Museum Times: Changing Histories in South Africa 9781800735392

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface. Guides to Museum Times
List of Abbreviations
Introduction. Changing Museums, Reshaping Histories
Chapter 1. Remaking the Chameleon: A History of History in South African Museums
Chapter 2. History on the Beach: Making a Museum Home in Lwandle
Chapter 3. History at Sea: Remaking a Museum of Eventless History
Chapter 4. A New Hippo for a New Nation: The Journey of a Museum ‘Across the Frontier’ in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Chapter 5. The Museum, the Rabbit and National History: The Voice of Robben Island
Chapter 6. ‘We Are Sick of Van Riebeeck, Van Riebeeck. We Want to Know Our History’: Y350? and the Remaking of Settler Histories in Post-Apartheid Times
Conclusion. Museums Closing and Opening
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Museum Times

Museums and Collections Editors Mary Bouquet, University College Utrecht, and Howard Morphy, The Australian National University, Canberra As houses of memory and sources of information about the world, museums function as a dynamic interface between past, present and future. Museum collections are increasingly being recognized as material archives of human creativity and as invaluable resources for interdisciplinary research. Museums provide powerful forums for the expression of ideas and are central to the production of public culture: they may inspire the imagination, generate heated emotions and express conflicting values in their material form and histories. This series explores the potential of museum collections to transform our knowledge of the world, and for exhibitions to influence the way in which we view and inhabit that world. It offers essential reading for those involved in all aspects of the museum sphere: curators, researchers, collectors, students and the visiting public.

Recent titles: Volume 16 Museum Times: Changing Histories in South Africa Leslie Witz Volume 15 Museum, Place, Architecture and Narrative: Nordic Maritime Museums’ Portrayals of Shipping, Seafarers and Maritime Communities Annika Bünz Volume 14 Contested Holdings: Museum Collections in Political, Epistemic and Artistic Processes of Return Felicity Bodenstein, Damiana Oţoiu and Eva-Maria Troelenberg Volume 13 Transforming Author Museums: From Sites of Pilgrimage to Cultural Hubs Ulrike Spring, Johan Schimanski and Thea Aarbakke Volume 12 Exchanging Objects: NineteenthCentury Museum Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution Catherine A. Nichols

Volume 11 Extinct Monsters to Deep Time: Conflict, Compromise, and the Making of Smithsonian’s Fossil Halls Diana E. Marsh Volume 10 The Witness as Object: Video Testimony in Memorial Museums Steffi de Jong Volume 9 Visitors to the House of Memory: Identity and Political Education at the Jewish Museum Berlin Victoria Bishop Kendzia Volume 8 Museum Websites and Social Media: Issues of Participation, Sustainability, Trust and Diversity Ana Luisa Sánchez Laws Volume 7 The Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums Zuzanna Bogumił, Joanna Wawrzyniak, Tim Buchen, Christian Ganzer and Maria Senina

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://berghahnbooks.com/series/museums-and-collections

Museum Times Changing Histories in South Africa

Leslie Witz

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2022 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2022 Leslie Witz All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Witz, Leslie, author. Title: Museum times : changing histories in South Africa / Leslie Witz. Other titles: Museums and collections ; v. 16. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2022. | Series: Museums and collections; volume 15 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022004647 (print) | LCCN 2022004648 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800735385 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800735392 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Museums--South Africa--History. | Historical museums--South Africa--History. | South Africa--History--1994---Museums. Classification: LCC AM89.A2 W59 2022 (print) | LCC AM89.A2 (ebook) | DDC 069.0968--dc23/eng/20220201 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022004647 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022004648 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-538-5 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-539-2 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800735385

Contents List of Illustrationsvi Preface. Guides to Museum Timesvii List of Abbreviationsxx Introduction. Changing Museums, Reshaping Histories Chapter 1. Remaking the Chameleon: A History of History in South African Museums

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Chapter 2. History on the Beach: Making a Museum Home in Lwandle73 Chapter 3. History at Sea: Remaking a Museum of Eventless History101 Chapter 4. A New Hippo for a New Nation: The Journey of a Museum ‘Across the Frontier’ in Post-Apartheid South Africa

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Chapter 5. The Museum, the Rabbit and National History: The Voice of Robben Island

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Chapter 6. ‘We Are Sick of Van Riebeeck, Van Riebeeck. We Want to Know Our History’: Y350? and the Remaking of Settler Histories in Post-Apartheid Times

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Conclusion. Museums Closing and Opening

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Bibliography245 Index269

Illustrations Figure 0.1. Notice on entrance door to the McGregor Museum, Kimberley, 27 March 1999.

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Figure 0.2. Notice at entrance to East London Museum, 8 July 2001.

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Figure 0.3. Notice at the African Cultures Gallery, Iziko South African Museum, 10 June 2007. © Leslie Witz.

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Figure 0.4. Visiting the archived diorama, 5 January 2002. © Wendelin Schnippenkoetter.

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Figure 0.5. Notice of inaccuracy, Mossel Bay, Dias Museum, 12 August 2007. © Leslie Witz.

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Figure 1.1. Chameleon on display at the Robot Zoo, Horniman Museum, London, 2009. © Leslie Witz.

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Figure 2.1. Hostel 33, Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, 2014. © Thulani Nxumalo.

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Figure 3.1 The reconstructed Bartolomeu Dias caravel in the Dias Museum complex, Mossel Bay, 23 May 2013. © Leslie Witz.

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Figure 4.1. Huberta the hippopotamus in the Shortridge Mammal Hall, Amathole Museum, 27 May 2014. © Leslie Witz.

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Figure 5.1. European Rabbit, Robben Island, 17 July 2007. © Richard Sherley, University of Exeter.

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Figure 6.1. The inverted statue of Jan van Riebeeck constructed for the exhibition Y350? September 2014. © Leslie Witz.

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Figure 7.1. Simon Gush, Red (2014), installation view, Ann Bryant Gallery, East London, August 2015. Image courtesy of the artist and Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town and Johannesburg. © Simon Gush.

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Preface Guides to Museum Times In Museum Times I tell a series of tales about a post-apartheid moment when museums in South Africa thrived. Over the same period that these stories cover I thought a great deal about museums, pondered about what they actually do, what made them different, visited many, researched and wrote about their histories and forms of representation, and taught students from across Africa who have become museum practitioners at all levels, from curators and educators to those starting up museums themselves. As part of a process of critical engagement through practice and application, I worked closely with several museums in creating exhibitions, constituting collections and altering and setting up organizational structures. The strands of research and teaching and my involvement in museum making were always tied up with each other, so that in this book I am always telling related stories, those which form part of my life and those of museums and their changing histories. These museum times have been energizing and frustrating, rewarding and thankless, filled with joy and utter desperation. In writing Museum Times, I have often wondered how it was that my life became so intertwined with an institution that affected me in such widely discrepant ways. After all, throughout my youth and when I began studying history at high school and university, I had hardly any interest whatsoever in museums. Growing up in the coastal city of Durban in the 1960s and 1970s the first museum I ever visited was most likely the local history museum. While carrying out research for Museum Times I came across the following entry in a guide to museums of Southern Africa published under the auspices of the South African Museums Association, in 1969, about the Durban Museum of Local History: The new museum contains various relics relevant to the development of Natal, and Durban in particular, since colonial times… The life and times of early settler families are illustrated by means of old family portraits combined with personal objects, and old prints and photographs depict Natal and Durban in the early

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days. The museum has a particularly interesting collection of period costumes. With the aid of imaginative display techniques, basically modest material has been made to tell a fascinating story.1

This description bears all the hallmarks of the history museums which proliferated in South Africa in the 1960s. Under the guise of history these museums sought to depict a local past aligned with a racialized settler nationalism of what at the time was an increasingly authoritarian apartheid South Africa. Making much out of insubstantial holdings of artefactual material on which to construct a short settler history, an arbitrary assemblage of domestic personal objects and photographs were made into illustrative depictions of urban and regional particularities, claiming a racially exclusive legacy of proprietorship to the city. These displays, as the extract indicates, required much imaginative fabrication for the personal and the household as object sites to perform as museum pieces. Family possessions became histories of the city’s ‘life and times’, while everyday attire and dress were reconstituted as ‘period costumes’. Apartheid was not merely effaced in the museum. Its violence was marked through the displays of the time of settlement as mundane. Although I have memories of visiting this museum in my youth, I cannot recall very much about it. Perhaps I went there on school excursions. If I try remembering hard enough, I have a sense of dimly lit rooms, dark wooden floors, display cases with costumed mannequins, exhibitions of military uniforms and weapons (was this really so?) and photographs of Durban street scenes. Apart from the latter, where I would try to make past / present associations, there was little that held my attention. Despite a reference in the description to the employment by the curatorial staff of their imagination, the subdued displays in showcases offered me nothing of the sort. I don’t think that I visited the museum very frequently. Instead, I spent more time in the City Hall around the corner which contained the more extensive part of the Durban Museum, its natural history collections and an art gallery. The 1969 directory listed it as ‘the oldest and the largest municipal museum in the country’.2 I do have some vague memory of visiting this part of the museum. But it was not the main reason I was drawn to the City Hall entrance on Smith Street. My destination was the municipal public library where I roamed the aisles, inhabited its corridors and perused the books on the shelves. Within the somewhat formidable structure of the library, and its adherence to the strictures of racially defined separate amenities under apartheid, I found there were possibilities for constant reinterpretation and re-imaginings. Perhaps it was a personal preference but in the library I discovered a world

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containing abundant resources of difference, change and creative allusions that afforded ways to comprehend and constantly question the underpinnings and understandings of contemporary South African society. Connectedness, inquisitiveness, an affinity for the peculiar and a desire to inquire into and destabilize the ostensibly apparent led me into history and, via a circuitous route, to work and think with museums and the possibilities they held to remake time in post-apartheid South Africa. If it was the written word that took me into history, then it was storytelling by members of my family, friends, teachers and later lecturers that held me there. There was the possibility of surprise contained in the inseparability of the content and its narrative renditions. Perhaps it was the allure and fascination for understanding the personal story that led to an early attraction of a career in psychology and therapy. But in my second year of study at university what appeared to me to be models of predictability in some areas of psychology turned me away from that path. Instead I was more and more attracted to history that was offering immense possibilities of narrative instability for changing pasts. In apartheid South Africa, where the state sought to impose racialized exclusive versions of history, searching for ways to contest histories seemed to be even more urgent. When I moved to Johannesburg in the 1980s, first as a graduate student and later as an employee of the educational NGO the South African Committee for Higher Education (Sached), the political struggles over re-writing history became even more intense. At a time of heightened repression and resistance, histories were not only mobilized to counter the state, but they also assumed the status of lessons that served to buttress theoretical and strategic positions advanced by differing anti-apartheid organizations. In these political struggles with and for history, sometimes broadly encompassed by the term ‘people’s history’ and at other times seeking to reflect the agency and experience of the marginalized as ‘history from below’, the issue of form was overdetermined by questions of accessibility, audience and popularization. What language should be used? If English, how could it be made broadly comprehensible through using images as illustrative technique combined with an uncomplicated language structure? Beyond the written word, how could theatrical performance, storytelling, political education classes and audio-visual productions effectively enhance dissemination?3 There was some mention of exhibitions in relation to photographs but museums were notable for their absence in History from South Africa: Alternative Visions and Practices.4 I do not recall spending much time, if at all, going to museums in Johannesburg in the time I spent there in the 1980s.

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Surprisingly the museum which I did visit a few times was in the town of Mafikeng, in the north-west part of the country, near to the border of Botswana, where I lived in the mid-1980s. My first academic posting was in the Department of History in what was then called the University of Bophuthatswana (it now forms part of North-West University). In the internal contradictions of the apartheid state the ethnic puppet bantustan of Bophuthatswana was constructed as a country in a series of landlocked islands, located within and outside South Africa. I had quite by chance landed up in Mafikeng to avoid conscription into the South African army. In the apartheid’s state own contortions of boundary setting I was deemed to be living outside its borders. There was not much to do in the town of Mafikeng itself and in the couple of years I spent there, before I was deported by this pseudo fantasy puppet state, I visited the museum several times. Again, my memories are vague and so I have turned to the South African Museums Association updated guide (1978) to help me out. The entry is brief: The focal point of display is the Siege of Mafeking during the Anglo-Boer War. Thanks to the presence at the time of an official war photographer, the siege has been extensively documented. …. The collection includes some fire-arms used during the siege, as well as local relics such as trophies, flags, medals, municipal records, etc.5

In the guide to the museums of the Cape published under the auspices of the provincial administration in 1982 the description is more elaborate. Again, the siege of Mafikeng is highlighted, presented as a ‘colourful history’, with part of the museum devoted to Colonel Baden-Powell and the founding of the Boy Scout movement. The description ends by pointing out that that ‘the town played an important role in the development of Bophuthatswana and this too was reflected in the displays’.6 My recollections are of a light-filled interior hall with different types of cannons standing on the floor, other forms of artillery on show, and a re-created war bunker from the outskirts of the town during the siege (again this may be inaccurate). The display on Bophuthatswana I do not recall at all. But what I do remember is conversations that were taking place about changing the museum. There was an intention, for instance, to research and represent Sol Plaatje, a founder and first general secretary of the South African Native National Congress, who spent time as a court interpreter in the town and wrote a diary of the siege between October 1899 and March 1900. Similarly, the museum was developing strong associations with the prominent Molema family who lived in Montshiwa,

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the site of the original Barolong settlement in Mafikeng. In an attempt to sustain student interest in history, I was similarly trying to draw upon affinities with the locality in my classes at the university. Whether my teaching strategy was successful or not was debatable. Perhaps though this was a time when I began to think of the museum as an important site to reshape history. There appeared the possibility of shifting the emphasis in the content away from the colonial military nexus towards what the provincial guide to museums of the Cape referred to as ‘the indigenous inhabitants of the region’.7 If living in Mafikeng may have sparked an interest in the potential of museums to re-make history, it was not at all apparent in the projects I undertook. My central concerns were researching labour history, teaching African history at a tertiary based community bridging college that was part of Sached, popularizing academic texts using audio-visual and written formats, and training community groupings in methodologies of researching and writing history. Like most of my engagements with history through the 1980s, there was little concern with or interest in museums. Soon after political organizations were unbanned in 1990, Nelson Mandela released from prison, and talks about transition to a post-apartheid future began, I moved to Cape Town to take up a position at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). These were such exhilarating times in the Department of History at UWC. It is difficult to even describe the tremendous sense of excitement, engagement and commitment to changing history. The Department was at the forefront of producing popular history texts, was sustaining a People’s History Programme, an ambitious oral history research project that encompassed all the 3,500 undergraduate history students, ensuring that African history from precolonial to postcolonial times was central to the curriculum, setting up and participating in seminar programmes that linked history with the imperatives of social and political transition, and negotiating for the return of anti-apartheid archival collections to South Africa. The originating moment might not be identifiable, but it was certainly within this intoxicating concoction of changing histories that colleagues and I began to take an increased interest in museums and other forms of history in what the Department of History and the Mayibuye Centre for History and Culture on the campus titled in a conference they co-hosted in 1996 as the Future of the Past. But it is possible to mark a shift to considering museums as a site for changing history several years before that. Through research and writing with my friend and colleague at UWC, Ciraj Rassool, on the making and challenging of the iconic figure of European settlement in South Africa,

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Jan van Riebeeck, in the mid-twentieth century, we began to take on board in a sustained manner issues of how histories are produced across different genres, the politics of constructing and contesting public histories and the forms and imagery of representation. We took our paper ‘The 1952 Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival: Constructing and Contesting Public National History in South Africa’ to the Myths, Monuments, Museums: New Premises? conference held under the auspices of the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand in July 1992.8 There we encountered many museums who were trying to alter their policies and practices. Frankly we were not that impressed. We wrote at the time: Even though there may already have been minor policy shifts to fit in with new times, at the end of the day those in control of public history in museums and other state structures were unwilling to relinquish control. At best what seemed to be shown was a desire to become the willing functionaries of a new governing party.

We saw the challenge that museums faced as one that would lead to a fundamental change in their practices by engaging issues of their institutional pasts, methodologies and legacies of production. For us as historians based in the academy it was a way to begin re-thinking our historical practices and make our presence felt ‘where history matters most’ through ‘monuments and in museums, and the audio-visual media’. We issued a clarion call for historians to enter the ‘real world of lived history’ and for ‘the concern for popularizing the past [to] be shifted into the institutions and mediums of public history’.9 Ciraj took his own summons very seriously and responded positively to an invitation to become a trustee of the District Six Museum Foundation, an initiative that had begun in 1989 around the memories of those who had been forcibly removed through racially based legislative fiat from central Cape Town. There were no indications at the outset what such an institution would entail but it was clear that Ciraj’s involvement was to be hands-on, becoming part of what he later referred to as productive ‘synergies and contests’ between ‘community-connected-academics’ and former residents of District Six.10 The District Six Museum website, which can also be accessed through the South African Museums Association’s membership list, highlights the museum’s memory work, the ‘storytelling opportunities’ and the linkages to return and restitution.11 This presents a very different type of museum than the one that I had encountered in my youth in Durban. It was all

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about memories, stories, making political associations between past and present, constituting a place of return that was necessarily one of discomfort. Instead of emphasizing a building or a collection as foundational, the museum highlights the processes of continual remaking. The inspiration the District Six Museum provided in this nexus of contested pasts was one of instability, difference and the constant possibility of surprise. Remaking and recalling communities of dispossession held possibilities for re-imagining histories. There were other prospects to re-think history and museums emerging at UWC at the time. Most notably the Mayibuye Centre for History and Culture had begun to operate on the campus. The return of the International Defence and Aid Fund collection from London provided the base and impetus for activities that ranged from organizing conferences and establishing archival holdings to producing publications, presenting talks and performances and, most significantly, co-hosting a series of exhibitions with museums. Increasingly the Centre’s staff took a major role in formulating new museum and heritage policy in South Africa and devoted specific attention to turning Robben Island from a place of incarceration into a museum. The Robben Island Museum website, which can also be accessed through its membership of SAMA, today highlights the museum’s central assertion of conveying ‘the triumph of the human spirit over adversity’. In addition to offering a guide to the formal logistics of how to visit the Island, the site includes stories of ex-political prisoners, an interactive timeline and a virtual tour. Central to the depiction of the museum to visitors is its place as a site where stories are told.12 I recall in the mid-1990s when the Mayibuye Centre invited members of the Department of History to visit Robben Island to discuss the museum possibilities. Political prisoners had already been released but there were still common law prisoners on the Island. We were told not to interact with them. I remember how the site affected us and the endless possibilities for different depictions and interpretations it seemed to offer, from the leper graveyard and the World War Two military installations to the shipwrecks, the flora and fauna, the kramat and the various prisons on the Island. The issue for the prospective museum was always going to be deciding which and whose stories to tell and how. On that visit there appeared to be opportunities for us to somehow become part of and contribute to this museum project of making history on Robben Island. One major outcome which I write about in Museum Times is the joint tertiary level qualification in museum and heritage studies which UWC established and offered together with Robben Island Museum and the University of Cape Town. Ciraj and I, drawing upon our growing interest,

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research and teaching in public history, took a major role in developing this programme, coordinating its different elements and teaching the binding element, the core course on issues in museum and heritage studies. Quite by chance this teaching took me into the project to develop a museum in the town of Lwandle, 40 kilometres outside the Cape Town city centre. Bongani Mgijima from Lwandle was in the first cohort that enrolled for and completed the Post-Graduate Diploma in Museum and Heritage Studies. Somehow the obscure museum project in an almost unknown place that he told me about gradually, sceptically and reluctantly drew me in. I became a member of the board where I was joined by my friend, Noëleen Murray, an architect then at the University of Cape Town. We worked with staff, residents of Lwandle and outside contractors on exhibitions, collections and restoration to imagine and realize what had appeared as the unlikelihood of a museum in Lwandle. Not surprisingly there is no guide to the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum through a link on the SAMA website. But lwandle.com is easily accessible through a Google search which directs prospective visitors to the museum and its activities. The Museum presents itself as signifying much more than its locality to be a national and regional symbol that ‘commemorate the trials, tribulations and triumphs of migrant workers and hostel life in Southern Africa’. The museum offers a visit to an original restored workers’ hostel and a guided walk ‘to view the whole township’.13 Noëleen and I were attracted to the possibilities that Lwandle held for reconfiguring the museum landscape in South Africa, its struggles to make a museum community, the negotiations of our expertise and the battles for institutional recognition in the museum sector and in Lwandle itself. Bongani led us into a museum that should never have existed and for almost twenty years claimed a large portion of our lives. This then is a sketch of a route to a life in and through Museum Times. It sometimes follows a temporal path of chronology, although that isn’t always straightforward. A geography of movement between towns and cities provides a spatializing framework to locate and commence the marking of change. The assemblage is held together by an overarching situatedness of a trajectory from apartheid limits to post-apartheid possibilities. All along the way there are guides from museums themselves, through printed publications and websites. At their most obvious they provide some description of what the museums contain and carry out. From the perspective of this sometime itinerant visitor, sometime researcher, sometime consultant and sometime as an integral part of the institution itself, they are also a way for me to enter these museums and think through and with them, their representations, histories and future

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prospects. As guides they accompany me to and with museums in the reshaping of time. Of course, the guides to Museum Times are way beyond the published print and online material. They are innumerable. There are friends and colleagues, museums and their staff, photographers and publishers. Some of them have already been identified as individual characters in the journey I have begun narrating. I am not sure whether I am thankful to Bongani Mgijima or not. He really had the chutzpah to pursue the utterly outrageous idea of a museum in Lwandle and somehow convinced me to join in. What a roller coaster of a ride followed. My fellow traveller to and from Lwandle was Noëleen Murray. We shared stories and inspirations, learning from each other along the way about narrative, time and space. Ciraj Rassool and I met in the late 1980s when we were African History Co-ordinators at Khanya College, he at the Cape Town campus and myself in Johannesburg. We have been friends ever since and his insights, enthusiasm, participation and activism have all been integral components to my teaching, research and museum and heritage engagements. There are many, many others who have guided me along the way. They know who they are and I want to thank them all for their generosity, support and advice. There are a few whom I want to single out. Along with Ciraj there was Gary Minkley. Together in those early years at UWC we formed a team that some jokingly referred to as the young turks. The combination was energizing and productive. As we wrote together, we would each in turn quite literally take up positions in front of the computer monitor and play the keyboard. It was Gary who offered the deviations, the lines of thoughts that took us off in remarkable directions as we engaged with and unsettled public history in South Africa. One of my very first graduate students at UWC and later colleague in the Department before he became director of the Centre for Humanities Research, Premesh Lalu, asked the difficult questions and incessantly pushed the boundaries of history and the humanities more broadly. Nicky Rousseau, who for some time convened the People’s History Programme at UWC and subsequently became a leading figure in the field of forensic history, constantly provoked, offered up different framings and opened up new directions in research. Cory Kratz and Ivan Karp became mentors, friends, ardent supporters and the most incisive critics. Over the past few years Cory has generously provided a close, critical reading of my work, offering productive ways in which I could make associations with comparative settings. Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, who was joint UWC Centre for Humanities Research/University of Minnesota Interdisciplinary Center for Global Change/Andrew Mellon Research Chair with me in 2014/15,

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has before and since been a constant friend, brought an imaginative thinking to our work together, and forged committed partnerships. Helena also enabled me to see Red (she will know what that means). Colleague and friend Patricia Hayes pushed the boundaries for understanding visual imaginaries. Carolyn Hamilton has been a friend since we met as graduate students at the University of the Witwatersrand in the early 1980s. Our ongoing discussions over the years have constantly made substantial contributions to formulating my ideas about museums. I recall it was at The Future of the Past conference at UWC in 1996 that Carolyn asked: ‘Why museums?’ and ‘What do they do?’ These questions have bothered me ever since. They are the impetus for this book. A way to read Museum Times is as a coming together of two sets of institutions. One is an academic department in a university, and the other a series of museums. I cannot express how fortunate I have been to have been part of the Department of History at UWC for now over thirty years. I often encounter people, especially former students, who say to me ‘are you still at UWC?’ I am rather puzzled. Why should I have left? The Department was and is one of the most unique spaces in the academy and it was integral to the making of museum times, playing a leading role both in the transformation of museums throughout Africa and the support for this book. While of course there were moments of tension and conflict, it was the openness, experimentation, engagement and support from staff and students that was the prevalent spirit. I hope this book reflects how we sought to continually change history. Museum Times also could not have happened without the generosity and assistance offered by staff at museums. Here again the list could be endless, but I particularly want to thank staff at the museum and exhibition spaces which are the focus of this book: the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum; the Dias Museum in Mossel Bay; the Amathole Museum in King William’s Town; Robben Island Museum; Iziko Museums of South Africa; Worcester Museum at Kleinplasie; the library at UWC; and the Ann Bryant Gallery in East London. In the long time it has taken for this book to emerge I have been fortunate to have been afforded research, writing and thinking space at various institutions. As I was completing my previous monograph on settler nationalism and starting to develop ideas for this one, I was a Rockefeller Fellow on the Institutions of Public Culture program at the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship at Emory University. The first chapter drafts emerged when I was a Senior Fellow at Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. It was the intellectual opportunities afforded to me as the Andrew Mellon Research Chair that provided the impetus to

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complete the book. In that time spent at the University of Minnesota’s Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change and UWC’s Centre for Humanities Research, ideas were refined and the book started to take shape. The Burnish Writing research completion workshop that I was part of in 2015, led by Brenda Cooper, was all about finding and keeping to a specified focus. Finally it was a sabbatical that UWC granted me, unexpectedly under the extraordinary isolation brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, that the manuscript was completed. Funding for this research over the years has come from several directions. National Research Foundation focus area projects and rating scholars programme provided funding for research on museums and heritage in post-apartheid South Africa. The Andrew Mellon Foundation funded the UWC / University of Minnesota exchange. It also funds the supra national project based in the Department of History at UWC, Remaking Societies, Remaking Persons, which allocated monies for relief teaching. Further funds came through UWC’s Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor and the university’s research committee. I am grateful for the generosity of all these funders in enabling this project. Of course, opinions expressed, and conclusions arrived at, are mine and are not necessarily to be attributed to any of these funding bodies. I was fortunate to have the support for the project from Berghahn Press, from when I approached them many years ago with the idea of a book on transformation in South African museums. The Museums and Collections series editors Mary Bouquet and Howard Morphy encouraged me to continue with the book, especially when it appeared to have lost momentum. Sulaiman Ahmad, Editorial Associate at Berghahn, and Caryn Berg, Archaeology, Heritage Studies and Museum Studies Editor, managed the project with their persistence and assistance. The production editor Caroline Kuhtz and copy editor Julia Goddard designed and shaped the book as production started to reach its final stages. I am also grateful for the insights from the two anonymous reviewers appointed by the press. This book would not have been possible without the assistance of photographers whose work I have used. Thank you to Simon Gush, Thulani Nxumalo, Wendelin Schnippenkoetter and Richard Sherley for permission to reproduce their photographs. The photograph on the cover is taken by the remarkable Paul Grendon. Paul died in 2019 and I want to thank his partner, Tina Smith, for the rights to use the photograph here. I hope Paul would have been pleased. Finally, thanks to my partner Josi Frater. She has lived with this book for a very long time and we have visited many museums together.

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Through these Museum Times she has been a critical reader, museum commentator and constant companion.

Acknowledgements and Permissions I am grateful to publishers and editors who have granted me permission to republish extracts from material which I have authored or co-authored in journals and books. The relevant publications are as follows: Noëleen Murray and Leslie Witz, Hostels, Homes, Museum (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2014). Leslie Witz and Noëleen Murray, ‘Fences, Signs and Property: Heritage, Development and the Making of Location in Lwandle’, in Derek Peterson, Kodzo Gavua and Ciraj Rassool (eds), The Politics of Heritage in Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 70–96. Extracts reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press and the International African Institute. Leslie Witz, ‘Hunting for Museums’, Journal of Southern African Studies (Taylor & Francis Ltd) 41(3) (2015), 671–85. Extracts reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com. Leslie Witz, ‘Eventless History at the End of Apartheid: The Making of the 1988 Dias Festival’, Kronos 32 (2006), 164–93. Leslie Witz, ‘The Making of an Animal Biography: Huberta’s Journeys Through South African Natural History, 1928-1932’, Kronos 30 (2004), 138–66. Leslie Witz, ‘Apartheid’s Icons in the New Millennium: The Making and Remaking of Settler Histories’, in D. de Lame and C. Rassool (eds), Popular Snapshots and Tracks to the Past: Cape Town, Nairobi, Lubumbashi (Tervuren: Royal Museum for Central Africa, Studies in Social Sciences and Humanities, no. 171, 2010), 203–21. Leslie Witz, ‘Memorials Beyond Apartheid’, in Premesh Lalu and Noëleen Murray (eds), Becoming UWC: Reflections, Pathways and Unmaking Apartheid’s Legacy (Bellville: University of the Western Cape, 2012), 162–77.

Notes  1. Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1969, 44–45.  2. Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1969, 42.   3. These are all discussed at length in a series of essays in Brown et al., History from South Africa. See in particular the essay by Bozzoli, ‘Intellectuals, Audiences and Histories’.   4. Brown et al., History from South Africa is largely an insider account of the emergence of social history in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s.  5. Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1978, 70.   6. Du Preez, Museums of the Cape, 106.   7. Du Preez, Museums of the Cape, 106.

Prefacexix

  8. This paper was published the following year in the Journal of African History. See Rassool and Witz, ‘The 1952 Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival’.   9. Rassool and Witz. ‘The Dog, the Rabbit’, 241–42. 10. Rassool, ‘Introduction: Recalling Community’, xi. 11. ‘About the District Six Museum’, retrieved 13 September 2021 from https:// www.districtsix.co.za/about-the-district-six-museum/. 12. ‘Robben Island Museum – Home’, retrieved 13 September 2021 from https://www.robben-island.org.za/. 13. ‘Welcome to the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum’, retrieved 14 September 2021 from www.lwandle.com.

Abbreviations ACTAG Arts and Culture Task Group ACIP

African Critical Inquiry Program

ANC

African National Congress

APMHS

African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies

AWB

Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging

BAB

Basler Afrika Bibliographien

CREATE Commission for the Reconstruction and Transformation of the Arts DAC

Department of Arts and Culture

DACST

Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology

MUSA Museums for South Africa Intersectoral Investigation for National Policy NEUM

Non-European Unity Movement

NRF

National Research Foundation

NUMSA

National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa

PAC

Pan Africanist Congress

PoPP

Project on Public Pasts

RIM

Robben Island Museum

SAAAH

South African Association of Art Historians

Sached Trust

South African Committee for Higher Education

SAHRA

South African Heritage Resources Agency

SAMA

South African Museums Association

SANG

South African National Gallery

Abbreviationsxxi

SARChI

South African Research Chairs Initiative of the NRF

TRC

Truth and Reconciliation Commission

UCT

University of Cape Town

UWC

University of the Western Cape

VOC Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie / Dutch East India Company Wits University University of the Witwatersrand Zeitz Mocaa

Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa

Introduction Changing Museums, Reshaping Histories If there is one institution that flourished in post-apartheid South Africa it is the museum. In the two decades following the official demise of apartheid in 1994, in nearly all the older museums there were renovations on the go, new displays were being installed and ongoing debates and discussions about how to re-shape policies and practices were the order of the day. Some undertook a complete overhaul of their exhibitionary strategies, others revisited and re-thought their classificatory categories and new institutional arrangements were set in place. There was a considerable expansion in the number and type of museums. At least fifty new museums were opened. The vast majority of these were constructed to display violence and suffering under apartheid. They drew attention to forced removals into racially designated spaces, the exploitation of workers, the harshness and brutality of political imprisonment and the growth of resistance movements. Others sought to establish a precolonial past, stretching history into a deep, immense time often beyond human memory.1 Some of the largest financial, industrial and agricultural companies museumized their pasts as a celebration of achievement, sometimes (but not always) acknowledging an association with histories of repression and exploitation. A time that appeared as prior to the post-apartheid era was produced through the spatializing and representational logics of the museum. Such a manifestation of institutional re-construction was remarkable. With material concerns such as employment, health, housing and education high on the developmental agenda of post-apartheid South Africa, securing funding for museums was hardly a priority. In addition, there was deep suspicion of the knowledge value of museums. Associations with forms and content of expertise that were infused with ideas of racial science, used categories that drew upon and supplied regimes of colonial administration and employed racialized hierarchical classificatory divisions, were all contributing to these misgivings. The African National

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Congress (ANC) which assumed power after 1994 (initially as part of a Government of National Unity) had shown little or no interest in the past for museums as a political resource for change – or in common parlance as a ‘site of struggle’ – during its existence as a liberation organization. This cannot only be explained by museums siting themselves as zones of exclusion, but also in relation to notions of culture expressed in forms of song, dance, visual arts, drama and poetry as forms of popular expression. Appearing as organic rather than bound to an institutional form, it was these expressions of culture as consciousness that had held the potential for mobilizing political activists in struggles against apartheid. The museum did not feature at all.2 Yet not only was the museum not shunned in post-apartheid South Africa, it was embraced. Government structures, business corporations, groups making community claims and sporting bodies all clamoured to participate in the construction and re-construction of museums throughout the country. Through research, display and collection, new pasts came into view in museums. Narratives of pastness were re-made and bold assertions made to disavow prior interpretations, rectify empirical errors and recover hidden and neglected pasts through the institution of the museum. Curatorial focus shifted, collections were reconstituted and displays realigned to ‘attribute value’ and ‘mobilize representations’3 in accord with what appeared to be a changing political scenario that, above all, proclaimed the rights and asserted freedoms of association and expression. Several museums altered their material structures while a plethora of new ones opened their doors. The key argument in this book is that this excessive production took place through a contradiction that lies at the very heart of museums: an institution that is manifestly concerned with the conservation and management of time into a space of and for the past is simultaneously the site of contesting, changing and reshaping history. Through the displacement of objects and locating them spatially in altered temporal sequences, museums continually make a new space for history. Museums, which Bennett, drawing on Latour, characterizes as ‘“object institutions” par excellence’, were ideal to inaugurate a new time claimed as being after and beyond apartheid and simultaneously a place of preservation to consign a previous past to history.4 The interior and exterior worlds of museums, both old and new, became one of the primary settings for contesting, changing and reshaping history.5 More than anything, the museum became the site of ‘history frictions’ in post-apartheid South Africa.6

Introduction3

Museum Moments These frictions in South Africa museums intersected with much broader trends internationally in museums as their claims of authority to conserve and represent were subjected to intensive pressure. Some of this was related to their collections where holding and ownership rights were questioned by individuals, assemblages and national states who asserted prior and rightful proprietorship.7 In other instances the rights of museums to make depictions derived from their own knowledge authority were challenged by claimants to community and indigeneity. A new museum literature emerged with collections of essays devoted to the politics and poetics of representation, relations with community groupings, histories of collection, ways to reformulate practices and create new publics. With titles such as Museums and Communities, Exhibiting Cultures, Museum Revolutions, Museums and Difference, The Museum Time-Machine, The Politics of Display and The New Museology, these books reflected an unease with existing forms of knowledge production within museums and a desire to re-shape the institution.8 Above all they sought to develop an understanding of how museums were made and re-made, the tensions amongst a multiplicity of authors, how knowledge was produced, authorized, conveyed and contested, and the different genealogies of elements that went into constructing museum expertise. These were intended to be the basis to develop what one collection called New Museum Theory and Practice.9 South African museums were occupied with similar issues, but they emerged at a time of heightened intensity as the pressures to construct altered institutional selves coincided with a post-apartheid remaking of pasts as reconstituting a nationalized citizenry through government commissions, memorial making, tourist narratives and forms of heritage production.10 It meant that all museums, almost simultaneously, across a range of typologies and their own specific histories, were confronting questions of previous entanglements and engaging possibilities of representing pasts in ways that marked a post-apartheid difference. This was as much the case for museums which had longer institutional pasts as for those which had recently been established, those which focused on natural history as well as those which concentrated on the category of history and its affiliations with cultural, political and social trajectories, and those which framed their publics around national belonging (often intersecting with global sovereignty) and those which sought to make museum communities around the locality. It is this convergence of institutional re-formation and the possibility of fundamental political

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restructuring that offers the possibility of interrogating similarities and divergence in approach, of history frictions that surfaced in what appeared as a museum moment. This appearance of a moment and its temporal framing brings with it an ambivalence, not merely about the specifics of whether 1994 signals an appropriate demarcation but more importantly for this book about how time itself is constructed. In The Museum Time Machine Robert Lumley had identified the late 1980s in Europe, Britain, the USA and Japan as a museum moment in terms of the increased number of museums and their visitors, the renewal of existing fabric and a reconceptualization of what they set out to do. This he tracked to an interest in history beyond the professional domain, with the museum’s function, in his terms, being its ability ‘to present ideas to a wider public in three-dimensional and accessible forms’.11 The Time Machine, as he conceptualized it, was related to mechanisms of making history popular and accessible, and using its moving parts to respond to predicaments of display, collection and visitor interaction as museums were re-made. The issues he identified were those that emerged in these processes of enhancing accessibility, of heritage and nostalgia, bias in museums, public engagements, commercialization, realist constructions, and the media and its impact.12 His Time Machine never appeared to make time itself. In Museums Times I intend to make Lumley’s Time Machine much more productive, enabling its mechanisms to make time, signalling the instability of moment, and the movements it makes towards setting and re-setting the changeable edges. Despite the allusion to a fleeting instance, moments contain both the solidity of fixed foundations and the elasticity that enables the frameworks to extend and contract. It is the contradictory power of a time machine that compresses, extends, fabricates, originates, finishes, arranges and forms the museum moments. Time can be reversed to a beginning, accumulated in a layering, lengthened to a deep past, shortened to associate with recent memories, straightened to achieve a progression, interrupted to secure an ending, and can reappear and return to commemorate. The power of time in history is its appearance as natural in an ongoing linear movement, with, as Lalu points out, the idea of event used as a temporal signifier of progression and/or transition. In his work Lalu uses event as a marker of difference, between the possibilities of what could be said and what is said.13 Museum Times makes use of both understandings to try and show how in the work of museum making, the event of history is brought into being. I am particularly interested in instances when a great deal of work is seemingly required to make the event of history,

Introduction5

when there is little to sustain it in terms of previous appearances as evidence and/or as signifier. It follows then that much is required to fabricate the event as history for museum purposes. This is not the same as pure invention but involves locating and establishing a documentary presence, often through objects, employing contextual devices to systematically elaborate on a theme, and setting sequences in place through designing a spectacle of the past. In effect this book is a form of historiography of this process of museum making. Sometimes it is about changing relationships between academic historical texts and museum practices, at other times about the links between museums with disciplinary formations and their institutional structures of teaching and research, and most perhaps most vividly in the ways in which exhibitionary practices and methodologies in themselves become the reference points in museums, confronting, limiting and affording possibilities of change.14 This is about histories of different genres of history as museums change, or perhaps more appropriately, and rather clumsily, a museological historiography. Importantly, I make a key distinction between the museum and another set of knowledge appropriations which reorganizes time: the archive. The latter has been used by Sara Byala as the framework to construct a history of MuseumAfrica in Johannesburg. She asserts that through collecting, classifying and displaying, museums not only constitute a physical archive but also an intellectual one that can be thought of as a biography of shifting ideas and concepts.15 There is a fundamental difference though between the ways in which that time is stored, accessioned and re-arranged in archival practice and in museums. This concerns the centrality of the production of objects. While Mbembe maintains that the archive may be thought of as conjuring up both the physical signs of the temple and cemetery, it is the metaphoric allusions to ritual and internment in the lives of documents, the ‘procedures and regulations’ of practice, which, he argues, convey status. Of course, objects do constitute archives and undergo similar exercises of ‘power and authority’ in the museum.16 And, as Crooke points out, part of the museum’s appeal lies in its conservationist allure, its ability to appear as if it is permanent, solid and able to withstand the vagaries of time.17 But central to the museum are the mechanisms of re-constituting temporalities through objects, using structural forms, siting, placements, routing, classification, juxtapositions, size, colour, lighting, textual formats, volume and visibility. In the museum, according to Kratz, this ‘array of sensory and communicative resources’ constitutes a powerful persuasive force that she terms the ‘rhetorics of value’.18 This ‘array’ might be thought of collectively as the operations which ‘spatialize time’ through a sequential ordering.19

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A similar observation may be made in relation to forms and strategies of collection where classifications and placement in different storage locations may indicate temporal sequencing. As Lefebvre points out, the reconfiguration of space creates the appearance of both opaqueness and transparency. It is in the making of sequences, he maintains, that ‘objects touch one another, feel, smell and hear one another. Then they contemplate one another with eye and gaze’. Altering positions in a sequence and changing the surrounds can then ‘precipitate an object’s passage into the light: what was covert becomes overt, what was cryptic becomes limpidly clear’.20 Of course the converse is also the case as objects are taken out of one order and positioned in new ones. This making of objects and their space/time configuration makes museums, according to Bennett, civic laboratories which bring expertise and disciplinary knowledge together with social management, so that they are ‘simultaneously epistemological and civic’.21 The analogy with a laboratory is one of displacement, where the object is studied, and knowledge is remade in environments situated in times and spaces that are markedly different from an initial occurrence. Bennett calls the laboratory and the museum ‘custom-built environments’, or sites of ‘fabrication’, where the object, detached and manipulated and observed through the employment of epistemologies, comes to create new ‘civic and social’ entities.22 It is little wonder then that the contests over history in museums are precisely around the terms of this object re-formation. For all the museums that I present in this book, it is the object as the figure of loss and accumulation that make the event of history: an unattractive insignificant building; a phony sailing ship; a wandering hippopotamus; an escaping rabbit; and an inverted statue. In presenting these objects that I have selected as emblematic, I am situating them in two different forms of analysis identified by Dudley. I do want to think about them in what she calls an informational way, as signifying political and disciplinary meanings in relation to the changing forms of the institution. After all, my main concern throughout is about how the category of history is made and given content in museums. Simultaneously, there are moments when I consider the object in a different way through its materiality and physicality.23 This is not as pronounced as the former evocation, yet in all the chapters space, design, visuality and the tactile are all considered to be part of history making. Some of this is presented through accounts of personal encounters with these objects as they shift and change, at other times through reports of curators, museum staff and designers on intentions and their outcomes, and then, when these are at hand, through expressions by those who come to be constituted as the

Introduction7

addressed public.24 Perhaps another way to articulate object formation is to think through Kratz’s insistence that communication is always key to the politics of representation, in what is portrayed, how, when, where and the shifting constituencies of circulation. These she calls ‘interrelated processes of representation, mediation, and interpretation’.25

Dilemmas of Change There is one museum object that signifies the conflicts over pasts and meanings perhaps more than any other: the dilemma label. Signalling a need or intent to alter displays or that such changes are in process, they are usually hastily produced by museum curators or managers on a word processing package, manufactured on an A4 sheet, laminated and then affixed to a wall or window. Sometimes they are elaborate, providing explanation and rationale on specially constructed sign boards, at other times they are no more than a cursory notification. Sometimes they indicate a commitment to change, to new exhibitions, and at other times they are notices of regret for either what is missing from display or an interpretation that the museum is no longer at ease with. Sometimes they are bold and prominent, at other times hidden away so as not to command attention, almost as if they are on show somewhat reluctantly. Veering between the assertive and the apologetic, the dilemma label is always on show as a temporary awkward presence pointing to a future when it will no longer be required and when it will disappear and be discarded, hardly ever to be retained in the museum’s collection. I first started documenting dilemma labels in the late 1990s when I led the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) focus area Project on Public Pasts (PoPP) in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in Cape Town, South Africa. In conceptualizing public history PoPP drew upon ideas formulated by Cohen and Odhiambo around history produced beyond the academy in a variety of domains through employing a range of distinct methodologies.26 These sites of production included museums, monuments, memorials, television, tourist routes, interpretative centres, government commissions, comic books, festivals and so on. The proposal for PoPP, initially drawn up by my colleague Gary Minkley, and later elaborated upon by other members of the project team, asserted that these all constituted ‘historical practices within different genres characterized by different sociologies and modalities of historical production’. The implication of this approach was that it subverted ‘the neat hierarchies of

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knowledge formation’ in which it was conventionally assumed that the academic was the bearer of expertise. Finally, and most importantly, it was necessary for researchers on the project to understand and interrogate how these different sites of history were being constituted, how they articulated with each other and the relations of power in the production of public historical practices.27 This shift to public history was to be one of the major impetuses behind the establishment of a teaching programme in the late 1990s to staff a growing and changing museum and heritage sector throughout Africa. The Postgraduate Diploma in Museum and Heritage Studies, initially offered jointly by the University of the Western Cape, the Robben Island Museum and the University of Cape Town, and later rebranded as the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies (APMHS), sought to develop ‘critical practitioners’ who would constantly challenge the underlying assumptions of heritage and museum practice.28 In particular, the programme sought to problematize and critique a discourse of museum transformation of ‘making new displays or altering old ones to mirror the political moment’. The challenge was ‘to extend students’ critique of apartheid into a historicized understanding of nationalism and heritage’.29 Instead of seeing the programme as merely a site of technical training for jobs in museums, it was linked by the convenors to ideas of public scholarship with an emphasis on an ‘understanding of the conceptual challenges of transformation’.30 In PoPP itself, the research sought to ‘investigate the different ways that public representations of the past could open up debates about the nature of history by considering the different ways that pastness is framed and claimed as history in its own right’. Those who belonged to the research team, which included historians, archaeologists, architects and museum curators, were concerned to ‘understand the production, representations and the makings of meanings in a range of sites, from museums to memorial sites in the Eastern and Western Cape’. It was as part of this research into some of South Africa’s older museums and by questioning the extent to which they were ‘introducing new histories into their displays and collections’ that I began noticing these labels of incongruity.31

The displays in this museum are currently under renovation. We apologise for the inconvenience. Figure 0.1 Notice on entrance door to the McGregor Museum, Kimberley, 27 March 1999.

Introduction9

This was the label (Figure 0.1) which greeted colleagues from UWC Department of History, Martin Legassick, Ciraj Rassool, Gary Minkley, Michael Abrahams and myself, when we visited the McGregor Museum in Kimberley (established in 1907) in 1999 to assist with its new exhibitions Ancestors and Frontiers. Legassick had constituted a NRF project on histories of the Northern Cape and he invited those in the Department who had an interest in public history to join him and work with the McGregor in re-conceptualizing their museological approaches. At the time of our arrival the central features of the museum were its display of the siege of Kimberley during the South African War (1899–1902), a reconstructed room showing where Cecil John Rhodes stayed during the siege, photographs and information about the building when it had been a sanatorium and hotel, a display devoted to the Kimberley army regiment and a hall with ‘Kimberley Firsts’ and ‘Kimberley Personalities’ to which an occasional portrait of a person designated as ‘black’ had been added. The label signalling refurbishment was pasted on the entrance door, alongside a sign about an exhibition on Sol Plaatje, one of the founders of the South African Native National Congress (which later became the ANC), a sticker with a slogan ‘I care for tourists’ and an advertisement for a booklet on trees and shrubs. With the McGregor Museum under pressure since the transition to a democratic South Africa in the early 1990s to demonstrate its commitment to change, the new exhibitions which we were being asked to assist with were a response to ‘an instruction’ from the government of the Northern Cape province ‘to transform the displays’. The intention behind the exhibition was to showpiece the McGregor, establish it as the flagship institution of the newly established province and construct a racially inclusive past as part of the process of ‘Bringing Museums to the People’.32 The short dilemma label on the front door was a hint that something was on the go, but gave little indication of what it might be. In seemingly neutral language, it spoke of change as ‘renovation’. The museum, it appeared, was to make anew by keeping the old in place and giving it a fresh coat of paint. After the interregnum of the ‘inconvenience’, the label promised, museum normality would be restored. A couple of years later I started conducting research in museums in the Eastern Cape province and visited the harbour city of East London. The city’s museum was established in 1931 and its claim to fame is that it houses a coelacanth caught nearby in 1938. Named Latimeria chalumnae after the museum’s then director, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, it is proclaimed, somewhat bizarrely, to be a ‘living fossil’. There is an entire hall devoted to coelacanths, which the museum asserts is ‘the most famous fish

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in the world’.33 On display was the type specimen, a timeline showing the temporal location of the coelacanth in the evolution of species, a collection of coelacanth paraphernalia and a re-created living environment (together with fishing nets) that made use of the cast and model made by James Drury of the ‘fossil fish’. The East London Museum has collected and displayed much more than botanical and zoological specimens. As with many museums that contain ‘natural history’ collections as their central focus, they have substantial anthropological holdings consisting of artefacts relating to the indigenous people of the region. These are placed in the ethnological sections of the museum and displayed as markers of tradition, tribe and craft. Separate dioramas making use of models depict ‘Xhosa Home Life’, ‘Three Ages of Dress’, ‘Initiation into Womanhood’, ‘Initiation into Manhood’ and a ‘Roadside Scene’. According to a 1970s museum guidebook, these habitat displays were ‘of great interest to tourists’ as they were ‘able to view our Bantu in their natural settings, as they lived before the European influence affected their lives’.34 The museum also has significant collections and exhibitions that it places in the category of ‘cultural history’, most of it acquired from and devoted to European settlement in the area. One example is a German settler display that emphasized rural life, the use of farming implements and ‘very life-like figure groups illustrating the costume, furniture and domestic objects of the period’.35 Pinned to the wall opposite the entrance desk of the museum in 2001 was this label. EAST LONDON MUSEUM

TOWARDS TRANSFORMATION We are at present engaged in a process of changing what we do to accommodate and embrace the interests and needs of all South Africans. What would you like to see featured in our displays? We invite all interested to share your interests and concerns with us! We are guided by the following principles: • The Eastern Cape is our field of interest • We want to give an understanding of the present by examining the historical forces which have shaped the past • We want to show first how the indigenous people and later arrivals from Asia and Europe adapted and utilized the resources of the natural environment • We would like to give the communities of the Eastern Cape a sense of pride in their unique heritage Figure 0.2. Notice at entrance to East London Museum, 8 July 2001.

Introduction11

Much more elaborate and directed than the label in Kimberley, this notice, rather than signalling that change was taking place, was claiming that the museum first needed to consult with local communities. It was to be their ‘interests and concerns’ that would guide the envisaged alterations in representational practices. At the same time, the interpretative framework of change was already set in place by the museum. It had to deal with the Eastern Cape, show adaptation and utilization by all communities of the province and establish a regional identity and legacy of the ‘historical forces’. Community and commonality were being asked for as the foundation for a new history in the East London Museum. Probably the longest lasting dilemma label was in the African Cultures Gallery of the South African Museum (established 1825), a component of what became the Iziko national flagship museum structure in Cape Town. Colloquially referred to as the ethno-wing, the gallery, constructed in the 1970s, comprised a series of displays of ‘bounded’ ethnicities, that ‘reinforce an ideology of cultural difference’:36 the Zulu; the Swazi; the Southern Nguni (Xhosa); a Nama Camp; Khoisan hunter-gatherers; dancers in the Central Kalahari; the South Sotho; the Tswana; and the Lobedu. The gallery contained casts and/or sculpted ‘life-like figures’ in glass cases, designed according to an ‘aesthetic of modernism’. Silk-screen photographs were used, colours were aligned with the content – ‘red ochre was chosen for the screened panels relating to the people of the Transkei, and beige for those relating to the desert dwellers’ – and the display cases were set out in an asymmetrical manner that constantly interrupted the viewer’s journey through the gallery.37 Alongside the models in the cases was a series of objects to signify ethnic meaning and identity: clay pots, snuff boxes, blanket pins, notices about the importance of beer, clothing and narcotic substances. As in East London, the displays were used to explain aspects of culture as ethnic, such as initiation rituals, bead work, dancing, hunting, dancing and music. Taken in its entirety, the gallery created the impression ‘of traditional ways of life situated in the ethnographic present with no account taken of historical context or the dynamics of change’.38 In 1993 a series of minor alterations were made to the African Cultures Gallery. Attempting to show changes in societies, the museum’s anthropological section placed photographs of people in modern, urban environments on the glass frontage of the ethnic displays. The intention was to challenge stereotypes of African people as rural, undeveloped and unchanging. In addition, an elaborate dilemma label was installed to alert visitors about the problems with the displays.

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The text displayed reads:

Figure 0.3. Notice at the African Cultures Gallery, Iziko South African Museum, 10 June 2007. © Leslie Witz.

OUT OF TOUCH? This gallery was constructed in the 1970s and since that time approaches to exhibiting African cultures have changed. Do these exhibits create the impression that all black South Africans live in rural villages, wear traditional dress and use only hand-made utensils? What about those people who live and work in towns and travel abroad or become industrialists? Do they not challenge the conventional ethnic stereotypes? African culture is not static. Why, then, are many labels in the gallery written in the present tense, as if time had stood still? Many black people regard the term ‘Bantu’ as an insult. Although intended to refer to language, the term Bantu acquired derogatory connotations under the apartheid system, which denied basic rights to black South Africans. New images have been introduced in the gallery to create an awareness of these issues.

There were some modifications to the gallery after 1993 – a display of the terracotta heads from Lydenburg and a Zulu beadwork exhibit, were added, for instance – but these were relatively minor. The dilemma notice was still on display almost twenty years later but had been moved by the museum staff to a relatively hidden position in an unlit corner of the gallery. Its wording indicated a keen awareness that the portrayals were essentialized stereotypes and that they needed to be changed. Yet its presence also enabled stasis implying something needed to be done but not carrying it out. The label became a placeholder for a yet unrealized, continually postponed, future. While there was inertia in the African Cultures Gallery at Iziko South African Museum, dramatic events had taken place in the adjacent room that displayed a diorama scene of a hunter-gatherer camp in the nineteenth

Introduction13

century – more widely known as ‘the bushman diorama’ or even just as ‘the diorama’. Like the coelacanth, farm workers and prisoners in the northern Cape, who were taken to represent a racial type of ‘bushman’, had been cast by the museum modeler James Drury at the beginning of the twentieth century as examples of ‘living fossils’. First displayed in glass cases as specimens, they were changed in 1960 into a diorama which displayed an invented cultural world of Khoisan hunter-gatherers based on a nineteenth-century painting by Samuel Daniell. In April 2001, after much discussion and controversy surrounding its history and its depictions, the CEO of the museum instructed that the diorama be boarded up. A notice was displayed (see Figure 0.4 below). The museum was initially insistent that this measure was only a temporary one and it did not remove the diorama. Instead, it maintained that the display was being archived, the implication being that in consigning it to

Figure 0.4. Visiting the archived diorama, 5 January 2002. © Wendelin Schnippenkoetter. The text reads: THE DIORAMA IS NOW CLOSED After many years of debate, the San diorama was closed to the public on 3 April 2001. It will be left in place while a process of consultation with affected communities takes place. We are committed to working in partnership with Khoisan people in developing new exhibitions.

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a storage category there was still the possibility of reinstatement in another form. This was a notice of action, of something that had been done and that assured a public consisting of the bearers and representatives of assumed indigenous groupings a say in a new past. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a professor of performance studies from New York University, referred to the notice that stood in front of the archived, boarded-up diorama as one of the most powerful displays in a museum setting. It incited inquisitiveness and curiosity, making visitors actively engage with what they imagined might be on display beyond the hoardings and the words provided on the notice.39 Within two to three years a new exhibition on rock art was installed that completely modified the route through the museum. Instead of entering the museum and proceeding through an archaeological display to the diorama and then on to the African Cultures hall, the new rock art exhibition closed the door to the gallery where the diorama was archived. The dilemma label was removed and placed in storage. Finally, in the Maritime section of the Bartolomeu Dias Museum complex in the southern Cape town of Mossel Bay there was a dilemma label in an alcove containing an exhibition with miniature dioramas containing depictions of encounters between the early travellers from Europe and the indigenous population. The exhibition employed crude physiognomic racial stereotypes to describe the indigenous population: ‘The Hottentots (Khoikhoi) were walnut-coloured, comparatively small in stature and with peppercorn hair’. At the entrance to the alcove the dilemma label alerted visitors to problems with the display: Figure 0.5. Notice of inaccuracy, Mossel Bay, Dias Museum, 12 August 2007. © Leslie Witz.

The text reads: Incorrect Information The Bartolomeu Dias Museum Complex is aware of a number of grammatical and historical errors in the text of this exhibition. The exhibition is displayed as it was donated and presented to the Museum Complex, and we therefore request that queries for information required be addressed to the staff of this Museum.

Introduction15

Produced on a laminated A4 sheet, the label was affixed using removable putty. Its temporary production belied its semi-permanence, having been on display for more than ten years. Through it the museum absolved itself of responsibility for the ‘errors’ and shifted it to the donor. Being aware of the inaccuracy was not a compelling enough motivation for the museum to disturb the collection on display. These dilemma labels appear somewhat different to texts that usually appear in museums as explanatory boards, contextual markers and directional signs. Setting in place an ‘interpretative framework’ museum labels are usually devices that provide both a focus on what is there and what is not, creating sequential links across the gaps. In these ways texts perform the spatializing function of defining ‘relations among things and ideas, whether showing stylistic developments or contrasts, an evolutionary sequence, or historical connections’. It is not only the words per se, but the size and style of the font, the choice of colour and the siting of the labels that provide a means to highlight and select importance. The text is ‘buttressed by the implicit imprimatur of institutional authority’ of the museum as rendering knowledge.40 The dilemma label instead gives the impression of exposing the fissures and interrupting this authority. They seem to say ‘we might have got it wrong’, and ask the visitor to hesitate, not to accept what they see and hear on display. In Latour’s categorization they would appear as signalling a ‘source of uncertainty’. At the same time as display objects they bear the promise of anticipation, agents of confidence and conviction, acting to enhance a trust in a future when the museum will be able to set the sequences in place once again.41 Reading these dilemma labels in some of South Africa’s older museums I was struck by a growing commitment to change history, to alter displays and to shift categories. Even if some were less assertive than others, took different forms and indicated different processes of adjustment, there was an unease about their practices in and of the past. In the dilemma labels were the beginnings of an engagement with different approaches to modify history in South African museums. These included closing exhibitions, installing new ones, changing labels, making statements of culpability, declaring inaccuracies, evoking new audiences as communities, rethinking classifications and drawing upon new sets of expertise. The dilemma label signalled an intention to change history in South African museums in the 1990s and early 2000s. Simultaneously, they reflected the contradiction of museums that is at the heart of this book. For all their explicit notification of altering the sequences of time, the dilemma labels were an assurance that the museum would maintain its role of keeping history in place. The donated

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exhibition at the Dias Museum could not be taken down even though the museum realized it contained errors, the diorama in Iziko South African Museum had to stay up as consultations took place, and despite problems of stereotyping and the depictions of timeless ethnicities that the museum acknowledged with the African Cultures Gallery, it was in no rush to change these exhibitions. Underlying the intervention of the dilemma label as a somewhat awkward display technique, that spoke as and for institutional authority, was an assumption that history as conservation would remain at the core of the museum.

Museum Times For older museums which had sizeable collections, impressive displays and well-established institutional arrangements in place, the dilemma of how to re-shape time loomed large. Although there had been several debates within South African museum circles from the 1980s about altering strategies of display, attracting new audiences and modifying policies on staffing and institutional arrangements, it was the political shifts in 1990 which pointed to the end of apartheid that spurred museums to take new directions. One way to secure pasts of preservation and indicate new temporal sequencing was to have a complete makeover by installing narratives that foregrounded histories of oppression and resistance. Johannesburg’s municipal Africana Museum was one of the first of the older museums in South Africa to think about how to begin anew. Based in the public library, where it was devoted to South African cultural history and ethnology (in its official story of origin published in 1977 its Africana collection began with the discovery of the gravestone of ‘the first white woman to die north of the Vaal River in the Transvaaal’),42 it shifted to the Newtown precinct alongside the Market Theatre and re-established itself as MuseumAfrica where it initially sought to depict a social history of the city and its underclasses.43 Opposite the Houses of Parliament, in central Cape Town, the building which housed offices of the British colonial administration, the Supreme Court and later the South African Cultural History Museum reverted in 1999 to its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century appellation as the Slave Lodge. It does not house slaves of the Dutch East India Company as it did then. Instead, it became a component of a new national consortium of museums in Cape Town known as Iziko, and its main exhibition Remembering Slavery signalled an intention to alter the site into a museum of slavery and human rights.44 The Jewish Museum in Cape Town shifted from being a place that emphasized Jewishness into

Introduction17

becoming an institution that represented South African Jews as a progressive, modern, post-apartheid community. Using the figure of Nelson Mandela to claim a place in struggles for non-racialism, the museum was entirely reconstructed to depict a history of Jews in South Africa as one of ‘individual and organizational roles and contributions’ towards making a post-apartheid nation.45 As indicated above, others, like the McGregor Museum in Kimberley and Iziko South African Museum (where many natural history collections are sited), took a more incremental approach, displaying dilemma labels, adding elements on to their existing displays, creating new ones, while closing down others. The formation of Iziko itself was an indicator of reconstruction through shifting institutional arrangements. Using the model of the Smithsonian Institution in the United States, national museums in Cape Town and Pretoria/Johannesburg respectively were amalgamated into two flagship structures. Iziko (hearth in isiXhosa), covering five national museums in fifteen sites and collections in Cape Town, became the southern flagship. The ‘northern flagship institution’ brought together eight former national museums, and in 2010 was branded as ‘Ditsong’, the Tswana word for a ‘place of heritage’.46 In both instances the amalgamation was meant to be much more than an administrative shift. Iziko altered its classificatory categories, did away with cultural history, and established three new divisions: art, natural history and social history collections.47 Arguably at the forefront of this change at Iziko was the South African National Gallery, which since the early 1990s had become the site of exhibitions that experimented with using artefacts from across the collections, at times raising questions of institutional pasts, knowledge production and processes of acquisition.48 There was much greater adherence to existing museum categories in the northern flagship, especially in maintaining the category of cultural history and recasting it as tradition and diversity. The National Cultural History Museum in Pretoria, for instance, relocated part of its holdings to the old mint and opened the African Window as a site to display ‘African traditions’. The opening of the Tswaing Crater Museum in March 1996, as an open-air eco-museum that contained stories of former workers from the salt factory located on the banks of a meteorite crater between 1919 and 1956, gestured towards a much more substantial shift in approach. Yet, under the auspices of the Cultural History Museum it remained tied to collecting and displaying bounded knowledge as fixed traditions.49 For the vast number of new museums that opened their doors there appeared to be greater possibilities to alter methodologies, practices and content. In many cases museum making involved constituting coherent

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collections and creating display environments either by using an existing structural fabric, be it a church, prison, hostel, community hall or private residence, for museum purposes, or by designing and constructing a new building. Some of the new museums emphasized the process of becoming and establishing their communities. Others were ‘architecturally driven projects’ that were more concerned with the design of a new building as museum.50 Using recollections of a recent past of violence and oppression under apartheid, depicted largely through photographs and oral testimonies, they all operated as memorial museums. This was situated as the marker of difference to a post-apartheid present.51 There can be little doubt that if changing subject matter was an indication of temporal shifts then these new museums, which made apartheid into the site of collection and exhibition, were reshaping pasts. In the newness of museums in South Africa after 1994 there were linkages to an earlier set of more conservative institutional practices that had been set in place under apartheid. These are elaborated upon in the following chapter but at this stage it is important to point out that the number of history museums had increased exponentially in South Africa from the 1960s, outstripping those devoted to natural history which had dominated previously. This history museum movement was based on a shortening of time, so that sequences in museums were no longer of the long durée of the earth but of the much shorter series of human memory. Memories of racialized settler pasts, collected through documents, oral testimonies and artefacts of habitation, were inscribed as empirical facts in museums under apartheid. These collections made museums in South Africa into an institutional place for history and set in place the foundations for their construction and reconstruction in the 1990s. By shortening history the path was cleared for memories of apartheid to find their ways into the museum and simultaneously established a framework of empiricism that set limits on the possibilities for change.52 The most obvious and arguably the most prominent of these new history museums was the Apartheid Museum that was built primarily as an experiential display environment adjacent to Gold Reef City Casino in Johannesburg. It sought to provide an all-embracing socio-political narrative of South Africa focusing on the period from 1948 to 1994.53 Others plotted specific aspects of apartheid: the District Six Museum, the Cato Manor Heritage Centre, the Sophiatown Heritage and Cultural Centre, the Fietas Museum and the South End Museum, in Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth respectively, drew attention to forced removals.54 The Cata Museum and Heritage Trail focused on the operation of apartheid and betterment schemes in the Eastern Cape to

Introduction19

provide evidence that removals in apartheid’s ethnic ‘homelands’ were as much a part of a policy of land dispossession as those that took place from ‘former “white” South Africa’.55 The Lwandle Migrant Labour, Langa and Khayelitsha museums in Cape Town, the Workers Museum in Johannesburg and the Kwa Muhle branch of the Durban Local History Museum drew on social histories to represent accounts of the lives, politics and cultures of workers in South Africa’s cities.56 The Red Location Museum in New Brighton, Port Elizabeth, the Liliesleaf Legacy Project in Rivonia, Johannesburg, the Hector Pieterson Memorial Museum and the Kliptown Open Air Museum (the latter both in Soweto) emphasized anti-apartheid resistance struggles. The museum at the old Johannesburg Fort, adjacent to the Constitutional Court, highlighted the harshness and brutality of imprisonment, and new national museums like the Robben Island Museum in Cape Town and //Hapo Freedom Park Museum in Pretoria were built around narratives of repression and resistance. A new set of characters was found by those initiating these museums to people this dichotomous narrative, with prominence given to a lifestory of Nelson Mandela.57 In addition to Robben Island Museum as the site and story of eighteen of his twenty-seven years’ imprisonment, there was the Nelson Mandela Museum in Mthatha, Qunu and Mfezo where the focus was on the early years of his life, and the family house of Nelson and his second wife Winnie in Soweto. The Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and Commemoration in Houghton although not formally a museum hosts archival collections and exhibitions associated with aspects of his biography. A yard in Alexandra township, the site of his first few years in Johannesburg, was turned into a building that was supposed to contain a Nelson Mandela Yard Interpretation Centre. In an ongoing and ever-growing industry around Mandela-as-life-story it was envisaged that a temporary exhibition space at the site where he was captured near Howick in 1962 would be turned into a museum as part of making the space signify ‘one of the historically important moments in the struggle against Apartheid’.58 Biographical emplotment often took the form of the house museum, situating an individual’s life in a space of becoming.59 Although these are generally modest establishments, and unlike many of their counterparts in the United States do not have the aura of a shrine, they are meant to be part of establishing a ‘national legacy’ and naming the home as a site associated with a resistance narrative. This is most evident in Groutville in Kwazulu-Natal where the home from 1929 until his death in 1967 of ANC President Albert Luthuli has been turned by the central government into a national museum as a ‘landmark associated with South

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Africa’s struggle for human rights and democracy’.60 At Satyagraha House (a combination of museum and guest house) in Johannesburg, Mohandas Gandhi’s close friendship with the German architect Herman Kallenbach is depicted. The website proclaims that the house where Gandhi lived in 1908–1909 is now a ‘registered part of the country’s historical heritage’, where ‘the future Mahatma created and developed his philosophy of passive resistance’.61 At 32 Angel Street in Kimberley the house where South African Native National Congress’s first General Secretary Sol Plaatje spent his last years before he died in 1932 became a provincial heritage site with a small library of African literature and a museum containing an exhibition on Plaatje’s life.62 In Ginsberg, King William’s Town, the house where Steve Biko lived between 1973 and 1977, while serving his banning order, became part of a Biko heritage route. Although not named as a museum the specially designed and constructed Steve Biko Centre, under the auspices of the community foundation bearing the same name, which opened in Ginsberg in 2012 contains a photographic exhibition on Biko’s life and functions as a venue for art exhibitions and cultural activities. It emphasizes that it is through learning and performance that South African history is remembered, discovered and interpreted.63 In these new histories it is liberation struggles against the colonial and apartheid regimes that are foregrounded in the making of new national histories and identities. Another important marker is the assertion of a cultural difference with the world of the colonizer, giving the post-colonial nation its distinctive character. Significance was accorded to a narrative of indigeneity prior to the moments of European contact and settlement.64 As part of this new deep time of the post-apartheid nation, archaeology type displays became a major focus of several new museums. In 2001, at Wildebeest Kuil, thirty kilometres outside of Kimberley, an extensive set of rock engravings provided the impetus for an interpretive centre under the umbrella of the McGregor Museum. Five years later the South African Rock Art Museum opened at the Origins Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand, largely as a celebration of the work and analysis of the archaeologist David Lewis-Williams. At the University of Pretoria, which previously had not publicized widely the findings of its archaeologists of an ancient African kingdom in the northern part of the country, a Mapungubwe Collection section was opened in 2000 as a site of conservation and display. At the time calls were starting to be made to repatriate these artefacts from the University of Pretoria to the tenth- to twelfth-century iron-age site at Mapungubwe, some 500 kilometres to the north. An architecturally award-winning interpretation centre was constructed inside Mapungubwe National Park but its contents remained

Introduction21

very sparse, consisting of a few objects lent to it on an annual basis by the University of Pretoria, replicas of golden artefacts and a series of information posters and audio-visual presentations about the archaeological site.65 And on the Ganora farm, near Graaff-Reinet, South Africa was taken into a prehuman past in a fossil museum that was officially opened in 1998 of a time ‘about 280 million years, ago, when reptiles roamed the earth before the age of dinosaurs’, situating the land spatially and metaphorically in what is called ‘big history’.66 The worlds of finance, industry, agriculture and sport embraced the museum with even greater vigour, often branding their corporate image with a post anti-apartheid identity. AngloGold, then the country’s biggest mining company, opened the Gold of Africa Museum in Cape Town, displaying the Barbier-Mueller collection of artefacts from the Akan kingdom of West Africa, much of it originally ‘taken from Akan state treasuries’,67 as the foundation of a visual and textual narrative of gold trade, mining and production in Africa. ABSA Bank’s Money Museum and Archives in downtown Johannesburg represented a history of money, saving and banking in South Africa.68 In 1995 South African Breweries (in 2002 it took over the USA based company Miller Brewing to become SABMiller), which presented Castle Lager as the beer of a new South African nation, with its marketing ditty ‘one nation, one soul, one beer, one goal’, opened two museums: the Centenary Centre at the Market Theatre precinct in Johannesburg and the Heritage Centre in Cape Town.69 Three wine estates, Groot Constantia, Solms-Delta, and Vergelegen, all sought to turn away from the assertion of a European heritage that is commonly expressed through ‘Cape Dutch’ architecture to build museums and interpretative centres that focused on slavery and its legacies in the Western Cape. In the Cape Town docks at the reconstructed Victoria and Alfred Waterfront in the basement of the new Board of Executors building, remains of an eighteenth-century fortress discovered during construction were used as the basis of the Chavonnes Battery Museum. It drew upon an older historiography that focused on the technologies of the military installation and colonial administration.70 Nearby at Portswood House, overlooking the Waterfront, the South African Rugby Union relocated its museum from Newlands, reconstituted it and turned it into ‘The Springbok Experience’. While there was a substantial addition of ‘Black and Coloured history’, and ‘Rugby and apartheid’, the museum devoted itself to affirming a corporate image of ‘The Springbok’ as the force which changed South Africa from apartheid to racial reconciliation ‘on the rugby field’.71 There are several other new museum initiatives that cover an array of pasts, have varied sponsors and are not that easy to categorize. The

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Ncome museum in Kwazulu Natal, an initiative of national government, for instance, attempted to give a version of events of the military struggles between frontier farmers and Zulu armies in the early nineteenth century from the perspective of Zulu speakers.72 The Cape Town Holocaust Centre asserted that it was ‘the first and only Holocaust centre to be established in Africa’.73 Under the banner of the South African Holocaust and Genocide Foundation, it expanded to establish branches in Johannesburg in 2007 and Durban in 2009. On 3 December 2007 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the world’s first heart transplant operation carried out by a team of surgeons led by Christiaan Barnard, the Heart of Cape Town Museum at Groote Schuur Hospital was opened. In 2011 the gallows at Pretoria Central Prison were turned into a national memorial site which includes an extensive exhibition. Opening the museum, then South African President Jacob Zuma referred to it as a place ‘where the political prisoners who were hanged there can be honoured and the past can be buried’.74 Although he referred to it as a museum it was not open to the general public until a way could be found to access the site without breaching prison security. And, finally, there was the stand-up comedian Pieter Dirk Uys’s quirky little apartheid museum that formed part of his theatre and restaurant complex in the small town of Darling on the Cape west coast. Containing apartheid era memorabilia, signs for segregated amenities, election posters and Afrikaner nationalist cultural artefacts, the museum (or ‘nauseum’ as he calls it) was presented on its website as a place ‘based on reality and pretty close to the truth’ where ‘everyone has a chance to laugh and/or cry, then remember and celebrate that we are no longer there’.75

A Space for History This astonishing manifestation of a plethora of museum productions – and there are more – may be accounted for through an alignment with a developmental agenda, appearing as a favourable arena for social and economic investment. In South Africa the post-apartheid state adopted a strategy whereby it envisaged that growth would lead to development. In such a framework the objectives were defined as increasing productivity, marketing effectively and sustaining long-term growth to create jobs and alleviate poverty. Whether this was appropriate or effective has been the matter of considerable debate. But if we take it as the policy pursued, then museums were potentially one of the sites of, or as economists would say nodes of, development. This is not because they would necessarily employ

Introduction23

large numbers of people, but they could potentially be at the forefront of cultural led regeneration of cities and regions through linkages and opportunities created through visitation. Culture was the potential dynamic to make a destination.76 It is not surprising then that the mission of the post-1994 South African government’s Department of Arts and Culture (which was initially combined with the Department of Science and Technology) was defined almost entirely as ‘developing the economic potential in the cultural industries’.77 For museums the implications were two-fold. On the one hand they were explicitly instructed by the Department to ensure ‘effective and efficient use of limited resources’, undergo a ‘systematic process of restructuring and rationalization’ and subject themselves to ‘performance measures’.78 On the other hand their primary role according to the Department was to position and market themselves so that they could become ‘part of a strategy of branding the Country as a sought-after tourism destination’.79 Where a developmental discourse is paramount, the museum is primarily viewed as an institution that can generate products of commodity value through situating itself as part of an economy of tourism and visitation as the engine of employment. Despite being urged by the Department to become commercial operations with international tourism as their core function,80 the number of visitors to museums has remained low. Museums in South Africa are hardly able to sustain themselves and rely heavily on funding from private capital, foundations, foreign governments and, in most cases, the central, regional or local administration. This would suggest that the momentum to invest in museums is coming from alternative directions. An extraordinarily strong impetus derives from the reconstitution of notions of citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa. The ANC-led government, elected on a basis of universal adult suffrage, proclaimed itself to be committed to a national state where public institutions would be much more accessible, employ a wider and more representative staff, respond to broad societal needs, and restore justice. It called upon the populace, most of whom had under apartheid been racially excluded from institutions such as museums, to participate as citizens in the newly constituted nation. Yet, in looking forward to the commonality of a post-apartheid nation, the idea of forging a collective past that would be aligned with the present and the anticipated ‘never-ending’ future was promoted.81 Presented as a national inheritance and called ‘heritage’, this past, which emphasized cultural diversity within an identity labelled as ‘African’, was to be utilized by the state as ‘a powerful agent for cultural identity, reconciliation and nation-building’.82

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Drawing upon notions of museums as domains of public education and citizenship, they presented the potential of helping to ‘form a new public and inscribe it in new relations of sight and vision’.83 When opening Robben Island as the first new national museum in South Africa in September 1997, President Nelson Mandela posed the question: ‘Having excluded and marginalized most of our people, is it surprising that our museums and national monuments are often seen as alien spaces? How many have gone to see one of our monuments? In other countries such places throng with citizens’. He then went on to maintain that ‘with democracy, we have the opportunity to ensure that our institutions reflect history in a way that respects the heritage of all our citizens’. The role being accorded museums by Mandela in the speech, along with ‘monuments’, ‘sites’, ‘songs’ and ‘festivals’, was primarily as mirroring institutions that would visualize a new, inclusive national society and construct a citizenry.84 By bringing all these different spheres under the broad rubric of ‘heritage’ (and museums were to be a part of this), there were implications of an apparently seamless legacy being brought together with a sense of naturalness that could then constitute a commonality that would be labelled as national. Heritage was presented by Mandela as the site of recovery of lost pasts, where representations would be subject to modification and correction, and the national citizenry institutionalized.85 This focus on museums cannot only be located in the assumption of state power and the reimagining of a nationalized citizenry. While many museums are in some way funded (or as they consistently claim, underfunded) by different tiers of government and have their authority vested in them through organs of state, their range and extent suggest this is a far wider movement. Large international foundations, foreign governments and corporate sponsors have provided funds for independent museums. In some instances local capital has developed its own museums, seeking to project their corporate image and/or representing a specific industrial or financial niche. Groupings, constituting themselves as communities, have seized the initiative and established museum-type projects. In debates around heritage and nation, all these museum developments, together with state funded museums, could easily be grouped together and accounted for through notions of a dominant ideology. Heritage (of which museums are then taken as one component) is analysed as a malleable instrument that is used by those holding the reins of state power (or alternatively those in opposition to or resisting the state) to convey a particular political message to subordinate groupings. Much of the literature on heritage and museums in post-apartheid South Africa has taken this position, showing how dominant narratives were inscribed in memory

Introduction25

through a combination of commercial interests and political imperatives of the new state.86 But it would be simplistic to account for these museum movements as being somehow ‘moulded’ as part of the process of legitimation by those who have acquired the reins of financial and government power.87 Not only does this argument, in its crudest forms, assume a somewhat instrumentalist tone, but it also plays down the inconsistencies among the many different producers of meaning, the occasional lack of a clear distinction between the dominant producer and subordinate receiver groupings, and the ways in which the subordinate groupings may construct their own meanings. While the ANC might have wanted or demanded museums to change into mirroring institutions, the contests over meaning amongst the enormous variety of producers and their publics limited their ability to shape the forms and content over the images that appeared and disappeared. The emphasis on the inscription of a dominant representational narrative would also limit the range and histories of museums. Museums have shifted in their approaches and forms over time from private, seemingly haphazard collections to public bodies for classifying and exhibiting knowledge. They also exist in a variety of institutional settings, typologies and possibilities. These include operating as secular shrines, commodity machines, markers of colonial collection and classification and as self-reflexive sites to experiment with new, different and contested forms of knowledge.88 Divergences such as these suggest a much more complex operation where the establishment of museums and a reconfiguration of their representational practices may be thought of as resulting from conflicts and negotiations over determining values and ascribing meanings. These struggles taking place in museums were in direct contrast to the dominant assessment of many academic historians about the state of history in South Africa at the time. Their contention was that despite the dramatic political changes following the formal demise of apartheid, South African history was stagnating. With reference to the secondary and tertiary educational sectors, it was pointed out by many university based historians that the numbers of student enrolments for history declined dramatically, that history as a subject was at times under threat in the school curriculum, that there were few new historians and little fresh historical writing was emerging.89 Bald statements about history losing its appeal, history lacking any use value, history being appropriated for nationalist causes and history being undermined by post-modernism were all advanced as reasons for its apparent demise. Yet contests were emerging as claims to historical knowledge were being ‘asserted, substantiated

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and articulated across an ever increasing wider-range of communities and institutions’. There were ‘ongoing negotiations where different and competing narratives, claims and priorities’ constantly came ‘up against each other’.90 At South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s, in claims to recover land lost through the actions of the segregationist and apartheid states, through debates over the future of existing memorials, the construction of new ones, and the invocation and rejection of commemorative pasts, histories were constantly being debated and mediated. Across disparate domains and interests, many, varied and different histories emerged. In this moment when there was a ‘chaotic state of representation’, museums, both old and new, became one of the primary settings for remaking and contesting histories.91 In emphasizing these contests or ‘history frictions’ there is an explicit evocation of Kratz and Karp’s notion of ‘museum frictions’, a concept which they use to analyse the shifting and conflicting forces in the mediation of knowledge. Kratz and Karp have extended Clifford’s appropriation of the concept of a ‘contact zone’ to examine the collecting and curatorial practices of museums. Clifford had argued that not only is dissonance nearly always evident in relationships between museums and their differing communities, but perhaps more importantly, it is ongoing. In the social setting of the museum, he insisted, ‘all culture-collecting strategies [are] responses to particular histories of dominance, hierarchy, resistance, and mobilization’.92 As those who were previously the subjects of research, collection and display assert their rights, a ‘power charged set of exchanges’93 takes place between institutional and knowledge authority and those groups claiming locality and community around issues of ownership, usage and meanings. Although framed in the language of reciprocity, these are fundamentally unequal exchanges over value and significance. It is these potentially multiple (and asymmetrical) contests and collaborations over ownership, displays and meanings that are the contact zones where representations are produced and re-produced. Clifford’s concern was that of the cultural activist and he proposed a shift in the museum from an institution concerned with the acquisition of knowledge to one that acknowledges and works in the contact zones. Recognizing the operations of power and domination, he does not foreclose the possibility of museums abandoning their claims to universality and moving towards much more open-ended engagement with the bearers of different practices and knowledges. What Kratz and Karp assert is that these contests that Clifford points to can be located beyond the specific institutional setting of the museum. They point out that in his analysis of ‘contact zones’, Clifford’s accounts

Introduction27

are within the specific institutional bounds of the museum or gallery: the performances by community groupings around the collections in Portland Museum of Art, the multiple meetings of sponsors, artists and curators in Africa: Art of a Continent, the installations by artists from Highland New Guinea on the campus of Stanford University in California are three of the examples he cites. What makes these contact zones is that they draw upon contexts, knowledges, institutions and authorities that are to be found beyond the immediacy of the museum. Kratz and Karp assert that it is the conjunction of ‘disparate communities, interests, goals and perspectives’ that ‘produce debates, tensions, collaborations, conflicts of many sorts’, which they term ‘museum frictions’. Most prominently, these frictions occur as museums which are established as part of asserting status as a modern nation, ‘institutions of knowledge, power and exhortation’ that both seek to ‘enlighten’ and ‘inculcate’, become sites where differing communities and constituencies assert a range of competing ambitions, opinions and expertise.94 This is not a return to conceiving of museums as a legitimating institution, where power ultimately resides in the workings between the state and the material relations in society, but is about how specific forms of knowledge about society come to operate within, through and beyond the museum.95 Despite the resurgence of museums in South African there has been little critical reflection on these processes of change. Nearly all the monographs have dealt with heritage more broadly, largely seeking to understand memorial practices in relation to what appears as a new state, the framing of a national past around a narrative of repression and resistance, and the simultaneous evocation of and distancing from colonial forms.96 Sometimes, as in the study by Hlongwane and Ndlovu of heritage sites in and around Johannesburg, museums are included in order to convey a sense of the extent of new memorial practices and the issues they confront such as the expertise drawn upon, senses of alienation and filiation from different publics, the commodification of images and places, and contested political interests over content and form.97 When it comes to specific museums there have been histories of three new museums, the District Six Museum, the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum and the Robben Island Museum. They have outlined the multiple origins, the varying strategies of museum making and personal memories of those processes, the ways in which museum communities have been constructed, and have insisted upon museums being processes that arise out of ongoing knowledge transactions.98 Biographies of individuals who were associated with the founding of two of the older museums, MuseumAfrica and the Johannesburg Art Gallery, have been highlighted by Sara Byala

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and Jillian Carman, respectively. In both instances, they stress how it was negotiations over the association of value to the collections that led to the establishment of these institutions.99 Similarly, Anna Tietze uses a chronology of the individual as director to embark upon a history of shifts in direction of the South African National Gallery (SANG) between 1875 and 2017.100 From the position of an insider, Marilyn Martin, who was director of SANG and member of the council of Iziko, gives an account of its history over a similar period by focusing on the political pressures that the institution faced as it attempted to remake the contents of what constituted a national art collection.101 Martin Legassick and Ciraj Rassool have shown a much more explicit operation of institutional and disciplinary power in museum making. By tracking in sometimes minute detail the histories of the collection of human remains, they have argued that this disreputable past, which involved the disinterment of bodies from graves in the name of racial science, was at the heart of the development of the modern South African museum at the beginning of the twentieth century.102 It is the question of how to deal with this legacy of racial science that they maintain is key to challenging and changing museums in South Africa. The only substantive account of historical knowledge and museum transformation in South Africa is provided by Annie Coombes. In History After Apartheid she takes on contests over pasts and public memories in museums. She locates these between, on the one hand, the recovery and depiction of social lives, which was the subject of much historical research and writing in South African universities in the 1980s, and the articulation of individual lived experiences, on the other. The latter, she maintains, drew upon multiple frameworks of memory that were often outside the limitations set by narratives of national and/or material struggles. These many, different and contradictory accounts all signalled ‘the compromised, complicated texture of living under and fighting under apartheid’. For her then, the post-apartheid challenge for museums was, instead of attempting to inscribe a new singular narrative as real, to pursue representational practices to convey the ironies, complexities and contradictions of life as lived. In her examples it was often through imaginative aesthetic practices of art that this was attempted and achieved.103 The distinction that Coombes draws between claims of history derived from research of the social and those which base their authority on genealogies of lived memory is particularly important in analysing museum changes in South Africa. This approach, while highlighting difference, can fall into an easy dichotomy between the authority of disciplinary knowledge, on the one hand, and more vernacular, seemingly less

Introduction29

mediated, localized histories, on the other. What is important instead for Museum Times is to rethink the many, often disparate, sites of historical production in relation to their form, content and institutional vectors and, significantly, how these have shifted. This book examines the particular dilemmas and responses of museums as they sought to find forms, methodologies and content to express new and altered pasts through object formation in post-apartheid South Africa. It is the ongoing dilemmas of whether and how to incorporate new and different histories, the reverberations that arose, and the ways in which they were re-solved that are the core of this study. The book examines the different ways in which histories were invoked, mediated and negotiated in museums in post-apartheid South Africa. By highlighting the dilemmas, or to return to Latour’s phrasing, the ‘sources of uncertainty’, by showing that the conflicts and their re-solutions as objects were set in altered temporal and spatial sequences of ‘civic laboratories’, one can begin to show how histories and museums changed amidst ongoing negotiations over pastness.104

Changing Histories All the case studies presented in this book are located at the seam of museum change: between history as safeguarding and preservation and history as producing new sets of time. In broad brushstrokes the museums dealt with in this book are either older institutions, created in the colonial or apartheid eras, and that are now seeking to develop new audiences and histories, or those which have been established since 1994 and are laying claims to establishing foundational memories of apartheid pasts. It starts with the almost unknown Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, established in 1999 and which claims to be the Western Cape province’s first township-based museum, and moves to the southern Cape town of Mossel Bay, where apartheid’s last museum, the Bartolomeu Dias Museum complex, had opened ten years previously. It then journeys to one of South Africa’s oldest museums, the Amathole Museum established in the late nineteenth century in King William’s Town in what is today the Eastern Cape, and returns to Cape Town to the first post-apartheid new national museum on Robben Island. Finally, it goes on a journey with an exhibition that travelled between three sites from 2002 to 2004: the iconic structure of colonial rule which served as the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company, the Castle of Good Hope, a farm museum in the town of Worcester which celebrates the lifestyle of the pioneer farmer, and the library foyer of the University of the Western Cape. In asking the

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question about what to do with old memorials in new times, the exhibition epitomized the central theme of this book: about giving shape and form to a past in the interstices between conserving and changing history. These are all instances where I, to a greater or lesser extent, was drawn into research, exhibition, administrative and general advice type relationships. This has been as board member, researcher, editor and designer of exhibitions, running educational programmes, being consulted by management and staff about the possibilities for altering the displays and being invited to give talks at museum events and conferences. The claim to partial insider knowledge is an epistemological one. If institutions of public culture are ‘critical social locations where knowledge and perceptions [of the public sphere] are shaped, debated, imposed, challenged, and disseminated’,105 then the public historian enters into discussions and debates with these institutions as a series of knowledge transactions. Pasts that are produced in museums are often the result of negotiations and conflicts between opposing groups over its constituent elements, what events and personalities should be included and excluded and how they should be represented. My role as a public historian therefore involves more than imparting knowledge and skills of the profession or investigating the poetics of representation and the politics of production. It has meant being deeply involved in the difficult processes of constituting and reconstituting meanings, a ‘messy in-between space’106 where one acts both as an academically trained historian and as an active member of the museum community. One’s expertise as an historian is constantly being challenged, shaped and re-shaped in negotiations over the past as different historical knowledges are articulated, and where individuals and events are produced and excised in what Premesh Lalu, in a most evocative phrase, has called the ‘cut of history’.107 While this selection relates to another time, that of the personal and autobiographical, and is therefore not geographically or typological representative, it does point to the processes by which different types of histories are worked with in these museums. In the case of the Lwandle Museum there is the making of locality through an assertion of its role in a national past. The Dias Museum struggles with an older imperial maritime structuring which it is ambivalent about and embraces the idea of returning to the local as double manoeuvre of retention and transformation. In King William’s Town the Amathole Museum takes on settler history by returning to an older form of historiography, that pertaining to the frontier of colonial expansion and conquest, but uses it to assert a move that traverses fixed boundaries of history, race and conflict. The Y350? exhibition, at its various locations, confronts settler pasts more

Introduction31

directly by asking meta-historical questions with regard to the politics of production and representation. And Robben Island Museum is completely part of inscribing a new national history, yet at moments and in enclaves seeks to represent difference and multiplicity. The ways in which time itself is configured and operationalized are set alongside and together with forms of history. The Amathole Museum, which started its life classified as a natural history institution, constantly deals with the processes of how it can shorten and compress time. Both the Y350? exhibition and the Dias Museum confront the cyclical time of anniversary and commemoration, but in vastly different ways. One consistently works to undermine its appearance of inevitability, while the latter, with some hesitation, still celebrates and sets in places a moment of founding and beginning. Both Lwandle and Robben Island, in situating themselves in national pasts, establish linear timelines. The degrees of emphasis, selections of what counts as events, the framings provided and the indications of beginnings and endings establish these museums’ times. The book starts by presenting an account of how the category of history was employed and altered in South African museums from their inception as mainly colonial institutions devoted to natural history in the nineteenth century, to becoming memorials of settlement in the second half of the twentieth century with the implementation of apartheid. It considers how museum frameworks that were put in place in the 1990s after the demise of apartheid sometimes challenged these older histories as modes of exclusion and partial interpretation, but also confirmed them, particularly when museums invoked a status as bearers of heritage. I am particularly concerned with how history in museums was shaped through a lineage of preservation that reified an empirical approach and turned artefacts into facts. I then turn attention to specific museums and exhibitions and visit two museums that are haunted by the possibilities of ‘eventless history’. In the case of the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, making event as history required an enormous amount of work and attention. Lwandle was a place that was hardly written about, and, when it was, tended to be inscribed as a problem either requiring ethnographic study and/or socio-political intervention, and had little going for it in terms of a foundational object collection. It also had almost no support for the museum idea from those living in the immediate vicinity and from government structures. To recover and establish community and history as event, the Lwandle Museum resorted to making what Mowitt appropriately calls a Con-Text, a materialist past that is created with and through constant literary engagements constituting what he refers to as a geography designating the

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space of history, or later on as the space ‘between the discourse on society and the writing of that discourse’.108 The Lwandle Museum shapes its historical geography by using a nondescript building that lacked a specific marker of significance, and placing it in historical research and writing on South African social and labour history that emerged in the 1970s that was located almost in and on the space of the Witwatersrand. This chapter examines how a new local history surrounding this hostel was framed by the museum through a national history of migrant labour based on the narratives of the mines of the Witwatersrand. To establish events in a local history, the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum metaphorically reproduced the gold mine, taking it to the seaside, and ironically almost totally ignored both the site of work in its invocation of labour and its coastal appellation in the naming elwandle, at the sea. Mossel Bay, on the other hand, already had a local history on display in a small museum. It is described in the Guide to the Museums of Southern Africa (1969) as being of ‘a miscellaneous nature’ and included ‘old documents, maps, photographs, utensils, etc’.109 But in the late 1980s this collection was largely placed in storage as the museum shifted direction. Drawing upon a festival that took place in 1988, a massive new Bartolomeu Dias Museum complex was built that discarded its existing local history to make way for an extravagant display of Portuguese founding. The foundations of what in effect was apartheid’s last museum were constructed from the experience of this showpiece that was produced by the late-apartheid state for the 1988 Dias festival. Its centrepiece, in a specially designed triple volume interior, was a reconstructed caravel that sailed from Lisbon to Mossel Bay in 1988 with considerable motorized assistance and was given the invented name of Bartolomeu Dias.110 This pageantry of glorified European founding that worked to consistently deny, suppress and substitute events became cast into the museum structure as its sign of authenticity. Since 1994 there have been various attempts by the museum to move away from this monumental past and ‘focus on local history, culture and the natural environment’ and to ‘represent voices from all the inhabitants of Mossel Bay’.111 I examine how this objective, to assert what is claimed as inclusivity, has come into conflict with an existing pervasive framework of maritime history and a spectacular eventless past that celebrates founding, discovery and achievement. The museum has resorted to a series of temporary exhibitions in a human rights framework which have little to do directly with Mossel Bay or Dias but which serve to retain the maritime history of European discovery in place. From the coast I move to the interior to consider the changes that took place in the History Hall at the Amathole Museum in King William’s

Introduction33

Town. Formed as a Naturalist Society in 1884, it became the Frontier Districts Museum in 1898, the Kaffrarian Museum in 1921 and then was re-named as the Amathole Museum in 1999.112 Across these name changes, the key exhibition in this museum since the 1930s has remained that of a hippopotamus that supposedly wandered about 1,000 kilometres southwards over a three-year period, and was shot and killed on the banks of the nearby Keiskamma river. Ever since this hippopotamus was recovered, skinned and prepared for display, the museum has been known as the ‘Home of Huberta’. Along with the name change to the Amathole Museum in the late 1990s, a new exhibition was conceived of and installed in the History Hall entitled Across the Frontier. In this exhibition the tension was always between making use of what the museum had at hand in its collection and employing some of the newer historical research and writing on the Eastern Cape. The issue was how to give shape and form to a new history about race, conflict and cooperation on the colonial frontier of expansion and conquest, when its artefacts had been acquired in pursuance of assembling a mammal collection, or collecting and displaying a settler past as history, or as part of a separate ethnological Xhosa gallery. In this moment Huberta was remade into an object of scientific enquiry and a multicultural artefact of cooperation, securing its home for the future, even though officially the museum discarded its taxonomic designation with its hippopotamus singularity as it took history ‘across the frontier’. If for the Amathole Museum the key issue was about transforming the locality as a colonial frontier into an inclusive cooperative post-apartheid past for Huberta, then for Robben Island it was about making a place of banishment and imprisonment for over 300 years into a museum. I am particularly interested in how museum-type methodologies have sat alongside the establishment of a site for large-scale visitation and the political imperatives associated with its construction as the first new national museum of post-apartheid South Africa. From 1997, in its early years as a museum, there seemed to be little contradiction.113 Commentators enthused over how personal experiences of ex-political prisoners were integral to the functioning as a museum through the tours of the prison which they conducted. Their performance and narration were initially seen as the foundation of a special, new type of museum, a museum without walls, a symbolic and sacred site, emphasizing lives as lived rather than the physical structures and the artefacts. As with the Tswaing Crater Museum in the north of the country, it had an affinity, it was maintained by commentators, with the ecomuseum movement that emerged in France in the 1970s.114 Liberation from apartheid and the strictures

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of the conventional museum were symbolized in the figure of a rabbit which made a brief appearance on the film played to visitors on the ferries Makana and Autshumato to Robben Island in the early 2000s. As the rabbit scampered away from the camera, the narrator, speaking in the first-person singular as the Island, heralded the coming of freedom: ‘At last I was free again, free to sustain life, free to impress upon children the bonds between humans and their natural environment, free to become a place of learning and peace’.115 There were warnings that these apparently innovative museum methodologies might recede into the background through the prioritizing of commercial and political concerns. Shackley was worried that commercialization and the demands of mass tourism might lead to the commodification of Robben Island and the trivialization of the experience.116 Garuba’s sense was that the personal narratives of guides on the island were becoming subsumed into the ‘dominant narrative of the anti-apartheid struggle’, its apparently morally inevitable victory and its outcome in the ‘new nation’.117 There was a constant tension on Robben Island about its museum status as it mediated the meanings, values and roles associated with its museum claims with its status as a heritage and tourist site. And by 2008 the rabbit was no longer the symbol of liberation but was instead seen by the museum management to be responsible, together with the fallow deer, for the environmental degradation on the Island which had been praised as an ecomuseum. Both became targets of a mass culling campaign which carried on for over ten years.118 I turn from the extermination of the rabbits by the Robben Island Museum to reflect upon an exhibition that dealt with one of the fundamental questions about changing history: what to do with older memorials in a society that is claiming newness and change. The Y350?: Old Memorials in New Times exhibition that travelled from the Castle of Good Hope to the Worcester Museum at Kleinplasie, and then to the University of the Western Cape, reflected on the tensions inherent in the commemoration of the 350th anniversary of settlement in post-apartheid South Africa. The exhibition’s central figure was a metal statue created by designer Jos Thorne that referred back to a poster from a meeting held on Cape Town’s Grand Parade protesting against the glorification in 1952 of settlement through the iconization of the first commander of the Dutch East India Company’s revictualling station, Jan van Riebeeck, some three hundred years previously. Like the poster in 1952, the unstable statue which Thorne created for the exhibition in 2002 inverted the figure. More broadly, by asking Y350? the exhibition used the occasion to raise questions about the presence and future of many South African

Introduction35

monuments and memorials that endure as icons serving to glorify individuals and events that represent and articulate South Africa’s colonial and apartheid pasts. In each venue the exhibition reflected on the anxiety inherent in the commemoration of the 350th anniversary of settlement in post-apartheid South Africa by giving it a local inflection that related issues to the specific site. Not only did the exhibition highlight an unease with commemorating the 350th anniversary, the exhibition itself also became the site of reluctance. The various institutions where the exhibition was held all displayed some measure of hesitation in both its content and methodology. In addition, responses from those who came to view the exhibition concurred with, enhanced and also diverged from the curatorial intent. It is this ‘tension between exhibition communication and the politics of representation’119 that was central to the production and reception of an exhibition that tried to insist that the question to be asked in 2002 was whether and how to conceive of memorials beyond apartheid: should Van Riebeeck be turned on its head or discarded altogether? Museum signage can also indicate an interruption, that a future of the institution is not assured. Rather than a dilemma label which refers to specific exhibitionary practices, there is a sign of another kind, of the rejection of the museum in its entirety indicating that the museum is unable to keep its doors open. These signs have gone up at various museums in South Africa since 2013 including some of those indicated earlier on: the Red Location Museum in New Brighton; the Springbok Experience and the Gold of Africa Museum in Cape Town; and uMkhumbane Cultural and Heritage Museum in Cato Manor, Durban. At the same time though some new museums have emerged, particularly in the world of contemporary art. Prominent amongst these are the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa and the Norval Foundation in Cape Town. As I write this introduction all museums in South Africa (and most internationally) are closed because of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the conclusion I look at some of these instances of closure, opening and change and indulge in a little bit of speculation as to whether the excess of museum making that characterized the period since 1994 has come to an end, or perhaps shifted to new object formations. Here, my arguments are far less secure, but ironically the spectre of closure opens and interrogates the trajectories of the history I present and reveals my overall intention in the book. In presenting a history of histories in museums and exhibitions I am attempting to support those both inside and outside the museum sector who are constantly seeking to develop reflexive, critical institutional practices. In drawing on all these case studies one of my main objectives is to provoke, suggest and open up

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possibly fruitful areas of engagement for museums. The book is written in the hope and anticipation of changing histories in museums, that the patience which the dilemma label asks of the visitor will be rewarded with new visions, even more contests over the pasts they produce and will keep museums open and on the move.

Notes   1. This idea draws on Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory.  2. Bunn, ‘The Museum Outdoors’, 356.  3. Lidchi, ‘The Poetics and Politics’, 160.  4. Maleuvre, Museum Memories, 2; Bennett, Making Culture, 55.  5. Knell, MacLeod and Watson, Museum Revolutions, 1.  6. Witz and Rassool, ‘Making Histories’. As elaborated upon later, this idea of ‘history frictions’ draws upon Kratz and Karp, ‘Introduction. Museum Frictions’.  7. See Hafstein and Skrydstrup, Patrimonialities for a discussion on the distinction between claims to cultural property and cultural heritage.  8. Karp and Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures; Karp, Kreamer and Lavine, Museums and Communities; Knell, MacLeod and Watson, Museum Revolutions; Sherman, Museums and Difference; Macdonald, The Politics of Display; Lumley, The Museum Time-Machine; Vergo, The New Museology.  9. Marstine, New Museum Theory. 10. See Witz, Minkley and Rassool, ‘South Africa and the Unsettling’. 11. Lumley, The Museum Time-Machine, 2. 12. Lumley, The Museum Time-Machine, 4–18. 13. Lalu, The Deaths of Hintsa, 263–69. 14. In relation to understanding how previous displays work with and against new exhibitions, see Lien and Nielssen, ‘“Permanent Displays”’. 15. Byala, A Place That Matters, 3–7. 16. Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive’, 19–20. 17. Crooke, ‘Dealing with the Past’, 137. 18. Kratz, ‘Rhetorics of Value’, 25. 19. Sherman, Museums and Difference, 6. 20. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 183. 21. Bennett, Making Culture, 49. 22. Bennett, Making Culture, 55, 52 23. Dudley, Museum Materialities, 6. 24. Here I am drawing on Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, who argues that publics are called into being through being addressed. 25. Kratz, The Ones That Are Wanted, 220. 26. See for example, Cohen, The Combing; Cohen and Odhiambo, Siaya; Cohen and Odhiambo, Burying SM.

Introduction37

27. Leslie Witz, ‘Proposal for extension of the NRF funded Project on Public Pasts based in the History Department at the University of the Western Cape’, 31 August 2000. For an elaboration of the work of public history at UWC, see Witz, Minkley and Rassool, Unsettled History. The work of PoPP is also featured in Murray, Shepherd and Hall, Desire Lines. 28. Witz, ‘Museum and Heritage Studies’; for an extensive account of the APMHS, see Morakinyo, ‘A Historical and Conceptual Analysis’. 29. Witz and Cornell, ‘From Robben Island’, 8. 30. Rassool and Witz, ‘Transforming Heritage Education’, 2. 31. Witz, ‘Proposal for extension of the NRF funded Project on Public Pasts’. 32. Voigt, ‘A Very Special Museum’, 32. For an account of interventions at the McGregor Museum and thoughts on museum transformation in the 1990s more generally, see Witz, Rassool and Minkley, ‘The Castle, the Gallery’. 33. ‘The most famous fish in the world’, postcard, East London Museum, 2000. 34. Department of Nature Conservation, Provincial Museums, 4–5. 35. Notes from displays at the East London Museum, 8 July 2001; Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1969, 50. 36. Davison, ‘Material Culture’, 128. 37. Davison, ‘Material Culture’, 129–30. 38. Cluver and Davison, ‘The South African Museum’, 280. 39. This was in her presentation ‘Space of Memory/Site of Redress: Museums and the Performance of Citizenship’ at the Institutions of Public Culture conference held under the auspices of Emory University’s Center for the Study of Public Scholarship in Cape Town, Museums, Local Knowledge and Performance in an Age of Globalisation, Cape Town, 3–4 August 2001. 40. Kratz, ‘Rhetorics of Value’, 34–36. 41. Both these concepts, ‘sources of uncertainty’ and the ‘agency of objects’, are drawn from Latour, Reassembling the Social. 42. Smith, Treasures of the Africana Museum, 8. 43. On the intentions of MuseumAfrica see Van Tonder, ‘From Mausoleum to Museum’; Bruce and Saks, ‘A New Museum’; Byala, ‘The Museum Becomes Archive’; Byala, A Place That Matters. 44. ‘Iziko Museums of Cape Town: Slave Lodge Current Exhibitions’, retrieved 30 August 2008 from www.iziko.org.za/slavelodge/c_ex.html. 45. ‘South African Jewish Museum. History’, retrieved 23 July 2008 from http:// www.sajewishmuseum.co.za/about/history.asp. For a critical analysis of the exhibitions in the South African Jewish Museum, see Buthelezi, ‘The South African Jewish Museum and the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum’. 46. Xingwana, speech at the launch of the new name for the Northern Flagship Institution. 47. See Davison, ‘Redressing the Past’, on the ways in which Iziko’s collections were reorganized and reconceptualized. 48. See Tietze, A History of the Iziko South African National Gallery, especially chapter 5; see also Martin, Between Dreams and Realities, chapters 4–9.

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49. Photographs by Leslie Witz at Tswaing Crater Museum, 27 October 2004. Text on panels written by Helen van Coller. The Tswaing Crater Museum forms part of Ditsong, the Northern flagship of museums. 50. Murray and Witz, Hostels, Homes, 164. 51. See Williams, Memorial Museums. For a discussion of these new memorial museums in South Africa, see Witz, Minkley and Rassool, ‘Sources and Genealogies’. 52. This point is emphasized in Witz, Minkley and Rassool, ‘Sources and Genealogies’. 53. Hall and Bombardella, ‘Las Vegas in Africa’. 54. There is an extensive literature on the District Six Museum. One of the best pieces that examines the different and often conflicting claims made upon the museum is Rassool, ‘Community Museums’. On the South End Museum, see Kadi, ‘The Group Areas Act’. 55. Photographs by L. Witz of exhibits at the Cata Museum, 10 September 2008. 56. On the Lwandle Museum, see Buthelezi, ‘The South African Jewish Museum and the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum’; Mgijima and Buthelezi, ‘Mapping Museum-Community’; Murray and Witz, Hostels, Homes. 57. Rassool has labelled this a component of a ‘biographic order’. See Rassool, ‘The Individual, Auto/biography’. 58. ‘About the capture site’, retrieved 29 January 2014 from http://www.thecapturesite.co.za/the-site/. 59. On the form of the house museum, see West, Domesticating History. 60. Notice boards at Luthuli Museum, 1 July 2011. 61. ‘The Satyagraha House’, retrieved 6 February 2015 from http://www.satyagrahahouse.com/en/Travel-Johannesburg. See Witz, ‘The Arcades’ Affinities’ for a description and analysis of exhibitions at Satyagraha House. 62. On some of the early ideas for this museum, see Voigt, ‘Sol Plaatje’. 63. ‘The Steve Biko Centre: Museum’, retrieved 6 February 2014 from http://sbf. org.za/museum.php. 64. Werbner, ‘Smoke from the Barrel’; Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments; Wade, ‘Introduction’. 65. ‘Mapungubwe Museum: About Us’, 20 November 2008, retrieved 11 February 2021 from https://web.archive.org/web/20081120192421/ http://web.up.ac.za/default.asp?ipkCategoryID=5901&subid=5901&ipklookid=14; York, ‘The Return of the Golden Rhino’. 66. ‘About Ganora Fossil Museum Nieu Bethesda’, retrieved 10 April 2015 from http://www.graaffreinet.co.za/listing/ganora_fossil_museum. The other fossil museums in this area are those at Wellwood Farm, established by Sydney Rubbidge, and the Kitching Fossil Exploration Centre in Nieu Bethesda. Together with Ganora they form part of what has been presented by GraaffReinet Tourism on ‘The Plains of Camdeboo’ as a ‘paleontology route’. Retrieved on 5 December 2020 from https://www.graaffreinet.co.za/routes/ palaeontology_route. ‘Big history’ refers to placing a universal history in a context of expansive time-scales that, taking a multidisciplinary approach,

Introduction39

67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

stretches history back to the big bang and beginnings of life on earth. This type of history has received financial and strident support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. See Christian, ‘The Case for “Big History”’; Christian, ‘World History in Context’; Sorkin, ‘So Bill Gates has this idea for a history class …’; Christian, Big History. Silverman, ‘All That’s Gold’, 79. In 2009, following an agreement between the Barbier-Mueller Museum and the Gold of Africa Museum, the museum was re-named ‘Gold of Africa Barbier-Mueller Museum’. The intention was to establish ‘a campus on the African continent through this partnership’. See Gold Africa Barbier-Mueller Museum newsletter, August 2011. See ‘Absa Money Museum’, retrieved 31 January 2015 from http://www.absa. co.za/Absacoza/About-Absa/Absa-Bank/Attractions/Absa-Money-Museum. See Mager, Beer, Sociability and Masculinity; Mager, ‘Trafficking in Liquor’. Christians, ‘Step Back in Time’. The quotation on rugby as effecting change in South Africa, becoming the vehicle to change racial attitudes and bringing about reconciliation comes from Danie Craven (president of the South African Rugby Board 1956–1993) and was prominently displayed on the wall at the entrance to the museum section of the Springbok Experience when I visited on 11 October 2013. This idea is also the key element of John Carlin’s book Playing the Enemy and the film Invictus directed by Clint Eastwood. The museum placed a large emphasis on this narrative. Dlamini, ‘The Battle of Ncome Project’. ‘Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre: About’, retrieved 23 July 2008 from http://www.ctholocaust.co.za/. ‘Gallows Museum Opened at C-Max’, South African News Government Agency, 15 December 2011, retrieved 12 March 2015 from http://www.sanews.gov. za/south-africa/gallows-museum-opened-c-max. Thanks to Angela Tuck and Madeleine Fullard for information about this museum. For an analysis of photographs used in the museum, see Van Laun, ‘Bureaucratically Missing’. ‘Events at Evita se Perron’, retrieved 12 March 2015 from http://pdu.co.za/ events.html; ‘The Venue: About Evita Se Perron in Darling’, retrieved 22 July 2008 from http://www.evita.co.za/the_venue.htm. This move is analysed by Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture. See also Fraser’s critique of this strategy in ‘Isn’t this a Wonderful Place?’. Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology (DACST), Annual Report 2001/2002. DACST, White Paper on Arts. DACST, Annual Report 2001/2002. Rassool, ‘Community Museums’, 307–309. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 148. Arts and Culture Task Group, Report of the Arts and Culture Task Group, 55. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 73. Mandela, ‘Address on Heritage Day’; Witz, Rassool and Minkley, ‘The Castle, the Gallery’, 104.

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85. See the argument of Autry, Desegregating the Past. 86. Tunbridge and Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage, 47–50. For South African examples, see Murray, Commemorating and Forgetting and, albeit from a perspective of memorials, Marschall, Landscape of Memory. 87. Graham, Ashworth and Tunbridge, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Heritage’, 34. 88. Marstine, New Museum Theory. 89. The most extensive statement of this position is Stolten, History Making; See also Kros and Saunders, ‘Conversations with Historians’. 90. Witz and Rassool, ‘Making Histories’, 6–15. 91. Byala, ‘Regenerating South Africa’s Heritage Sector’, 234. 92. Clifford, ‘Museums as Contact Zones’, 451. 93. Clifford, ‘Museums as Contact Zones’, 438. 94. Kratz and Karp, ‘Introduction. Museum Frictions’, 2. 95. Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory, 5. 96. See Murray, Commemorating and Forgetting; Marschall, Landscape of Memory; Herwitz, Heritage, Culture and Politics; Autry, Desegregating the Past; Jethro, ‘Aesthetics of Power’. 97. Hlongwane and Ndlovu, Public History and Culture. 98. Rassool and Prosalendis, Recalling Community; Murray and Witz, Hostels, Homes; Ramoupi, Solani, Odendaal and Mpumlwana, Robben Island Rainbow Dreams. This is in addition to a series of articles on these museums. Amongst many, see, for example, Rassool, ‘Community Museums’; Layne, ‘The District Six Museum’; Mgijima and Buthelezi, ‘Mapping MuseumCommunity’; Murray and Witz, ‘Camp Lwandle’; Garuba, ‘A Second Life’; Solani, ‘The Saint of the Struggle’. 99. Byala, A Place That Matters; Carman, Uplifting the Colonial Philistine. 100. Tietze, A History of the Iziko South African National Gallery. 101. Martin, Between Dreams and Realities. 102. Legassick and Rassool, Skeletons in the Cupboard. 103. Coombes, History After Apartheid, 10. There are two other accounts which tend to be more impressionistic. Dubin’s Mounting Queen Victoria, rather than presenting an argument, seeks to convey a series of impressions from those working in the museums about what they see as the problems of, and aspirations for, the sector. Using a similar technique of inscribing lengthy quotations from interviewing senior employees, Goodnow, Lohman and Bredekamp in Challenge and Transformation draw out comparisons on changes which took place in selected museums in cities in South Africa and Australia. 104. I am here referring back to Bennett’s laboratory analogy in Making Culture and adapting the title of Nuttall and Coetzee, Negotiating the Past. 105. Center for the Study of Public Scholarship, ‘Institutions of Public Culture Fellowships, 2005-6’, poster/brochure, Cape Town and Atlanta, Steering Committee, Institutions of Public Culture, 2005. 106. Murray, ‘Working with Inconsistencies’, 32. 107. Lalu, ‘In the Event of History’.

Introduction41

108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

119.

Mowitt, Offering Theory, 147. Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1969, 95. Witz, ‘Eventless History’. Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport, ‘Transformation of the Bartolomeu Dias Museum Research Brief ’, Cape Town, 2007, DM. Amathole Museum Annual Report, 1998/1999, Appendix 1, ‘Press Release, Renaming of Kaffrarian Museum’; Appendix 2, ‘Name Change: Reasoning and Explanation’, AM. As Museum Times was going into its production phase, Robben Island Rainbow Dreams, by Ramoupi, Solani, Odendaal and Mpumlwana, was published. It is a detailed account of the early years of the Robben Island Museum, largely related through remembrances of museum staff from 1997 to 2002, particularly from the vantage of its first director, André Odendaal. Although Robben Island Rainbow Dreams was published too late for Museum Times to engage with it, I do draw on several of the previous papers, articles and talks that are either published or re-published in this compilation on the history of the Robben Island Museum. Deacon, ‘Intangible Heritage’; Shearing and Kempa, ‘A Museum of Hope’; Corsane, ‘Using Ecomuseum Indicators’. O’Keeffe, The Story of Robben Island. Shackley, ‘Potential Futures’. Garuba, ‘A Second Life’, 143. See for example, amongst many articles on the culling, ‘Robben Island Culling “On Track”’, News 24.com, 2 November 2009, retrieved 27 February 2020 from https://www.news24.com/SciTech/News/ Robben-Island-culling-on-track-20091102. Kratz, The Ones That Are Wanted, 214.

Figure 1.1. Chameleon on display at the Robot Zoo, Horniman Museum, London, 2009. © Leslie Witz

Chapter 1

Remaking the Chameleon A History of History in South African Museums The primary metaphor that was used by public history commentators in describing and analysing changes in South Africa museums from the advent of democracy in the 1990s was that of a chameleon. In offering a critique of the alteration of the Africana Museum in Johannesburg to MuseumAfrica, Carolyn Hamilton warned against museums becoming chameleons and merely changing colour to blend in with a changing environment. She noticed that in uncritically taking on board a social history approach to place an emphasis on the city’s underclasses there was a danger that MuseumAfrica in Johannesburg might be following this route and not thinking through its legacies of classification and collection.1 Five years later Amareswar Galla, a consultant then based in Australia, who was employed to change various elements of the South African heritage sector post-1994, challenged the characterization of transformation in museums as chameleon-like. He insisted that they represented ‘an active engagement in shared cultural spaces informed by contested and empowering discourse for all South Africans’.2 Two of his main examples were the Robben Island Museum and the District Six Museum, which, he maintained, showed a true sensitivity to oppression. The former, through recording memories of prisoners and warders was, in his opinion, in the process of becoming ‘one of the most dynamic interpretative centres of the struggles of humanity against oppression’.3 The power of the latter, the District Six Museum, he asserted, lay in the curation of its collections and displays ‘by the very people that the official scripts failed to rub off the record’.4 In 2007 at one of South Africa’s oldest museums, the McGregor in Kimberley, the metaphor was again invoked. In celebrating the

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museum’s centenary, the former director, Elizabeth Voigt, turned Galla and Hamilton’s presuppositions on their head. Museums, she said, need not disavow the chameleon but embrace it by being ‘ready to change to meet new challenges but somehow remaining themselves’.5 The McGregor Museum, she claimed with pride, had shown its adaptability by ‘looking outwards towards community audiences and towards changed policies with regard to collections and displays’, while at the same time maintaining what she saw as the museum’s ‘fundamental functions’, ‘conservation, preservation, education and research’.6 One way to read these different metaphoric associations of the chameleon in 1994, 1999 and 2007 is of a hesitant anticipation of change, eager renunciation to herald transformation, and then unbridled acceptance of conservation signalling a return to what is represented by Voigt as the basic institutional core of a museum’s business. In all these instances the metaphor of the chameleon that is presented is of adaptation to the environment, changing and shifting as the need arises to blend in with new scenarios. But it is perhaps more appropriate to regard chameleons as developing responses to a constantly shifting and multi-faceted environment and signalling its preference as to how to appear. This was an alternative image of the chameleon that was on display at the Horniman Museum in south London in 2009 and again in 2017. Established in 1890 in the house of the tea merchant Frederick Horniman, the museum was initially a veritable cabinet of curiosities, containing items he had acquired on his travels. In 1900 the collection was moved into a specially designated building and classified in accordance with theories of racial hierarchies and evolutionary progression.7 Over the years the classificatory practices shifted, most notably when items in the collections were associated with different categories intended as representative of apparent cultural entities. Some of the most dramatic changes came in the 1990s with the museum developing a centenary gallery that displayed the theoretical assumptions behind the methodologies of collection and display, and the exhibition on African Worlds. In the latter Africa was identified on display not as a singular continental unit but as an expansive and shifting entity, indicated through the inclusion and extensive use of objects and explanations from Brazil, North America, the Caribbean and Europe. In most instances three different interpretations were presented for each object in the exhibition: one of academic expertise, one from the site of the object’s origin before its movement to the museum collection, and one of a contemporary inhabitant of London. The critical reflections on its history in the centenary gallery and the multiplicity of interpretations in African Worlds

A History of History in South African Museums45

suggested concerted attempts by the museum in its exhibitionary strategies to counter any claims that it had merely been chameleon-like (in the sense of simple adaptation). So it was perhaps appropriate that when the Horniman Museum actually displayed a chameleon as part of a travelling temporary exhibition largely aimed at children, entitled Robot Zoo, it confounded the metaphorical stereotypes of constantly blending into the environment. A gigantic robot chameleon that sought to represent the ‘biomechanics … of how real animals work’, was ever alert, had the ability to view the world independently from multiple perspectives and could, when appropriate, ‘blend in or stand out’. ‘Sometimes a chameleon wants to be seen’, reads the text alongside the display. ‘When it meets another chameleon its colours shine brightly or as a warning to stay away or an invitation to a mate’.8 Perhaps then to think of a museum as chameleon is not to characterize it as simply fitting in to suit the social and political circumstances. This is a chameleon that is attentive, appraises situations and displays its intentions. Taking my cue from this re-conceptualized metaphor of the chameleon I want to present a possible trajectory of the ways in which the category of history was employed in museum policy and practice in South Africa from the nineteenth century. My intention in doing this is to begin thinking through different possibilities that were available for the museum chameleon in post-apartheid South Africa. One of these, which I argue became the basis of official policy, was based on claims to revise history through a model of ‘infinitely expansive inclusiveness’ that is ‘grounded in an unrevised notion of the museum’s untroubled ability simply to add others without losing a bit of the self ’.9 In this form the category of history remains bound to a past of empirically verifiable facts that have to be amended, added to, deleted and reinterpreted in order to reconstruct new and different pasts. This I argue is how museums have easily shifted to the category of heritage. Another, which is less prominent, seeks to scrutinize and destabilize the categories of knowledge formation and then to make these apparent. In this approach attempts are made to constantly question the disciplinary foundations of history and museological practice. These are of course not all the variations of history in museums in post-apartheid South Africa, nor is it possible to mark a single museum as typical of either (though there are some remarkably close approximations), but outlining these possibilities enables one to think through the different ways in which histories are being re-imagined in museums and importantly the varieties of practices that are set in place, disbanded and re-conceptualized.

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Natural History Museums and the Sedimented Time of Colonial Rule When the first museums were developed in what later became known as South Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century they presented themselves primarily as scientific institutions. The South African Museum, which had been started rather falteringly by the British colonial administration in Cape Town in 1825 as a repository for the collection and categorization of items in the natural world, and took on the form of a ‘private club for knowledgeable gentleman’, was reconstituted as a public museum in the 1850s.10 Although initially it maintained several features that could be identified with displaying cabinets of curiosity, it expanded its associations with imperial networks of science and, by the end of the century, was using these to develop methods of classification that made use of principles of common association. A small number of ethnographic items, acquired in quite an arbitrary and random manner, formed part of this collection. These were regarded initially as items of curiosity that later became incorporated into formal systems of collection and classification when physical anthropology and scientific racism took hold in the early twentieth century.11 Similar types of museums soon followed in other areas of British control in southern Africa. Much of this activity was in the eastern parts of the Cape colony that had been the region of large-scale military conflicts between colonial armies and local inhabitants for much of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the former military garrison of Grahamstown, a ‘Literary, Scientific and Medical Society’ was formed in 1855. The society invited papers on medical subjects, geology of the area, fossil remains and ‘the physical characters, manners and customs of the Native tribes of South Africa’.12 Reconstituting itself a year later as the Albany Museum, it developed a reputation as an institution for the collection and research of what one of its founders described broadly (although not exclusively) as the ‘ologies’: ‘Natural History; Native Manufacture; Anatomy; Physiology and Pathology; Geology and Mineralogy; and Palaeontology Curiosities’.13 Further eastwards, following a trajectory of imperial expansion and settlement, in King William’s Town, where the crown colony of British Kaffraria had been established in the mid-nineteenth century as the military base for ‘warfare against the Xhosa’, a Naturalist Society was established in 1884, and in 1898 turned into the Frontier Districts Museum.14 Likewise, along the south-eastern sea board, port towns which had become the disembarkation points for schemes of settlement to shore up colonial

A History of History in South African Museums47

frontiers also established their own natural history museums. In Port Elizabeth and Durban, where museums were established in 1856 and 1877 respectively, large numbers of mammals, birds, insects and geological items from adjacent areas which had recently come under British control were collected for study and display. A substantial portion of these museum collections were acquired through hunting and killing animals throughout the recently colonized territories of southern and central Africa. Although by the beginning of the twentieth century, imperial hunts for game on a grand scale had been drastically reduced as animal populations were decimated, the activity of hunting remained firmly in place, increasingly framed in a discourse of serving the interests of museums, classification and science.15 So, the Port Elizabeth Museum could assert with pride that it had ‘a magnificent Eland bull’ that was ‘shot and presented by the late noted hunter, F.C. Selous’, while at the same time calling for ‘serious efforts’ to be made ‘to domesticate the Eland before it becomes extinct’.16 All these museums were more than assertions of a localized urban identity and progress, countering claims emanating from the metropole of colonial backwardness and inertia in areas of settlement.17 In effect they were the sites for domesticating the frontier of conquest of land and people into specimens to be collected, classified, viewed and researched. Like their contemporary counterparts in Britain, these museums of the ‘historical sciences’ – archaeology, palaeontology, anthropology, geology and natural history – reached back into ‘pasts beyond memory’ to construct an extended sequential layering of time. Artefacts collected, classified and displayed in museums provided the evidence for visualizing the ‘modern person’ as the sedimented accumulation of time, its succession and archaeological inheritance.18 In colonial contexts the colonizers were placed by these newly established museums in a long, deep history of a land where they lacked substantial material on which to construct a past. An imagined visitor to the Port Elizabeth Museum, for instance, was confronted in Room 111 on the Second Floor with a ‘real vision of the past history of mother earth. Fossil remains are shown in profusion of reptiles, large and small, which existed in the Midlands of South Africa, possibly about eighteen million years ago’.19 Displays, such as these, enthused the museum guidebook, showed that The earth and all that is on and in it, is nature’s book, and by careful study we are enabled to read the past history of our world back to primeval times more than a hundred million years ago when it was still a world in the making, bubbling and seething on the surface, belching forth vast volumes of gases and liquid rocks.20

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In these ‘institutions of slow modernity’, Bennett maintains, it was increasingly the relationship between objects that mattered, indicating change as directed and gradual, where the labelling and categories served as ‘templates for regulated progress’.21 The normative figure who was formed within these ‘sediments of time’ was racially constituted as ‘white’ and gendered as male. Women and colonized subjects were placed outside modernity and assigned an ‘archaic status’. For women it meant being temporally located in the time of ‘habits’ and ‘cycles’, while the colonized were often situated at ‘evolutionary ground zero’ as pre-modern timeless beings, ‘living fossils’, and objects ‘of display and research’.22 From this base hierarchies were set in place so that, as racial categories that were formed through physical associations, they were coupled with stages of technological and cultural ‘progress’ and situated as sites of ‘arrested development’.23 The visitor to the Port Elizabeth Museum was thus invited, after seeing the variety of mammals on the ground floor, to enter the room containing the ethnological collections. Of exceptional interest, maintained the guidebook, was the central case: Here we have the various implements of palaeolithic man in South Africa. Round water-worn stones with holes artificially drilled through them, axe-heads, spears, scrapers, etc., roughly chipped and truly characteristic of men of the Palaeolithic Age are shown in profusion. On the top shelves there is a large series of skulls of Bushmen, Hottentots and Kafirs, with casts of the skulls of cave men who lived in remotely ancient times.24

These human remains were displayed adjacent to examples of ‘native’ ‘arts and crafts’, ‘full-size reproductions of Bushman paintings’, photographs of ‘two typical Bushmen’ and ‘weapons of the native races’. Framing the gallery, at either end, were two display cases containing animals that could not be accommodated in other areas of the museum.25 As the boundaries and regulations of race were more rigidly demarcated under British colonial rule during the nineteenth century, and then later in the structures of the racially exclusive segregationist state forged in the early decades of the twentieth century, history in museums in South Africa was constituted as the long, gradual, deeply sedimented durée. This layering of the past into the ‘ologies’, deep histories and pre-historical hierarchies was employed together with what Lalu has described as settler-colonial history. This does not refer to processes of racial exclusion, bias or error, but to the shoring up of ‘tensions of empire’ between settler narratives and those of official colonial accounts.26 Settler narratives, Lalu points out, were largely constituted through a creative structure that portrayed settlers as bearers of ‘progress, justice and property’. This was, at times, at odds

A History of History in South African Museums49

with the ‘administrative records pertaining to colonial governmentality’ where settler actions often overstepped and threatened the supposed ‘rational’ ordering of society. It was through creating, selecting and modifying evidence of and from the latter that settler pasts were produced in newspapers, books and museums that claimed a substantial and verifiable history that ‘elide[d] its imaginary structure’. Most importantly, Lalu argues in George Cory’s ‘epic’ history text The Rise of South Africa, a ‘subaltern effect’ was produced. Local inhabitants of the area were cast in Cory’s history as devious and ultimately untrustworthy and thus legitimated what might have appeared as excessive actions by settler and colonial armies.27 Through narratives of colonization and conquest, where ‘the lives of blacks and whites … had become inextricably – and inequitably – intertwined’,28 the events and facts of history were created. The objects collected and displayed had their origins in colonial encounters, emerging from relationships of confrontation with land, animals and people. The institution of the museum stripped these objects of their antagonistic histories and ordered them in nature through sequences and classification. By turning the earth into strata, animals into specimens, and fossils into remains, an archive of the past was created. Through this archive prehistories were constructed that provided colonialism with signs of depth, markers of difference and the basis of assertions to be bearers and directors of progressive change. Much more than ancient histories that drew upon a literate and oral archive, these ‘new pasts that had been fabricated within the recently constructed horizons of prehistory’ stretched human memory ‘backwards in time to encompass the much deeper pasts than had been written into the body’.29 Settler-colonial history also constituted a new discipline for the museum, that of genealogy. This was never more evident than in the developments at the Albany Museum in Grahamstown. To coincide with a series of events to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the scheme of British settlement, the 1820 Settlers Association of South Africa was established, turning settlers into ‘pioneers’.30 A special committee, headed by Cory, acquired a vast assortment of household items, clothing, documents and paintings for the museum. These were attributed worth as artefacts, described as ‘interesting and valuable Settler objects’ and claimed as unique, authentic and irreplaceable.31 Through genealogy an archive was created that sought to establish settler descent and rootedness through family trees, family histories, letters and bibles. The new department and associated items supplemented the existing and ever-growing natural history collections which included an extensive bird room, a mammal hall, and a special gallery showing ‘the traditional

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life of the amaXhosa’ and a series of ‘Bantu wood-carvings, ornaments, clothing, and utensils’.32 One of the most prominent items in the Albany Museum brought the settler histories together with the natural history collections: the Godlonton Candelabrum. Presented to the editor of the Grahamstown Journal, Robert Godlonton, in 1853 by the ‘citizens of Grahamstown’ for advocating settler interests, it featured in an article on the museum published in The Lantern in 1960. It was described by the writer as an ‘Euphorbia encircled by wild fig, with three figures at the base: European settler, Kaffir, and Hottentot, representing the races engaged in the Kaffir Wars. The three European women around the stem are allegorical of commerce, peace and plenty’.33 This was settler-colonial history in its most vivid form in the museum. The foundation was colonial conflict amongst men, where ‘chief Sandile’ is depicted in an attacking pose of almost ‘picturesque wildness’ counterpoised to the seated settler with rifle in his hand, at his side, pointing downwards. The ‘European women’ then emerge from the base, depicted as bearers of progress, reaching up to the light of settlement and knowledge that the Albany Museum sought to portray.34 Amongst the museums established in the latter half of the nineteenth century in what became South Africa, there were two that did not conform entirely to this new slow, deep, sedimented history of the settler-colonial frontier: the Transvaal Staatsmuseum in Pretoria (established 1893) and the National Museum in Bloemfontein (established 1877). They were notably in regions where migrant settler farming communities had appropriated vast tracts of land, clashed and sometimes formed alliances with local communities and created independent states outside the ambit of British colonial rule. Although both museums contained extensive natural history collections, and the beginnings of the former was associated with the promotion of geological knowledge as the basis for independent economic expansion,35 they deliberately sought to establish a sense of national identity by drawing upon an archive of artefacts associated with a recent past which delineated a sequencing marking it off from the sphere of British imperialism. Notably collections were established by these museums around a narrative of a journey of autonomy in the first half of the nineteenth century, of settlers who had moved northwards and eastwards in search of new sources of land and labour. The museum collections cast these journeys of occupation as an odyssey of preordained founding, labelled the ‘Great Trek’.36 A visitor to the Staatsmuseum in Pretoria would therefore have moved from the flora and fauna sections to the library and then onto the historical and ethnological halls where voortrekker household items, trek leader Piet

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Retief ’s diary and bible, a model of a voortrekker wagon and a series of guns were displayed.37 History being produced in these museums was then much more contemporaneous and established collections of items as material markers of settlement and claims to authority and sovereignty. Time was marked by objects constituting moments and props in an elongated pageant that was being called history. By the 1930s a report commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation on museums in the British Empire indicated that there were thirty-two museums in South Africa, of which seven were recognized as ‘historical’. Racially designating the space of South Africa as ‘white’, the commission acclaimed that ‘every centre with a white population of over 10 000, except those in the Witwatersrand area, had a museum or art gallery that was open to the public’. Most of these museums, as had been in the case at the end of the nineteenth century, were devoted to forms of natural history rather than establishing a settler lifestyle with an artefactual presence of history and culture.38 The ‘historical’ museums which were in place tended to be associated with ideas of developing a distinct white Afrikaner nation with a history derived from conquest of the interior and being re-formulated as itinerant epics of predestination towards liberation and independence. Even then these activities tended to be peripheral to the core activities around natural history.39

From Settler Colonial to Settler History: Shortening History If the Godlonton Candelabrum in the Albany Museum is a visual rendering of settler-colonial pasts, then its relocation into a specially designated 1820 Settlers Memorial Museum (which later became the Albany History Museum) in 1965, with the support of local British settler associations and various structures of the apartheid state at regional and national levels, represented a severance between settler and colonial pasts.40 The structuring of South Africa as a nation that was supposedly derived from European settlement and that simultaneously was grounded and indigenous was central to the functioning of apartheid as it gradually took shape from the late 1940s. In effect this included all those who, from the 1950s, were racially classified as white and excluded most of the population who were then categorized into definable ethnic entities, with separate nationhoods. Mamdani refers to this as the ‘dual identity of apartheid’, ‘racial solidarity amongst its beneficiaries, and an ethnic particularism amongst its victims’.41 The category ‘history’ as it came to be employed by South African museums reproduced the division between the racially bound nation and

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ethnically separate ‘people’. A guidebook produced for the South African Museums Association in 1969 maintained that it was ‘understandable that in South Africa the art galleries and (cultural) history museums only came into prominence during recent decades’ because ‘up to the end of last century this country had no pure artistic tradition to speak of, while its rich cultural history, the “sub”-culture, at least of its European population, only became “history” about the same time’. Excluded from this newly established category called ‘history’, as ‘living memory’, was the local population who were conceptualized as timeless, located in the depths of ‘pre-history’ and placed together with the ‘vast and exciting zoological, botanical [and] mineralogical’ collections as ‘ethnological material with which the Europeans were confronted here’.42 A sense of a white identity and history, based on European founding and establishing the figure of Jan van Riebeeck, the first commander of the Dutch East India Company’s revictualling station at the Cape of Good Hope in the mid-seventeenth century as iconic, was promoted by the apartheid state as the basis of a national settler past. Each component of what was considered to be this broader (white) nation was encouraged to establish and promote its own set of founders. In this history of settlement, the frontiering of race found itself being almost outside of history. Not only were races defined as components of the South African ‘European nation’ – with French, British, German and Dutch ancestry – but colonial conflict between components of the settler population and the local inhabitants was substantially reduced. ‘The sense of a commonality to be achieved was one based on settlers and settlement, which hardly encountered blacks even if it was cast in terms of conquest and colonization’.43 What then became ‘South Africa’s heritage’ from the 1950s was one where the moments of ‘white settlement’ were cast as the onset of ‘Western civilization in Africa’ and the ‘nation and the state’ was conceived and born out of ‘European founder nations’.44 Cultural history museums flourished in South Africa from the 1960s. The Guide to Southern African Museums estimated that this category of museums had, by the late 1970s, ‘become far the largest, with about 50% of the total display area and a large majority in a number of institutions’.45 In these museums settlers were depicted as ‘pioneers who tamed the district’ and portrayed as the bearer of culture, dress, progress and modernity.46 Stripped of race and made, through genealogy, household artefacts and military technology, into empirically verifiable history, colonialism was made into exploration, research and discovery. This was never more evident than in the second edition of the Guide to the Museums of Southern Africa published in 1978. The introduction was

A History of History in South African Museums53

toned down, presumably to counter criticism that there may have been an implication that the ‘European’ lacked culture and history. The parenthesis was removed from culture, ‘European’ was changed to ‘settler’ and it was asserted that the ‘settler population did have a rich and variegated material culture’ which only became cultural ‘history’ (italics in original) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Ethnology and natural history were now described as ‘material’ that ‘Europeans found’.47 This was an important shift. Rather than an antagonistic relationship of confrontation where previously the objects had borne the signs of a vanquished enemy, agency was given to the process of ‘finding’ instead of ‘confrontation’, signalling an adjustment to domesticated subjects of examination. A memory of settlement was created in museums that invoked recognition and uniqueness for people who were being constituted as members of a racially exclusive South African nation through an assemblage of artefacts that bore the imprint of the familiar (most notably in the household). In Pretoria there was a dramatic shift in emphasis from natural history to cultural history. A separate National Cultural History Museum (which until 1964 formed part of the Transvaal Staatsmuseum) was described in the Southern African museums’ guidebook as dealing primarily with the ‘cultural history of the European population’. It contained, amongst other things, a collection of ‘Cape, pre-Great Trek furniture … Cape Silver…, a good costume section and an interesting collection of Chinese and other ceramics’.48 Its collection was defined in the timescales of settlement, as ‘articles of daily use which depict the styles from 1652 until the twentieth century’.49 In Cape Town, collections of items deemed to be ‘cultural’ were removed from the South African Museum in 1965 and placed under the auspices of a newly established South African Cultural History Museum. With its headquarters in the old Dutch East India Company Slave Lodge, which had in turn become the vacated premises of the Supreme Court, the museum claimed to represent an array of ‘civilisations’: ‘extensive Egyptian and Roman archaeological collections, Greek vases and terracotta figures and Chinese and Japanese objects… [and] a vast collection of arms and armour, a major part including … Indian and Tibetan weapons’.50 Items in the cultural history museum sustained the image of the settler as the founding figure of a racially exclusive South African nation in an art history of creativity and aesthetic beauty that supposedly bore the hallmarks of ‘civilisation’.51 Although there was a strong emphasis on the materiality of the object, a new type of arrangement was set in place that situated the artefact and its use in a specific time. Exhibitionary techniques shifted from the display case to the period room where culture became depictions of settler

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lifestyle in the bedroom, living room and kitchen, rendered as both ‘accurate historical’ and ‘stylistic impression of the past’.52 Using organizational techniques of succeeding periods enabled change to appear as both foundational and progressive. In these time-scales uniqueness and achievement were demarcated within the boundaries of a discrete culture that were associated with South Africa as a settler-nation. As in the period rooms which were a distinguishable feature of the new History Hall at the Natal Museum in Pietermaritzburg, culture became identifiable and fixed as part of a national story that was settled and of settlement, related to a set of accompanying objects that were located through the museum in the room and the house.53 The interior domestic space as the marker of the everyday, rather than the pageant and the odyssey of movement, became the unit for the transmission of this new time of history. This history which depicted the past as settled, verifiable, periodizable and racially exclusive, were precisely the terms in which heritage was invented and reformulated in what became known as South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As Merrington has argued, heritage has a ‘patriarchal imperial genealogy’, bound up with ideas of inheritance, the family and the nation, and the constitution of races as distinct and hierarchical.54 The measures employed to create heritage were the production of a category that bore the name of ‘history’, the formulation of ideas of conservation with a set of associated practices and invocation of a notion of societal ethics that was depicted as ‘organic’. Practices of history as inheritance, of conservation as the symbol of that history and of society as adhering to a set of common ethics that appeared as seemingly natural were (and indeed are) the foundations of heritage, a teleological narrative where patrimony is emphasized as an essential value.55 Artefacts of ‘how our forefathers lived, worked and played’ from the times of the figure configured as the first settler until the nineteenth century were brought into the realm of ‘South Africa’s heritage’.56 A series of booklets, bearing this title, and produced by the oil and gas company Caltex Africa ‘as part of its contribution to the commemoration of the Union’s Jubilee, 1960’, began with ‘their homes’, and moved on to ‘furnishing, treasures, and the costumes of the people’, ‘customs, amusements and sports’, and ‘their commerce and transport’. The first volume, with its emphasis on buildings and their gables, positioned Cape Town on the threshold of history as the ‘gateway to Africa’,57 ‘the first centre of civilization in Africa south of the Equator’. 58 But the volumes which followed provided much more of a history of settler culture though illustrations and artefacts. Not only were many of these derived from photographs of items in museum collections but they followed the same typology that history

A History of History in South African Museums55

museums were employing. Part two, entitled Interior of their homes and their homes: and their dress, was thus divided into sections that dealt with ‘FINE PIECES OF FURNITURE used at the Cape’, China, glassware, ‘CAPE SILVER’, ‘DOMESTIC METALWORK’, gardens and ‘COSTUMES’.59 Photographs, illustrations, reproductions of paintings and drawings, and extracts from documents provided a visual rendering of the past in these household categories. Their presence settled the past in a history that was constituted as a collection. Almost totally devoid of conflict, it was this collection of foundings, firsts and ‘forefathers’ in the ‘bygone times’ of the home that was rendered by Caltex Africa as ‘the knowledge and appreciation of Our Heritage’.60 Alongside, and sometimes combined with this identification and collection of artefacts designated as culture and history, and constituted collectively and genealogically as heritage, was the acquisition and display of South African art in new or refurbished galleries. The William Humphreys Art Gallery was opened in Kimberley in 1952, based on a collection of ‘Old Masters’ and a bequest of South African paintings, making the gallery ‘one of the most diversified in the country’. In Pretoria, the collection was moved from the City Hall to a newly constructed ‘modern museum building’, where South African art was a specialty. From the 1950s the South African National Gallery in Cape Town committed itself to building a ‘representative collection of South African Art’.61 As with the history museum, South Africanness was constituted as a settler past, with origins of creativity and aesthetic value deriving from ‘founder nations’ located in Europe.62 In the galleries a new art history canon was established where gaps were identified and filled by a chronologically sequencing, establishing a context traced from ‘the European art schools’, with ‘related’ European art ‘forming the background’ to the development of South African art.63 Beyond the artefacts, illustrations and structures of the settler nation there was ‘African heritage’ situated in what Fabian refers to as ‘another Time’.64 This was a heritage that was signalled as distinct from the nation, yet at the same time was very much bound up within its ways of operation. This ‘African heritage’ was located as being ‘of the black peoples of Southern Africa’. Cast very much in the mould of traditions, customs and rituals, these included, amongst many others, ‘games’, ‘music and dancing’, ‘initiation’, ‘funeral rites’, ‘crafts’, ‘beliefs and religion’. They were typified as an essential ‘traditional way of life’ located within the confines of a delineated ethnic group. Here the project of heritage was an ethnographic one concerned with recording in visual and material forms what was termed a ‘fast disappearing’ way of life.65 When this African heritage was part of museum collections and display it was in the earlier

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incarnation of the colonial museum as part of the long durée. ‘African bodies, cultures, languages, and institutions were dismembered’, recast as ‘museum pieces’, placed in the ethnological sections of the natural world and displayed as markers of tradition, tribe and craft.66 The ‘indigenous people of South Africa’ remained in the South African Museum in Cape Town which was described in the guidebook as being ‘now chiefly concerned with natural history’.67 The turn to settlers as the bearers of culture, art and history signalled a shift in the content and the form of the museum as an institution. From being the machine that produced ‘pasts beyond memory’, museums in South Africa were effectively re-made into institutions that shortened the past considerably, making the known into a ‘remembered past that had been transmitted to the present through the storage systems of writing or oral tradition’.68 Artefacts were made into the facts of a settler and settled past, with the display in a diorama, period room or show case providing the narrative of a situational context that needed to be recognizable. Aligning an artefactual legacy with a ‘living memory’ became the foundations of an empirically verifiable past in museums that was labelled as ‘history’. History in the museum became about finding ‘facts’ and their manifestation in written texts, the oral record and objects, establishing provenance, verifying ‘accuracy’ and bringing these together in a visual narrative that presented claims to a past that was knowable and authentic. Through a series of circuits between the academy and the museum, a profoundly realist notion of history was firmly set in place. Departments and divisions of cultural history were established at the universities of Stellenbosch and Pretoria which became training grounds for many of those seeking employment in the museum sector. In 1982, the Society for Cultural History was founded and two years later it began publishing the South African Journal of Cultural History. After three years and six issues a ‘new era’ was celebrated when it joined forces with the South African Association of Art Historians (SAAAH) to publish the South African Journal of History of Culture and Art.69 In this incarnation, as well as in its predecessor, there were continual debates about the category of ‘cultural history’: about what constituted culture, whether the emphasis should be on specific articulations of culture or a wider context, the weighting given to the spiritual in relation to the material aspects of culture, and what an appropriate methodology would be. Translated into museums, cultural history became about applied history, ascertaining the ‘facts’ about an object through systematic research, determining provenance, and establishing ways to preserve that empirically verifiable past.

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Underlying all of this were two wider conceptions of history. One was the connection between cultural history and groups which were often designated racially or ethnically. This worried SAAAH members through its association with apartheid and its foundational principles of separateness. The uneasy partnership between the two organizations came to an end in 1990 when the SAAAH decided to withdraw from the joint journal and launch the South African Journal of Art and Architectural History. It also troubled some of those working in museums who were worried about becoming ‘tools of the system’ through the associations of culture with apartheid’s conceptions of rigidly defined groups.70 But perhaps even more fundamental to cultural history as it emerged as the foundation of the new South African museum that developed from the 1960s was the way in which the category of ‘history’ was framed in very narrowly defined parameters. Evidence, objectivity and the collection of facts as a mode to depict ‘what happened’ or to give an accurate approximation or to provide a backdrop to the emergence of cultural forms were key to the methodology to what was constantly referred to as a science. Munslow and Jenkins have characterized this type of history as ‘reconstructionism’. At its essence is an almost unshakeable belief in empiricism and the ability of the ‘knowledgeable and scrupulous historian’, who has been trained in how to locate evidence and evaluate it, to present an analysis that corresponds with the ‘truth of the past’.71 This was most clearly articulated in an article in the South African Journal of History of Culture and Art by O.J.O. Ferreira of the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch Cultural History at the University of Pretoria. Although acknowledging the impossibility of achieving absolute objectivity, Ferreira asserts that the foundation of good research was to strive towards this ideal. To search for the ‘hidden truth’ was presented as the way for the cultural historian to become scientific.72

From South Africa’s Yesterdays to the Real Story This short history as empirically verifiable living memory was turned by the Reader’s Digest in 1981 into South Africa’s Yesterdays. Drawing heavily on library and museum collections (particularly the Africana Museum in Johannesburg), the heavily illustrated volume presented itself in a series of themes stretching from 1881 to 1981 which claimed to be ‘social rather than political’ and where the issues were ‘reported rather than argued’.73 In this style of reportage which aimed to ‘tell a good story, to trigger memories, and to evoke the mood of the times’, South Africa history started with the ‘Birth of a Nation’ presented as the ‘two white tribes coming

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together’ and ended with ‘Growing up’, depicted as a narrative of progress encompassing the growth of urban settlements, health services and educational institutions.74 Much like museum classification, the chapters were arranged thematically so that they could include a vast array of photographs, magazine and newspaper cuttings and items in museum collections: ‘House and Home’, ‘Leisure and Pleasure’, ‘The Performing Arts’, ‘Going Places’, ‘Fashion Parade’, ‘Printed Page’, ‘Sporting Life’, ‘Earning and Spending’, and ‘South Africans at War’.75 History was aligned with memory and turned into a series of artefacts that were constituted as national and defined as progress. In this history as progress, where the past was an assemblage of artefacts that evoked nostalgia, racial segregation and apartheid did make very brief appearances. But in these very few instances South Africa’s Yesterdays made use of and presented history in a liberal paradigm. The structures of race were presented as the ‘problems’ of a ‘mixed society’ that had begun with the movement of frontier farmers in the nineteenth century and had set in place an ‘almost Darwinian inevitability of events – of action and violent reaction’. South Africa’s Yesterdays claimed that over the next two centuries this led to a series of conflicts, the emergence of what was described as ‘black political consciousness’ that is said to have ‘tax[ed] the integrity and expertise of the country’s leaders’, and culminated in the ‘incident which jolted millions of South Africans’ at Sharpeville in 1960 and further ‘outbreaks of violence in 1976’ when ‘black schoolchildren took to the streets and clashed with police in bloody encounters across the country’. All these events were then presented by Reader’s Digest as difficulties, ‘complex’ and ‘acute’ facts of the past (called ‘racial problems’) which needed to be overcome.76 More than a set of problems though, these were instances of resistance to apartheid, which in turn set in place two complementary movements around the category of history and its deployment in the public domain in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The first was at best a very deep distrust of what was being projected as history through the state broadcasting media and the school system. History was regarded by anti-apartheid activists as a series of falsehoods that had been imposed via the state, primarily through school textbooks, and learnt by rote. What was evident in these formulations was an understanding, albeit quite crude, that history was being produced through structures of power and authority which determined its content.77 The question of ‘whose history’ was consequently always presented as key to developing new, alternative forms of historical material that was produced, distributed and disseminated, largely through non-governmental organizations, designed for political

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education and as a means of popularizing social history. At times bearing the title ‘People’s History’, these histories were presented as one of many, as history could be ‘written in many different ways’.78 The second movement, which sometimes contradicted the former (and was indeed evident in the same publications), was that what was being produced as these oppositional texts was authoritative. The notion and prominence of the museum (and the book as museum) as a site of relatively short, provable history in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with much broader trends within South African society to establish the ‘real story’ of the past and to abbreviate it. Broadly termed ‘people’s history’, these alternative texts included claims to be ‘the real history of the people of South Africa – a history that speaks of the majority of South Africans. It is a history that has been hidden from us, hidden from our text books’.79 This ‘real history’ was a short and recent one, largely dealing with events of repression and resistance in the twentieth century, and reaching back to the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries to show ‘origins’ and ‘legacies’. The procedures of history as an academic pursuit – locating primary and secondary sources, critically using and evaluating evidence, providing chronology, understanding different viewpoints – were all presented as necessary in order to establish a ‘new’ history that was all about ‘the doings and thoughts of ordinary men and women’, that identified ‘historical sources of dispossession, oppression and exploitation’, and examined ‘the ways in which these were resisted’.80 Picking up on these trends, and after conducting a series of market surveys which found that ‘the faint stirrings of rebellion against the traditional view of South African history [had] grown into a whirlwind’,81 the Reader’s Digest in 1988 decided to present a completely revised history of South Africa. Discarding almost in its entirety South Africa’s Yesterdays, it drew together all the latest historical research, particularly that coming from radical social historians in the South African academy, and compiled an Illustrated History of South Africa. It was an instant best-seller. The first print run sold out ‘within a couple of months’ and Reader’s Digest battled ‘to keep up with demand for the book’.82 One the major reason for its success was its emphasis on twentieth-century history, especially its large section on ‘Apartheid and resistance’ where, Reader’s Digest claimed, ‘it was the first local popular publication in nearly 30 years to feature photographs of Nelson Mandela’.83 The other was its sub-title. Going with its market surveys rather than advice to the contrary from several academics, the sub-title Reader’s Digest chose was The Real Story.84 That ‘real story’ was one that instead of using thematic categories was explicitly chronological and gave primacy to a narrative of colonialism, apartheid and resistance:

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‘The Peopling of Southern Africa (to 1652)’, ‘The Fatal Impact (16521800)’, ‘Conquest and Dispossession (1800-1868)’, ‘Diamonds, Gold and War (1868-1902)’, ‘Union and Disunion (1902-1948)’, ‘Apartheid, Resistance and Negotiation (1948-)’. Events were rearranged, deleted and added in a ‘quest for truth where nothing was taken for granted’. Previous accounts were turned into ‘beliefs’ and ejected from the past ‘if they did not fit the facts’ that were represented as deriving from ‘the vast amount of new academic research into the nation’s past’.85 In this purging of the past to make way for a ‘real history’ of linear progression, one aspect from South Africa’s Yesterdays was retained. Museumtype classifications and artefacts were incorporated into each section as a special feature entitled ‘Life of the times’. Including ‘The Naughty Nineties’, ‘Making South African music’ and ‘The many faces of a changing South Africa’, these were now re-cast as ‘aspects of social history’. The museum and its categories were incorporated into a new ‘real story’, and although in the preface there were claims that ‘history has many memories and many versions’, that ‘one person’s beliefs may be another’s lies’ and that ‘today’s truth may be tomorrow’s fiction’, it was through checking the text with ‘our consultants’ and incorporating new research ‘where appropriate’ that a ‘broader, more balanced view of South African history’ was asserted.86 History was authorized as a site of chronological progress, which could be reconstructed through a process of accumulating evidence, correcting interpretations and offering up more and better versions of ‘the past’ of human memory.

Remaking Museums, Remaking Histories Indications of which direction museums would take in post-apartheid pasts, that veered between uncovering the real story and exploring the politics of historical knowledge production, were demonstrated at the University of the Witwatersrand History Workshop’s landmark Myths, Monuments, Museums: New Premises? conference in 1992. The ambiguity of the word ‘premises’ and the invocation on the conference programme and poster, created by artist Penny Siopis, of crowds toppling the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria (the iconic structure of an Afrikaner nationalist past) suggested that this was an opportunity to rethink the content and methodologies of histories in the public domain. There were moments at the conference when such approaches seemed to be on the table. Issues of working against simple dichotomous notions of authenticity, placing publics and their production of history at the forefront of change, turning

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museums into sites of debate and contestation, and calls for curators to display their authorial role in the construction of pasts all challenged the power of the museum as the possessor and controller of the artefact as fact.87 Yet these moments seemed to be few and far between. Much more apparent were attempts to include more in museums and to correct biases. Hamilton’s hopes for museum ‘to acknowledge their own claims to authority, to come to a more reflexive understanding of museum discourse, and reconsider their charters as sites of public memory’ were almost drowned out by a chorus from museum practitioners who presented their practices primarily as the ‘making good of omissions’.88 One word was almost entirely missing from the conference in 1992: heritage. From my records of the papers I have only been able to find three directly dealing with ‘heritage’. In these three papers there were intonations of a prospective relationship between museums and heritage being tabled. One, by Janette Deacon, then of the National Monuments Council, was concerned to include more archaeological sites that affirmed a precolonial past into the ambit of preservation, declaration and accessibility as ‘living monuments’. Heritage, for Deacon, entailed a project of making the findings of archaeologists more popular, so that they became ‘rich’ with meaning and knowability.89 The second, by Farieda Khan of the Environmental Advisory Unit of the University of Cape Town, was more concerned with the politics of heritage and made calls for redress, inclusion, consultation, sensitivity and addressing material concerns as the basis of a ‘heritage conservation’ practice which was ‘relevant to the needs of local communities’ and would commemorate a ‘common past’.90 Much like the museum practitioners at the conference, heritage in both instances was about adding on more, including extra voices and eliminating partiality to arrive at a consensual past that bore all the hallmarks of history as real. Most significantly, heritage and museums were explicitly brought together in a paper by R.C. de Jong of the National Cultural History Museum in Pretoria, a museum which had been at the forefront of establishing the practice of cultural history as heritage in South African museums in the 1960s. The paper delivered in 1992 signalled a future trajectory for the museum in South Africa. Placed at the centre of the proposals presented in the paper was the conservation of what was termed ‘cultural heritage’ as an amalgamating force that began in the home and then moved outwards to ‘the state and the public’.91 Heritage was depicted as being all about inheritance from the past for a future of cultural interaction.92 With the problems of conservation being identified in the paper as coordination and relevance, it is not altogether surprising that the major proposals for museums in the realm of heritage involved

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managerial structures that would obviate ‘fragmentation’, involvement of communities in decision-making and moving away from a ‘Eurocentric approach to the presentation and interpretation of South African history’. The heritage of museums in the future, De Jong asserted, was to become ‘more Africa-oriented’, ‘adopt an African character’, reflect and respect ‘cultural diversity’, and work against the content and typology of ‘small stereotype cultural history museums’ that ‘mushroomed in the past’.93 Heritage for museums was a project of sustaining conservation, embracing history as an authentic past that was readily available for collection and preservation, and expanding the category to include ‘the tangible and intangible property considered to be of cultural value by any group of South Africans’.94 A South Africa of ‘groups’ with ‘cultures’ was presented by De Jong as the heritage of the future for museums. Behind all these discussions of museum futures was the prospect of the African National Congress assuming the reins of government in a democratic South Africa. A strong desire was expressed throughout the conference to obtain ‘the sanction of the ANC’ and become ‘the willing functionaries of a new governing party’.95 Delegates were informed by the presenter that the paper given by the National Cultural History Museum member of staff had been endorsed by the Transvaal branch of the South African Museums Association and submitted to the African National Congress for comment. Within the world of anti-apartheid political activism of the previous decade, though, there had barely been a mention of museums. At the Culture and Resistance Festival held in Gaborone, Botswana, in 1982, self-styled ‘cultural workers’ from South Africa promoted art as a ‘weapon of struggle’ against apartheid. It was ‘mobilising peoples art’, producing visual images for the liberation movements and furthering the cultural boycott of South Africa that were prioritized.96 Museums were simply not on the agenda. A similar situation prevailed five years later at the Culture in Another South Africa conference held in Amsterdam, which brought together South African cultural activists in exile and those at home. Resolutions were passed, amongst others, to continue the academic and cultural boycott against apartheid South Africa, to assert that the role of ‘cultural workers’ was ‘inseparable from the overall struggle against apartheid’ and that literature, poetry, the media, visual arts (graphics, film and video, photography, architecture, crafts), performing arts (theatre, music and dance) had to continue to be mobilized to ‘further the national democratic struggle’.97 By the time of the Myths, Monuments, Museums conference in 1992 circumstances had altered dramatically. The ANC and other liberation

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organizations had been unbanned, many exiles had returned to South Africa, political leaders were released from prison, and intensive negotiations were underway around the structure of transitional arrangements for the establishment of a democratic form of government. At the ANC’s Looking Backwards Looking Forwards: Culture and Development Conference, held in Johannesburg in April/May 1993, the future of museums came under discussion. They were perceived to be ‘educational institutions’ that were specifically located in ‘the scientific and cultural structure of society’. Their future prospect was articulated as the ‘primary custodians of and repositories for the material culture of the nation’.98 In such a location as a ‘cultural repository’, and despite a series of sometimes acrimonious negotiations and discussions over the future of museums between the ANC and elements within the established museum sector, there was a convergence in ideas over the ways in which the museum as heritage produces and structures knowledge. In the early 1990s the National Party government, which had ruled through various forms of its policy of apartheid for over forty years, after meeting with a delegation from the South African Museums Association, had appointed the ‘Museums for South Africa Intersectoral Investigation for National Policy’ (MUSA). This incensed the ANC who ‘saw MUSA as part of a unilateral restructuring process by the apartheid government’. When MUSA’s report was released in early 1994 the ANC’s Commission for the Reconstruction and Transformation of the Arts (CREATE) called the report ‘an attempt to maintain the status quo’, a ‘mere re-positioning in the South African museum sector’ that would effectively serve to protect the structures and staff of existing institutions from any semblance of fundamental change. Yet, although CREATE did raise the issue that no plans had been proposed by MUSA to deal with what was referred to as the ‘ideological functions’ of museum collections,99 it did not question the ways in which the museums function to produce knowledge. Indeed, the museological aspects were characterized by CREATE as ‘technical’ competencies and, as such, they were largely in agreement with this part of the MUSA report. Instead, it was institutional restructuring, democratic decision making, the implementation of affirmative action in staffing and aligning museums with new government social and economic policies that were seen as the means to dust away the ‘giant cobwebs of the pasts’ that stood ‘guard over a redundant history’.100 Over the next few months there were bitter disputes and ongoing negotiations over the content of the MUSA report. This all took place amid the transition to democracy in South Africa. With an ANC-led government in place from May 1994, the report was shelved and the

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process over the future of museums was placed within the parameters of the Arts and Culture Task Group (ACTAG) appointed by Minister of the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, Ben Ngubane.101 The ACTAG report, which was finally published in the middle of 1995, after an extensive series of meetings, consultative workshops across the country and the release of provisional drafts which were then opened up to comments, confirmed the emphasis on the institutional imperatives. Museums were cast in the ACTAG report, first and foremost, as artefactual sites of knowledge. The primary role of a museum is to look after the collections for which it has custodianship. The museum’s job is to ensure that the necessary information is collected about where and when the item was found, that the item is stored safely so it does not deteriorate, and that a representative collection is put on display so that the public can see what is there and learn something of the results of the study of the material.102

Once these functions were taken as a given, and marked off as technical, the recommendations stressed governance, restructuring, and the rationalization of existing national museums in the north and south of the country into two flagship institutions.103 A separate report on museums, which appeared as an addendum to the main ACTAG document, elaborated on these recommendations. As at the conference at the University of the Witwatersrand several years previously, it was once again the National Cultural History Museum in Pretoria that featured prominently in laying down possible future directions. The report, authored by Udo Küsel, the museum’s director, reiterated that museums were sites of education and collection. Its objectives were for museums ‘to become permanent repositories in which significant cultural and scientific treasures are housed and cared for on behalf of the citizens’ and to use those collections to ‘increase knowledge and understanding of the cultural and natural world’.104 In this form the museum was presented as a veritable accumulator of authorized knowledge, the ‘facts’ of ‘the past’, which it acquires in an almost transcendental fashion, and which is passed on to a public constituted as a nationalized citizenry. What then acquires importance is the means to operate these functions of accumulation and transmission, and over two-thirds of the addendum’s sixty-six recommendations are about ‘governance bodies’, ‘structures’, ‘legislation’, ‘finances’, ‘staff’, ‘assets’ and ‘information systems’.105 It is primarily through implementing these administrative changes that museums were placed by the report in a position to be re-cast as ‘custodians of the nation’s heritage’.106

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But, of course, the content of that knowledge represented in these restructured institutions also needed to be altered. Settler pasts did not accord with the post-apartheid presents and the development of new publics who formerly had been regarded as people and cultures ‘only to be looked at’.107 Instead, museums were promoted in Küsel’s report for ACTAG as prospective champions of intangible heritage, living heritage and living traditions. Museums are exhorted to add ‘intangible heritage (voices, values, traditions, languages, oral history, folklife, creativity, adaptability and distinctiveness) into their collections’. The collection of what is labelled as Amasiko (and loosely translated as ‘living heritage) ‘through recording on paper, video, photographs and tape’ is presented as adding value to the already extensive items of ‘tangible heritage’ (‘objects, artworks, documents, audiovisuals … sites, places, landscapes, sculptures’) held either in museums holdings or identified in locations accorded significance by museums. Offered as a manoeuvre of inclusivity, Amasiko is presented as enabling museums to ‘portray an integrated and holistic South African culture and history’.108 The report recommends training existing museum staff and appointing newer ones so that this ‘living culture’ is ‘given its rightful place in museums’, so that ‘intangible heritage’ through ‘song, dance, music and story-telling’ is incorporated into educational programmes and so that a ‘more Afro-centric approach to museums’ is adopted.109 A prospective future, envisaged by the report, is one that counters ‘an over emphasis on white local museums in virtually every little town’, fills in the ‘neglected’ aspects of ‘the country’s history’ and, in approaching history as if it is a racial scale that has been unfairly weighted to one side, aims to restore a balance to the past.110 A notion of ‘bias’, with history depicted in the report as the means to establish factual objectivity, was to become central to official policy towards museums.111 Activities of collection, documentation and dissemination of intangible heritage are thus presented as incorporative strategies to eliminate ‘bias’. Through these methodologies not only does Amasiko enable museums to present themselves as promoting transformation, but the intangible items acquire museumness through conservation and classification. The process of making museum meaning is described at some length in Küsel’s report, stressing the very same practices and procedures that had been used by cultural history museums over at least the previous quarter of a century: Items in a collection have little value unless they are documented and made accessible. This information is essential if an item is to be placed in its proper context in a museum collection and is to be of use in research. Museums are more than just institutions that house collections; they also record and process huge amounts of

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data that relate to the objects they store. The combination of assemblages of objects and related information makes museums powerful educational and research resources for our country: they are information utilities par excellence. Collections of objects that are properly preserved, documented, researched, displayed and interpreted present a three-dimensional world in which individuals can, as in no other situation, understand themselves in historical and scientific perspective. This enables them to interpret their own and other culture. Such a first-hand, intimate interaction between person and object will always remain the museum’s unique and priceless medium of communication.112

Intangible heritage would, in this conceptualization of the museum, acquire ‘value’ by being ‘properly preserved’, placed in a ‘proper context’ and situated ‘in historical and scientific perspective’. In so doing it would become part of the world of museum as ‘information utility’. So, as Gary Minkley points, out, while indigenous knowledge and intangible heritage is characterized as fundamentally the antithesis of the settler/tangible, it seeks and is given meaning by being ‘either listed and made textual, translated via objects as represen­tations of context (plants, instruments, artefacts, etc.), translated into images and memorial objects (plaques, statues, signs, pictures), or archived, making memory, performance, etc. into documentary listed material’.113 As museums attempt to inscribe ‘new’ and/or ‘real’ pasts by incorporating ‘living traditions’ into their institutional activities, intangible heritage acquires value, factuality and a corporeal presence. This enabled older forms of cultural history to reassert itself as the means to provide originating context, explanations of form and methodology for collection.114 Somewhat ironically, it was through promoting heritage that the transforming museum could remain as the ‘last relic of the positivistic view of history’.115

Museums and Changing Histories What then was presented in a range of policy documents as the post-apartheid museum was a strategy of incorporation through a more inclusive model of representation. Initially couched in terms of bridging barriers between cultural groups, it was reframed as a national imperative grounded in histories and memories of apartheid and resistance.116 According to Rooksana Omar, the President of the South African Museums Association from 2001 to 2003, the task of museums was one of ‘correcting the historical and cultural record’, ‘depicting the struggle for democracy and contributing to the forging of a new national narrative in public life’.117 She

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characterized the museum as an institution that needed to prioritize ‘the national collective memory’ and engage ‘creatively in national cultural production’.118 Artefacts and accumulation remained central to the methodology but were re-presented by Omar in narratives of history from below, enabling through their new contexts ‘the voices of the former victims of oppression and exploitation’ to speak and be heard in order to ‘serve a new post-liberation South Africa’.119 The trajectory presented here suggests that the dominant policy framework which emerged in museums in the transition to post-apartheid South Africa was one where there was a convergence between older models of history in museums and the claims to present new and different pasts. In this convergence an empiricist and deeply conservative history was produced that set the bounds of what was claimed as transformation in policy documents and through museum associations. This mode of history was one that strove for inclusivity by adding more and more voices, objects and explanations that were given the authority of a factual past. Through this approach to history that sought to ‘fill in gaps’ and ‘correct biases’,120 the very basis of the museum, its modes and histories of collection and classification, far from being challenged, was reinforced, leaving ‘intact the concept of plenitude at the heart of the museum project’.121 History in the post-apartheid museum, instead of being on the move, performative, off balance and placing ‘authoritarianism in perpetual disgrace’,122 was instead conceptualized as restoring an imaginary equilibrium to a post-apartheid present. In the words of Irit Rogoff, what was assumed was ‘a possibility of change without loss, without alteration, without remapping the navigational principles that allow us to make judgments about quality, appropriateness, inclusion, and revision’.123 There was a sense though, in Omar’s assertion of the possibility of a different type of history, that replacement was insufficient and that one should not merely randomly place new labels on old objects. Instead, she asserted, artefacts should not be sites of veneration but rather should offer up ‘critical points of challenge, discussion and debate’ that related to ‘new sets of social and political relations’, reflecting ‘wider issues of inequality, discrimination, privileged access to resources, and the conflicts, tensions and challenges these engendered’.124 This harks back to the questioning of the sites of authority and power involved in the production of history that was evident in struggles against apartheid in the 1980s and that became submerged in policy formulations in the 1990s. Omar’s claims though are ones that want to think of museum objects in a different way, to make them speak to the politics of the present in contemporary South Africa. It is as if they can be deployed to address societal concerns.

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If one takes her suggestions further, it opens up the possibility of interrogating the very classificatory formations of the museum and the ways in which the category ‘history’ is used as speaking for a past that can be reconstructed. Bennett’s museum as a ‘civic laboratory’ is a site of discovering and remaking incomplete meanings, where objects are multi-dimensional and have no fixed beginnings or endings.125 The constant provisionality of the object in the laboratory allows for an examination of how localities and temporalities are made and re-made and the possibility to interrogate existing frameworks and assumptions about the representation, production and circulation of knowledge. This is a history that allows the possibility of constantly challenging the structures, modalities and authorities of the discipline. It is a history where changing time rather than conserving it becomes paramount. In a moment of transition there was the potential for museums in post-apartheid South Africa to open up history to the question of remaking events, recasting time and embracing the ‘tug of-war between competing knowledges regarding the relations between objects and persons’.126

Notes   1.   2.   3.   4.   5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

Hamilton, ‘Against the Museum as Chameleon’. Galla, ‘Transformation in South Africa’, 43. Galla, ‘Transformation in South Africa’, 40. Galla, ‘Transformation in South Africa’, 41. Voigt, ‘A Very Special Museum’, 32. Voigt, ‘A Very Special Museum’, 27. Coombes, Reinventing Africa, 113–17. Texts cited and information on the museum and its history are drawn largely from my visit to the Horniman on 12 June 2009. Rogoff, ‘Hit and Run’, 66. Dubow, Commonwealth of Knowledge, 37. Dubow, Commonwealth of Knowledge, 58–59. Barry, ‘The Albany Museum’, 217–18. Gore, Albany Museum, 2, 6. Hirst, ‘Introduction’, x–xii. See also Du Preez, Museums of the Cape, 36–40. Landau, ‘Hunting with Gun and Camera’, 153. In an alcove near the top of the staircase of the Natural History Museum in London there is a statue of Selous with a gun across his chest with the inscription: ‘Hunter, explorer, naturalist. Born 1851. Killed in action at Beho Beho German East Africa, 4.1.1917’. Lazarus, Port Elizabeth, 22. Carman, Uplifting the Colonial Philistine, 30.

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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory, 1–11, 36–63. Lazarus, Port Elizabeth, 39. Lazarus, Port Elizabeth, 41. Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory, 187. Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory, 110–13, 136–37. Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory, 59. Lazarus, Port Elizabeth, 27. Lazarus, Port Elizabeth, 28–30. Lalu, The Deaths of Hintsa, 124–39. Lalu is drawing here on Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire. Lalu, The Deaths of Hintsa, 124–39. The word ‘epic’ is not Lalu’s; it comes from Gore, Albany Museum, 29. Crais, The Making of the Colonial Order, 125. Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory, 87. Tapping, ‘Genealogy’, 82. Barry, ‘The Albany Museum’, 219. Welman, Museums of Grahamstown, 2; Barry, ‘The Albany Museum’, 225. Barry, ‘The Albany Museum’, 223. Bunn, ‘The Sleep of the Brave’, 79. Plug, ‘Die Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek’, 113–14. Dubow, Commonwealth of Knowledge, 167–68. Hugo, ‘The Museum in 1906’, 14–15. Grobler and Pretorius, ‘The British Museums Association’, 50, 64. Gore, ‘A Lack of Nation?’, 37; Grobler, ‘Collections Management Practices’, 365. Schoeman, Bailie’s Party, 338–39. Mamdani, ‘Reconciliation Without Justice’, 4. Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1969, 5. Minkley and Witz, ‘Sir Harry Smith’, 39. State Information Office, South Africa’s Heritage, 3–5. Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1978, 6. Department of Nature Conservation, Provincial Museums, 32. Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1978, 6. Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1978, 167. ‘Components of the Museum’, Museum Memo, National Cultural History Museum, 17(3) (September 1989), 16. Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1978, 24. See Mazel, ‘Apartheid’s Child’; Mazel, ‘Exhibiting Apartheid’. Grobler, ‘Collections Management Practices’, 382–86; Pilgrim, ‘Inherited from the Past’, 5. Rodéhn, ‘Displaying Anglophile Whiteness’, 285. Merrington, ‘Heritage, Pageantry’, 133. Merrington, ‘Heritage, Pageantry’, 134. Caltex (Africa) Ltd, South Africa’s Heritage. Merrington, ‘Heritage, Pageantry’, 132.

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58. Caltex (Africa) Ltd, South Africa’s Heritage, Part One (1960), 2, 17. 59. Caltex (Africa) Ltd, South Africa’s Heritage, Part Two (1961), 6, 10, 16, 20, 24, 26, 28. The text is in upper case in the original. 60. Caltex (Africa) Ltd, South Africa’s Heritage, Part Five (1964), 2. 61. Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1969, 83, 112, 25. 62. Barben, ‘What Does it Mean?’, 57, 112–14; Martin, Between Dreams, 54. 63. Barben, ‘What Does it Mean?’, 85; Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1969, 83, 112, 25; Tietze, A History of the Iziko South African National Gallery, 105. 64. Fabian, Time and the Other, 148. 65. See Tyrrell and Jurgens, African Heritage, dustjacket and preface. 66. Peterson, ‘Introduction: Heritage Management’, 7. 67. Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1978, 18–19. 68. Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory, 1. 69. Ferreira, ‘Editorial’, 3. 70. Webb, ‘The Cheshire Cat’s Advice’, 248. 71. Jenkins and Munslow (eds), The Nature of History Reader, 9. 72. Ferreira, ‘Taak van die Kultuurhistorikus’, 100. 73. Reader’s Digest, South Africa’s Yesterdays, 7. 74. Reader’s Digest, South Africa’s Yesterdays, 7, 24, 41. 75. Reader’s Digest, South Africa’s Yesterdays, 8–9. 76. Reader’s Digest, South Africa’s Yesterdays, 36–37. 77. Witz and Hamilton, ‘Reaping the Whirlwind’, 42. 78. This quotation comes from the back cover of the Let Us Speak of Freedom series from the University of the Western Cape, which, from the late 1980s, ran a People’s History Programme. Similar formulations are to be found in the National Education Crisis Committee package of materials and sources that could be used by students and communities, entitled What is History? 79. National Union of South African Students, A People’s History, 3. Other manifestations of the term ‘People’s History’ in published material are those cited above and also the series of people’s histories produced under the auspices of the University of the Witwatersrand’s History Workshop: Callinicos, Gold and Workers; Callinicos, Working Life; Callinicos, A Place in the City. 80. National Education Crisis Committee, What is History?, 1. 81. Reader’s Digest ‘Bluebook’ for the Illustrated History of South Africa, cited in Witz and Hamilton, ‘Reaping the Whirlwind’, 36. 82. Witz and Hamilton, ‘Reaping the Whirlwind’, 29. 83. Oakes, Reader’s Digest Illustrated History, 7. 84. Witz and Hamilton, ‘Reaping the Whirlwind’, 37. 85. Oakes, Reader’s Digest Illustrated History, 5–9. 86. Oakes, Reader’s Digest Illustrated History, 6–7. 87. Kros, ‘New Culture of Control’; Hamilton, ‘The Poetics’; Rassool and Witz, ‘The Dog’. 88. Hamilton, ‘The Poetics’, 237, 235. 89. Deacon, ‘Archaeological Sites’, 9–10. 90. Khan, ‘Hidden Heritage’, 13.

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91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

De Jong, ‘Development of National Policy’, 5. De Jong, ‘Development of National Policy’, 3. De Jong, ‘Development of National Policy’, 14–16. De Jong, ‘Development of National Policy’, 5. Hamilton, ‘The Poetics’; 237. Rassool and Witz, ‘The Dog’, 241. ‘Thamsanqa Culture is a Weapon of Struggle’, retrieved 17 November 2008 from http://www.sahistory.org.za/pages/library-resources/articles_ papers/thamsanqa_weapon_struggle.htm. 97. Campschreur and Divendal, Culture in Another South Africa, 214–23. 98. Sirayi, ‘Securing a Shared Sense’, 53. 99. Coombes, History After Apartheid, 16, citing Odendaal, ‘Giving Life to Learning’, 4. 100. Odendaal, ‘Museums and Change’, 18. 101. This account is from Odendaal, ‘Museums and Change’. Similar accounts are in Coombes, History After Apartheid, 14–17; Küsel, A New Policy, 1–3; Corsane, ‘Transforming Museums’. 102. Arts and Culture Task Group, Report, 60. 103. Arts and Culture Task Group, Report, 68–69. 104. Küsel, A New Policy, 4. 105. Küsel, A New Policy, 86–106. 106. Küsel, A New Policy, 70. 107. Bennett, Critical Trajectories, 129. 108. Küsel, A New Policy, 9–11. 109. Küsel, A New Policy, 17, 27. 110. Küsel, A New Policy, 11. 111. Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, White Paper. 112. Küsel, A New Policy, 10. 113. Minkley, ‘A Fragile Inheritor’, 29. 114. See, for example, Burden, ‘Museums and the Intangible Heritage’. 115. Domanska, ‘Toward the Archaeontology’, 397. 116. For an early articulation of what transformation of museums in South Africa should entail, see Wilmot, ‘Bridging Cultural Barriers’. 117. Omar, ‘Meeting the Challenges’, 53. 118. Omar, ‘Meeting the Challenges’, 53. 119. Omar, ‘Meeting the Challenges’, 54. 120. See Witz, Minkley and Rassool, ‘South Africa and the Unsettling’; Witz, Rassool and Minkley, ‘The Castle, the Gallery’; and Witz, Minkley and Rassool, ‘No End’. 121. Rogoff, ‘Hit and Run’, 66. 122. Peffer, Art and the End, 239. 123. Rogoff, ‘Hit and Run’, 66. 124. Omar, ‘Meeting the Challenges’, 54. 125. Bennett, Making Culture, 55–56, 64. 126. Bennett, Making Culture, 65.

Figure 2.1 Hostel 33, Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum. 2014. © Thulani Nxumalo.

Chapter 2

History on the Beach Making a Museum Home in Lwandle In the language of isiXhosa elwandle translates into English as ‘at sea’ and sometimes pertains to the beach as well. The word in Afrikaans for beach is strand and the sea is die see. Adjacent to the southern African coastline as it stretches out in a north-easterly direction from the edge of the peninsula at Cape Point in a pincer-like formation to almost the same southerly latitude at Hangklip where runaway slaves took refuge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and named as a ‘false bay’ by sailors who mistook it for Table Bay further north, are the towns of Strand and Lwandle. The former, initially largely a fishing village called Mosterd’s Bay, and then Van Ryneveld’s Town when settlers moved in following the development of De Beers Explosive Works in the area in 1901, was turned in the twentieth century into a seaside resort. Known for its extensive beachfront and calm warm waters, it was described in a guide book of the 1920s as ‘one of the finest bathing resorts along the coast of South Africa’.1 In the 1950s and 1960s people racially classified as ‘coloured’ under apartheid, many of whom had worked in the boarding houses and hotels or ran small businesses near the sea front, were forcibly removed to nearby Rusthof, while in Strand, for those identified under the Population Registration Act (No 30 of 1950) as ‘white’, additional specially set aside residential, dining, beach and recreational facilities were constructed.2 Immediately to the interior of Strand and Rusthof the farm of Cornelius Petrus Jansen van Vuuren was expropriated (with some compensation) during the 1950s and turned by the Stellenbosch Divisional Council into a ‘location’ of dormitory accommodation for male workers from areas 600 to 1000 kilometres to the east of Strand. They were recruited as ‘native’ (a category the Population Registration Act defined as ‘a member of any aboriginal race or tribe of Africa’) labourers for the municipal services of the seaside resort and

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for the growing fruit and canning industry that was burgeoning in the town of Somerset West at the base of the nearby Helderberg mountains. Wedged between and separated by buffer zones from the seaside resort of Strand and the town of Somerset West in the shadows of the mountain, the farmland ‘commencing at a point A, the most northerly beacon of Portion 22 (1921.196.115588) of Gustrouw, now Erf No. 5088’, was officially proclaimed in 1958 as a ‘location and native village’ and named as Lwandle.3 This was to be emaHolweni, the place of halls/hostels for amagoduka, the migrant workers.4 A Helderberg council memorandum forty years later signals another beginning: ‘the proposal that hostel no. 33 in Lwandle be retained for the purpose of the establishment of a museum be supported in principle’.5 A task team is established by the council to set up a steering committee to plan a workshop that will conceptualize the museum. The idea is outrageous. Lwandle is unseen and virtually unknown. For a moment in the late 1990s it had begun to achieve some prominence as the site of a major post-apartheid urban planning project when the single-sex hostels were converted into family homes, an arts and crafts centre was constructed out of the ruins of a burnt-out beerhall, a library built, and stalls for small scale traders assembled in what was envisaged as the business district. Lwandle, which previously had only been written about in studies that focused on apartheid repression, poverty, overcrowding, criminality, and the instability of family structures,6 became prominent and visible in discussions as a site for urban experimentation. Sustainability, forms of consultation and accountability and the creation of spaces that were amenable to support livelihoods were the basis for the implementation of new models of urban planning in post-apartheid South Africa. Solar water heaters became the sign of development in Lwandle.7 In the Hostels-to-Homes scheme, there was initially no mention of a museum. Twenty years later, the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum is the only working museum in an area that was set aside for people that were racially designated as ‘native’ under apartheid in the Western Cape province of South Africa.8 Most notably the single-sex hostel which had been identified as being the raison d’être for the museum has, in terms of Section 27(3) of the National Heritage Resources Act (Act 25 of 1999), been declared by the Western Cape government as a provincial heritage site. In the genre of the ‘memorial museum’, described by Paul Williams, the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum has a small collection, but uses its site to evoke memories of suffering in the past and provide historical interpretations within a ‘moral framework’ that continually opposes forced racial and ethnic division.9

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This chapter is about trajectories of hostel to museum in Lwandle, moves that are discontinuous, are about changing and shifting prospects, and about processes of framing, localizing and structuring.10 What is remarkable is how difficult it was to make the case for turning Block 6, Hostel 33 into the foundation of a museum and a memorial presence. An unremarkable replicable structure with little intrinsic significance and with no association to local or national events or individuals of import could hardly make the case for a designated heritage site. There was an even a greater problem in sustaining the memorial and museum ambitions of Hostel 33 in Lwandle as some residents of the hostel had publicly expressed opposition to the museum. ‘First give us accommodation before you can get this room’ they posted on the door of the hostel when the museum officially opened on 1 May 2000.11 How then did a building with little apparent significance, and where there was some opposition to its use for and as a museum, become a heritage site twenty years later and the foundational object of the memorial museum in Lwandle? Or, to ask it another way, what were the discontinuous trajectories of framing? Some clues lie in the official proclamation as a provincial heritage site in 2018. What made Hostel 33 into a museum object and heritage signifier was its production through a long history – over a century – of migrant labour in southern Africa. Built in 1960 it was proclaimed as significant in 2018 because it reached back into a past before it even existed, speaking ‘volumes about its origins in the late nineteenth century and its role later in a repressive apartheid system in South Africa’. Hostel 33 not only brought a past into temporal alignment but gave it a national geography as ‘both part of a spatial expression of a wider system of oppression as well as a representation of a system of managed oppression at a local level’. Value was accorded through its ‘representative and symbolic nature’ as memorializing and acknowledging ‘migrant workers, their role and contribution to society’.12 Through spatializing a national past, the structurally weak and shallow raft foundations of Hostel 33 gave depth and a sense of stability to a fragile institution that asserted it was the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum.13 Hostel 33 alone could not secure a future for the museum, especially when some of its inhabitants were reluctant to surrender their residence. Exhibition and collection space was also extremely limited, even if Hostel 33 was available. The museum steering committee obtained permission to take over a nearby old migrant labourers’ community hall, which had been a dirty, run-down building with broken windows where parties were held regularly on weekends, opposite the taxi rank and near to Hostel 33,

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as an administrative and exhibition space.14 When I visited the museum for the first time in 1999 I was confronted by this building that was ‘symmetrical, austere’, ‘largely made of face-brick’, and had ‘a sloping roof on either side that reached a central apex’.15 The interior had been turned by the museum steering committee into an exhibition space through a display that was labelled Raising the Curtain, largely consisting of a series of random photographs of contemporary Lwandle street scenes by local photographers from Strand and Somerset West. These were affixed by the museum’s first manager/curator, Bongani Mgijima, to black, white and yellow card and placed on the walls with reusable putty. A small group of women sat in the well of the hall around a table threading glass beads onto necklaces. There was a notice near the entrance on an A4 sheet. It indicated that the mission of the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum was ‘to commemorate the migrant labour system and hostel life’. There have been many exhibitions since Raising the Curtain, all in some way building upon one another, using elements of the older displays, incorporating and reframing them for new purposes.16 It is this project of museum making, across Hostel 33 and more prominently in the exhibitions in the old community hall, that have made Lwandle into a site of significance. The Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum has ‘constructed itself as a museum through its exhibitions’.17 These have taken two general forms. The first tries to make meaning of the specific locality through biographical, visual, aural and textual renditions of the experiences of those who live in Lwandle, placing these narratives in overarching urban developmental accounts of turning the hostel artifices of apartheid into post-apartheid family homes. Simultaneously, in a move which tries to compensate for a lack of objects and events, and as a counter to marginality, the museum flattens Lwandle’s past into a ‘plane projection’, where history was reduced to a time and space which was over-determined by the ‘nowhen’ of apartheid.18 Lwandle’s residents on display in the museum were placed into a new national visual history that conformed to a post anti-apartheid dichotomous narrative of repression and resistance, employed frameworks of social history that were generated primarily around a history of mining on the Witwatersrand in the late nineteenth century, and proclaimed the changing political scenario as the culmination of victory for freedoms of association and expression with dreams of a ‘beautiful Lwandle’.19 Establishing stability through its exhibitionary frameworks of development and apartheid, deeply inflected by the methodologies and content of social history, has meant that Lwandle has remained a generic marker and its own history, space and locality continued on the path of marginality. As Noëleen

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Murray and I have argued, ‘this is the contradiction of the visual history on display in the museum. The synchronic ordering of the past makes Lwandle important, universal and also anonymous’.20

Unayo na imephu? Do You Have a Map? When the idea of preserving one hostel in Lwandle, as others were being converted into family homes, was mooted and approved by the local council in 1998, there was little thought as to what such a museum would entail beyond the idea of memorial and the establishment of the steering committee headed by the town librarian. On that committee were two individuals who were to drive the museum idea: Bongani Mgijima, a resident of Lwandle and a History student from the University of the Western Cape whom I had taught and who completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Museum and Heritage Studies; and Charmian Plummer, a teacher who lived in nearby Somerset West and carried out a considerable amount of philanthropic work in Lwandle, particularly being involved in the setting up of creche facilities. Mgijima recalls that ‘the Steering Committee was entirely left on its own with nothing at its disposal only the idea of a museum’.21 I first heard of a museum being established in Lwandle when Mgijima approached me during a break in the Museum and Heritage Studies class and related the plans that were afoot. Not only was he enthusiastic about the prospects of the project creating economic opportunities in Lwandle but he was also interested in the power of museum representations. As an undergraduate History student at UWC he had been set an assignment to analyse the infamous ‘Bushman diorama’ in the South African Museum as part of their course that dealt with images, representations and the making of stereotypes. Mgijima recalls that ‘this one museum visit actually transformed my whole life. From that day on I became very interested in museums because I realized how their power to represent others bestows upon them an authority to determine how those who are represented get to be viewed and understood’.22 He showed me some photographs of Lwandle, of the building he said was an old community hall which the museum intended to occupy, and the unremarkable, standard issue labour hostel that was to be the museum’s centrepiece. He also brought along an article he had written for the local Helderberg region newspaper about the museum idea in Lwandle. Here he outlined what he saw as the tourist potential of such a museum, the physical and human resources in Lwandle and the surroundings it could draw upon

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and maintained that the focus should not be on either one building or one story. For ‘history’s sake’, he asserted, there should be ‘no single master narrative’.23 This was a potentially exciting idea: a new museum in post-apartheid South Africa that would encourage multiplicity and divergence. These were the sorts of ideas that were being encouraged in the Museum and Heritage Studies programme that Mgijima was enrolled in and in the research projects on public history being developed in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape.24 These revolved around the production of histories across many genres by different and contending authors and authorities which engaged with contests over the meanings of public pasts. When Mgijima invited my colleague from the Department of Architecture at the University of Cape Town, Noëleen Murray (who was a research collaborator on the Project on Public Pasts), and I to become involved with the museum, we were very keen. It meant engaging in a practice where we could employ our research skills and where there would be negotiation and ‘knowledge transactions’ over what we did.25 We have written that ‘we would like to believe that our cautious approach to the applications of these skills’ as board members, researchers, writers and exhibitions designers ‘widened and complicated the possibilities for thinking the museum beyond outreach’.26 Mgijima similarly presented a circumspect and steady approach towards museum making that emphasized process, rather than outcome, much like the memory project associated with the new District Six Museum in central Cape Town from which he drew much inspiration.27 He deliberately situated collecting as the Lwandle Museum’s major activity, aligning the prospective institution with the archival processes and definitions that, for at least a century-and-a-half, have bestowed upon museums their claims to authenticity: their holdings of artefacts.28 But Mgijima was well aware that in new museological practices the notion of a collection had moved well beyond the artefactual. What he wanted the proposed museum to have as its primary modus operandi was the gathering of stories. In the article he had shown me in June 1998 he had asserted that the memory of Lwandle people was ‘recorded in its buildings, street names and their hearts and minds’. These memories were the basis of a ‘rich variety of stories’ that residents of Lwandle told ‘about their lives, their experiences and their environment’. He pleaded that ‘for history’s sake people’s testimonies have to be collected and recorded’. This process of gathering and documenting, ‘the powerful “museums of the mind”’, would, he envisaged, set the foundations for the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum.29

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What was crucial for Mgijima at the time was that the multitude and range of stories available in Lwandle would necessarily mean that the museum would be able to create uniqueness and difference. Using the metaphor of story-telling, he made claims that although the memory of Lwandle was ‘collective’, in the sense of many and widespread, it was most definitely varied, plural and continually challenged.30 In this environment, where history appeared to be available but as yet uncovered, the role of the museum was to become the site where ‘township-bred fundis’ would be turned into archaeological excavators, discovering and recording, so as ‘to piece together fragments of Lwandle’s ignored yet rich public history’. Hostel 33, together with the oral histories, would constitute the remnants of the past and the basis of a museum. According to Oom Raymond Ntako, an elderly Lwandle resident whom Mgijima interviewed to promote the museum project in the local press, these historical foundations would enable ‘our children’ to ‘know where they are coming from’.31 From the outset it was envisaged by Mgijima that oral history collecting would be the driving force of the museum and that exhibitions would either be the mechanism for gathering more and diverse recollections, or else be the natural outcome of the research. Taking a somewhat minimalist approach to design, Mgijima claimed that the lack of texts in his initial display of photographs in Raising the Curtain was a deliberate ploy to elicit reminiscences. In an interview with the press a couple of years later he reflected that ‘the idea was that residents of Lwandle would be prompted to narrate stories about their experiences’.32 This approach of invoking the particular and the experiential, that were to be retrieved through the medium of the oral, was in tandem with one that sought to establish a broader framework in which to place Lwandle and the museum’s memorial project. In the exhibition Memorising Migrancy which coincided with the official opening on 1 May 2000, various pieces of legislation from apartheid and before were named, set by the staff on to a timeline and affixed as labels onto a series of removable green and blue felt boards in order to create the effect that ‘the apartheid laws and regulations shaped the lives of the people who lived in Lwandle’.33 Accompanying this timeline was a series of photographs grouped under themes such as ‘Influx control’ and ‘Poverty in the homelands’, all loaned from the Mayibuye Centre at UWC. Based initially on the archives of the solidarity International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF), returned from London, the Mayibuye Centre (which was subsequently renamed the UWC Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archive) was ‘a project which sought to develop a museum of apartheid

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and an archive of resistance’.34 Many of the photographs it lent to the emerging Lwandle Museum were images of repression, such as the arrests made under pass laws, by photographer Eli Weinberg, that had circulated widely as mobilizing material in anti-apartheid campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s. If the commissioning of street photographs and the pasting of these onto walls of the community hall by Mgijima was the moment of Raising the Curtain, then this loan from the Mayibuye Centre and its stock of anti-apartheid photographs initiated a generic national framing of Lwandle as ‘a place of apartheid’s victims’, with depictions of migrant labour, from poverty in the rural areas to influx control, and then moving onto forms of protest and resistance. Ironically, as Buthelezi points out, in the new exhibition there was no direct story ‘that related people of Lwandle and their experiences’.35 The first tentative steps in establishing a specific history of Lwandle came with Unayo na imephu? Do You Have a Map? which opened in August 2001 to coincide with the South Africa-Atlanta Institutions of Public Culture conference held at the museum.36 The somewhat hastily assembled photographs which had been placed on the walls and on felt boards were removed and replaced by poster type panels that were carefully arranged sequentially and hung along the periphery of the interior space of the hall by members of the National Research Foundation’s Project on Public Pasts (PoPP) and museum staff. Photographs of Lwandle, and of apartheid and migrancy in general, some of them sourced from the original displays, were combined into collages with topographical maps, aerial photographs, plans for the hostel compound, title deeds to property, official correspondence, survey diagrams, engineers reports and newspaper articles. The maps and aerial photographs served as introductory elements, locating the contemporary place and time of Lwandle on the Cape Peninsula situated between Cape Point and Hangklip, then going back through the topography of farmland belonging to Van Vuuren (Before Lwandle, 1953), a view of the isolated compound from above (1977), and then the expansion into the present (2000). The poster boards sought to establish a visual chronology of becoming Lwandle with collages on themes such as: ‘Black spots and buffer zones’; ‘Deeds of segregation’; ‘Imaging migrancy’; ‘Land for a location’; ‘Ukuhlala ehostele’ (Staying in a hostel); KwaJabulani (The Place of Jabulani – the Lwandle Beer Hall); and ‘A museum at last’. Through exhibition and design, where ‘planning and control were juxtaposed with personal stories and images’, the community hall was ‘reshaped into a museum space’ that depicted the making of a racialized spatial ordering between the mountains and the sea on the False Bay coast.37

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What happened though was that the collection and display did not elicit the multiplicity of local stories that Mgijima had envisaged. Unayo na imephu? was fundamentally about the marking and settling of the landscape of race, again using many generic images of migrancy and pass laws as frames, although there was much more specificity pertaining to the making of Lwandle. Like other new museums in South Africa, such as District Six and the South End Museum, it used the map as a memorial inscription on the landscape. The map was also employed as a sign of control and restriction of place and movement. There was one oral history on display (extracts from an interview with police Captain Zama, conducted by Vusi Buthelezi, about the burning down of the Lwandle beer hall in 1991) but this was not the core feature. In this respect Unayo na imephu? instead presented itself as reinvigorating the process Mgijima had begun. A special small A4 board entitled ‘Lwandle photo album’ showed a photograph of children in the street carrying pictures that they had drawn. Residents of Lwandle were encouraged to come to the museum and share their memories: ‘The museum has collected a number of photographs of people in Lwandle. Are you in any of these? Do you recognize others who appeared in the photographs? Help us to put names to faces. Tell us where the people are now’. The idea was that this would be reproduced in pamphlet form and encourage both visits and recollections from residents of Lwandle. Neither took place to any large degree.

Iimbali zeKhaya: Stories of Home The first five years were immensely difficult ones for the institution that claimed it was the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum. A desperate shortage of funds meant that it was constantly on the verge of closure. Staff went for months without salaries. Criminals targeted the museum as a potential source of resources in an area where these were incredibly scarce. Museum activity itself was lethargic. Exhibitions in the community hall were static and visitor numbers were low, not reaching more than 500 annually, most of these not from within Lwandle. There was an oral history project in place, funded by the South African Heritage Resources Agency, on the experience of migrant workers in Lwandle with the hope that ‘results’, ‘findings, statistics and artefacts’ would go on display at the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum.38 This proceeded in fits and starts. Staff members Vusi Buthelezi (who had taken over as museum manager once Mgijima departed) and Bonke Tyhulu conducted several

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interviews, but by the beginning of 2005 there was little to show for it in the museum. Attempts by the museum management to persuade the provincial government of the Western Cape to incorporate it into its official structures also proved unsuccessful. Lwandle was not considered to be a proper museum because it was seen by officials of the Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport to have no substantial collection. Above all, no alternative accommodation had been found for the residents of Hostel 33 despite ongoing efforts by the museum board to facilitate this through the local ward councillor and the building contractor, ASLA Construction (PTY) Ltd. A modus vivendi was reached whereby one side of the hostel was used for residential purposes while the other side was used for the museum. Buthelezi was very uneasy with the arrangements: ‘When the museum brings tourists to view the historical building there is always cooperation but this not always voluntary and willingly. Occupants of Hostel 33 become living museum objects’.39 What on reflection might be considered a low point came in 2006. A new sign was inscribed onto Hostel 33 by the then residents. These were not the same group who had been seeking alternative accommodation through the Hostels-to-Homes scheme. In fact, with the assistance of the local ward councillor at the beginning of 2006 homes had been found for this group of hostel residents. But once they moved out a youth gang moved in and inscribed their insignia inside a hostel room, the number 28. This indicated they were part of the 28s, a number gang that had been operating in South African prisons since the 1880s. Hostel 33 was turned into a shebeen (a tavern) and the gang used it as a base from which to conduct their criminal activities. A feeling of helplessness pervaded the museum as realizing its memorial intention based on Hostel 33 seemed as far away as ever. Despite its precarity and the ongoing negotiations and difficulties around using Hostel 33, the museum not only managed to sustain itself through ad-hoc grants from the City of Cape Town and the Western Cape provincial government, continued support from councillors, businesses and individuals in Lwandle and Somerset West and its association with the Project on Public Pasts based at UWC, it also started to reconceptualize the space and design itself into becoming a museum. With the museum battling to secure the necessary finances to survive, some of the important museum activities, such as growing a collection, took a back seat. Jos Thorne, who was contracted as a designer on several of the museum’s exhibitions, recalls that ‘there was no museum collection to speak of in the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum’ and that ‘much’ had to be made ‘out of a little’.40 To create substance the idea that the

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museum’s governing board articulated was to both personalize and generalize, and stake a claim to becoming ‘the first “official” Black Museum in the Western Cape’.41 If in the early days of the museum the metaphor of the curtain being lifted was used, and the map then charted a direction, then the permanent exhibition which was installed in 2005, Iimbali zeKhaya: Stories of Home, designed and curated by Jos Thorne, was all about framing the museum. This was more than just a symbol. The whole landscape around the community hall was refigured through the creation of an urban precinct, the entrance was shifted to the north of the building facing land earmarked for a community garden, and a large light-weight aluminium frame was installed in the well of the hall.42 Onto this frame was affixed a biographical gallery consisting of ‘large format colour photographs, vinyl stencilled text and excerpts from the limited oral history collection’.43 As exhibitionary imperatives became paramount these few individuals on display came to speak for Lwandle in the museum. On the surrounding walls of the hall supawood boards were attached, with image and text panels that contained a more generalized account of migrant labour, hostel life, the particularities of hostels in Lwandle and the Hostels-toHomes project. By imagining the space through these literal and metaphoric inner and outer frames, ‘the community hall was designed and spatialized as a museum’.44 On the inner biographical aluminium frame, the selected extracts and enlarged photos of the interviewees presented short narratives of lives, journeys, occupations and homes. The stories of home were multiple and shifting, countering any claims of a home situated in an essentialized, rural, ethnicized, timeless past of tradition, which is indeed where tourism and some museum authorities had sought to place the Lwandle museum at its inception.45 The large photographs, often full-on and facing the camera, and the text which omitted the name of the interviewer and began with the phrase ‘I am…’, gave the impression of telling individuated stories ‘without any form of mediation’.46 Appearing as bearers of Lwandle’s history, these interviews on display in Stories from Home, although admittedly very few, demonstrated variety and diversity: ‘escaping from home to avoid an arranged marriage or because of a “problem amongst parents”, of Lwandle as a “blessing”, of the surrounding landscape as “beautiful”, of Lwandle as a place one visited on weekends, and following members of the family to take up life in the hostels’.47 These are the types of tales of difference that Mgijima had hoped to generate when he and Plummer had raised the curtain several years before.

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The biographical exhibition on the inner frame did not always sit easily with the story on the supawood board frame hanging on the walls of the museum, where the display sought to make Lwandle generalizable. Material included is sourced from popular history texts of social processes that led to the supply and control of labour to the gold mines of the Witwatersrand in the late nineteenth century, photographs by Leon Levson showing a mine labour recruitment agency and conditions on mine compounds (these came from the UWC Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archive), a set of arbitrary letters from mine workers complaining about conditions at the beginning of the twentieth century, a photograph of a trade union meeting, and a map showing routes taken to the mines. The overwhelming impression is that ‘the map, the photographs, the letters and the accompanying text all combined to situate Lwandle’s Stories from Home at the genesis of social history on the gold mines of the Witwatersrand’.48 Lwandle was established in the late 1950s and when it appears on the subsequent display panels of the perimeter wall it is presented as a place of difference, ‘solely a place of hostel accommodation for African male migrant workers in the Helderberg basin’.49 Once the locality was established in the exhibition (thus providing an explanation for the presence of the museum), most of what follows are examples of how Lwandle fits into a linear trajectory from repression that has its source on the mines (influx control and the pass laws), to resistance struggles (the formation of a hostel dwellers association), leading ultimately to a community of the post-apartheid as a sign of development (Hostels-to-Homes). Shorter extracts from the interviews that the museum carried out are placed on these outer panels, but they take on a different association from the divergent stories of home. In the move from the local, they cohere as illustrative of a national history, enabling a framing of the museum in which ‘the story of Lwandle becomes nationalized as both emblematic and derived from an originary past’.50 This is the ‘single master narrative’ that Mgijima explicitly wanted to avoid. As the permanent exhibition was settled onto the walls and frames of a national past in the exhibitionary environment of the community hall, a new possibility for history was emerging in Lwandle. On the ‘shifting sands at the seaside’51 another notice was affixed to the front door of Block 6 in June 2007: ‘Hostel 33 Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum Purposes ONLY’. After many months of exceedingly difficult negotiations, involving the local ward councillor and neighbouring residents, the youth gang moved out. Hostel 33 became part of the museum. The museum manager, Lunga Smile, instructed the local sign writer, Simon

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Nehonde, to design a notice, a padlock was placed on the door by Smile and the potential for opening up the hostel as a new home for Lwandle’s pasts emerged. Whereas when Stories of Home was in its planning stages the museum was in a precarious state, by 2007 (with some hindsight of course) a more viable future had begun to emerge. Funding was secured from the National Lottery Board and the National Heritage Council, the Western Cape provincial museum authorities were taking a renewed interest in the possibilities of incorporating Lwandle into its governance structures (although there was still much hesitation in the Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport around whether Lwandle could be considered a ‘proper museum’), and activities such as football matches, dance classes, after school homework sessions and theatrical performances were drawing more local visitors to engage with the museum’s programmes. Hostel 33 had formally been secured by the museum, and in 2009 plans to develop the hostel took a massive step forward when, in an international competition, the museum was the recipient of an award from the U.S. State Department Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation. The notice on the hostel indicating the building’s use for museum purposes was removed by Smile. In its place the new sign he affixed read: ‘Hostel 33 Restoration Project 2010. For more information contact the museum manager, Lunga Smile, at the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum’. The move from a hostel in a compound to the prime object of museum possession to a memorial site of preservation and interpretation inaugurated the possibilities of new curatorial pasts. Issues arose amongst museum staff and board members about which period of hostel life to emphasize: should there be an attempt to return to the state when it was built in 1960 to show how, in its starkest and most brutal terms, the migrant labour system was operationalized? Or the 1970s and 1980s when many women had lived in the hostels, defying the apartheid regulations and often being arrested? What should be done with the temporary interior alterations that inhabitants had added to create a semblance of privacy? How would the lives and stories of those who had lived in Hostel 33 over a fifty-year period be represented? Importantly, how could the structure itself be maintained and secured while at the same time ensuring that it would convey a sense of its ‘disacommodation’ – the leaks, the flaws, the cracks and its deliberately constructed inhospitability?52 At the heart of the restoration project of Hostel 33 which developed over the next few years was how it could perform as part of the Lwandle Museum, with the emphasis on what buildings do, can do and how they change.53 The idea that was accepted by the museum board and staff was

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that there should be as little intervention in the structure as possible, so as not to return it to an originary state, while at the same time securing its stability and its ability to ensure performance for the museum. Employing the conceptual framework of stories of inhabitation, different periods in the hostel’s history, its life and the lives of those who stayed there were to be depicted. The hostel rooms were dressed up by staff, board members, residents of the community who had lived in the hostels and outside contract designers. They used artefacts sourced by bartering with Lwandle’s inhabitants and by scouring second-hand shops in Cape Town for old magazines, cooking and eating implements and blankets. Museum guides, taking visitors to the hostel, told stories in each room based upon interviews with those who lived there. The sensory confines of closeness, the subdued lighting and the instability of the interior structures enabled each room and the hostel overall to become a stage to perform a different telling: about living as a family of three or four on one or two beds; hiding beneath beds and inside small cupboards during police raids; running a meat supply shop from the hostel; defying apartheid’s Mixed Marriages Act which forbade marriages between people classified into separate racial categories; the criminal activities of the 28 gang; the shebeen (tavern) which operated in the hostel; using the public outdoor latrine bucket system attached to the hostel; and the last resident of hostel 33 who had nowhere else to go. Much like the inner frame of the community hall, the emphasis in the display of artefacts, the dressing up of rooms and the telling of stories was on sustaining divergence, change and precarity. This philosophy of securing the unstable and the uncertainty of life and its tellings was perhaps most aptly summed up in the display in the entrance corridor of the restored Hostel 33. It was a re-creation of the sign that went up when the museum had opened on 1 May 2000: ‘We the residents of Room 33 disagree about this room to be a museum [sic]’. From 2010 this sign welcomed and greeted visitors, underlining the hostel as a place to constantly feel uncomfortable and ill at ease, in the past and the present. When in its annual report for 2009 the U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation announced that it had allocated $45,200 to support the restoration of Hostel No. 33 as ‘the last remaining hostel in the Apartheid-era migrant labor camp in Lwandle’, it asserted that the project would involve ‘critical structural repairs and the restoration of the building for use as an architectural exhibit’.54 Two years later when the restored hostel was opened by the US Consulate’s Public Diplomacy Officer, Cynthia Brown, and the Western Cape Minister for Cultural Affairs and Sport, Ivan Meyer, the form that it presented was

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substantially different. The US Consulate noted in its report that the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum had peeled back the ‘layers of history to capture personal stories and images of hostel living’. The museum’s ‘painstaking’ process had involved restoring ‘sagging cardboard ceilings, Sunlight soap label wallpaper, makeshift metal bunk beds propped on paint tins, and the hallway “shebeen”’. Simultaneously, the report also noted that the museum was placing its history in a larger frame, where the particular stood for a role in a general historical narrative. The metaphorical new foundations of Hostel 33 that were being built in the restoration project were about the ‘underpinnings of apartheid’.55 As Minister Meyer announced the imminent declaration of the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum as a provincial-aided museum in the Western Cape, he recognized Hostel 33 as part of a history lesson, having served ‘the needs of capital’ as part the ‘draconian system’ of apartheid.56 On that hot mid-summer’s day at the end of 2011 the Lwandle Museum and Hostel 33 were ‘perched’ between the personal invocations of the locality and the constant demands for, and its own shaping of, a national geography, ‘on a sand-swept tract of land between the seaside resorts and lush Cape farmland’.57

Siyanyanzela: We Are Forcing Those summer days must have been a distant memory at the beginning of June 2014 when one of the severest storms swept across False Bay into the Helderberg basin. As residents tried to take shelter from the incessant winds and rain, a group of police officers and employees of a private security company acting on behalf of South African National Road Agency Ltd (SANRAL) moved into the area known as Siyanyanzela (translated meaning: ‘we are forcing’), or more formally Erf 32524 Nomzamo, adjacent to Lwandle, and cleared ‘an area as large as six soccer fields’ of its houses.58 The officers maintained that they were implementing a court order granted in January 2014 to halt the occupation of this strip of land which was intended for road construction and in response to written complaints from the adjacent gated community at Strand Ridge about an upsurge in crime and unsanitary conditions from what they termed the ‘squatter camp’ in the area.59 Although the interim order actually was not against those on the land but those who intended to occupy it, and the final interdict had not been granted – and there was also no eviction order in place – the residents of Siyanyanzela, near Strand, looked on in deep distress in the heavy rains as armed police officers moved in,

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tore down their houses, scattered their belongings and ‘trammelled’ their ‘paltry possessions’.60 All of a sudden the name Lwandle was everywhere in the local and national media: ‘Lwandle Eviction Battle’, ‘Petrol Bombs Fly in Lwandle Evictions’, ‘Lwandle Informal Settlement Evictions’, ‘No Court Order Granted for Lwandle Evictions’, ‘SANRAL Responsible to Carry the Evictions at Lwandle’, ‘Lwandle Evictees Still Without Land’.61 At times there were references to Strand and later on to neighbouring Nomzamo, as many found refuge in the community hall there. The name Siyanyanzela hardly appeared. A battle of blame ensued between various departments of central government (Human Settlements, which was responsible for housing, and Transport, which was responsible for road construction), the African National Congress (the national governing party), the Democratic Alliance (the official opposition nationally but in control of the province of the Western Cape and the City of Cape Town), SANRAL and the City Council as to who was responsible for setting up the houses on the land which SANRAL owned and who had ordered the evictions. ‘DA Punishing Lwandle Voters’, ‘Politics the “Real Story” Behind Lwandle Evictions, says Zille’, ‘Sisulu Criticises Lwandle Evictions’ read the headlines as stories of responsibility and culpability unfolded and were contested.62 The political battle raged back and forth for several weeks as charities delivered food parcels and medical assistance for those who had sought shelter in the Nomzamo Community Hall. After lengthy negotiations it was decided that the evictees could return to the land they had previously occupied, that they be allocated Temporary Relocation Areas (TRA) houses and an enquiry be set up by the Minister of Human Settlements, formally given the title of ‘Ministerial Enquiry into the Eviction of the Informal Settlement Community of Lwandle, Cape Town, 5th June 2014’, or abbreviated by the commission itself as ‘The Lwandle Eviction Ministerial Enquiry 2014’.63 Lwandle, which had been in existence for almost sixty years, first as a labour compound, then as a model urban development scheme, was suddenly turned into an ‘informal settlement’ in or near Strand. Named in relation to Strand (and the owners of Strand Ridge security complex), its existence and history were effaced.64 Lwandle itself had almost been destroyed just over twenty-five years previously when residents of the town of Strand signed a petition calling for the removal of its residents to Khayelitsha as they maintained there were not enough facilities for families in what was initially set up in the late 1950s as a compound for single male migrant labourers. In the 1980s Lwandle had changed from being a place which provided for a regulated

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and controlled supply of labour into what was seen by residents of Strand as an uncontrolled ‘social’ problem.65 There were voices of opposition to the idea of removal from local commercial and industrial concerns in the region and from the Lwandle Men’s Hostel Committee that had been set up by hostel residents in 1987, advocating that families be united through the provision of family housing. After a series of drawn-out and sometimes acrimonious negotiations over the years, instead of being obliterated Lwandle became the site of Hostels-to-Homes, from which the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum was accidentally born. The evictions in 2014 recalled this past to memory. The museum’s staff and board members realized that given its history and as the local repository of memories, they had to document what was taking place in Siyanyanzela. Amidst the scenes of destruction, museum staff witnessed, supported and assembled, they spoke to the evictees, photographed extensively the process of eviction, and the museum became a collection point to gather and distribute relief for those who were sheltering in the Nomzamo Community Hall.66 When the commission of enquiry was appointed, the museum thought it was its responsibility to participate in its proceedings. Although there was some hesitancy about the wording of the call for ‘public submissions’ which seemed to predetermine its outcomes – the commission was going to undertake an investigation into ‘all the circumstances under which the evictions took place, and the history of the evictions’, and also wanted to know ‘how the community came to be on the land in question when there is [sic] waiting list for the provision of housing in terms of government programmes’67 – the museum still felt obliged to make a representation to the commission as a local institution with knowledge of Lwandle’s urban history.68 The response from the commission to the museum’s request to make a submission was totally unexpected. They asked the museum to present a paper which would share ‘research outcomes on mass evictions and illegal occupation of land’ and give advice on ‘best practice in managing mass evictions’.69 Staff and board members of the Lwandle Museum were taken aback. The museum could not participate in the commission in terms of this brief and responded by pointing to the role of the museum in memorializing migrant labour, the control of the lives of black workers under apartheid and the continuity of these conditions in the post-apartheid city. It was totally inappropriate to accede to the commission’s request.70 A short reply was received from the commission’s secretariat: ‘Good day. Thank you for your response. Is it possible to make a presentation focusing on the history of the area instead of the requested paper?’71

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On 9 September 2014 a representative of the museum staff and the acting chair of the board respectively, Masa Soko and Noëleen Murray, made a presentation to the commission. They recounted Lwandle’s history, histories of migrancy, how Lwandle was made to be always invisible and dislocated while providing a controlled labour force for the area, of attempts by ratepayers in Strand to close down Lwandle in the 1980s when families came to live there, how the actual site called Siyanyanzela was never named in reports (or indeed in the commission) and how Lwandle near Strand or Lwandle /Nomzamo had been invoked as a substitute for any informal settlement that could be easily replicated. It was as if in all the visibility and prominence given to a place named as Lwandle ‘the precise coordinates of the ruins of Siyanyanzela’ were being made ‘invisible’.72 As representatives of the only organization present at the commission on that day which was from Lwandle, Masa Soko asked how many people in the room had been to the museum. A lone hand appeared. Promises were hastily made by Adv. Potgieter, the chairperson, that the commission would remedy this and visit the museum at some future date before winding up and presenting its findings.73 The commission never fulfilled its promise. The 239-page report released in November 2014 describes in its introduction that it ‘provides a detailed account of the investigation in respect of the evictions that occurred on 2 and 3 June 2014, in Nomzamo (Lwandle), Strand’, documents the on-going disputes over the land, the sizes of the houses being reconstructed, and the negotiations over permanent settlement.74 Amongst its major findings are that the City of Cape Town was complicit with SANRAL in initiating the removals.75 It also details measures to rectify situations of removals, how these should take place, under what circumstances and the necessary authorization and consultation required. But it also had some harsh words of warning that may have been directed at the residents of Siyanyanzela: ‘While it is mindful of the devastating effects of human rights abuses that might accompany steps to address land invasions, the Enquiry does not support or condone “queue jumping” by means of land invasions which should be avoided at all costs’.76 In that detailed account not only was the museum’s testimony totally ignored but the museum was not even listed amongst the organizations that had made presentations. It was if the museum’s submission had never even taken place. Perhaps it was because the museum did not respond directly to the letter of request for ‘best practice’ for removals and instead had opened up questions about Lwandle, Siyanyanzela and their histories. Within the commission’s limited framing it did not want to even bring

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this to the table. For all its focus on the specifics of culpability and claims to be listening to all voices, it was as if neither Lwandle nor Siyanyanzela existed. Instead they were located through generic, reproduceable frameworks and were named as informal settlements. Prior histories of displacement and dislocation in the area on the beach at False Bay and in the Helderberg basin that the museum presented were not its concern. The approach of the media and indeed of the commission to the removals was perhaps best summed up in a visual image that accompanied a story by Jamie-Leigh Matroos where SANRAL was signalling its intention in its submission to the commission, denying its culpability in the removals. The headline in SA Breaking News online on 22 July 2014 read: ‘Sanral to Submit Proof of DA’s Responsibility in Lwandle Evictions’. Below the headline is a photograph of a scene showing many informal housing structures. There is no indication of place and no accreditation of a photographer. Assuming the visual site of evictions as all being the same no matter the specific place, the photograph is clearly of Khayelitsha, 20 kilometres from Lwandle.77 In its response to the removals at Siyanyanzela, the Lwandle Migrant Museum asserted a spatial and temporal specificity in contra-distinction to the commission’s search for an all-purpose historical geography. This was translated into the exhibition Siyanyanzela which opened almost four years after the evictions in March 2018. As with Stories of Home the largescale photograph was the favoured exhibitionary technique. One showed police attacks on the residents of Siyanyanzela, another showed houses reduced to rubble, and, most prominently, three photographs counterposed Siyanyanzela with Strand Ridge, the largest of which, along the entire back wall of the museum, emphasized the dividing barrier between them. The latter three photographs were not contemporaneous with the events of June 2014 but were specially commissioned in May 2017 from independent photographer Aubrey Graham for the exhibition. The other two came from photographers from Independent Newspapers and the museum, respectively. A short explanatory text (in English and isiXhosa) accompanied these visually bold photographs. It covered the reasons why people had settled on the land, the complaints that emanated from Strand Ridge, that the evictions were unexpected and condemned as inhumane, the appointment of a commission which found that the evictions had not followed due process, and that the City of Cape Town had refused to participate in the commission’s proceedings. The text also noted that the museum’s submission ‘was not recognised in the [commission’s] report’. The images and the text together situated Siyanyanzela in a history of racialized struggles over land and housing adjoining the false bay.

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At the opening of the exhibition on 21 March 2018 the museum manager, Masa Soko, said that the museum had wanted ‘to investigate the whole incident … to find out exactly what happened’. The museum staff had spoken ‘to residents to find out what was taking place and we decided to take that information for this exhibition’ she said.78 Yet there was a contradiction in place for nowhere in the exhibition were the words of the residents evident. A few exceptionally large images – five in total – on the back and side walls of the stage of the community hall came to stand for the events and experiences of those cold, gloomy days at the beginning of June 2014 at Siyanyanzela. For all the claims to exactitude and specificity, it was the power of these images of a starkly divided society that overwhelmed and gave the exhibition its aura of the intensity of the continual violence and oppression of the post-apartheid South Africa. And it was the exceptionally large photograph of the divide between Strand Ridge and Siyanyanzela, taken in 2017 by Aubrey Graham that stretched across the back wall of the stage, that bore witness to the shock of ‘such an incident in a democratic country’.79 This photograph in effect became emblematic of the name Siyanyanzela, ‘We are forcing’. Six months after the Siyanyanzela exhibition opened a new sign was affixed by the provincial government outside Hostel 33 in Lwandle: the blue and brown logo of Heritage Western Cape. The symbol of the setting sun on the logo is meant to encompass cultural diversity, tangible (built) and intangible heritage, where blue is used as the designated colour of international heritage and the brown represents the artefacts of earth, found and constructed.80 The Western Cape Minister of Cultural Affairs and Sport officially declared Hostel 33 as a provincial heritage site and indicated that this meant a commitment to its protection and conservation.81 Masa Soko, speaking to the local press a month before the declaration, stressed the uniqueness and importance of the museum and the hostel in depicting the lives of migrant workers not only in the province, but nationally as well. Setting the sights of the museum much higher, she argued that the hostel should not only become a national heritage site but should work towards its inscription on the world heritage list.82 In this celebratory moment Hostel 33 was dedicated to the insignia which claimed cultural diversity, bringing together the blue of heritage with the brown of its manufacture beneath the midday sun on Heritage Day 2018. The declaration of Hostel 33 was the culmination of years and years of lobbying, starting with the idea of retaining the single-sex migrant labour hostel as a memorial site; through to its restoration and rehabilitation as the integral component of the museum in 2010/2011; and

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then to the research and preparation of the heritage nomination dossier by Melanie Attwell and Associates, appointed by the museum board.83 In those years between the opening of the restored hostel and its proclamation as a provincial heritage site, the museum staff displayed a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards its main artefactual presence. Hostel 33 was still the major part of the walking tours of Lwandle that the museum staff took visitors on, the stories that had been collected about individuals and family lives during the restoration process remained a central component in the narration performed on these tours and the rooms with their artefacts were largely the same as they had been curated in 2010/2011. But there were two significant changes. A few of the rooms in the hostel were turned into a museum storeroom. This included stacking up piles of beds that had been specifically purchased with the intention to curate further hostel rooms, and an assortment of tables, chairs and other items that the museum could not find space for in the community hall. In addition, in what was a curatorial oversight, an elaborate security system was installed with an electrical box, flashing lights and wiring that were altogether incongruous with the overall aesthetic of a hostel environment. When the time came for the proclamation event in 2018 there was little recognition amongst museum staff of the broader contribution that many individuals and organizations had made to what ultimately turned into the heritage proclamation of Hostel 33. The organization of the event was left largely in the hands of the Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport. Very few people were invited, even fewer attended. The new heritage logo outside Hostel 33 seemed to be the culmination of the council memorandum twenty years previously which resolved that ‘hostel no. 33 in Lwandle be retained for the purpose of the establishment of a museum’. At that very moment questions were starting to emerge as to whether the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum was interested in retaining Hostel 33.

A Beach Museum on the Highveld As I write this chapter the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum has just officially turned twenty and there are a variety of exhibitions on show: Iimbali zeKhaya, stories of home based on oral histories; an overview history of Lwandle in a national framework of migrant labour; photographs by David Goldblatt entitled The Transported of KwaNdebele that portray the daily journey of migrant workers from the ethnic homeland of KwaNdebele to the city of Pretoria; an artwork by Gavin Younge,

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Workmen’s Compensation 11, consisting of wheelbarrows containing artefacts taken to represent the lives of migrant workers; paintings by young Lwandle artists on the theme of memories of migrancy; Siyanyanzela, a photographic exhibition on land evictions; Abavelisi Bengingqi yaseLwandle / Lwandle Designers, which highlights the work of clothing makers in the area; the dressed rooms and structure of a restored Hostel 33, a provincial heritage site; and, somewhat inappropriately, a large trophy cabinet prominently situated adjacent to the stage in the community hall containing the awards the museum has garnered. Some of these exhibitions have been referred to in this abbreviated twenty-year history of the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum as it shuffled between specifying place and locating within nation, between asserting difference and establishing similarity, between the Lwandle Museum and the Migrant Labour Museum. Making Lwandle into a museum of events in history has in effect meant designing the exhibitionary frames of visibility which has placed its history on a linear trajectory from apartheid to development (with some interruptions along the way), which ironically has hidden its past adjacent to the false bay. There is one exhibition in the museum that has no title, no explanatory text and is rarely explained by staff who guide museum tours. It is one of the oldest and arguably most prominent and powerful displays in the museum. It is a large orange sign, with bold black lettering, hung with chains to a beam below the ceiling that immediately confronts visitors as they enter the community hall turned museum space. The sign, removed from the beach when apartheid was coming to an end and donated to the museum by a local shop owner from Strand, reads: STRAND & SEE NET BLANKES: BEACH AND SEA WHITES ONLY. An arrow below the sign indicates the area that had been set aside for people racially classified under apartheid as ‘white’. Without any explicit explanatory text, this sign performs the function of recontextualization, subverting ‘the original intention of exclusion, turning it into a memorial to apartheid’s pasts and laying claim, through its re-siting, to an anticipated inclusive future’.84 In Greg Dening’s terms this may be a ‘beach crossing’,85 where ‘the very marker that was used to confine and limit possibilities to racially distinct zones’ has been ‘re-inscribed in a museum that seeks to provide a continual reminder of the very foundation of apartheid, the migrant labour system’.86 Yet for all its nominal connections, since the 1950s, with being at the sea (elwandle), its associations with the beach and its pasts being continually and inextricably linked to the Strand, apart from this sign of exclusion and subversion, the waves hardly reach the shore at the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum. Instead, the shoreline runs

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along the seams of low-grade gold ore on the highveld 2000 metres above sea level, tying Lwandle into a history of the land that begins in the nineteenth century with the supply, control and reproduction of cheap labour for the cities and towns of the underground.87

Notes   1. Strand Municipality and South African Railways and Harbours, The STRAND, 6–7.   2. Rhoda, The Strand, ch. 11.   3. ‘Divisional Council of Stellenbosch. Establishment of Location and Native Village’, Government Notice 71, 17 January 1958, LMLM.   4. Buthelezi, ‘The South African Jewish Museum and the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum’, 65.   5. Helderberg Municipality Memorandum, from Director Executive Office, Ref 17/18/1, Proposed Museum in Lwandle, 1 July 1998, LMLM.   6. Jones, Assaulting Childhood; Sloth-Nielsen et al., Chickens in a Box.   7. Ward, Energy Book, 54; Reeep, ‘Lwandle Hostels’; COMMEND, ‘Solar Water Heater’.   8. There is the Langa Museum located in a building where the apartheid laws of influx control into urban areas was administered. It has an exhibition that is looked after by a security guard. The 18 Gangster Museum is more of a starting point for a tour of Khayelitsha with an emphasis on understanding gang origins and culture. There has often been talk of other museums in Khayelitsha, but they have not yet materialized. For a brief moment there was a Workers Museum in Khayelitsha, but it appears to have folded and in 2014 the City of Cape Town was looking at plans for a Khayelitsha memory centre.   9. Williams, Memorial Museums, 184. 10. This draws upon various iterations of Latour: Latour, Reassembling; Latour, ‘A “Compositionist Manifesto”’; Latour, ‘Concluding Remarks’. 11. Murray and Witz, Hostels, Homes, 3. 12. Formal protection of archaeological sites, the landscape and natural features of cultural significance, structures and unmarked burials, situated on or at Hostel 33 on portion of erf 13600, Lwandle, Strand, Provincial Notice 97/2018, Province of the Western Cape Provincial Gazette, 7956, 13 July 2018, 575, LMLM. 13. Jakupa Architects and Urban Designers, Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum Restoration of Hostel 33, conditional assessment, 23 March 2010, LMLM. 14. Mgijima, ‘Personal Reflections’. 15. Witz and Murray, ‘Fences, Signs’, 76–78. 16. Kratz, ‘Adapting and Transforming’, 6–7. 17. Kratz, ‘Adapting and Transforming’, 7.

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18. De Certeau, The Practice, 159. 19. ‘Dreaming of a Beautiful Lwandle’ is the title of one of the display boards in the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum. 20. Murray and Witz, Hostels, Homes, 93. 21. Mgijima, ‘Personal Reflections’. 22. Mgijima, ‘Personal Reflections’. For more on the ‘bushman diorama’, see Introduction. 23. Mgijima, ‘Let’s Talk’. 24. See Introduction. 25. For a discussion on knowledge transactions, see Witz, Minkley and Rassool, ‘South Africa and the Unsettling’, 19. 26. Murray and Witz, Hostels, Homes, 14. 27. On the museum as process, see Rassool, ‘Community Museums’. 28. Marstine, New Museum Theory, 8–21. 29. Mgijima, ‘Let’s Talk’. 30. Mgijima, ‘Let’s Talk’. 31. Mgijima, ‘Oom Ray’. 32. ‘Museum Chronicles Life of Migrant Workers in Lwandle’, DistrictMail, 30 November 2001. 33. Buthelezi, ‘The South African Jewish Museum and the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum’, 65. 34. Rassool and Witz, ‘Transforming Heritage Education’, 2. 35. Buthelezi, ‘The South African Jewish Museum and the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum’, 72, 75. Mgijima and Buthelezi, ‘Mapping Museum’, 801–804. 36. Institutions of Public Culture conference held under the auspices of Emory University’s Center for the Study of Public Scholarship in Cape Town in 2001, Museums, Local Knowledge and Performance in an Age of Globalisation, Cape Town, 3–4 August 2001, retrieved 7 February 2015 from http://www. csps.emory.edu/CSPS_CT_WORKSHOP_AUGUST_2001.HTML. 37. Murray and Witz, Hostels, Homes, 61. 38. ‘Museum Depicts Migrants’ Life’, DistrictMail, 19 April 2002. 39. Buthelezi, ‘The South African Jewish Museum and the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum’, 103. 40. Thorne, ‘Designing Histories’, 155. 41. Murray and Witz, Hostels, Homes, 62; Minutes of Meeting of LMLM Board, Tuesday 22 March 2005, LMLM. 42. Murray, ‘Working with Inconsistencies’, 32–33. 43. Murray and Witz, Hostels, Homes, 62. 44. Murray and Witz, Hostels, Homes, 62. 45. For an account of tourism and the Lwandle Museum, see Witz, ‘Revisualising Township Tourism’. 46. Witz, Minkley and Rassool, ‘Sources and Genealogies’, 196. 47. These extracts are all from the Stories of Home exhibition in the Lwandle Museum.

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48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

62.

Witz, Minkley and Rassool, ‘Sources and Genealogies’, 196. Stories of Home exhibition in the Lwandle Museum. Witz, Minkley and Rassool, ‘Sources and Genealogies’, 197. Witz, Minkley and Rassool, ‘Sources and Genealogies’, 197. Cooke, ‘The Migrant Labour Hostel’, 64–69. Yaneva, ‘A Building’s Trajectory’, 19. For a detailed account of the processes of the restoration of Hostel 33, see Murray and Witz, ‘Camp Lwandle’; Murray and Witz, Hostels, Homes, chapter 2. US Department of State, U.S. Ambassadors Fund 2009/10. ‘US Mission Supports Lwandle Migrant Labor Museum Restoration Project’, 3 December 2011, retrieved 5 February 2021 from https://web. archive.org/web/20120120230052/http://southafrica.usembassy.gov/consulcpt_news_111203.html. Speech delivered by Dr Ivan Meyer, Western Cape Minister of Cultural Affairs and Sport at the Opening of Hostel 33, Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, 3 December 2011. ‘US Mission Supports Lwandle’. Social Justice Coalition, Equal Education and Ndifuna Ukwazi, ‘We Condemn the Destruction’. Various letters from residents of Strand Ridge and the Strand Ridge Homeowners Association, ‘Complaints regarding squatters behind Strand Ridge Complex’, 22–23 January 2014: see for example letters from Mr and Mrs Verheen, 23 January 2014; Miss Joan Hannah, 23 January 2014; HM Janse van Rensburg, 22 January 2014; Patrick Koen, Chair Strand Ridge Homeowners Associations; Worsie Fransman, 23 January 2014; Debbie Coney Mari Enslin where complaints included increases in noise and crime, unhygienic conditions, litter, and shootings. LMLM. ‘The Meanings of Lwandle 2014’, ENCA News, 4 June 2014, retrieved 30 April 2020 from https://www.enca.com/opinion/meanings-lwandle-2014 Wednesday 4 June 2014. ‘Lwandle Eviction Battle’, Independent online, 3 June 2014, retrieved 7 February 2021 from https://www.iol.co.za/news/lwandle-eviction-battle-pics-1697669; ‘Petrol Bombs Fly in Lwandle Evictions’, Independent online, 3 June 2014, retrieved 7 February 2021 from https://www.iol.co.za/ news/petrol-bombs-fly-in-lwandle-evictions-1697993; ‘Lwandle Informal Settlement Evictions’, SABC Morning Live, 3 June 2014, retrieved 7 February 2021 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGmOgeZLO-g; Equal Education, ‘Press statement’; ‘SANRAL Responsible to Carry the Evictions at Lwandle’, SABC Digital News, 9 June 2014, retrieved 7 February 2021 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoqAGxMwBSY; Etheridge, ‘Lwandle Evictees’, Mail & Guardian, 10 June 2014. ‘DA Punishing Lwandle Voters’, Independent online, 3 June 2014, retrieved 7 February 2021 from https://www.iol.co.za/news/da-punishing-lwandle-voters-anc-1697743; ‘Politics the “Real Story” Behind Lwandle Evictions, says Zille’, Mail and Guardian, 9 June 2014, retrieved 7 February 2021 from

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https://mg.co.za/article/2014-06-09-politics-the-real-story-behind-lwandle-evictions-says-zille/; ‘Sisulu Criticises Lwandle Evictions’, Sowetan Live, 5 June 2014, retrieved 7 February 2021 from https://www.sowetanlive. co.za/news/2014-06-04-sisulu-criticises-lwandle-evictions/. Sisulu, ‘Lwandle: Ministerial Enquiry Appointed to Establish Truth’; Department of Human Settlements, The Lwandle Eviction Ministerial Enquiry. The naming of Lwandle as an informal settlement was across most news reports, in the commission’s terms of reference and in its report. Petition from ratepayers of Strand to the Mayor of Strand, 20 June 1988, LMLM. See Lwandle Museum Facebook Group, ‘We Love Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum’, June 2014. ‘The Ministerial Enquiry into the Evictions of the Informal Settlement Community of Nomzamo (Lwandle), Cape Town’, advertisement, City Press, 22 June 2014. Email: Leslie Witz, Chair of the board of Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, to Dr Z. Sokopo, Lwandle Enquiry secretariat, 25 June 2014. Email: Adv. D. Potgieter, Chair of Commission to Prof. L. Witz, Chair of Lwandle Museum Board, ‘Contribution to the mandate of the Lwandle Enquiry’, 14 August 2014. Email: Leslie Witz to Adv. Potgieter, 22 August 2014. Email: Dr Zoleka Sokopo, Lwandle Ministerial Enquiry Secretariat, Housing Development Agency (HDA) to Leslie Witz, 27 August 2014. Masa Soko and Noëleen Murray, ‘Siyanyanzela 2014’. ‘Museum: Lwandle Remains Dislocated and Invisible’, News 24, 10 September 2014, retrieved 7 February 2021 from http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/ News/Museum-Lwandle-remains-dislocated-and-invisible-20140910. Department of Human Settlements, The Lwandle Eviction Ministerial Enquiry, 1. Department of Human Settlements, The Lwandle Eviction Ministerial Enquiry, 228. Department of Human Settlements, The Lwandle Eviction Ministerial Enquiry, 239. Matroos, ‘Sanral to Submit Proof ’. Mkalipi, ‘“Powerful” Display’. Mkalipi, ‘“Powerful” Display’. Heritage Western Cape, ‘Launch of Logo’. Mkalipi, ‘Local Heritage’. Mkalipi, ‘Heritage Hostel 33’. Melanie Attwell and Associates on behalf of the Lwandle Labour Museum Trust, Hostel 33, Case 17103015, Portion erf 16300 Lwandle Somerset West. Proposal to grade site Hostel 33 situated at JKLM Portion erf 13600 Somerset West as a grade 2 site and to initiate the proclamation of Hostel

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84. 85. 86. 87.

33 as a Provincial Heritage Site (PHS). Submitted in terms of S 27(3) of the National Heritage Resources Act (Act 25 of 1999), October 2017, LMLM. Witz and Murray, ‘Fences, Signs’, 72. Dening, Beach Crossings, 18–19. Witz and Murray, ‘Fences, Signs’, 72. This idea of underground cities comes from Mbembe and Nuttall who maintain that the world below could productively be engaged to recast urban narratives of Johannesburg, as it is at the ‘deeper levels’ of mining and its interaction ‘with the surfaces and the edges that the origins of the city as a metropolis are to be located’; Mbembe and Nuttall, ‘Introduction: Afropolis’, 16–17.

Figure 3.1. The reconstructed Bartolomeu Dias caravel in the Dias Museum complex, Mossel Bay, 23 May 2013. © Leslie Witz.

Chapter 3

History at Sea Remaking a Museum of Eventless History For those who accepted the mythologies of apartheid, the town of Mossel Bay along the southern Cape coast held special significance. It was here that a little-known Portuguese seafarer and merchant stepped ashore in 1488. That occasion, when he was probably searching for food and water supplies on his anticipated onward voyage to India (faced with mutiny he soon turned back, his expedition at the time being regarded as ‘a gigantic failure’),1 was subsequently in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries metamorphized, in the settler construction of a nation that became known as South Africa, into a pioneering moment of European discovery and arrival. As if South Africa had somehow already existed in 1488, the ‘explorer Bartolomeu Dias’ was turned in segregationist and apartheid histories into ‘the first white to arrive on its soil’.2 Five hundred years later the moment of disembarkation in pursuit of provisions was further transformed into a multicultural commemoration of the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by the Portuguese captain, in a festival of discovery funded and supported by P.W. Botha’s National Party government and performed on stage in Mossel Bay. The quincentenary festival of ‘many cultures’, with Dias invoked as a figure of ‘cosmopolitan diversity’, took place in the midst of some of the most intense moments of apartheid repression, heightened resistance and very limited social and political reforms.3 The festival was a small part of a desperate attempt by an increasingly isolated regime to secure a future for its re-formed version of apartheid along the lines of separate racially designated structures of political representation. The Portuguese conservative government, correspondingly, was using the notion of 500 years of discoveries as a claim to modernity as a nation that was entering the European Economic Community, to ‘shed the backward heritage of its long dictatorship, debilitating colonial wars and a chaotic revolution’.4 In January 1987 Prime Minister Aníbal António Cavaco Silva’s government set up a National Board for the Celebration of

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the Portuguese Discoveries and proclaimed that the Portuguese explorers should become examples of progress, to ‘revive national pride, and to remember the contribution we made to the improved knowledge of Man and the Universe’.5 In a moment of ardent nationalist fervour, Commander Rodrigues da Costa of the National Board maintained that ‘from 1480 to 1520, we were the greatest in the world, no doubt about it’. Explicitly, the commemorations were seen to compensate for the end of the Portuguese imperial project.6 In the script of re-enactment late apartheid South Africa was linked with the conservative government in Portugal in a 500-year continuum that claimed progress, discovery and innovation. The Bartolomeu Dias Museum complex in Mossel Bay which opened a year later in 1989, on the somewhat shaky grounds established by apartheid’s last festival where Dias landed, is one of the most popular museums in post-apartheid South Africa. Its central theme is a world history that celebrates notions of European discovery and rounding the Cape on the sea route to India. The Maritime Museum, which is the main part of the complex, pays homage to Dias and Portugal as innovators and discoverers. It is a world history of ‘travels’ of ‘innovation’, of Portugal giving ‘new worlds to the world’, of becoming ‘pioneers of a Europe engaged in defining a new age in the History of Mankind’.7 The museum’s main home, from the early 1980s when it was conceived of by the museum services in the Cape province, was designed by architect Gabriel Fagan, primarily around a reconstructed Portuguese caravel that was built for the festival, travelled from Lisbon at the end of 1987, and arrived in Mossel Bay on 3 February 1988 in time for the spectacle planned for Dias’s landing.8 But the caravel which made the voyage to Mossel Bay could not fit into the existing structure of the double-storey nineteenth-century saw and grain mill which was chosen to be the museum site. Under Fagan’s supervision the building was altered to include a parabolic roof, a special opening was made on a side wall to slide the caravel into the museum, a beam was constructed allowing it to be berthed inside, and the floor of the mill was excavated to make it appear more like a harbour.9 Similar to its contemporary, the Vasa Museum in Stockholm which houses the seventeenth-century Swedish warship which sunk a few minutes into its maiden voyage in the bay just outside the shipyard, interior diagonal ramps were built to afford visitors the opportunity to ascend and descend on each side, allowing views of the caravel at different levels.10 The ship is undoubtedly the highlight of the Maritime Museum of the Dias Complex and there is little hesitation from visitors to paying the extra fee required to go on board, walk around the deck, stand beneath the masts and be photographed. They descend to view the sleeping quarters on what

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is claimed on the adjacent notice to be a full-scale model of a fifteenth-century caravel that looks ‘exactly like its predecessor’ from the outside. Although the ship is stationary, is inexplicably named as the Bartolomeu Dias (no one knows the name of the ship Dias travelled in), and the notice does tell visitors that the replica differed from the original in that it had ‘luxuries’ for the crew, an engine and modern navigational equipment, visitors to the museum imagine themselves at sea in a fifteenth- (and not a twentieth-) century world historical drama of maritime discovery. It is the caravel’s engine, that is neither on display nor in the collection, that establishes the link between the histories established through the re-enactment in 1988 and the museum which opened a year later. In 1987/8 the caravel required the auxiliary engine in order to keep to the schedules set by the festival organizers. It could not depend upon the vagaries of the weather. The Caravel Sub-Committee of the National Dias Festival committee took the decision that the caravel hull, below the water line, was to be designed according to late twentieth-century technology but with the appearance of an old-time caravel above the water line. During the day the caravel would use wind-power and at night the engine would be operated.11 Keeping the engine below the water line became the central concern of the festival, and subsequently the main feature of the museum. As well as the concealment of twentieth-century technologies of navigation, comfort and engineering, apartheid was covered up through alibis of cultural contact and global discovery. The lack of a substantive archive about what happened on Dias’s voyage was, if not altogether hidden away, then at least sidelined, the account of conflict on the beach with the local inhabitants at Mossel Bay in 1488 was written out of history for the pageant, and the massive opposition to the festival in 1988 was dealt with through rearrangement and replacement. More than the specifics of the pageantry, it is these acts of disavowal, concealment and substitution that went into the endeavour to produce Dias for the late apartheid period in 1988 that provided the foundations for the Bartolomeu Dias Museum in 1989. This chapter elaborates upon these processes of production in the form of elision, from festival to museum, and then extends the history beyond 2000 when apartheid’s last museum staked out its intention to establish new publics and counter the dominant institutional narrative of discovery and progress derived from Europe. Sometimes, this meant engaging with the museum’s inextricable associations with all the renunciations, cover-ups and replacements made on the dying embers of apartheid on the beach in Mossel Bay in February 1988. But this has not been the major direction. The foremost challenges over the years, as set out in its transformation brief, are reduced to issues

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of inclusion and exclusion, the former about adding displays ‘relating to the coloured and black communities of Mossel Bay’, the latter to the excisions that have emerged from the ‘representation of the caravel in a 15th century “maritime” context’ and ‘its associated Eurocentric focus’. Instead, the focus would need to be shifted to ‘local history, culture and the natural environment’.12 With different pressures coming from elements within the Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport, tourist operators and the trustees of the Museum who are wary of change upsetting the thematic of maritime discovery, even this has been difficult to implement. The museum management has attempted to move from being located in a world history that glorified exploration as the alibi for expansion by trying to place the museum in a new set of histories that will resonate with envisaged publics in post-apartheid South Africa by resorting to temporary exhibitions. This new world history is framed by a human rights discourse and an anti-racist moral economy. Placed within the Dias Museum’s context which emphasizes ‘European discovery’, these new world histories briefly challenged the very foundation of the museum and led to much controversy. I deal with one of these specifically below, when Separate is not Equal, from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, travelled to the Dias Museum, causing some minor fractures to the infrastructure of discovery on the shores of Mossel Bay. Most commonly though, these temporary exhibitions have enabled the museum to continue in the same frameworks of history that were set in place when it first opened its doors in 1989.

Denial, Suppression and Substitution in the Making of a Festival History In expressing his dislike of historical re-enactments, Greg Dening has argued that what these performances do is ‘to hallucinate us into seeing the past as us in funny clothes. Not any “us”. An abstracted “us”. An “us” reduced to an ideal. An “us” identified with the past as myth’.13 Who is this ‘us’ and what are the processes of abstraction? Initially, when the concept of a Dias quincentenary festival was being mooted in South Africa in the 1970s by the local town council in Mossel Bay and the Cape provincial authorities, it was as a commemoration of and by a racially designated white ‘us’ as discoverers and founders.14 Ten years later such an emphasis was no longer tenable. With the National Party government proclaiming that it was reforming apartheid, this festival could not simply assert the primacy

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of South Africa as a white settler nation. Although Dias’s arrival was one that could, without doubt, contain all the elements necessary to script a performance of ‘white founding’ and settlement, the emphasis in 1988 was on apartheid South Africa as being constituted by a ‘rich diversity of cultures’ that emanated from the contact and interaction ‘between Eastern, western and African cultures in this part of the world’.15 Festival organizers asserted that Dias’s significance reached far beyond national importance, claiming that what was being commemorated was the ‘wonderful discovery’ of the sea route to India, a breakthrough that was ranked ‘as equal to modern space travel’.16 ‘Us’ was being reconstituted through the festival as multicultural products of world history rather than as a racialized citizenry. To make Dias appear in South Africa in 1988 as both a symbol of global importance and of a multicultural nation, the participation of the apartheid government had to be actively obscured. In meetings of the festival steering committee, finding ways to hide the South African government’s role in the festival, despite the funding it was making available, was always a matter of considerable concern. The committee was well aware that, as the international boycott of apartheid South Africa was becoming more effective in the 1980s, ‘the overt involvement of the SA Government in either the organisational arrangements or fund-raising for the caravel project would prejudice international participation’.17 The constant refrain was that ‘the impression must not be created that it would be a festival organized by the Government’.18 In order to promote a multicultural re-formed Dias, the committee pledged that there would be no racial restrictions to venues and events associated with the festival. Assertions that the Dias commemoration was ‘a festival for whites’ were repeatedly denied by festival organizers in the press. In line with the reformist politics of the apartheid state, selected people officially racially designated as ‘coloured’, ‘indian’ and ’bantu’ were appointed to the various festival committees. The festival programme contained elements that asserted late apartheid South Africa as a multicultural community with a series of separate folk dances as part of the same event, with Israeli, Italian and Indian dancers, Scottish bagpipe players, gum boot dancers, and the Malay choir board.19 Pencilled in to the opening programme, just prior to the arrival of official dignitaries, were performances of mass rhythmic gymnastics by a contingent of black policemen from the training college in Hammanskraal. By inserting racialized and ethnicized groups into an international world of cultural difference, some of them dressed up to inhabit custom as folk performers, others providing the ‘spectacle’ of their ‘mass displays’, apartheid South Africa could take to Dias’s stage in 1988 as the site of ‘many cultures’ that were initiated five centuries before.20

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Staging the festival in this harmonious multicultural society aura of discovery within the bounds of apartheid was not easy. There was firstly the problem of finding archival material to draw upon to produce a script. There was little of it. Visual images of Dias are scarce and no contemporary ‘authentic portrait’ exists.21 Furthermore, Eric Axelson, the major historian of Bartolomeu Dias who was involved in the organizing committee for the festival, admitted there was ‘no log, no journal, no chart’ of Dias’s voyage which had survived.22 Much of that history which had been reconstructed is based upon chroniclers who wrote about his travels over the next century. One of these is the so-called diary of the voyage of Vasco da Gama between 1497 and 1499, apparently written by Álvaro Velho who sailed with Da Gama’s fleet aboard the São Rafael, from which extracts were copied in the sixteenth century and which was first published in 1838.23 Contained within ‘Da Gama’s diary’ is a description of Dias’s encounters with the local population when he landed at Mossel Bay, ten years before Da Gama. It tells of how local inhabitants initially fled from Dias’s presence, refused to take anything he offered, then a couple of days later ‘defended the watering place with stones thrown from the top of the hill’. Dias loaded his crossbow, shot at them and killed one.24 Creating a multicultural pageant on the basis of this evidence would have been enormously difficult. Even though there were some discussions in the festival committee about what Dias’s crossbow might have looked like, there are no intimations that including this event into the history in February 1988 at Mossel Bay was even considered. The Dias festival committee kept this incident away from the stage of history. There also remained the ongoing problem of associations with the apartheid state. Although there were claims to multiculturalism, the festival committee was convened under the auspices of the ‘whites only’ Department of National Education. Compounding this difficulty was the matter of racial segregation on the beaches at Mossel Bay, which was featured prominently in the news with the ejection of Revd Pieter Klink, a cleric from Bellville South, from the ‘whites only’ De Bakke beach in January 1988. The implication was that, even though for the festival the beaches would have no signs of segregation, Santos beach, near the centre of the town, where Dias was going to land, was one that normally would have been designated for ‘whites only’. Ironically, it was Dias beach 4 kilometres away that was reserved for people who were racially categorized as ‘coloured’. A call was made by a range of individuals and organizations, even from those who normally would have collaborated with the apartheid government, to stay away from the festival and not to participate with Dias as he went ashore to the racially segregated facilities of Mossel Bay.

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With apartheid, boycott and history confounding the attempts to provide a multicultural imagery for Dias, a bus crash on the day the festival was due to open entirely shattered any remaining hopes the organizers might still have retained for a ‘spectacle of colour’. On the Robinson Pass, 35 kilometres from Mossel Bay, one of the buses, carrying eighty-three of the police gymnasts from Hammanskraal, lost its brakes. It careered off the road, went over the side of the pass and crashed into a forest of pine trees. Twelve of the passengers were killed and seventy-one were injured. The performances of the police from Hammanskraal were cancelled and the gymnasts were no longer able to convey the image that Gene Louw, the administrator of the Cape and the chair of National Festival Committee Dias 1988, had explicitly anticipated that they would, of the festival (and of late apartheid South Africa) as a place and time for all ‘rassegroepe’ [racial groups].25 The plans were far too advanced for the festival committee to cancel the proceedings. At the end of January and the beginning of February 1988 the Dias festival in Mossel Bay took place as a public relations event for apartheid South Africa as multicultural. The Afrikaner youth movement, the Voortrekkers, paraded in the streets of the town with South African, Portuguese and Dias festival flags. A prestige ball was held for specially invited guests. And the separate folk dances, as indicated in the festival programme, were performed with enthusiasm and vigour.26 These images of multiculturalism were impossible to sustain. Almost all newspapers reporters who were in attendance, from those who supported the festival to those who were far more cynical, concurred that one had to look ‘hard and long to find a black face’.27 The stayaway was most evident when the pageantry took place on the beach on 3 February when a tableau of Dias’s landing was re-enacted. To meet Dias and two members of his crew were actors representing the indigenous inhabitants, who had gathered around a fire. As they saw the opera singer Manuel Escorcio, who played the part of Dias, land on the beach they backed away, allowing him to proceed to a nearby spring for a drink of water. But it had been impossible for the local festival organizers to find groups that would represent indigeneity and be on hand to welcome Europe to Africa with expressions of appreciation. What made spectators gasp in astonishment was that the actors who portrayed the indigenous local population were a ‘group of whites’ in black mask. The group had donned curly wigs, painted their faces black with shoe polish, and bedecked themselves with jewellery and other decorations in order ‘to portray the Khoisan people met by Dias and his party’.28 In one of the ironies of the late 1980s, it was only through whites rendering themselves

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as black that the festival which still affirmed ‘whiteness as rightness, and blackness as backness’ could proceed.29 The pageantry of the Dias festival produced what I have termed ‘eventless history’.30 This is not the same as saying that performance replaced history, but that the script and the production was not about reconstituting an historical event but creating the spectacle. When Dias (played by Manuel Escorcio) arrived, he did not disembark from the caravel. He had not been part of that voyage from Lisbon on board the caravel at all. Instead, he arrived aboard a small rowing boat from behind the harbour wall. When he stepped ashore and was greeted by the white men in black masks, he then proceeded to take in some water and walked over to a specially constructed wooden stage where he sang Franz Schubert’s early nineteenth-century piece ‘Ave Maria’. The various folk dances were given prominence in festival events and in the photographs that were published in the South African government’s glossy propaganda magazine, South African Panorama.31 Most attention was devoted to the caravel as the central actor. In the planning stages there had been a special committee to deal with the caravel’s construction and itinerary. There were no contemporary existing plans on which to base the reconstruction, the oldest available being from the early seventeenth century. Instead, invoking a concept dressed up as a science called ‘naval archaeology’, sketches of caravels on maps and paintings in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were used to approximate the type of ship and the necessary specifications.32 Built in the shipyards of Samuel & Filhos, a company who are specialists in historical replicas based in Vila do Conde just north of Porto, it was launched in July 1987 by Maria de Jesus Barroso Soares, the wife of the president of Portugal, and left Lisbon on 8 November 1987 on its voyage to Mossel Bay. Enroute it briefly docked in Madeira where the escapist popular pastoral-like Afrikaans singer, Carike Keuzenkamp, dressed up in a fifteenth-century costume, came on board, and sang the hit song, ‘Dias’, with its ambivalent reprise about home in Portugal or Africa, ‘Bartolomeu Dias, ons wil huistoe gaan’ (Bartolomeu Dias, we want to go home).33 Captain Emilio de Sousa and the caravel crew, which included the architect of the new museum building, which was under construction, Gabriel Fagan, were the featured members of the cast all along the journey. In Dening’s terms, they dressed up in funny clothes to step ashore in Mossel Bay and were treated as the main performers, rather than Dias. The South African president, P.W. Botha and his wife Elize welcomed and greeted them warmly. Most of the glossy photographs of the festival that were subsequently published featured De Sousa and his crew. Photographs of Dias’s landing, which are mainly of inferior quality, fuzzy

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and unfocused, were stored in an album that was kept in the museum archive. The caravel, with its engine hidden below the water line, instead of producing an event as history in effect, had borne an eventless history, in which Bartolomeu Dias was an almost incidental persona, to the shores of Mossel Bay in 1988. After all, of course, there was an insubstantial archive at hand to make his voyage into history.

From Eventless History to Museum Much to the disappointment of both the festival organizers and those involved in the new complex being built in Mossel Bay, the museum was not ready in time for the arrival of the caravel in 1988 and only opened the following year. The delay was caused not only by the incomplete building operations but also because, apart from plans for the caravel and the restored sawmill becoming a maritime museum, there was extraordinarily little discussion as to its content. The planned timing was inappropriate as well. How could the caravel have been the main display of the new museum in February 1988 when that was the precise date it was due to arrive at Mossel Bay for the festival? In the initial design concept for the maritime museum drawn up by Gabriel Fagan, he had pencilled in the possibility of displays of smaller ships, navigational instruments and charts, a landing basket, and exhibitions on ancient seafarers and Mossel Bay history in areas surrounding the main exhibit, the caravel.34 More formally, a fundraising information document put out by the Cape Provincial Administration a few years later summed this all up as depictions of ‘the history of the Portuguese voyages of discovery around the coast of Africa and of Dutch voyages before 1652’.35 In the most detailed list I could locate, compiled in 1984 by Edith Neethling from the Cape Provincial Museums’ head office in Cape Town, the suggestion was that they find copies of travel documents and maps from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, particularly from the archives in Lisbon, acquire copies of paintings of Portuguese seafarers, construct a replica of the padrão (stone pillar) that the Portuguese planted along the coast, make illustrations of clothing and living arrangements of the times, and locate duplicates of navigational instruments.36 Underlying this, there was to be intensive research in Portugal, which as far as I can ascertain was never carried out, and a commitment to the copy, the replica and the facsimile as the representational foundation. There were two other possibilities that emerged, one from the existing Mossel Bay Museum and the other from the elaborate dig that was

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undertaken by archaeologists from the University of Stellenbosch as part of the building and landscape restoration of the terrain of the new museum site where the national monument known as the Post Office Tree, that indicated where Portuguese travellers had left correspondence for onward delivery in the sixteenth century, was located. Much like many of the other small-town cultural history museums in South Africa, the one in Mossel Bay dates to the early 1960s when it opened in the old synagogue. By the 1970s it had moved to rooms in the municipal building and developed a theme of ‘the discovery of the sea-route to India around the southern tip of Africa and the history of Mossel Bay’.37 It seems to have had an arbitrary miscellany of objects on display from paintings of ships, to a printing press, a wheel stretcher with a canopy, a ship’s landing basket, newspaper articles on the town, old maps and photographs, models of ships, an old fire engine and most notably a vast collection of shells.38 For the latter, a special Shell Museum was reconstructed under Fagan’s auspices in what was known as the Shirley Building on the same campus as the envisaged Maritime Museum. The plan of the then Mossel Bay Museum management committee was that most of the other objects would remain in situ and form the basis of a refurbished local history museum while a set of new displays and a collection would be established for maritime history. In effect, Mossel Bay would have two history museums, but all the attention was going into building the new complex.39 The problem was that there was still no definite collection and display plans for the envisaged maritime museum. Moreover, the extensive archaeological dig on site had been a dismal failure in yielding potential objects. Nothing relating to the Portuguese period was found and most of the material uncovered was of late Victorian domestic rubbish from Mossel Bay, samples of which were ‘deposited in the museum’. No historical material before the Victorian period was found by the archaeological team, and absolutely nothing the planned maritime museum could make use of.40 All that really remained throughout was the insistence on procuring the caravel and the decision that it would be exhibited stripped of the signs of its modernity: ‘Die enjin en lood van die kiel sal verwyder word’ (The engine and lead weight to measure the depth of the keel would be removed).41 With the 1987 caravel replica as the central object, it was artefacts, photographs and ephemera produced for and derived from the festival that gave the institution its claims to permanence and authenticity as a museum. An extensive, brightly lit photographic gallery was created in an alcove with whitewashed walls, in which were mounted many of the images from the festival proceedings taken by Ruby van Coller for the South African government’s glossy magazine South African Panorama. The intense sharp colour

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images are devoted to events of the journey of the Dias caravel, its arrival at various locations, the popular Afrikaans singer Carike Keuzenkamp on board in Madeira, and the landing of the captain and crew in Mossel Bay. Most of the collection of approximately fifty photographs, block mounted without any covering or encasement, placed on the walls in a scrapbook type montage, are of public performances that took place on the beach when the caravel arrived, in the Van Riebeeck stadium in Mossel Bay and at the specially constructed Portuguese village in the harbour where the performances of folkness took place. In this extensive blaze of illumination, the commemoration is depicted on the walls of the museum as the organizers insistently claimed it was, as a participatory, inclusive, multicultural festival. In the luminosity of display, apartheid, the boycott, the tragedy of the accident on the Robinson pass, the engine below the water line and Dias’s landing are barely discernible. The photographic moments of the Dias festival usher history into the museum as staged moments of publicity. In a quite different materiality, and given more prominence, are a set of photographs individually mounted on a blue background, placed in a silver frame and set behind glass. These are of a march of flag waving by the Afrikaner youth movement, the Voortrekkers, through the streets of Mossel Bay, Carike Keuzenkamp (yet again – she features prominently in the museum) together with members of the Drakensberg Boys Choir, and President P.W. Botha taking a salute with members of the navy. Then, adjacent to the arched entrance of the gallery foyer, is a photograph of Botha and his wife Elize greeting Captain de Sousa, the captain of the caravel. Looking on are Hantie Louw, wife of then administrator of the Cape, Nette Barnard, wife of the mayor of Mossel Bay, and Chris Heunis, Minister of Constitutional Development and Planning.42 Bringing together the popular and the regimented of Afrikaner nationalism, a nautical past through the caravel and a show of apartheid’s military present, and the figures of De Sousa and Botha, the photographs herald and anticipate the spectacle of montage beyond the arch. In their framing and location, they proclaim the museum as the place of the festival, where Dias could land again as a ship rather than as a person, where events mattered little, and where it was the apartheid government in the figure of P.W. Botha and his entourage that would stand on guard at the entrance to the museum’s pasts and futures. Complementing the photographs are artefacts from and related to the festival. In a display cabinet in the festival gallery foyer, where the special framed photographs are displayed, are the commemorative coins that were struck for the occasion. Emilio de Sousa donated his captain’s uniform to the museum, and it is exhibited in a separate glass cabinet on a headless clothing dummy in the festival photographic gallery. At the

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bottom of the ramp leading up one side of the caravel, another display entitled ‘Replica Clothing from the 15th Century – 1988 Dias Festival’ was installed. These are the costumes of the performers who took to the stage in 1988, from those of the captain and crew of the caravel, to those of Manuel Escorcio (Dias) and the dress worn by Carike Keuzenkamp which is labelled as ‘Replica outfit of a lady from the era’. Apart from the caravel, it is the cloth and the coin designed and produced for the proceedings of the festival that are the objects of value for making the mill building into a maritime museum. Beyond the photographs and the ephemera of the festival in constituting the objectness for history in the museum, a more didactic past is inscribed through poster displays surrounding the caravel on the walls of the diagonal ramps alongside. These were donated by the National Commission for the Commemorations of Portuguese Discoveries in 1988 and may have originally been intended as a travelling exhibition. They have become a permanent feature and are more than just decorative wallpaper. Their importance is that they affirm the category of history as context for the costumes, replicas and photographs derived from the festival. Although these posters introduce ‘Portuguese travels’ as ‘meeting with civilizations’, rather than as moments of discovery, the narrative text on the posters herald Portugal as the makers of a new world. In line with the intentions of the National Commission to inscribe Portuguese greatness, these posters follow an itinerary that establishes Portugal as the architect of modernity due to its location on trading routes and political processes of centralization. They move along a geographical and temporal routing on what the posters term ‘voyages of discovery’ from North Africa, West, southern and East Africa to India, China, Japan and Brazil. The sequence ends with claims to accomplishments in nautical techniques, navigational instruments, medicine, botany, history and literature. The final poster, number 30, sums up this assertive past and future, claiming Portugal and its citizenry as great, innovative, emblematic of a ‘pioneering character’ in their attitudes towards ‘overcoming the unknown, and from their ability to adapt and transform in the presence of the multiple realities they were encountering throughout the world’.43 This is a world history of exploration and discovery where Portugal appears as innovator. Almost totally obliterated is its extensive participation in the Atlantic system of slavery. There is a brief mention in relation to Brazil: ‘From the middle of 16th century onwards sugar production constituted the basis of the development of this territory, attracting thousands of settlers and traders, apart from African slaves, the majority of them acquired through the slave trade with Angola’.44 The transactional violence of procurement through ‘the way of death’45 does not appear when

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Portuguese ‘discovery’ becomes cast as a ‘meeting of civilizations’ on the whitewashed walls alongside the caravel in the Dias Museum. Bartolomeu Dias hardly features either. On the museum’s website he is proclaimed as ‘the master mariner after which the Mossel Bay Museum Complex is named’ and ‘the first explorer to set foot on South African soil here in Mossel Bay on 3 February 1488’.46 In the museum itself there is extraordinarily little attempt to provide any sort of biographical rendition. There is a statue of him in the museum’s garden precinct donated by the Portuguese government and a brief allusion in the National Commission exhibition to his rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1488.47 A schooltype information poster prepared for the 1988 festival by the insurance company Old Mutual, largely devoted to the journey in 1488 and the caravel, is affixed to a board and exhibited. Similarly, a much older-type display follows the route around Africa and appears to be a remnant of the local history museum in the town. In contrast Vasco da Gama appears much more throughout the Dias Museum, in elaborate dioramas and various text/image displays. Some of these Da Gama exhibitions were later additions to the museum to coincide with the quincentenary of his voyage in 1997. There is a much more substantial archive on Da Gama and, in Portugal, his image was imbued with a far more heroic status as he reached India. Using this archive Da Gama is produced in the museum as a person with events in a life while Dias, whose travels became an ‘exploit’ in 1988, is transfigured into a replica festival caravel, a ‘unique, mysterious presence’ that can be viewed ‘from any point on the three galleries that encircle it’.48

Changing a World History Museum There have been attempts by the museum management and the Western Cape Department of Arts, Culture and Sport to bring about substantial changes to the displays at the Dias Museum complex for over twenty years. I became involved in some of these discussions when I started doing research on the Dias festival of 1988 as a means of comparison with the 1952 Van Riebeeck Festival, a commemoration of settler founding that I had written about and that was held soon after the National Party had instituted apartheid in 1948.49 As I started reading through the documentation of the Dias festival I became intrigued as to how this festival had become the basis of the museum that I was sitting in doing research. In 2005 the Assistant Director of Museum Services of the Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport invited me to a series of workshops that they were convening to consider ideas for transforming the museum. When Mbulelo

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Mrubata, a former manager of the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, who had completed his master’s in History at UWC, was appointed manager of the Dias Museum complex with the specific task of furthering this project of changing history, my interest in the future plans for the museum grew. ‘Were there any possibilities to metaphorically shift the position of the caravel?’ was the question uppermost in my mind. To try and generate discussion amongst a broader public, Mrubata invited me to give a talk to the Friends of the Museum on Heritage Day (24 September) 2007 on intangible heritage. It was also the centenary of the railway line between the nearby town of George and Mossel Bay, and Mrubata had been part of the group of dignitaries, along with the mayor of Mossel Bay, who had welcomed the Choo Choo train into the station below the museum complex in the morning. In my talk that evening I drew upon this event to think about representations of transport in museums and argued that the caravel in the Maritime Museum appears as a signifier of a mode of travel ‘in a linear history of progress, from the fifteenth … century’. I suggested that another meaning might be associated with it, as a vehicle of apartheid history. Should the caravel then be removed from the museum? ‘Most definitely not’, I asserted. ‘In fact, I would argue exactly the opposite. The caravel should remain’ but it ‘should be shown to be the bearer, not of Bartolomeu Dias, but of the contradictions that went into the apartheid state attempting to assign itself … a multicultural aura in 1988’. For the Dias Museum it would mean ‘reflecting on the apartheid state at war, the struggles against segregated beaches, and the boycott of the festival’.50 This was the intangible heritage it needed to uncover and represent. I suggested in the workshops and discussions with management the representational work the museum might want to consider as a basis to move away from a narrative of history that remains framed and named as ‘voyages of discovery’. Ideas included creating an audio installation that would play sounds of the caravel’s engine, constructing a display of apartheid beach signs, using the television footage of whites representing themselves as black to welcome Dias in 1988 (this is in the museum’s collection), and creating some sort of memorial presence in the museum to the black policemen who died in the crash on the way to the festival. If one thought of history merely as content then more possibilities of difference could include the museum seeking forms for representing Dias as lacking biographical emplotment, his encounter with local inhabitants at Mossel Bay and legacies of Portuguese trade and colonialism. One of the objectives of the transformation brief in 2007 was to provide an interpretation of the caravel ‘in its 1988 context’.51 Together with the work that researchers from the

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Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport were doing at the time for the museum, it did seem that the space would be opened, if only hesitantly, for the museum to draw upon its own archive to reflect upon and interrogate its own past in its processes of remaking history. There was another, much stronger, trend evident in the 2007 Department’s research brief for transformation. Rather than providing new frameworks of interpretation and challenging maritime history as narratives of progress, the museum was presented in the document as a potential site of locality and community, thereby re-casting the museum as a space of the people of Mossel Bay. The replica caravel would remain firmly in place as a monument to a maritime history of discovery, but together with this exhibitionary imperative would be an additional one, to ‘represent voices from all the inhabitants of Mossel Bay’ and to ‘redress the imbalances depicted by the Bartolomeu Dias Museum by producing new, logically themed, educational and stimulating inclusive exhibitions that promote social cohesion’.52 Instead of its legacy as a symbol of attempts to reform apartheid through notions of multiculturalism, which was the basis on which the 1988 Dias festival and the complex which opened the following year was constructed, the Department and the staff and management wanted the museum to become a post-apartheid multicultural institution that would add the locality on to its pre-existing framework of a world history of discovery. What and how local history would be conceptualized was unclear. The initial challenge had emerged in 1989 when the Maritime Museum opened and the local museum had been left in place as being devoted to cultural history which in this instance referred to a miscellany of objects, paintings and photographs pertaining to Mossel Bay as a locality of European settlement. An annex contained an exhibition on the indigenous people of the area and the Mossel Bay fire brigade.53 Since 1997 the Western Cape Museum Service had sought to refurbish, update and transform the cultural history museum so that it would become, in its words, more ‘meaningful’ and represent ‘the broader community’. In these terms the category of community was invoked as one of inclusivity while locality was one of exclusion. The Management Committee of the Museum decided to close the cultural history museum in 2002, to shift its contents to the new complex and place the artefacts and didactic panels in the Granary building which served as the reception to the complex. Those that could not be accommodated because of space were consigned to the storage rooms at the Maritime Museum.54 Several years later many of the local history objects were secreted away to the confines of the upper level of the Maritime Museum in a display which resembled a cumulative hodgepodge of objects

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that included a railway signal, a suit of protective gear, printing presses, laundry wranglers, rugby shirts, trophies, model ships, projectors, cameras, benches, framed photographs of Mossel Bay, free standing text and image exhibitions on Dias and Da Gama, and the old fire engine. This was hardly the sort of local history that sought to reconceptualize and broaden the Dias Museum’s public. In the meetings and workshops that took place it was apparent that the way in which museum staff, management and Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport of the Western Cape officials were seeking to reshape the museum’s local history, as the foundation for reconstituting its presence, was by reconstructing and augmenting its archival holdings. Oral history projects around events like forced removals were set up and individuals identified to recount their lives as part of a broader Mossel Bay biographic project. Researchers, appointed by the museum and the Museum Service head office in Cape Town, carried out these interviews but there was little to show for this in the museum. This was because of financial problems, an inordinately over-optimistic faith in orality as the bearer of community, and a lack of desire amongst some staff, board members and provincial authorities to implement new and different representations of histories. In addition, according to the museum manager, Mbulelo Mrubata, there was a great attachment, especially amongst visitors, to the permanent exhibition of the caravel and the maritime as the story of discovery.55 Instead, what happened is that Mrubata negotiated that a series of temporary exhibitions be brought to the museum in an attempt to construct new publics. This was also in line with a recommendation from the Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport that each museum in its ambit host three or four temporary exhibitions every year. Many of these were supplied by the Department itself which produced a series of travelling exhibitions at its Museum Services division then based in the suburb of Ruyterwacht in Cape Town. These exhibitions, which included the Abolition of Slavery in the British Empire, the Land Act Centenary exhibition, Slave History in the Western Cape, and South Africa’s Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, are presented by the Department in a mode of history as an imperative of empirical rectification in a project of national citizenship and identity.56 Other temporary exhibitions were available from the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg and the Nelson Mandela Museum / Michigan State University Museum Project.57 These take the idea of national citizenship further by linking the civil rights movement in the USA with resistance against apartheid. Anti-racism, gender equality, and anti-colonialism all become the frames for interpreting histories in these exhibitions, defined and named continually as ‘struggles’.

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These exhibitions had almost nothing to do with the maritime world history on display in the museum and were placed in a small, out of the way corner next to the souvenir shop so as not to interfere with the main exhibitions. The idea of the museum management was that temporary exhibitions would enable a resonance with those who identified with resistance against apartheid and that it would draw in new publics. There was little sense of exhibitionary thought behind these exhibitions in the Dias Museum and when visitors did notice them, a comment that tended to be made was around their inappropriateness in the museum. What usually happened though is that these temporary exhibitions were almost overlooked. When an exhibition South African Noble Peace Prize Laureates was installed in 2011, for instance, the only comment that the Mossel Bay Tourism officer Marcia Holmes could offer to the local press was that it was ‘an interesting adjunct to the Dias Museum Complex’s permanent collections’ of ‘the Post Office Tree, the Maritime Museum, the Shell Museum and Aquarium, the Braille Trail and the Ethno-botanic gardens’ and should provide an additional incentive to visit the museum in the summer season.58

Separate Is Not Equal This disregard of temporary exhibitions remained in place until Separate is not Equal opened in the Maritime section of the Dias Museum complex in Mossel Bay on 18 July 2012. Originally shown at the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, DC in 2004, the exhibition marked the fiftieth anniversary of the US Supreme Court decision in Brown v Board of Education which made separate but equal education unconstitutional. In its original manifestation at the Smithsonian, the exhibition was conceived as contributing to an understanding of a national past. It was presented by the Smithsonian as a story of ‘how dedicated lawyers, parents, students, and community activists fought to overcome legal racial segregation in America’. The history on show, the Smithsonian asserted in its publicity, depicted Brown v. Board of Education as transforming ‘the nation’ and as ‘a watershed in the evolution of American democracy’.59 But once Separate is not Equal was turned into a travelling exhibition, it became a world history that associated the civil rights movement in the US with campaigns against racism elsewhere. On its journey through South Africa it was given a local inflection by being curated ‘by the Apartheid Museum (in Johannesburg), with financial support from the United States Embassy’.60 Autry maintains that panels were included to compare segregation in the US to apartheid and that for source material it drew upon local

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archives.61 When I saw the exhibition at the George Museum, after it had been to Mossel Bay, and on the Apartheid Museum website where it can be downloaded, there was little evidence of these inclusions.62 The exhibition highlights the microcosm in a history of resistance against racial segregation in the USA from after the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement. It was schematically composed as a series of juxtapositions, with black or red colouring serving as a background for the blocks of explanatory text in a white script, combined with photographs around events, themes and specific stories, where the words of participants in the events are cited to give a sense of interiority. The images and stories are of individuals and localities, mainly through portrait photographs and scenes of landscapes, buildings, and events as news. The didactic element is explicitly accentuated by the sizable panels, the several large photographs throughout, and the eminently readable font size, and by explicitly directing the viewer to certain texts and images and asking pointed questions around these. The impression of magnitude is confirmed through four photographs that stand alone, with some explanatory text, but without any other competing images. These are of Martin Luther King Jr. and the march on Washington, Rosa Parks on board a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, a group of white women from Poolesville, Maryland, protesting against integration, and a reproduction of Norman Rockwell’s painting The Problem We All Live With, depicting six-year-old Ruby Bridges being protected by federal guards as she goes to school in New Orleans in 1964. These are all iconic images, placing Brown v the Board of Education as both part, and instigator, of the national history of the US Civil Rights movement. It is in the text, and not the photographs, where the comparative associations with South Africa are made by using small, highlighted inserts. Similarities are indicated at selected moments in the exhibition through a framed icon of white text on black background with the words ‘WHITES ONLY’. Through this textual image device, the story of similarity is highlighted, following a familiar structure around a simple repression / resistance dichotomy. This begins with a narrative of repression where vocational training for African Americans is compared to Bantu Education in South Africa, Jim Crow laws with petty apartheid, and different racial categorizations in US cities compared to apartheid’s classifications. It then moves onto narratives of resistance, where the Soweto youth revolt in 1976 is associated with black students going on strike in Farmville, Virginia in 1951. The exhibition also compares forms of racial solidarity where ‘whites’ supported ‘the lawsuit [Brown versus the Board of Education]’ and several ‘white activists joined with their black comrades’ in fighting apartheid. Finally, there is the moment of triumph, and the victory in Brown v Board

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of Education is aligned with post-apartheid racial integration in schools in South Africa.63 By using what Hayden White identifies as a romantic emplotment, ‘a drama of the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of light over darkness’,64 the story culminates in a victory for a universal morality emerging from a joint anti-racist world history. These comparisons were underlined at the opening of the exhibition in Mossel Bay by the Public Diplomacy Officer of the US Consulate General in Cape Town, Cynthia Brown. According to Brown, the exhibition told ‘a universal story of courage and determination in which people – many of whom were very young – were moved to civil disobedience by a simple, but fearless insistence on justice and freedom and equality’. She drew comparisons between what she termed ‘South Africa’s story’ and that of the USA, claiming that while it was not the same, it was also ‘not very different’. For her the exhibition was honouring ‘American and South African heroes’ and its lesson was that ‘we have a duty to preserve and protect what they fought for: the right to vote, the right to hold our governments accountable, the right to express ourselves freely and yes, the right to learn, excel and succeed’. Significantly, Marcia Holmes from the tourism association in Mossel Bay heralded the display not only because of its moral message of fighting against abuse and discrimination but also because it focused attention on how ‘people of different cultures share common bonds’. This ‘search for common bonds’, she said, was ‘the essence of responsible tourism’ and ‘the philosophy that should underpin everything that the tourism industry does’.65 In this manner, anti-racist struggles were brought together by the Dias Museum not only in a moral universe of world history but also in a future world history of international tourism of responsibility rather than appropriation. Within a few months these words, which evoked a joint and similar path of anti-racist struggle aligned with a future of commonality and sharing through tourism, were disrupted. The visitors’ book started filling up with a series of ‘diatribes against the museum’.66 Harry Hill, the spokesperson for the Mayor of Mossel Bay, issued a statement to the press that tour companies who brought busloads of tourists on South Africa’s Garden Route to the museum in Mossel Bay were complaining that the exhibition was about the United States and not South Africa. In addition, it did ‘not add value to the South African nation-building process’, claimed Hill, ‘was not suitable for children’ and was ‘not relevant to the mainly maritime theme of the museum’. The mayor, Marie Ferreira, wanted the exhibition to be taken down as it could lead to tour companies not bringing visitors to the museum and to Mossel Bay. Rather than establishing a future of responsible tourism, the exhibition was turned by the town’s mayor into the

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evocation of an irrelevant localized national history that threatened Mossel Bay and its prospects for the future.67 These were not the only responses to the exhibition. A blog site of two tourists from the USA were surprised, and enthusiastic, to chance upon the display in Mossel Bay and to ‘recognize the connecting themes of violence, mistreatment, and passive silence responsible for destroying lives in both lands’.68 The Minister of Cultural Affairs and Sport in the Western Cape province, Ivan Meyer, whom the mayor had appealed to in order to ensure that the exhibition was taken down, also decided, after some hesitation, to let it go ahead. His spokesperson said that the exhibition showed a shared history in the US and South Africa of racial prejudice and presented an ‘opportunity to reflect and renew our resolve to never again go down that path’.69 This was a reassertion of pasts linked together through claims to universality and history that appeared as an overarching moral lesson and imperative. But why and how had this temporary world history caused such disruption to the Dias Museum in Mossel Bay when others that also had presumably no link to a maritime theme had not? The first part of the answer is where and how the exhibition was displayed. Unlike previous temporary exhibitions, this was not in the corner next to the souvenir shop. Although it contained none of the artefacts from the original exhibition, such as a Woolworth’s luncheon counter and the interior of a classroom, the enormous photograph and text panels were too large for the small space. Instead, the posters of Portuguese exploration were taken down and replaced by the Separate is not Equal exhibition. On the ramps, surrounding the caravel, was a story that told of resistance to racial oppression. There was also a specificity around one of the panels that evoked a much more heightened response to Separate is not Equal at the Dias Museum. The exhibition emphasized the violence of racial segregation, particularly in the US South, with panels on the activities of Ku Klux Klan activities and another entitled ‘Lynching the shame of the south’. The latter showed a large photograph of a lynching in 1930 in Marion, Indiana of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith with a large crowd of onlookers, many facing the camera. It was this photograph and the violence of its depiction which the mayor of Mossel Bay had particularly objected to and claimed that it would destroy the museum (and the town’s) tourist economy. The display of lynching photographs has been the subject of major discussion and controversy in the United States, with the Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America exhibition, book and website.70 Given that these images were initially widely circulated in order to maintain white superiority and black subordination, the display of these

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‘brutal’ photographs as ‘a testament to the camera’s ability to make us remember what we often choose to forget’71 was undoubtedly going to provoke major debate. Yet, as Raiford points out, lynching photographs were often appropriated as part of and in the service of anti-racist struggles and to promote black identity and memory: ‘these images reconceived the received narrative of black savagery as one of black vulnerability; white victimization was recast as white terrorism’.72 There was a similar intent in using a lynching photograph in the Separate is not Equal exhibition. The text of the exhibition sought to direct a reading of the photograph by posing the questions: ‘What makes this photograph so shocking? What is the mood of the people in this photograph? Why do they smile so readily? And why are they not concerned about being identified?’ It then answered the questions it posed: ‘It was not uncommon for lynch mobs to pose willingly for the camera. In fact, this crowd is more than happy to display their sense of triumph at the death of two more African Americans. They show no fear because they will not be prosecuted or convicted by a white jury’.73 Much as Raiford suggests, this image and the pointed reading offered in the exhibition was about the complicity of racism in violence and terror. When the photograph was read by some visitors in Mossel Bay though, together with the displacement of a maritime history of exploration, it became both an irrelevant and undesirable new world history that the museum management was being urged to undo and replace with the previous past of Portuguese travels. Separate is not Equal had placed ‘experiences of oppression’ and anti-racism as the fundamental principles of its world history.74 By showing the lynching photo in the exhibition, the museum had disturbed the caravel from its berth on the shores of apartheid’s last festival and the narratives of colonialism dressed up as discovery and pioneering. The photograph had laid bare ‘that systematic disenfranchisement was not merely an inconvenience or a theoretical problem. It kills’.75 Ironically, in a maritime museum in which it was seemingly such an inappropriate presence, its incongruity made its imputed morality of dissonance and dissent even more powerful. The museum management did not succumb to the pressure to either take down the exhibition or to remove the lynching panel. Separate is not Equal ran as scheduled until December 2012 when it moved to the museum in George, 40 kilometres from Mossel Bay. This time, though, the museum management decided to leave out the lynching panel as they felt it might cause more offence and controversy. As I have indicated, it was here that I saw the exhibition for the first time, and it was displayed in the vacuous interior of the Sayers Hall surrounded by chairs stacked up against the side. It was there as an awkward, apologetic presence. Ironically, the hall

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had been built as an annex to the George Museum to house a collection donated by P.W. Botha, the National Party president who had presided over the Dias festival in 1988 and welcomed the captain of the caravel.76 But Botha had withdrawn his collection and the George Museum found itself with a hall it could do very little with and did not know how to utilize. In the almost ‘dead’ space of the Sayers Hall, Separate is not Equal disappeared from history. Meanwhile, the Dias Museum installed another temporary exhibition that made the same associations as Separate is not Equal. Once again struggles against racism and racial segregation were the theme of Dear Mr Mandela, Dear Mrs Parks: Children’s Letters, Global Lessons, curated by Michigan State University Museum and the Nelson Mandela Museum. It draws upon the many letters that children wrote to Nelson Mandela and Rosa Parks. According to Kurt Dewhurst, who was involved in organizing the exhibition, its aim was to develop tolerance ‘of diverse cultures and traditions’, an awareness of ‘the ongoing struggle for human rights around the world’, and ‘recognize ways to honor individuals in their own families and communities who – like Mandela and Parks – have contributed, in large and small ways, to making a better world’.77 Drawing together South Africa and the United States into a universal world history of human rights struggle, the narrative replicates that of Separate is not Equal. This time though the exhibition is back in the space next to the souvenir shop, there were no lynching photographs, and the world history was about ‘courage’, ‘hope’ and ‘freedom’. There was absolutely no controversy.

Redoing a Museum of World History What can one say about these tales of world history in museums? Firstly, and more generally, a new world history is being created in post-apartheid South Africa. Whereas previously world history was brought together through beginnings in discovery and settlement, it is now being reconfigured through anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles. In this move a world history that claims a universal morality around anti-racism is configured in museums that recall pasts of oppression as a morality lesson for the future.78 In post-apartheid South Africa there has been a flourishing of this type of museum. Examples include the Workers Museum in Johannesburg which uses an old municipal labourers’ hostel compound to depict harsh living conditions under the migrant labour system, the District Six Museum which thematically focuses on forced removals to

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racially designated areas under apartheid and, of course, on Robben Island where a prison site of anti-apartheid activist incarceration has become a post-apartheid museum built around political imprisonment centred on a biographic rendering of the life of Nelson Mandela. There are many more examples of such remakings where persecution has been turned into a post-apartheid moral message. The Dias Museum clearly has some difficulty in making a move that identifies itself as a site of oppression and conscience and is reluctant to use the 1988 festival to go along this route. But in using the temporary exhibitions that tell stories of civil rights and resistance in South Africa and the USA, it is beginning to stake a claim for a memorial past alongside this new museum movement. Secondly, the museum is not just a blank slate upon which one can easily install a new set of facts and interpretations. Changing histories in museums always means having to reconfigure spaces and their meanings. In the case of the Dias Museum the entire design was conceived around the theme of Portuguese discovery and hardly allowed any space for different meanings, interpretation, and histories to emerge. To use the existing exhibitionary environment always means thinking about the caravel that stands as the museum’s centrepiece of history. To set in place a new and different world history almost invariably takes the form of the add-on that appears incongruous at best and unable to provide any substantial change. The caravel in the Dias Museum is represented as the monumental fact of world history based upon maritime progress that steadfastly resists change. Yet the add-on of Separate is not Equal did destabilize the museum and its history precisely because it was so explicitly incongruous. Its large images began to draw attention away from the caravel and simultaneously contradict its maritime past that staged colonialism as progress. In resisting the pressure to take down Separate is not Equal, the Dias Museum continued what I called, in a talk I gave at the museum for International Museum Day in 2013, a dance with history.79 It might not have used the artefacts it had at its disposal to create a museum that thought about how it came into being via apartheid’s last festival, and it added on these temporary exhibitions in a framework of history as accrual, but it opened up debate and discussion around the content and form of world history in museums and how they can change. Those changes might appear small and unanticipated yet the controversies that the museum sustained in that brief period have destabilized its world history. While the caravel does remain in place, it no longer can claim to be the only type of world history that can appear on the shores of Mossel Bay.

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A Postscript: New World History from Mossel Bay Meanwhile another world history started to emerge in the region that may pass the Dias Museum by. It centres around the nearby cave and archaeological site at Pinnacle Point. Claims are being made by archaeologists that it is here that one can trace the origins of homo sapiens to 164,000 years ago. The inhabitants of the cave exploited the marine life, made sharp stone knives and painted their bodies. And they had to work out the movement of the tides to secure their food. This was an enormous ‘mental leap’ and indicative that an ‘extremely creative’ culture developed at the seaside. This is a vastly different world history. It is one that places southern Africa and the people at the sea at a beginning of human history.80 Mossel Bay may be one of the times and spaces that can compete for inclusion in a big history of humankind. But instead of using the existing museum in Mossel Bay, a new interpretative centre at the cave site is being discussed. Once again it is Marcia Holmes, the town’s tourism officer, who is proclaiming the tourist potential: People are fascinated by the story of human evolution, and this is driving a whole new niche in tourism. We’re seeing a growing trend in travel to sites like Olduvai Gorge in the Great Rift Valley, and the even older Sterkfontein in the Cradle of Humankind in Gauteng. But as fascinating as those places are, Mossel Bay’s archaeology is much closer to us today because this is where human beings started to think and behave in much the same way that we do today. As far as we know, this is where culture began, and we’re excited that our visitors will be able to visit the Pinnacle Point Caves in the company of such highly qualified professionals to learn about this. These tours should go a long way towards positing Mossel Bay as one of the world’s premier evolution tourism destinations.81

The Dias Museum is being displaced by a new world history of human culture that is emanating from the shoreline at Pinnacle Point rather than the beaches of Mossel Bay where Dias, or rather the caravel, landed in 1988.

Notes   1. Welch, ‘Europe’s Discovery’, 22.   2. Oberholster, Die Historiese Monumente, 121.

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  3.  4.   5.  6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Louw, ‘Message’, 1; Figueiredo, ‘Introduction’, 15. Cody, ‘Portugal Celebrates Age of Explorers’. Serra Brandão, ‘Message’, 4–5. Cody, ‘Portugal Celebrates Ages of Explorers’. National Commission for the Commemorations of Portuguese Discoveries, Portuguese Travels, Poster 3: Portugal in the Middle Ages. Fagan, ‘Ontwikkeling van die Geskiedkundige Posboom’. Scurr, ‘Context and Authenticity’, 76–78. ‘The Vasa Museum’, retrieved 5 February 2021 from https://www.vasamuseet. se/en/. Minutes Caravel sub-committee, Dias 1988, meeting 4 May 1984, Eric Axelson papers UCT (hereafter EA, UCT), Caravel: Minutes, papers. Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport, ‘Transformation of the Bartolomeu Dias Museum Research Brief ’, August 2007, DM. Dening, ‘Deep Time, Deep Spaces’, 19. See for example reports on the initial idea of planning a festival in the Mossel Bay Advertiser, 25 August 1978. Louw, ‘Message’, 1. Saunders, ‘Dias Festival’. Minutes 3rd Meeting National Committee Dias 1988, 20 August 1985, EA, UCT, Dias 1988 Steering Committee: National Committee: Management Committee. Minutes 1st meeting National Committee Dias 1988, 1 February 1985, EA, UCT, Dias 1988 Steering Committee: National Committee: Management Committee. Annex C: Three Monthly Report by Marie Hamman, Assistant Director Dias Festival, 1-1-87 – 31-3-87, appended to Minutes 8th Meeting National Festival Committee Dias 1988, 5 June 1987, EA, UCT, Dias 1988 Steering Committee: National Committee: Management Committee. Appendix F: Program sub-committee, 3 Oct 1985, appended to Minutes 5th Meeting National Festival Committee Dias 1988, 19 Nov 1985, E.A, UCT, Dias 1988 Steering Committee: National Committee: Management Committee; Maree, ‘A Spectacle’, 5–7. Maree, ‘In Honour of Dias’, 31. Axelson, Dias and his Successors, Foreword. Axelson, Vasco da Gama, 18–19. Axelson, Dias and his Successors, 7; Axelson, Vasco da Gama, 26–27. Van Gijsen, ‘Wit Span’. Maree, ‘A Spectacle’, 7; ‘Feesbooikot Keer Mosselbaaiers Nie’ (Festival Boycott Does Not Stop People of Mossel Bay), Die Burger, 1 February 1988. Williams, ‘Dark Shadow’. Duggan, ‘A Dias-guised Welcome’; Series of photographs of tableau of Landing of Dias, 3 February 1988, File 51, DM; SATV footage, 3 February 1988, DM. Gubar, Racechanges, 25.

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30. Witz, ‘Eventless History’. This section on the making of the festival draws upon this article. 31. Maree, ‘A Spectacle’, 4–7. 32. Soeiro de Brito, ‘The Caravel’, 38. 33. Van Heerden, ‘Carike Bekoor’, 14–15. On Carike Keuzenkamp’s musical career, see Erasmus, ‘Re-cover: Afrikaans Rock’. 34. Fagan, ‘Ontwikkeling van die Geskiedkundige Posboom’. 35. Department of Nature and Environmental Conservation, The Post Office Tree, 22. 36. Minutes Mossel Bay Museum Management Committee, Addendum on Museum Themes, Edith Neethling, 5 April 1984, DM. 37. Du Preez, Museums of the Cape, 56. 38. See Du Preez, Museums of the Cape, 565–7; Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1969, 94–95; Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1978, 73–74. 39. Minutes Mossel Bay Museum Management Committee, 20 November 1986, DM. 40. Schoeman, Die Posboom Museumkompleks, 7, 106–109. 41. Minutes Mossel Bay Museum Management Committee, 16 May 1988, DM. 42. Maree, ‘A Spectacle’, 5; ‘Feesbooikot Keer Mosselbaaiers nie’. 43. National Commission for the Commemorations of Portuguese Discoveries, Portuguese Travels, Poster 30, ‘The New Vision of the World’. 44. National Commission for the Commemorations of Portuguese Discoveries, Portuguese Travels, Poster 20, ‘The Colonization of Brazil’. 45. Miller, Way of Death; see also Konadu, ‘Naming and Framing’. 46. ‘The Maritime Museum’, retrieved 9 August 2013 from http://www.diasmuseum.co.za/index.php/buildings/the-maritime-museum. 47. National Commission for the Commemorations of Portuguese Discoveries, Portuguese Travels, Poster 10, ‘On the Way to the Cape of Good Hope’. 48. Soeiro de Brito, ‘The Caravel’, 38; Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport, Dias Museum. 49. This is detailed in chapter 6. 50. Witz, ‘A Nineteenth Century Mail Coach’. 51. Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport, ‘Transformation Brief ’, 2007, DM. 52. Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport, ‘Transformation Brief ’, 2007, DM. 53. Labuschagne, ‘Die Ontstaan’. 54. ‘Dias Museum: Agtergrond’ (Dias Museum: Background), document presented at the Workshop held at Dias Museum, 11 April 2005, DM. 55. Melton, ‘Traveling Histories’, 191. 56. ‘Museum Services Travelling Exhibition Brochure’, 2017, retrieved 26 May 2020 from https://www.westerncape.gov.za/assets/departments/cultural-affairs-sport/museum_service_travelling_exhibition_brochure_in_english.pdf. 57. ‘Apartheid Museum Temporary Exhibitions’, retrieved 26 May 2020 from https://www.apartheidmuseum.org/temporary-exhibition; ‘Dear Mr.

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58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

Mandela, Dear Mrs. Parks: Children’s Letters, Global Lessons’, retrieved 26 May 2020 from https://www.museum.msu.edu/?exhibition=dear-mr-mandela-dear-mrs-parks-childrens-letters-global-lessons. ‘Nobel Laureates exhibition at Dias Museum’, The Gremlin, 21 December 2011, retrieved 26 May 2020 from http://thegremlin.co.za/mossel-bay-news/ wordpress/2011/12/21/nobel-laureates-exhibition-at-dias-museum/. ‘Separate is not Equal Exhibition’, retrieved 17 December 2013 from http:// americanhistory.si.edu/brown/exhibition/index.html. ‘Separate is not Equal’, 20 May 2015, retrieved 26 May 2020 from https:// za.usembassy.gov/separate-is-not-equal/. Autry, Desegregating the Past, 103. ‘Separate is not Equal’, retrieved 28 May 2020 from https://www.apartheidmuseum.org/exhibitions/separate-is-not-equal-the-struggle-againstsegregated-schooling-in-america. These quotations are all from the text of the exhibition Separate is not Equal. White, Metahistory, 8–9. ‘Shared Struggle a Bond Between South Africa and the USA’, 1 August 2012, retrieved 11 August 2013 from http://www.visitmosselbay.co.za/ media-releases/shared-struggle-a-bond-between-south-africa-and-usa. Melton, ‘Traveling Histories’, 192. Jordan, ‘Close Race Exhibition’. Two Oregonians, ‘Civil Rights and Chip Twisters’. Jordan, ‘Close Race Exhibition’. See the Without Sanctuary website, https://withoutsanctuary.org/, retrieved 12 February 2021. ‘Without Sanctuary: James Allen, ed’, retrieved 27 October 2020 from https:// twinpalms.com/products/james-allen-without-sanctuary. Raiford, ‘Photography and the Practices’, 117. These quotations are from the exhibition panels of Separate is not Equal. Melton, ‘Traveling Histories’, 193. Melton, ‘Traveling Histories’, 193. ‘Door to be Kept Shut on PW Botha’s Past’, South African Press Association, 21 January 1998, retrieved 27 May 2020 from https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/ media/1998/9801/s980121b.htmm. ‘Dear Mr. Mandela’. Williams, Memorial Museums. ‘Celebrate International Museum Day’, Mossel Bay Advertiser, 17 May 2013, retrieved 27 May 2020 from https://www.mosselbayadvertiser.com/News/ Article/General/celebrate-international-museum-day-20170711; Witz, ‘Do Museums Have a Future?’. Gillis, The Human Shore, 20–22. ‘Mossel Bay Announces New Archaeological Tours’, 19 April 2013, retrieved 11 August 2013 from http://www.visitmosselbay.co.za/tag/pinnacle-point.

Figure 4.1 Huberta the hippopotamus in the Shortridge Mammal Hall, Amathole Museum, 27 May 2014. © Leslie Witz.

Chapter 4

A New Hippo for a New Nation The Journey of a Museum ‘Across the Frontier’ in Post-Apartheid South Africa In the early 1970s the Department of Nature Conservation of what was then the Cape province of South Africa published a brochure of museums under its auspices. With no indication of how the classification was being made, it labelled five of these as natural history museums and the remaining twenty it designated in the category cultural history. These natural history museums were, with one exception, geographically located within a 350-kilometre stretch of what, after 1994, became the Eastern Cape province: the East London Museum, the Albany Museum in Grahamstown, the Kaffrarian Museum in King William’s Town and the Port Elizabeth Museum.1 These museums largely collected and displayed a variety of animal and plant specimens, referred to as part of ‘the natural environs’.2 Most prominent amongst these were two specimens: Latimeria chalumnae, a coelacanth caught in 1938 off the Chalumna River mouth, brought to the East London Museum under the auspices of its director, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, and displayed in its entrance hall as a ‘living fossil’; and Huberta, the ‘wandering hippopotamus’ who achieved fame from 1928 to 1931 due to the epic tale of a 1,000-kilometre journey from the area around the St Lucia wetlands in Kwazulu-Natal to the banks of Keiskamma river in the eastern Cape, before being shot (by a group of farmers), skinned by museum staff in King William’s Town and prepared for display by taxidermists in Camden Town, London, before being ‘enshrined at the entrance of the old Natural History building’ of the Kaffrarian Museum.3 Huberta was accorded ‘pride of place’ by the Department of Nature Conservation amongst ‘one of the world’s largest collections of Southern African mammals’.4 Many of these specimens were acquired through large-scale annual hunting expeditions to Namibia, Malawi and Zambia

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in the first half of the twentieth century. There were also substantial anthropological holdings in the Kaffrarian Museum consisting of artefacts relating to the indigenous people of the region, some of these obtained almost incidentally as by-products of the hunting collecting expeditions. A separate ethnological section named as the Xhosa gallery in the nearby old post office was opened in the early 1980s to display parts of this collection. Already in the 1950s, with some hesitation, as it was seen by the previous director as possibly detracting from the primary objective of constituting an extensive mammal collection, the museum had opened what it called a historical section in the old town library, named the Daines Wing after a local pharmacist who worked at Grey Hospital in the town. These history exhibitions came to consist of a somewhat arbitrary assemblage of artefacts that signified European settlement in the area surrounding King William’s Town. By the mid-1980s, as the museum commemorated its centenary, major extensions had taken place, accommodation found and made for history as settlement and anthropology as ethnicity, and the museum buildings themselves were declared national monuments.5 From the 1990s arguably the most visible change in the museums of the Eastern Cape took place in these history and anthropology halls of the museum in King William’s Town. It altered its name in 1999 from the Kaffrarian to the Amathole Museum, the Xhosa gallery was refurbished, an anti-apartheid liberation struggle tour entitled Wings of the Dove was launched at the museum, coinciding with a travelling exhibition of Robben Island as a political prison from the 1960s through to the 1990s, and, most notably, a new history display, Across the Frontier, opened in March 2002.6 The Amathole Museum, in its altered materiality, presented itself as a space that revived histories of the colonial frontier, aimed to broaden the category of local history to represent ‘the entire population of the town’ and sought to re-position itself by providing prospective audiences with the roots of struggles against racial segregation and apartheid.7 To situate this shift from the Kaffrarian to the Amathole Museum, this chapter first takes a step back to examine the elements that went into constructing the ‘frontiers of knowledge’ that the Kaffrarian Museum ‘subscribe[d] to’8 from its inception. The intention is to unravel the different, multiple and sometimes contradictory layers that became part of Across the Frontier. Lien and Nielssen have identified several ‘signatures from the past’ that come into play in the construction and meanings of exhibitions: histories of museum practice, broad classifications and more institutionally specific historiographies which are drawn upon, changes

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in larger political agendas, curatorial and display techniques. They argue that these layers can unsettle permanent exhibitions and ‘work against and even undermine contemporary perspectives in the displays’ and diminish the stated intention to substantially alter museum practices.9 My own encounter with those layers of knowledge and practice is much more recent. I visited the Amathole in 2002 as part of the Project on Public Pasts to ascertain the changes which had taken place in Eastern Cape museums. Although my intention was to study Across the Frontier, it was to the natural history building that I was almost inevitably drawn to see Huberta, the central figure in a diorama with a mountain backdrop, depicting tales of her travels, evidence of possible sightings, a map, and artefacts and photographs relating to her wanderings and death. What caught my attention nearby was a free-standing, roped off display at the back centre of the hall of a buffalo with its head slightly tilted to one side. A notice instructs visitors, ‘Do Not Touch Wolsak’. At Wolsak’s feet there was a photograph entitled ‘Wolsak and the Hunting Party’. It shows a group of hunters (six men), rifles vertically at their sides, gathered around the body of a buffalo. The caption indicates that the photograph was taken by Frank Pym, the first curator of the Kaffrarian Museum. Who were these hunters? And how was Wolsak connected to the collecting practices of all the other animals on display in the hall and the trophy heads that surrounded the gallery? And to Huberta? And to the history and anthropology galleries which I had initially come to see? The questions relating to the layering of the museum’s history materialized in one of its oldest acquisitions (1906), the display of Wolsak in what was named as the Shortridge Mammal Hall of the Amathole Museum. Taking my cue from the museum’s signification of beginning and the importance given to its large mammal collection, in this chapter I initially consider the elements that went into establishing the foundational assemblage of animals and the arrival of Huberta the hippopotamus amidst this collecting frenzy. It is from there that I turn to how a history and ethnology of the region was produced in this mammal museum and to the attempts since the 1990s to construct a heritage across the frontier of change in post-apartheid South Africa. I consider the paradox of this setting of new histories when the frontier that is always framed, conceptualized and collected through European expansion10 becomes the marker that sets up the possibility for a ‘cross-cultural perspective’.11 Throughout this chapter, as I track the remaking and the layering of displays, collections and disciplines, I visit the museum’s anchor tenant Huberta several times, following how she has been turned from a somewhat fanciful tale into a figure of history, tradition, science and reconciliation.

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Huberta in Natural History Collections King William’s Town initially emerged as a British frontier garrison in the early to mid-nineteenth century in colonial wars against various local polities. By the end of the century, as initial processes of conquest and dispossession momentarily ceased, the town became a major trading centre in the eastern Cape region of South Africa. With its public gardens, schools, hospital, library and tree-lined-streets, King William’s Town had a ‘sophisticated mercantile sector’ that linked the port of East London, 60 kilometres away, with farmers and markets in the interior.12 Out of this grew an upper middle-class that ‘dominated political, economic and social life’.13 A feature of the colonization of this region was the collection and classification of artefacts considered to be representative of the natural environment. A meeting at Grey Hospital in 1884, ‘attended by prominent local men and members of the medical profession’ to establish a naturalist society, was cast as the public museum’s moment of origin.14 This society, which became the Frontier Districts Museum in 1898, was part of the complex of institutions that developed in the town, giving it ‘an established air of bourgeois solidity’.15 The development of the museum’s collection from its inception was based upon a series of hunting expeditions. As the museum did not have the finances to undertake regular large-scale game hunts to other areas of southern and central Africa – some of these did take place spasmodically – most of the initial collecting, under the auspices of the first full-time curator, Frank Pym, was centred on farms in the immediate vicinity. For instance, with the assistance and cooperation of local farmers Job Timm and Wm Pike, an old large male bull buffalo that was known as Wol Zak, was sought out and shot on their farm Trappe’s Valley in the Bathurst district specially for the display in the museum: ‘Mr Pike … walked forward, sat on the animal, and exclaimed: “It’s old ‘Wol Zak’, it’s old ‘Wol Zak,’ the finest Buffalo in the country, who shot him?” On being informed he gave Mr Pym a hearty handshake. Mr Timm assured Mr Pym that a finer animal could not have been found’. The carcass was cut up, meat portioned amongst those who had assisted with the hunt, and the skin of Wol Zak taken back to the museum to be prepared by the taxidermists for display in the Frontier Districts Museum.16 Such occasions tended to be rare, with the process of museum making and collecting being rather ad-hoc and ‘almost totally dependent on donations supplemented by exchange with collectors’.17 There was hardly any method of classification beyond assembling a set of somewhat arbitrary curiosities. Guy Chester Shortridge, who succeeded Pym as director,

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reported that he found on his arrival at the museum in 1921 ‘rows of large glass pickle jars containing monstrosities, (two-headed calves, Siamese twin-lambs, human and monkey embryos, and disgusting anatomical objects)’, an ‘assortment of abnormal skulls: four-horned sheep, freaks with malformed jaws and teeth’, ‘pyramids of gall-stones and hair compresses from the insides of cattle, ranging in size from golf-balls to cannon-balls’, ‘coloured wax models of fruit’ and a ‘pair of leather trowser’ with no designation of their provenance. Altogether, Shortridge maintained – while of course using this as a comparison to indicate what he saw as his achievements some twenty years later – ‘there was an atmosphere of hibernation and “drift”’.18 It was to be Shortridge and his assistant (who had been his gardener), Nicholas Arends, who continued the practice of collecting mammals, on a much more elaborate and systematic scale. Almost on an annual basis they went on expeditions to collect/hunt for mammals. The British Museum in London and the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who were, at the time, merchants of exotica, funded many of these collecting hunting trips to Namibia, Malawi and Zambia. Shortridge provided these museums with specimens of ‘animals of Empire’ to display to visitors as imaginary inhabitants of ‘faraway Africa’, keeping the remainder for the museum in King William’s Town.19 During his tenure as director Shortridge went on thirteen expeditions, collecting some 30,000 to 35,000 specimens, of which about 15,000 were sent to London and 3,000 to New York.20 Shortridge used the information gathered on the Namibian expeditions to publish a two-volume directory entitled Mammals of SouthWest Africa which attempted to give ‘as complete and reliable’ an ‘account of each mammal … as possible’.21 In the foreword Field Marshall Allenby brought the hunting and collecting together, describing Shortridge as ‘a sportsman … as well as a naturalist’.22 In 1933 Shortridge maintained that the ‘scientific reputation’ of the museum rested solely on ‘its study collection of mammals’. Earlier that year he had emphasized the unique nature of the mammal collection by reporting that Jane St Leger from the Department of Zoology of the British Museum, who had visited King William’s Town, considered ‘the Kaffrarian Museum collection of outstanding value, and expressed the doubt if anyone in the country fully realized the scientific importance’. At the time Shortridge had the support of the board which regarded the museum as ‘purely a zoological institute’.23 What Shortridge and members of the museum board were asserting was an order in which there were distinct and disparate fields of knowledge between the long time of the ‘historical sciences’ of geology, palaeontology and natural history, and

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history as a category of time of the modern, remembered and recorded in oral and documentary texts. ‘Systematic mammalogy’, which Shortridge saw himself as contributing to, could make use of the short time of history in written accounts of animal sightings and behaviour. But he regarded these narrative descriptions as subjective, to be used as a supplement to the scientific study that he maintained he was undertaking though his own personal research observations and ordering in a Linnaean classification.24 While initially in colonial settler societies it was the ‘historical sciences’ that enabled the formation of racialized hierarchies, by the early part of the twentieth century there were intonations that the category of history with short memories of settlement was beginning to assert itself as the foundation of the past.25 This was evident in the renaming of the Frontier Districts Museum in 1921 shortly after Shortridge became curator. The new name, the Kaffrarian Museum, was in accord with a mid-nineteenth century imperial identification of the region as British Kaffraria, conceived as a frontier ‘buffer zone’ between the Cape Colony as the ‘zone of settlement’ and Xhosa polities.26 In the naming an association was made between the museum and the imperial marking of the territory in the nineteenth century, its colonial history of conquest was inscribed into its identity. The struggles over the future of the Kaffrarian Museum, while Shortridge was director, were around the ordering within an imperial museum network which differentiated between an elongated time of the ‘historical sciences’ associated with settler colonialism and that of the recently acquired collection of the household and settlement called ‘history’. By the 1940s calls to establish a historical section became more vocal but Shortridge, whose major objective was an additional building for mammals, remained steadfastly opposed to history. A resolution was passed by the museum board ‘stating that the Mammal Collection of the Museum be the chief and most important section of the Museum and that the future policy would be to preserve and improve it’.27 Huberta was secured in 1931/32 amidst this struggle between history and the historical sciences. The museum was not deliberately pursuing a hippopotamus for its collection at the time, having already killed, measured, skinned and feasted on specimens for itself and the British Museum respectively on a 1929 expedition to the Okavango and Western Caprivi.28 But the hippo named as Huberta in the museum was more a set of stories than a specimen in a mammal collection. Spotted and photographed in the sugar cane fields near Stanger in 1928, then elaborated upon through local and international press reports throughout the years of the Great Depression, it was gendered as male and named as Hubert. Its appearance,

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wanderings and travails became part of fantasy tales of courage, determination, elusiveness and resilience on a journey, without any apparent destination, southwards. There were imaginary stories of sighting in Durban’s main thoroughfare, West Street, on April Fool’s Day, 1929, at Port St Johns’ town square in January 1930, and of evading attempts at capture by the Bloemfontein zoo while based near East London in early April 1931.29 And then, quite coincidentally, a hippopotamus was shot and killed on a farm on the banks of the Keiskamma river. Given that a hippopotamus had not been seen in this area for over seventy years, populations having already been decimated though game hunting, the dots were joined together, and the stories of the wandering hippo acquired a culminating moment. Time was one amongst many magazines and newspapers that reported, ‘Death comes to the Arch-hippo’.30 The Kaffrarian Museum seized the opportunity to take possession of the body of the story, gendered the hippopotamus as female, and in death assigned her a revised name of Huberta. A pamphlet produced by the Amathole Museum recounts: The day after hearing the news of the shooting at the Keiskamma River, he (Shortridge) and his assistant, Nicholas Arends took a taxi to the scene. They persuaded a number of local farmers to help in the skinning of the rapidly deteriorating carcass, and finished the task by 11 pm on the 24th April. The next day the hide and skull were taken to King William’s Town by bus. While Nicholas Arends laboured at cleaning the remains, curious onlookers trampled the museum’s garden and surrounding fence. Sympathy cards and donations for Huberta’s mounting poured in.31

Arends relates in his memoirs how he removed the flesh, shaved the hide, boiled, bleached and cleaned the skull, and then dried the skin in preparation for the ‘late lamentable Huberta’ to be prepared at the taxidermist in London. Once Huberta was returned to South Africa she was displayed at the Durban and East London Museums and the Rand Easter Show, an annual industrial, trade and agricultural fair held at the Empire exhibition showgrounds in Johannesburg, before becoming a permanent display at the Kaffrarian Museum in 1932. ‘Possession is nine points of the law’, relates Arends, ‘and we were determined to keep her, and keep her we did’.32 Huberta’s life after death in 1931 was initially created by those who purportedly rescued her for posterity, the director and his assistant at the Kaffrarian Museum, Guy Shortridge and Nicholas Arends, and the authors of the first two full-length Huberta biographies which appeared in the same year, Hedley Chilvers and G.W.R. Le Mare.33 Through arranging for her body to be reconstructed and by compiling textual narratives, using

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the newspaper stories and a limited photo archive, the route of Huberta’s life was literally mapped along the south-east African coast from Lake St Lucia in Kwazulu-Natal (as her presumed place of birth) to her death on the Keiskamma. By the middle of 1932 Huberta’s biographical journey had begun to take on more substantial proportions. She had travelled from the banks of the Keiskamma, where she had been killed, to the taxidermists in Camden Town, London and had returned to take her place safely ensconced in a glass case in the Kaffrarian Museum in King William’s Town. There she was surrounded by a variety of mammal specimens that Shortridge and Arends had acquired in their collecting/hunting expeditions. The books that were written about her by Le Mare and Chilvers inhabited her body with African ancestral voices. The routes that she took in these books went backwards towards an imaginary originary home, and then forwards and southwards as she was inscribed in their writings as the symbol of the need for protection and control of animals through the establishment of national parks in South Africa. Huberta, as she was being biographized in the museum and the publications by Le Mare and Chilvers, was being made into much more than a mammal specimen. As racial segregation began to be firmly entrenched in South Africa in the 1930s, she was invoked as a symbol of territorial demarcation for people who were called ‘native’ (and were controlled by the Native Affairs Department) and animals who were designated and separated as part of ‘nature’. ‘Native reserves’ were considered to be the appropriate habitus of the former while the game reserves were being set aside for the latter. The game reserves, which were initially set aside to protect animals for hunters, were being turned into national parks, where animals, such as Huberta, were being made available for viewing by a tourist elite.34 With their designation as ‘national’ they were to be owned by the nation. In this case the nation was racially exclusive, with membership determined by whiteness. These national parks, with the story of Huberta presented as a symbol of their necessity, were imaged as bearers of united white South African identity, helping to overcome divisions amongst the white ‘races’.35

Incorporating Cultural History Although the mammal section was considered the essential feature of the Kaffrarian Museum in the first half of the twentieth century, there were more strident voices emerging on the board maintaining that the only way to preserve this collection was to expand and ‘to develop the historical and ethnological branches of the museum’.36 With the death of Shortridge in

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1949 by ‘strychnine poisoning, self-administered’37 – his body had been found in the laboratory of the museum and there was some speculation that he had been upset about the lack of progress over a promised additional space for the mammal display – some of the opposition towards this policy shift was removed. These were the early years of the apartheid state and establishing a sense of a white identity and history, based on European founding, was promoted as the basis of a national settler past. Components of this (white) South African nation were encouraged by the apartheid state to identify themselves and promote a set of settler founders as European in origin. Museums which had largely been devoted to natural history began to incorporate, on a large scale, a history of settlement from Europe. For museums in the eastern Cape, this was translated into the German settlers of the 1850s and the English who arrived in the 1820s.38 The latter were depicted as people who had ‘achieved distinction’ as ‘pioneers, hunters, explorers, traders, builders of roads and ports, founders of towns and … industry’.39 Grahamstown opened a museum in the 1960s devoted to the 1820 settlers, while in East London and King William’s Town large German settler displays were created with elaborate maps showing the origins and places of settlement, emphasizing rural life, the use of farming implements, ‘agriculture and business’, and ‘customs and tradition’. One of the most significant history exhibitions was held in the Kaffrarian Museum in 1958 to coincide with the centenary commemorations of the arrival of German settlers.40 The foreword to a special brochure produced for the commemoration situated these German settlers in a lineage starting with the arrival of the commander of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape in 1652, Jan van Riebeeck, and culminated in apartheid South Africa.41 Cultural history – at times simply referred to as ‘history’ – as derived from Europe, was literally coming ‘into’ its ‘own’ in the museums of the eastern Cape.42 In 1950 the Kaffrarian Museum established a special historical section in the Daines Wing. A somewhat arbitrary assemblage of artefacts included a large magistrates chair, the first fire engine in King William’s Town, a mangle, a sewing machine, a piano display, a butter-making display, a pub, a wheeled stretcher, and a panel showing a variety of clubs and societies in the area. But there were two elements that defined the exhibition. The first was a reconstructed trading store that displayed a variety of household items, measuring and farming implements, and advertisements for some of the goods. The store provided the link between the frontier of settlement and the town as a trading emporium in the late nineteenth century, placing the origins of the latter in what appeared as the acumen

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and initiative of the settlers. What brought the whole exhibition together was the entrance where a huge bust of Queen Victoria was displayed. It was settlement, under the auspices of imperial Britain, that brought the artefacts of traders, the piano player, the pub, and the clubs and societies into the category of history as a form of reconstruction. If reconstructionism enabled the settling of history in the Kaffrarian Museum, then it facilitated the containment of Huberta into an empirically verifiable past. Huberta became a permanent display and was placed in a new glass case in a prominent position opposite what was then the main entrance of the museum. In 1961 a scenic context was added through a diorama, where the body of Huberta appeared to be walking alongside a river with mountains and valleys in the background.43 In this new setting Huberta was different from the other animals on display in glass cases. Placed in a context of progress, the exhibitionary technology of the diorama helped to reform stories of Huberta into an historical tale.

100 Years of Museum Making: Huberta, History and Ethnology Establishing Huberta as a historical figure became much more accentuated in the 1980s when she featured prominently in the centenary activities of the Kaffrarian Museum. A special supplement for the centenary that appeared in the local newspaper, The Mercury, was called The Huberta, a Huberta 100 Fun Run was organized, a first day postage cover of the old museum building with a Huberta date stamp was issued, the celebrations were opened in front of the Huberta display, and the folk-singer Jeremy Taylor, renowned for his rendition of the song that was a tribute-cum-satire to aspirant lower- to middle-class whites, ‘Ag Pleez Daddy’, was invited to the town to perform the song he had written in 1962 entitled ‘Huberta’.44 In Taylor’s song, Huberta is a somewhat misguided and lost soul, a martyr who should have remained at home. Reading and listening to the song of ‘Huberta’, the impression is one of bloodthirsty, premeditated violence of humans towards animals. Taylor told the King William’s Town Mercury that he had done a great deal of historical research, locating and reading through contemporary newspaper cuttings as the foundation on which to compose his rendition of ‘Huberta’.45 Taylor’s song was recorded and performed not only at a time when the Kaffrarian Museum was celebrating its centenary, but also when its newly appointed education officer, Denver Webb, was embarking upon a major research project to re-evaluate Huberta’s journey.46 He sought to find more information about the behaviour of hippopotami, how people

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at the time had reacted, and tried to fill in the gaps in the story, in particular of Huberta’s travels in the ‘Transkeian territories’ where there was a ‘relatively small white population’.47 Webb invoked historical methodology – going through contemporary newspaper reports, finding more about Xhosa cosmology, consulting those with expertise on hippopotami and communicating with people who had encountered Huberta – in an attempt to present a ‘simplified narrative’.48 As in Taylor’s song, it was the historical research that was the basis of asserting the real Huberta. And that real Huberta was presented by Webb as one whose ‘footsteps were … dogged by crowds of Blacks along the way’49 and who, more and more, was being associated with ideas of indigenous beliefs, practices and histories. Webb’s unpublished manuscript which he produced the following year is based upon a mode of writing history that depends upon a reading of previous accounts for inaccuracies and silences. This enables him to assert the authority of new knowledge. We are told by Webb that previously when ‘overseas newspapers’ reported on Huberta it was ‘sometimes with more glee than accuracy’, lacking ‘firm evidence’ and was based upon fabrication, speculation and imagination.50 In its place he sought to place a ‘scientific account’. The one way he did this was to be much more tentative in the assertions that were made. Secondly, he consulted a variety of sources to construct the narrative, which were quoted liberally throughout the text and that could be verified through examining the endnotes. There is one important difference in the narrative that Webb constructs for the reader, and that is his drawing of Huberta into a modernist narrative of African nationalist resistance. Making a distinction between people whom he categorizes as ‘traditional’ and ‘educated’, he maintains that, for the former, Huberta was aligned to their cosmology, ‘a manifestation of Imvubu – the great person of the river’. In the case of the ‘educated’ he alludes to newspaper accounts ‘purported to be written by Blacks’, where various Xhosa leaders from the nineteenth century who fought against the British colonialists are associated with Huberta: ‘the returned spirit of Makana; the spirit of Sandile; the ghost of Hintsa’. For Webb this pointed to a much more ‘nationalistic significance to the animal’s appearance’. The identification with what he called ‘national characters’, he noted, was ‘usually accompanied by pleas for more justice for Blacks’.51 Contained within the body of Huberta, as she was re-emerging in the mid-1980s in Webb’s manuscript, was not merely a historical figure but an ancestral spirit of modernist national resistance.52 Alongside Huberta, the other major event in the centenary celebrations was the opening in July 1984 of a Contemporary Anthropology Hall, displaying ‘socio-cultural change among Xhosa-speaking peoples of the

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Ciskei during the 20th century’.53 The Kaffrarian Museum’s ethnological collection had been established in the earlier part of the century on the hunting collecting expeditions when ‘Capt Shortridge collected material pertinent to many groups, including the Khoisan people’.54 Included in the collection were bracelets belonging to Chief Sandile, who was killed in the Frontier War of 1877–1878. As early as 1939 the government had suggested that the museum become officially designated as the ‘ethnological centre for Kaffraria and the Transkei’. It was only to be many years later, in 1978, that the museum appointed a social anthropologist under whose auspices the ethnological collection was placed in a more secure storage environment, and a new Xhosa gallery was developed in the old post office, separate from the interlinked buildings which housed the mammal and history sections. The gallery design included a ‘scale model of a nineteenth century Xhosa homestead featuring the old style “bee-hive” hut’.55 When the new hall in the Xhosa gallery was opened in 1984 it incorporated a ‘complex three-dimensional relief sculpture depicting the world of Xhosa beliefs and mythology’, a ‘sensory panel’ where the visitor was invited to smell, taste, touch herbs and roots, and view ‘striking paintings of the people’. In its publicity for the gallery the museum claimed that the aim was to show ‘the Xhosa nation as an established culture co-existing alongside a western one’.56 The prominence given to the collection and display of Xhosa ethnicity as the key feature of contemporary anthropology formed part of the working relationship that was developing between the Kaffrarian Museum and cultural structures of the bantustan of the Ciskei. In accordance with the apartheid government’s policy of establishing separate ethnic nations for people who were designated as ‘native’ and later as ‘bantu’, Ciskei had been made, in 1981, into an independent ‘homeland’ for Xhosa speakers on the western side of Kei river. Despite its ‘pseudo-ethnic gyrations’ the homeland ‘could not create the semblance of a Ciskei nation’.57 Prominent amongst the guests at the opening of the new hall of the Xhosa gallery at the museum in 1984 were many ministers and officials from this Ciskei government. The chair of the museum’s board of trustees report for 19871988 indicated that ‘our staff members are playing an active role in the cultural development of the Ciskei. The Curator of history, for example serves on the Ciskei National Monuments Council, while the Curator of Anthropology serves on the Ciskei Museum Committee’.58 Two new appointments to the board of the museum – W. Tena, the mayor of Bisho and the first black member of the board, and Professor Graven from the University of Fort Hare – were proclaimed by the chair of the museum board as providing ‘a much needed link with the Ciskei and its peoples’.59

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One of the museum’s major involvements with the Ciskei government was in the planning of an open-air cultural centre 30 kilometres outside King William’s Town at Ntaba kaNdoda, described by the historian Jeff Peires as a ‘costly prestige project’ of establishing a ‘national shrine’ for the Ciskei bantustan which was in the process of fabricating a ‘distinct Ciskei national identity’.60 The monument, resembling ‘something between a triumphal arch and a pair of bull’s horns’ which had been built in the late 1970s, was being redesigned by the Ciskei government at a cost of approximately 90 million rands. The idea of the envisaged centre was to change the monument from a blatant piece of ‘political propaganda’ into a site that incorporated substantial ‘traditional’ design features, so that it became a ‘new acropolis for the Xhosa nation’.61 The specific duty of the museum’s anthropologist was to chair a sub-committee ‘to research and design a series of murals depicting history and culture of Ciskeian Xhosa during the last 250 years’.62 For the museum these associations with the Ciskeian authorities were part of concerted effort to broaden its audience. This was at a time when those inhabitants of King William’s Town who had racially been classified as white were actively spurning any political associations with people classified as black. In a referendum they had rejected ‘incorporation’ into the Ciskei and rushed the proclamation of colonial buildings as national monuments in a bid to keep King William’s Town ‘white’.63 Collaboration with the Ciskei government was therefore presented by the museum as a strategy of racial inclusion and it was undoubtedly successful as visitor numbers, especially from scholars who came in groups from the areas designated as the Ciskei, increased substantially.64 The flipside was collaboration with a government that sought to develop a distinct Xhosa history and ethnicity and lacked any sense of legitimacy. One expression of this association with the mobilization of Xhosa identity politics occurred when large parts of Webb’s manuscript on the history of Huberta was published, with Cicely van Straten, a writer of children’s books which have their basis in fantasy and African folklore, as the author. The narrative of Huberta’s Journey (1988) was rerouted into a precolonial ethnic past. Van Straten’s book, which she called a blend of fact and fiction,65 was translated from English into Afrikaans, became a school text and an accompanying study guide was produced. Although Van Straten is the author of the book and she carried out some research herself, it is Webb’s work that forms the core of Huberta’s Journey. The story was developed by Van Straten from the unpublished manuscript that the museum provided her with, and the Kaffrarian Museum received royalties.66 But while Van Straten relies heavily on Webb’s text, her book reads Huberta

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in a very different way. She takes Webb’s account of the association of Huberta and past Xhosa leaders and employs it in a backward-looking narrative of modernity rather than an anticipated African nationalist future. The invocation of the world of tradition (and the words of the elders) as powerful, legitimate and the basis of stability in the past and the future are key to Van Straten’s novel. One of the characters, a Xhosa-speaking youth, named Solani, hears stories that Huberta ‘must be the spirit of Sandile come back to liberate his people. Another said it was perhaps the great Hintsa. People were hoping that the old days of glory for the Xhosa people would return – that they would be like they once were before wars with the whites, Hottentots and Zulus had destroyed a proud nation’.67 Van Straten dilutes the burden of the colonial and apartheid past by introducing the idea of Xhosa conquest by both colonial and indigenous forces, resonating with claims being made by the apartheid state and its media in the late 1980s that cast political violence as almost atavistic.68 At the end, the envisaged future of Huberta is not a post-apartheid South Africa but a supposed restoration of a precolonial past in a fictive Xhosa nation that resonates with the native and natural reserves that were envisaged for the early Huberta of the 1930s.

Changing Ethnology and History Following the unbanning of organizations in 1990, the release of political prisoners and the beginnings of open negotiations, there was the possibility that apartheid’s end was imminent. Ethnic bantustans, like Bophuthatswana, Transkei and Ciskei, which had been an integral part of the grand apartheid scheme, began to ‘implode’. Ntaba kaNdoda, a monument that ‘represented the impossibility of “Ciskei”’, ended in ‘ridicule and failure’ and was abandoned.69 For the Kaffrarian Museum this was a time of reflection on its past alliances, collections and displays as it began to rethink its future. The chair of the museum’s board of trustees called for ‘views on museums from all South Africans because of the inherent difficulty of most people and institutions to be completely objective’.70 Although there was a German settlers exhibition which officially opened on 15 May 1992, much more effort was being directed by the museum ‘to depict the history of the greater King William’s Town/Bisho area and all its people’.71 As the museum commemorated its 110th birthday in 1994, the chair of the board issued a statement laying out a prospective future in which it would move away from Eurocentrism and ‘right’ its ‘wrongs’. He

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announced that the Kaffrarian Museum had been planning ‘a complete new history exhibit in the Daines Wing’ since 1993. which would ‘provide for a history of all the people in the region’.72 Meetings had taken place, a special sub-committee established, and exhibition scripts circulated for comment. The history which was on display was now seen by the museum as ‘at best Eurocentric and at worst ideologically authorized representations which confound both factual evidence and its interpretation’. The call, by the museum’s historian, was to develop a history that was ‘the story of man’s past based on actual evidence’. History-as-fact that had been in place from the 1950s was now being rejected as ‘ideological’. Placing faith in an empirical approach, a new history was proposed that would establish a ‘broader context’. Greater inclusivity was presented as a manoeuvre of liberation from ‘an ideologically authorized version’.73 It took almost nine years after the original idea had been mooted for the new history exhibition to open. In the interim the name of the institution was altered in 1999 from the Kaffrarian to the Amathole. The former name was considered to be ‘insulting and offensive’ by members of the local community, while the latter, named after a mountain range, invoked the area where ‘Xhosas resisted the advance of colonialism in the nineteenth century’,74 the ‘magnificence’ of the mountains, and an indigenous name ‘which all language groups can identify and pronounce’.75 Other than the name change, displays in the Xhosa gallery also began to be altered. This was not only motivated by political transformation. On 14 April 2000 ‘a man who was freed from prison that same day’ broke into the Xhosa gallery, seized an old firearm from the Frontier War display and wreaked havoc ‘going from one display to the next, leaving his mark, either by breaking the glass or damaging it with a rifle butt’. The museum repaired the damage, refurbished the gallery and changed some of the displays. Most notably, it replaced a ‘Republic of Ciskei’ exhibition with one on the ‘National Anthem’, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, that gives a brief biography of its composer, Enoch Sontonga, and displayed a portrait of him alongside the words and music of the hymn and anthem.76 These were signs of an alignment with the cultural policies of the new national state, bringing the museum into a broader future-past of a South African national heritage constituted by cultural diversity rather than ethnic particularism. Securing funding, carrying out the necessary research and a process of consultation all delayed implementation of the new history exhibition. The latter involved community meetings, street polls, a survey and a workshop with museum professionals to establish how to reconceptualize the ‘predominantly colonial’ history display and ‘show the history of other communities, the complete community’.77 Although the outcome of the

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‘community consultations’ was that the exhibition should focus on twentieth-century resistance in South Africa, the museum decided initially to concentrate on developing a nineteenth-century local history and then, in a second phase, to deal with political resistance after 1948 where it was anticipated that the figure of Steve Biko, ‘one of the most important sons’ of King William’s Town, would feature strongly.78 The exhibition that was realized as phase one presented a local history of nineteenth-century King William’s Town, invoking the frontier, but inviting one to go across its signs of demarcation. The use of the term ‘frontier’ in the title suggests multiple meanings. Taken literally, it could refer to the spatial designation of King William’s Town in the early nineteenth century as a buffer zone on the colonial frontier. This would refer to its naming then as British Kaffraria. It also finds expression in new tourist depictions of the Eastern Cape at the beginning of the twenty-first century where road-side signs with the insignia of a canon appeared, indicating that one was now entering ‘Frontier Country’. The towns of ‘settler country’ had been recast as ‘frontier towns’, and the area into ‘a region that saw no less than nine frontier wars’; new tourist routes were created, named mainly after Xhosa leaders who fought against the British.79 Settler pasts were replaced with new routes/roots where there was a convergence of resistance and indigeneity along the fractures inscribed by the colonial frontier.80 The frontier also invokes a formative debate in South African historiography about racial attitudes being the result of conflicts between remote areas of settlement and indigenous societies, ultimately finding their outcome in the firming up of polices of segregation and apartheid in the twentieth century. Martin Legassick had countered such formulations in the influential paper that he presented at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, at the University of London in 1972, ‘The Frontier Tradition in South African Historiography’. He shows that rather than being isolated, societies were inextricably linked, fluid, reliant upon one another, vacillating between trading and raiding, conflict and cooperation.81 The origins of racial segregation needed to be found elsewhere and not in the psychological and social effects of frontier remoteness. Taking on board some of this critique, Noël Mostert, in his monumental account Frontiers, published in 1992, argued for reasserting the importance of the frontier in setting in place the racial structuring of South African society. Instead of locating race in the isolation of the frontier, he situates it in the global world of an aggressive Enlightenment philosophy that had its outcome in British imperialism. It was this ‘moral’ struggle over the demarcation of the ‘frontier line’, he maintains, which led to conquest, dispossession and the making of race in South Africa.82

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The analysis of the exhibition which follows points to an eclecticism which draws on all these formulations in the use of the frontier as the conceptual framework. There is also an important hesitation. The word ‘frontier’ appears in the title in inverted commas, and the text below the title, when entering the Daines Wing, claims that the frontier is not merely a physical phenomenon, but cultural as well, encapsulating ‘both body and soul’. This suggests that in its naming, the exhibition is recognizing the power of the frontier as a limit, and that by invoking a crossing the exhibition presents a challenge not to accept the frontier as a barrier of knowledge and understanding. This is the way in which the museum’s historian viewed the exhibition, arguing that ‘interpretations are either non-existent or intentionally open-ended’ and visitors are given the freedom to engage in debate and ‘interpret the objects in a new light’.83 But the frontier that invites a crossing, new questions and debates is also one that defines possibilities of interpretative openness. There is a constant invocation by the museum of the exhibition having ‘appropriate contextual detail’, addressing ‘historical inequalities’, and laying bare the ‘“true facts” of history’. It is the context and empirical detail, represented through artefactual display, that is presented by the museum’s historian as enabling ‘visitors to find their own place’ in a visual narrative that is set in place.84 That story is reinforced through elements of the design. Labels, sometimes minimalist and at other times extensive, are assertive, identifying events, specific people, ethnicities, use of artefacts and sometimes provenance. The authority of the written word on display is affirmed through the use, at times, of an old or antique font, appearing as if they were pages in a book, with the right-hand corner seemingly folding over as the page is turned. The profoundly realist notion of history is further sustained through what must be one of the most symmetrical exhibition designs which separates the room itself into two equal parts and aligns illustrations and texts on the rectangular boxed shape exhibition columns, so that for a photograph or illustration on one side there is a counterpart on the opposite side, and the display cabinets, set along and adjacent to the left and right walls of the room, are themselves divided into three zones with the illustrations and artefacts on the right balancing with those on the left side. The middle zone usually contains a dominant artefact or a key label which the eye is drawn to and is the defining feature of the display. The claims to seeking appropriate empirical and contextual detail, and then representing these as facts through the symmetrical design technique, limit the possibilities of multiplicity and divergence, affirming an adherence to the frontier of meanings.

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The key aspect of the exhibition that the museum seeks to represent is one of racial inclusivity as it pertains to King William’s Town.85 The frontier as history is a site that shows some signs of conflict but is largely one of multiculturalism and fluidity, enabling the museum to make use of artefacts from both its historical, largely settler, collection which it had in abundance and, on a much more limited scale, its ethnological collection. Surrounding the Victorian-type gallery, with its ‘rich turquoise’ walls and pillars of ‘blue with gold trimmings’, are six display cabinets which makes use of these collections to reflect life inscribed as culture in nineteenth-century King William’s Town: ‘Pastimes and Pleasure’ includes a water pipe for smoking hemp, a camera, a phonograph, a trophy for winning a cycle race, and ping pong bats; ‘Health Healing’ includes amputation instruments used by colonial armies, porcupine quills used by Xhosa healers in lieu of a scalpel, and grinding stones used by Xhosa herbalists; in ‘Divine Worship’ there are christening robes worn by Xhosa converts, a flagon, and chalice and church vestments from the Anglican church; ‘Dress: The Silent Language’ includes a top hat, a fan, Victorian wedding shoes, glass beads used by Xhosa speakers as adornment, and German print cloth which Xhosa speakers adopted. Two of the cabinets do not fit into the cultural life category: ‘Ilizwe Lifile: The Land is Dead’ includes military accoutrement, such as the uniform of the Kaffrarian Rifles, a bugle, a drum, a sword and sheath, prison shackles, a revolver, cannon balls and a Xhosa spear (manufactured in England) to represent colonial conquest; ‘History Prehistory’ includes stone and iron tools, and pieces of rock art and pottery shards to depict archaeology as foundational evidence of precolonial life and culture in the region. In all these cabinets the objects are displayed in the foreground with captions indicating provenance and application, while the surrounding walls contain copies of documents, illustrations and photographs, locating the objects in their use and specificity relating to the overall theme. Other features of the exhibition are: a large satellite image where places that are referred to on the exhibition can be located; a touch-screen computer display showing magic lantern images; two rectangular pillars containing illustrations and texts about colonial wars and economies; and a series of very large panels, taking up almost half of one side of the room, on the ‘Cattle-killing movement of 1856-57’. The overwhelming impression in the exhibition is that social history read through objects of ‘ordinary lives’ is constituted mainly through a history of cultural history, with additional elements from its ethnological collection. The fractures of the colonial frontier in the region in the nineteenth century and its layering in the museum’s own history in the twentieth century are the mechanisms used to show cultural diversity.

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Opening the exhibition, the historian, Paul Maylam, commended the displays for concentrating ‘more on culture and lifestyle than on military conflict’. One reading of Across the Frontier is that it negotiates between presenting colonization as embodying, on the one hand, violence and dispossession, and, on the other, what Maylam referred to as ‘exchange’ and ‘acculturation’.86 This enables an affirmation of the scholarship of historians like Legassick and Mostert who assert the aggression of colonization in constantly trying to impose boundaries in a world of shifting alliances, cultural borrowings and negotiating meanings. The exhibition simultaneously offers a reading back of contemporary twenty-first-century multicultural concerns into the nineteenth century and presents a King William’s Town where the colonial frontier is represented in the categories, classifications and artefacts of a ‘cross-cultural perspective’.87 In using this cultural contact framework, the danger is that the colonization of the Eastern Cape is turned into a set of multicultural encounters that lead to a predetermined future as a region where people today ‘celebrate their diversity as they push new frontiers of development and understanding’.88 The multicultural emphasis in the exhibition asserts a distinctiveness that emphasizes categories of timeless tradition as culture, and of the borrowings and shifting meanings that Maylam referred to. Exhibition labels in Across the Frontier for instance sometimes employ the category of ‘Xhosa’ as a given and represented as one of the key ‘cultures’. There are references to Xhosa men and women, a Xhosa spear, a Xhosa warrior, Xhosa women hoeing, Xhosa herders, a Xhosa diviner and a Xhosa healer sprinkled throughout. In other instances, though, culture is depicted as neither essentialized nor fixed. The exhibition was reported in the local press in precisely these terms: ‘Elegant Xhosa smoking pipes fashioned from bullocks’ horns lie alongside delicate ping-pong bats, African miracle potions next to violent-looking dentistry sets, and stories about German Print (amaJamani) are displayed with Victorian underwear and photographs of stiffly-corseted Xhosa nannies’.89 This is most obvious in the display case, ‘Dress: The Silent Language’, where what may appear as ‘Western’ dress is shown being worn by people who are apparently Xhosa speakers. A central image is of Tausi Soga ‘dressed in Victorian fashion’ and artefacts include a mannequin wearing a long black dress, a black hood, two corsets and, as indicated above, an example of German print cloth worn by Xhosa women. The museum has deliberately avoided what must have been a huge temptation to show ‘Xhosa women’ in ‘traditional dress’, as the nearby museums in East London and Grahamstown do. Instead, photographs show many of the items on display worn across what may appear as fixed cultures,

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although the suggestion made in the labelling is that this change in dress amongst Xhosa speakers was largely imposed by missionaries and the municipal regulations which forbade ‘natives’ in the mid-nineteenth century from entering King William’s Town unless they were ‘decently dressed in European clothing’. The sub-title of the display case is a quotation from the historian Noel Mostert’s book, Frontiers: ‘England expects her subjects to be properly dressed’. If Mostert is one historian who is explicitly drawn upon, then Jeff Peires is another. His book The Dead Will Arise, originally published in 1989, which seeks to explain the events that led to the millenarian cattle-killing movement of the mid-1850s in the eastern Cape and its consequences, is summarized in a series of five text and illustrative panels.90 Set in an alcove where directional markers prescribe movement from right to left, there are panels on ‘What was the cattle-killing?’ through to ‘Who were Nongqawuse and Mhlakaza’, ‘What was the prophecy?’, ‘Did the Xhosa believe the prophecy?’ and ‘Consequences’. Included in this final panel is a table indicating the number of deaths in the region as result of the cattle-killing, and a series of illustrations concerning the Edward Street Cemetery barely 200 metres from the Amathole Museum. This part of the exhibition brings the cattle-killing into the present as it relates the finds of human remains of ‘at least 100 Xhosa casualties of the CattleKilling Movement [who] were buried in a mass grave situated behind Edward Street Cemetery and under the tennis courts of Dale College’s Presby Hostel’. By bringing these finds together with the explanation and information derived from Peires’s book, the museum links its work into memorial practices in contemporary King William’s Town. Although in the ‘Dead Will Arise’ alcove it is the millenarian nature of the prophecy that is emphasized, Peires’s interpretation of the cattle-killing movement around the spread of lungsickness amongst the cattle, the devastating effects of colonial conquest and the infusion of Xhosa belief systems with Christian ideas of resurrection are taken on board. This ties into the broader thematic of the exhibition which brings together a stress on the malleability and shifting of identities across the frontier with the impact of colonial conquest. Most notably, the extensive ‘Dead will Arise’ series of panels accepts, without any hint of debate, what is probably Peires’s most contentious assertion, that Mhlakaza, who conveyed the words of the cattle-killing prophecy from the young woman Nongqawuse to leaders of Xhosa polities, was the missionary trained William Goliath. The implicit assertion goes beyond bounded communities of belief and tradition, seeking historical understandings that go ‘across the frontier’.91

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The implication of this approach is that it questions the larger classificatory divisions in the Amathole Museum between an ethnology collection and display with distinct ethnic affiliation, and history with its settler pasts. It was even more accentuated in the ways in which the actual making of the exhibition continually undermined such institutional classifications. It was the principal human scientist, formerly named as the curator of anthropology, who was deeply involved in researching and writing for the historical displays. Moreover, parts of the ethnology collection were used in Across the Frontier, at times questioning the evocation of objects as bearers of fixed traditions. Yet the separate Xhosa gallery, about fifty metres away, remained in place. In 1986/1987 a yellow line had been drawn on the pavement indicating the direction to the Xhosa gallery from the buildings that housed the mammal and history sections. In addition, to market the Xhosa gallery a municipal rubbish bin had been painted with a ‘traditional Xhosa motif ’.92 At the time of the new history exhibition this arrangement remained in place. It appeared that the one frontier that the museum did not dare to cross was between anthropology and history, between the Daines Wing and the Xhosa gallery. I remarked upon the retention of this demarcation in a paper I presented at a conference about the history and politics of the eastern Cape held in East London in 2003.93 It seemed to me that the words my colleagues, Gary Minkley, Ciraj Rassool and I had written in respect of the McGregor Museum in Kimberley were as appropriate for the Amathole Museum in King William’s Town: ‘The museum remains characterized by a classificatory system in which the exhibitionary and ethnographic work of the Gallery is considered to be separate from the historical activities in the Museum’.94 The principal human scientist disagreed with this assertion and argued vehemently in the museum’s annual report in 2003/2004 for maintaining a separate Xhosa gallery. He claimed it was an important ‘resource on the history of the chieftainship and Xhosa culture in general’, it enabled the maintenance of peripheralized and ‘marginalised segments of contemporary society’ and it was relevant to ‘the shared cultural background of the majority of the population in the Eastern Cape, better known as EmaXhoseni (Xhosaland)’ who had been ‘denied full and proper expression in South African museums’ under apartheid. He saw the physical location of the Xhosa gallery as nothing more than a simple accommodation arrangement when there was no other space available for this part of the collection ‘in the rest of the museum’.95 The separate Xhosa gallery has been used extensively since the 1980s in the museum’s public education activities as it seeks to broaden its audience. On a tour of the gallery in September 2008 with a group of schoolchildren,

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it was evident from the enthusiastic presentation of the education officer and the responses of the children that its displays are popular and enable a narrative around Xhosa tradition and leadership, represented as heritage preservation.96 In the historical hall the exhibition boldly asserts movement across the frontier of knowledge, while the primary location of heritage in the Amathole Museum is firmly located in the separate ethnically designated gallery.

Huberta Across the Frontier What has happened to Huberta amidst this flurry of activity in the realm of history, where establishing new facts and interpretations of a cross-cultural past has become central? In September 2008 I had been doing research at the Amathole Museum in King William’s Town on Across the Frontier, carefully going through the exhibition, making extensive notes on the objects on display, the design, the explanatory texts and captions, reading annual reports and going on tour with the historian, an educational officer and a technical officer. At the end of one of the days I returned to the office of the museum’s historian. Earlier in the day we had been talking about the changes that had taken place at the museum over the past ten years and although she was not there when I returned, she had left for me three clean, unused museum postal mail letterheads. They contained the museum’s logo, contact details and watermarks. She had placed the letterheads in an order that delineated the changes that had taken place in the period we had been talking about. The top quarter of the first letterhead contained the title ‘Kaffrarian Museum’, with its address, landline phone and fax number. Above the heading were two sketches. To the left was the main museum building (‘Est 1884’) and on the right the structure housing the nearby South African Missionary Museum, which had become part of the museum. Below the sketch of the main building were the words ‘Home of Huberta’. And, about halfway down, and covering the remainder of the page, was a large watermark of the image of a hippopotamus. In the second letterhead the buildings had disappeared, and the top panel contained the words ‘Amathole Museum’. Stretched out below the words was an icon of a range of mountains. Details of the museum’s postal address, phone, fax, email address and web-presence were provided. The hippopotamus was no longer a watermark but appeared as a sketch on the left-hand side of the page. Below it was the words ‘Home of Huberta’. Finally, there was the museum’s letterhead at the time of my visit. It had changed

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from black and white to white with shades of blue. The receding background of the page returned to the images of the museum’s buildings: the South African Missionary Museum, the original museum (containing the Natural History section), the old library (where the History section is located) and the old King William’s Town post office (which became the Xhosa gallery). The contact details are at the bottom of the page, below which is a thin strip depicting local beadwork. A circular icon appears centred at the top of the page. A spiral line drawing of what may be an animal-type figure (it is very unclear) on a white background is surrounded by a blue and white zig-zag circle (perhaps the form is a sun, or a pool, or a pot). Below it are the words ‘Amathole Museum’ and ‘isesele solwazi – treasure of knowledge’. The hippopotamus who for so long was the museum’s iconic image appeared to have disappeared from the pages of a new history. But, of course, appearances are deceptive. The museum might not have been represented as the ‘Home of Huberta’ on its letterhead, but Huberta still has a permanent home in the museum in the Shortridge Mammal Hall. Since 1992 though there has not been a separate Huberta entrance to the museum. Except for a brief interregnum when the History Hall was being altered, visitors to the museum enter through the Daines Wing, go across the frontier though the history exhibitions, walk through the mammal section and end at Huberta, an empirical embodiment of a past that is taken as a sign of the future. If the colonial frontier is represented in the Amathole Museum by weaving a tale of conflict together with the ‘interaction of peoples and values’, all leading to a South Africa ‘in all its modern complexity’,97 then it is through Huberta that a collective inheritance is affirmed as a new common national identity. The work of Shortridge, Arends, Chilvers, Le Mare, Webb and Van Straten had all laid the groundwork for Huberta becoming in the late 1990s, in press reports and in museum publicity material, a multicultural creature, embodying beliefs about death and ancestors in Hindu, Zulu and Xhosa societies. When an attempt was made to publicize Huberta by playfully concocting a supposed repatriation claim by the Richard’s Bay municipality (as the site of origin), the press report was littered with stories about her being the reincarnation of Shaka, the spirit of both a ‘great Xhosa chief ’ and a ‘famous’ Mpondo ‘sangoma’, and a Hindu protector of the poor. The same report managed to bring the racial category of ‘whites’ into the frame as well, saying that they were ‘so distressed when she was shot’. The reporter even went so far as to fabricate ‘a top-level police investigation into her shooting’, that the government had supposedly ordered.98

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At the same time Huberta’s scientific status was asserted when she was moved for the first time in sixty-seven years and displayed at SciFest 99 in Grahamstown, an initiative that sought to make science ‘accessible’, explore its relationship to ‘everyday activities’, and break down ‘popular misconceptions’.99 The museum’s newsletter reported that Huberta generated a great deal of publicity in the media, the story was ‘related countless times to groups and individuals’ at the festival and 1,250 pamphlets about her journey were distributed. Huberta’s ‘famous’ story was presented alongside general information on small mammals and a demonstration of the ‘mass difference between bird and mammal bones’. In this manner, Huberta, who had entered the museum by chance in the 1930s and who was not an object of study in the way that other species in the collection were categorized, was incorporated into a group of ‘mammal specimens’ for the festival of science.100 The temporary move to Grahamstown, which involved producing material for the exhibition, also led to a substantial revamp of the Huberta display in what had recently become the Amathole Museum. Much more textual and illustrative material was included. This included a map indicating sites on her travels, scanned illustrations from a children’s book by Wendy Emslie entitled “Huberta” published in 1992, information on ‘Huberta’s story’ and how the museum had acquired her.101 There was also a list of four ‘interesting facts about Huberta’. Most of these ‘facts’ are about the cultural imaginings of Huberta, that had their sources in the contemporary press reports and the writings of Le Mare and Chilvers. Once again Huberta was ‘deified as “Protector of the Poor”’ at a Hindu temple, the spirit of Xhosa leaders, Sandile or Hintsa, and also a ‘famous traditional doctor’ of the Mpondo. What was being inscribed in the Amathole Museum was an empirically based Huberta, representing the imagined facts of a multicultural past and present. It is notable that Emslie’s book was used in redoing the display as, perhaps more than any other of the Huberta books before, it is written as an empirical past. Although it makes use of what Webb regarded as some of the more fanciful stories, there is an attempt to be precise. Making use of press cuttings, Emslie plots exact places and dates in her narrative and on a map as to when and where events occurred, from the place of birth through to her death on the banks of the Keiskamma in April 1931 and the movement of the body to a display environment in the Kaffrarian Museum. More than this, Emslie shows where she acquired her information. There are reproductions of photographs that appeared in the Natal Mercury in 1931, newspaper reports on Huberta’s death, the letter from the taxidermists in London confirming the cost of mounting

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Huberta, and a transcript of the trial of those who allegedly shot Huberta, Nicolaas Jacobus Marx, Petrus Johannes Marx, Nicolaas Jacobus Marx Jnr and Johannes Christoffel Hattingh. By using these source, together with other information that Emslie indicates is ‘from the Kaffrarian Museum Archives’ – on the naming of Huberta, her measurements, age, place of birth, place of death and a description of where she died – readers are encouraged to do their own research and construct their own story of Huberta.102 Emslie’s book is somewhat like the source-based history textbooks that started to become popular in the 1980s, encouraging scholars to construct their own histories through the sources rather than the given narrative. Yet in inscribing the ‘sources’ as the fount of Huberta’s history, they acquire an authority, conveying historical authenticity and credibility. It is then these sources selected by Emslie that become the very basis of history, giving Huberta a validated, verifiable past and future. That past is framed by Emslie, on the one hand, in a domain of cultural meanings (for which the sources are almost non-existent), and, on the other hand, around the death (where most sources on Hubert/a exist). And those facts of death were affirmed several years later at a ceremony on the farm Good Hope in July 2006.103 Here were gathered Jean Engelbrecht, ‘granddaughter and niece to Huberta’s principal assailants’,104 with her cousin Leon Naude and his brother-in-law, Lionel Cummings. First, they visited the family graveyard, then with the help of a geo-positioning system and photographs from the Amathole Museum, they located the spot where Huberta had been dragged out of the river. They spoke about events that had occurred some seventy-five years before and how misfortune had befallen the family because of the shooting. The fine for shooting Huberta had been substantial; the farm had to be sold off to other members of the family and was later expropriated to become part of the Xhosa homeland of the Ciskei. Through Jean Engelbrecht’s journey the past of Huberta and her ancestors had been revealed and could now be laid to rest. Whereas previously she had believed her grandfather and uncle had been ‘monsters’ for shooting Huberta, she claimed she now understood that ‘they were ignorant and they saw a huge animal they could not identify’. Speaking in words that were very reminiscent of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process that ran between 1996 and 1999 and sought, in the words of its chairperson, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to ‘open’, ‘cleanse’ and ‘heal’ ‘the wounds of the [apartheid] past’,105 Engelbrecht maintained that this did not absolve them from the crime they had committed but it did provide her with an understanding of ‘how it happened’. Like apartheid, the story of the killing of Huberta was

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established as an empirically true history and was ‘no longer a dark dirty shadow from … [the] past’.106

Containing the Frontier In September 2008 I was fortunate enough to be allowed by an education officer at the Amathole Museum to accompany him as he took a group of schoolchildren on their tour of the museum. This was ‘Heritage Month’ in South Africa (24 September is the public holiday, Heritage Day) and the museum was inundated with visits from school groups. We all first posed for a photograph in front of the main building of the museum and then walked along the yellow line to the Xhosa gallery. With a mixture of regimentation and persuasion, learners were encouraged to participate and interact with the exhibits in the gallery while the educational officer spoke about Xhosa leaders, the sacred function of cattle and about different world views. We were then taken over to the History Hall where the formation of King William’s Town and its aftermath was the basis of a lengthy, detailed tour. Finally, we went along to the Shortridge Mammal Hall and ended the tour in front of Huberta. The education officer started singing a gospel song, ‘The Battle belongs to the Lord’, in isiXhosa, but instead of praising ‘the lord’ he thanked and praised Huberta. He expressed thanks to the museum director who had taken the initiative to rescue Huberta and bring the body to the museum, for since then the museum had become ‘The Home of Huberta’. And the schoolchildren were asked to repeat after him that this is ‘The home of Huberta’, that Huberta ‘is a sacred artefact’ and that ‘Huberta is a sacred animal’.107 In those days that I spent at the Amathole Museum I witnessed an energy that I had not seen before. Maybe it was because it was ‘Heritage Month’, but it also seemed that the new group of education officers were injecting the institution with vibrancy and commitment. The tour might have been regimented but the docent held his audience spell-bound for over two hours as he took them from exhibit to exhibit, explaining, cajoling, singing, touching, showing, lecturing and responding. With his experience of teaching and his enthusiasm, he used the displays to tie together an account of ‘Xhosa tradition’ with a local history of King William’s Town, all brought together at the end through his rendering of praises to Huberta. In effect, to use an old metaphor that is often used in relation to debates on museums, he had turned the museum into a temple of instruction. There is no doubt that by going Across the Frontier, the museum was in some ways challenging conventions of South African history in museums.

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Most obviously, Across the Frontier was neither settler history, nor ethnic history. The assertion by the then director of the Amathole Museum that previously ‘there were a few photos of some black people but the emphasis was on King William’s Town as a white town’ and that ‘we’ve got out of that now’ is most certainly apt.108 Colonial conquest, its consequences and the malleability of identities were all integral to constructing a nineteenth-century past through objects arranged by presenting life as cultural interaction. But although Across the Frontier might have sought to create a rupture with the museum’s previous pasts, the history it represented in the Daines Wing was constrained by the continuities in practices, modes of exhibition, systems of collection and classification, and the cultural politics of post-apartheid nationalism.109 This was far from Clifford’s notion of interaction across borders enabling what he calls ‘contact histories’ which self-critically question the limits, markers and categories of museum knowledge, whereby it is possible for centres to ‘become borders crossed by objects and makers’.110 The symmetry in design, the presentation of a past as an assertion of historical authority, the reliance on the collection of cultural history as settlement with elements from the ethnology collection appended to constitute the various cultural themes, and the alignment with a contemporary post-apartheid discourse of multiculturalism all affirmed the colonial frontier as the marker of history. There were also remnants of the older gallery on the first floor where the German settlers exhibition, showing household items and farming implements, displayed how they made ‘this dangerous, foreign country their new motherland’ and ‘established themselves as a prominent culture and major force in the … Border region’. The Xhosa gallery also retained its position as one which claimed an ethnic distinctiveness. As for Huberta, while the museum was no longer officially described as her home, she was perhaps even more securely in place than ever before, as a praised, venerated, multicultural artefact of the museum’s past and future, comfortably part of a history that was proclaimed as, but did not in the end venture, across the frontier.

Notes   1. Department of Nature Conservation, Provincial Museums. The only provincial ‘natural history’ museum outside this region was the Alexander McGregor Museum in Kimberley, in what is today the Northern Cape. After 1994 nine provinces were constituted in South Africa. As part of this arrangement the larger Cape province was divided into three separate provinces: Western Cape, Eastern Cape and Northern Cape.

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  2. Department of Nature Conservation, Provincial Museums, 1.   3. Department of Nature Conservation, Provincial Museums, 3, 13; East London Museum, ‘The Coelacanth’, 1; Amathole Museum, ‘Huberta’.   4. Department of Nature Conservation, Provincial Museums, 13; Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1969, 86.   5. Government Notice no.1117, 8 June 1984. ‘Declaration of the property inclusive of the Kaffrarian Museum complex thereon, consisting of the old museum building and the Daines building (Old-Public Library), situated on the corner of Alexandra and Albert Roads, King William’s Town’, War Graves and National Monuments Act, no. 28 of 1969. See also, ‘King Museum Declared a Monument’, Daily Dispatch, 9 June 1984; ‘Monument Status as Museum Nears Centenary’, King William’s Town Mercury, 14 June 1984.   6. Bennett, ‘The Dove Trail’; Van Breda, ‘History Revived’, 3; Bennett, ‘Museums Bring History Alive’.   7. Pienaar, ‘Across the Frontier’, 19.   8. Swanepoel, ‘Preface’, iv.   9. Lien and Nielssen, ‘Permanent Displays’, 440, 453. 10. Clifford, ‘Museums as Contact Zones’, 438. 11. Van Breda, ‘History Revived’, 3. 12. Minkley et al., King William’s Town Research Report, 41. 13. Webb, ‘King William’s Town’, 27. 14. ‘July 23, 1884’, The Huberta supplement to The Mercury (King William’s Town), 19 July 1984. 15. Hirst, ‘Introduction’, x–xii. 16. ‘Wolsak Story’ (abridged), extract from Visitor’s Guide to the Collections Contained in the King William’s Town Museum, compiled and edited by Frank A.O. Pym (ca. 1907), retrieved 29 June 2020 from https://www.museum. za.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=45:wolsak&catid=21&Itemid=162. 17. Randles, Kaffrarian Museum, 20. 18. Minutes Board of Trustees Kaffrarian Museum, 18 August 1943, Minute Book vol 3 1933-1949 W10241, AM. 19. Asma, Stuffed Animals, 44. 20. ‘Capt. G. C. Shortridge’, Nature, 9 April 1949, vol 163: 556–57; Calman, ‘Preface’; Manuel, ‘Barney’; Manuel, ‘Naturalist-politician’. In the case of the American Museum of Natural History, this added to the already considerable collection of African mammals undertaken by Carl Akeley. From my research it appears that the mammals collected by Shortridge and Arends did not end up on display in the African Hall which was devoted to the results of Akeley’s expeditions and taxidermy. See Haraway, ‘Teddy Bear Patriarchy’. 21. Shortridge, The Mammals, vol 1, xi. 22. Allenby, ‘Foreword’. 23. Minutes Board Kaffrarian Museum, 16 June, 8 February 1993; 5 February 1932, AM. 24. Witz, ‘Hunting for Museums’, 676.

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

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

This is discussed at length in Chapter 1 of this book. Price, Making Empire, 3–4. Randles, Kaffrarian Museum, 54. Arends and Stopforth, Trapping Safaris, 31–32. These stories are elaborated upon in Witz, ‘The Making of an Animal Biography’. ‘Death Comes to the Arch-Hippo’, Time, 18 May 1931, retrieved 2 July 2020 from http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,741745,00. html. Time magazine’s headline was an obviously play on the title of Willa Cather’s 1927 novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Amathole Museum, ‘Huberta’. Arends and Stopforth, Trapping Safaris, 56. Le Mare, The Saga of Huberta; Chilvers, Huberta Goes South. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, 267. Carruthers, The Kruger National Park, 60–66. This point is elaborated upon in Witz, ‘The Making of an Animal Biography’. ‘Museum Development Discussed – Half Yearly Meeting of Subscribers’, Cape Mercury, 17 August 1946. Randles, Kaffrarian Museum, 63. On Shortridge’s biography, his continual struggles against history and the circumstances surrounding his death, see Witz, ‘Hunting for Museums’. This is discussed at length in Witz, Apartheid’s Festival, ch 5. See also Minkley and Witz, ‘Sir Harry Smith’. Hockly, The Settlers of 1820, 56. Randles, Kaffrarian Museum, 54, 78. Schnell, ‘Foreword’, 3. Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1978, 7. Annual Report of the Kaffrarian Museum, 1961, AM. Bietjie, ‘Jeremy T’. Bietjie, ‘Jeremy T’. Letter from R.H. Taylor (Research Section, Natal Parks Board) to D.A. Webb, 12 June 1984. Huberta files, AM. Webb, ‘The Story of Huberta’, 13. Webb, ‘The Story of Huberta’, 1. Webb, ‘The Story of Huberta’, 13. Webb, ‘The Story of Huberta’, 20; Letter from R.H. Taylor (Research Section, Natal Parks Board) to D.A. Webb. Webb, ‘The Story of Huberta’, 14. This is elaborated upon in Witz, ‘Reading Hippo Stories’. ‘Director’s Report: Past – Present – Future’, Kaffrarian Museum Centenary Year, Annual Report Kaffrarian Museum, 1984-5, AM. Annual Report Kaffrarian Museum, 1985-6, AM. Randles, Kaffrarian Museum, 51–52, 122–23, 129, 136, 140. ‘Roots of the Xhosa and Today’s Culture’, supplement to The Mercury, 19 July 1984.

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57. Peires, ‘The Implosion’, 382. Ideas of a bounded Ciskeian geographic entity based on an ethnic identification have a much longer genealogy, dating back to well before apartheid bantustan policies. For some of those earlier origins and invocations see Mager, Gender and the Making. 58. Annual Report Kaffrarian Museum, 1987-8, AM. 59. Annual Report Kaffrarian Museum, 1988-9, AM. 60. Peires, ‘The Implosion’, 377. 61. Bunn, ‘White Sepulchres’, 4C. 62. Annual Report Kaffrarian Museum, 1985-6, AM. 63. Miti, ‘The Politics of Heritage’. 64. Annual Reports Kaffrarian Museum, 1987-88, 1988-89, 1989-1990, AM. 65. Van Straten, Huberta’s Journey, 12. 66. Annual Report Kaffrarian Museum, 1990-91, AM. 67. Van Straten, Huberta’s Journey, 96. 68. See Posel, ‘A “Battlefield of Perceptions”’. 69. Peires, ‘The Implosion’, 377, 380–82; Bunn, ‘White Sepulchres’, C4. 70. Annual Report Kaffrarian Museum, 1991-2, AM. 71. Annual Report Kaffrarian Museum, 1992-3, AM. 72. Annual Report Kaffrarian Museum, 1993-4, AM. 73. Annual Report Kaffrarian Museum, 1993-4, AM. 74. ‘New name for King’s Kaffrarian Museum’, Dispatch Online, 26 January 1999, retrieved 25 March 2007 from http://www.dispatch.co.za/1999/01/26/easterncape/KING.HTM. 75. S. Mancotywa, Press Release, 25 January 1999, ‘Renaming of the Kaffrarian Museum’, in Annual Report Amathole Museum, 1998/9, AM. 76. Van Breda, ‘Xhosa Gallery Upgrade’, 3. 77. ‘History Revamped’, Dispatch Online, 4 August 2000, retrieved 25 March 2007 from http://www.dispatch.co.za/2000/08/04/features/HISTORY. HTM. 78. ‘Paul Maylam’s Address at the Opening of the New History Exhibition, Amathole Museum, 23 March 2002’, Imvubu, April 2002; Pienaar, ‘Across the Frontier’, 19. 79. Mackie, Eastern Cape Madiba Action, 11; Your Travel Companion to South Africa’s Eastern Cape (brochure), 2004, 73, 68, 62, 36; Makana Municipality, ‘What to do in Grahamstown’ (pamphlet), Makana Tourism, 2003; ‘Frontier Country on National TV’, Grahamstown Makana Tattler, 3(4) (May 2003), 3. 80. Minkley, ‘A Fragile Inheritor’, 33. 81. Legassick, ‘The Frontier Tradition’. 82. Mostert, Frontiers, xvii. 83. Pienaar, ‘Across the Frontier’, 21. 84. Pienaar, ‘Across the Frontier’, 19–21. 85. Pienaar, ‘Across the Frontier’, 19. 86. ‘Paul Maylam’s Address at the Opening’, Imvubu, April 2002. 87. Van Breda, ‘History Revived’, 3.

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88. 89. 90. 91.

Your Travel Companion to South Africa’s Eastern Cape (brochure), 72. Gerardy, ‘Exhibit Depicts Life’. Peires, The Dead Will Arise. At the time of Across the Frontier the prominence Peires gave to Mhlakaza / William Goliath and the claim that they were the same person had been questioned by Bradford in ‘Women, Gender and Colonialism’. It was also questioned by Guy, ‘A Landmark, not a Breakthrough’, and Tisani, ‘Peires, Pathbreaker’. Peires responded to this in the re-publication of The Dead Will Arise in 2002. The actual evidentiary claims made by Peires around Mhlakaza / Goliath were more substantially challenged later by Sheila Boniface Davies, ‘Raising the Dead’. Peires responded in ‘Cry Havoc!’ 92. Annual Report Kaffrarian Museum, 1986-7, AM. 93. Witz, ‘From Huberta’. 94. Witz, Rassool and Minkley, ‘The Boer War, Museums and Ratanga Junction’, 15. 95. Annual Report Amathole Museum, 2003/4, AM. 96. Tour of Amathole Museum for schoolchildren, 9 September 2008. 97. Amathole Museum, pamphlet, 2003. 98. Salgado, ‘Tourist Towns’. 99. Wilmot, ‘SASOL SciFest’, 63–64. 100. Wingate, ‘Amathole Museum’s Mammals’. 101. Annual Report Amathole Museum, 1999/2000, AM; Emslie, “Huberta”. 102. Emslie, “Huberta”, 44–45. 103. Stent, ‘On the Trail’. 104. Stent, ‘Tragedy Plagued Family’. 105. Tutu, ‘Chairperson’s Foreword’, 7. 106. Stent, ‘On the Trail’. Jean Marx-Engelbrecht wrote a book that she self-published in 2010 about her search for what happened to Huberta, her family’s involvement in the death, the misfortunes that befell them as a result (the curse of Huberta) and the search for the family farm where Huberta was shot and killed. See Marx-Engelbrecht, Huberta the Untold Story. 107. Tour of Amathole Museum for schoolchildren, 9 September 2008. 108. Gerardy, ‘Exhibit Depicts Life’. 109. The idea of ruptures and continuities in relation to the layering of history comes from Lien and Nielssen, ‘Permanent Displays’, 453. 110. Clifford, ‘Contact Zones’, 444.

Figure 5.1. European Rabbit, Robben Island, 17 July 2007. © Richard Sherley, University of Exeter. BBC News, 31 October 2009: ‘Robben Island is under threat. The 5 sq km island could have up to 25,000 rabbits’. Retrieved 17 January 2021 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8335618.stm.

Chapter 5

The Museum, the Rabbit and National History The Voice of Robben Island Apartheid’s last museum, the Dias complex which sought to commemorate the moment of European founding, is in the southern Cape town of Mossel Bay. The first national museum created after the advent of universal adult suffrage in South Africa is in and around the place which had been represented for most of the second half of the twentieth century as the gateway to settlement three hundred years before, Table Bay in Cape Town.1 But the museum in Table Bay was far from being an icon to European founding and occupation of the land. The Robben Island Museum, opened by former prison inmate for eighteen years, President Nelson Mandela, on 24 September 1997, was based on a deeply evented history, invoking the period between 1960 and 1990 when the Island, situated some 10 kilometres from Cape Town harbour, was first and foremost a political prison. Its focus was on how apartheid brutally attacked those who tried to resist the system of institutional and structural racial domination and how the political prisoners had endured, fought against and emerged triumphant from the clutches of this repressive system. As a post-apartheid narrative of national founding, this was presented as emblematic of transformation. This was graphically illustrated in the twelve-minute film which tourists were shown when they travelled on the catamaran passenger ferries, named after seventeenth- and nineteenth-century symbols of resistance who were amongst the Island’s early prisoners, Autshumato and Makana, from the Nelson Mandela Gateway to Robben Island.2 In the film the Island was made into a human being and the voice of Leslie Mongezi bellowed out ‘I am Robben Island’. To accompanying images of the sea,

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documentary and re-created film footage of the system of apartheid, and photographs of key individuals, he (it) narrated an autobiography of geomorphological formation, human settlement, the onset of colonialism and apartheid, resistance, imprisonment, political unity, the setting up of structures of tolerance and future democratic governance by the prisoners, all culminating in the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 (although this was from Victor Verster prison near the town of Paarl). As the ferry approached Murray’s Bay Harbour, and the film neared its end, a rabbit darted across the television monitor and the narrator proclaimed a restored freedom for the Island and South Africa. The moment of liberation for the Island was signalled as the process of transformation, from a ‘prison of apartheid’ into a national museum, a national monument, a world heritage site, a ‘cultural showcase of South African democracy’ and potentially ‘an open university and conference centre where the legacy of critical debate painstakingly chipped out in the limestone quarry’ could be ‘upheld and passed on to future generations’. Moving from ground level to an aerial view, accompanied by the strains of the anthem and hymn Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika (God Bless Africa), the Island declared itself to viewers on the ferry before disembarkation: ‘I might be small, but I am no longer isolated. I rejoice at the triumph of the human spirit that prevailed on my shores’.3 This chapter is about this proclamation in which the move from prison to museum is heralded in a dual movement as the liberatory enabler (the end of apartheid) and the emancipatory manoeuvre (the institutional reconfiguration). The ease of narrative progression from one to the other belies the ways in which museum making itself constantly works around and with processes of confinement in its classificatory, institutional and exhibitionary forms. It is not so much that the museum is a prison but that, as Bennett points out, its systems, arrangements and practices are embedded in the making of a self-disciplined public citizenry often within the bounds of states conceived of as nations.4 Like many memorial museums in this genre – and there are several – the spatial move and the bodily encounters on Robben Island are ones that makes associations with governmentality in its both negative and positive connotations at the centre of the visitor experience.5 From the outset, in its aspiration to represent universality, plurality, debate and critical engagement, Robben Island as a prison remade into a museum claimed a space beyond these limits. While undoubtedly apartheid and its demise set the framework of representation in its exhibitionary practices, educational offerings and the accounts rendered to tourists, the museum, particularly in its early years, offered the possibilities of decentred and multiple locations of

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historical knowledge. There was the prospect of the rabbit roaming freely on the Island beyond the frames of the camera in this evented history.6 Through the literal and metaphoric figure of the scampering rabbit I track some of the elements that went into this reconfiguration of the time of incarceration into museum temporalities. My view is intensely personal as I view several of the exhibitions, from Esiqithini: Robben Island in 1993 (which was more of a precursor to the establishment of a museum and set in place the moments and themes of its narrative timeline) to the Robert Sobukwe House display, briefly relate the development of a curriculum for a joint tertiary-level educational programme – involving the University of the Western Cape (UWC), the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the Robben Island Museum (RIM) – the Post-graduate Diploma in Museum and Heritage Studies (which was later incorporated into the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies), that I, at times, coordinated and taught on for extended periods between 1998 and 2016, and follow guided tours of the Island and the prison that formed an integral component of the museum. It is these curated tours, especially those conducted by ex-political prisoners, rather than the designed exhibition installations, that constituted the public face of Robben Island, in effect turning the guides into the museum artefacts.7

Exhibiting Robben Island as Museum At the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront (themed in the 1990s as a recreated late nineteenth-century Cape Town dockland with shopping mall, curio shops and a variety of restaurants and pubs) on Quay 5, Jetty 1, there is a small ‘nondescript building’ that for thirty-five odd years served as the embarkation / disembarkation point for the ferries that took prisoners, warders and visitors between the mainland and Robben Island.8 Officially designated in 1957 as the Robben Island berth, it was originally a zinc and iron structure which, in the 1970s, was rebuilt as a red-brick building, with wrought-iron doors, surrounded by barbed wire.9 This did not fit into the Waterfront Company’s ‘aesthetic vision’ of a nostalgic Victorian maritime past in Table Bay Harbour that it was trying to project. It was only under pressure from the National Monuments Council and the new post-apartheid government that plans by the Company to destroy the building were put on hold.10 Instead, to coincide with the visit of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom in March 1995, the Waterfront was spruced up, and along with all harbour

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facades, the Robben Island berth was painted in ‘corporate colours’ of an imperial grey.11 When Robben Island was opened as a museum in January 1997 the area adjacent to Jetty 1 became the initial embarkation terminal for visitors. At first these journeys across this narrow stretch of water in Table Bay were aboard the self-same ‘twin screw, mono-hull’ passenger vessels that had taken prisoners to the Island from the 1960s: the Penguin (commissioned in 1986 and named after the marine birds which proliferated on the Island), the Susan Kruger (built in Mandal, Norway, in 1959, originally a pleasure boat named the White Lady, purchased in 1977 and re-named after the wife of the National Party’s notorious minister of prisons, police and justice, Jimmy Kruger) and the Dias (built in Durban in 1956 and named after the fifteenth-century Portuguese merchant, inscribed in nearly all Robben Island timelines as the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope and anchor in Table Bay).12 Not only were these prison vessels reassigned for the museum, but recollections of the voyage on board these boats ‘which ploughed the Atlantic Ocean’ to and from the Island in the latter part of the twentieth century formed a component of its collections and display. As part of the Memories project undertaken by the museum’s staff and researchers in the late 1990s, where hundreds of ex-political prisoners were interviewed, the voyage to the Island was recounted by some as a moment of severance from friends and family, of the uniqueness of first encounters of sea travel, of being held below deck, and of spells of sea sickness.13 Models of the boats were also made by common law prisoners and given as gifts to prison warders. When they left the Island warders took these offerings with them, presumably as mementos. One was left behind on the Island and found in the Prison Warders Club House in 1999 and later placed on display in what used to be the Visitor’s Registration Room at Jetty 1.14 The result was that a boat named as the Dias not only appeared as a fanciful fifteenth-century caravel in apartheid’s last museum in Mossel Bay in 1989, but ten years later it also took the form of a tourist ferry and a model of a prison boat in the first post-apartheid national museum at some of its offices on Quay 5 at the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront. As the point of embarkation and disembarkation, Jetty 1 in effect acts as the troubled connector between the mainland and the Island, between the old and new, between prison and museum. It attaches itself to histories of Robben Island as a place that connects and disconnects, geologically part of and then over hundreds of thousands of years sporadically reconnected to and severed from the landmass by changing sea-levels, a place of seals and penguins slaughtered as food provisions for

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passing merchant sailors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of banishment, imprisonment and isolation as the adjacent continent was appropriated by settlers, of the divisions that apartheid sought to sustain, and then part of and emblematic of its demise. More contemporaneously, Jetty 1 was assigned to the post-apartheid, in its location amidst one of the primary sites of tourist consumption in South Africa at the Waterfront and for several years the commencement of the voyage that took one to a past at the museum’s pivotal location on Robben Island. Even though the boats to the Island as museum initially left from Jetty 1 in 1997, and the newly formed institution opened several administrative and ticketing offices in its immediate surrounds, it was never incorporated on an extensive scale into the museum. Today, only if they have limited time available or else the weather conditions make it impossible to visit the Island are visitors encouraged to visit Jetty 1 in order to acquire a ‘full understanding of the emotional torment that was endured by Ex Political Prisoners and their loved ones’.15 Negotiations with the Waterfront company over what had become prime property, and the logistics entailed in running a full-scale tourist operation from this site, effectively side-lined Jetty 1. While retaining all the signs to claim the authenticity of experience, Jetty 1 was relegated to secondary status in the programme of museum making for Robben Island. What was constructed in its stead was first the concept, developed in 1995, and then the actual materialization in 2001, of a gateway to Robben Island at the Clocktower on the Waterfront. As a physical site, across from the Alfred Basin, where the pub Bertie’s Landing previously operated, the gateway was not envisaged as having any pre-existing associations with Robben Island. Its prime purpose was as a departure / arrival point and an exhibition space. The idea of building a gateway was all about sustaining visitation: for ‘the large volumes of people’ expected to be ferried to the Island as museum once it was handed over from the Department of Prisons; and a display area where one could possibly obtain ‘clear views of Table Mountain and Robben Island’ and see exhibitions that used the documents and photographs from the archival depository at University of the Western Cape’s Mayibuye Centre for History and Culture that depicted Robben Island’s history ‘and the struggle for freedom in South Africa’. The purpose-built exhibition and transportation space of the gateway, rather than the uncomfortable presence of Jetty 1, was envisaged as part of the Cape Town’s ‘tourism and cultural infrastructure’ on the Waterfront and the visiting and viewing portal to ‘the neglected history of South Africa’.16

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Before construction began on the gateway project, and as ferries were operating to and from Jetty 1 after the prison shut its doors in November 1996, and ideas of a museum were starting to take shape, a utilitarian temporary exhibition space on the Waterfront was already in operation. At the Caltex Exhibition Centre, which was situated on the premises of its filling station at the Dock Road entrance to the Waterfront, a Robben Island Exhibition and Information Centre was installed by the Mayibuye Centre. In the 1960s Caltex had been the sponsor of a series of booklets that promoted a settler heritage in South Africa that had been at the core of the history museum movement.17 Moreover, in some maps of Cape Town the Caltex logo had been used to obliterate the presence of Robben Island.18 By the late 1990s Caltex was positioning itself in a new heritage, proclaiming its logo as the sign of the changing times where circa 1950s nostalgic fuzzy photographs of pumps at filling stations were reproduced with images of Robben Island at the ‘crossroads of culture’, together with Nelson Mandela imprisoned on the Island as always somehow the ‘president-in-waiting’.19 This alignment to heritage as leadership, great men and a nation of the post-apartheid era was expressed by Mike Rademeyer, MD of Caltex South Africa at the opening of the exhibition at the Information Centre. He spoke of how the display told ‘a little of the story of the nation’s greatest leaders’ and how, on Robben Island they ‘kept the flame of freedom alive’ for the ‘new South Africa’.20 For the Mayibuye Centre the exhibition at the petrol station was part of establishing a museum and affirming its role in that process. André Odendaal, the Mayibuye Centre’s Director, spoke of the installations as the ‘first practical step’ in the project to design a ‘fully fledged museum’.21 In the remaking of Robben Island, the Mayibuye Centre was a constant advisor and interlocutor with national government over the future of museums and heritage more broadly, a general depository for collections of the anti-apartheid movement and specifically ex-Robben Island political prisoners, and a location of post-apartheid curatorial expertise.22 These all came together in the three exhibitions at Caltex Centre. A series of glass panels, gathered in the centre of the room, displayed documents from the Robben Island archive. The documents floating in glass panels was a display technique used in a previous exhibition, Setting Apart, curated by Hilton Judin, which the Mayibuye Centre had hosted at the Castle of Good Hope in central Cape Town with the District Six Museum and the William Fehr Collection in 1995.23 In that exhibition the official documents of racialized spatial segregation in the city of Cape Town hovered in-between see-through screens, allowing for their reading as transparent, what the curator referred to as ‘starkly visible’, making

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the repressive purpose of the documents apparent, and for their intent to be continually resisted and ultimately undone.24 At the Caltex Centre the use of this technique was different, employed instead to highlight the unofficial, relating ‘to the prisoners’ own organization of sporting, recreational, educational and cultural events’.25 These documents were presented by the Mayibuye Centre as a ‘history from below’, evoking both culture and experience on the Island, of resistance at the margins and in the everyday, and authenticated as recovery of a neglected past.26 The second component was a series of photographs from the reunion held in February 1995 of ex-political prisoners returning to Robben Island, labelled in the Cape Town press in masculinist terms evocative of school reunions as a gathering of the ‘Robben Island Old Boys’.27 Mayibuye Centre staff had played an important role in organizing this event which included an exhibition, banners, a symbolic rock-breaking event on the Island and a large gathering at its premises at UWC.28 On the perimeter of the display space at the Caltex Centre were story boards from Esiqithini: The Robben Island Exhibition which were initially displayed in the joint exhibition between the Mayibuye Centre and the South African Museum, hosted by the latter, in 1993. Presenting a timeline from geological formation to the release of political prisoners, the story boards framed the exhibition and set up possible elements that later could become part of what would be constituted as history on Robben Island as it was altered into a museum. That timeline later became a key exhibitionary device in the making of Robben Island as a museum, travelling across a variety of venues such as the Baxter Theatre in Rondebosch and the Cape Depot of the National Archives, and then, when Robben Island opened to visitors in 1997, at its different museum locations. It was also transformed into part of a book, provided the essential ingredients of an interactive timeline on the Robben Island website and was reproduced in its annual report in 2011/12.29 Its emergence in May 1993 at the South African Museum was in an exhibition that was heralded as a pivotal moment of institutional transformation. The oldest museum in the country was coming together with a new centre that celebrated and collected a culture of resistance to apartheid based on the archives of the International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF), to open up a forum for the future of public pasts in a post-apartheid South Africa more generally and Robben Island specifically. The Mayibuye Centre, through its collection, constituted to a large extent the artefactual presence in the post-1960 part of the exhibition, including some of the ex-political prisoners’ personal possessions from the Island that they had carried away in apple boxes when released,

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and the contacts with prisoners that enabled the rendering of memories. The South African Museum, with its legacy of racialized collecting and exhibition practices, brought its resources and expertise in research and curatorship. In effect, the exhibition played out the tension between the classifications in the South African Museum, which were primarily devoted to natural history and anthropology, and a political history as an embodiment of resistance to apartheid, centred on the Island after 1960. The past was constantly negotiated between the claims to the political through the Mayibuye Centre’s collections and an insistence on a longer durée where the category of nature and its museum genealogy became part of the history on display.30 Timelines in exhibitions appear almost as verification of a linear narrative of history, through creating contexts, ends and beginnings, affirming untroubled ideas of progress, creating personal situatedness and claiming moments of significance. Their reification of empiricism, their fixation with dates and their boundedness within all-encompassing reference points suggest ‘rigid grids of history’.31 There are possibilities though of altering the contextual signifiers by presenting contesting chronologies, starting and ending at different moments, including branches that suggest deviations, juxtaposing contrasting images and texts, and providing diverse time-scales that suggest interruptions rather than congruence.32 The mechanism of the illustrated Robben Island timeline that was designed for the exhibition in 1993 suggested constituting different and extended histories, with the prospect of opening up a debate on what future the past might inhabit on Robben Island. Based upon ‘A chronological history of Robben Island’ which historians Nigel Penn and Harriet Deacon had compiled following a UCT adult education school course they had conducted in 1992 together with fellow historian and ex-Robben Island prisoner, Neville Alexander, its key feature was the chronological range, from the deep time of 900 million years ago to 1991 when the last political prisoners were freed.33 On a series of twenty narrow vertical panels, with blocked off text and images arranged on a sepia background with burnt dark brown edges, the emphasis was on processes of formation in a narrative that moved from legacies of geological and human disconnection and banishment to liberation and connection to a contemporary nationhood, where Robben Island became ‘an icon’ of ‘the struggle for human rights and freedom in South Africa’.34 Only four of the twenty panels dealt with the period after 1960 when the Island was a high-security prison. Almost equal attention was devoted to periods when the Island was an infirmary and prison between 1846 and 1891, a British military prison between

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1806 and 1846, and a Dutch colonial outpost between 1652 and 1800. Other themes included the use of the Island for food supplies in the sixteenth century, its conversion into a leper colony in the late nineteenth century and its use as a military fortification in the World War Two. By highlighting such a range in its text and images and through its grunge design that located its past in antiquity, the timeline did not specifically conform to what former political prisoner Ahmed Kathrada, when opening the exhibition in 1993, said should be ‘the main focus of the Island’: a ‘monument to political prisoners and the struggle for democracy in South Africa’.35 It must be stressed that in 1993 Esiqithini, of which the Robben Island timeline was a component, was presented as an opening up of futures, a provocation in the space of its situatedness in South Africa’s oldest museum. Three years later when it moved to the Caltex Centre, the plans for Robben Island as South Africa’s newest national museum were starting to take shape. In the post-apartheid government, a Future of Robben Island Committee, located in the President’s office and headed by Ahmed Kathrada, had been formed in August 1995. At the end of that year it was announced that the Island would be declared a national monument. The gateway project at the Waterfront had been inaugurated by UWC’s Mayibuye Centre in the same year with the idea that it would be linked to a museum being established on Robben Island. The display at the filling station in 1996 in preparation for these linked exhibition sites was in a space that simultaneously was emptied of any physical association with Robben Island and filled with the heritage of Caltex and the Mayibuye Centre. The timeline from Esiqithini: The Robben Island Exhibition on the perimeter of the display, instead of providing an opportunity for future prospective histories, became a mechanism of framing, a pathway that led to and located monument and museum in a new nation. Ciraj Rassool, Gary Minkley and I wrote in 1996 that the metaphorical foundations of the gateway to Robben Island at the Caltex filling station were reshaping ‘the political wing of a South African prison defined by gender and race’ (it was for men who were officially racially classified under apartheid in categories other than as a ‘white person’) into a singularity as ‘“The Island”, “the symbol of resistance,” “the university,” “the prison,” “the monument,” the national past’.36 This strand of museum making on a purpose-built stage culminated in the opening of the Nelson Mandela Gateway to Robben Island at the Clocktower precinct on the Waterfront on 1 December 2001. By then, according to the museums’ first Director, André Odendaal, it was attracting 300,000 visitors per year, reaching just under 40,000 per month

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in the summer peak season, outstripping visitor numbers at any other museum site in South Africa.37 As the museum’s mainland facility, the ‘triple-story, glass facade’ terminal was seen by the architect Lucien le Grange as a ‘transitional space’ between the Waterfront and the Island, deliberately separated from the adjacent shopping mall, and its modernity conceptualized as out of place with the themed Victoriana.38 There were some mnemonic associations with Robben Island – the ‘extensive use of dark grey slate wall cladding and stone floor paving’ with echoes of the stone quarries where prisoners worked, and the use of metal mesh on the inside courtyard which hinted at ‘enclosure’ – but the emphasis was on the ability of the building to provide a technology of viewing out and beyond. It was the ‘wide’ panoramas, the ‘unobstructed views’ and the flow from the building onto the jetty where the ferries were moored that mattered. Symbolically, according to the architects, it represented a move from darkness to the light (of freedom) shining from the unseen prison that had become museum. What the Gateway building did was to enable scenic vistas with ‘views of the harbour; harbour mouth and some of Cape Town’s surrounding mountains’ (but not of Robben Island).39 Similarly, in the opening exhibitions at the Gateway, curated by photographer Roger Meintjes who was then Exhibitions Co-ordinator for RIM, working in partnership with, amongst others, the Heritage Agency, a consultancy based in Cape Town, and Spanish architect Marcos Corrales Lantero, emphasis was placed on the mechanics of viewing in the difficult small interior spaces of the ferry terminal. This included utilizing easily manoeuvrable touch-screen monitors which stored and showed materials from the Mayibuye Centre’s Freedom Struggle Video Series; a vertical pulley system that allowed access to many posters of anti-apartheid struggles at variable heights with accompanying explanatory panels and texts as part of a section on the upper level on Media in Struggle; several more monitors in a library facility that enabled access to the posters not on display; large drawer archives ‘in corian panelling according to Corrales Lantero’s design’ which enabled views of selected documents and artefacts; three enormous billboard size photographs, showing prisoners at work in the courtyard of the maximum-security prison on the Island, a view of Robben Island from Signal Hill, Cape Town, and the release of prisoners at Jetty 1 carrying their possessions in apple boxes, which covered a wall of the interior well on the Ferry Level leading to the boats; voices and life-size images of thirty-eight ex-political prisoners who had been incarcerated in apartheid’s prisons and police cells, knitted together in a digital audio-visual mural in a darkened corridor which welcomed visitors at the Entry Level to the Gateway and onward to the

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ferries below and then to Robben Island.40 The abundance and range of visual technologies gave the appearance of accessibility, promoted by the museum, to provide the apparatus to display the multitude of its collections to ‘tell the story of resistance to the system of apartheid’.41 But access was not simply a matter of embracing what was then stateof-the-art audio-visual technology. For designer Meintjes, it was the minutiae and the attention to the objects, their affect and meanings that mattered. It was ‘the humbleness of a single document’ that ‘could move somebody infinitely more than the design of a touch screen’, he maintained.42 Meintjes’s sensitivity to the materiality and detail of the object was indicative of another less highly visible strand of museum making that was at play as the institutional form of Robben Island was reshaped from its prison past. Rather than constructing anew, the existing prison fabric was employed to make the museum through a series of exhibitions on the Island and at the Jetty 1 embarkation point at the Waterfront. One could track this different route of exhibition making through the figure of the rabbit which ran away from the camera in the film shown on board the ferries Autshumato and Makana departing from the Nelson Mandela Gateway. Upon arrival at Robben Island, it deviated from what had quickly become a well-worn visitor route that inevitably led to Cell 5 in B Section, Mandela’s cell for eighteen years.43 It darted into the ‘lesser known’ Section A of the prison, where in the Cell Stories Exhibition and Archive it heard songs and stories of isolation and intimacies, of bonds of friendship and camaraderie, and of affiliation to objects that were accorded extraordinary significance.44 Avoiding the tourists who were being herded about in groups around the Island and the prison complex, it moved towards the house where Robert Sobukwe, the leader of the Pan Africanist Congress, had been kept apart from all the other inmates in terrifying seclusion in the 1960s. The rabbit slipped inside building T160 where the Sobukwe children had slept when visiting their father during the school holidays in 1967 and 1968 and was overcome by an overwhelming sense of fear. This building had become a dog kennel after Sobukwe was released from the Island in 1969. A notice informs: ‘Traces of the kennel wall are visible inside. The exterior dog rungs have been left intact’. Absolutely terrified, the rabbit ran away and smuggled itself on board the boat that took visitors back to the mainland. Having returned to the secure environment of the Nelson Mandela Gateway, it did not pause to look at the ‘world class, ground breaking digital museum displays’.45 It crossed the drawbridge over the Alfred Basin that connected the Clocktower precinct to the restaurants and shops surrounding the adjoining Victoria Basin of the Waterfront and made its way

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to the non-descript embarkation point at Jetty 1. Inside the building it followed the directional arrow up the staircase towards ‘Wagkamer Waiting Room Iqumri 1.2.3’.46 The walls of Room 2 were plastered with application letters from families seeking permission to visit their relatives in prison. Some bore the mark of formality while others tried to appeal to what they hoped would be the sensitivity of officials. Alongside the waiting room there was the hospital cell where prisoners were held when taken for medical visits on the mainland. Laid out on the floor were thin rectangular sisal mats, a set of shackles were mounted in a glass case, and on one wall were memory drawings that prisoners made when reflecting on their hospital visits. Filled with invocations of memories, the rabbit left Jetty 1 and entered through the revolving glass doors of the nearby shopping mall in search of sustenance. Of course, such an imaginary exhibition journey was increasingly difficult for the rabbit to embark upon. By the end of 2006 the catamarans Makana and Autshumato were no longer plying the route from Table Bay Harbour to the Island (for a brief interregnum the prison boat Susan Kruger came back into use for the museum) and the film in which the rabbit briefly starred was no longer being played on board ferries to the Island.47 Rabbits were also starting to be constituted as a problem of ecological degradation by Robben Island Museum management. When the museum initially opened in 1997 there were about 100 rabbits on the Island. But a decision by the museum in 1998/99, and again in 2005/6, to reduce the presence of their major predators, the feral cats, led to a massive increase in the number of rabbits over a short period of time.48 The museum embarked on discussions around the possibility of a mass culling operation. As plans for the exhibition in Jetty 1 were taking shape in 2006, the number of rabbits on the Island was reduced by 1,000, with further reductions prioritized for the following year.49 By March 2009, when the Robert Sobukwe House exhibition was opened, a full-scale programme under the authority of the state veterinary services had been implemented to eliminate rabbits on the Island.50 It was being made more challenging for the rabbit to even dare enter into the kennels adjacent to the Sobukwe House. When rabbit numbers were starting to expand following the first culling of the feral cats in 1998/99, there would have been a greater opportunity to visit Cell Stories, curated by Meintjes and the RIM’s assistant exhibition designer, Ashwell Adriaan. Ciraj Rassool has referred to the exhibition as containing the possibility of ‘radical ambivalence’.51 Thirty-nine cells in A section were used to depict stories of thirty-nine prisoners, either through audio links by pressing an intercom buzzer or

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through text extracts placed on the cell wall. These stories came from the extensive set of interviews that RIM’s research department carried out with ex-political prisoners. The Pretoria News reported that on entry into the cells, the prisoners’ ‘dark, stark faces greet you, glance above their beds, and their stories demand your attention’.52 Each story had an associated object, selected by a prisoner as significant to their life on the Island. Regarded by the museum as on loan rather than as acquisitions, these became reconstituted on the exhibition as valuable artefacts through their personal significance rather than museum classification. The objects were in themselves performers, enabling the narrative structure, situating the museum’s telling through the staging of a personal prop. They included effects and possessions, such as a brush, razor, prison card, blanket pin and storage box; items of ingenuity, such as a ‘hand-made belt from fishing tackle’, a writing book constructed out of cement bags and a saxophone crafted from ‘flotsam and jetsam’; items that held special meanings associated with friends and family, such as paintings, photographs and letters; and a contraption made in dreaming of and planning an escape, a ‘duplicate master key, made by Sedick Isaacs (1964–1978) out of a steel bar’.53 Stories, songs and objects brought together were intended to give the ordinary importance, to make a Robben Island history that asserted the categories of the unknown prisoner and of individuals from a range of liberation organizations.54 In the intimacies of the personal, the evocation of the ordinary, the presentation of diverse pasts and the performance of objects, there was a possibility of history in the museum that, while still tied to biography, went beyond the figures of leaders and the singularity of events conjoined in a national narrative. Cell Stories established a trend for in-house exhibition making by staff of the Robben Island Museum that focused on the everyday, sought multiplicity and contestation, rendered forms of narration as interior voices, and invoked personal affection for and affiliation to objects. The interpretation team of the Robert Sobukwe House complex, led by artist and designer Gaby Cheminais, inevitably devoted some attention to the political biography of the individual as president of the Pan Africanist Congress, using poster-type image and texts which sought to establish contextual framings that delineated the origins of apartheid and pan-Africanist resistance. T159, where Sobukwe lived in ‘profound loneliness’, was sparsely furnished by the curators with a single wrought iron bed, a bedside table with a radio and a lamp, a desk which doubled up as display cabinet showing his writing, correspondence and a magnifying glass, and a table with an iron on top for pressing clothes. Large movie

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poster-size photographs showed Sobukwe ironing a shirt and sitting at his desk surrounded by books. The emphasis was on everyday life in solitary confinement, doing the laundry and the importance of reading and writing. More than a construction of Sobukwe’s political biography and the rituals of the everyday in isolation, it was the struggle to maintain family that was highlighted through the beds of the children in T160 when they came to visit, the letters that sought permission for these brief stayovers, and extracts from contemporary interviews articulating the memories of these infrequent moments. The similarity to Cell Stories was evident. Connecting voice to object was always the preferred methodology. It was the relationship to the personal that was highlighted, the tangibility of objects referentially invoking all too brief family visits. And then, if one looked very carefully, there was an element of surprise. Amongst the many letters affixed to the wall, placed under perspex, are references to accompany a job application to become an African Language Assistant (Nguni) in the Department of Bantu Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. One from Z.K. Matthews at the University for Fort Hare refers to Sobukwe as exhibiting ‘considerable gifts as a leader of men’ but another, from a school principal in Standerton, found Mr Sobukwe to be ‘a born African gentleman’ who was ‘cooperative’ and ‘subordinate to those placed in authority over him’. Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe passed through Jetty 1 and travelled aboard the Dias on 3 May 1963 when he was banished to Robben Island, and again when he was released in 1969 and placed under house arrest in Kimberley. He appears amongst a collage of sixty-seven photographs that cover part of a wall in the Robben Island Museum exhibition at Jetty 1: ‘This site bears the footprints of thousands of people, whether patient, exile, warder, or political prisoner, who, by official decree since the 1800s, sailed towards a feared, unknown destination that was Robben Island’. ‘Yet, conversely’, reads the exhibition text, ‘Jetty 1 also signalled a promise of freedom and indeed, eventual release’. Visitors to the exhibitions at Jetty 1 were invited to ‘experience on-site narratives told by people who once passed through here’. Jetty 1 made use of the same techniques as Cell Stories and the Sobukwe House in an attempt to sustain the many diverse pasts of memory and the ambivalence of place, as the bearer of ‘sorrow and hope’ for political prisoners and their families, and of feelings of longing and tediousness for prison warders and their families. Instead of a singular Robben Island timeline, Jetty 1 has three parallel timelines on display for these narrative voyages, allowing for vertical and horizontal readings across decades from the

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1840s to the 1990s that provide a ‘chronology of three interconnected places: Table Bay Harbour, Jetty no 1 & Robben Island’ (although the actual timelines are headed South Africa, Robben Island and Table Bay Harbour, with Jetty 1 forming part of the latter chronological category). In different rooms in the jetty building, interpreted and set up by Cheminais and her team, audio and video technology was used to make available to visitors extracts from interviews with legal representatives of ex-political prisoners, warders, ex-political prisoners themselves and women who visited their relatives who were imprisoned on the Island. The latter, from interviews conducted by RIM staff in 2004 and 2005, were combined with the contemporary letters of appeal to be granted a visit that are pasted on the walls of waiting room 2. In the installation the letters are displayed as articulations of experience, of pleas to officialdom often necessarily using the racial and ethnic categories and classifications of apartheid South Africa, of long and arduous journeys to Cape Town, and most disappointingly, of missing the boat or being refused permission to travel to the Island. On the level below is the waiting area for prison warders and their families, filled with some of the scanned mementoes collected by Desiree van Zyl whose husband was an engineer servicing the Island ferries. Included are photos of officers and staff of the prison service, receipts for food and beverages at the club on the Island, visitor registers, correspondence relating to the school for their children, and stubs of boat tickets. In the middle of this room on a pedestal in a glass case is the model of the Dias. There is no indication of provenance, and no associated information is provided through labelling. Its somewhat crude construction, the lack of attention to scale and the irregularities of the detail make it more of ‘an exuberant presence’ than a ‘media of spatial and historical verisimilitude’ characteristic of museum models.55 As a somewhat awkward display, the model of the Dias is a vessel to many pasts that the Robben Island Museum cannot contain and that the exhibition at Jetty 1 seeks to let loose: of affinities and loathing, of journeys and destinations, of embarkation and disembarkation and of multiple endings and beginnings. But most who came to the museum were not afforded the opportunity to visit these exhibitions. On the Island itself, the limits set by the turnaround time for ferries with loads of tourists from the Gateway terminal meant that Cell Stories and the Sobukwe House exhibitions could not be fitted into the strictly regulated itineraries. There were some technical problems with the audio feed in Cell Stories; it was shut down for several years and then refurbished and reopened in several iterations and configurations. As for Jetty 1, it had a security officer on duty, some

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administrative offices and limited signage outside. Anchored alongside stood the seemingly abandoned Susan Kruger. Little effort was made by the museum to direct visitors to the Jetty 1 site or to publicize its presence. There were discussions and serious plans for specialized tours along a series of ‘interpretative routes’ which included all these sites and exhibitions, but they did not materialize.56 Robben Island Museum regarded such schemes as ‘too complex and, therefore, difficult to implement’.57 Even if they were largely unseen, it was these carefully designed exhibitions that emphasized the primacy of articulating the ‘specifics of time, place and object’.58 More than anything, in the process of museum making on and through Robben Island, they conveyed the appearance of maintaining the category of critical debate as a legacy of political imprisonment expressed as acquiring the equivalent of a university education. At Cell Stories and in the Sobukwe House on the Island, and at Jetty 1 Quay 5 on the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, objects with personal affinities, extant structures, perceptible documents, complex and contradictory stories, and the representation of memories that related differing experiences were the stuff of constituting a new post-incarceration institution for Robben Island, claiming a liberated time of history for the museum as a critical space. While the Nelson Mandela Gateway was a purposeful site of vision and visitation for experiencing the Robben Island Museum, Cell Stories, Sobukwe House and the Jetty 1 exhibitions employed extensive resources in the construction of an economy of the critical. Ostensibly opening up the landscape to interpretation and reinterpretation, they helped to enable assertions in promotional material, in presentations at workshops and conferences, and in museum institutional planning documents of independence, autonomy and authenticity, of ‘multiple voices and multi-layering’ that were neither heard nor seen.59 As practices of what Hall calls ‘enclaving’, these exhibitions helped to anchor the experience of Robben Island in a world of the ongoing visual ‘spectacle of history making in Mandela’s walk through apartheid’s gateway’.60

Teaching Robben Island as Museum At the top of the stairs leading to the waiting rooms 1, 2 and 3 at Jetty 1, attached with reusable putty to a door numbered 12, is a makeshift horizontal, A4, olympic blue paper sign indicating in an Arial font ‘RIM – APMHS OFFICE’. Not only does the sign appear to be improvised but what is being specified on and perhaps behind the closed door is unclear.

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The rabbit was curious and decided to enter. It found inside employees of the Robben Island Museum whose main task was to administer and coordinate the museum’s component of the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies. Thus named in 2004, this was a rebranding which incorporated the Postgraduate Diploma in Museum and Heritage Studies qualification offered by the University of the Western Cape, the University of Cape Town and the Robben Island Museum.61 The rabbit was astonished and immediately recognized the connections. It had been a part of the Diploma for several years, helping to provide tertiary education in the museum and heritage sectors in Africa that would prepare students ‘as practitioners, to enter and engage in the debates and contests over the changing heritage representations in the public sphere’.62 When the Robben Island Museum approached the universities of the Western Cape and Cape Town in 1997 with plans to establish a programme in heritage studies, this was not their intended objective. The content of the museum’s proposal was primarily based upon a definition of heritage in the government appointed Arts and Culture Task Group (ACTAG), where heritage refers to an almost naturally occurring phenomenon, ‘that which we inherit’, and ‘a powerful agent for cultural identity, reconciliation and nation building’.63 With heritage being conceived of as occurring almost naturally through the passage of linear time, heritage training as referred to in the document revolved around the discovery of what was supposedly already there and acquiring professional and technical expertise in a particular field to present and impart those findings. In an associated way, for museums in general, the primary objective was to introduce new staff to their institutions who would be able to meet the criteria required for museological expertise, where time was associated with the practices of conservation. This was expressed by the South African Museums Association through the concept of training and the idea that the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology should establish a National Heritage Training Institute to facilitate the development of programmes and create and extend networks between training providers in the heritage sectors. Robben Island, as the first new post-apartheid national museum and the bearer of a legacy of the Island as a site of teaching and learning for political prisoners, was keen to be the prime mover in such a concept. With accreditation through the universities of the Western Cape and Cape Town, the Robben Island Museum envisaged that it would provide a museum and heritage programme that would replace those at the Universities of Stellenbosch and Pretoria that had sustained and served the history museum movement in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. The central tenet of the planned

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new programme was that heritage and museum education would almost entirely involve training for jobs in the sector, keeping the categories, classifications and temporalities in place as the site of expertise.64 But importantly, according to the ACTAG report, ‘museum critical theory’ also needed to be regarded as ‘an essential part of skills development’, so that new museum workers would be independent thinkers.65 Such ideas in the ACTG report resonated with some of the research and teaching initiatives that were already underway in departments of History, Anthropology, English, Fine Arts, Architecture and Archaeology at the universities of the Western Cape, Cape Town and the Witwatersrand that focused on issues of the politics of representation and the production of pasts in the public domain. Instead of the singularity of heritage as an inheritance, these programmes invoked at times ideas of different imagined heritages coming into constant conflict with each other as individuals and groups staked claims on the basis of the identities and pasts they associated themselves with. Teaching heritage as a varied and disputatious field meant interrogating ways in which it could open up more debates about the representations of pasts and studying the different ways by which heritage was produced. ACTAG’s call for an engagement with critical theory allowed for a meeting point between a grouping of academics, across various disciplines at the universities of the Western Cape and Cape Town, and the Robben Island Museum, in effect superseding the idea of a National Heritage Training Institute and establishing instead a Postgraduate Diploma in Museum and Heritage Studies with its first intake in 1998. In July 2001 I was asked by the convening committee of the Diploma to collect and collate its minutes since its inception in 1997. The twelve-member committee had representatives from the participating institutions and the broadly defined heritage sector. Its task was to administer the courses for the Diploma, the selection of students, the allocation of teaching staff, the appointment of external examiners, and the final overall assessment and recommendations for the award of the Diploma. While carrying out the task of collating the minutes, I came across the following item recorded in the first meeting held on 17 November 1997: ‘Leslie Witz agreed to be the interim Chairperson of the Convening Committee until the Chair of Public History at the University of the Western Cape assumed this position early next year’.66 The Chair of Public History at UWC was never filled and I remained chairperson until my colleague Ciraj Rassool took over convening and directing the Diploma as part of the rebranded African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies in 2004. I remained integrally involved in the Diploma,

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teaching key components until it came to an end in 2016. This minute set me thinking further on how the field of public history was related to a programme on museum and heritage studies. How did teaching through the frames of public history relate to the times of history in the museum? This question took me back to 1992 and another rabbit that had emerged at the Myths, Monuments, Museums: New Premises? conference organized by the University of the Witwatersrand’s History Workshop. As Ciraj Rassool and I argued, the key question at the conference was posed by a young student: ‘If you have a dog chasing a rabbit’, he asked, ‘and the dog catches the rabbit and then begins to devour and tear the flesh of the rabbit, how would you create a historical monument based on the memory and experiences of the rabbit?’… If [one] may extend this metaphor, now that the rabbit, is potentially about to escape the clutches of the dog should these public depictions merely shift to representing the rabbit?67

This question raised several important issues: what should happen to the perspective of the dog, should the suffering of the rabbit be the focal point of new memorials and museums, how does one avoid representing the rabbit as a mere victim, and how could displays ‘expose the layers and complexity of subjective experiences’ and steer clear of new stereotypes, romanticization and hero-worshipping? It placed on the agenda the problem of ‘who was going to shape these new historical representations of the dog and the rabbit’.68 These were all questions about the politics of historical production in the public domain and pertained especially to museums that could not simply be conceptualized ‘as institutions of conservation, display and education, but also as sites that, in practice, also engage, produce and constitute histories and publics’.69 The paradox of the making of history in museums, as Bennett points out, is that they separate the past from the present while being ‘entirely the product of the present practices which organize and maintain that frame’.70 To understand and teach about the making of museums then implied ‘assessing their relations to, and placement within, a whole repertoire of textual [and visual] conventions through which the socially demarcated zone of the past is made to connect with contemporary social, cultural and political preoccupations’.71 Giving the Diploma programme its overall coherence was a compulsory core module ‘Issues in Museum and Heritage Studies’. Run over two semesters, the key to the core course, which Ciraj Rassool and I coordinated and taught for almost twenty years, was an insistence on the time and politics of the present and, in the particularities of the South African

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case, an examination of ‘the cultural workings of heritage, public history and identity formation under conditions of political transition’.72 What was required was to develop an understanding of the dominant modes of knowledge production at work in making museums and heritage appear as new, the ways these were and how they could be contested, and to encourage a search for imaginative means to push the boundaries of these powerful visual and textual narrations. The focus of the first semester was to understand debates about different forms of heritage, ranging from national heritage, to living heritage and natural heritage, seeking to show the process of heritage formation and production. During the second semester, the course shifted to specific sites of production, with an emphasis on museums, analysing displays in specific exhibitions, looking at methodologies of renovation and change, interrogating the making of the category of community in museum settings and engaging in debates on repatriation. The intention was to develop practitioners who would reflect upon and, if appropriate, challenge the underlying assumptions of their practice by constantly addressing the sort of questions that the student at the Myths, Monuments, Museums conference in 1992 had asked about the dog, the rabbit, their shifting positionality and the making of memories. It was towards the end of the core course of the Diploma that the rabbit appeared as an object of critique. In a class held on Robben Island, which in the early years of the Diploma was given the subject title ‘Tourism and Robben Island’, and then shifted in the early 2000s to ‘Robben Island: history and national heritage’, students watched the film shown on the ferries, the Makana and Autshumato, in which the rabbit briefly featured. Initially, this class was accompanied by a set of readings about Robben Island from prison autobiographies from the 1960s to the 1990s that referred to conflicts between common law and political prisoners, sexual relations between prisoners and intense struggles amongst political prisoners with different affiliations.73 These readings were chosen because they did not fit into narratives that were being presented to tourists in the early days of the Island as museum which emphasized harmony and unity as the origins of national reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa. This was never more evident than in the film where Leslie Mongezi as The Island acclaimed: A unique brand of democracy was being forged in the most unlikely place of all, the hell hole of the apartheid regime, Robben Island. Despite appalling conditions and the psychological torment of long sentences a disciplined united force

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grew. Against all odds the flame of democracy kept flickering until at last it consumed the political captors and swept away an oppressive system.

Soon after this, in the film, the rabbit was ‘at last free again’.74 Discussion in class was framed by questions about whether those elements of conflict amongst political prisoners and relations with common law prisoners, highlighted in readings, which were unlike the story which led to the freeing of the rabbit, should be represented to tourists who visited Robben Island and if so, how, and if not, why not? In later years as Robben Island developed as a museum, this particular class shifted focus a little and asked questions around the concentration by the museum on a biography of Nelson Mandela and a narrative of reconciliation, about which stories were being silenced by the Robben Island Museum and about the ways in which the museum itself was a site of different and contested pasts.75 Quite astonishingly, Robben Island as museum, in the very tertiary education programme where it was a major partner, was opening up itself and its practices of contemporary knowledge formation to intense analysis, assessment, interrogation and the possibilities of change. It would be inaccurate though to see Robben Island as a museum shifting its educational norms towards the temporalities of public history. The overall programme of the Diploma in Museum and Heritage Studies was negotiated between museums as sites of public scholarship and of conservation. The Robben Island Museum offered the latter as electives in the programme that were focused on museum and collection management, researching and interpreting heritage material, communication techniques and institutional management. This was modelled closely on the ‘Basic Syllabus’ of the International Committee of Training of Personnel (ICTOP) of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) which had been adopted in 1971 and became the foundation of several museum training initiatives in Africa.76 The other electives broadly intersected with the temporalities of public history. Including, amongst others, courses in the politics and ethics of collecting, public history and tourism, visual history and curatorship, they posed issues that challenged frameworks and classifications, consistently seeking to bring together, rather than separating out, the times of pastness and the contemporaneous. The past, in this set of courses mainly offered through university-based departments, was never readily available for techniques of management, interpretation and preservation. But in keeping with the emphasis on opening up vocational possibilities that would provide a ‘fast track’ for staff in museum and heritage institutions through the

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acquisition of a set of technical skills, the electives offered by the Robben Island Museum tended to be more about managing and preserving an already separated time of the past.77 The Museum constituted its own components of the programme as developing ‘practitioners’, and frequently referred to the entire Diploma itself as a course of instruction in heritage management offered by the Robben Island Training Programme.78

Touring Robben Island as Museum After lunch in the session of the core course of the Diploma held on Robben Island, the students were taken on the museum’s tourist excursions, around the Island in a bus and then on a prison tour conducted by an ex-political prisoner. Elements of the Island bus tour have, over the years, included pointing to the wrecks along the coastline, the flora and fauna, the World War Two installations, the leper graveyard, the lime quarry where political leaders laboured, and the house where the leader of the Pan-African Congress, Robert Sobukwe, was kept in isolation. The maximum-security prison walking tour takes visitors to the censor’s office, various communal cells, the courtyard in B-Section and the ‘centrepiece of the … tours to Robben Island’,79 cell no 5 in B Block which is pointed to as Mandela’s cell. These tours are highly regulated and do not allow for diversion from the standard guided prescribed route from the moment of embarkation onto the ferry at the Nelson Mandela Gateway, to disembarkation at Murray’s Bay Harbour, taking the Island tour, walking through the maximum-security prison and returning to the Gateway (perhaps stopping en route at the Museum shop on the Island), all in approximately three and a half to four hours. All in all, the tours constitute the public face of Robben Island as a museum. For the museum at Robben Island to be conceptualized through tourism is not necessarily a comfortable fit. Although museums since at least the 1980s have become major destinations for the tourism industry, with the latter having the potential to ‘deliver the hordes’ to their doors, they have not always sat easily together in terms of their character and trajectories. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett articulates this as a difference between ‘product-led’ and ‘market-driven’ approaches. Museums in their histories have prioritized instruction for audiences as a public citizenry through constituting collections, carrying out research on objects, and enabling the means to see, all exemplified by the centrality given to curation as a process of caring. The tourism industry casts its publics primarily as consumers. Seeking difference and newness is the priority, with

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increasing emphasis on providing a means to engage through participation. Becoming more and more part of the tourist industry signals a shift for museums towards publics as customers, and engagements cast as multi-sensory experiences.80 In this experiential schema, more than just providing ‘an effect called the real world’, the vision which museums as sites and destinations for the tourism industry are called upon to offer is ‘the world as a picture of itself ’.81 This world of picture and performance, constituted by the space and time of difference, is the hallmark of a tourist industry that persists in glorifying ‘colonial adventure and a repudiated anthropology of primitivism’.82 Since the 1990s, as South Africa entered the international tourism market on a large scale, museums have been under enormous pressure to align their offerings with the visual imagery and temporal subjectivities of a ‘world in one country’, demarcated through a primitiveness / modernity dichotomy.83 Older museums like the South African Museum which formed part of the new Iziko consortium were concerned that by closing down their ethnic displays they would lose visitors, while newer ones like the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum were constantly urged by tourism, and indeed museum, authorities to depict essentialized versions of culture cast as rural and timeless.84 The Robben Island Museum was located, in part, at the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, a site that was pivotal in the construction of an image of South Africa’s, and particularly Cape Town’s, modernity as ‘Europe in Africa’.85 Before Robben Island had been reconstituted as a museum, the Waterfront Company had sought to present a sanitized version of the Island as ‘rich in history’ and insisted that more emphasis be placed on its wildlife inhabitants in the storyboards they commissioned from historians based at the University of Cape Town.86 Once the museum opened its doors it explicitly dissociated itself from these Waterfront imaginaries through its own exhibitions, buildings and tours, shifting the emphasis to the Island as the site of political imprisonment. A different modernity was installed for tourists, of South Africa and the achievement of nationhood as illustrative of the possibility of racial reconciliation through the figure of leadership. Nelson Mandela metaphorically stood at the Gateway, on the Waterfront, to this vision of the past and future being inaugurated on Robben Island. This has been referred to as a narrative of the ‘triumph of the human spirit’, leading inexorably to a multicultural South Africa, inscribed on Robben Island through what has been referred to as ‘Mandelaization’.87 The Robben Island Museum places itself in a biographical genealogy through which ‘the discursive instruction of Nelson Mandela has moved through

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different phases, from born leader to sacrificial hero to Messiah, culminating in symbolic father with paternal authority in the public sphere’. 88 But Robben Island Museum tried to go further than this allusion to leaders and political imprisonment in a new modernity of national becoming by boldly recasting the time of the tour into that of museum as collection and product. This was not primarily in relation to the bus tour of the Island which was formulaic, and involved gazing out the window for thirty to forty-five minutes at sites and landscapes that were pointed out by a guide as they were passed by, with some pauses on the journey where longer accounts were provided, such as the Sobukwe House. There was no opportunity to disembark from the bus, and in the museum’s own assessment ‘no clear interpretative objectives for the sites, places, landscapes or stories’.89 Over the years this tour was shortened and more time was spent off the bus. But this was to go to the tuckshop, take a bathroom break and pose for what the museum promoted as a ‘unique’ photograph inside the large blue frame structure outside Alpha 1, the recreational lounge (formerly pump house, abattoir and butcher’s shop) on the south-eastern end of Robben Island, where, according to the Lonely Planet guide, there is a ‘superb view of the mainland and Table Mountain’.90 While the Mandela Gateway provided the vision to Robben Island as a museum, the photo opportunity on the hurried bus tour of the Island framed ‘a vista of European discovery and exploration’ across Table Bay that is Cape Town’s ubiquitous imagined heritage.91 Curation instead centred on memories of imprisonment and their rendition as performances by ex-political prisoners to groups of about fifty people in and of the maximum-security prison complex of the museum. Photographs, artefacts in cells (such as bunk beds, rolled up mats and cupboards), enlarged reproduced documents (such as those assigning different food rations depending on racial categorizations, B for ‘Coloureds/Asiatics’, ‘C for Bantus’, and the identity card of Billy Nair, prisoner 69/64, with name, fingerprints, prison number, crime – ‘sabotasie’ – date and length of sentence – twenty years) and the spaces en route (some of which the museum labelled) were all used as props for the storied itinerary. Depending on the guide, varying degrees of stress were placed on elements of discriminatory treatment in prison based on racial categorization and length of imprisonment, the ways in which conditions changed over the years, forms of mental and physical terror that were inflected, communal and individual forms of resistance, and, importantly, resilience and the establishment of a cohesive prisoner community. This narrative culminates in the coming of freedom, where through ‘outstanding moral strength’ the ‘terrible hardships’ were overcome, and

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victory was achieved. Tourists are often thanked for their solidarity in fighting against apartheid, tracking the Island tale into a universal account of a triumph of human values, reproducing the storyline from the film on the boat, which starred the rabbit. Taking history out of time, the storyline through the artefactual remnant of the maximum-security prison at Robben Island Museum in the end assumes a moral tale of the coming of a new national future in the guise of reconciliation.92 My brief description above of the tour given by ex-political prisoners, suggests a collectively and uniformity that is inconsistent with other accounts that point to the Robben Island Museum as encouraging independence and singularity from the guides. Instead of a scripted past, culminating in a tale of humanity’s triumph over adversity, what is provided for visitors through these tours is an affiliation and engagement with the interiority of the personal rendition. The overarching theme of inclusion and tolerance, rather than being bound in a universal time, is seen by commentators such as Shearing and Kempa to emerge from ‘a patchwork of personal anecdotes’, specific histories that convey ‘a synthetic truth about the island, apartheid, the lives of prisoners’. 93 Taken further, these itinerant tales through the prison are depicted as dialogic, where visitors are constantly encouraged to ‘become active participants in interpretation and meaning making’, polyvocal in elaborating on distinct political affiliations and times spent on the Island as period and duration, and ranging far beyond the proclamations and appearances of ‘Mandelaization’ by visiting the communal cells and engaging with ‘the shared and individual memories of the rank and file members’.94 These personal stories, repeated on a daily basis to the large crowds who are ‘hurried through the spaces’ of what was once a maximum-security prison, often blocking its passageways, are the foundations of Robben Island’s claims to be a museum that breaks away from ‘traditional didactic authoritative monologues’.95 Since 1997 I have been on many of these tours conducted by ex-political prisoners, sometimes with groups of students and colleagues, at other times as a regular fee-paying visitor. Much depends on who the guide is on the day and what they tend to emphasize in their respective narratives: brutality or resilience, internal stresses and conflicts or cohesiveness, the personal account or a more generalized story of apartheid and resistance. This suggests a much greater degree of individuality, though the morality tale of victory and triumph always features, providing an overarching framing of the telling. What is also apparent is how, over the years, there was a shift from the individual account towards standardization in the tales being told. Initially, when the museum opened, and ex-political

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prisoners who had acted as volunteers were offered employment contracts, there was a somewhat haphazard and ad-hoc implementation of tours, and no written script was issued.96 Conformity started to emerge from discussions amongst the guides themselves, some of which were based upon stories they were told by other ex-political prisoners and also biographical and autobiographical accounts they had read, such as Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom.97 Through this process of narrative formation in the intersection of the published, the individual account, and stories related, heard and passed on, an increasingly fixed oral tradition with accompanying props took hold. There is little doubt that the display of imprisonment by the ex-political prisoners performs a ‘double manoeuvre’ that simultaneously inscribes ‘agency and objecthood’ that is at the heart of the oral traditions that are presented daily as narratives to tourists.98 It is precisely these narrated experiences of the ex-political prisoners as traditions which gives Robben Island its claim to second life, from prison of apartheid to a national museum. Yet, that ‘second life’ on and for Robben Island as a museum, according to Harry Garuba, ‘is only available to artefacts, sites and human subjects, so long as they “live” within the discourse that produces that life’.99 The museum’s Tours Department in 2007/8 significantly altered its name to the Tourism Department, with oversight responsibilities of ‘monitoring, evaluation and reporting’. The primary objective became to consider the quality of the ‘visitor experience’ so as to make it ‘memorable’. An Interpretation and Narrative Committee led by the Senior Manager of Tourism examined draft scripts and distributed them to guides for comment. Under what was termed by the museum as ‘tourism product development’, the ‘key narrative and interpretation’ was identified.100 The lives, memories and stories of ex-political prisoners on Robben Island which were becoming traditions were re-constituted in the cultural economy of international tourism into museum objects that imparted what Solani refers to as ‘dominant Robben Island Museum narratives’ of ‘victory, nation building and reconciliation’.101

How Many Rabbits Are There on Robben Island? At the beginning of October 2009 Robben Island Museum announced it was going to continue to expand its mass programme of killing rabbits. Estelle Esterhuizen, the Island’s nature conservator, was cited as saying they had called in ‘sharpshooters’. She painted a picture of massive degradation to the Island’s ecosystem. The rabbits have ‘eaten so much

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vegetation that the island is a desert’, she said. Furthermore, they were threatening the penguin population by competing for space and were also placing the museum’s prison structures at risk. ‘The rabbits are burrowing into the foundations and threatening the museum buildings’, she added. ‘The prison could collapse as a result of burrows. It’s like walking on a sponge’. She claimed it would take years to accomplish the museum’s objective of ‘the complete eradication of about 30 000 rabbits’.102 But how many rabbits there actually were on the Island was very unclear. Surveys carried out by UCT’s Animal Demography Unit between 2003 and 2005 showed approximately 2,000, increasing to 4,200 by 2006, and then dramatically in November 2008 the numbers were estimated at 24,000.103 After a ‘capture-and-euthanase project’ in that month, and natural dying off in summer months which followed, the Earthwatch Institute counted that there were 5,700 left. The average number in 2009 was around 6,000.104 This did not accord with the museum’s count. In the annual report for 2009/10 the acting CEO Jatti Bredekamp indicated that 7,018 rabbits were culled and there were approximately 14,000 remaining.105 Les Underhill, director of the Animal Demography Unit, called these numbers ‘an overestimate’ and the former interim CEO of the museum, Seelan Naidoo, while agreeing that the rabbits had to be ‘removed in order to restore ecological balance’, maintained that there was ‘not the “crisis”’ that was being reported.106 Whatever the actual number and whether it constituted a crisis or not, the presence of the rabbits remained a major concern for the museum. The killing of rabbits took place annually from 2011 and targets were reported in terms of goals achieved. In 2011/12 the target was 1,000 rabbits but only 559 were killed. Underperformance was attributed to the cull not being necessary due to ‘lower reproduction rates’.107 In 2013/14 a service provider was appointed to carry out the killing and ‘the rabbit population decreased significantly’.108 Culls took place on a monthly basis, with the only interruptions coming when the heavy winter rains, winds and swells made it difficult to reach the Island.109 There was also increasingly little left to forage upon as the limited grass and shrubs were decimated. Desperately hungry rabbits started climbing trees in search of food. ‘Complete eradication’, which Esterhuizen had thought would take an exceptionally long time, seemed to have taken place by the end of 2016.110 In this personal journey from prison to museum which I have undertaken in the tracks of the rabbit, from heralding liberation to becoming the target of eradication, the formal institutional arrangements that were set in place and the increasing emphasis on Robben Island as a tourist

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destination all contributed towards constraining a museology of the critical. The exhibitions which were developed and constructed did move towards inhabiting this space of difference and debate but they were marginalized as enclaves. A tertiary education programme in museum and heritage studies in which the museum was a fully-fledged partner was continually at odds with Robben Island Museum’s insistence on the time of conservation and learning its accompanying set of techniques. It continued to persist with plans that conceived of the museum as an ‘excellent learning centre for heritage management’ and remained committed to establishing its own heritage training institute.111 Although the tours of ex-political prisoners were never fully standardized, the inconsistencies in narratives were noted and there was an ongoing requirement to ‘meet optimum service delivery expectations of the Robben Island Museum’.112 In the Robben Island Museum’s annual report for 2008/9 the acting chief executive officer Seelan Naidoo maintained that in the long term the core purpose of the Robben Island Museum had to be ‘primarily museological in nature’. As the museum was the ‘foremost memorial to the 350 year-long South African Struggle for Liberation’, Naidoo maintained that this purpose had to be ‘delimited in a manner that allows the institution to pursue a meaningful and focused strategy but not so narrowly as to strangle it through prescription’.113 Robben Island Museum’s exhibitions of difference remained in place, it continued to be part of the Post-graduate Diploma in Museum and Heritage Studies, producing a cohort of critical public intellectuals who were able to critique Robben Island’s politics of representation and who have gone on to staff museums in Africa and beyond, and there was still a possibility for ex-political prisoners to tell a story as ‘living artefacts of the site’ to hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.114 The rabbit had not managed to survive from the days when it had scuttled across the television monitors on board the Autshumato and Makana travelling from the Nelson Mandela Gateway to Murray’s Bay Harbour on Robben Island, heralding the dawn of freedom, but its legacy still persisted.

Notes  1. Witz, Apartheid’s Festival.  2. Solani, ‘Memory and Representation’, 82, points out that this is an edited version of the 90-minute documentary made by Jurgen Schadeberg, Voices

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 3.  4.  5.  6.

 7.  8.  9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

from Robben Island, made in 1994. A book accompanying the longer film was published in the same year, Schadeberg, Voices. O’Keeffe, The Story of Robben Island. A similar point is made by Williams, Memorial Museums, 89–90. Williams, Memorial Museums, 90. Witz, Minkley and Rassool, ‘South Africa and the Unsettling’, 19. I also want to acknowledge the work of Ri’aad Dollie who researched, designed and constructed an exhibition in 2014 on the representation of rabbits on Robben Island, and in photographs, films and various other artworks for the Postgraduate Diploma in Museum and Heritage Studies Curation module. See Dollie, ‘The Making of “Bunny Chatter”’. Garuba, ‘A Second Life’. Sisulu, ‘Return to the Island’, 65. ‘Robben Island Museum’s Jetty 1 encapsulates WWII and political imprisonment history’, retrieved 12 October 2020 from https://www.robben-island.org.za/files/press/PR%20-%20Jetty.pdf. Worden, ‘Contested Heritage’, 69. Worden, ‘Contested Heritage’, 69. ‘Request for proposal. Manufacture, deliver and commission one new highspeed passenger ferry of proven design, operating in the Table Bay area between the Nelson Mandela Gateway at the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town harbour, and Murray’s Bay harbour at Robben Island’, 20 October 2017, retrieved 11 November 2020 from https://www.robben-island.org.za/files/tenders/RIM%20FER-2017%202018%20Executive%20 Summary%20FINAL.pdf; ‘Historical Background of Suzan Kruger Ferry’, Documentation submitted to the South African Heritage Resources Agency as part of request for the disposal of Robben Island historical boat Mev Susan Kruger, 14 November 2017, retrieved 13 October 2020 from https://sahris. sahra.org.za/sites/default/files/additionaldocs/Susan%20Kruger%20background%20for%20SAHRA%20%20application%20doc.pdf; ‘Request for the disposal of Robben Island historical boats - Penguin and Proteus’, 11 October 2016, retrieved 17 November 2020 from https://sahris.sahra.org. za/cases/request-disposal-robben-island-historical-boats-penguin-and-proteus. For Robben Island timelines, see Deacon, The Island; De Villiers, Robben Island; Kathrada et al., The Robben Island Exhibition Esiqithini; Hutton, Robben Island. ‘Historical Background of Suzan Kruger Ferry’. I am grateful to Mariki Victor, director of the UWC Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archive, for information about the model of the Dias. ‘Robben Island Museum’s Jetty 1’. On Ex-Political Prisoners memories project, see Deacon, ‘Traumatic Personal Histories’. Mayibuye Centre, ‘Gateway to Neglected Past’. This is expanded upon in Chapter 1. Odendaal, ‘“Let It Return” – Setting up an Archive’. Macdonald, ‘Heritage Day’.

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20. Mike Rademeyer, speech made at the opening of the Robben Island Exhibition and Information Centre, 8 June 1996, notes by L. Witz. 21. André Odendaal, speech at the opening of the Robben Island Exhibition and Information Centre, 8 June 1996, notes by L. Witz. 22. Odendaal, ‘“Heritage” and the Arrival of Post-colonial History’. 23. Aranes, ‘Cape Apartheid’; Dubow, ‘History ever-present’; Streak, ‘Glimpses’; Breier, ‘A Sorry Pass’. 24. Witz, Rassool and Minkley, ‘The Castle, the Gallery’, 110. 25. Friedman, ‘Robben Island Life’. 26. Witz, Rassool and Minkley, ‘The Castle, the Gallery’, 120. 27. Mgxashe, ‘Back to The Island’. 28. Fourth Annual Report: Maybibuye Centre for History and Culture in South Africa, Bellville, UWC, 1995. 29. Deacon et al., Robben Island Timeline; Robben Island Museum, ‘Interactive Timeline’; Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2011/12. 30. Davison, ‘Museums and the Reshaping’, 155; Davison, ‘The Mayibuye Centre’, 25. See Chapter 1 for a discussion on the categories and classification of natural history in museums. 31. Rassool and Thorne, ‘A Timeline’, 96. 32. Rassool and Thorne, ‘A Timeline’, 96. I am indebted to Corinne Kratz for discussion with me on this point. 33. Deacon et al., Robben Island. 34. Deacon et al., Robben Island Timeline, 39. 35. Kathrada, ‘Opening Address’, 9. 36. Minkley, Rassool, and Witz, ‘Thresholds, Gateways’, 29, citing Hutton, Robben Island; Deacon, The Island; De Kock, ‘Island May Become’. 37. Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2001/2; ‘Peak season visitor figures’, Ilifa labanatu / Heritage of the People 6(1) (2002), 9. Museum consortiums like Iziko which combine museums at several sites do attract more in total. 38. ‘The Nelson Mandela Gateway to Robben Island’, Ilifa labanatu / Heritage of the People 4(4) (2000), 3. 39. ‘The Nelson Mandela Gateway to Robben Island’, Ilifa labanatu / Heritage of the People 6(1) (2002), 3. 40. ‘The Gateway Exhibitions’, Ilifa labanatu / Heritage of the People 6(1) (2002), 4–5; Corrales Lantero, ‘Exhibition Design’. 41. Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2001/2. 42. ‘The Gateway Exhibitions’, 5. 43. Rassool, ‘The Individual’, 267. 44. ‘Cell Stories’, Ilifa labanatu / Heritage of the People 4(1) (2000), (reprinted from Pretoria News Weekend), 8. 45. ‘The Gateway Exhibitions’, 4. 46. This translation by prison services of ‘waiting room’ into isiXhosa seems to be an error in the signage. It should be ‘igumbi’ which translates as room, or, more fully, ‘igumbi lokulinda’.

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47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

Bamford, ‘Blast from Apartheid Past’. Sherley, ‘Unusual Foraging Behaviour’, 2. Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2006/7. Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2008/9. Rassool, ‘The Rise of Heritage’, 19. ‘Cell Stories’, 8. Rassool, ‘The Rise of Heritage’, 18; ‘Cell Stories’, 8. Rassool, ‘The Rise of Heritage’, 18; Mulcaire, ‘Interview with Ashwell Adriaan’. 55. Puff, Miniature Monuments, 6. 56. Robben Island Museum, Integrated Conservation Management Plan, 20072012, 90–123. 57. Robben Island Museum, Integrated Conservation Management Plan, 20132018, 5. 58. Hall, ‘The Reappearance of the Authentic’, 71. 59. Robben Island Museum, Integrated Conservation Management Plan, 20072012, 93. The idea of an ‘economy of the critical’ draws upon Nicky Rousseau’s critique of my own work, Write Your Own History. See Rousseau, ‘Unpalatable Truths’. 60. Hall, ‘Reappearance of the Authentic’, 93; Minkley, Witz and Rassool, ‘Heritage and the Post-antiapartheid’, 226. 61. Morakinyo, ‘A Historical and Conceptual Analysis’, 1–2. 62. Witz, ‘Museum and Heritage Studies’, 6. 63. ACTAG, Report of the Arts and Culture Task Group, 55. 64. Corsane et al., ‘National Strategy for Heritage Training’. 65 ACTAG, Report of the Arts and Culture Task Group, 77. 66. Minutes of meeting for convening committee of the Programme for Museum and Heritage Studies held on 7 November 1997. 67. Rassool and Witz, ‘The Dog, the Rabbit’, 240. 68. Rassool and Witz, ‘The Dog, the Rabbit, 240–41. 69. Witz, Minkley and Rassool, ‘South Africa and the Unsettling’, 17. 70. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 130. 71. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 130. The words in parenthesis are mine. 72. Rassool and Witz, ‘Transforming Heritage Education’, 6. 73. These were extracts from Mandela, Long Walk; Dlamini, Robben Island; Babenia, Memoirs. 74. O’Keeffe, The Story of Robben Island. 75. Readings over the years included Solani, ‘Saint of the Struggle’; Deacon, ‘Memory and History’; Rassool, ‘The Individual’; Buntman, Robben Island; Kruger, ‘Robben Island’; Garuba, ‘A Second Life’. 76. Morakinyo, ‘A Historical and Conceptual Analysis’, 23, 72. 77. African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies, ‘Postgraduate Diploma in Museum and Heritage Studies’, UWC, UCT, RIM, 2004 (brochure).

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78. See, for example, Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2001/2; Robben Island Museum, Annual Report 2002/3; Odendaal, ‘Looking Back’, 22. 79. Rassool, ‘The Individual’, 23. 80. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, 137–38. 81. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, 14. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is quoting Mitchell, ‘The World as Exhibition’, 225. 82. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, 136. 83. Rassool and Witz, ‘South Africa: A World in One Country’. 84. Witz, ‘Transforming Museums’; Witz, ‘Revisualising Township Tourism’. 85. Rassool and Witz, ‘South Africa: A World in One Country’, 361–62. 86. Rassool and Witz, ‘South Africa: A World in One Country’, 363; Worden, ‘Contested Heritage’, 69. 87. Buntman, ‘Politics and Secrets’, 18. See also Solani, ‘Saint of the Struggle’; Nwafor, ‘Nelson Mandela and the Politics of Representation’. 88. Rassool, The Individual’, 36. See also Garuba, ‘A Second Life’: Solani, ‘Memory and Representation’. 89. Robben Island Museum, Integrated Conservation Management Plan, 20072012, 119. 90. Leach, ‘Proposed Upgrades to Alpha 1’; Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2015-16; ‘Robben Island’, retrieved 4 December 2020 from https://www.lonelyplanet.com/south-africa/cape-town/attractions/ robben-island/a/poi-sig/1201965/355612. 91. Rassool and Witz. ‘South Africa: A World in One Country’, 362. 92. Riouful, ‘Behind Telling’, 27, 29–33. 93. Shearing and Kempa, ‘A Museum of Hope’, 72. 94. Corsane, ‘Using Ecomuseum Indicators’, 409. 95. Robben Island Museum, Integrated Conservation Management Plan, 20072012, 119; Mpumlwana et al., ‘Inclusion and the Power of Representation’, 252. 96. Sambumbu, ‘Making Heritage’, 252–53. 97. Solani, ‘Memory and Representation’, 93. 98. Garuba, ‘A Second Life’, 131. 99. Garuba, ‘A Second Life’, 143. 100. Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2006/7; Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2007/8. 101. Solani, ‘Memory and Representation’, 96. 102. Kamaldien, ‘Acting Chief ’. 103. ‘Robben Island’s Rabbits Hop Down After Big Jump Up’, Cape Times, 12 November 2009: See also Sherley, ‘Unusual Foraging Behaviour’, 2. 104. ‘Robben Island’s Rabbits’; Naidoo, ‘Protecting the Meanings’. 105. Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2009/10. 106. ‘Robben Island’s Rabbits’; Naidoo, ‘Protecting the Meanings’. 107. Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2011/12. 108. Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2013/14.

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109. Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2015/16. 110. Quintana et al., ‘African Oystercatchers’, 216. 111. Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2015/16; Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2017/18. 112. Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2017/18. 113. Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2008/9. 114. Robben Island Museum, Annual Report, 2017/18.

Figure 6.1 The inverted statue of Jan van Riebeeck constructed for the exhibition Y350? on display at the library atrium, University of the Western Cape, as part of Memorials Beyond Apartheid, September 2004. In the background on a banner is an enlarged photograph of the 1952 Anti-Van Riebeeck Festival protest meeting on Cape Town’s Grand Parade. © Leslie Witz.

Chapter 6

‘We Are Sick of Van Riebeeck, Van Riebeeck. We Want to Know Our History’ Y350? and the Remaking of Settler Histories in Post-Apartheid Times In the mid-seventeenth century Johan Anthoniszoon van Riebeeck, disgraced employee of the Dutch East India Company, who had been found guilty of trading for his own benefit, was consigned to a remote outpost to establish a revictualling station on the trading routes between the Netherlands and Batavia.1 Despite his own exaggerated claims of prospects at the Cape of Good Hope, where he had been posted, there was little opportunity for promotion, material wealth, and social and political advancement. By the time he left after ten years as Commander, he had not even been able to establish a successful regular supply station for the passing trade. Instead, the Cape remained reliant on importing food from Batavia and the arrival of the return fleet in Table Bay from the East Indies was a much more momentous occasion than Van Riebeeck’s arrival in 1652. Increasingly, all he really wanted was to leave and in 1662 he seized the opportunity to be appointed Commander of Malacca, even if he was not given a long sought-after promotion. The repeated requests that he made to the Company over the years to become a member of the Council of Indies that advised governor generals were turned down, and he died in 1677 in Batavia while serving as a clerk of the Council.2 It was a rather inauspicious career of a Company servant. But of course Jan Van Riebeeck did not land at the Cape in April 1652 but 300 years later. It was in the 1950s that the Commander of the Dutch East India Company’s insignificant revictualling station at the Cape, and his wife, Maria de la Quellerie, were iconized as South Africa’s first settlers

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and the bearers of apartheid. The coincidence of the three hundredth anniversary of Van Riebeeck’s landing provided the opportunity for the National Party government, which had come to power in 1948 with the promise to implement apartheid, to construct an identity of those racially classified ‘white’ under the Population Registration Act of 1950 as culturally and historically white.3 In a massive state sponsored tercentenary festival, the moment of arrival was transformed into the beginning of ‘civilisation’, the (white) South African nation and its history.4 This was the launching pad for Jan and Maria to become key figures over the next forty odd years in a racialized consensual past that emphasized European settlement and culminated in a coming together of a white settler nation with an indigenous history constituted as South African. An image of his face adorned bank notes, his statue and later that of Maria de la Quellerie in central Cape Town became the scene of annual wreath laying ceremonies, 6 April – designated as the day of landing in 1652 – became an official public holiday, and South African school histories began with the moment of arrival. Reciting and regurgitating facts of Van Riebeeck’s time as Commander at the Cape from prescribed textbooks became a central requirement to pass school history exams.5 Part of the production of the Van Riebeeck Festival in 1952 was an attempt by the organizing committees to lure people officially classified as ‘native’ and/or ‘coloured’ to view and contribute towards the proceedings which celebrated settler nationalism. In keeping with the doctrines of apartheid, this participation was planned to be in racially and ethnically separate events and histories according to the classifications designated by the state. In this respect the festival was a failure. Resistance movements and anti-apartheid political organizations contested the very basis of the festival, its celebration of ‘white’ founding that employed the alibi of South Africa as nation, and its assignation of those in other racial categories into separate, bounded, exclusive pasts. The most sustained and vocal of these anti-celebratory campaigns came from the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), a broad front of political organizations fighting against racial domination through boycotts and non-collaboration. They called for, and were successful in organizing, a massive boycott of the festival, labelling it a ‘festival of hate’, an ‘orgy of Herrenvolkism’ and a celebration of ‘the national oppression and exploitation of the NonWhites’.6 Phyllis Ntantala, a speaker at one these protest meetings, later enthused, ‘the people were not there. What a flop for the government that had put up this show! What a success for the people’s boycott!’7 An essential element of this boycott campaign, as Ciraj Rassool and I argue, is that the published histories in pamphlets, books and newspaper

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columns that were produced around it were a direct inversion of the historical representations of the festival. Jan van Riebeeck, for instance, was described as a ‘mediocre surgeon’ and a petty criminal, who had ‘left Batavia under a cloud’ after defrauding his employer, the Dutch East India Company.8 These reverse images were replicated in speeches given at mass meetings, such as one on Cape Town’s Grand Parade on 30 March 1952. Displayed on the podium where the speakers sat was a poster showing an image of Van Riebeeck. This was no ordinary depiction. It consisted of an upside-down figure of the Van Riebeeck statue in Cape Town’s main throughfare, Adderley Street, with a cross disfiguring its façade. In a vivid visual rendering that confronted the apartheid present and its past evocations, Van Riebeeck, as represented in central Cape Town, was turned on its head and the icon defaced. Fifty years later this image from the poster at the protest meeting became the central figure in the Y350? Old Memorials in New Times exhibition which reflected on the tensions inherent in the commemoration of the 350th anniversary of settlement in post-apartheid South Africa. Under instructions and drawings from exhibition designer, Jos Thorne, and one of the co-curators, Noëleen Murray, a ‘mock memorial’ of the upside-down Van Riebeeck was cut out of low carbon steel and placed on a stand enabling it to rotate in the wind.9 Although there was no cross through it this was an explicit reference to the anti-festival campaigns of 1952 and the mass meeting on the Grand Parade. The emblematic inverted Jan van Riebeeck statue, according to Thorne, was meant to be ‘subversive and ironic’.10 The major objective of Y350?, under the auspices the Project on Public Pasts (PoPP) based in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), was to use the occasion of a planned commemoration of settlement in Cape Town in 2002 not merely to encourage debate over the appropriateness of this anniversary event but to broaden it to reflect on the times, meanings and structures of memorial pasts, particularly those associated with colonialism and apartheid. Rituals associated with commemorating anniversaries are one of the most powerful forces in constituting historical knowledge. Attempts are made by the organizers to bring individuals into a community of memory, that appears as singular, with its markers of time signifying before and after a moment that is fixed, seemingly as an innocent historical fact. Through commemorating anniversary, the date appears as natural, giving history a sense of certainty, filling silences ‘with narratives of power about the events they celebrate’ and taking the form of annual ‘cyclical inevitability’.11

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But no matter how much they attempt to engineer a settlement of history through commemorations and memorials, there are always faultlines in the construction, evocation, selection, presentation and reception of these public pasts. The intention in Y350? was to highlight such dissonances in an exhibition that dwelt on both the conflicts associated with the 1952 festival and those of contemporary (2002) apartheid and colonial memorial remnants. In direct contrast to the Dias Museum complex in Mossel Bay, apartheid’s last museum, which was a celebration of the temporalities of anniversary, the experiment of Y350? sought to inaugurate an always disrupted sense of time. It denaturalized commemorations, undid linear historical trajectories and opened up possibilities of assigning to memorials, as both anniversary dates and monumental structures, different futures. In this chapter I follow the inverted Van Riebeeck statue as it was moved as part of the Y350? exhibition to the Castle of Good Hope, South Africa’s oldest colonial building dating back to the late seventeenth century, the frontier farm museum, Kleinplasie (literally’ Small Farm’) in the town of Worcester, where Van Riebeeck was venerated as ‘Die Grondlegger’ (The Founder) of agriculture, and the library foyer of the University of the Western Cape (UWC) where I teach. These are not necessarily all formally museum spaces. Kleinplasie, with its collections of implements and displays of operations of frontier farmers, certainly is. The Castle primarily served as the headquarters for the South Africa National Defence Force in the Western Cape. It has a military museum, part of the Wiliiam Fehr collection of art, furniture and ceramics is on the premises, it was the location of some of Iziko Museum’s offices and its various halls had been used for a series of temporary exhibitions since the mid-1990s. The UWC space was a library atrium that was occasionally used for lectures and exhibitions. These differences enable an analysis of curatorial choices made at the various venues, the publics it sought to inaugurate and, following the work of Corinne Kratz, how politics of representation and communication shifted in making them places for exhibition.12 Visitor experiences, recorded in writing and through interviews which related to specific aspects of the exhibition in these differing configurations, also suggested that the curatorial intentions and what was communicated were not always aligned with each other. Much like several of the other instances written about in this book, I had a sustained engagement with and investment in Y350? It had started as a public art project upon the insistence of Zayd Minty who had initiated the Black Arts Collective (BLAC) in Cape Town in 1998, its lecture, film, music and oral history series ‘Liberating Zones’ (organized in partnership

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with PoPP at UWC), and Public Eye, a grouping of politically engaged artists and curators.13 The exhibition itself was based on research I conducted in the 1990s around the 1952 Van Riebeeck Festival, initially with Ciraj Rassool, and later, for the Dutch government, on perceptions in South Africa about commemorative events relating to the 400th anniversary of the Dutch East India Company planned for 2002, together with Mbulelo Mrubata.14 Present and past graduate students were brought onboard as educators, researchers and co-curators. I worked with designer Jos Thorne and the rest of the curatorial team as we formulated exhibition strategies, raised funds, wrote texts, constituted a collection, and negotiated and curated spaces and events.15 This is a privileged position of interiority, of many personal memories around engagements in making history in the public domain, of the chaos and messiness of the politics of production and the difficulties of contemplation and self-reflection.

Commemorating 350 in 2002 The Y350? exhibition was initiated by PoPP as a conversation with the plans of the City of Cape Town administration and the Western Cape provincial government to commemorate 350 years since the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck in 2002. It is completely astonishing that such a commemoration even entered the realm of possibility. From the 1950s Jan van Riebeeck had become a central figure in a South African public history defined through apartheid and the construction of a white settler nationalism. But during the last decade of the twentieth century, as aspirations to preserve a racial elite in South Africa were abandoned, the wreath laying ceremony in front of the statues in Adderley Street, Cape Town, fell by the way, Van Riebeeck Day was dropped by the post-apartheid government from the commemorative calendar of public holidays, the South African Reserve Bank replaced the image of Van Riebeeck on bank notes with wildlife such as lions, rhino and buffalo, and the school history curriculum started to focus on indigeneity and struggles against colonialism and apartheid. Jan van Riebeeck and Maria de la Quellerie, and the events surrounding their arrival in 1952, appeared to have been ‘consigned to the rubbish dump of history’.16 Somewhat surprisingly though, they did appear, in different forms than they had assumed fifty years previously. In post-apartheid South Africa the inverted, defaced Jan van Riebeeck that had appeared on the platforms of those opposing the festival in 1952 became a dominant signifying image. The moment of arrival in 1652 was recast in national

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government pronouncements and official speeches as the onset of colonial conquest and the icon installed as the initiator of racial domination, oppression and dispossession. Another take was to approach history as if it was akin to a racial scale that had been unfairly weighted to one side in the past and that had to be balanced. Recognizing that it was no longer possible to commemorate a past for a nation that was derived from European founding and settlement, the VOC (Dutch East India Company) Foundation, an organization based in Cape Town, which is the owner of the Company logo in South Africa and aims to ‘cultivate interest in the VOC period at the Cape (1652-1795)’, made a call for the 350th commemoration in 2002 to be ‘inclusive’ and ‘multi-cultural’.17 It was history as a racial scale and a multicultural evocation that framed the campaign by the City of Cape Town and the Western Cape provincial government to commemorate 350 years since the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck. The mayor of Cape Town, Gerald Morkel, called for a commemoration of ‘the city’s founding as a permanent settlement’ which would include the ‘contributions of all who came to these shores to settle’, thereby casting all of Cape Town’s inhabitants as settlers.18 In the local press as well a multicultural commemoration was promoted. Somewhat bizarrely, those who were opposed to an anniversary event and had fought against Van Riebeeck and apartheid were depicted by the Cape Times as wanting to promote an exclusive heritage, while those who supported the commemoration were portrayed as those who hoped that ‘that the heritage of the country as a whole would be taken into account’.19 The multicultural commemorative campaign was given a boost by the shifting nature of politics in South Africa at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The ANC, which in 1952 had condemned Van Riebeeck as part of the Defiance Campaign against the unjust legislation of apartheid, at the end of 2001 entered into a coalition with the descendants of the party that celebrated Van Riebeeck, the New National Party, to govern the province of the Western Cape. The ANC gave their support to a 350th commemorative anniversary as ‘an opportunity to celebrate and acknowledge our diversity and build unity and understanding as equal South Africans’.20 The City of Cape Town and the Western Cape government allocated funds for a 350th commemoration along these multicultural lines with the emphasis being on the founding of the city of Cape Town. They hired a publicity company, Blue Cape Media, to promote the anniversary under the title of Cape Town 350. Banners appeared around the city with the numbers 350 inscribed on a blue background together with images of Table Mountain and the sun. Commemorative memorabilia, including

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t-shirts, caps and fluffy penguins, were produced by Blue Cape Media. Included as part of the commemoration was a series of concerts and festivals, sponsorship for individuals and events (such as a local Businessman of the Year competition), a website (www.capetown350.co.za), and a regular slot on a local radio station on Monday mornings where the activities of the ‘commemorative year’ were promoted.21 By and large it was a promotional campaign that came to constitute the festivities that the Western Cape government and the City of Cape Town organized to ‘celebrate the country’s long journey from subjugation to liberation’.22 As the primary concern of the commemoration was to locate markers of culture, any idea of conflict tended to be written out of history. Jan van Riebeeck, along with other colonial type figures, was to be presented in the promotional material as the deliverer of a European heritage and one of the founders of South Africa imaged as a rainbow nation. In this commemoration as public relations, the parameters of debate about the content and meaning of history in post-apartheid South Africa in relation to Jan van Riebeeck was being set by the Cape Town press and local politicians. It was situated between history as a universal category containing an unmediated linear set of events and, countering this, localized understandings, labelled ‘our real history’, which presented an assertion to correct the past. In this latter set of claims, ‘only clowns would celebrate their oppression’. Ironically, in both positions the event of 1652 was not being contested at all. It was rather its legacy that was at stake in the debate ‘to praise him or to bury him?’23

Y350? Old Memorials in New Times: B Block of the Castle of Good Hope, 28 September to 18 October 2002 The exhibition Y350? elicited this debate about the appropriateness of the histories being enunciated through anniversary but took it further. It was the punctuation symbol of the question mark that asked questions of relevance and the value of 1652 in post-apartheid 2002. The inclusion of the sign Y broadened these limits. More than merely a shorthand for ‘why’ as a question, it was a remnant from the millennium panic when the coming of 2000 was heralded by doomsayers as the end of the world, related to the crashing of computers whose calendars had not been programmed to accord with the possibility of two 00s, 1900 and 2000, coinciding. Y2000, or in shorthand Y2k, foretold a future event as historic, that would bring about untold chaos and turmoil. Computer engineers, especially those trained in older technologies, were called in as fixers to

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reprogram systems. Whether this intervention was necessary or not, in the end nothing much happened and ‘the episode came and went with little fanfare’.24 The whimper of the Y extended Y350? to question the constitution of events as history, and of assigning signification to pasts aligned with anticipated futures. The first and condensed incarnation of Y350? was in one of the most symbolic spaces in Cape Town, the late nineteenth-century monumental gardens in the central city. Bounded by buildings of British rule (parliament, library, museum, church), with tree-lined avenues, filled with statues that celebrated men as heroic figures of imperial conquest and regimes of racial segregation, it was constructed on tourist routes in the 1990s as the Company Gardens, asserting a romantic fantasy link to the supposed foundations of settlement from Europe in the seventeenth century under Van Riebeeck.25 With the support of Public Eye’s ‘Please Turn Over’ project, a series of public arts interventions had started taking place in Cape Town. These included artists transforming the statue of General Louis Botha outside parliament into a Xhosa initiate and placing parking cones on the heads of Jan van Riebeeck and Maria de la Quellerie in Adderley Street.26 PoPP furthered such initiatives and as part of the Cape Town festival at the end of March 2002, installed a huge billboard on the Queen Victoria Street side of the Gardens and the metal Van Riebeeck statue below the staircase that led to the plaza in front of Iziko South African Museum. The billboard was an enlarged One Rand monetary note with the image of Van Riebeeck, folded over in the right-hand corner, where two men wearing beret caps, standing back-toback, superimposed on the Cape Town City Festival logo, were asking in cartoon bubbles ‘Founder or Flounderer?’, ‘Maar Jannie is nie van die kaap nie’ (But Jannie is not from the Cape). Van Riebeeck himself also asks the question ’Why me?’ while a caption across the bottom of the billboard reads ‘In 1952 Jan and Maria van Riebeeck were celebrated as the founders of white South Africa’. The billboard and statue did not stay up long. This was more of a teaser event and they were dismantled and removed once the festival was over. Over the next few months, as these installations were placed in storage, plans were afoot, through discussions between PoPP, Public Eye and Iziko Museums, for an extended exhibition. As with the initial foray into the Company Gardens, the choice of venue was significant: the Castle of Good Hope. This was the foremost monumental presence in South Africa, asserting a past linked to European settlement, declared in listings and guides to be ‘undeniably the most important building in the country’.27 It had also been a stage for pageantry and exhibitions of the

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1952 Van Riebeeck Festival, including various dinner parties and photo opportunities for Jan van Riebeeck and Maria de la Quellerie after they landed at Granger Bay in April 1952. This association with the Castle was reinforced through the tercentenary festival’s major symbol: a representation of Jan van Riebeeck within the Castle’s hexagonal fortress icon. For those who opposed the festival, Cape Town’s Grand Parade, which stood adjacent to the Castle of Good Hope, was a central venue for protest meetings. Since the 1990s outside exhibitors had also begun to utilize the various spaces of the Castle as they sought to make visible new and different South African pasts. These included: Fault Lines (1996), in which artists were invited into inquire into meanings and memories being invoked through South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission; 300 Years: The Making of Cape Muslim Culture (1994) which, as the title suggests, was primarily a recovery project that sought a more inclusive history; and Setting Apart (1995) which documented racialized spatial segregation in Cape Town.28 Given the Castle’s role in housing the South African Defence Force for much of the twentieth century and Dutch East India Company administration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was considered by experimental artists and curators as ‘an ironically appropriate venue for … exhibitions’ such as Y350? that exposed ‘past power relationships’.29 There were some outstanding problems though associated with using the Castle for Y350? The Defence Force oversaw the property and there was a sense of caution in discussions with officials from Iziko that they might not approve of parts of the exhibition, such as the inverted Van Riebeeck statue and the billboard ‘Maar Jannie is nie van die Kaap nie’ which were to be displayed outdoors. In the end such concerns proved to be unfounded. There were other logistical problems. The venue in the Castle allocated for the exhibition, the officers dining room in B Block, with walls painted aquamarine and illuminated by hanging glass chandeliers, had already been booked for an evening function on one of the days allocated for the exhibition. Rather than shorten the duration of the exhibition, the curator/designer Jos Thorne, in consultation with members of PoPP and Iziko, decided to take the entire exhibition down for one day mid-way and then re-open. Finally, there was the directive from the Castle that the walls themselves could not be tampered with. No nail or screw or adhesive tape could be affixed. Y350? had to be designed as freestanding. What was as important as design and venue was securing additional funding to promote the exhibition. The National Research Foundation’s funded Project on Public Pasts based at UWC and the Royal Netherlands

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Embassy in Pretoria provided the major financial resources, the latter fitting it into the series of cultural projects it was supporting in South Africa at the time.30 More was required, especially if it was to be successfully promoted. The curatorial team audaciously approached Blue Cape Media, the marketing company behind Cape Town 350, for assistance. The Cape Town 350 convening committee, headed by Patrick Mackenzie, the Western Cape’s Minister of Cultural Affairs, Sport and Recreation, attempting to insert a sense of history into the commemorations, ‘in order to address and to correct the injustices of yesterday’, accepted PoPP’s proposal and decided to sponsor the opening of the exhibition and a public debate about memorials in post-apartheid South Africa. Blue Cape Media sent out press statements, organized the opening, set up an interview on a local radio station and placed details about the exhibition on its website. Cape Town 350 claimed it had ‘thrown its full support behind the Y350? exhibition due to open at the Castle’s Good Hope Gallery on 28 September’.31 This was not actually the case. There were tensions throughout between Cape Town 350 and the curatorial team behind Y350? The former’s main concern was around promoting the Cape Town 350 commemorations and they saw the exhibition as a component of this broader campaign of racial inclusivity and multiculturalism, bringing a ‘sober reflection’ to the festivities of celebrating ‘our diverse cultures, our heroes and our heroines’.32 But promoting Cape Town 350 was not the primary aim of Y350? PoPP wanted to disrupt memorial time and open up for discussion the appropriateness of Cape Town 350 and its modes of representation. The partnership was never going to be easy. There were intense negotiations between Blue Cape Media and the Y350? team which expressed themselves most clearly in discussions over the design of the invitation to the exhibition opening. Blue Cape Media insisted that as Cape Town 350 was providing some sponsorship for the exhibition, its logo should be prominently displayed. The curatorial team instead was insistent that its icon, an inverted, defaced Van Riebeeck statue, be highlighted. An unhappy settlement was reached with the inverted Van Riebeeck dominating and a small Cape Town 350 logo placed in one corner. Cape Town 350 withdrew its funding of the invitation and the poster for the exhibition. The pressures associated with venue and marketing manifested themselves in the exhibition. At the entrance below the stairs leading into the officers’ dining room stood the inverted Van Riebeeck statue and the billboard, advertising the presence of the exhibition indoors. In the ante-room was a conventional series of panels with images and texts on printed boards, hung along the wall suspended with wires from the

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ceiling, serving as an introduction to the exhibition and possibilities around the future of memorials in post-apartheid South Africa. The core of the exhibition was located next door in the actual officers’ dining hall. But before they could enter visitors were handed a photocopied reproduction of a pamphlet that was produced in 1952 calling for a boycott of the Jan Van Riebeeck Festival. Visitors were in effect being asked to join in the boycott and perhaps consider leaving the exhibition. As far as can be ascertained none did. In the dining room large banner-type reproductions of photographs from the 1952 festival – entitled ‘Creating an imaginary history for a mythical white future’ and ‘Deleting a history’ – and the protests against it – entitled ‘Turning a history upside down’, ‘Speaking back to a history’ and ‘Boycotting a history’ – were hung from builders’ scaffolding. This was an innovative response from the designer Jos Thorne to the directive not to attach anything to the walls. It may have created a sense of provisionality as an image of history under construction. Artefacts from 1952 were displayed in glass cases, documentary film footage from the festival was shown, the chair that the mayor of Cape Town used to preside in, known as Van Riebeeck’s chair, was placed on a podium and, alongside it, on loan from the nearby District Six Museum, a long vertical embroidered banner depicted the iconography of political movements associated with the political campaign in the 1940s and 1950s against the establishment of a Coloured Affairs Division and advocating a boycott of the festival. Differences between Cape Town 350 and PoPP spilled over into struggles over the display and the placing of Cape Town 350 banners and its memorabilia. At the opening of the exhibition these had been placed by Blue Cape Media in a position of prominence surrounding the speakers’ podium but had been shifted by the curatorial team to a less conspicuous place at the back of the ante room. In the exhibition itself, the memorabilia produced for Cape Town 350 – a promotional 350 apron, desk flags, adjustable caps, business card holders, promotional sun visors, sweatshirts and commemorative penguins – were interspersed in the display cabinets with items from the 1952 Van Riebeeck Festival as an invitation to make comparisons between the two events. All these images and artefacts, from 1952 and 2002, taken together with the pamphlet that was handed out at the entrance to visitors, were an ‘attempt … both to depict the festival and subvert its message of a white founding father for South Africa and Cape Town’.33 To extend these associations between 1952 and 2002 reference could be made to the scaffolding in the exhibition in relation to the temporary 40,000-seater purpose-built stadium on the foreshore for the Van

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Riebeeck Festival that appeared in several of the large banner photographs on display. Unlike in 1952 though, visitors to Y350? were insistently asked to be more than passive spectators on the stands to pageants of history. At various moments they were asked to contribute to a discussion on the future lives of the many colonial and apartheid symbols in post-apartheid South Africa. This took the form of a set of interviews conducted by independent researcher, Mbulelo Mrubata, as visitors left the exhibition, written responses to the future of the inscription on a specific memorial, Van Riebeeck’s hedge in the elite Cape Town suburb of Bishopscourt, and a public debate held at the Castle on what should happen to old memorials in new times, chaired by Premesh Lalu from the UWC Department of History, with architect Mokena Makeka and myself as the key speakers. Questions on how to alter depictions of pasts – would you commemorate Van Riebeeck and 350, what sort of new memorials would you create, and in what different ways would you put the Castle to use? – challenged visitors to rethink times of remembrance and place them in the space of Y350? as contemplative agents in memorial reconceptualization. Responses to one of these questions around the future of Van Riebeeck’s hedge indicated an extension of dissonances between the temporalities invoked by Y350? and Cape Town 350. For many South Africans the hedge has a particular symbolism as the genesis of a system of structured racial separation and oppression in the twentieth century that is then dated back to the boundary marker for the Company station set by Van Riebeeck in the seventeenth century. The hedge of wild almonds itself has different residual segments. One is in the grounds of Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens where in the twentieth century a few disparate bushes were thinned out and others added to create a sense of hedge which was declared a National Monument in 1936. Another part, declared a National Monument in 1945, is outside the garden on Klaasens Road.34 On display at Y350? was the plaque placed alongside the hedge in the latter location after the original, installed in 1955, had been stolen and never found. In 2001 this replacement sign had in turn been vandalized – by whom it is unclear – and this prompted the newly formed South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) to remove it and keep it in custody while its future was being decided. Researcher Mbulelo Mrubata secured permission from SAHRA to display the damaged plaque at Y350? as an evidently disputed presence. Visitors were asked (in writing and through recorded interviews) whether the plaque should be replaced and, if so, what they would inscribe on it. The wording, as it appeared in 2002, read:

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This hedge of wild almonds was planted in the year 1660 A.D. by order of Commander Jan van Riebeeck to mark the southern frontier of the Cape Colony, from Kirstenbosch along Wynberg Hill, to a point below the hen and chicken rocks. Thence the hedge was continued by a fence of poles across the camp ground to the mouth of the salt river.

Most of the respondents at Y350? favoured the idea of repairing the plaque and replacing it as is. Their line of argument was one that equated it with history as defined by linear unmediated time. By associating the plaque with the event instead of with processes of memorial production, assertions tended to be made such as, ‘if you hide something you bury history’, ‘people can learn from history’, ‘if you remove this you kill history’, ‘history should not be changed’ and ‘don’t rewrite history just re-present it’; more contextual information on Van Riebeeck and the early days of settlement should be provided. ‘What’s wrong with this?’, asked one visitor. Although in a minority, another set of respondents projected a sense of time around the politics of memorialization that coincided more with the instability of Y350? They either wanted no plaque or a different wording on it. One asked about ‘the boundaries (forgotten) respected by the First Peoples’. Another maintained that the hedge was a ‘symbol of division – and is probably best forgotten’. Others wanted a new plaque that would reflect a new post-apartheid South Africa. Suggestions included: that the preamble to the new constitution should be used; that reference should be made to the ‘duplicitous conduct of Van Riebeeck’; and that the new wording should be ‘Boundaries of racial separation. Free South Africa. We have no racial boundaries’. One respondent argued that there should not be any wording on the plaque at all. There was ‘still too much emotion involved’, he maintained. Even if one does not take this last argument on board – as if there could be a future coldly rational possibility that stands as a possible counter to the affective and emotional – it does suggest competing sets of memorial biographies that are more open-ended, where commemorative time is always liable to different possibilities that go beyond inversion and eradication. Both Mokena Makeka and I asserted such prospects in the public debate held on the opening day of the exhibition on 28 September 2002. In my presentation I argued for a consideration of the lives of memorials, the politics of their creation and their sometimes unanticipated usages. Along such lines I asserted the possibility of future memorial lives, ‘altering the spatial context, moving it to another venue, creating a new purpose for it, and yes, perhaps taking the decision to end the life of the memorial’. ‘What is important in dealing with these creations’, I argued,

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‘is that while they might appear to be cast in stone, their lives can be very malleable’.35 Mokena Makeka said that his role as an architect was to create ‘frameworks for understanding debate and discourse in the most potent spatial arrangements possible’. For him the most crucial questions were: ‘How we inscribe actions, which support education rather than indoctrination and suppression? How do we shape history not exclusively in the terms of the victor but as a critical implement for understanding human behaviour in its complex totality?’36 Such interventions were in accord with Y350?’s claimed curatorial objectives of enhancing interpretive openness: ‘In asking “Why Three Fifty?” we want to debate, discuss and indeed contest South Africa pasts’.37 The exhibition though might have undermined its own intent. The inverted Jan van Riebeeck as icon and statue, in drawing a line from 1952 and 2002, perhaps reinforced rather than contested the temporal frameworks. Responses in the public debate tended to remain within these linear and signifying temporalities, vacillating for instance between giving prominence to indigenous Khoisan figures as emblems of resistance to settlement, to those stressing Van Riebeeck’s arrival as a moment of historical import. The words that Ciraj Rassool and I wrote in relation to the tercentenary festival might be just as appropriate to both Cape Town 350 and Y350?: ‘In the conflict which played itself out in I952 [and 2002] there was a remarkable consensus about the meaning of Van Riebeeck’s landing in I652. The narrative constructed, both by those seeking to establish apartheid and those who sought to challenge it, represented Van Riebeeck as the spirit of apartheid and the originator of white domination’. What was left in place was the marker of 1652 as the signal event and the figure of Van Riebeeck as the ‘lead actor on South Africa’s public history stage’.38

Y350? Symbols of Worcester: Worcester Museum at Kleinplasie, 16 September 2003–28 February 2004 The inverted Van Riebeeck went back into storage for almost a year as its next possible appearance was discussed. It meant that the association with 350 had to be made much more tangentially rather than through direct linkages to the appropriateness or otherwise of an ostensible anniversary. The District Six Museum was one possibility as it already evoked resistance to the 1952 festival through some of its displays on forms of political mobilization in the area. Another possibility was Het Posthuys in Muizenberg, claimed as the ‘2nd oldest building in the Cape after the

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Castle’.39 In both instances the unavailability of appropriate space for the exhibition was a major consideration. Instead, the idea emerged amongst members of PoPP to approach Bongani Mgijima who in 2002, following his departure from the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, had taken over as the manager of Kleinplasie Open-air Museum situated on the outskirts of the town of Worcester. His mandate from the Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport was to represent the wider cultural heritage of Worcester by adding to the existing installations to ‘balance’ history.40 Given Mgijima’s association with UWC as a student, then through the Lwandle Museum, Y350? could conceivably form part of his plans to interest and attract ‘members of all races’ to Kleinplasie and, as he quite dramatically and somewhat erroneously later termed it, ‘positioning Worcester as a leading Post Modern Museum’.41 The challenge facing Bongani Mgijima was immense. Kleinplasie, which had opened in 1981, was envisaged and constructed as a living cultural history museum, depicting a romantic rural white Afrikaner pioneering past. Drawing upon models of the Swedish open-air museums of folk life and the North American living history re-enactments, it was developed under the auspices of the museum’s first curator, Heloise Naude, architect Gabriel Fagan and his wife Gwen Gannon. The idea was to build structures of habitation and various home industries set in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, combined into what appeared as a farmyard-type environment with on-site live demonstrators dressed in appropriate garb that relied upon claims to authenticity. There was a clear distinction in setting out time and space. This historic farmyard was based upon a time situated as period, of ‘typical farm structures’ in the Breede River Valley, rescued, moved and reconstructed on site.42 The ‘museum landscape’ linked the architecture with associated performances by demonstrators of trade and home industries and a narrative of lifestyle of the frontier farmer, creating a past of self-sufficiency.43 Although claimed by Fagan as representing a particular historical period, the emphasis was on a cultural milieu, a world of social history in the farmyard. Material embodiments and performances became values and traditions of contemporary racially classified ‘white’ Afrikaans speakers. Attachment to the land and a self-contained world that appeared almost as if it could operate without requiring servile forms of labour was the basis of claims to an independent whiteness that recast conquest into an inherent pioneering spirit.44 Alongside the farmyard an exhibition hall was built which not only gave a much broader agricultural history through the display of implements of various facets of production but also set in place a narrative of national time from the beginnings of settlement. It is here that Van Riebeeck emerged

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on display at the genesis of farming in South Africa, with the refreshment station and the Dutch East India Company’s gardener Hendrick Boom, made into an agricultural pioneer.45 Within the linear national times of the museum as a modern exhibition hall, the world of the adjacent living farmyard at Kleinplasie was situated as the tradition that needed to be maintained and asserted in a trajectory of progress. As apartheid reform policies were implemented in the late 1980s the museum had, in some respects, begun to change. All of a sudden, the argument appeared in planning documents that the museum was not actually a small farm but a terrain with structures associated with agriculture.46 A KhoiKhoi matjieshut (indigenous pastoralist woven grass hut) was added to the farmyard in recognition of earlier pre-settlement forms of farming. In addition, a mid-nineteenth-century labourer’s house was built, modelled on and using materials from the Rosendal farm, approximately 100 kilometres away in the Koue Bokkeveld, where there was a similar extant structure.47 To align with changes in the farmyard, panels were added to the displays in the exhibition hall which dealt with KhoiKhoi as the first farmers accompanied by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travellers’ sketches and some replica artefacts such as clay pots and mats.48 These attempts to ‘correct history’ through what Rogoff calls an ‘additive model’, and what Witz, Rassool and Minkley refer to as a strategy of incorporation while keeping the essential ingredients and structures in place, were in line with late apartheid reforms, what the museum manager, still employing the official racial classifications, referred to as recognizing the role of ‘Coloureds in the development of agriculture’.49 Much more research and planning was devoted to a capital intensive expansion project to attract visitors through developing a new exhibition hall, a re-created late nineteenth-century rural Cape village, locomotive engine displays and a tram system which would traverse an expanded museum expanse.50 In the end this project ran up huge debts and was never completed. When Mgijima arrived in 2002, Kleinplasie showed very few signs of its history of frontier pioneering having been altered, the ‘hegemonic supremacy of the colonizer’s culture’ was very much in evident and it was in a financial crisis with a historic debt of over 1.7 million rands.51 The situation was dire. Staff positions were not being filled, components of the Worcester Museum in the town, such as the Stofberg House, were closed and sold off by the municipality, visitor numbers were declining, for five years there had been no museum manager, and the farm yard at Kleinplasie was not being attended to on a regular basis.52 A letter

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from a visitor in 2002 pointed to, amongst many other signs of neglect, the mill being half buried, the cooking implements scattered all around, the filth in the dipping tank and the vegetable garden in total disarray.53 Mgijima and the chair of the Museum’s Board of Trustees, the poet Floris Brown, acknowledged in response that an overwhelming sense of decay and a feeling of tiredness was pervasive.54 Even though he had a mandate from his employer, the Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport, to bring substantive change to the museum, Mgijima moved with caution. What he meant by a ‘commitment to move beyond modernity’ was to save money by bringing in, on loan, outside curated exhibitions.55 This lent a degree of ambivalence to hosting Y350? at Kleinplasie. When he had ventured along this path in December 2002 by hosting UCT’s Centre for Popular Memory exhibition on alcohol brewing and consumption entitled Umqombothi, Utywala and Lucky Stars, he had been criticized by some viewers for ‘not fitting into the context’ and ‘not giving any more place for us’.56 These criticisms had come from conservative elements on the board of management and some visitors who were insistent that the core theme of the frontier farmer not be disrupted. Such reactions resonated with those in June 1996 when another component of the Worcester Museum, the Stofberg House, a former residence and practice of a dentist which displayed a local history, installed an exhibition on the Muslim community in the town. Letters in the local press were brimming with indignation, bordering on rage. Assertions were made that the exhibition did not show Muslim contributions to the history of either the town or the region and instead was a blatant display of anti-Christian religious propaganda. The overwhelming sentiment expressed was that the museum should remain intent on depicting the agricultural heritage of the Western Cape.57 There was one letter that was an exception. It commended the exhibition and referred to the criticism being expressed in the Worcester Standard and Advertiser as being based on bigotry and ignorance.58 These prejudices did indeed taken a violent turn later that same year when, during the festive season, members of the right-wing Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) (Afrikaner Resistance Movement) planted a bomb at a downtown store in Worcester, killing four people and injuring sixty-seven others. Although possibilities for Y350? were being discussed seven years after the exhibition at Stofberg House and the right-wing bombing in the Christmas season of the same year, given some of the responses to Umqombothi, Utywala and Luck Stars it was apparent that remnants of the racial prejudices were still in evidence.

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Mgijima was understandably wary. Somewhat guardedly, he accepted Y350? after assurances were made that it would not cost the museum anything to install, that the exact dates would be defined, that PoPP would contribute R10,000 to defray any costs involved and that, in the end, a television monitor which was being used would be donated to the museum. Kleinplasie could also appear at one remove from the exhibition by asserting that the ‘museum was not responsible for the curatorial content’.59 By the time the exhibition was re-made for Worcester in September 2003, Mgijima was no longer the manager (he had moved on to a position of Deputy Director in the tourism department in the NorthWest province). The acting museum manager was not available on the day the installation of the exhibition was scheduled. He had an appointment in the town. It was left to the chair of the board, Floris Brown, to oversee the setting up of Y350? at Kleinplasie. The content of Y350? at Kleinplasie was adapted to speak to local issues in Worcester by representing the participation of the town in the 1952 Van Riebeeck Festival and by opening up discussion on the variety of contemporary memorial structures in the Garden of Remembrance in Church Square.60 In 1952 Worcester had its own local festivities to coincide with the arrival of a mail coach named ‘Johannesburg’ from the north on its way to the central stage of the Van Riebeeck Festival in Cape Town.61 It also contributed an exhibition on the town and agricultural produce of the region to the Festival Fair on Cape Town’s foreshore and a float labelled ‘Piet Retief ’s Manifesto’, designed by the local artist Jean Welz, to the Pageant of the Past street procession. The latter as event was cast in the pageant script as the initiating moment of the movement of settler famers in search of new sources of land and labour, as a so-called Afrikaner ‘freedom manifesto’ outside of the ambit of British control (where slaves had been emancipated), monumentalized into a narrative called a great trek.62 Placed on display at Kleinplasie together with the other banners from Y350? was a huge reproduction of a photograph of this float which originally appeared in the Cape Times in 1952, showing two bare-chested young men standing upfront, one bearing a fiery torch, and behind them a wagon wheel surrounded by a group of women wearing mythologized voortrekker garb of long white dresses and bonnets (kappies). The caption on the banner in 2003 linked this float with the festival of South Africa as a racially white nation, the construction of the figure of Van Riebeeck in 1952 as the bearer of settlement, and the displays of Van Riebeeck as founder in Kleinplasie itself. Additional poster-type boards were also added to Y350? One contained some detail of events of the 1952 festival in Worcester and another

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drew attention to some of the memorials in the Church Square in the town, such as those to the 100th and 150th anniversary of the Great Trek, the 50th anniversary of the Union of South Africa, the centenary of the codification of Afrikaans, the 250th anniversary of the arrival of seventeenth-century French religious refugees known as the Huguenots, and the 1952 Van Riebeeck Tercentenary.63 The exhibition posed the question to viewers: ‘Are these symbols of Worcester?’64 Amongst this array of monumental structures to settlement and its commemorative symbols, in front of the Huguenot centenary memorial, was a small black plaque ‘to the memory of the bomb blast of 24 December 1996’. Almost unseen, it reads (in Afrikaans and English): May their suffering contribute to reconciliation. Juanita April. Sydney Jalile. Xolani Matshoba. Andile Matshoba. We will not forget

Y350? drew particular attention to this memorial as the only one that really referred to a specific local event and that attempted to construct a post-apartheid memory based on the forming of an inclusive citizenry in the town. Perhaps this was a sign of a new symbol of Worcester? These elements of Y350?, the poster boards and the banners, together with the billboard, the display cabinets with Van Riebeeck Festival and Cape Town 350 items, the television monitor showing film footage from 1952, and the upside-down Van Riebeeck statue were installed in the transitional spaces of the museum leading to the farmyard and the exhibition hall respectively. This both undermined and facilitated encounters through and with Y350? The poster boards were attached to a soft board on one side of a wall on a walkway where previously local craft items such as cloth and woven baskets had been displayed for sale by the museum. The corridor acted as a much traversed throughfare where the intention of most visitors was to reach the farmyard beyond as quickly as possible. There was little likelihood of paying much attention to a poster display in pursuit of this destination. Other components of Y350? were placed to the right of the reception area, down a small staircase that led to the exhibition hall. It could also be reached when one exited the exhibition hall after visiting the farmyard. On one of the walls running alongside this walkway, where previously there had been displays on the uses of plants and herbs, the banners were hung, and the billboard placed. The floor space alongside was occupied by the display cabinets and the television monitor. And in the middle stood the upside-down Van Riebeeck. Standing indoors, it had seemingly been effectively immobilized by being

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unable to rotate in the wind. But in its calm immobility the inverted statue constantly interrupted visitors as they entered or departed the exhibition hall, always seeking a route to pass by. Although out of the three venues Y350? had its longest run at Kleinplasie – from 16 September 2003 until 28 February 2004 – it seemed that the questions it posed were uncomfortable for the museum. The museum’s initial ambivalence and reluctance translated into almost no engagement with the exhibition. Apart from a press statement which I compiled, and which was published in the local newspaper, the Worcester Standard, the exhibition was given little publicity.65 Visitors were not directed to the display and the visitor’s book seemed to indicate avoidance rather than any form of engagement, antagonistic or otherwise. When the museum hosted the Western Cape celebrations of the national public holiday Heritage Day on 24 September 2003, the exhibition was almost entirely by-passed. The emphasis was on speeches by Western Cape provincial officials, performances of poetry, gumboot dancing, volkspele (white Afrikaner nationalist folkdances and games), and an explanation of post-1994 national symbols such as the anthem, flag and coat of arms which was the theme for the day.66 A poster from the national Department of Arts and Culture with this explanation was simply affixed by the museum with drawing pins next to the Y350? exhibition boards that questioned the symbols of Worcester. Almost as an afterthought, I was asked to say a few words about the exhibition when guests left the nearby stadium arena where the performances had been taking place to come to the museum’s buildings for refreshments. It was not surprising that with the closing date imminent, the new management ensured that the exhibition was hastily removed. The inverted Jan van Riebeeck was taken away, went back to UWC and was placed in the foyer of the Department of History.

Memorials beyond Apartheid, Library Atrium, University of the Western Cape, 23 September 2004–19 October 2004 Y350? appeared to have had its day in history. The posters and banners were stored in rooms in the Department of History. The large billboard went into the depths of the university’s sports stadium. The television monitor, as promised early on, was bequeathed to Kleinplasie. Overall, the fate of Y350? seemed to be settled and safely stowed away. But later that same year the inverted Van Riebeeck made a somewhat surprising re-appearance. From being a project primarily out of UWC

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that produced and asked questions of history, Y350? was, in September 2004, relocated into a history of UWC.67 The UWC Visual History project had earlier that year produced an exhibition, co-curated by Patricia Hayes and Farzanah Badsha, entitled Contact Sheets that sought to bring together ‘photographs that provide traces of UWC’s beginnings, its structures, its histories, its upheavals, and its students, staff and workers’.68 Drawing on this initiative I asked History master’s students, for their major assignment, to both produce an exhibition about memorialization at UWC and to write an analytical reflection on the processes of production, representation and communication of the exhibition. The title of Y350? was no longer appropriate. UWC had nothing directly to do with the tercentenary festival (it was not in existence at the time), nor was it involved in promoting the Cape Town 350 event beyond producing, through PoPP, the exhibitions at the Castle and Kleinplasie which explicitly questioned commemorative excesses. Instead, the title that master’s students selected for the exhibition, Memorials Beyond Apartheid, suggested that there were practices of memorialization that could invoke new and different meanings beyond the monumental constraints of apartheid pasts. UWC, with its claims to a history of resistance to apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s, initially largely through student protest and then later in the assertion to be the ‘institutional home of the left’, might be the site where such ideas could circulate and put in place new practices.69 Yet with obstacles being positioned in its path, this relocation almost did not take place. Initially, when the project was proposed to the students in early August 2004, the idea was that it be displayed in the library atrium. This was a space that many students and staff traversed daily and the light, open circular area adjacent to the loan desk offered a conducive environment for the exhibition. The library was also very amenable to this suggestion; indeed, it was trying to find ways to make more effective use of the atrium space. But in the wake of another set of seven small exhibitions associated with the forthcoming Gender and Visuality conference, organized by the UWC Department of History in collaboration with the Women’s and Gender Studies Programme, the attitude of the library appeared to shift. This seems to have most probably been associated with complaints from some library staff to the opening of the conference where wine was served. It may also have been a response to the display of photographs by Zanele Muholi from her first solo exhibition entitled Visual Sexuality which had just been on display at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. The MA students planning Memorials Beyond Apartheid were suddenly being asked to show the plans of the exhibition to the librarians

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and told that its quality needed to be assessed. They were also referred to a set of library guidelines that exhibitors would have to follow. When the Department of History asked for these guidelines, they were not immediately forthcoming. With some hesitation, the library allowed the exhibition to go ahead and it opened on 23 September 2004. Five days later the library sent through to the Department of History a memorandum headed ‘Guidelines for use of the Library Atrium’. It laid down ‘rules’, ‘conditions’ and ‘general criteria’ for exhibitions. Displays were required to be ‘complete’, ‘coherent’, ‘properly mounted’, to communicate ‘properly’, to use pictures and photographs ‘in a non-offensive way, within the given theme’ and utilize ‘simple’ language. Equipment employed, it further indicated, ‘should be stable and in a good condition appropriate for the display’, while it reiterated that ‘the theme and purpose of the exhibition should be communicated’.70 A post-hoc random series of conceptual and technical standards was invented by which it was envisaged that the UWC library would become the arbiter of the suitability and effectiveness of the exhibitions in its space. In the round of the library atrium Memorials Beyond Apartheid contained all the elements from the previous incarnations of Y350? The banners with the enlarged photographs from 1952 were draped by the graduate students on the surrounding circular face-brick walls of the interior ramp of the library at its lower levels. Image / text posters on the futures of memorials were affixed to freestanding boards on castors forming a semi-circle on the floor space. All around the room, and not intended to be part of the exhibition, were young palm trees in blue pots which inhabited the library space on a more permanent basis. As these could not be moved from the atrium, they were deliberately set in places where they would be largely obscured by the poster stands of the exhibition, though always remaining as an unintended ever-present backdrop.71 A display cabinet with 1952 Van Riebeeck Festival artefacts was placed on the polished red clay-tiled floor of the atrium. Cape Town 350 artefacts were not present as they had been returned to Iziko Museum and accessioned in their collection after being on display at Worcester. Neither was the big billboard part of the exhibition at UWC, having been badly marked and scratched while in storage in the sports centre. In the middle of the semi-circle, facing the entrance of the atrium and further towards the circulation desk of the library, was the upside-down Van Riebeeck, contemplating on where it had now been relocated and on the future and past of memorials through and by the institutional space of UWC.

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As in Worcester, the exhibition sought to focus attention on and extend debate on local memorial practices. Poster boards with the title ‘Symbols of UWC as Memorials of Struggle’, with examples of places and their naming (such as the various student residences that were named to ‘commemorate comrades’ in the ‘anti-apartheid struggle’), indicated that UWC had been ‘caught up with the need to memorialize the struggle and to transform public space in a post apartheid society’. The exhibition pointedly drew attention to a debate that had erupted at UWC around the sculpture Ending and Beginning by David Hlongwane. Depicting a ‘rural working mother’ holding a broom while ‘congratulating her recently graduated son’ wearing graduation robes and holding his certificate ‘as he moves ahead with confidence, eager to meet the challenges awaiting him’, the sculpture had been unveiled on the plaza bounded by the UWC library, the administration building, the Great Hall and the student centre on a chilly winter’s day in September 2001.72 A photograph consisting of the sculpture prominently in the foreground (it was never referred to as a statue, with the implication of artistic creation rather than a monumental assertion), students milling about the plaza and, in the background, the university’s Great Hall with its doric pillars and triangular pediment adorned with the university crest, was the image used in the posters to promote Memorials Beyond Apartheid. The debate was invoked in the exhibition by reproducing and enlarging a page from On Campus, the UWC bulletin, of 5 September 2001, that reported on the sculpture’s unveiling. Through citing the words of Gordon Metz, who had initiated the project when he worked at the Mayibuye Centre, and the artist, David Hlongwane, the sculpture Ending and Beginning was proclaimed in the article as projecting resistance, ‘endurance’, ‘resilience’ and ‘sacrifice’, all leading ultimately to personal, institutional and national victory.73 Another story from the UWC bulletin on display containing an interview with Mary Hames, the Director of UWC’s Gender Equity Unit (GEU), presented a dissenting view. Maintaining that the sculpture was in effect conservative, she claimed that it perpetuated a gender stereotype of women as servile and inferior. She pointed out that the student graduating was presented as a male figure whereas most UWC graduates were women.74 Hames’s dissonant voice, represented in the On Campus bulletin and highlighted through the exhibition, was used by the graduate student curators as an indication that the university’s idealized and heroic institutional narrative of transformation did ‘not’, as the exhibition text stated, ‘necessarily meet with the approval of everyone on campus’.

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By pointing to this instance, the exhibition sought to draw attention to a contemporary debate. It also wanted to incite a debate about UWC’s most used symbol, its crest, which appears on its letterheads, graduation certificates and at the entrance gates to the main university campus. The exhibition prominently displayed the crest and alongside quoted extensively from the minutes of a senate meeting held on 28 November 1961 when it was adopted. The ‘Greek Temple’ was said to represent ‘a universal academic symbol’, the motto ‘respice prospice’ translated as ‘look back; look ahead’, and the proteas symbolic of ‘religion, culture and science’, South African indigeneity and the Western Province as ‘the centre of gravity of the Coloured Community’.75 The exhibition board was provocatively entitled ‘Apartheid’s Legacy: The UWC Crest’. More than inviting reflections on the creation of a new past (which the sculpture sought to do), here was a moment to consider a much-used symbol from a longer past, expose its original intent and pose the question as to whether a new and different history should be created through what was the university’s most ubiquitous marker: ‘The crest was created by a committee when the university was a paternalistic “coloured” institution controlled from Pretoria. Does this symbol reflect the many challenges and struggles that students on campus have engaged with to improve their education?’ More than merely a suggestion, Memorials Beyond Apartheid forcefully presented an argument in the exhibition text for UWC to discard the old and create ‘new symbols’ which reflected ‘the post-apartheid situation’. If there was an initial reluctance to allow the exhibition to go ahead, there was no such hesitation amongst those who came to view the displays in the library auditorium. The visitors’ book contained extensive detailed responses by many of those who visited, rather than insipidly inscribing themselves as being ‘interested’. This may have been because of the History master’s students who were in attendance and engaged the visitors in discussions. There was an extensive response to the debate over the form of the sculpture, Ending and Beginning. Those who emphasized the work as signifying a memorial past tended to defend its imagery: If Hlongwane’s sculpture does not reflect the deeply-rooted love, endurance, struggle and the hard-fought successes and the integral role played by woman in society and in S.A.’s victories, then probably nothing will. If anything, the sculpture depicts woman’s success, for that is not measured by how today’s woman are portrayed in a portrait or sculptor but rather how their children are reflected. For that is what is meant by LEGACY.

This vociferous comment took a realist, personal approach:

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The educational statue in UWC must be kept, it’s very relevant and that is what is happening to me right now, doing a degree while my mother is working hard in domestic work. It’s not what women are perceived to be in the future. Most of us were or are supported/educated by our single women who are cleaning kitchens. People like the GEU need to wake up and smell the coffee and get the idea and stop analysing unnecessary. That statue is a fact not an assumption.

But there were several who supported Hames’s position and argued that the statue was ‘very offensive to women’. In these instances, it was the image of gender relations presented that was at stake. A group of three, who each gave individual comments, also presented a collective response: ‘The statue depicts women as servants and stepping stones to a man’s success. It is a primitive way a man depicts a woman. UWC moved from being an institution that fought racism to an institution that promotes sexism’. This response was about contemporary image making and not the past of ‘struggle’ or ‘resilience’ it was supposedly evoking. In resuscitating and drawing attention to this debate that had been publicized some three years before, the exhibition’s student curators had again unsettled UWC’s past. Although one respondent may have wanted everyone at UWC to ‘embrace and be proud’ of the sculpture, there appeared to be no such unanimity, either in 2001 or 2004. UWC’s crest was undoubtedly inherited from its inception as a separate racially constituted institution in the 1960s, but whether it was, as the exhibition suggested, ‘apartheid’s legacy’ was another question. Disappointingly, from the side of the exhibitors, those who responded to the crest and the motto seemed to have missed the provocation entirely. Instead of responding to its associations with UWC’s past as a racially based and demarcated university, the few who did comment on this exhibition board saw it in purely didactic terms: ‘The motto of UWC is not known to a lot of students and now I know’; ‘I now know what the motto of Respice Prospice stands for’; ‘I never knew what our motto meant only up until now, as this is my 4th year at the university. Thanx!!’ These somewhat bland written comments on the crest and the motto may be a reflection on the exhibitionary practices. There was little to highlight the issue beyond the narrative text, the questions posed and an image of UWC’s original crest. But it may also be that this image of UWC has become so naturalized that its symbolism has completely lost its intended meaning and turned into a brandmark that can completely dissociate itself from its past. The irony of the Memorials Beyond Apartheid exhibition at UWC was that, although its central objective was to make the analytical point about contested processes of commemoration in the present, it was turned by

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some viewers into the purveyor of a discovered and authentic history of institution and nation. Sometimes this was expressed by those who responded in the visitors’ book as affirming the content (as in providing what was seen as information) and at other times disagreeing with what was perceived as a depiction of a history that glorified a settler narrative. The exhibition was not trying to work with such notions of history. It may be that the ambiguity in depicting processes of production and representations of history through visual and textual signs that at times made use of the very same imagery had invited realist renderings. Memorials Beyond Apartheid at UWC wanted to turn national and institutional histories to even more open-ended pasts but it may have allowed for more claims to emerge that sought to ‘yield resolution and consensus, not to prolong conflict’.76 At the time of writing, both the crest, adopted in 1961with its deliberate associations of being an ethnically constituted university, and the sculpture Ending and Beginning that was unveiled in 2001 with some controversy over its gendered depictions, are the key images of UWC. They appear on its publicity, official correspondence and the physical landscape. Wrenched from their pasts, they have become symbols whose meanings have become attached to an institutional brand of a university that casts itself in a narrative from apartheid to resistance, the immediate disappointment of the post-apartheid era and then overcoming its past to become ‘a place of quality, a place to grow’.77 And if the upside-down Van Riebeeck was able to peer beyond the doors of the library onto the adjacent plaza, it would have noted the queues forming on graduation day. UWC graduates were excitedly waiting in line with their families and friends for the opportunity to pose for photographs in front of the sculpture Ending and Beginning. The memorial had become for many an appropriate and chosen marker of event in a history of personhood.

Memorial Time, Museum Times One of the most frequent responses in considering the future of surviving monuments that celebrate and commemorate figures and events of repressive pasts is that they be relocated to museums. In this iteration the institution of the museum is a site of consignation, preservation, storage and seclusion, presented as an alternative to what is sometimes referred to as a destruction of history. This is a history of a time that is seemingly embodied in the monumental structure and the museum in the role of the conservationist. But what if the museum was potentially the space that

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disrupted the time of the commemoration? This was the provocation of Y350? in its exhibitionary movements and manoeuvres from the Company Gardens to the Castle of Good Hope, Kleinplasie and then to the library at UWC when it became Memorials Beyond Apartheid. The inverted Van Riebeeck statue and its associated elements – the billboard, the changing posters series, the artefacts in the display cabinets from 1952 and 2002, the film footage, the banners from 1952 – were employed as interruptions to anniversary events, monumental histories and institutional pasts and presents. Instead of being a place of conserving history through gathering together monuments as remainders, the concept of museum space lay in its ability to offer up the promise of changing history. Sometimes in its representations Y350? realized that potential but at other moments what was communicated in the varying spaces either did little to enhance engagements with such provocations or, of more concern, reinforced the temporalities of the cycles of commemoration. Or, to put it another way, whether Van Riebeeck metaphorically was still left standing as the pivotal figure of event, time and history was always the worry. After being dismantled from the library auditorium at UWC Y350? was again placed in storage in the Department of History where the upside-down Van Riebeek stood in the reception area for almost twelve years. Sometimes it was temporarily moved for a day or two and used in the Great Hall to promote the Department at university exhibitions which sought to encourage undergraduate student enrolment. When there were changes in the décor in the foyer there were pressures to find another home for the statue. But little happened. It was only in 2016 that an opportunity arose. There was much talk and planning at the time around establishing a Museum of Cape Town, with the Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport in the Western Cape taking the initiative. In my discussions with representatives from the Department and Iziko Museums, an agreement was reached that Y350? would be placed in the latter’s collection until such time as it may be used for exhibitionary purposes. The terms of the agreement was that Iziko would in effect become the owner of Y350?, would accession and care for it, but was under no obligation whatsoever to exhibit it.78 The inverted Van Riebeeck was relocated to the social history collection of Iziko Museums where some thirteen years previously promotional material from Cape Town 350, the cooking apron, the desk flag, the letter holder and the fluffy penguin had been accessioned. Both Y350? and Cape Town 350 were formally located in the museum’s storage as the space that conserved history.

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Notes   1. The title of this chapter is taken from an interview on 11 November 2001 with Carohn Cornell, educationist and author of booklet Slaves at the Cape: A Guidebook for Beginner Researchers, in which she spoke about perceptions of the figure of Jan van Riebeeck amongst a group of school learners, cited in Witz and Mrubata, ‘An Opportunity or a Problem?’, 11.   2. Coolhaas, ‘Malacca Under Jan Van Riebeeck’, 173–74.   3. Population Registration Act, Act no 30 of 1950.   4. This is detailed in Witz, Apartheid’s Festival; Rassool and Witz, ‘The 1952 Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival’; Witz with Pohlandt-McCormick, ‘Commemoration / Centenary’.   5. Witz, ‘Beyond Van Riebeeck’.   6. ‘Special Meaning and Special Task’, The Torch, 8 January 1952; ‘Fierce Attack on Festival of Hate: AAC President’s Call: Build the Nation’, The Torch, 24 December 1951; ‘We Cannot Celebrate Our Own Enslavement: Inspiring Boycott Meeting at Langa’, The Torch, 9 October 1951; Rassool and Witz, ‘The 1952 Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival’, 460–61.   7. Ntantala, A Life’s Mosaic, 152.   8. Rassool and Witz, ‘The 1952 Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival’, 466.   9. Thorne, ‘Designing Histories’, 153. 10. Thorne, ‘Designing Histories’, 153. 11. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 116–18; Cohen, The Combing of History, 242. See also Witz, ‘Apartheid’s Icons in the New Millennium’. This chapter draws upon this article. 12. Kratz, The Ones that are Wanted. 13. Minty, ‘BLAC Bows Out’; Minty, ‘Post-apartheid Public Art’. 14. Rassool and Witz, ‘The 1952 Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival’; Witz, Apartheid’s Festival: Witz and Mrubata, ‘An Opportunity or a Problem?’; Van der Merwe, ‘Y350?: Old Memorials in New Times’. 15. The designer and curator of the Y350? exhibition at the Castle of Good Hope was Jos Thorne. The curatorial team consisted of Premesh Lalu and Leslie Witz, History lecturers at UWC, Noëleen Murray, lecturer at UCT’s Centre for African Studies, Chrischene Julius and Jill Weintroub, students on the Postgraduate Diploma in Museum and Heritage Studies, Mbulelo Mrubata, an independent researcher, Pia Bombardella, a research assistant at the Research Unit for the Archaeology of Cape Town at UCT, and Lalou Meltzer, researcher in the social history division of Iziko. 16. ‘To Praise Him or to Bury Him?’, Cape Times, 30 November 2001. 17. ‘VOC Foundation, Welcome’; Letter from the Chair and Co-ordinator VOC Foundation, ‘VOC Commemorations in 2002: 400th Anniversary of Founding of VOC (1602) and 350th Anniversary of the VOC Settlement at the Cape (1652)’, 1 October 2001, retrieved 23 March 2003 from http:// batavia.rug.ac.be/balzaal/omsendbriefAfrikaans.pdf. 18. Peters, ‘Van Riebeeck Celebrations Make a Small Bang’.

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19. ‘To Praise Him or to Bury Him?’ 20. ‘Van Riebeeck gets his Day in Cape Town’, Cape Times, 10 February 2002, retrieved 23 December 2020 from https://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/ van-riebeeck-gets-his-day-in-cape-town-81550. 21. Muller, ‘Herdenkingsjaar 350’; ‘Cape Town 350 Commemoration’, Capetown 350, 26 September 2002, retrieved 31 December 2020 from https://web.archive.org/web/20020926045243/http://www.capetown350.co.za/. 22. Peters, ‘Van Riebeeck Celebrations Make a Small Bang’; Carew, ‘Not With a Bang, but a Whimper’. 23. ‘To Praise Him or to Bury Him?’ 24. Halton, ‘Y2k’. 25. Murray, ‘The Imperial Landscape’. 26. Minty, ‘Post-apartheid Public Art’, 432–34. 27. Oberholster, Die Historiese Monumente, 5. 28. Witz, Rassool and Minkley, ‘The Castle, the Gallery’, 106–11. 29. Dubow, ‘History Ever-present’. 30. Royal Netherlands Embassy, The Power of South African Culture. 31. ‘Y350? Exhibition Press Release’, Capetown 350, 26 September 2002, retrieved 31 December 2020 from https://web.archive.org/web/20020926045243/ http://www.capetown350.co.za/. 32. ‘Y350? Exhibition Press Release’. 33. Julius, ‘Y350 Exhibition’, 3. 34. Boehi, ‘Radical Stories’, 75. 35. Witz, ‘Talk at Y350? Debate?’ 36. Makeka, ‘The Topography of the Unseen’. 37. Witz, quoted in Van der Merwe, ‘Y350: Old Memorials in New Times’, 62. 38. Rassool and Witz, ‘The 1952 Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival’, 467–68. 39. ‘Het Posthuys Museum’, retrieved 4 January 2021 from https://www.capepointroute.co.za/moreinfoOther.php?aID=533. 40. McIntyre, ‘Kleinplasie se Posisie’. 41. Smit, ‘New Boss Wants Kleinplasie to Make Money’; Worcester Museum, Annual Report, 2002/3, WM. 42. Jonas, ‘Kleinplasie Living Open Air Museum’, 35. 43. Jonas, ‘Kleinplasie Living Open Air Museum’, 36. 44. Jonas, ‘Kleinplasie Living Open Air Museum’, 61. 45. Jonas, ‘Kleinplasie Living Open Air Museum’, 66. 46. Du Plessis, ‘Die Khoikhoi Hut’. 47. Worcester Museum, Annual Report, 1988/89, WM. 48. Jonas, ‘Kleinplasie Living Open Air Museum’, 66–67. 49. Rogoff, ‘Hit and Run’, 66; Witz, Rassool and Minkley, ‘The Castle, the Gallery’; Minutes of Board of Trustees, Worcester Museum, 29 August 1988, cited in Jonas, ‘Kleinplasie Living Open Air Museum’, 60. 50. Worcester Museum, Annual Report, 1988/89; 1990/91; 1991/92, WM. 51. Rogoff, ‘Hit and Run’, 66; Van Staden, ‘Kleinplasie Smoor in Skuldkas’.

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52. Van Staden, ‘Kleinplasie Smoor in Skuldkas’; Worcester Museum, Annual Report, 1999/2000, WM; ‘Hulp Nodig om Kleinplasie van Ondergang te Red’ (Help Needed to Save Kleinplasie From Demise), Worcester Standard, 24 May 2001; McIntyre, ‘Kleinplasie se Posisie’; Brown and Mgijima, ‘Reply to H.M. Merrick’. 53. H.M. Merrick, ‘Teleurgesteld in Kleinplasie’. 54. Brown and Mgijima, ‘Reply to H.M. Merrick’. 55. Worcester Museum, Annual Report, 2002/3, WM. 56. Worcester Museum, Annual Report, 2002/3, WM; Witz, ‘Report on Y350?’. 57. Krige, ‘Uitstalling Grief Hom’; Van de Venter, ‘Christene word Wakker!’; Du Toit, ‘Hieroor Mag Ek nie Stilbly’; Rabie, ‘Uitstalling nie Aanvaarbaar’. 58. Walters, ‘Exhibition is Excellent’. 59. Worcester Museum, Annual Report, 2002/3, WM. 60. Added to the curatorial team in 2003 were two students who were part of that year’s enrolment for the Postgraduate Diploma in Museum and Heritage Studies, Khayalethu Belani and Lindisipho Senzela. Belani was from Zweletemba, Worcester, and was involved in local heritage research activities. 61. On the journeys of the mail coaches in the Van Riebeeck Festival, see Minkley and Witz, ‘Sir Harry Smith’. 62. Van Riebeeck Festival Supplement, Worcester Standard, 4 April 1952. 63. Eistadt and Souris, ‘Kerkplein’. 64. Witz, ‘Symbols of Worcester’. 65. Witz, ‘Symbols of Worcester’. 66. ‘Worcester to Host Western Cape’s Official Heritage Day Programme’, 21 September 2003, retrieved 12 January 2021 from https://www.westerncape. gov.za/news/worcester-host-western-capes-official-heritage-day-programme. 67. This section of the chapter draws on Witz, ‘Memorials beyond Apartheid’. 68. Contact Sheets: UWC and History, Exhibition, March 2004, UWC. 69. The students were Kletus Likuwa, Khayalethu Mdudumane, Isidore Ndikumana, Joanne Parsons, Napanduwe Shiweda and Richard Whiteing. On UWC in the 1970s and 1980s respectively, see Lalu, ‘Campus’ and ‘Constituting Community’. 70. University of the Western Cape, ‘Guidelines for use of the Library Atrium’, Ref. 092004. 71. Pot plants used to be quite a strong decorative presence in museums and galleries and may be becoming popular again. See Pittman, ‘Plants as Decorative Element’ and Cassar, ‘Using Cut Flowers and Potted Plants’. 72. ‘Award-winning Sculpture Unveiled in University Square’, On Campus, UWC Bulletin, 5 September 2001. 73. ‘Award-winning Sculpture’. 74. ‘Hlongwane Sculpture Depicts Women Negatively says GEU’, On Campus, UWC Bulletin, 5 September 2001.

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75. Although not part of the exhibition, this symbolism had been accentuated by UWC’s first rector who maintained that the protea was ‘a flower which … Coloured people cherished’. See Martin, ‘An Open Space’, 25. 76. Savage, Standing Soldiers, 4. 77. ‘UWC Mission’, retrieved 15 January 2021 from https://www.uwc.ac.za/ about/mission-vision-and-history/mission. 78. Iziko Museums of South Africa, ‘Social History Collections Department Acquisitions Deed of Donation: Acknowledgement and Conditions’, 12 September 2016.

Figure 7.1. Simon Gush, Red (2014), installation view, Ann Bryant Gallery, East London, August 2015. Image courtesy of the artist and Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town and Johannesburg. © Simon Gush.

Conclusion Museums Closing and Opening Set in the interlude twenty years after South Africa’s first elections based on universal adult suffrage, Museums Times has told stories about a period when museums burgeoned, when the trajectories and limits of time itself were reconfigured through altering classifications, reconstituting collections, drawing upon new and different historiographies, shifting temporalities through exhibition design, and constructing and reconstructing institutions. These are tales of journeys into and through new and older museums of several character objects: an upside-down statue, a roaming rabbit, a wandering hippopotamus, a motionless sailing ship, and an insecure hostel dwelling. They traverse museums that romanticize the frontier farmer, mythologize European founding, nationalize an insignificant locality, naturalize history and image a post anti-apartheid nation. Watched over by an ever-alert chameleon, sometimes these characters are literal, at other times they are metaphors, their personalities shift, they highlight contradictions and ironies, they are always present, yet their futures are constantly under threat. In the biographical rendering through Museum Times they are emblematic and destabilizing. Museum Times is also a somewhat disjointed, interspersed account of the self, a highly selective autobiography of sorts. The narrative draws upon my teaching in the Department of History at UWC, particularly since 1998 in the Postgraduate Diploma in Museum and Heritage Studies which became part of the APMHS. There are descriptions of interactions with museums that I write about, sometimes through presenting talks and offering advice, being an integral part of a curatorial team and most intensely through a commitment to the development of the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum. As an active board member for twenty years, with friend and colleague Noëleen Murray, I was constantly involved, together with staff, fellow board members and the museum’s divergent communities, in supporting the development of policies, the design of exhibitions, the restoration of buildings, constituting collections and the

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formulation of institutional plans. I have continually brought my broad research as a public historian through the NRF Project on Public Pasts and The Heritage Disciplines to bear on the accounts I have presented. Specific research on settler anniversaries in Apartheid’s Festival and for the Dutch government on mercantile commemoration, and the collaborative work with Ciraj Rassool and Gary Minkley for over a quarter of a century that was the foundation of our book Unsettled History, all feature. Friends, colleagues and students appear as characters throughout, as co-authors, museum managers, exhibition designers, curators and fellow investigators. Elements of their histories are sometimes made apparent to the reader but are hardly accentuated. A literary critic would surely point to the lack of depth in the depictions. In the interstices of biography and autobiography these characters assist in weaving the fabric of the tales that I tell in Museum Times. Beyond the parameters of Museum Times there are a multitude of biographical and autobiographical moments that can add fragile and always tentative threads towards constituting the materiality of past and future museum presences. Instead of drawing out and upon many of these instances, I want to highlight two moments, firstly when there were hardly any prospects for museums as the site of history making, and another when the future histories in the form of museums were offered opportunities for speculative pasts through an engagement with a set of objects assembled as a disjointed installation artwork. The first, in 1987/88, the Write Your Own History project and book that I led and authored (or maybe co-authored), was about history presented as a writing skill to be learnt primarily by anti-apartheid politically activist groupings. The second, the artwork Red by Simon Gush and the accompanying workshop in 2015, Red Assembly, organized by Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, Gary Minkley and myself at the Ann Bryant Gallery in the coastal city of East London, presented possibilities of imaginative, open-ended pasts, of disassembling and reassembling, of enabling discordant histories.1 I want to use these alternative biographical/autobiographical moments as frames to present a reflection on the in-between of Museum Times and of the futures that possibly lay ahead.

Write Your Own History Established in the late 1980s which one can now depict as the last throes of apartheid – though at the time it never seemed that immanent – Write Your Own History was a project of making history where the institution

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of the museum was absent. As a joint project of the Sached Trust, an NGO which aimed ‘to counter the imbalance created by the apartheid educational system’,2 and the University of the Witwatersrand’s History Workshop, which was committed to making popular and accessible academic articles and books of radical, social historians, it was conceived of as broadening the ambit of historical production beyond the academy to enable a wider range of individuals and activist groupings to research and write history. As I wrote at the time, the idea was that these aspirant historians ‘would engage with the past critically by examining a variety of sources, detecting bias and evaluating evidence’.3 In a mode of history as reconstruction, primacy was given to oral history as a research methodology, which, when combined with self-writing, was seen to hold the potential for a transformative project that would help facilitate struggles against apartheid, in that what was presented as a critical understanding of history could enhance effective political mobilization.4 The project, and the book which emerged, was intent on developing history as a set of skills that could be learned and imbibed. My task was to set up groups of people who would write their histories. They were workers from Kagiso on the West Rand, high-school students from Soweto and a group of rural youth from Driefontein (today known as Saul Mkhizeville) near the western border of Eswatini. I then ran a series of skills workshops with them, established contact with similar history writing projects and produced a book that reflected these experiences and that would encourage others ‘to engage in the process of writing history’.5 Throughout the project and the book, the category of history was offered as a combination of a research methodology, such as drawing up an interview outline and locating books in a library, developing interpretive abilities, such as detecting ‘bias’, interpreting interviews and evaluating evidence such as court records, and then writing, through a coherent structure, careful planning and linking evidence with each specific topic. This was the way to make history as an academic discipline into history by and for ‘communities’ as a critical engagement with the past.6 Through this ‘veneer of scientificity’, certain approaches that approximated the method of history as an academic profession were validated and others (such as creative story-telling or political tracts) invalidated as myth or propaganda.7 The latter were not admitted to history in Write your Own History.8 As the title of the project and the book make clear, it is writing that is both the foundation of history and any form of production that might follow. The instruction is that ‘once you have written up your history you have to decide how you are going to present it’.9 I presented the

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writing up as akin to an undergraduate history assignment and the ‘few tips’ read like comments that I would give to a student. These include writing simply, using clear paragraphs, acknowledging sources by using quotations, making a plan and keeping to it, and following a logical sequencing which may involve a chronology.10 I thoroughly recommended the latter approach: ‘The chronological order makes the incidents you describe easier to understand, as the reader can follow the events one after the other’.11 The time of Write Your Own History for the purpose of an imagined critical history is of linear sequencing, using stories, photographs and documents as evidence, reading books and articles to establish context, all enabling and leading inexorably to resistance to apartheid and the anticipation of liberation. Although never explicitly stated in the book, none of the groups that I co-ordinated completed writing their histories. The production of their histories is ambivalently situated, ‘set in an ideal future time, one indicated through the subjunctive auxiliary verbs, “could” and “would” and a hypothetical occasion where history is present and presented’.12 There are suggestions of delivering a lecture, staging a play, recording an audio talk, compiling a book, magazine or pamphlet, making a film and exhibiting a history.13 The latter comes closest perhaps to the idea of a museum, using an example from the New York Chinatown History Project and its exhibition on laundry workers at the New York Public Library. It refers to either laying out documents and artefacts on a table as one option or placing photographs and documents on walls for viewer accessibility.14 Alternative locations for such exhibitions that Write Your Own History presents are classrooms, community halls, or church halls. In this way, I claimed, ‘members of the community can see your work, learn about their history and comment on what you have done’.15 There was not even the thought, in this world of possibilities, of the museum as the institutional site for representing community and history. The only actual mention of museums in Write Your Own History is in the list of resources at the back of the book in a section entitled ‘Where to get help?’. They are indicated by me as a place where ‘documents, newspapers and photographs about the history’ of a locality are kept. Grouped together with libraries, they are referred to as good places to find ‘historical sources’.16 In effect, the museum is represented in Write Your Own History as an archive that is prior to a history which will only come about through research and writing following the edicts of the critical account, assessment and evaluation. History, written as if it is following a trajectory of chronology, employing the archive as source, could make use of the museum to establish a narrative of becoming that had the potential

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to culminate in liberation. But in the late apartheid world of Write Your Own History, the museum could neither be a site of history making itself nor could it hold the promise of emancipation.

Museum Times It is the movement of the museum from a storage and retrieval site that appears as prior to history to becoming a primary setting of history making that is the mark of Museum Times. From drawing upon a capacity to conserve the objects of time and make them available for writing logical (or, in terms of Write Your Own History, more desirably, chronological) pasts that have emancipatory endings, the museum shifts to configuring time itself. How to displace objects from their temporal attachments and re-place them in new and altered configurations is the primary subject of museum making twenty years after the official demise of apartheid. In all the settings of Museum Times, those arrangements were institutionally organized through structural alterations and transforming intended applications. A migrant labourers’ hostel, a prison, rooms and halls in a castle, a saw and grain mill, parts of an old farm and various libraries are the foundations of the museums discussed in this book. Sometimes their previous histories were totally obliterated to make way for new uses, as was the case with the Dias Museum. At other times they became a central object of museum making, as on Robben Island and in Lwandle. These were remnants from the abyss, what the Spanish novelist Javier Marias, drawing upon Shakespeare’s The Tempest, calls the Dark Back of Time, where time has not happened or ‘happens in a sphere that isn’t precisely temporal’, in spaces of imagination and envisaged futures.17 It references the scene where Prospero says to Miranda, ‘What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time? If thou remember’st aught ere thou camest here. How thou camest here thou mayst’. And she replies, ‘I do not’.18 Museum Times delves into this abyss to imagine the ways in which temporalities were constructed, and how different types of museums made post-apartheid alignments in response to Prospero’s query. For Lwandle, its museumness was established by situating itself in a time that both framed and was beyond its immediate locality through a national geography. This was the role of time as context, providing the explanations, shoring up the many absences in research and collection, and asserting significance. Radical social histories, with their tales of origins situated in the mid- to late nineteenth century on the mines of Kimberley

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and the Witwatersrand, were the foundations for a local history museum of the late twentieth century, adjacent to a false bay, near Cape Town. In the back of time, through a manoeuvre of fabricating context, lineages of social history’s narratives were stretched along a linear trajectory, through museum technologies, into a form of local proprietorship for a national memory of migrant labour. Robben Island as a museum had no problem with regard to claiming significance. Its time was thoroughly overdetermined through frames of apartheid / resistance, the biographical emplotment of Nelson Mandela and chartered routes of national founding. In museum making it was these timelines that structured Robben Island, through the portal of the Nelson Mandela Gateway, into what I have called a site of vision and visitation. Maintaining these times, while simultaneously offering up possibilities for disturbance that asserted individual lives, political differences and narrative variations as momentary, was part and parcel of becoming the first post-apartheid national museum. As interspersed moments and museological enclaves, the disruptions did not only not jeopardize the broad narrative temporalities of national resilience on Robben Island they also enabled an economy of the critical. The museum, which opened in 1997, presented itself as an uninterrupted descendant in a genealogical lineage of a Robben Island that had been transformed by the political prisoners between 1960 and 1990 into a university-type environment of openness and debate. While in the museums in Lwandle and on Robben Island time was made as new, in Mossel Bay and the exhibition constructed around contesting the icon of settler nationalism, Jan van Riebeeck, it was re-forming the old that was at stake. The challenge lay in the immense power of commemoration, of time appearing to pass through seemingly inevitable cycles. The Dias Museum complex, as apartheid’s last museum, was built on the commemorative structures of European discovery and was very reluctant to shift these. It could only bring in a series of unrelated exhibitions set down as temporary in an unobtrusive space. The time these exhibitions remained in situ was deliberately short and provisional. It was almost by chance, when one of these exhibitions undid and took up the space usually reserved for celebrating discovery, that a slight tremor was felt in the museum’s anniversary foundations. Y350?, in contrast, in its various incarnations at the Castle of Good Hope, at Kleinplasie in Worcester and at the UWC library, was all about the potential of disrupting commemoration. By inverting the icon and moment of European settlement, it sought to pose questions, rather than install a new time. If anything, Y350? intended to always accentuate uncertainty. What was

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communicated though may have had the opposite effect, that of buttressing the power of commemoration and enhancing the date of 1652 as the inaugural moment of apartheid. All these instances were in some form structured as history museums. There is one institution in Museum Times that is primarily devoted in its collections and displays to natural history classifications. The Amathole Museum, formerly the Kaffrarian Museum, had truncated time in the 1950s to incorporate into its establishment a history of settlement. In the early twenty-first century it sought to unsettle the histories it had inaugurated in the 1950s by stretching the spatio-temporal metaphor of the frontier to indicate mentalités and offering possibilities of reinterpretation that crossed these imagined boundaries in the past and the present, in King William’s Town particularly and the Eastern Cape more broadly. Using and challenging the limiting notion of the frontier which framed European settlement was an imaginative and always hazardous move. In its exhibitionary and collection practices, classification systems and its imbrication with a post-apartheid cultural politics, the passages of time, space and attitudes that the Amathole Museum sought to traverse and exceed were liable to persist. Re-producing the frontier, even as a move of transformation beyond its constraints, continually limited the museum’s ability to go across its classificatory and historical borders. Displacements. Alignments. Histories. Lineages. Context. Emplotment. Stretching. Moments. Genealogies. Cycles. Linear. Commemoration. Inaugurating. Limiting. Provisional. Origins. Shoring Up. Traversing. Truncating. Trajectories. Installing. Obliterating. Temporalities. Sometimes. Other Times. Museum Times.

Future Times As I finished writing the first draft of the manuscript of Museum Times in January 2021, the official tourism webpage of Nelson Mandela Bay municipality, comprising the cities of Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage and Despatch, was enticing prospective visitors to #sharethebay. One of the listings is for the Red Location Museum in New Brighton which is described as standing ‘like a beacon in the middle of a destitute mass of brightly coloured small houses within sight of the Bay’s breakers’. Built ‘as a tribute to the liberation struggle against apartheid’, it offers exhibitions, montages and timelines that detail ‘the history of the township, its people and their place in the bid for liberty’. There is also a special note: ‘Red Location Museum has been closed since 18 October 2013 due

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to community protests around RDP housing issues. The municipality is working closely with the community on reopening it soon’.19 When it opened in 2006 the Red Location Museum promised innovative design, multiple interpretative possibilities and that it would become a cultural hub for economic regeneration.20 The museum developed displays for its specially designed corrugated iron memory boxes as a ‘space for many voices to be heard’, was ‘considered conceptually brilliant’, attracted international tourists and garnered several prestigious architectural awards.21 But the envisaged economic trickle-down effects hardly materialized. Although most of the museum’s employees came from the surrounding area of New Brighton, the sometimes specialized nature of museum employment limited these possibilities. The factory-like structure of the museum only seemed to offer a mere illusion of employment.22 From the outset there were ‘repeated service delivery protests’ aimed at the museum and its plans for expansion. In 2005, even before it opened, ‘human waste buckets were emptied in front of the Museum and tyres burned on its porch in protest to housing grievances’. Eight years later, in October 2013, demonstrators from the area surrounded the entrance to the building, not allowing staff into the premises. The museum was referred to by the protestors as a ‘gold-mine’ that was not benefitting the local residents. Negotiations about the museum’s future were entered into with what became the Red Location Coordinating Forum. As these talks dragged on, the museum was vandalized. Acting curator Chris du Preez reported that ‘the outlook at this stage for a speedy reopening of the Museum looks extremely bleak for the now demoralized staff and increasingly concerned local stakeholders’.23 In its physical and representational claims as new and innovative, the museum sought to establish itself as a place where a national and local past of the anti-apartheid could be represented, consigned and also literally buried in coffins in a mausoleum set aside for bodies of selected people designated as leaders. In the end the families refused to allow the bodies to be disinterred and placed in the mausoleum. Nonetheless, the museum remained, for the demonstrators, metaphorically ‘a house for dead people’ while they lived alongside ‘in squalor’ and did not have a roof over their heads. Museum interiors and exteriors were stripped, the building ransacked and its windows shattered. Overall, the museum became an extremely dangerous place to inhabit.24 The proclamation of temporariness of closure on the front door of the Red Location Museum in October 2013, and on the tourism website eight years later, still suggested the possibility of return. But the duration of the interregnum continues to be far from certain. Red Location

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Museum struggles to keep alive, operating for what it hopes is ‘the interim’ from an office space of the Department of Recreation and Culture in the city, co-hosting programmes with other museums in the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality while its award-winning 22 million Rands building de-materializes daily.25 The time of the museum emerged in New Brighton through the formal institutionalization of a site for the conservation of the dead, the association of symbolic capital with an ‘award winning’ building, and the fast-disappearing remains of a ‘spatial dream of a post-apartheid memorial’.26 Red Location Museum is probably the most high-profile closure in the period beyond the central focus of Museum Times. In Cape Town the Gold of Africa Museum shut its doors as the mining company AngloGold Ashanti moved the core collection, the Barbier-Mueller gold pieces from West Africa, to its headquarters in Johannesburg.27 SA Rugby found that the costs of running a museum were too much to bear and closed down the elaborate Springbok Experience at the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront.28 Over the years MuseumAfrica in downtown Johannesburg has faced constant threats of closure due to a lack of funds and staff positions not being filled. This was exacerbated in 2020 when a flood, caused by burglars severing the water pipes, threatened the collection.29 In Soweto the Mandela House Museum was facing liquidation as the Heritage Trust which manages it tried to pay off its debts.30 Paralleling Red Location, another architectural award-winning museum, the uMkhumbane Heritage Centre in Cato Manor, Durban, has remained shut since its official opening in 2017 as contractors have not yet repaired snags in the monumental five-storey building.31 Operating difficulties in general were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, with the lack of visitors and the shifting of donor funds into areas of public health and food security plunging museums into deep financial crises. Museum Times appear to be over. This may be deceptive. There have been new museum-type structures which give themselves the appellation of heritage centre. Their main features are that they tend to be exhibition spaces, do not have extensive collections and while they may be memorial in their intent, they are usually in purpose-built structures. In the greater Durban area the Mpumalanga Heritage Centre recalls the political violence in the area between 1983 and 1992.32 The 1860 Heritage Centre, also in Durban, focuses primarily on representing a history of indentured labour from India in the second half of the nineteenth century, but takes that forward to the present with the intention to present migration more generally and also devote attention to biographies of people, whom the museum

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terms ‘heroes  and  heroines  of our forgotten and troubled past’.33 The Alexandra Heritage Centre, which had begun its life as the Nelson Mandela Yard Interpretation Centre, finally opened seventeen years later in 2018 with exhibitions that highlighted social histories of the locality.34 In Graaff-Reinet the Robert Sobukwe Museum and Learning Centre is in the process of being developed. Although it has a small exhibition, the emphasis at this stage is on the learning of craft and technical skills.35 These instances are not only less grandiose, but their publics more focused, indicating a shift towards local histories as the domain of museum making. Much more pretentious has been the emergence in South Africa of the art gallery through the intervention of a large private collector. The early instantiation of this trend was the Rupert Foundation Museum that opened in Stellenbosch in 2005 and was renovated in 2018. An initiative based on the collection of apartheid-era tobacco magnate Anton Rupert and his wife Huberte, the focus is on modern South Africa art.36 The collection and financial contribution of Jochen Zeitz, former chair and CEO of the sporting apparel company Puma, is behind the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz Mocaa for short) which opened at the Silo District at the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront in Cape Town in 2017. Its key objectives are the exhibition, collection and preservation and research on ‘contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora’.37 The family of CEO of Homestead Group Holdings, Louis Norval, are behind the collection and displays in the galleries of the Norval Foundation in the Cape Town suburb of Steenberg, opposite the offices of the United States Consul General. It opened in 2018 and, like the Rupert Museum, its primary focus is ‘20th- and 21st-century visual art from South Africa’.38 A little over a year later the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (Javett-UP), was completed and opened. The collection of lawyer-turned-businessman Michael Javett is the driving force behind this gallery, with a broad objective of collecting African art over the centuries. It is here that the Barbier Collection, which was the basis of AngloGold Ashanti’s Gold of Africa Museum in Cape Town that closed in 2013, has been relocated.39 The Javett represented the culmination of three incredibly busy years for establishing private art collectors as the foundation of massive projects in museum making in South Africa. But perhaps more than the collections themselves, it was the design of the buildings, their settings (gardens and waterfront), their restaurants and museum shops that were integral to their appeal. These are the times of the museum as sites of aspirant consumption made available through the benevolence of the philanthropic art collector.40

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Closure. Illusions. Protests. Death. Danger. Disappearances. Relocations. Threats. Liquidation. Heritage Centres. Local Histories. Philanthropies. Art from Africa. Design. Consumption. Future Times.

The Times of Red The flourishing of the art foundation gallery in South Africa since 2017 points to a lacuna in Museum Times, that of engagements between the classifications of history and art in museum-type spaces since 1994. This is surprising given that, as pointed out early on in this book, the categories of art and cultural history were intricately tied together through settler pasts in the 1970s. There was an active movement towards dissociation by artists in the late 1980s leading to an organizational breakaway in 1990.41 Furthermore, in our book, Unsettled History, Gary Minkley, Ciraj Rassool and I identified a series of exhibitions at the South African National Gallery in the 1990s, that were, albeit ambiguously, at the forefront of transformation and constituted ‘serious points of engagement with perceived notions of culture’.42 I was actually on display in one of these exhibitions – Miscast: Negotiating Khoisan History and Material Culture – and co-authored an article for the catalogue.43 It appears that an autobiographical thread could easily have been pursued across collections, exhibitions and research of convergences in the broad formations and shifting formulations of history and art. That I have not tracked this possibility is by and large a result of my more active focus in the years that followed Miscast with understanding the vectors through which the category of history itself was being produced, re-made and contested in the public domains, simultaneously drawing upon and challenging the discipline as profession. These are apparent in the stories related throughout the book, particularly in my accounts of deep-rooted engagements with the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum and the Robben Island Museum. What these and similar commitments have meant for troubling and re-thinking history has been the driving force behind Museum Times. Rather than pursuing this explanation further I want to end Museum Times by pointing to an exhibition and workshop in 2015 where issues of history and art in formation were actively pursued and related to possibilities of constituting engagements where neither of them were taken as self-evident or given. This was Red Assembly, the 2nd African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) workshop held in East London which Gary Minkley, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick and I organized in 2015.44

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One beginning of Red Assembly was a moment of vexing ambivalence: the making of a red Mercedes as a gift for the recently released Nelson Mandela at the Mercedes Benz factory in East London in 1990, followed soon thereafter by a wildcat strike with a factory sleep-in where the target was both management and the trade union, the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA), disputing their centralized industry-wide rather than shop-floor bargaining agreement. Then there was artist Simon Gush’s installation piece, Red, which was a response to this set of events. The components of Gush’s work were the reconstruction of the body of a disembodied red Mercedes, a set of designer clothing that he called somewhat strangely ‘strike uniforms’, contorted beds in scaffolding alluding to the ripped out seats of cars on which the strikers slept in the factory, and a film (made with James Cairns) that ‘fabricates the story of the events of 1990’.45 Gush asserts that the reconstructions ‘are not historically accurate, but imagine the possibilities of moments when the factory was appropriated for alternative ideas of what production might be’.46 What brought this all together in East London, South Africa, in 2015 was another moment in the abyss of time. On 11 September 1797 Napoleon Bonaparte, whose armies had taken control of Venice, ordered the removal of the painting by Paolo Veronese, the Wedding at Cana, from the monastery at San Giorgio Maggiore. The painting was ‘cut up into several parts for the purpose of transport, the canvas was packed and sent to Paris … The work was duly re-assembled and shown at the Louvre’. 47 The Wedding at Cana is today on display on the first floor of the Louvre Museum, in the Denon wing, Room 711, opposite Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Forward to Bologna in 2013 where my partner, Josi Frater, and I were visiting our friend Giacomo Loperfido. Looking for a book to read while on holiday, I picked up a copy of Coping with the Past: Creative Perspectives on Conservation and Restoration at a sale being held on the Piazza Maggiore. I was intrigued. There is nothing on the cover to indicate what it’s all about, but I did recognize some names – Bruno Latour, Carlo Ginzburg – and I started skimming through the first couple of pages. I was enticed by the prospect. The book is an account of a conference held at the Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, under the auspices of the Cini Foundation which had assumed control of the building for its offices and research. The Foundation had contacted Adam Lowe of Factum Arte in Madrid to make a digital facsimile of the Wedding at Cana. As a result, ‘some 210 years after its removal the canvas was unveiled and the overall work of art consisting of the architecture

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and painting was fully reconstructed and could once more be admired by Venetians and the rest of the world’.48 What followed between 12 and 14 September 2007, and is represented in the book, was that historians, literary scholars, environmental conservationists, theologians, scholars in sound and musicologists all gathered in the monastery beneath this work of art that had been remade, restored and unveiled, to discuss what it means to conserve. The debate, conducted in situ, was about the meaning and claims to restoration, ‘trying to capture moments in the history of anxiety’, seeking a possibility of return without asserting origins or authenticity, looking for ‘an alternative vocabulary to oppose the notion of fundamentalism’,49 or, as the editors of the volume claim, through comparative discussions to work towards an understanding of ‘how we can inherit the past “well”, what it really is to re-produce and thus, perhaps, to faithfully betray’.50 When I spoke with Helena Pohlandt-McCormick about the book and the project of restoration and conversation it portrayed, her mind turned to the exhibition Red which she had seen at the Goethe Institute in Johannesburg. She enthused about it and we began to wonder whether we could try and re-produce a similar type of conversation to that held in Venice, but that would deal with themes and possibilities emerging from Simon Gush’s work. Would he, the artist, be interested in such a project? And as Red pertained to Mercedes and East London, we thought to approach our friend at the University of Fort Hare, the SARChI Chair in Social Change, Gary Minkley, to see if he was also interested in this possibility and then submitting a proposal to the ACIP. These schemes and energies came together in August 2015 at a gallery in East London that sought to ‘build up a representative collection of South African art’ in what had previously been the home of Ann Bryant for nearly forty years, a ‘pleasing and well-preserved example of late Victorian architecture’.51 On show was Gush’s installation Red and gathered together was a group of scholars to reflect on these disassembled components. The idea was not to attempt to make these parts into a whole but to contemplate the processes of assemblage, the mechanisms of production, and the possibilities of simultaneously creating and destabilizing art and history.52 In the presence of Red we convened a somewhat rickety and unstable Red Assembly. Red was a provocation and a prompt, a frame that provided ‘for agreement and disagreement’.53 We invited participants of Red Assembly to respond to the different forms of expression invoked by the installation (film, photography, sculpture, oral and written text, sound/the acoustic, even critique). The idea was to initiate a discussion

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around time, work and art that would return us to questions of how particular subjectivities (racial, gendered, classed) are established and contested in the modern social. How do we move predictably and unpredictably – as art workers, historians, curators, activists, laborers – between assemblages of the aesthetic, the political, the social, the real, the spatial, the modern and, yes, the historical?54

Presenters responded to our prompts by considering, for instance: the ways in which leadership and biography are configured in the politics of red assemblies associated with socialism / post-socialism; music, sound, aurality and performance through a reading of the film that forms part of Red; the meaning and symbolism of clothing and uniforms; and critiques of labour processes through art and film.55 These papers, and many others, were, we hoped, continuing the work of probing how the new ‘lines of sight’ afforded by Red coax us into perspectives that are ‘unpredictable and indeterminate, contingent and creative’.56 It was the malleability, surprise and shifting positions that Red instigated that enriched the discussions and articles. Gush had not reassembled Mandela’s Mercedes but constructed a red Mercedes without engine, undercarriage or interior fittings from a scrap yard as an allusion to the gift made to Mandela. And, importantly, Gush was concerned with the coming together of the strike against Mercedes Benz and NUMSA with the gift of the Mercedes, as we were. Our writing and the reading of Gush’s work was about showing disconnections, ambiguities and precarious worlds of production and representation, not about a car being gifted, dismantled and reassembled but about assemblies and assemblages. ‘The red Mercedes is not whole’. It never was. What has been lost, again and again, are the struggles over unionization and the political differences. It is to these challenges (differences, divisions, conflicts, dissension, disassembling, undoing etc.) to a unified, common purpose political struggle that the presentation of the red Mercedes as dismantled and gutted addresses itself. … What does it mean to assemble, what is the work of assemblage, how is work assembled? … Simon Gush’s [not Nelson Mandela’s] red Mercedes was in fact dis-assembled.57

As was asserted by Richard Powers, the novelist who participated in the discussion in Venice in 2007 around the restoration of Veronese’s Wedding at Cana (which portrays the biblical tale of a banquet where water was miraculously turned into wine), ‘the map gives way to a wider place’ enabling possibilities for a ‘dynamic act of re-presenting’, where the ‘shared text-tile’ can be ‘constantly rehabilitated’.58 In my response to Red I considered how Gush’s employment of ‘speculative reconstruction’ as the principal idea in the installation may provide

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a way to re-examine labour histories and their museum representations. It is a really a bizarre concept. Reconstruction implies a foundation with evidence and authentication, while speculation refers to guesswork or chance taking, relying upon probabilities. By bringing them together in Red Gush invites a questioning of reconstruction as history making. Although the reference is back to events of 1990, the ‘strike uniforms’, the ‘beds’, and the disembowelled car (which is not effectively a car) created for Red are not meant to reproduce original artefacts associated with the gift and the strike at the Mercedes Benz factory. They do not appear as signs of documentation. Instead, what they do is ‘cast doubt on historical artefacts mobilized to support a particular version of events and to query forms of evidence and the construction of narratives generally’.59 The artefacts as ‘speculative reconstructions’ offer possibilities of divergent trajectories, and the enactment of disassembly redirects attention to ‘the construction of evidence in the making of historical narrative’.60 Similarly, the film Red as part of the larger installation is very awkward. There is a lack of fit, individuals interviewed do not appear as representative and there is no overarching narration. What ties the film together are individuals speaking at length, and a set of breakaway images, ‘sometimes with voice overs, sometimes to accompanying sounds from the scenes, sometimes in silence’.61 These scenes are not synchronous of the time being talked about. They are ‘images from when the film was made, and they often have little connection to what is being spoken about’.62 I identified in Red histories of labour that alluded to the type of narratives Powers refers to, moving beyond ‘the monolithic conventions’ of ‘fixed autonomous positions’.63 The stories told and represented through Red are ‘of multiple and contradictory betrayals’.64 The artefact and film components of Red differed markedly from the forms that labour histories took in new museums in South Africa. At the Workers Museum in Newtown, Johannesburg, there were intertwined two stories of workers and progress, ‘from rural to urban, and oppression to freedom’.65 In the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, quite astonishingly the work of labour itself was hardly depicted. Instead, the museum was held together by a linear story of urban development, about migrant labour hostels changing to family homes in the making of a public citizenry.66 Red imagines different possibilities of labour histories in museums. ‘By releasing the present to once again re-semble and re-assemble the past’, the speculative reconstructions ‘can free the past to rejoin its vital new futures’.67 The object and objects of Red ‘keep changing sides, and even … change the sides’ itself.68 By shifting the ‘mutable past’ and thereby ‘altering the event that generated it’, Red offered the possibility

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of museum remakings, moving us constantly backwards and forwards in time, ‘across all three tenses, through a country full of voices’.69 I want to finish with a quotation from the words of another novelist, Andrea Barrett, in her short story about probably the definitive mapper of life, Carl Linnaeus, whose system of classifications sought to articulate the visible though their structure, establishing a language that excluded uncertainty and that became the basis of museum ordering and classification.70 At the end of Linnaeus’s life, after he had suffered a stroke, as Barrett narrates it, place and time ultimately eluded his apprehension: ‘His mind, which had once seemed to hold the whole world, had been occupied by a great dark lake that spread farther every day and around which he tiptoed gingerly. When he reached for facts they darted like minnows across the water and could only be captured by cunning and indirection’.71 Perhaps cunning and indirection, rather than mapping, ordering and holding the whole world, are the requirements to re-form stories of museums and their pasts in the entanglements and shifting trajectories of art and history in Marias’s ‘dark back of time’. Indirection. Malleability, Surprise. Precarious. Creative. Contingent. Assembled. Disassembled. Reassembled. Cunning. Indirection. Water. Wine. Speculative Reconstructions. The Wedding at Cana. Red. Red Assembly. Red Times.

Notes  1. See Pohlandt-McCormick et al., ‘Red Assembly: East London Calling’; Witz et al., ‘Red Assembly: The Work Remains’.  2. Witz, Write Your Own History, back cover.  3. Witz, ‘The Write Your Own History Project’, 370.  4. Witz, Write Your Own History, 17. History as reconstruction is a genre identified in Jenkins and Munslow, The Nature of History Reader.  5. Witz, ‘The Write Your Own History Project’, 371.  6. Witz, ‘The Write Your Own History Project’, 369–70.  7. Rousseau, ‘“Unpalatable Truths” and “Popular Hunger”’, 64.  8. This is expanded upon in Witz, ‘Archives, Museums and Autobiography’.  9. Witz, Write Your Own History, 119. 10. Witz, Write Your Own History, 114–16. 11. Witz, Write Your Own History, 99. 12. Witz, ‘Archives, Museums and Autobiography’, 20. 13. Witz, Write Your Own History, 119–32. 14. Witz, Write Your Own History, 125–26. 15. Witz, Write Your Own History, 126.

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

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Witz, Write Your Own History, 139. Marias, Dark Back of Time, 301. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2 in Complete Works, 1136. ‘Red Location Museum’, retrieved 19 January 2021 from https://www.nmbt. co.za/listing/red_location_museum.html. ‘Draft report of the Red Location Museum governance workshop’, 5 September 2006, complied by Gcinibandla Mtukela, Red Location Museum. Du Preez, Presentation to ‘Repackaging Historical Material’, 10. Murray, ‘Architecture Dreaming’, 52. Du Preez, ‘The Role of Architecture’. ‘PE Residents Force Anti-apartheid Museum to Close’, News24.com, 31 July 2014, retrieved 14 April 2015 from http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/ News/PE-residents-force-anti-apartheid-museum-to-close-20140731. These protests are extensively analysed in Roux, ‘A House for Dead People’ and Smith, ‘Interment’, where they look at the demonstrators’ expressions of material issues in relation to the meanings and promises of the museum. Red Location Museum, poster of closure, 18 October 2013, Media Office, Dept of Recreation and Culture, Nelson Mandela Bay Metro. Murray, ‘Architecture Dreaming’, 46. Tilley-Nel, ‘Two Curator’s’. ‘Springbok Experience Museum to Close Down due to “Economic Reality”’, Independent online, 1 March 2019, retrieved 29 January 2021 from https:// www.iol.co.za/sport/rugby/springboks/springbok-experience-museum-to-close-down-due-to-economic-reality-19584224. Pijoos, ‘Burglary at Museum Africa’. ‘Public Urged to Help Stop the Total Liquidation of the Mandela House Museum’, SABC News, 17 January 2021, retrieved 29 January 2021 from https://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/public-urged-to-help-stop-the-totalliquidation-of-the-mandela-house-museum/; Mokhoali, ‘Mandela House Museum’. Pillay, ‘Award-winning Zulu Heritage Museum’. ‘About  Mpumalanga Heritage Museum’, retrieved 29 January 2021 from https://durbanhistorymuseums.org.za/mpumalanga-heritage-museum/. ‘Indenture to Democracy: A South African Story of Struggle, Heritage and Achievement’, retrieved on 4 February 2021 from https://1860heritagecentre.wordpress.com/about/. Blignaut, ‘A Cultural Centre’. ‘Robert Sobukwe Museum and Learning Centre’, retrieved 29 January 2021 from http://146.141.12.32/robert-mangaliso-sobukwe-museum. ‘Rupert Museum’, retrieved 31 January 2021 from https://www.worldartfoundations.com/foundation/rupert-museum/. ‘Zeitz Mocaa: About Us’, retrieved 31 January 2021 from https://zeitzmocaa. museum/about-us/. ‘About the Norval Foundation’, retrieved 31 January 2021 from https://www. norvalfoundation.org/about-the-foundation/.

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39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

‘About Javett-UP’, retrieved 31 January 2021 from https://javettup.art/about. I am grateful to Noëleen Murray for extensive discussion on this point. This is discussed in Chapter 1. Witz, Rassool and Minkley, ‘The Castle, The Gallery’, 111–12. Gordon, Rassool and Witz, ‘Fashioning the Bushman’. The African Critical Inquiry Program was created through the Ivan Karp / Corinne Kratz fund to honour the memory of the anthropologist and public intellectual Ivan Karp. The idea was that the fund would help to ‘continue his collaborative work with universities, museums and other cultural institutions in South Africa through activities such as lectures, programs and student research support’. Support for PhD research of graduate students at African universities and for running an annual workshop in Africa on a proposed theme are its focuses. See Emory University Laney Graduate School, ‘African Critical Inquiry Program’. Pohlandt-McCormick et al., ‘Red Assembly: East London Calling’, 121. Gush, ‘Portfolio: Red’. Gagliardi, ‘Prologue’, viii. Gagliardi, ‘Prologue’, xi. Latour, ‘Concluding Remarks’, 181. Gagliardi, Latour and Memelsdorff, ‘Introduction’, xvi. Fransen, Guide to the Museums, 1978, 44–45. Pohlandt-McCormick et al., ‘Red Assembly: East London Calling’, 125. Pohlandt-McCormick et al., ‘Red Assembly: East London Calling’, 124. Witz et al., ‘Red Assembly: The Work Remains’, 15. Witz et al., ‘Red Assembly: The Work Remains’, 15. Pohlandt-McCormick et al., ‘Red Assembly: East London Calling’, 126. John Mowitt joined the organizing team to co-edit the two journal special editions on Red Assembly in Parallax (‘Red Assembly: East London Calling’) and Kronos (‘Red Assembly: The Work Remains’). Pohlandt-McCormick et al., ‘Red Assembly: East London Calling’, 124–25. Powers, ‘Saving the Best Wine for Last’, 168, 164. Sweet, ‘The Renewed Work of Copies’, 163. Sweet, ‘The Renewed Work of Copies’, 163. Witz, ‘The Voices of the People Involved’, 84. Witz, ‘The Voices of the People Involved’, 84. Powers, ‘Saving the Best Wine for Last’, 164. Witz, ‘The Voices of the People Involved’, 84. Witz, ‘The Voices of the People Involved’, 88. Murray and Witz, Hostels, Homes, 6. Powers, ‘Saving the Best’, 164. Powers, ‘Saving the Best’, 164. Powers, ‘Saving the Best’, 163–64. Foucault, The Order of Things, 146. Barrett, ‘The English Pupil’, 35.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

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Index Please note, number indicators in bold represent illustrative material Abavelisi Bengingqi yaseLwandle/Lwandle Designers (exhibition), 94 ABSA Bank’s Money Museum and Archives, 21 Across the Frontier (exhibition), 33, 130–31, 147–50, 154–55, 159n91 Adriaan, Ashwell, 172 Africana Museum. See MuseumAfrica African Critical Inquiry Program (ACIP) 237, 244n44 African cultures, 12, 17, 105. See also African heritage; dioramas African Cultures Gallery, 11–12, 14, 16 African heritage, 55–56 African National Congress (ANC), 25, 62–64, 88, 200. See also Commission for Reconstruction and Transformation of the Arts (CREATE); Culture and Resistance Festival 1982; Looking Backwards Looking Forwards: Culture and Development Conference 1993 African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies (APMHS). See heritage studies programmes/qualifications African Window, 17. See also Ditsong Museums African Worlds, 44–5 Afrikaner nationalism, 111 as museum trope, 50–1 Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB), 211 Afro-centricism, 62, 65 Albany History Museum/Albany Museum, 46, 49–51, 129, 137, 147. See also Godlonton; settler collections Alfred Basin (Waterfront, Cape Town), 165, 171 Alexander, Neville, 168 Alexandra Heritage Centre, 236. See also Nelson Mandela Yard Interpretation Centre Amasiko, 65. See also living heritage Amathole Museum, 29–33, 46, 129–38, 140–43, 148–55, 233 as ‘Home of Huberta’, 33, 150–1, 154 visitors to, 131, 133, 145, 151 See also Across the Frontier; Contemporary Anthropology Hall; Daines Wing; History

Hall; Huberta; Ntaba kaNdoda (cultural centre); settlers; Shortridge Mammal Hall; Xhosa Gallery; Wings of the Dove; Wolsak amaXhosa, 11, 33, 46, 49, 50, 139–44, 147, 150–152, 202 leaders, 50, 139–140, 142, 144, 148, 150–2, 154 See also Amathole Museum; Ciskei; Eastern Cape; isiXhosa; Transkeian Territories American Museum of Natural History, 133, 156n20 Ancestors (exhibition), 9 AngloGold, 21, 236 Angola, 112 Ann Bryant Gallery, xvi, 226, 228, 239 anniversaries, 22, 31, 117, 117, 199, 201, 208, 213, 221. See also settler anniversaries anthropological collections, 10–11, 130 anthropologists/anthropology 46–47, 130, 140–1, 149, 169, 178, 183, 249n44 apartheid. See apartheid state; Bartolomeu Dias Museum Complex; National Party; petty apartheid apartheid state, x, 18, 22, 32, 51–52, 105–106, 114, 137, 142. See also National Party, petty apartheid archaeological collections/sites, 14, 20–1, 47, 53, 61, 79, 110, 146 archaeologists/archaeology, 8, 20, 47, 108, 110, 124 Arends, Nicholas, 133, 135–36, 151, 156n20 artefact/s, 10, 17–8, 20–22, 31, 33, 53, 61, 145, 155, 241 art galleries, 51–52, 55, 238. See also under specific galleries, e.g. Ann Bryant Gallery, William Humphreys Gallery Arts and Culture Task Group (ACTAG), 64–5, 177–78 Autshumato, 161 Autshumato (Robben Island ferry), 34, 171–2, 180, 188 Axelson, Eric, 106 banners, 167, 194, 200, 205–6, 212–4, 216, 221. See also posters Bantu Education, 118

270 ‘bantustans’. See Bophuthatswana; Ciskei; Transkei Barbier-Mueller Collection, 21, 39n67, 235–6. See also Gold of Africa Museum Barrett, Andrea, 242 Bartolomeu Dias (caravel replica), 32, 100, 102–105, 108–16, 122–24 as Robben Island ferry, 164 Bartolomeu Dias Museum Complex, 14, 29, 32, 104, 115–7, 119–120, 122–4, 161, 164, 198, 231–2. See also Separate is not Equal Batavia, 195, 197 beach/beaches, 73, 91, 94, 103, 106–7, 111 Biko, Steve, 20, 144. See also Steve Biko Centre Black Arts Collective (BLAC), 198–99 Blue Cape Media, 200–201, 204–5 bombs, 88, 211, 213. See also Stofberg House (Worcester) Bophuthatswana, x, 142 Botha, Louis, 202 Botha, P.W., 101, 108, 111, 122 boycotts, 62, 105–107, 112, 114, 106, 205 British colonialism/British Empire, 1, 16, 21, 46–51, 114, 116, 202, 212. See also imperialism British Kaffraria. See Eastern Cape British Museum, 133–34 Brown, Cynthia, 86, 119 Brown, Floris, 211–12 Brown v. Board of Education, 117–19 Bryant, Ann, 239. See also Ann Bryant Gallery bus accident, 107, 111 Buthelezi, Vusi, 80–82 Byala, Sara, 5, 27 cabinets, viii, 11, 48, 53, 94, 111, 145–8 173, 205, 213, 216, 221. See also curiosities Cairns, James, 238 Caltex Africa, 54–55, 166, 169 Caltex Exhibition Centre, 166–67, 169 chameleon (exhibit), 42. See also under museums Cape Colony, 46, 134, 207 Cape of Good Hope, 52, 101, 113, 164, 195 Cape Provincial Administration, x, 109 Cape Provincial Museums, 85, 109 Cape Town, xii, xiv, 7, 11, 16–19, 29, 46, 53–54, 78, 86, 166–7, 175, 196–7, 200, 202 Cape Town, dockland and harbour, 21, 161, 163 Cape Town, tourism infrastructure, 165 Cape Town festival 2002. See Cape Town 350 Cape Town Holocaust Centre, 22 Cape Town municipality. See City of Cape Town Cape Town press, 167, 201 Cape Town 350, 200–202, 204–206, 208, 213, 215–16, 221. See also Y350?

Index caravel (Bartolomeu Dias replica). See Bartolomeu Dias (caravel) Carman, Jillian, 28 Carnegie Corporation, 51 Castle of Good Hope, 29, 166, 198, 201–3, 221, 231–232 Cata Museum and Heritage Trail, 18–19 Cato Manor. See uMkhumbane Cultural and Heritage Museum Cato Manor Heritage Centre, 18 cattle-killing movement 1856–57, 146, 148 Cell Stories Exhibition and Archive, 171–76 Centre for Popular Memory (UCT), 211 Cheminais, Gaby, 173, 175 Chavonnes Battery (Waterfront, Cape Town), 21 Chilvers, Hedley, 135–36, 151–52 Ciskei, 140–43, 158n57, 175. See also Eastern Cape citizenry, 3, 24, 64, 105, 112, 162, 182, 213, 241 City of Cape Town, 82, 88, 90–91, 95n8, 199–201 Civil Rights Movement, 116–8 Clifford, James, 26–27, 155 Clocktower (Waterfront, Cape Town), 165, 169, 171 coelacanths, 9–10, 13, 129 collecting practices, 66–67, 78, 131, 155, 168, 181–2, 231, 233 collections, vii, xi, 2–3, 8, 16–19, 25, 27, 43–44, 47, 50–53, 57–58, 63–66, 110–1, 117, 131–2, 142, 146, 16, 166–7, 184, 199, 216, 235, 239. See also under the names of the qualifiers, e.g. anthropological collections; archaeological collections/sites; ethnological collections; natural history collections; settler collections; etc. colonists. See settlers Coloured Affairs Division, 205 Commission for Reconstruction and Transformation of the Arts (CREATE), 63 common law prisoners, xiii, 164, 180–1 Company Gardens (Cape Town), 202, 221 Contemporary Anthropology Hall (Amathole Museum) 130, 139–40 Constitutional Hill Museum. See Johannesburg Fort Museum Contact Sheets, 215 Coombes, Annie, 28 Coping with the Past: Creative Perspectives on Conservation and Restoration (Gagliardi and Latour), 238 Cory, George, 49 costume/dress, viii, 10, 12, 52–55, 108, 112, 146–8, 212 Courtenay-Latimer, Marjorie, 9, 129 Covid-19, xvii, 35, 235 cultural collections, 16, 8, 53, 134, 146, 144 cultural heritage, 61, 209

Index271 cultural history, 16–17, 52–53, 57, 61–62, 65–6, 129, 137, 155, 237 as academic discipline, 56 cultural history museums, vii–viii, 52–3, 61–2, 65–66, 110, 115, 209 cultural workers, 62 culture, 2, 11–12, 23, 26, 30, 32, 51–57, 63, 65–66, 95n8, 104, 124, 140, 141, 146–7, 155, 166–7, 201. See also cultural heritage Culture and Resistance Festival 1982, 62 Culture in Another South Africa conference, 62 curiosities, 44, 46, 132–3 Da Gama, Vasco, 106, 113, 116 Daines Wing (Amathole Museum) 130, 137, 143, 145, 149, 151, 155 Dale College, 148 Daniell, Samuel, 13 Dark Back of Time (Marias), 231, 242 Darling. See Uys, Pieter-Dirk Deacon, Harriet, 168 Deacon, Janette, 61 De Beers Explosive Works, 73 De Jong, R.C., 61–62 De la Quellerie, Maria, 195–6, 199, 202 Democratic Alliance (DA), 88 Defiance Campaign, 200 Dening, Greg, 94, 104, 108 Department of Arts and Culture, 23, 214 Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, 177 Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport (Western Cape), 82, 85–86, 92–93, 104, 113, 115–6, 120, 209, 211, 221 Department of Cultural Affairs, Sport and Recreation (Western Cape), 204 Department of History (UCT), 183 Department of History (UWC), xi, xiii, xvii, 7, 9, 78, 197, 206, 214–6, 221, 227 Department of Nature Conservation, 129 Department of National Education, 106 Department of Prisons, 165 Department of Recreation and Culture (Nelson Mandela Bay metro), 235 De Sousa, Emilio, 108, 111–3 Dias (ferry), 164, 174–5 Dias, Bartolomeu, 101, 103, 105–7, 109, 113–4 Dias festival, 32, 103, 106–8, 111–3, 115, 122 Dias Museum Complex. See Bartolomeu Dias Museum Complex dilemmas, 7, 9, 11–12, 14–17, 29, 35–36 dioramas, 10, 12–14, 16, 56, 77, 113, 131, 138 display cases. See cabinets District Six Museum, xii, xiii, 18, 27, 43, 78, 81, 166, 205, 208 Ditsong Museums, 17, 38n49 diversity, 17, 23, 62, 83, 92, 101, 105, 143, 146–7, 200 Drakensberg Boys Choir, 111 Drury, James, 10, 13

Du Preez, Chris, 234 Durban, vii, 18, 22, 35, 47, 135, 164, 235 Durban Local History Museum, vii, viii, 19 Durban Museum, viii Dutch East India Company, 16, 29, 34, 137, 195, 197, 199–200, 203, 210 Eastern Cape (province and region), 18, 29, 33, 46, 129, 132, 134, 137, 144, 147–9, 155n1, 233 Eastern Cape museums, 9–11, 130–1, 137. See also under names of specific museums, e.g. Amathole Musuem East London, xvi, 9, 132, 135, 137, 149, 228, 237–9 East London Museum, 10–11, 129, 135, 147 ecomuseums, 33–4 1860 Heritage Centre (Durban), 235 1820 Settlers Association of Southern Africa, 49 Elizabeth II, 163 Emslie, Wendy, 152–3 EmaXhoseni, 149 Ending and Beginning (Hlongwane), 217–8, 220 Engelbrecht, Jean. See Marx-Engelbrecht, Jean Escorcio, Manuel, 107–8, 112 Esiqithini: Robben Island Exhibition (1993), 163, 167, 169 Esterhuizen, Estelle, 186–7 ethnological collections, 10, 33, 48, 50, 56, 130, 140, 146, 149, 155 Eurocentricism, 62, 143 European Economic Community, 101 European settlement, xi, 10, 16, 51–2, 115, 130, 196, 199–200, 202, 227, 232–3 evictions and forced removals, 1, 18–19, 88–91, 94, 116, 122 exhibition methodology/practices, 53, 168 exhibitions, role of, 146 ex-political prisoners, xiii, 161, 164–8, 170, 173, 175, 184, 188, 235 as tour guides, 33–34, 163, 185–8 reunion, 167 Fagan, Gabriel, 102, 108–10, 209 fallow deer, 34 False Bay, 73, 80, 87, 91, 94, 232 Fault Lines (exhibition), 203 Ferreira, Marie, 119–20 Ferreira, O.J.O., 57 Fietas Museum, 18 frontier, 33, 47, 50, 130–32, 134, 137, 144–8, 151, 155, 207, 233 frontier, colonial conquest of, 30, 33, 46–7, 49, 132, 134, 142, 144, 146, 148. See also Ciskei; Eastern Cape; Transkei/Transkeian Territories Frontier Districts Museum. See Amathole Museum frontier farm museums, 198, 210

272 frontier farmers, 22, 58, 198, 209, 211, 227 frontier wars, 140, 143–4 Frontiers (exhibition), 9 Frontiers (Mostert), 144, 147–8 Future of Robben Island Committee, 169 Galla, Amareswar, 43–4 Gandhi, Mohandas, 20 Ganora Fossil Museum, 21, 38n66 Garuba, Harry, 186 Gender Equity Unit (UWC), 215 Gender and Visuality conference, 215 George Museum, 118, 121–2 Godlonton, Robert, 50–51 Gold of Africa Museum, 21, 35, 39n67, 235–6 Gold Reef City Casino, 18 Gqeberha. See Port Elizabeth Goliath, William. See cattle-killing movement 1856–1857 Graaff-Reinet, 21, 236 Graham, Aubrey, 91–2 Grahamstown, 46, 49–50, 129, 137, 147, 152. See also Albany History Museum Grahamstown Journal, 50 Great Trek, 50, 53, 212–3 Groot Constantia, 21 Guide to the Museums of Southern African 1st and 2nd eds, x, 32, 52–3 Gush, Simon, xvii, 226, 228, 238–242 Hames, Mary, 217, 219 Hamilton, Carolyn, xvi, 43–4, 61 //Hapo Freedom Park Museum (Pretoria), 19 Hayes, Patricia, xvi, 215 Heart of Cape Town Museum, 22 Hector Pieterson Memorial Museum, 19 hedge. See Van Riebeeck’s hedge heritage, 4, 17, 20–24, 27, 31, 42, 52, 55, 62–64, 66, 101, 131, 147, 150, 166, 169, 178, 200 heritage, definition of, 61, 177 invention of, 54 policy of, xiii politics of, 61 See also under qualifiers, e.g. ‘African’ heritage’; cultural heritage; intangible/ tangible heritage; living heritage; ‘South African’ heritage Heritage Agency (consultancy), 170 Heritage Centre, Cape Town. See SABMiller/ South African Breweries heritage centres, 235 Heritage Day/Month, 92, 114, 154, 214 heritage sectors, 8, 43, 177–8 heritage sites, 20, 27, 74–75, 92–9, 162 provincial, 92 heritage studies programmes/qualifications, xiv, 8, 77–78, 163, 177–9, 181, 188, 222n15, 224n60, 227 Heritage Western Cape, 92 Hintsa, 139, 142, 152

Index hippopotami. See Huberta history, contestation of, 25–6 discipline of, 25–6, 28 modification of, xiv, 15 See also under qualifiers, e.g. cultural history; people’s history; public history; settler history; natural history; social history; urban history, etc. History after Apartheid (Coombes), 28 History from South Africa: Alternative Visions and Practices (Brown et al.), ix, xviii n4&5 History Hall (Amathole Museum), 32–33, 151, 154 History Hall (Natal Museum), 54 history museum movement, 18, 166, 177 history museums, viii, 18, 110, 233. See also cultural history museums; natural history museums, etc. Hlongwane, David, 217–8 Holmes, Marcia, 117, 119, 124 Horniman Museum, 42, 44–45. See also African Worlds; Robot Zoo Hostel 33, 72, 75–76, 79, 82, 84–87, 92–94. See also Lwandle hostel life, xiv, 76, 83, 85 Hostels-to-Homes scheme, 74, 82–84, 89 Huberta, 33, 128–9, 131, 134–6, 138–9, 141–2, 150–5, 159n106. See also Le Mare, G.W.R.; Webb, Denver “Huberta” (Emslie), 152–3 Huberta Goes South. See Chilvers, Hedley Huberta’s Journey (Van Straten), 141–2, 151 Huberta (supplement to The Mercury), 138 ‘Huberta’ (Taylor), 138 Huberta the Untold Story. See MarxEngelbrecht, Jean hunting/hunting expeditions, 11, 47, 129–33, 135–6, 140 identity, 11, 21, 23, 47, 50, 52, 116, 121, 134, 136–7, 141, 151, 196 formation of, 180 Iimbali zeKhaya: Stories of Home (exhibition), 83–84, 91, 93 Illustrated History of South Africa; The Real Story (Reader’s Digest Association South Africa), 59–60 imperialism, 46, 50, 102, 134, 138, 144, 202. See also British colonialism/British Empire indigeneity, 3, 20, 107, 144, 199, 218 Institutions of Public Culture conference 2001, 30, 37n39 International Council of Museums (ICOM), 181 International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF), xiii, 79, 167 Isaacs, Sedick, 173 isiXhosa, xvii n10, 190n26, 139–140, 142, 146–8, 154 Iziko Museums of South Africa, 11, 12, 16–17, 28, 183, 190n37, 198, 202–3, 216, 221. See

Index273 also Slave Lodge; South African Museum; South African National Gallery Javett Art Centre (University of Pretoria), 236 Jetty 1 Quay 5 (Waterfront, Cape Town), 163–6, 170–2, 174–6 Jewish Museum (Cape Town), 16–17, 37n45 Jim Crow laws, 118 Johannesburg, 5, 16–22, 27, 43, 57, 63, 99n87, 104, 116, 118, 122, 135, 212, 235, 239, 241 Johannesburg Art Gallery, 17–18, 215 Johannesburg Fort Museum, 19 Kaffraria. See Eastern Cape Kaffrarian Museum. See Amathole Museum Karp, Ivan, 26–27, 244n44 Kathrada, Ahmed, 169 Keuzenkamp, Carike, 108, 111–2 Khan, Farieda, 61 Khayelitsha, 19, 88, 91, 95n8 101, 111–9 Khoisan, 14, 103, 106, 114, 210 Kimberley, 9, 11, 17, 20, 43, 55, 149, 155n1, 174, 231 King William’s Town, xvi, 20, 132–33, 135, 137, 141–2, 144, 146–8, 151, 154–5, 233. See also Amathole Museum King William’s Town Mercury, 138 King, Martin Luther Jr, 118 Kleinplasie Open-Air Museum, 29, 34, 198, 208–212, 214–5, 221, 232 visitors to, 210–1, 213–4 Klink, Pieter, 106 Kliptown Open Air Museum, 19 Ku Klux Klan, 120 knowledge, indigenous, 66 Kratz, Corinne, 5, 7, 26–27, 198, 244n44 Küsel, Udo, 64 labour history, 241 Lalu, Premesh, xv, 4, 30, 48–49, 206 land, 21, 49–50 dispossession of, 19, 26, 47, 50 See also Lwandle land invasions, 87–90 Langa Museum, 19, 95n8 Lantern, The, 50 Lantero, Marcos Corrales, 170 Lefebvre, Henri, 6 Legassick, Martin, 9, 28, 144, 147 Le Grange, Lucien, 170 Le Mare, G.W.R, 135–6, 150–2 Levson, Leon, 84 Lewis-Williams, David, 20 Liliesleaf Legacy Project, 19 Linnaeus, Carl, 134, 242 living heritage, 65 Long Walk to Freedom (Mandela), 186 Looking Backwards Looking Forwards: Culture and Development Conference 1993, 63 Luthuli, Albert, 19

Lwandle, xv, 31, 77–78, 90 history, 73–74, 76–77, 80, 84 residents, xiv, 75–82, 84, 86–88, 91–2 See also Hostel 33; Siyanyanzela Lwandle Men’s Hostel Committee, 89 Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, xiv, xv, xvi, 19, 27, 29–32, 72–76, 78–84 and City of Cape Town, 82, 88, 90, 113 funding of, 85–6 visitors to, xiv, 85–86, 93–94, 183 and Western Cape (Province) government, 74, 82, 85–88, 92–93 See also Abavelisi Bengingqi yaseLwandle/ Lwandle Designers; Iimbali zeKhaya: Stories of Home: Memorising Migrancy; Raising the Curtain; Siyanyanzela (exhibition); Unayo na imephu? Do You Have a Map? lynchings, 120–22 Mafikeng, x, xi Makana, 139 Makana (Robben Island ferry), 34, 161, 171–2, 180, 188 Makeka, Mokena, 206–8 Makhanda. See Grahamstown Malawi, 129, 133 Mamdani, Mahmood, 51 Mammals of South-West Africa (Shortridge), 133 Mandela, Nelson, xi, 17, 19, 24, 59, 122–3, 161–2, 166, 169, 171, 176, 181–184, 186, 188, 232, 238, 240 Mandela House Museum, 235 Mandela, Winnie, 19 ‘Mandelaization’, 183, 185 Mapungubwe Collection, 20 Mapungubwe National Park, 20 Marias, Javier, 231, 242 Maritime Museum. See Dias Museum Complex Martin, Marilyn, 28 Marx-Engelbrecht, Jean, 153–4, 159n106 Matroos, Jamie-Leigh, 91 Matthews, Z.K., 174 Mayibuye Archive/Centre. See UWC Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archive Maylam, Paul, 147 Mbembe, Achille, 5, 99n87 McGregor Museum, Kimberley, 8–9, 17, 20, 37n32, 149. See also Ancestors (exhibition); Frontiers (exhibition); Wildebeest Kuil Meintjes, Roger, 170–2 memorialization, 75, 89, 207, 215, 217 memorials, 7, 18, 26, 30–1, 34–5, 179, 198, 204–7, 213, 216 Memorials Beyond Apartheid (exhibition), 194, 215–229 Memorising Migrancy (exhibition), 79 Mercedes, 238–40 Mercedes Benz factory, 238, 241 Merrington, Peter, 54 Metz, Gordon, 217 Meyer, Ivan, 86–7, 120

274 Mgijima, Bongani, xiv–xv, 76–81, 83–4, 206, 209–12 Mhlakaza. See cattle-killing movement migrancy, 80–81, 90, 94 migrant workers, xiv, 74–75, 81, 84, 92, 94 Ministerial Enquiry into the Eviction of the Informal Settlement Community of Lwandle, 88 Minkley, Gary, xv, 7, 9, 148, 169, 210, 228, 237, 239 Minty, Zayd, 198–9 Miscast: Negotiating Khoisan History and Material Culture, 237 modernity, 8, 48, 52, 101, 110, 112, 142, 170, 183–4, 211 Molema family, x Mongezi, Leslie, 161–2, 180 monuments, national, 24, 130, 141, 163, 169, 179, 206 Morkel, Gerald, 200 Mossel Bay, 29, 32, 101–104, 106–111, 113–5, 118–24, 161–4 tourism/tourists in, 117, 119–20, 124 visitors to, 102–103, 116–117, 119, 121, 126 See also Dias, Bartolomeu Mossel Bay Museum, 109–110, 115. See also Bartolomeu Dias Museum Complex Mostert, Nöel, 114, 147 Mowitt, John, 31, 244n56 Mpumalanga Heritage Centre (Durban), 235 Mrubata, Mbulelo, 114–6, 199, 206 Muholi, Zanele, 215 multiculturalism, 33, 101, 105–107, 114–5, 146–7, 151–2, 155, 183, 200, 204 Murray, Noeleen, xiv–xv, 76–78, 90, 197, 227 Murray’s Bay Harbour (Robben Island), 162, 182, 188 museology, 3, 5, 9, 45, 63, 78, 88. 177, 188, 232 MuseumAfrica, 5, 16, 27, 43, 57, 235 museum and heritage studies. See heritage studies museum and heritage studies programmes/ qualifications. See heritage studies programmes/qualifications museum closures, 13–14, 35, 81, 90, 115, 210, 234–7 museum curators, 6–8, 27, 61, 76, 131–2, 134, 140, 149, 166, 173, 199, 203, 209, 217, 219, 222n15, 234, 246 museum dilemmas. See dilemmas museum guides, 34, 86, 163, 185–6, 202 museum practitioners, 8, 61, 171, 180, 182 museum staff, 6, 12, 14, 23, 30, 44n113, 62–64, 79–81, 85–86, 89, 92–94, 115–6, 129, 140, 164, 175, 188, 210, 215, 227, 234–5. See also museum guides museum staff training of, 8, 56, 65, 177–9, 181. See also Robben Island Training Programme

Index museums as chameleons, 43–45 as civic laboratories, 6, 29, 40n104, 68 as memorials of settlement, 31 contradictions in, 2, 15, 33, 77, 92 financial support and funding for, 1, 23, 85, 105, 117, 143, 203–4 and history making, 228, 231, 241 making of, 27, 65 role of, 23, 62–66 museums. See also museum practitioners; and under qualifiers, e.g. apartheid museums; independent museums; ‘memorial’ museums; national museums; natural history museums; post-apartheid museums, etc.; and names of specific museums Museums for South Africa Intersectorial Investigation for National Policy (MUSA) 63–4. See also South African Museum Association Myths, Monuments, Museums: New Premises? conference 1992, xii, 60–4, 179–180 Naidoo, Seelan, 187–8 Nair, Billy, 184 Natal Mercury, 152–3 Natal Museum (Pietermaritzburg), 5 nation building, 3, 23–4, 119, 177, 186, 200. See also reconciliation National Board for the Celebration of Portuguese Discoveries, 101–2 National Commission for the Commemoration of Portuguese Discoveries, 112–3 National Cultural History Museum, 17, 53, 61–62, 64. See also African Window; Tswaing Crater Museum National Heritage Council, 85 National Heritage Resources Act 1999, 74 National Lottery Board, 85 National Monuments Council, 140. See also monuments, national National Museum (Bloemfontein), 50 national museums, 17, 19, 64 national parks, 136 National Party, 63, 101, 104, 113, 122, 164, 196 artefacts of, 22 National Research Foundation, xvii, 7, 80, 203. See also Project on Public Pasts (PoPP) National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), 238, 240 nationalism. See Afrikaner nationalism; settler nationalism; post-apartheid nationalism; white nationalism natural history, 3, 31, 53, 56, 131, 133, 137, 151, 168, 190n30 collections, 10, 17, 46, 49–50, 131, 136, 152, 156n20 museums, 18, 31, 47, 51, 68n15, 129, 155n1 Neethling, Edith, 109

Index275 Nehonde, Simon, 84–85 Nelson Mandela Bay, 233, 235 Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and Commemoration (Houghton), 19 Nelson Mandela Gateway, 161, 169, 171, 176, 182, 188, 232 Nelson Mandela Museum/Michigan State University Museum Project, 116, 122 Nelson Mandela Museum (Mthatha, Qunu and Mfezo), 19 New Brighton (Port Elizabeth), 19, 35, 233 New National Party, 200 New York Chinatown History Project, 230 Ngubane, Ben, 64 Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, 143, 162 Nomzamo (Lwandle), 87–90 Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), 196 Nongqawuse. See cattle-killing movement 1856–57 Norval Foundation, 35, 236 Ntaba kaNdoda (cultural centre), 141–2 Ntantala, Phyllis, 196 Odendaal, André, 41n113, 166, 169 Omar, Rooksana, 66–8 On Campus (UWC official bulletin), 217 oral history/testimonials, xi, 81, 83, 116, 198, 229 oral tradition, 56, 186 Origins Centre, 20 Pageant of the Past, 212 Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), 171, 173 Parks, Rosa, 118, 122 Penn, Nigel, 168 people’s history, xi, xv, 59, 70n79 People’s History Programme, xi, xv, 70n78 Penguin (ferry), 164 penguins, 165, 187 penguins (commemorative), 201, 205, 221 period rooms. See under exhibitions petty apartheid, 118 Pike, Wm, 132 Pinnacle Point Caves, 124 Plaatje, Sol, x, 9, 20 Plummer, Charmian, 77, 83 Pohlandt-McCormick, Helena, xv, 228, 237, 239 political prisoners, xiii, 22, 142, 161, 167–8, 174, 177, 180–1, 232. See also ex-political prisoners Population Registration Act 1950, 73, 196 Port Elizabeth, 18–19, 47, 233 Port Elizabeth Museum, 47–48, 129 Portugal/Portuguese, 32, 101–102, 107–14, 117, 120–1, 123, 164 Post Office Tree (Mossel Bay), 110, 117 post-apartheid museums, 64, 66–67, 123 post-apartheid nationalism, 155

post-apartheid state, ix, xvii, 1–3, 17–8, 20, 29, 33–35, 67–68, 74, 78, 92, 102, 104, 122, 131, 163, 167, 169, 180, 197, 201, 204–5, 207 developmental agenda, 1, 22, 94 Post-Graduate Diploma in Museum and Heritage Studies (UWC). See heritage studies programme/qualifications posters, 21–2, 34, 60, 80, 112–3, 120, 170, 173–4, 197, 204, 212–4, 216–7, 221. See also banners Posthuys, Het (Muizenberg, Cape Town), 208 pot plants, 216, 225n75 Potgieter, Adv., 90 Powers, Richard, 240–1 prisoners. 13, 43, 161, 163, 167. See also common law prisoners; ex-political prisoners; political prisoners Project on Public Pasts (PoPP), 7–8, 78, 80, 82, 131, 197–9, 202–5, 209, 212, 215, 228. See also public history; public pasts proteas, 218, 225n75 Public Eye, 199, 202 public history, xii, xiv, xv, 7–9, 43, 78–79, 179–81, 199, 208 public history, proposed chair of (UWC), 178 public intellectuals, 188 public pasts, 78, 167, 198 Pym, Frank, 131–32 Qonce. See King Williams Town rabbit, as a symbol of liberation, 6, 34, 162–3, 171–2, 179 rabbits, 160 rabbits, an ecological problem, 34, 172, 186–7 racial domination, 161, 196, 200, 208 racial hierarchies, 44, 134 racial prejudices, 211 racial science, 1, 28, 44 Raiford, Leigh, 121 Raising the Curtain (exhibition), 76, 79, 80 Rand Easter Show, 135 Rassool, Ciraj, xi, xii, xv, 9, 28, 149, 169, 172, 178–9, 196, 199, 208, 210, 228, 237 Reader’s Digest, 57–59 reconciliation, 21, 23, 39n71, 131, 177, 180–1, 183, 185–6, 213. See also nation building; Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Red (film), 238–9, 241 Red (Gush), 226, 228 Red Assembly (workshop), 228, 237–40 Red Location Coordinating Forum, 234 Red Location Museum, 19, 35, 233–5 Remembering Slavery (exhibition), 16 removals. See evictions and removals resistance, ix, 19–20, 26–7, 38–9, 66, 76, 80, 84, 101, 106, 117–8, 120–1, 139, 144, 161–2, 167–9, 171, 173, 184–6, 208, 215, 217, 230, 232

276 Retief, Piet, 50–51, 212 Rhodes, Cecil John, 9 Robben Island, xiii, 31, 33–34, 161, 164–5, 167–9, 173–4, 180–1, 184, 186–8, 232 anthropomorphization of, 161–162 lepers on, 169, 182 timeline, 164, 167–9, 174–5 as tourist destination, 188 transformation from prison to museum, xiii, 33–34, 123, 162–8, 171, 180–1, 183 See also common law prisoners; ex-political prisoners; fallow deer; penguins; political prisoners; rabbits; Robert Sobukwe House Robben Island berths. See Jetty 1 Quay 5 Robben Island ferries, 161–4, 166, 170–2, 175. See also Autshumato, Dias, Makana, Penguin, Susan Kruger Robben Island Museum (RIM), xvi, 8, 19, 27, 29, 31, 43, 163, 175–78, 186–6, 188, 231, 237 opening of 1997, 24 visitors to xvii, 34, 163–5, 167, 169–71, 175–6, 182, 185, 188 website, xiii, 167 Robben Island Museum Tourism Department, 186 Robben Island Museum tours, xiii, 33, 163, 175–6, 182–6, 188 Robben Island Museum tours, description of, 182. See also ex-political prisoners as tour guides Robben Island Prison, closure 1996, 166 Robben Island Training Programme, 182 Robert Sobukwe House, 163, 171–3, 182 Robert Sobukwe Museum and Learning Centre, 236 Robinson Pass. See bus accident Robot Zoo (exhibition), 42, 45 Rogoff, Irit, 67, 210 rugby, 21, 39n71. See also Springbok Experience Rupert Foundation Museum, 236 SABMiller, 21 Sached Trust. See South African Committee for Higher Education (Sached) San, 13, 48. See also dioramas; Khoisan Sandile, 50, 139–140, 142, 152 Sáo Rafael, 106 Satyagraha House, 20 segregation, 58, 74, 86, 94, 101, 104–7, 117–8, 120, 123, 134, 136, 141, 144, 166, 196, 200, 202–7, 209 Selous, F.C., 47, 68n15 Separate is not Equal (exhibition), 104, 117–123 settler anniversaries, 34–35, 49, 196–201, 208, 213, 228 settler collections, vii–viii, 10, 18, 33, 49–56, 134, 137–8, 146, 155 settler nationalism, xvi, 101, 105, 196, 232

Index settlers, 48–52, 56, 73, 113, 137–8, 165, 199–200 settlers, 1820, 51, 137 settlers, German, 10, 137, 142, 137, 155 Shackley, Myra, 34 Sharpeville 1960, 58 Shell Museum (Mossel Bay), 101, 117 Shortridge, Guy Chester, 132–7, 140, 151, 156n20 Shortridge Mammal Hall (Amathole Museum), 128, 131, 151, 154 show cases. See under exhibitions Silva, Aníbal António Cavaco, 101 Siopis, Penny, 60 Siyanyanzela, 76, 79, 80, 87–92 Siyanyanzela (exhibition), 92, 94 Slave Lodge, 16, 53. See also Remembering Slavery slavery/slaves, 16, 21, 73, 112, 116, 212 Smile, Lunga, 84–85 Smithsonian Institution, 17, 104 Smithsonian Museum of American History, 117. See also Separate is not Equal Soares, Maria de Jesus Barroso, 108 Sobukwe, Robert, 171, 174, 182. See also Robert Sobukwe House; Robert Sobukwe Museum and Learning Centre Society for Cultural History, 56 Soko, Masa, 90, 92 Solani, Noel, 186 Solms-Delta, 21 Somerset West, 74, 76–77, 82 Sontonga, Enoch, 143 Sophiatown Heritage and Cultural Centre, 18 South Africa post-apartheid provincial divisions, 155n1 South Africa-Atlanta Institutions of Public Culture workshops, 80 South African Association of Art Historians (SAAAH), 56–57 South African Committee for Higher Education (Sached)/Sached Trust, ix, xi, 229 South African Cultural History Museum. See Slave Lodge South African Defence Force/National Defence Force, 198, 203 South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA), 81, 206 South African Holocaust and Genocide Foundation, 22. See also Cape Town Holocaust Centre South African Journal of Cultural History, 56–57 South African Museum, 11, 12, 14, 16–17, 46, 53, 56, 77, 167–8, 183, 202. See also African Culture Gallery; dioramas South African Museum Association (SAMA), vii, x, xii–xiv, 52, 62–63, 66, 177 South African National Gallery (SANG), 17, 28, 55, 237

Index277 South African National Road Agency Ltd (SANRAL), 87–88, 90–91 South African Native National Congress. See African National Congress (ANC) South African Panorama, 108, 110 South African Reserve Bank, 199 South African Rugby Union. See Springbok Experience South Africa’s Yesterdays (Reader’s Digest Association South Africa), 57–60 South End Museum (Port Elizabeth), 18, 81 Soweto, 19, 118, 229, 235 Springbok Experience, 21, 35, 39n71, 235 Steve Biko Centre, 20 Stofberg House (Worcester), 210–1 Stories of Home. See Iimbali zeKhaya ‘Story of Huberta’. See Webb, Denver Strand, 73–74, 76, 87–90, 94. See also Lwandle; Siyanyanzela; Somerset West; Strand Ridge Strand Ridge, 87–88, 91–92 Susan Kruger (ferry), 164, 172, 176 Table Bay/Table Bay Harbour, 73, 161, 163–4, 172, 175, 184, 195 taxidermists, 129, 132, 135–6, 152, 156n20 Taylor, Jeremy, 138 Thorne, Jos, 34, 82–83, 197, 199, 203, 205 Tietze, Anna, 28 Timm, Job, 132 tour guides. See museum guides tourism, 23, 34, 86, 117, 119, 163, 182–3, 185–6, 233 websites, 233–4 tourists, 9–10, 82–119–20, 161–2, 171, 175, 180–1, 183, 185–6, 234. See also visitors Transported of KwaNdebele (Goldblatt), 93 Transkei/ Transkeian Territories, 11, 139–140, 142, 159 Transvaal Staatsmuseum. See Ditsong Museums Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 26, 153, 203 Tswaing Crater Museum, 17, 33 uMkhumbane Cultural and Heritage Museum, 35, 235 Umqombothi, Utywala and Lucky Stars (exhibition), 211 Underhill, Les, 187 Union of South Africa 1960 Jubilee, 54 University of Cape Town (UCT), xiii, xiv, 8, 61, 78, 163, 168, 177–8, 183. See also Centre for Popular Memory University of Pretoria, 177. See also Mapungubwe Collection University of Stellenbosch, 177 University of the Western Cape (UWC), xi, 8, 34, 70n74, 77, 163, 177–8, 197, 215 Library, 29, 215–7, 220–1, 232 University of the Western Cape (UWC). See also Department of History (UWC); People’s

History Programme (UWC); Project on Public Pasts (PoPP); UWC Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archive; Visual History project (UWC) University of the Witwatersrand, xii, 60, 64. 174, 178. See also Origins Centre University of the Witwatersrand History Workshop. See Myths, Monuments, Museums? conference 1992 urban planning, 74 U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation, 86–87 UWC Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archive, xi, xiii, 79–80, 84, 165–70, 217 Uys, Pieter-Dirk, 22 Van Coller, Ruby, 110 Van Riebeeck, Jan, 195–6, 208 iconization of, 195–6, 198–9, 201, 203, 208, 202, 221 Van Riebeeck, Jan, image on bank notes, 199. See also Cape Town 350; Y350? Van Riebeeck Day, 199 Van Riebeeck Festival 1952, 194, 196, 199–200, 203, 205, 212–3, 216, 221 Van Riebeeck statue (Adderley Street, Cape Town), 197, 199, 202 Van Riebeeck statue (inverted), 194, 197–8, 203–4, 208–10, 213–5, 220–1 Van Riebeeck’s hedge, 206–7 Van Straten, Cicely, 141–2, 151 Van Vuuren, Cornelius Petrus Jansen, 73, 80 Van Zyl, Desiree, 175 Velho, Álvaro, 106 Vergelegen, 21 Victor Verster prison, 162 Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, 21, 163–4, 176, 183, 235–6. See also Alfred Basin; Clocktower; Jetty 1 Quay 5; Nelson Mandela Gateway; Victoria Basin Victoria Basin (Waterfront, Cape Town), 21, 163, 164, 176, 183, 235, 236 visitors, 4, 14, 23, 102, 204–206, 233, 235. See also under tourists; and under the names of exhibitions, festivals and sites Visual History project (UWC), 215 Visual Sexuality (exhibition), 215 VOC Foundation, 200 Voigt, Elizabeth, 44 Voortrekker Monument, 60 voortrekkers, 50–51, 212 Voortrekkers (youth movement), 107, 111 Waterfront. See Victoria and Alfred Waterfront (Cape Town) Waterfront Company, 163, 165, 185 Webb, Denver, 138–9, 141–2, 151 Wedding at Cana (Veronese), 238, 240, 242 Weinberg, Eli, 80 Welz, Jean, 212

278 Western Cape (province). See also Cape of Good Hope Western Cape (province) government, 74, 82 Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport (see Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport (Western Cape)) white nationalism, 51, 212 Wildebeest Kuil, 20 William Fehr Collection, 166, 198 William Humphreys Art Gallery, 55 Wings of the Dove (museum tour), 130 Wolsak, 131–2 Women’s and Gender Studies programme, 215 Worcester, 216–7, 232 Worcester Museum. See Kleinplasie Worcester Standard and Advertiser, 211, 214 Workmen’s Compensation II (Younge), 93–4 world history in museums, 102, 104, 112–3, 115, 117, 119, 121–4

Index World War, 1939–1945, xiii, 169, 182 Write Your Own History project, 228–31 Xhosa gallery (Amathole Museum), 33, 130, 140, 143, 149, 151, 154–5 Xhosa language/speakers. See isiXhosa Xhosa. See AmaXhosa Y350? Old Memorials in New Times (exhibition) 30–31, 34, 194, 197–9, 201–9, 211–6, 221, 232–3 Younge, Gavin, 93–4 Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Mocaa), 35, 236 Zille, Helen, 88 Zulu, 11–12, 22, 151