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asked for the way to say ‘I am lost in the jungle’. After an exchange between the hunter and interpreter Nash was informed that the man did not get lost in the jungle. The query was as fatuous as that of inquiring from a city dweller “how he said ‘I am lost in my apartment’”;
“[l]acking a concept of controlled and uncontrolled nature, the Malaysian had no conception of wilderness” (Nash 1982, cited in Short, 1991:5).
As agricultural societies developed so did their idea of the ‘wild’ and its inhabitants.
Interestingly, the word ‘savage’ means “pertaining to the woods” from the Latin root ‘silva’
meaning “wood” (Short, 1991:8). Fear of the wilderness was in part a fear of the uncontrolled as much as the unknown and this included those who lived in the wild since they existed both spatially and socially outside of the prevailing formalised order. The idea soon became entrenched that those residing in the wilderness were a threat to the ‘civilised’. At the same time there was the fear of the effects of the wild on civilised people as “[c]ontact with the wilderness was contact with the wild unconscious” (ibid). The wilderness soon turned into an
“environmental metaphor for the dark side of the psyche” (ibid). The act of being in the wild, therefore, came to be a catalyst for deviant change in a person, and in cases of prolonged exposure would lead to a kind of dark regression, the likes of which are presented in folklore and contemporary media such as the Reality Television cult success Survivor.44
In contrast to the classicist born notion of the ignoble or primitive savage was that of the romantic tradition from which the belief arose that an appreciative contact with the wilderness was commensurate with a ‘sublime dignity’ (Short, 1991:16; Tomaselli 1995).
Themes of this motif include ecological sensitivity, custodianship, innocence, beauty, humanness and harmony (Guenther, 1980). The romantics saw ‘uncivilised’ communities as remnants of a “golden age” (Short, 1991:22). Their view of industrial progress could be summed up in Jean Jacques Rousseau’s famed dictum “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains” (1997:41). The noble savage motif thus became antithetical to the industrial onslaught, “the tyranny of the clock”, the excesses of materialism, consumption and its exponential uncertainties (Short, 1991:23). This resulted in groups such as the Pacific islanders, Australian Aborigines, North American Indians and San of the Kalahari “presented
44 The success of Survivor established the show as the archetypal format for contemporary Reality Television, thus perpetuating the development of reality shows proffering the “promise of a return to a natural and implicitly more traditional (even, at times, tribal) environment” (Andrejevic, 2004:195).
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as exemplars of a more ecologically sound, spiritually richer, freer, and less alienated society than our own” (1991:23–24).
While seemingly incongruous, themes of the noble and ignoble savage have existed alongside each other for centuries. In times when the noble savage motif grew in popularity there were those who, for example, distinguished between two kinds of San groups, firstly “the marauding bands of runaway slaves, escaped criminals (often of mixed ancestry) and other malefactors”; and, secondly, the ‘true Bushmen’ (Barnard, 2007:17). Making his own distinction, the French traveller and illustrator François le Vaillant45 (1790), called this latter group Housouanas after a Khoe name for them. Le Valliant offered a sympathetic portrayal of the Housouana. His writings and paintings are imbibed with a moral discourse, emphatically in contradiction to the argument for colonisation. Resisting the charge of the Housouana as beastly and offering reasons for, if not rationalising, their banditry, Le Valliant rendered white colonists the real slaughterers and thieves. It is little wonder then that his work was largely ignored in terms of what Ian Glenn (2010) calls the ‘great South African texts’. Glenn describes Le Valliant’s portrayals of San peoples as “less racist, [and] more interested in the political and personal reality of indigenous persons in South Africa than later writing would be” (Glenn, 1996:49) and most acutely “…rather too sophisticated and morally troubling for White South African comprehension [of the time]” (1996:42).
Essentialist representations of San peoples have been taken up by filmmakers and documentarists alike. By the 1950s San living as hunter-gatherers had entered the realm of myth, themes of which include San peoples as remnants of a golden age; a time of purity, innocence and harmony with nature (Guenther, 1980). San peoples as subjects of documentary and popular film have been ‘directed’ in correspondence with this myth. The romantic musings of Laurens van der Post (1958, 1961) have been echoed in publications as recent as March 2013, when Paul John Myburgh (2013) published The Bushman Winter Has Come, a book popularised as “[t]he true story of the last band of /Gwikwe Bushmen on the Great Sand Face” (front blurb) but one that documents Myburgh’s own spiritual awakening.
Readers are encouraged to journey with the author “towards a place where we may, once again, know who we are in the context of our life on this earth… towards a time when we
45 Le Vaillant was among the first to popularise a romantic image of Africa and the San. His watercolours, presenting an autochthonous idyll, captivated European audiences so much so that his books were promptly translated into English, German, Dutch, Russian, Swedish, Danish and Italian (Barnard, 2007:17; Lloyd 2004).
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may answer the /Gwikwe’s morning greeting, Tsamkwa/tge? (Are your eyes nicely open?) with a confident Yes” (penguinbooks.co.za). The /Gwikwe in this regard are the focus of a postmodern new age spiritualism. Readers-cum-disciples are encouraged, through a safe and mediated experience of them, to search for harmony, wholeness and meaning.
Whether deliberate scene-setting, such as in anthropologist John Marshall’s documentary The Hunters (1958), a fact to which he admitted after almost forty years (Tomaselli, 2003a), or the product of the awe-struck anthropologist/filmmaker/documentarist/writer such ‘direction’
highlights a desire to mediate and perpetuate the myth (Tomaselli 2003a; Gordon & Douglas 2000). This speaks to a deep sense of longing by Westerners (and tourists) for the temporary recovery, at least, of the innocence and simplicity dangled by interactions with pre-modern societies. This return to ‘nature’ (the lost apartment) from where we once came, may partly explain why the original Gods Must be Crazy films (1980, 1989) were so popular at their times of release (cf. Tomaselli 2006; McLennan-Dodd & Tomaselli 2005), offering, as they did, a means to recover ‘the wilderness’ in an unthreatening way.
Whether, noble or ignoble, the concern is that such a view perpetuates an essentialised primitive archetype which serves to relegate already marginalised groups to discourses of conservation and paternalism. In this sense, the silencing of the subaltern (cf. Spivak, 1985) is further entrenched. Nevertheless, strides have been made pertaining to the rise of indigenous rights worldwide (cf. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007).
This increased politicisation, coterminous as it was with a global shift in perspective of museological practice, prompted re-workings of out-dated modes of interpretation and presentation of indigenous peoples within the museum space. The following sections highlight the specific changes that occurred in the presentation and interpretation of San peoples in the South African context. Exhibition practices are explored as they relate to political changes at the time.
Historic presentations of San peoples
In colonial South Africa, San peoples were depicted as depraved, a scourge, and hierarchically lower than human beings (Finlay & Barnabas 2012b; Chidester 1996; Watson 1991; Van Zyl 1980). By the 1850s many San had concealed their genealogical origins;
leaving behind a hunter-gatherer lifestyle they sought employment as servants and labourers
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on white-owned farms (Watson, 1991). Dispossessed and hunted, they were considered virtually extinct, victims of genocide, by the end of the nineteenth century (Saugestad 2004;
Skotnes 1996; Watson, 1991). Nevertheless, an image of people described as San or Bushmen had been used historically in instances of political sensitivity to build an image of South Africa as developing beyond merely another British outpost (Coombes, 2004). An example of this was the incorporation of San people in exhibitions intended to portray South Africa “as an emerging country with its own particular cultural and economic contribution to make within the British Empire” (2004:210). In the Union Pageant of 1910 a group of San appeared as part of a battle re-enactment. In 1936 at the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg another group featured in a diorama called the ‘Bushmen Camp’ at the same time as there was a public campaign to set up a San reserve in the Kalahari Gemsbok Park (Dubow, 1995).
This aligned satisfactorily within the volkekunde tradition, an Afrikaans brand of cultural anthropology that had risen to prominence in the 1940s and which formed the basis of much anthropological training in South Africa at the time (Coombes 2004; Van Rensburg & Van der Waal 1999; Witz 1997; Marais 1993). Serving the objectives of the apartheid state, the perspective held that mankind was divided into races/ethnic units (volke) and that each of these had its own particular culture (Sharp, 1981). Segregation was described as a way to ensure that each race was free to develop its own way of life without the risk of miscegenation creating undesirable impurities. More specifically, this would ensure the strengthening of the white (Afrikaner) ‘race’ (ibid).
In 1952 San performers featured as part of the Jan van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival, a celebration of three hundred years of white settlement in South Africa. During this time apartheid was under considerable international criticism and the San’s involvement in the festival was intended to portray a culturally sensitive and responsible government making efforts to protect and preserve a race on the edge of extinction (Witz, 1997). Details of how San peoples came to be so close to disappearance were omitted; by and large the presentation of their history in this festival was highly selective, their dispossession and genocide passed over. They were cast in the role of a people close to nature and threatened with extinction by incursions of the modern world. The ‘Bantu’ races at the festival were shown engaged “in
‘productive labour’ and benefiting from the ‘clean’ and ‘modern’ conditions provided for them in the Transvaal Chamber of Mines pavilion, thus emphasising the apparently,
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‘progressive’ changes wrought by the South African government” (Coombes, 2004:211).
Less progressive were the crowds at the festival whose offensive behaviour (gaping at and physically mishandling the San—at times lifting up their clothes for a better view of their bodies) incensed the performers and caused them to leave the festival early. Likening the white spectators to baboons, the San refused to perform on demand. The liberal press, already critical of the representation of San peoples at the festival, picked up on this and began a dialogue concerning questions raised about the preservation of their race and “the fundamental assumptions of the ‘white nation’s’ claim to modernity” (Witz, 1997:298; cf.
Dubin 2009). This dialogue was quelled, however, by the much louder voice of the state.
Earlier in 1949, at the inauguration of the Voortrekker Monument, on the eve of the apartheid state, the opening speeches described the presence of San peoples in South Africa as a fact to be reconciled with Dutch colonialism (Coombes, 2004). Encountered by the Dutch expansion eastward the San were recognised as the “real aborigines of Southern Africa” (Rousseau 1949, cited in Coombes, 2004:213). Pursued, captured, sold and slaughtered, the remnants succumbing to the outbreak of smallpox in the first half of the eighteenth century, they were no longer a threat to Dutch expansion. Thus they could be:
…safely claimed as both the legitimate inhabitants of South Africa—the first South Africans—and a primitive version of early man, which necessarily gave way to the superior civilization of the European but whose historical and anthropological significance also leant status to the new republic in scientific terms. (Coombes, 2004:213)
Anatomical dissections in the nineteenth century and the trafficking of San skeletons and human remains fuelled by anthropological fascination are proof of the abject discriminatory and often violent ways in which San peoples were treated. Specious conceptions of science were rife in this period and a certain number of widely held beliefs in the European scientific community became the bedrock on which many museums were founded. At the same time as modern theories of racial segregation were beginning to be examined on a political level, physical anthropology became a dominating force in South Africa perpetuating a belief in the direct correlation between physical type and evolutionary status (Coombes 2004; Dubow 1995). In the early nineteenth century groups of San were exhibited as part of many European
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travelling ‘freak’ shows as well as other exhibitions with more ‘scientific’ pretentions.
Mathias Guenther (1980) cites a number of nineteenth-century examples in which San peoples are explicitly equated to animals. There is evidence to suggest that the Dutch term, Bosmanneken from which Bushman is derived, was a literal translation of the Malay word OrangOutan meaning ‘man of the forest’ (ibid). What is evidenced by the above is the notion of San peoples as uncivilised and less than human.
Museological presentations
Founded in 1825, the South African Museum (SAM) situated in Cape Town, is the foremost natural history museum in the country (Coombes 2004; Davison 1993). In the early 1900s San peoples became a primary research focus of the museum. In 1905 the British and South African Associations for the Advancement of Science held a joint annual meeting in South Africa. Prescriptions emerging from this meeting included the imperative to gather as much data as possible on the fast dwindling ‘prehistoric’ San. This coincided with a shift toward physical anthropology in the country at the time and significantly influenced the data accrued.
The majority of the remaining San were dispersed among the country’s prisons (many were incarcerated for petty crimes that were most likely the result of their dispossession and displacement). Louis Peringuey, director at SAM, obtained access to these individuals and responded to the above imperative with a project that spanned seventeen years (1907 to 1924) (Coombes 2004; Davison 1993).
Pureness of race was a priority and ‘purebred’ San were sought out based on physical criteria such as steatopygia in women. Precise measurements were taken of physical attributes involving what was in all probability a “hideous degree of humiliating scrutiny and manhandling” (Coombes, 2004:217). Approximately eighty-eight body casts were made.
They were later painted in the museum studio and some were put on display. Even into the late 1920s when it was challenged in anthropological circles the emphasis remained on physical anthropology with a comprehensive eschewal of complex social and cultural networks. The casts were recorded by registration number in terms of racial type, sex and location in the museum records. Consequently the individuality of each subject was lost (Dubin 2009; Coombes 2004). The label on the display case read as follows:
82 Cape Bushmen:
The Bushmen of the Cape appear to have been the purest-blooded representatives of the Bushman stock, much purer than those of the Kalahari and other more northerly districts. They are now practically extinct. They were light in colour and of small or medium height; the prominent posterior development (steatopygia) of the women was a characteristic of the race. To anthropologists the Bushmen are one of the most interesting races in the world. There are strong grounds for suspecting that they are of the same stock as the remote Upper Palaeolithic period. This cannot yet be definitely asserted but recent discoveries in North and East Africa have tended to strengthen the probability considerably. (cited in Davison, 1993:179)
The use of the past tense implicitly historicises these San, while the text states this unequivocally. As a consequence, San are portrayed as a past people and are relegated to the record books. This is in contrast to the Museum having been actively engaged in seeking out San for the process of casting. The label, describing their skin colour and height, highlights the emphasis on physical characteristics prominent in anthropology at the time. In a somewhat paradoxical turn, it was during the 1950s, the first decade of apartheid, in which plans were laid out to incorporate the casts into a diorama to portray the figures as part of a multifaceted social and cultural network. Loosely based on African Scenery and Animals 1804–5, an aquatint by the English artist and draughtsman Samuel Daniell (1805), the scene depicts the figures going about their everyday tasks at a campsite. The label accompanying this new arrangement read as follows (cited in Davison, 1991:159):
A Cape Bushman Camp in the Karoo:
This diorama shows some activities of hunter-gatherers. The viewer should imagine that a large flock of birds has flown overhead and attracted the attention of the group.
With the exception of a few in Gordonia, there are no Bushmen living in the Cape.
The figures shown here are PLASTER CASTS [sic] of living people aged between 18 and 60, excepting the man making fire who was alleged to have been about 100. They were nearly all living in the Prieska and Carnarvon districts. The casts were made by Mr. James Drury, modeller at the Museum from 1902–1942.
While an improvement to its predecessor, the display nevertheless lacked “specific historical temporality” and engendered a narrative of a disappeared people (Coombes, 2004:222). Apart from misrepresentations of San groups both past and present, Annie Coombes proposes that
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the most significant concern was that the body casts represented the physical traces of persons who had since died, the circumstances of which were often reprehensible (ibid). The figures have a “visceral association with death and dissection”; they cannot be separate from this fact of their origin and, in this lies the primary concern of the casts on display (ibid).
Nevertheless, the diorama had become entrenched in communal knowledge, even printed onto postcards and sold at tourist venues around the city of Cape Town. In 1988, recognising the potential of the diorama to increase public awareness of museum practice and facilitate visitor participation, the museum took further steps to improve its representations beginning with a changed label which now read (Davison, 1991:163):
In the early nineteenth century /Xam hunter-gatherers lived in the semi-desert Karoo.
From hilltop camps they could watch the movements of game on the plains and spot the approach of enemies. Their way of life was shaped by the seasonal availability of edible plants, water and the movements of game. To avoid overusing food and water supplies /Xam bands ranged widely within hunting territories which were defined by recognised landmarks. By the mid-nineteenth century most hunter-gatherers in the Karoo had been killed in fighting with advancing colonialists and displaced Khoikhoi.
The survivors were drawn into colonial society as labourers and servants.
Thus began the re-imaging of the diorama. Storyboard panels were set up adjacent to the display in a style evoking its unfinished nature, making an implicit statement about the production and re-production of myth (about San peoples in particular). Information about the casting process was added along with the names of individuals who were cast as well as archive photographs of these individuals. Perhaps most striking was the additional cast of a San woman set against a picture of the diorama and dressed in ‘modern’ attire—headscarf, shirt and long skirt—which would have been her daily wear at the time. With these additions, the diorama is shown to be a construct of its time. Later, further additions were included to highlight the methodological and ideological framework on which anthropology was founded at the time of casting. The mainstream focus on physical anthropology is further offset by additional information on the work of Bleek and Lloyd (1911).
Having worked on the expansion of the display, Patricia Davison identifies the need to find
“new ways of displaying objects, a new display vocabulary, so that the visual rhetoric will encourage an awareness of multiple views and not reduce the complex presence of an artefact