Museum Times: Changing Histories in South Africa

By Leslie Witz

Museums flourished in post-apartheid South Africa. In older museums, there were renovations on the go, and at least fifty new museums opened. Most sought to depict violence and suffering under apartheid and the growth of resistance. These unlikely journeys are tracked as museums became a primary setting for contesting histories. From the renowned Robben Island Museum to the almost unknown Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, the author demonstrates how an institution concerned with the conservation of the past is simultaneously a site for changing history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jun 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781800735392

Leslie Witz

Leslie Witz is a professor in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. He teaches African history and public history, and his research focuses on how different histories are created and represented in the public domain. Publications include Apartheid’s Festival; Hostels, Homes Museum (with Noëleen Murray); and Unsettled History (with Ciraj Rassool and Gary Minkley).

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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: Nineteenth-Century 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

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 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

ILLUSTRATIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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 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.

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, 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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