ‘Living by Fluidities’: Oral Histories, Material Custodies, and the Politics of Ar——— chiving.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton et al., 209–28. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. ——— —. “The Real Goat: Identity and Authenticity in Shakaland.” Paper presented at the University of the Witwatersrand History Workshop “Myths, Monuments, & Museums,” 16–18 July 1992. ——— —. Terrific Majesty: The Power of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Hamilton, Carolyn and Nessa Leibhammer. “Ethnologised Pasts and Their Archival Futures: Construing the Archive of Pre- and Early Colonial Southern KwaZulu-Natal.” Paper presented to the colloquium organized by SAVAH under the aegis of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA) hosted by the Wits School of Arts and the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 12–15 January 2011, 10. Hamilton, Carolyn, Verne Harris, and Graeme Reid. Introduction to Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton et al., 7–18. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. Hamilton, Carolyn et al., eds. Refiguring the Archive. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. Hammond-Tooke, W. D. Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa’s Anthropologists 1920–1990. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1997. Harris, Verne. “The Archival Sliver: A Perspective on the Construction of Social Memory in Archives and the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton et al., 137–51. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. ——— —. “Claiming Less, Delivering More: A Critique of Positive Formulations on Archives in South Africa.” Archivaria 44 (1997): 132–41. —. “Postmodernism and Archival Appraisal: Seven Theses.” South African Archives ——— Journal 40 (1998): 48–50. ——— —. “A Shaft of Darkness: Derrida in the Archive.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton et al., 39–60. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. Harris, Verne, and Sello Hatang. “Archives, Identity and Place: A Dialogue on what it (Might) Mean(s) to be an African Archivist.” Esarbica Journal 19 (2000): 46–60. Hayes, Patricia, Jeremy Silvester, and Wolfram Hartmann, “ ‘Picturing the Past’ in Namibia: The Visual Archive and Its Energies.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton et al., 103–34. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. Heller, Patrick. “Reclaiming Democratic Spaces: Civics and Politics in Posttransition Johannesburg.” In Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Postapartheid City, edited by Richard Tomlinson et al., 155–84. New York: Routledge, 2003. Heumann Gurian, Elaine. “What Is the Object of  This Exercise? A Meandering Exploration of the Many Meanings of Objects in Museums.” Daedelus 128 (1999): 163–83. Heyk, T. W., The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England. Chicago: Lyceum Books, 1982.

306 / Bibliography Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Holland, Heidi. “Getting Even.” In From Jo’burg to Jozi: Stories about Africa’s infamous city, edited by Heidi Holland and Adam Roberts, 107–11. London: Penguin Books, 2002. Holland, Heidi and Adam Roberts, eds. From Jo’burg to Jozi: Stories about Africa’s infamous city. London: Penguin, 2002. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 1992. ——— —. “The Power of Museum Pedagogy.” In Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Hugh H. Genoways, 235–45. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006. Hyslop, Jonathan. “An Anglo-South African Intellectual, the Second World War, and the Coming of Apartheid: Guy Butler in the 1940s.” In South Africa’s 1940s: Worlds of Possibilities, edited by Saul Dubow and Alan Jeeves. Cape Town: Double Storey, 2005. ——— —. “Gandhi, Mandela, and the African Modern.” In Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, with an afterword by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge, 119–36. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008. ——— —. “Global Imagination before Globalization: The Worlds of International Labour Activists on the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914.” Unpublished Seminar paper presented at Wits Institution for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, June 24, 2003. Integrated Marketing Research. “Africana Museum Research Report.” March 1994. Inventory of the “Gubbins” Africana Material To Be Handed over to the Corporation of the City of Johannesburg by the University of the Witwatersrand with Attached Letters from E. A. Borland, Librarian, to John G. Gubbins. 20 February 1934. Africana Museum Pam 0690968221. MuseumAfrica. Itzkin, Eric. Gandhi’s Johannesburg: Birthplace of Satyagraha. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press in association with MuseumAfrica, 2000. Iziko. “Sir Abe Bailey Bequest Catalogue.” http://media1.mweb.co.za/iziko/sang/conservation/view.asp?pg=catalogue&pgsub=cat _reapp2. Accessed 4 February 2012. Janes, Robert. Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance, or Collapse? London: Routledge, 2009. Jasanoff, Maya. Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850. New York: Knopf, 2005. Jeffreys, Mervyn David Waldegrave. Africanderisms. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1964. Joannides, Helen. “The Museum Meets the Classroom: An Exploration of the Interface between MuseumAfrica and a Grade Six Classroom.” MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 2003. Johannesburg Biennale Catalogue “Inside Outside.” Johannesburg: Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, 1995. Johannesburg Publicity Association. 1926 Official Souvenir for Johannesburg’s 40th Birthday. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Publicity Association, 1926. “John Gaspard Gubbins: Life with a Purpose.” Star. 14 November 1935. Johnson, Karlton C. Non-European Libraries in South Africa: A Paper Presented for the Transvaal Branch of the South African Library Association. 25 June 1941. Pamphlet. Reprinted in 1953 as Library Services for the Non-Europeans: A Summary Based on the Replies Submitted by Some Libraries in Response to a Circular Letter Sent Out in March 1953. Pamphlet. Spam 027.63 Joh. Johannesburg Public Library.

Bibliography / 307 Jordan, Z. Pallo. Speech at the Culture in Another South Africa Conference, Amsterdam, 12–19 December 1987. Reprinted in Culture in Another South Africa: Proceedings from the CASA Conference, edited by Willem Campschreur and Joost Divendall, 259–65. New York: Olive Branch Press, 1989. Judin, Hilton, and Ivan Vladislavic´, eds. Blank__Architecture, Apartheid, and After. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1998. Kallaway, Peter, ed. The History of Education under Apartheid, 1948–1994: The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall Be Opened. New York: P. Lang, ca. 2002. Kaplan, Flora E. S., ed. Museums and the Making of “Ourselves”: The Role of Objects in National Identity. London: Leicester University Press, 1994. Karp, Ivan, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine, eds. Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1992. Karp, Ivan, and Steven D. Lavine, eds. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 1991. Kennedy, Reginald Frank. Africana Repository. Johannesburg: Juta, 1965. ——— —. Books for Study and Research: A Pilot Investigation into the Existing State of Library Book-Stocks in the Republic of South Africa. Potchefstroom, South Africa: Potchefstroom University in collaboration with the South African Library, 1961. ——— —, compiler. Catalogue of Prints in the Africana Museum and in Books in the Strange Collection of Africana in the Johannesburg Public Library up to 1870. 2 vols. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1975. ——— —. Classified Cataloguing: A Practical Guide. Cape Town: Balkema, 1966. ——— —. “The Founders of the Africana Museum.” Africana Notes and News 11 (1955): 233–35. ——— —. “Harold Strange and the Strange Collection.” Africana Notes and News 7 (1950): 62–64. ——— —. The Heart of a City: A History of the Johannesburg Public Library. Cape Town: Juta & Company, Ltd, 1970. ——— —. Libraries for Africans. Pamphlet. Date unknown. Johannesburg Public Library. ——— —. “Private Collectors and Public Museums.” Africana Notes and News 1 (1954): 101–3. ——— —. Shipwrecks on and off the Coast of Southern Africa: A Catalogue and Index. Johannesburg: Public Library, 1955. ——— —, compiler. Some Africana Coloured Prints and the Originals from which They May Have Been Made: Catalogue of an Exhibition of Pictures from the Africana Museum Held in the Johannesburg Public Library 1–14 July 1963. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1963. ——— —. “Treasures and Trash,” unpublished manuscript, ca. 1977. Kingsford, Anna Bonus. “Clothed with the Sun”: Being the Book of Illuminations of Anna (Bonus) Kingsford. Edited by Edward Maitland. London: J. M. Watkins, 1937. Kipling, Rudyard. Something of Myself and other Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Thomas Pinney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ——— —. “South Africa.” In The Five Nations, 4th ed., 149–51. London: Methuen & Co., 1908. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Berke­ ley: University of California Press, 1998. Kreamer, Christine Mullen. Art of Sub-Saharan Africa: The Fred and Rita Richmond Collection. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, ca. 1986. Kros, Cynthia. “Experiencing a Century in a Day? Making More of Gold Reef City.” South African Historical Journal 29 (1993): 28–43.

308 / Bibliography ——— —. “Museums and their Cities: The Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and Some Minor Reflections on MuseumAfrica in Johannesburg.” Unpublished paper. Kruger, D. W., ed. Dictionary of South African Biography, Volume 1. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council, 1972. Kujundzic, Dragan. “Archigraphia: On the Future of Testimony and the Archive to Come 2002.” In The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Charles Merewether, 172–76. London: Whitechapel, 2006. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lambert, John. “South African or British? Or Dominion South Africans? The Evolution of an Identity in the 1910s and 1920s.” South African Historical Journal 43 (2000): 197–222. Lange, Margaret M. de, compiler. Catalogue of Musical Instruments in the Collection of Percival R. Kirby. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1967. Lattimore, Richard, trans. The Odyssey of Homer. New York: Harper, 1991. Le Marcis, Frédéric. “The Suffering Body of the City.” In Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, with an afterword by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge, 170–94. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008. Legassik, Martin and Ciraj Rassool. Skeletons in the Cupboard: South African Museums and the Trade in Human Remains 1907–1917. Cape Town: South African Museum and McGregor Museum, 2000. Lemon, Anthony, ed. Homes Apart: South Africa’s Segregated Cities. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. Lepore, Jill. “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography.” Journal of American History 88 (2001): 129–44. Lewin, Evans, M.B.E., “The Mendelssohn Library and Bibliography.” Africana Notes and News 3 (1946): 99–107. Lewsen, Phillis. “Liberals in Politics and Administration, 1936–1948.” In Democratic Liberalism in South Africa: Its History and Prospect, 98–115, edited by Jeffrey Butler, Richard Elphick, and David Welsh. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987. Leyds, G. A. A History of Johannesburg: The Early Years. Beperk, South Africa: Nasionale Boekhandel, 1964. Leibhammer, Nessa. “Filling the Spaces/ Contesting the Canons.” In One Hundred Years of Collecting: The Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1910–2010, edited by Jillian Carman, 83–87. Pretoria: Design > Magazine, 2010. Lipman, Alan. “Beyond Our Urban Mishaps.” In From Jo’burg to Jozi: Stories about Africa’s Infamous City, edited by Heidi Holland and Adam Roberts, 133–36. London: Penguin, 2002. “Livingstone in the Transvaal: Ruins Preserved.” Star. 29 November 1913. Lumley, Robert, ed. The Museum Time Machine: Putting Cultures on Display. London: Routledge, 1988. Mabin, Alan. “Dispossession, Exploitation, and Struggle: An Historical Overview of South African Urbanization.” In The Apartheid City and Beyond: Urbanization and Social Change in South Africa, edited by David Smith, 13–14. London: Routledge, 1992. Maboneng Precinct. http://www.mabonengprecinct.com/. Accessed April 14, 2012. MacCarthy, Harold. “The Africana Museum: A Valuable Collection Built Up over 25 Years.” Rand Daily Mail. 20 November 1961. Macdonald, Sharon and Gordon Fyfe, eds. Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

Bibliography / 309 MacKenzie, John M. Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures, and Colonial Identities. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009. Madondo, Bongani. “Tatty Whore with a Heart of Gold.” In From Jo’burg to Jozi: Stories about Africa’s Infamous City, edited by Heidi Holland and Adam Roberts, 141–45. London: Penguin, 2002. “A Magic Window on the World of Yesterday.” Star. 12 August 1947. Magubane, Peter. June 16, 1976: Never, Never Again: Twentieth Anniversary. Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1996. ——— —. Vanishing Cultures of South Africa: Changing Customs in a Changing World. New York: Rizzoli, 1998. ——— —. Women of South Africa: Their Fight for Freedom. Photographs by Peter Magubane. Text by Carol Lazar. Introduction by Nadine Gordimer. Boston: Little Brown, 1993. Maingard, L. F. “John Gaspard Gubbins.” Africana Notes & News 15 (1963): 347–48. Malala, Justice. “Losing My Mind.” In At Risk: Writing on and over the Edge of South Africa, edited by Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall, 171–86. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2007. Malan, Rian. “Jo’burg Lovesong.” In From Jo’burg to Jozi: Stories about Africa’s Infamous City, edited by Heidi Holland and Adam Roberts, 152–58. London: Penguin, 2002. Malherbe, Ernst Gideon. The Bilingual School: A Study of Bilingualism in South Africa. New York: Arno Press, 1978. “A Man and His Ideal.” Pretoria News. 19 September 1931. Mandela, Nelson. Address by President Mandela on Heritage Day, 24 September 1997. http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=4215. Accessed June 16 2011. Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ca. 1996. Marks, Shula. The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism, and the State in Twentieth Century Natal. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, ca. 1986. Masakele, Barbara. “Speech by Ms. Barbara Masakele, Secretary, Department of Art and Culture of the African National Congress (in Lusaka, Zambia) Delivered at the Opening Session of the Workshop on Culture and Apartheid by the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement on Friday 25 April 1986 at Trinity College, Dublin.” Maud, John P. R. City Government: The Johannesburg Experiment. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938. ——— —. Johannesburg and the Art of Self-Government. Johannesburg: RL Lesson & Co. Ltd., 1937. Maynard, E. J., compiler. Tokens Of Southern Africa: A Catalogue Based on the Collection in the Africana Museum. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1966. Mbembe, Achille. “Aesthetics of Superfluity.” In Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, with an afterword by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge, 37–67. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008. ——— —. “The Power of the Archive and its Limits.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton et al., 19–26. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. Mbembe, Achille, and Sarah Nuttall, guest eds. Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. Special edition of Public Culture: Society for Transnational Cultural Studies 16 (Fall 2004). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. McGee, Julie. “Restructuring South African Museums: Reality and Rhetoric within Cape Town.” In New Museum Theory and Practice, edited by Janet Marstine, 178–99. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.

310 / Bibliography McGregor, Liz, and Sarah Nuttall, eds. At Risk: Writing on and over the Edge of South Africa. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2007. ——— —, eds. Load Shedding: Writing on and over the Edge of South Africa. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2009. McGregor, Liz. “If Only There Was a God.” In Load Shedding: Writing on and over the edge of South Africa, edited by Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall, 13–30. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2009. Mda, Lizeka. “City Quarters: Civic Spine, Farady Station, KwaMayiMayi and Ponte City.” In Blank___Architecture, Apartheid, and After, edited by Hilton Judin and Ivan Vladislavic´, 10 D. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1998. Mendelssohn, Sidney. Mendelssohn’s South African Bibliography: Being the Catalogue Raissoné of the Mendelssohn Library of Works Relating to South Africa, Including the Full Titles of the Books, with Synoptical, Biographical, Critical, and Bibliographical Notes on the Volumes and Their Authors. Together with Notices of a Large Number of Important Works Not as Yet Included in the Collection, Based on Information Gathered by the Author in the Course of Researches in Many Libraries, and During a Residence in South Africa Extending over the Greater Part of a Quarter of a Century, Together with a Bibliography of South African Periodical Literature, and of Articles on South African Subjects in Periodical Literature throughout the World. Also a Complete List of the British Parliamentary Blue-Books on South Africa, a Cartography of South Africa etc., etc., etc. London: Holland Press, 1957. First published 1910 by K. Paul, Trench, Trubner. “Men Who Gave the Town Its First Library.” Star. 21 September 1936. Miers, Henry A. and Mr. S. F. Markham, Report on the Museums and Art Galleries of British Africa Together with a Report on the Museums of Malta, Cyprus and Gibralta by Aldeman Chas, Squire and D. W. Herdman to the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which Is Accompanied by a Directory of the Museums and Art Galleries of British Africa and the British Mediterranean. Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable Ltd., 1932. Mitchell, Timothy. “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order.” In Colonialism and Culture, edited by Nicholas Dirks, 289–318. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Morris, Alan. Bleakness and Light: Inner-City Transition in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1999. Mpe, Phaswane. Welcome to Our Hillbrow. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 2001. Mphalele, Ezekiel. Down Second Avenue. London: Faber & Faber, 1959. Mpumlwana, Khwezi ka et al. “Inclusion and the Power of Representation: South African Museums and the Cultural Politics of Social Transformation.” In Museums, Society, Inequality, edited by Richard Sandell, 244–61. London: Routledge, 2002. Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ca. 1988. “Municipal Library Is Johannesburg’s Mecca of Culture.” Rand Daily Mail. 14 February 1949. Murray, Bruce K. Wits: The Early Years: a History of the University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg and Its Precursors. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1982. ——— —. Wits: The “Open” Years: a history of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1939–1959. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1997. Musiker, Reuben. The Africana Collections of the University of the Witwatersrand. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University, 1976. Musiker, Rueben, and Naomi Musiker. Wits. Library: A Centenary History. Johannesburg: Scarecrow Books, 1998.

Bibliography / 311 Nagelgast, E. Blance. “Closure of  This Journal.” Africana Notes and News 30 (1993): 217. ——— —. “Directories of Museums in Africa.” Africana Notes and News 29 (1991): 279. —. Editorial. Africana Notes and News 30 (1992): 1. ——— Naidoo, Romaana. “Workers’ Museum Opens.” Archival Platform Newsletter 14 (2010). http://www.archivalplatform.org/news/entry/workers_museum_opens/. Accessed 14 July 2011. Nettleton, Anitra. “Arts and Africana: Hierarchies of Material Culture.” South African Historical Journal 29 (1993): 61–75. Nettleton, Anitra, and David Hammond-Tooke, eds. Catalogue: Ten Years of Collecting (1979–1989): Standard Bank Foundation Collection of African Art, University Art Galleries Collection of African Art, and Selected Works from the University Ethnological Museum Collection. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 1989. Ngubane, B. S. “Speech by the Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, Dr. B. S. Ngubane, Visit to Flagship Institutions.” 27 January 2000. http://www.info.gov.za /speeches/2000/000202929a1005.htm. Accessed July 5, 2011. Nuttall, Sarah. Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009. Nuttall, Sarah, and Carli Coetzee, eds. Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998. Nuttall, Sarah, and Achille Mbembe. Introduction to Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, with an afterword by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge, 1–33. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008. Nuttall, Sarah, and Achille Mbembe, eds., with an afterword by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge. Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008. Nuttall, Sarah, and Cheryl Ann Michael. Senses of Culture: South African Cultural Studies. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 2000. Odendaal, Andre. “‘Giving Life to Learning’: The Way Ahead for Museums in a Democratic South Africa.” Paper presented on behalf of CREATE at SAMA annual conference, East London. 23 May 1994. Odhiambo, Rom. “De Korte Street.” In At Risk: Writing on and over the Edge of South Africa, edited by Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall, 104–18. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2007. Oliver, H. G., The Africana Museum: An Examination in the Light of Observations on Museum Practice in Britain and Europe. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1939. ——— —, compiler. Catalogue of Commemorative Medals and Plaques of South African Interest in the Africana Museum. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1946. Omer-Cooper, J. D. A History of Southern Africa. Cape Town: David Phillip, 1994. Palmary, Ingrid, Janine Rauch, and Graeme Simpson. “Violent Crime in Johannesburg.” In Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Postapartheid City, edited by Richard Tomlinson et al., 101–22. New York: Routledge, 2003. Pama, C., ed. The South African Library, Its History, Collections, and Librarians 1818–1968; Papers Contributed on the Occasion of Its One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary. Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1968. Paris, Scott G. “How Can Museums Attract Visitors in the Twenty-First Century.” In Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Hugh H. Genoways, 255–66. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006. Parnell, S. M., and G. H. Pirie. “Johannesburg.” In Homes Apart: South Africa’s Segregated Cities, edited by Anthony Lemon, 129–45. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991.

312 / Bibliography Paton, Alan. South African Tragedy: The Life and Times of Jan Hofmeyr. New York: Scribner, ca. 1965. Paver, F. R. “John Gaspard Gubbins,” Africana Notes and News 3 (1946): 73–77. —. “John Gaspard Gubbins: Origin and Early Days of the Africana Museum.” Afri——— cana Notes and News 15 (1963): 319–25. Pearce, Susan M., ed. Interpreting Objects and Collections. London: Routledge, 1994. ——— —, ed. Museum Studies in Material Culture. London: Leicester University Press, 1989. ——— —. On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition. London: Routledge, 1995. Preziosi, Donald. “Philosophy and the Ends of the Museum.” In Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Hugh H. Genoways, 69–78. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006. Preziosi, Donald, and Claire Farago, eds. Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum. Burlington, V T: Ashgate, 2004. Price, Sally. Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Peters, Susanne, ed. Directory of Museums in Africa for Unesco-ICOM Documentation Centre. London: Kegan Paul International, 1990. Peterson, Bhekizizwe. “The Archives and the Political Imaginary.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton et al., 29–35. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. Phillips, H. Black October: The Impact of the Spanish Influenza Epidemic of 1918 on South Africa. Pretoria, South Africa: Government Printer, 1990. Phillips, Janet M. Liberalism in South Africa, 1948–1963. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Plaatje, Sol T. Native Life in South Africa: Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991. Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800. Translated by Elizabeth Wiles-Portier. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. Powell, Ivor. “Something New Something Old.” Mail and Guardian. 12 August 1994. http://mg.co.za/article/1994-08-12-something-new-something-old. Accessed 21 March 2012. Prakash, Gyan, ed. After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Post-Colonial Displacements. Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ca. 1995. “Rare Books Destroyed in Fire.” Star. 24 December 1931. Rassool, Ciraj. “Ethnographic Elaborations, Indigenous Contestations, and the Cultural Politics of Imagining Community: A View from the District Six Museum in South Africa.” In Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives, edited by Susan Sleeper-Smith, 106–26. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Rassool, Ciraj, and Leslie Witz. “The 1952 Jan Van Riebeck Tercentenary Festival: Constructing and Contesting Public National History.” Paper presented at the University of the Witwatersrand History Workshop, “Myths, Monuments, & Museums,” 16–18 July 1992. ——— —. “The 1952 Jan Van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival: Constructing and Contesting Public National History.” Journal of African History 34 (1993): 447–68. ——— —. “‘South Africa: A World in One Country’: Moments in International Tourist Encounters with Wildlife, the Primitive and the Modern.” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 143 (1996): xxxvi–3. Rees, William Lee. The Life and Times of Sir George Grey, KCB. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1892.

Bibliography / 313 Rich, P.B. White Power and the Liberal Conscience: Racial Segregation and South African Liberalism, 1921–1960. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984. Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London: Verso, 1993. Rosenthal, Eric. “Rand University Library Reborn.” Sunday Times. 25 February 1934. Rotberg, Robert, with the collaboration of Miles F. Shore. The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Sack, Steve. The Neglected Tradition: Towards a New History of South African Art (1930– 1988), Johannesburg Art Gallery, 23 November 1988–8 January 1989. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, ca. 1988. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. Saks, D. Y. “Changing the Subtext: Coping with Bias in Museums and the Historical Record in South Africa Today.” Paper presented at the University of the Witwatersrand History Workshop, “Myths, Monuments, & Museums,” 16–18 July 1992. ——— —. “Motivations behind the Chrono-Cultural Division in the Museum.” Position Paper. MuseumAfrica, 24 October 1991. Saunders, Christopher. “Liberal Historiography Before 1945.” In Democratic Liberalism in South Africa: Its History and Prospect, 137–47, edited by Jeffrey Butler, Richard Elphick, and David Welsh. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987. Schmidt, Bettina. Creating Order: Culture as Politics in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century South Africa. Nijmengen: Third World Center, ca. 1996. Second African National Congress Women’s Conference. “National Preparatory Committee Papers.” September 1987. Serote, M. W. “Paper Presented on Behalf of Medu Editorial Board at Foundation for Education with Production ‘Cultural Studies’ Workshop,” Gaborone, Botswana, September 12–17, 1983. First appeared in Medu Art Ensemble News Letter 5 (1983): 26–34. Shaw, Ella Margaret. “A System for Cataloguing Ethnographic Material in Museums.” Unpublished paper, South Africa Museum [Iziko], 1958. Shorten, John R. The Johannesburg Saga. Johannesburg: published under the authority of the Johannesburg City Council, 1970. Silbert, Rachel, compiler. “Southern African Drama in English, 1900–1964, in the Johannesburg Public Library and the Gubbins Collection of Africana in the University of the Witwatersrand Library, an Annotated Bibliography.” Typescript submitted in partial fulfillment for the requirements of the Diploma in Librarianship, University of the Witwatersrand, 1965. Silverman, Lois H. “The Therapeutic Potential of Museums as Pathways to Inclusion.” In Museums, Society, Inequality, edited by Richard Sandell, 69–83. London: Routledge, 2002. Simone, AbdouMaliq. “Globalization and the Identity of African Urban Practices.” In Blank__Architecture, Apartheid, and After, edited by Hilton Judin and Ivan Vladislavic´, 8D. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1998. ——— —. “People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.” In Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, with an afterword by Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge, 68–90. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008. Skotnes, Pippa, ed. Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1996. ——— —. “The Politics of Bushmen Representations.” In Images and Empires: Visuality in

314 / Bibliography Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, edited by Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin, 253–54. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Sleeper-Smith, Susan. “Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives.” In Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives, edited by Susan SleeperSmith, 1–5. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Smith, Anna Hester, ed. Africana Byways. Johannesburg: AD Donker, 1976. ——— —. Africana Curiosities. Johannesburg: AD Donker, 1973. ——— —. “The Bible as Africana.” Africana Notes and News 4 (1946): 21–23. —. “A Book on the Collecting of Africana.” Africana Notes and News 15 (1962): 49–50. ——— ——— —. Catalogue of Bantu, Khoisan and Malagasy in the Strange Collection of Africana. Johannesburg: Public Library, 1942. ——— —. Chronology of Johannesburg. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1977. ——— —, compiler. Commemorative Medals of the Z.A.R.: An Exhibition of the Collections in the Africana Museum and the Transvaal Museum Augmented by Special Loans, 17 November– 11 December 1958. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1958. ——— —, compiler. Johannesburg Firsts. Johannesburg: Africana Museum, 1976. ——— —, ed. Pictorial History of Johannesburg. Johannesburg: Juta and Co. Ltd for the Africana Museum, 1956. ——— —. Report on the Overseas Study Tour of the Director of the Africana Museum, June–October 1961. William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand. ——— —. “R. F. Kennedy.” Africana Notes and News 14 (1960): 81–82. ——— —. The Story of the Africana Museum. March 1965. Pamphlet. S Pam 069 (J) Joh. Johannesburg Public Library. ——— —. Treasures of the Africana Museum. Cape Town: Purnell, 1977. Smith, David ed. The Apartheid City and Beyond: Urbanization and Social Change in South Africa. London: Routledge, 1992. Smuts, Jan Christian. Holism and Evolution. New York: MacMillan, 1926. Southern African Museums Association. “Shifting the Paradigm: A Plan to Diversify Heritage Practice in South Africa.” A SAMA discussion paper, 1996. The Star: An Extraordinary 20th Century. Johannesburg: Star, 1999. Stark, Felix, ed. Seventy Golden Years: 1886–1956, Issued by the Authority and Special Permission of the City of Johannesburg Publicity Association. Johannesburg: L. E. Joseph and Co., 1956. Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Stevenson, Michael. Art and Aspirations: The Randlords of South Africa and Their Collections. London: Global, 2002. Stocking, G. W. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press, 1991. Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. ——— —. “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in the Form.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton et al., 83–102. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. Stone, Ida Mae. Sketches: Published on the Occasion of Johannesburg’s Ninetieth Birthday. Johannesburg: published for the Africana Museum by A. D. Donker, 1976. Stow, George William. The Native Races of South Africa: A History of the Intrusion of the Hottentots and Bantu into the Hunting Grounds of the Bushmen, the Aborigines of the Country. Edited by George McCall Theal. New York: Macmillan, 1905.

Bibliography / 315 Summers, R. F. H. A History of The South African Museum 1825–1975, Compiled from Museum Records by Summers and Published for the Trustees of the South African Museum. Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1975. Tanselle, Thomas. “A Rationale of Collecting.” Studies in Bibliography 51 (1998): 1–25. Taylor, Jane. “Holdings: Refiguring the Archive.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton et al., 243–81. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. Thomas, Elizabeth. “HIV/AIDS: Implications for Local Governance, Housing, and Delivery of Services.” In Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Postapartheid City, edited by Richard Tomlinson et al., 185–96. New York: Routledge, 2003. Tilley, Helen and Robert Gordon, eds., Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism, and the Politics of Knowledge. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007. Tomaselli, Keyan. Rethinking Culture: Proceedings from the Culture and Resistance Conference. Bellville, South Africa: Anthropos Publishers, 1989. Tomlinson, Richard. “Ten Years in the Making: A History of Metropolitan Government in Johannesburg.” Urban Forum 10 (1999): 1–40. ——— —. Urbanization in Post-Apartheid South Africa. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990. Tomlinson, Richard, Robert A. Beauregard, Lindsay Bremner, and Xolela Mangcu, eds. Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Postapartheid City. New York: Routledge, 2003. ——— —. “The Postapartheid Struggle for an Integrated Johannesburg.” In Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Postapartheid City, edited by Richard Tomlinson et al., 3–20. New York: Routledge, 2003. “Treasures in a Farmer’s Library.” Star. 26 June 1926. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report. 5 vols. Cape Town: Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1998. Tucker, Jennifer. Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Tylden, G. The Armed Forces of South Africa, with an Appendix on the Commandos. Frank Connock Publication no. 2. Johannesburg, 1954. ——— —. “Kipling Africana.” Africana Notes and News 2 (1945): 58–60. “Unique Library for City: Early History of South Africa: Munificent Gift by Farmer Miner.” Star. 13 May 1931. Vail, Leroy. The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Van den Berg, Clive. “Memorials without Facts.” Performance Research: A Journal of Perfor­ mance Arts 3 (1998): 10–14. van Niekerk, Marlene. “Take Your Body Where It Has Never Been Before.” In Blank___Architecture, Apartheid, and After, edited by Hilton Judin and Ivan Vladislavic´, 4F. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1998. Van Onselen, Charles. New Babylon, New Nineveh: Everyday Life on the Witwatersrand. Johannesburg: Jonathan Bell, 2001. van Tonder, Deon. “From Mausoleum to Museum: Revisiting Public History in the Inauguration of MuseumAfrica, Newtown.” South African Historical Journal 31 (1994): 165–83. Van Warmelo, Nicholas Jacobus. A Preliminary Survey of the Bantu Tribes of South Africa. Pretoria, South Africa: The Government Printer, 1935.

316 / Bibliography van Zyl, Susan. “Psychoanalysis and the Archive: Derrida’s Archive Fever.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton et al., 39–60. Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. Varley, D. H. Adventures in Africana. Cape Town: University of Cape Town and the Trustees of the South African Library, 1949. Vladislavic´, Ivan. The Exploded View. New York: Random House, 2004. ——— —. Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. ——— —. The Restless Supermarket. Cape Town: David Philip, 2001. W., M. M. “Library that Grew Up with Johannesburg.” Sunday Times. 25 April 1971. Wallace, Alfred Russell. Man’s Place in the Universe: A Study of the Results of Scientific Research in Relation to the Unity or Plurality of Worlds. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1904. Wallis, J. P. R. “The Late Dr. Gubbins.” Star. 13 November 1935. WaMogale Martins, Dikobe. “Art is Not Neutral: Whom does it serve?” Staffrider (July/ August, 1981), 30–31. Wanless, Ann. “The Silence of Colonial Melancholy: The Fourie Collection of Khoisan Ethnologica.” PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2007. Wanless Ann and Sara Byala. “Getting to Know the Zulu in MuseumAfrica.” Paper presented at “Tribing and Untribing the Archive” workshop, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 24–25 March 2012. “Weekend Diary.” Star. 25 August 1977. Weill, Stephen E. Making Museums Matter. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. Wendorf, Richard. The Literature of Collecting & Other Essays. Boston: Boston Anthenaeum and Oak Knoll Press, 2008. White Paper on Arts, Culture, and Heritage. http://www.dac.gov.za/white_paper.htm. Accessed July 5, 2011. Williamson, Sue. Resistance Art in South Africa. Cape Town: David Phillip, 1989. Wits History Workshop and MuseumAfrica. Making the Most of Museums in Teaching the History Syllabus. Papers presented Saturday 18 May at MuseumAfrica, Heinemann Press. Witz, Leslie. Apartheid’s Festival: Contesting South Africa’s National Pasts. Bloomington: Indianapolis University Press, 2003. ——— —. “Transforming Museums on Postapartheid Tourist Routes.” In Museum frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, edited by Ivan Karp et al., 107–34. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Witz, Leslie, Ciraj Rassool, and Gary Minkley. “Repackaging the Past for South African Tourism.” Daedelus 130 (Winter 2001): 277–96. Wolf, Eric R. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, ca. 1997. Worden, Nigel. “Unmapping History at the Cape Town Waterfront.” Paper presented at the University of the Witwatersrand History Workshop, “Myths, Monuments, and Museums,” 16–18 July 1992. Wylie, Diana. Starving on a Full Stomach: Hunger and the Triumph of Cultural Racism in Modern South Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. Xaba, Makhosazana. “Neighbours.” In At Risk: Writing on and over the Edge of South Africa, edited by Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall, 90–103. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2007. Zemon Davis, Natalie. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in SixteenthCentury France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987.

Bibliography / 317 A r c h i v e s C o ns u l t e d

African National Congress Liberation Archives, University of Fort Hare, Alice. Department of Historical Papers, William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Manuscript collections: A205, John Gaspard Gubbins, 1916–1934 A394, John David Rheinallt Jones, 1884–1953 A1134, John Gaspard Gubbins’s Papers, 1872 A1146, Vyvian William Hiller A1150, John Gaspard Gubbins, 1928–1977 A1351, Richard Rolls Gubbins A1462, Paul Butterfield, 1982 A1477, Paul Butterfield, 1982 A1479, John Gaspard Gubbins, 1877–1981 A1602, Paul Butterfield, 1983 A2255, Denis Godfrey A2354, Paul Butterfield Research Material AD843, SAIRR, vol. 1 AD 1428, Edith Rheinallt Jones, 1923–1959 Harold Strange Library of African Studies, Johannesburg Public Library, Market Square, Johannesburg. Local Government Library, Twelfth Floor, Metropolitan Centre, Braamfontein. MuseumAfrica Archives, MuseumAfrica, 121 Bree Street, Newtown, Johannesburg. National Archives of South Africa, 24 Hamilton Street, Arcadia, Pretoria. University of the Witwatersrand Archives, Senate House, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Int e r v i e ws

Muff Anderson, Kensington, 1 May 2003. Hillary Bruce, Illovo, 25 February 2003. Hillary Bruce, Lucy Rallis, and E. Blanche Nagelgast, Parktown North, 6 February 2003. Linda Chernis, MuseumAfrica, 27 July 2010. Anna Cunnigham, by telephone, 26 July 2010. Louise de Wet, by telephone, 29 April 2003. Sandra de Wet, MuseumAfrica, 22 April 2003. Ali Hlongwane, MuseumAfrica, 27 July 2010. Rochelle Keene, Johannesburg Art Gallery, 24 April 2003. Nisha Moodley, Johannesburg Property Company, Johannesburg, 6 May 2003. Seipati Moore, Johannesburg Development Association, 27 February 2003. Margaret Northey, Gubbins Library of Africana, 19 November 2002. Margaret Northey, by telephone, 26 July 2010. Steven Sack, Pretoria, 29 April 2003. Christopher Till, Apartheid Museum, 7 May 2003. Deon van Tonder, MuseumAfrica, 10 April 2003. Diana Wall, MuseumAfrica, 5 May 2003. Diana Wall, MuseumAfrica 27 July 2010. Ann Wanless, Wits University, 15 April 2003.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate photographs. Africana: Gubbins’s collection of, 7–8, 83–86, 90–102; Gubbins’s promotion in England, 88–90; as museum episteme, 4; objects found outside Africa, 84–86; other collectors of, 99–102; as term, 7–8, 120–22, 140, 271n55 Africana Library, 10, 63, 70–71; contents, 277n1; fire, 81; fundraising efforts, 83, 84; Gubbins’s founding of, 8–9; Gubbins’s rebuilding of collection, 82–86; Gubbins’s transfer of books to, 79–81; Gubbins’s vision for, 72–79, 105, 110; murals in, 88; opening exhibition, 89–90; professionalization of, 86–88; rac­ism and, 87–88; renamed John G. Gubbins Africana Library, 149 Africana Museum: acquisitions, 130–34, 165–66, 181, 183, 187–88, 243–44; administrative conflicts, 96–99; advisory committee, 96–97, 111, 128, 131, 269n9; AMIP’s ideological influence on, 167; under apartheid state, 12–14, 129–45, 147; binary thinking in, 110, 119–20, 124–25, 145–47, 191; branch museums, 141, 185, 275n139; bronze plaque honoring Gubbins, 237; City Council funding of, 276n154; closing of, 192–93; as collector, 4–5; critiques of, 173–74, 181–82; Curle Collection of Transvaal Stamps, 138, 232; displays, 129–30, 190–92; displays of black Africana, 125, 129, 166–67, 178–79, 220;

education initiatives, 134–38; first assessment, 118; Fourie collection of ethnographic items, 131, 278n19, 279n45; funding sources, 130, 178; galleries, 97; growth of, 109–10; Gubbins centenary exhibition, 109, 144–45; Gubbins’s founding of, 8–9; Gubbins’s threedimensional thinking concept and, 117–18; Gubbins’s vision for, 7, 91–92, 97–99, 145; historical path of, 7–14, 17; ideology of, 126–27, 140–41; imbalance between white and black objects, 180–81; initial inventory, 96; items in storage, 134; Johannesburg centenary exhibition, 164–65; at Johannesburg Public Library, 109–13, 117–49, 157, 167, 171, 172–73, 239; Kennedy’s control of, 112–13; Kennedy’s history of, 145–47; Kirby collection of African musical instruments, 131; lack of black visitors to, 165, 274n117; marketing research for, 183–87; mission statement, 94–95; name change commitment, 185; Oliver’s “Proposed Re-Arrangement of the Museum,” 119–20; opening of, 63; press about, 141–42, 182; proposal for, 94–96, 119–20; public outreach, 141– 44, 183–88; publications of, 138–39; reimagining of, 150–51, 172–88, 191, 199–200; renamed MuseumAfrica, 186– 87; renovation of market location, 178; reopened as MuseumAfrica, 1, 13–14,

320 / Index Africana Museum (cont.) 149; revised mission statement, 177–78, 181, 185–86; scholarship at, 138–41; scope of, 5–6, 63–64, 109, 185; selfcensorship, 168; separation between black and white collections, 12–13, 119–20, 123–24, 129–30, 134, 135, 145, 150, 151–55, 168–72, 179, 220, 271n52; Smith’s direction of, 128–45; staff polarization, 152, 168–72, 286n173; status quo operations, 1977–88, 163–67; temporary exhibitions, 135–36, 164; tensions within, 126–27; total holdings, 4–5; trial exhibition “Fractions of a Truth,” 182. See also Africana Museum in Progress (AMIP); MuseumAfrica Africana Museum in Progress (AMIP): attendance figures, 170; black visitors to, 158, 159, 162; building, 151–56; closure, 13, 171–72; conflict with Africana Museum, 168–72; employee on-the-job training, 156–58; ethnographic collection at, 154–55; focus of, 13; Gubbins’s vision and, 236; lack of focus, 163; lectures at, 159–60; Market building home, 12–14, 145, 146–47, 150, 151–55, 153, 158; objects housed in, 12–13; opening, 150; operation of, 156–63; press about, 170; recreated objects in, 155, 158–59; Wanless’s assessment of, 161–62; youth education at, 160–61, 161–62 Africana Notes and News quarterly journal, 18, 120, 139–41, 171, 176–77, 185, 203, 280n56 African National Congress: Africana Museum and, 188–92; analysis of culture’s role in suppressing blacks, 173–74; archives, 19; Conference on Women, 175; cultural campaigns to overturn apartheid, 13, 150, 151, 175–76, 188–92, 201; Department of Arts and Culture, 188, 216, 290n68; election won by, 1; Freedom Charter (1955), 16; history viewed under, 225–26; metanarrative called for by, 248; precursor of, 40 African Renaissance, 14 Amandla, 175–76 American Board of Commissions for Foreign Missions, 43 Andersen, Hans Christian, The Phoenix Bird, 81

Andersson, Llewellyn, 94, 96–97 anthropology, 26, 132–34, 136–37, 156, 266n183 apartheid (as term), 122, 132 Apartheid Museum (Johannesburg), 5, 216, 221–22, 225 archive(s): colonial, 229–30; museum as, 3–7, 223–24, 237–44; reimagining of, 245–47. See also museum(s) Arthur, Prince of Connaught, 87 Arts on Main (Johannesburg), 214 Asher, Samuel, 69, 95, 112; relation to the early Africana Museum, 96–98 Athlone, Lord, 84, 89–90 Australia: collecting in, 26; Gubbins in, 85 “backstory” of museum items, 242–44 Baden Powell, Robert, 91 Bailey, Sir Abe, 100 Baines, Thomas, 88 balance, Gubbins’s idea of, 54–55 Baloyi, Dyson, 159 Baneshik, Percy, 139 Barnard, Lady Anne, 66 Barringer, Tim, 229 Bartman, Saartjie, 166 Batavia, Africana in, 84–85 Baudrillard, Jean, 16, 26, 40, 60–61, 147–48, 228, 248 Beauregard, Robert A., 207 Bechuanaland Protectorate, 33 Beit, Sir Otto, 87 Ben-Guri, Ronit, 183 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 40, 240 Bennett, Tony, 5–6, 136–37, 180, 246, 270n35 Bensusan Photographic Museum (Johannesburg), 185, 198, 275n139 Berman, Esme, 166 Bernberg Museum of Costume (Johannesburg), 185, 233, 275n139 Bezuidenhout, F. I., 243 Bhabha, Homi, 60 binary thinking: collecting and, 26, 252n8; Gubbins’s early belief in, 25; Gubbins’s rejection of, 9, 29–32, 48–49, 54–58, 59, 61, 110; museums and, 97–98, 110, 119, 145–47; as product of modernity, 8–9 Blackwood, Algernon, 43, 256n131 blank___Architecture, Apartheid, and After exhibition and catalogue, 205, 211

Index / 321 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 256n131 Bleek, W. H. I., 99 Bloemfontein Museum, 99 Blomefield, Catherine, 114 Blue IQ, 206–7 Boers: Gubbins’s advocacy for educational reform for, 65; Gubbins’s historical columns on, 35; in Western Transvaal, 29–32; during World War I, 41–42 Boer War. See Second South African War Botha, C. Graham, 99 Botha, General Louis, 31 Bowler, Thomas, 243 Bremner, Lindsay, 207, 212 Brookes, Edgar H., 56, 66 Bruce, Hillary: on 1988–1994 period at museum, 177; as Acting Director of MuseumAfrica, 193–94, 196–97; activities at AMIP, 153–55, 156, 169; as Africana Museum ethnologist, 131; on Africana Museum’s Johannesburg centenary exhibition, 165; on black visitors to AMIP, 158; on closing of AMIP, 171–72; critique of Africana Museum, 178–79; on embracing change, 200; on Market location for museum, 151; on Museum­ Africa’s financial woes, 208, 210; on museum bifurcation, 152; on museum name change, 1; on people’s history approach for museum, 183; purchase of Zulu items for museum, 132–33; on revised mission for museum, 176, 215; vision for museum’s reinvention, 181; on visitors’ reactions to new museum space, 235; on Wits academics’ museum critiques, 173 Bunn, David, 223 Bureau of Illustrations, 102, 103 Burnett, Ricky, 205 Bus Factory, 206 Butler, Guy, 11, 66 Butler, Jeffrey, 127–28 Butterfield, Paul, 17–18, 109, 144–45, 276n157 Cabral, Amilcar, 173 Cameron, Duncan, 227 Campbell, Killie, 100–101, 140 Carman, Jillian, 214 Carnegie Corporation, 86–87, 94, 113, 265n157

Carr, David, 240–41 Cetewayo, 109, 187 Chernis, Linda, 233, 234, 235 Chipkin, Clive, Johannesburg Style, 211 Clarke, J., 56 classification systems: choices in, 6, 119; of Gubbins, 146; in librarianship, 112; limitations of, 147, 162 Claudius, Hendrick, 138 Coetzee, Carli, 225 collecting, act of, 15–16, 25–26, 32, 147–48 colonial institutions: collecting and, 26; cul­ ture and, 106–8; place in postcolonial society, 2, 10, 15, 178–79, 204–36, 237–48 Colvin, Ian, 100, 121 Comaroff, Jean, 61, 247 Comaroff, John, 61, 247 Compton, R. H., 127 Connock, Frank, 138 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, 47, 51 Cook, Sir Theodore, 46 Coombes, Annie, 173; Reinventing Africa, 132 Corlett, D. F., 82, 116 Corsane, Gerard, 218–19, 221 Crane, Aaron Martin, Right and Wrong Thinking, 53 Crane, Susan, 137 Crimean War, 26 Crocker, H. J., 94, 96–97 Crouse, Reshada, 233 Cullen, William, 33, 44, 84, 87, 89 Cullinan family, 243 Czeglédy, André P., 210 Dalrymple, William, 91, 92, 96–97 Dan, Calin, 147 Darroch, Mrs., 243 Darwin, Charles, 25 Davison, Patricia, 3–4 Declared Cultural Institutions (DCIs), 216, 289n62 Deetz, James, 180 De Kok, Ingrid, 225, 226 de Lange, M. M., 131 De La Rey, General Koos, 30, 42 Derrida, Jacques, 6, 7; Archive Fever, 4 de Villiers, Mrs., 243 de Wet, Louise, 143, 144, 145, 151, 152, 203

322 / Index de Wet, N. J., 139 de Wet, Sandra, 193–94, 200–201, 208–9, 218, 226, 235 Dhlomo, H. E. I., 187 Dirks, Nicholas, 107, 137 District Six Museum, 221 Dominion South Africanism, 66. See also South Africanism Dreyer, A., 57 du Berry, J., 104 Dubin, Steven, 217, 290n68 Dubow, Saul: on appellation “Second South African War,” 253n20; on colonial knowledge, 34; on colonialism and collecting, 26; A Commonwealth of Knowledge, 260n11, 264n132; on creation of South African Library, 114; on the genesis of South Africanism, 40; on history of white elites in South Africa, 20; on liberalism in South Africa, 65; on postapartheid history in South Africa, 247; on seeing alternative historical paths, 10–11, 64, 106; South Africanism as defined by, 31; on tertiary education in South Africa, 70; on understand colonialism, 60; on volkekunde notion, 132 Duncan, Carol, 4, 116 Duncan, Jane, 216 D’Urban, Benjamin, 109 Durban National History Museum, 99 Durran, Brian, 245 Dutch East India Company, 84–85 Eckstein mining syndicate, 44 Eclectic Club, 67 Elite Swingsters, the, 199 Elphick, Richard, 66–67, 107, 127 Emerging Johannesburg (collection), 213–14 eugenics, 156 Fairbridge Collection, 100 Farago, Claire, 19 Farmer, Moira, 27, 109, 145 Farmer’s Gazette, 57 Farmer’s Weekly, 68 Field, The (newspaper), 46 Foster, Jeremy, 66, 253n30; Washed with Sun, 211 Foucault, Michel, 3, 4, 25, 114, 119, 147, 245 Fourie, Louis, 278n19

Frank Thorold Ltd., 243 Freedom Park, 225–26 Freemasonry, 65, 106 Frees, Percy, 79 Fyfe, Gordon, 19, 229 Gandhi, Mahatma, 205 Geological Museum, 185, 198, 205 George, Duke of Kent, 87 George Harrison Park, 185 German West Africa, 41, 42 Gill (Cape Town curator), 93 Glass, Ira, 14 Godfrey, Denis, 99, 101–2, 121; “Collecting Africana,” 142; The Enchanted Door, 100 Gold Reef City, 5 Gordimer, Nadine, 133 Gordon, Lucy Duff, 66 Gray, Stephen, 214 Grey, George, 99 Griffiths, Tom, 16, 26, 32, 255n73 Gubbins, Carlie (nephew), 41 Gubbins, Elizabeth (daughter; later Rose, Elizabeth Duncan), 40, 102, 126 Gubbins, Ellen (née Rolls; mother), 24 Gubbins, John Gaspard, 22; Africana Mu­ seum and, 63, 83–86, 90–102, 123–24, 239; as anomaly in rural South Africa, 9, 32; around-the-world search for Af­ricana, 83–86, 88; arrival in South Africa, 27; attitude and actions after fire, 81–86; battle over estate, 126; birth, 24; bronze plaque honoring Gubbins, 237; centenary exhibition honoring, 109, 144–45; as collector, 32–40, 53–54, 68, 101–2; colonialism’s affects viewed by, 33–34; death of, 63, 103; early belief in binary thinking, 25; early life, 24–27; emigration to South Africa, 23–24; enactment of three-dimensional vision, 65–69, 79, 85–86, 89–90, 103, 106–8, 242–43; as farmer, 28–29, 40, 69; fears about fire, 69, 81; female mentors of, 258n196; finances of, 40, 52–54, 72, 102–3, 105; funeral of, 105–6; Godfrey on, 100–101; health problems, 102–3; honorary doctorate given to, 88; identity issues and, 29–32; interaction with Boers, 29–32; involvement in liberal movement, 9–10; at Johannesburg Public Library opening

Index / 323 ceremony, 116; lectures on threedimensional thinking, 56–57, 80; liber­ alism and, 67–69; as library advisor, 79; library transferred to Johannesburg, 79– 81; mining interests, 28, 52–53, 69; MuseumAfrica gallery named for, 235–36; neglect of, 150; newspaper articles on, 80; “Notes on the History of Marico” column for Marico Chronicle, 34–40; “Open Road” plan, 45–49, 55; period of personal examination, 47–49, 59–60; personal Africana collection, 7–8, 90–102; personal ideology, 8–9; personal library, 8, 10, 36, 39–40, 53–54, 57–58, 69–70, 72–79; post-publication depression, 58; race and, 35, 37, 50–51, 52, 73–74; reevaluation of, 11–12, 247–48; rejection of binary thinking, 9, 29–32, 48–52, 54–58, 59, 61, 110, 146; settlement in Marico District, 28–32; South African elite as acquaintances of, 32–33; studies of South African history, 43; television documentary on planned by Butterfield, 276n157; theosophical interests, 43–44, 50, 51; Three-Dimensional Thinking, 8, 12, 24, 54–58; three-dimensional thinking concept developed by, 48–52, 248; tributes to, 103–5; unfinished biography of, 17–18, 144; University of the Witwatersrand collection on, 17–18, 144–45; vision for Africana Museum, 7, 91–92, 97–99, 145, 148, 200; visit to black African districts, 33 Gubbins, Mona (née Levey; wife): absences from farm, 43; attitude toward husband’s scholarly pursuits, 47–48; campaign for Museum’s independence, 112; correspondence with husband, 61; death of, 122–23; Gubbins’s courtship of, 28–29, 40; on husband’s death, 103; letter to Hoernlé, 78; marital relationship, 50 Gubbins, Richard (brother), 17, 27 Gubbins, Richard (grandfather), 27 Gubbins, Richard Shard (father), 24 Gubbins family, 26–27 Gurian, Elaine Heumann, 240 Gutsche, Thelma, 133

Hall, Martin, 5 Hamilton, Carolyn, 3, 6, 182–83, 192–93, 223, 224, 241–42 Hamilton-Welsh, Estelle, 101 Harris, Captain John, 36, 38 Harris, M. J., 98 Harris, Verne, 3, 14, 137, 223–24 Hartmann, Wolfram, 4 Hayes, Patricia, 4 Hector Pieterson Museum (Soweto, Johannesburg), 5, 221–22, 230 Henderson, Mrs., 258n196 Hermetic Society, 256n131 Het Volk Party, 31 heterotopia concept, 3, 4, 114 Heyk, T. W., 25; The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England, 254–55n73 Hiller, Vyvian William, 84, 90, 92 Hilson, J. F., 96–97, 115 history: alternative paths in, 10–11; development of discipline, 254–55n73; museums and, 6–7, 15–20, 119–20, 129, 173–74, 183–88, 215–26, 246–48; need for metanarrative, 201, 224–26, 241–42; people’s history approach, 183, 199–201, 221–24, 246; postmodernity and, 248; progress concept and, 25, 155, 158, 178–79; selection of stories told, 14, 20, 223–24, 225–26; as social construct, 233–34, 245–47; South Africa through MuseumAfrica context, 239–40; South African racist views of, 142, 181–83; South Africa’s preapartheid era, 10–11, 64, 74–75, 211; “traditional” society and, 33, 120, 129, 133–34, 135–36, 155–56, 158, 174–75, 247 Hlongwane, Ali, 230–35, 238–39 Hoernlé, A. Winifred, 78 Hoernlé, R. F. Alfred, 78, 105–6 Hofmeyr, Jan Hendrick, 66, 106 holism 9, 259n211 Homer, Odyssey, 103 Hooper-Greenhill, Eileen, 5, 6, 7, 15, 137, 227, 248 Horvitch, I. O., 205 Humphrey, J. C. M., 149 Hyslop, Jonathan, 11, 12, 64, 257n135

Haarhoff, Theo, 66 Haggard, Rider, 27, 38

ideology: of Africana Museum, 126–27, 140–41; of liberalism in South Africa,

324 / Index ideology (cont.) 111; museums and, 4, 12, 19–20, 136–37; of South Africanism, 40, 64 Integrated Marketing Research (IMR), 183–87 International Coalition of Historic Sites of Conscience, 231 Itzkin, Eric, 205 Iziko, 216 James, William, Varieties of Religious Experiences, 53 James Hall Museum of  Transport (Johannesburg), 185, 275n139 Jameson, Leander Starr, 34 Janes, Robert, 227 Jaques, Henri, 131 Jasanoff, Maya, 15 Jeeves, Alan, 10–11 Joburg, Jo-burg. See Johannesburg, South Africa Joburg 2010 International Stamp Show, 232 Johannesburg, South Africa: crime in, 213; educational system, 135; Gubbins’s early opinion of, 27–28; liberalism and, 125–26; mines in vicinity of, 33; Muse­umAfrica in context of, 210–15; MuseumAfrica’s exhibition on, 195– 99; museums in, 5, 91–92, 170–71; Newtown district, 16, 145, 152–54, 192–93, 209, 213–14; Newtown district renewal, 205–7, 214–15, 231; postapartheid, 210–36; Pretoria’s rivalry with, 70–71, 76–78; seventh birthday of, 142; South Africanism and, 117; urban development of, 10, 64, 70–71, 72–73, 93–94, 106, 211 Johannesburg Art Gallery: 1980s exhibitions, 170–71; Africana Museum and, 181; display of black Africana, 291n81; Keene and, 209, 218; problems of, 214 Johannesburg Development Agency, 206–7 Johannesburg Historic Sites Committee, 142 Johannesburg Lace Making Guild, 163 Johannesburg Local Government Library, 19 Johannesburg Native Welfare Society, 67 Johannesburg Publicity Association, 95 Johannesburg Public Library: Africana Museum under control of, 10, 12–13,

17, 63, 64, 94–96, 103, 105, 109–13, 117–49, 157, 167, 171, 172–73, 239; archives of, 18; black South Africans allowed into, 145; black South Africans barred from, 137; criticism of, 187; debates about purpose, 114; foundation stones, 115–16; Harold Strange Library of Africana Studies, 95, 100; history of, 113–17; Kennedy as librarian of, 112–13; liberalism and, 117, 126–28; new building constructed, 114, 270n33; opening ceremony, 116–17; problems of, 214; race and, 115–16, 117; renovation, 289n54; separation from Museum, 122–23; Smith Trophy awarded to, 203 John G. Gubbins Africana Library, 149. See also Africana Library Jones, Edith. See Rheinallt Jones, Edith Jordan, Z. Pallo, 174 Jozi. See Johannesburg, South Africa Junod, H. A., 131, 182 Kaffrarian Museum (King William’s Town), 99 Kaplan, Flora, 137 Karp, Ivan, 137 Keene, Rochelle, 191–92, 193, 209, 218, 286n173 Kennedy, R. F.: Africana as understood by, 120, 129–30, 140, 152; control of Africana Museum, 111–13, 119–20, 122–28, 135, 157; Gubbins and, 111; journal Africana Notes and News and, 139–40; legacy of, 171; as librarian, 112–13, 119, 214; Nagelgast and, 151–52; retirement of, 127, 128; Treasures and Trash, 18, 82, 94, 97, 98–99, 118, 129, 145–47 Kingsford, Anna, 43–44; Clothed with the Sun, 256n131 Kipling, Rudyard, 140; “South Africa,” 23, 24, 58–59; voyage to South Africa with Gubbins, 23–24, 61 Kiraly, Josif, 147 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, Destination Culture, 227–28 Kujundzic, Dragan, 245 Lambert, John, 66, 106, 247 Lamprecht, Andrew, 217–18, 226, 290n68

Index / 325 Lascaux, caves of, 228 Lavine, Steven, 137 Le Marcis, Frédéric, 213 Leibhammer, Nessa, 232 Leveson, Lionel, 139 Levey, Mona. See Gubbins, Mona (née Levey; wife) Lewsen, Phillis, 67, 74–75 liberalism in South Africa: Africana Museum in context of, 15, 111, 125, 239; Cape, 73; changing ideology of, 111; ideas and agenda of, 9–10, 64, 65–69, 107–8, 262n56; Johannesburg Public Library and, 117, 125–26, 239; overlooked importance of, 106–8; racism and, 66–67, 110, 126–28, 144, 152, 262n56; Rheinallt Jones and, 9, 65, 67–69; social uplift and, 66–67; South Africanism and, 10, 11, 66 Library of Africana. See Africana Library Lima, Joseph Suasso de, 99 Lindley, Daniel, 35 Lipman, Alan, 211–12 Livingstone, David, 34, 35, 37–38, 49, 96, 129, 255n93 Lloyd, A. C. G., 99 Lobengula, 88 Lorenzo Marques (now Maputo), Mozambique, 33 Lumley, Robert, 20, 227, 240 Luthuli, Albert, 133 Luttig, Hendrick Gerhardus, 111 Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, 223 Mabele, Glen, 167 Macartney, Lord, 88 Macdonald, Sharon, 19, 229 Mackenzie, John, 99, 107, 137, 290n74 Madondo, Bongani, 212 Magubane, Peter, 205, 222 Mail and Guardian, 200 Maingard, L. F., 88, 106 Malala, Justice, 213 Malan, Rian, 211, 213 Malherbe, E. G., 66 Malmani Oog, South Africa, 28, 52–53, 82 Mandela, Nelson, 195, 201, 205, 215, 217, 219–20, 247 Mandela, Winnie, 205 Mandela Museum, 216 Mangcu, Xolela, 207

Marico Agricultural Union, 68 Marico Chronicle, The (newspaper), 34–40 Marico District (Western Transvaal, South Africa): Gubbins’s settlement in, 28–32, 34–40; Livingstone’s mission in, 38; white settlement of, 35–39 Market Theatre, 206–7 Markham, S. F., 118 Marks, Sammy, 33 Marshall, Methuen Marshall, South Africa, 36 Martha Washington Club, 43 Maseko, Mashayelo, 164, 243 Maseko, Ruth, 166 Masilela, Letty, 244 Maskew Miller Limited, 54 Masuku, Dorothy, 199 Mbembe, Achille, 113, 210, 212–13 Mbubana, Charles, 196 McGee, Julie, 219 McGregor, Liz, 213 Mda, Lizeka, 214 Mendelssohn, Sidney: avoidance of term “Africana,” 121; as collector, 99–100, 140; Gubbins and, 101; Introduction to Africana, 44, 53; South African Bibliography, 36, 100, 101, 267n196 metaphor, concept of, 25, 45–46, 54, 60, 65, 252n7 Mhlope, Gcina, 1, 199 Michaelis Collection, 216 Miers, Sir Henry, 94 Milner, Lord, 27 Minkley, Gary, 223 missionaries: Comaroffs’ case study on, 60; Gubbins’s research on, 35–37; Gubbins’s views on, 33 modernity: binary thinking and, 8, 60–61; Johannesburg as beacon of, 10, 72–73, 86, 117 Moeketsi, Kippie, 206 Moffat, J. S., 35, 37, 38 Moilos Location, 33 Monongoaha, Oriel, 196 Morrison, W. R., 111, 118 Mosega, South Africa, 36–37 Mosenthal family, 243 Mozambique, 33 Mpanza, James, 196 Mphalele, Ezekiel, 187 Mpondo people, 159

326 / Index Mpumlwana, Khwezi ka, 218–19, 221 Mthembu, Jephrey, 166 Murray, Bruce K., 70, 71 museology and museum theory: Africana Museum in Progress (AMIP) and, 13, 155–56; Africana Museum’s formation, 117–28, 177–83; AMIP curators and, 156–58; anthropology and, 266n183; “backstory” of items, 242–44; cataloguing of ethnographic material, 295n14; collecting and, 222, 291n96; collectors and, 15–16, 25–26, 147–48; development in South Africa, 231; Museum­ Africa and, 201, 226–30; museums’ locations, 270n35; racist ideology and, 136–37, 158–59, 181–82; retreat from metanarrative, 228; revisionist, 182–83, 185, 199–201; scholarship on, 15; trends in, 118–20, 226–30 museum(s): as archive, 3–7, 237–44; citizenship lessons from, 137–38; classification systems privileging choices, 6; as closed system, 147–48; cultural history, 237–38; display choices of, 3–4, 190–92; display of ethnographic objects, 228–29, 246–47; as ideological matrix, 19–20, 241–42; new media and, 227–28; postapartheid views about, 215–16, 244–45, 290n68; as profit-making enterprises, 215–16, 227; simulations and, 5, 228, 240; tourism and, 222–23; “traditional” objects in, 33; used as legitimation by authorities, 2, 4, 12, 265n153; varying scope of, 5–6 MuseumAfrica, 204; acquisitions, 187–88, 222; Apartheid Museum and, 222; bronze plaque honoring Gubbins, 237; collections put to use, 230–35; as conference center, 230; in context of global trends, 226–30; in context of Johannesburg, 210–15; in context of South African trends, 215–26; corruption at, 209; critiques of, 235, 292n105; curators’ visions, 13–14, 186–88; Curle Collection of  Transvaal Stamps, 232; current state of, 237–48; depreciation of, 204, 205–30; display of black Africana, 219–20; educational program, 194; exhibition and catalogue blank___Architecture, Apartheid, and After, 205, 211; final plan for, 192–201; financial dif-

ficulties, 207–8, 209–10, 215; focus on black South Africans, 193–200; Friends of, 234; Gubbins gallery, 235–36; Hlongwane as chief curator, 230–35, 238–39; inadvertent permanency of, 208; increase in visitors, 234–35; Johannesburg’s lack of support for, 207–8; “Johannesburg Transformation” exhibition, 195–99, 198, 201; Keene as acting director, 191–92, 286n173; lack of knowledge about, 17; naming of, 186–87; need for metanarrative, 201, 208–9, 224–26; negative perception of, 216–17, 220–21; negative views of by Africana Museum staff, 203; neglect of, 215, 236; new exhibitions, 232–34; new geology display, 232; Newtown location, 16, 192–93, 205–7, 209, 213–15, 231; opening of, 1, 149, 192–93, 200–201; permanent exhibits, 205, 286n186; place in postcolonial society, 2, 218–26, 237–48; in postapartheid era, 203–36; potential of, 6, 16–17; problems of, 1–2, 16; public outreach, 194–95; reproduction requests, 235; satellite museums, 231–32; stabilization of, 204, 230–35; staff divisions, 192–93, 286n173; temporary exhibitions, 205, 219–20, 222; use of living persons’ artifacts, 196–97; viewed as archive, 238–44; white museum workers and, 218. See also Africana Museum; Africana Museum in Progress (AMIP) Museum of Man and Science, 141 Museums for South Africa (MUSA), 190–91 “Myths, Monuments, and Museums” history workshop, 182–83, 192 Mzilikazi, 35 Mzwakhe, Livingstone, 159 Nagelgast, Blanche (Mrs. N.): on Afri­ cana Museum acquisitions, 187–88; as Afri­cana Museum head, 151–55; criticism of, 176–77; distance from AMIP activities, 156; earlier career, 151–52; entrenchment of, 163–64, 167; final editorials for Africana Notes and News, 203; friction with AMIP staff, 168–73; hiring of, 145; retirement of, 177; at SAMA conference, 279n50; on Smith, 128

Index / 327 Naidoo, Riason, 290n68 National Archives Commission, 102 National Arts Coalition, 191 National Cultural Conference (1990), 188, 193 National European-Bantu Conference, 68 nationalism in South Africa, 66, 74, 75–76, 85, 106–8, 114, 225–26, 241. See also racism; South African identity issues Native Land Act, 40–41 Ncome Museum, 216, 221 Ndebele people, 35 Nedbank, 172 Nelson Mandela Bridge (Johannesburg), 1, 206–7, 214 Nelson Mandela Museum, 218, 221 Nettleton, Anitra, 166, 181, 292n105 Ngubane, Ben, 1, 220 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 32 Nkosi, Kerry, 196 Nkosi, Mrs., 159–60, 166 nonracialism: Africana Museum in context of, 15, 240; as concept, 12, 225, 251n39 Nuttall, Sarah, 11, 113, 210, 212–13, 225, 251n39, 290n75 Nyambose, Sam, 196 Odendaal, Andre, 190 Odhiambo, Rom, 214–15 Oliver, Hermia Gifford, 111, 112, 118, 122, 124, 295n14; “Proposed ReArrangement of the Museum,” 119–20 Open Report to the Minister of Arts and Culture from the Archival Conference “National System, Public Interest,” 229–30 Oppenheimer, Ernest, 33 Ottoshoop (Western Transvaal, South Africa), 34 Owen, Alex, 43–44, 51 Papa, Martha, 195 Paris, Scott, 5 Parker, A. C., 118 Pastor-Makhurane, Juanita, 218–19, 221 Paver, F. R., 82, 87, 96, 106 Pearce, Susan, 6, 26, 252n8 Pemba, George, 187 Perry, John, 270n33 Phillips, Florence, 66 Phillips, Janet, 111 Phillips, Sir Lionel, 44, 45, 46

Pickover, Michelle, 226 Pieterson, Antoinette, 222 Pieterson, Hector, 195 Plaatje, Sol, 41, 187 Pomian, Krzysztof, 246 Port Elizabeth Museum, 99 Powell, Ivor, 200 Pretoria, South Africa, 70–71, 76–78 Pretoria News, 80 Pretorius, Piet, 1 Preziosi, Donald, 15, 19 progress, idea of historical, 25 Progressive Party, 31 Purcell, W. F. W., 99 racism: Africana Museum and, 119–20, 124–25, 127, 129–30, 132–34, 135–38, 143–44, 156, 185; blank slate concept and, 51; of Gubbins, 50–51; historical stasis concept and, 158; Johannesburg Public Library and, 115–16, 117, 187; liberalism and, 66–67, 110, 126–28, 144, 152, 262n56; postapartheid views of, 225–26; postapartheid views of white leaders, 218; scientific theories of, 25; in South Africa, 9, 11, 14, 29, 74, 188–92 Raikes, H. R.: on Africana Library advisory committee, 96–97; death of, 126; eulogy for Gubbins, 106; Gubbins’s dealings with, 72, 73, 76–78, 83, 86–88, 90–92; as pallbearer, 105–6; proposal for Africana Museum, 94 Rallis, Lucy Kennedy, 151 Rand Daily Mail newspaper, 56, 80, 98, 114, 115, 124–25, 234 Rand Pioneers Club, 164 Rassool, Ciraj, 218–19, 221, 223 Rathebe, Dolly, 1, 199 Reid, Graeme, 3 Rheinallt Jones, Edith, 72, 75, 77, 78 Rheinallt Jones, John David “RJ”: collection of papers, 18; donation of Gubbins’s library suggested by, 70; Gubbins’s collaboration with, 65, 68–69, 71–72, 76–79, 88; as liberal advocate, 67–69, 117; as pallbearer, 106; positions of, 9, 71–72 Rhodes, Cecil, 34, 99 Rich, P. B., 67, 111, 132 Rich, Peter, 155 Robben Island Museum, 216, 217, 218, 219–20, 225

328 / Index Roberts, Noel, 131 Robertson, Dawn, 230 Rose, Elizabeth Duncan (née Gubbins; daughter), 17, 144, 145, 149. See also Gubbins, Elizabeth (daughter; later Rose, Elizabeth Duncan) Rotary Club of Johannesburg, 93 Sack, Steven, 207, 216 Saks, David, 177, 178–79, 180, 181–82, 183, 195–96 Schonland, Basil, 66 Second South African War, 27, 31, 41, 43, 253n20 semiophores, 246, 247–48 Serote, Mongane Wally, 174 Sexwale, Tokyo, 222 Shaka, 35 Shakaland, 5, 181, 223 Shangaan people, 159 Shaw, Ella Margaret, A System for Cataloguing Ethnographic Material in Museums, 295n14 Silverman, Lois, 241 Silvester, Jeremy, 4 Simone, AbdouMaliq, 210, 213 simulated venues, 5, 181, 223, 228, 240 Sisulu, Walter, 205 Skotnes, Pippa, 290n68 Sleeper-Smith, Susan, 137 Smith, Anna Hester, 99; 1966 annual report by, 141–42; Africana Museum under direction of, 128–45; death of, 203; hiring of, 123, 273n87; overseas study tour, 123–24, 272n70; retirement of, 145, 146 Smuts, Jan: ceremonial scissors presented to, 166; Gubbins and, 30, 38, 41, 89; Holism and Evolution, 56, 259n211; South Africanism and, 66 social Darwinism, 25 Sofasonke Choir, 199 Sofasonke Party, 168, 196 South Africa (journal), 81 South African Association for the Advancement of Science, 260n11 South African Broadcasting Company, 143 South African cattle market, 45–49 South African Domestic Workers Union, 199 South African geographical rivalries, 70–71, 80, 85, 92–93, 262n42

South African history: Afrikaner rebellion, 42; apartheid state, 12–14, 74, 125–26, 129–45, 147, 150–201, 247; children’s uprising (1976), 145; colonial era, 23– 24; Gubbins’s newspaper column on, 34–40; heritage tourism and, 222–23; liberal view of, 262n56; MuseumAfrica exhibitions on, 205–10; museums in postapartheid era, 215–17, 290n68; Native Land Act, 40–41; postapartheid, 14, 146–47, 210–36, 247; post-transition, 2, 7, 204, 218–19, 223, 225, 230, 233, 239, 244, 248, 290n75; preapartheid, 10–11; racist interpretations in, 181–82; reevaluation of, 247–48; struggle narrative, 225–26, 247; Treason Trial, 205, 208; workers’ strikes, 41–42; during World War I, 40–44 South African identity issues: anthropology and, 26, 132–34, 136–37, 156; apartheid and, 74, 188–89; Boer residents, 29–32, 35, 41–42; collecting as means of control, 26; colonial relics and, 2; legacy museums, 220–21; museums and, 215–16, 246–47; need for defining, 37, 74–75, 247–48; race and, 9, 11, 14, 29–32, 50–51, 52, 115–16, 129, 211, 242–43; reimagining, 177–78, 188–92, 199–200; social explanations for unique­ ness, 51–52; three-dimensional think­ing and, 8–9, 12, 14, 30, 58, 61; tribalism and, 129, 135, 155, 156, 174–75, 247 South African Institute of Race Relations, 9, 65, 67, 71–72, 74–75 South Africanism: advocates of, 260n11; Africana Museum in context of, 15, 239; cultural work of, 264n132; ideological formation, 40, 64; Johannesburg Public Library and, 117; liberalism and, 10, 11, 66; need for study of, 11; overlooked importance of, 106–8; racism and, 31, 66; as term, 9, 31; triumph of, 107; women advocates, 66 South African Libraries Association, 127 South African Library (Cape Town), 99, 114 South African mining, 27, 44–45; diamond and gold mines, 33; of fluorspar, 52–53, 69; Gubbins’s investment in, 27, 52–53; workers at, 33

Index / 329 South African Museum (Cape Town), 85, 99, 101, 216, 265n153, 295n14 South African Museum of Rock Art (Johannesburg), 185, 198, 275n139 South African National Gallery (SANG), 216, 219, 223 South African Quarterly, The, 67 South African School of Mines, 70. See also University of the Witwatersrand South African Trade Unions, 176 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 220, 225, 247 South Africa’s 1940s: Worlds of Possibilities (collection), 10–11 Southern African Museums’ Association (SAMA), 127, 151, 157, 171, 180–81, 183, 188, 190, 193, 231, 279n50, 291n96 Southern Rhodesia, 33–34, 99 Sowetan newspaper, 233 Spencer, Herbert, 25 Spiegel, Leopold, 232 Stanley, David, 96 Star newspaper, 38, 57, 80, 81, 82, 87, 104, 106, 116, 117, 142, 145, 170 Steedman, Carolyn, 4, 25 Stein-Lessing, Maria, 232 Stoler, Ann Laura, 10, 15, 245 Stow, George, The Native Races of South Africa, 50 Strange, Harold Fairbrother, 95, 100 Stuart, James, 241–42 Sunday Times, 87, 234 Tenniel, John, 166 Theal, George McCall, 53, 100 theosophy, 43–44, 50, 51, 256n131 Thomas, Thomas Morgan, 88 Thorold, Frank, 100–101, 121 three-dimensional thinking concept, 8, 12, 48–52; adaptation to museum, 117–18, 242–43; difficulty of, 225; Gubbins’s Africana collection and, 85–86, 89–90, 103, 124–25, 148; Gubbins’s book on, 54–58; in Gubbins’s library plan, 73–74, 79; Gubbins’s practical enactment of, 65–69; social uplift in, 55–56 Till, Christopher, 172–73, 180–81, 191, 192, 209–10, 222 Times Media, 234

Tomlinson, Richard, 207 Transvaal Agricultural Union, 68, 106 Transvaal Agricultural Union Congress, Pretoria, 30 Transvaal Agricultural Union Library, 57 Transvaal Museum, 99 Transvaal Numismatic Society, 164 Transvaal University College, 76–77. See also University of Pretoria Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 137–38 Tufnell, Bertha (née Gubbins; sister): “The Birth of an Idea,” 45–46; death of, 78; farm of, 261n23; Gubbins’s correspondence with, 17, 27, 28, 36, 39, 45–46, 47–48, 49, 50, 53, 56, 58, 68, 258n197; memorial library fund, 82 Tufnell, Dick (nephew), 82, 93 Tylden, Major, 138 Tyrell, Barbara, 166 Uccello, Paolo, 45 UNESCO Directories of Museums in Africa, 178 United Democratic Front, 13, 176 University Archives, 18 University of Cape Town, 127 University of Pretoria, 76 University of the Witwatersrand: Africana collection and, 91–92, 95–96, 103, 105, 151, 173, 181; Africana Museum Johannesburg centenary exhibit condemned by, 165; cultural concerns, 188; fire, 81; Gubbins Collection in Historical Papers, 17–18, 144–45; history workshop “Myths, Monuments, and Museums,” 182–83, 192; library donated by Gubbins, 10, 63, 70–71, 72–86, 110; professionalization of library, 86–88 Vladislavić, Ivan, 212, 214 van Niekerk, Marlene, 212 van Riebeek, Jan, 84–85, 142 Van Riebeck Society, 99 van Tonder, Deon, 149–50, 179–81, 190, 195, 197–98, 198, 200, 207, 208 van Vuuren, Chris, 277n19 Van Warmelo, Nicholas Jacobus, 295n14 Varley, D. H., Adventures in Africana, 100, 120–21 Venable, Henry, 35 Vereeniging, Peace of, 27

330 / Index Victoria and Alfred Waterfront (Cape Town), 181 volkekunde notion, 132 Volkstem newspaper, 31 Voortrekker Monument (Pretoria), 142, 181 Walker, Eric, 53, 57 Wall, Diana, 157 Wallace, Alfred Russell, Man’s Place in the Universe, 53 Wallis, J. P. R., 104, 105 Wanless, Ann: activities at AMIP, 156–57, 158, 163, 169; on Africana Museum’s Johannesburg centenary exhibition, 164–65; assessment of, 161–62; on closing of AMIP, 172; doctoral study, 279n45; exhibition “What about the Workers” assembled by, 195; hiring of, 155–56; on intransigence of Nagelgast, 176; on irrelevance of Africana Museum in 1980s, 171; on Keene’s leadership, 192; on museum self-censorship, 168; on MuseumAfrica’s financial woes, 209, 210; on neglect of Gubbins at Museum­ Africa, 236; on opening of Museum Africa, 199; on people’s history approach for museum, 183; at SAMA conference,

279n50; trial exhibition at SAMA conference, 182; vision for museum’s reinvention, 180–81; on Wits academics’ museum critiques, 173 War of New Orleans, 26 Webb, Clem, 131 Webb, Mrs., 258n196 Weill, Stephen, 240 Welsh, David, 66 Williamson, Sue, 290n68 Wilson, Alexander, 35–37 Wilson, Jane, 35–37; gravestone of, 36–37, 49, 89, 109; proposed monument to, 43 Witwatersrand Council of Education, 71, 100 Witz, Leslie, 2, 223 Woodhouse, H., 277–78n19 Workers’ Museum, 206, 231–32 World War I: in England, 44–46; in South Africa, 40–44 Wybergh, Mrs., 258n196 Yalo, Sifiso, 233 Zeerust Gaol, 33 Zendlingpost, 37 Zulu Kingdom, 35, 132–33 Zuma, Jacob, 247