CHAPTER 6. COLLECTIONS CAPTURED IN TIME
6.1 Contested collections
The Msunduzi Museum (VM) relied on donations from Afrikaners materialising memories of the Great Trek. According to letters, the DRC was responsible for the collection (letter from Shawe 1912-02-27), and the museum was established as an institution housing Voortrekker history (letter from Secretary of the Voortrekker Museum 1933-10-17). Mkhize and Mapalala (2002) describe the collection as being biased with no acknowledgement of Africans and as
representing the hegemonic interest of Afrikaners. In Mkhize and Mapalala´s proposal there is a strong political and nationalistic agenda that taints their view of the collection. The museum policy was to represent Afrikaner heritage, not to represent Africans or for that matter Indians or Coloureds – groups that the writers neglect in their criticism. This collection was about belonging and was a materialisation of Afrikaner values located ‘in’ the specific time of collecting, forming a framework for a tradition of collecting. My field research has shown that African objects existed in the collection as early as 1910.105 African material culture in the collection was never intended to represent Africans, but to show a relationship between Afrikaners and Africans. The items were rather memory traces of events concerning Afrikaners and not Africans.
Afrikaners and in general Whites donated to the museums. The material culture that mirrors Whites´ relation to self and other in the society must therefore be seen in relation to the socio- political environment. Appadurai (1986: 11, 31), Frow (1997: 125) and Pearce (1995: 369) hold that donations became important for the understanding of a flow of social relations and for the social messages that transmit complex forms of knowledge. Donations create a bond between the museums and the givers and their role in society which defines the social relationship. They further position the material culture in the museum on the socio-political structures of society, depending on aspects of race, class and gender. Pearce (1995: 181-183), Attfield (2000: 135) and Kavanagh (1989: 127-128) argue that material culture represents knowledge about the world and how the museum presents knowledge as an act of dominance and control. The Msunduzi Museum (VM) collection materialised White interests ‘in’ time and is a reflection of a White society. Even African material culture mirrors White interests and becomes part of the understanding of White heritage rather than African heritage. This explains the norms and values that Whites created for themselves and others ‘in’ that time.
My field research has shown that the Msunduzi Museum (VM) received similar objects from the earliest days of the collection until the present. Material such as photographs, bibles, books and bonnets were donated by Afrikaner families to the museum. Pearce (1995: 243) explains that material from a personal past is able to express and embody profound meaning and deep feeling. In the Msunduzi Museum (VM) the relationship between the donors and the material culture socially constructed what was considered a Voortrekker object. The objects
105 A bracelet from King Dingane´s army.
inherited an Afrikaner identity through the narratives, but objects were no different from the material culture of other White communities. An Afrikaner object was constructed through the meaning given to the object in relationship to the donor and the museum´s concept as a place. In the 1960s the Natal Museum collected similar objects, but in this collection they represented anglophile heritage. The Msunduzi Museum (VM) embodied the donors and the donors´ relation to the Great Trek. Tolia-Kelly (2003: 326) holds that a relationship with material culture signals loss of land and a way of life. The material culture that the Msunduzi Museum (VM) desired, consolidated, and entrenched reflected thoughts of itself. According to Giliomee (2003), the Voortrekkers kept slaves and there were Coloureds on the Treks. I conclude that Coloureds and slaves were not seen as part of the museum´s self-expression and were therefore not collected. The collection was intended to be subjective and represent the memory of the Great Trek embodied in donations. It was thus a way to reaffirm Afrikaner identity and faith.
The Natal Museum collection started as an amateur collection within the Natal Society and was later transferred to the museum in 1904, becoming a scientific collection (NMAR 1904- 1924, Brooks 1988: 114). The museum had an active and passive collection policy, and donations and names of donors were published in the Annual Report (1904-1924), and according to Brooks (1988: 114), also in The Natal Witness. Brooks (1988: 60-65) argues, like Pieterse (2005: 164), that everything was welcomed into the collection and nothing was considered unimportant. The reason was most likely that the museum needed to acquire material and that once it had a collection it could be more selective. Once the Natal Museum was established the collection character changed, focusing on objective scientific principles that treated material culture as if it was essential truths that could be narrated. Although the museum was perceived as a natural history museum, there existed from its inception an ethnographical collection that consisted of African, ‘settler’, ‘Boer’ and Indian material.106 The Annual Report (1905) refers to it as the exhibited collection.
Donations were important to the museum and the police authorities played a large part in the Natal Museum collection process. On demand they forwarded all African articles that had been confiscated, like a ‘native’ blacksmith´s complete outfit (NMAR 1905). The Union defence forces also assembled material from the military campaigns and the museum received
106 The ethnographic collection was larger than the natural history collection.
donations from governors and monasteries (NMAR 1904-1915). This shows a White institutional network across Africa that, by exchange connected to colonisation, produced knowledge about Africans and other groups. The museum was part of a social system and structures which controlled symbolic material.
The Natal Museum expressed a great interest in African material culture. In the first and following Annual Report of the Natal Museum, Ernest Warren wrote that he found it significant to collect African culture because:
it must be pointed out, that it is of the outmost importance, that such specimen of native workmanship should be produced at once for in the near future in Zululand and Natal the use of these things will completely die out, as unfortunately from an ethnologist point of view, the native population is being very profoundly modified by its contacts with the white man (NMAR 1904, 1905, 1907).
This prompted the active procurement of objects from Zululand by the Natal Museum together with the ‘native’ clerk Mr Kambule (NMAR 1904). It is uncertain how much involvement Mr Kambule had in the collection and documentation process. If he was a decision-maker it makes the collection representative of an African self. The collection was a reflection of an African choosing African material culture while working within a colonial institution.
Since most of the African material culture that existed in the museum related to this period, and was collected in these socio-political structures, it became contested in post-1994 museums. The material related to imperial institutions whose activities vigorously subjugated African people. Simpson (1996: 247) holds that colonial collection campaigns contributed to the cultural decline of indigenous people. To transfer commodities to the museum in warfare, as the Union defence forces did, has (drawing on Appadurai (1986: 26)) a special symbolic intensity, since it transfers parts of the enemy to the museum. The collection interpreted ‘in’
the time of Transformation, therefore, triggered social memory of loss of cultural identity, right, land and power. Yet Kavanagh (1989: 130) holds that the material culture could only be of real significance if the symbols had currency and meaning in the social environment in which they existed. In the present they represent the time under which racial segregation was implemented, a situation from which the current political dispensation wanted to distance itself.
Brooks (1988, 2005) regarded the museum as a colonial archive and my informant Thabang (2006-04-04) expressed the belief that the public might understand this as showing that the museum kept its artefacts away from the public and especially away from Africans. During the early days, however, the collection was not hidden in archives, but was shown and collected for display. Lack of storage is important for the discussion of the early collection and shows that ‘settler’ objects played a minor role in the museum and were withdrawn from display due to lack of space and because the museum wanted to show African material culture (NMAR 1909-1924). Yanni (1999: 149) holds that English natural history museums had not been architecturally designed for holding collections; material culture was meant to be displayed. This also affected the material that was accepted into the museum. Much later the director of the Natal Museum said to The Natal Witness that ‘the Natal Museum collections are so big that they have been scattered on old exhibits or not shown at all’ (Rennie 1986-05- 27).
Yanni (1999: 149) holds that objects in display collections usually had minimal description or no labels at all. My field research has shown that there were similarities between Yanni´s statement and the museum´s classification of material. The classification was an ongoing process between the curator and the public, since the architecture contributed to the classification. Simpson (1996: 92) holds that the manner in which artefacts were collected during colonisations resulted in poor documentation. The Natal Museum, in the Annual Reports (1904, 1905, 1906), expressed an interest in documenting artefacts, indigenous names and research patterns of beadwork and the history of objects in general in order to fill gaps and find out more about different groups. My field research has shown that the early collected material culture lacked sufficient documentation and was interpreted during Transformation as numb, as a symbol of White domination and as neglecting or misrepresenting heritage. At the present time, however, collections play a role in the rediscovery of African roots in line with the African Renaissance and in using the colonial collections in museums for nationalistic purposes as a rhetorical tool to argue against White domination and as proof of past African civilisations.
Gore (2004: 28-34) argues that ‘settler’ collections in the 20th century grew as a proof of White domination. He continues that Africans were explicitly denied a history and that artefacts were not traced to African groups, but were collected as examples of taxonomic principles and as part of the flora and fauna. In the Natal Museum African, ‘settler’, ‘Boer’,
and Indian material was classified as ethnographic and incorporated in the same collection.
Both the Natal and Msunduzi Museum (VM) had numerical classification systems under which numbers were given to the objects at point of entry. In its displays, however, the Natal Museum reclassified objects into different themes (NMAR 1905) based on information about the objects. There were therefore multiple classification systems in existence and following Gathercole (1989: 74), I believe that classification systems modify objects from mere things to objects with a specific meaning.
The Natal Museum was interested in preserving African heritage and aimed to do an objective empirical study of it. The same taxonomical idea that was applied to African material culture was also applied to White material culture. The polarisation of nature and culture symbolising chaos-order is an underlying connotation in how Gore (2004) interprets African material culture. Gore´s model suggests that the place, the natural history museum, stipulated the context in which material culture should be interpreted. If African material culture was considered flora and fauna in this context, ironically, White material culture would also be considered flora and fauna in the Natal Museum. Yet Gore would never suggest that Whites be denied history or be equated with animals – as he does to Africans – since Whites were in power of representation in museums. In museums in the past there was not a distinction between natural and human sciences as there is today. It was a case of taxonomical principles articulating a eurocentric museum structure rather than an active cultural subjugation of heritage. Gore (2004) is part of a post-colonial critique that has the aim of stripping the museum of its hierarchal position as a heritage authority. Gore´s argument positions the collection in a socio-political context that exemplifies a point in a post-1994 discussion, but it does not correspond to the empirical material.
Whites desired certain kinds of things for a collection. Hence they created a system for collecting and copied and applied this when collecting African culture. The same kinds of things collected from Whites were collected from Africans. It is important to understand the White perception of the world in order to understand the perception of the other. According to Merleau-Ponty (2004: 406), the perception of the other is bound up with the self and that is how the other is understood. I argue that familiar references were used to classify and understand culture and material culture, and collections are a way of organising relationships and investigating the world. Cameron (2004:65) and Pearce (1992: 37, 56) hold that material culture was a socio-temporal testament of society and an extended self. Therefore Whites
extended the self into African heritage by collecting and classifying African material culture as they would White material culture and so created a familiar space.
Gore (2004) polarises Whites and Africans but the two concepts need to be better defined.
Drawing on Hall (1992: 275-331), I hold that Whites can only be regarded as homogeneous and unified when juxtaposed to the other. Pearce (1995: 308-309) holds that most societies position themselves against the other to produce a self. Pearce (1992: 55-56) also claims that material culture represents a way to narrate selfhood. Gore (2004) can be located within Pearce´s (1995: 314) remark that Whites, regardless of culture, class or creed, were seen as
‘high culture’ in collections. Africans were seen as matching European prehistory and as therefore primitive and ‘low culture’. These options which I draw on Taborsky (1990: 56-57), were maintained and made normative because they created stability within the group and therefore existed as a structure over time. Comparing Africans with the self, Whites concluded that since African culture resembled the culture of pre-history, the African should be classified as pre-modern. This had political overtones because the heritages were not just culturally apart but temporally as well. Knowledge is power and power in the museum was expressed in documentation and classification. The White self was employed to explain African cultures and became a way to instil the power of White socio-political structure into African cultures, which was seen as highly problematic in Transformation and needed to be deconstructed.
The distance between the imagined self and the other is something that museums are at present trying to bridge by changing the classification of their collections; they wish to change the knowledge production and meaning of material culture. Yet at present the material culture collected during colonial times is seen as tainted by the high and low meaning assigned to Whites and Africans. The early collections are at present highly challenged and serve as a reference-point from which Transformation can be constructed and the past deconstructed.
The rejection of colonial collections in Transformation must be regarded as a way to create a new self in the museum and new museum discourses. My field research has shown that collections were interpreted as being static and that Whites were a static fixed-point from where others could be positioned. There are no static centres, however, and only change is consistent.
I claim that the Natal Museum did not intend in its earliest stages to show anglophile nationalism. They had no need to do so as the aftermath of the Anglo-Zulu war and the Anglo-Boer war had made English-speakers the dominant group in the province; the Msunduzi Museum (VM) was in a different position. The collections aimed at an empirical study of material culture and showed a relationship in which English-speakers positioned themselves to other groups. Following Attfield (2000: 223), I hold that objects must be regarded in relation to identity and traditions to show how collectors make a connection to the past through material manifestations. Drawing on Massey (2005: 71), I believe that objects become authentic ‘souvenirs’ of the past. The representation of past spaces takes place through convening it into temporal sequences – challenging space through an imagination of time.
The early collection of the museum was particularly important for the understanding of the institution, since it articulated the interests and the type of material for further collecting activities. Time materialised itself in the collection. Material culture concretises time and encapsulates it in material culture which is then transferred into temporal repetitive patterns.
Time also entrenched the identity of the other and the self and, with the implementation of segregation, the other became all that was different from the self, e.g., in retribalisation in opposition to urbanisation.
My field research has shown that at the same time as the depression, the growth of Afrikaner nationalism, and the strengthening of existing segregation laws in the 1930s, the collection of White material culture in the Natal Museum grew (NMAR 1930-1940), but that the donated objects in the Msunduzi Museum (VM) dropped to half as many. The idea of the museum as a cultural repository was at this point not activated and there seems to be no need to represent the self through material artefacts. The decline could also have been related to the economic crisis in the country. Pearce (1995: 181-183) and Attfield (2000: 135) hold that objects were part of an act of dominance and control and a powerful extension of the self. Therefore I claim that the emerging strong Afrikaner identity, which might not have required an active assemblage of material culture, expressed itself in building monuments. It was perhaps only in heritage crisis or in threat that the collection activities were initiated. The ethnographic collection in the Natal Museum was divided into two collections; the ethnographic collection, consisting of African and Indian material culture, and the cultural historic collection consisting of White material culture. The museum had previously made a division between
the ethnographic collection and the archaeological collection, but after 1930 that division was no longer made (NMAR 1932, 1933-1940).
The amendment of the State-aided Institution Act 23 of 1931 was a professionalisation of the museum sector that strengthened the status of the museum in the Union of South Africa. The museum’s Board of Trustees was in charge of the collection, which was the core of the museum. The board was an extension of the minister’s power, since it was elected by him.
Collection activities were therefore officially undertaken to the government´s liking. More importantly donation was not just regarded as giving to the museum, but as giving to the Union. The act therefore positioned the museum as an instrument at the core of the Union´s cultural activities. There was reciprocity between socio-political developments and the museum, and it was at this time that a real division between White and African material culture was implemented and institutionalised, and not during the colonial period as other researchers have suggested.