CHAPTER 6. COLLECTIONS CAPTURED IN TIME
6.3 Towards transformed collections
community reconnecting to national romantic ideals of the peasant, manifesting traditional values, and re-establishing them in a changing environment.
Roodt-Coetzee (1966: 4) argued that the Msunduzi Museum (VM) collection was in the past impressive, but in 1966 when he compared it to other collections he found it limited. Nor was he impressed with the classification, and the only thing to his satisfaction was the collection of paper material and books. Roodt-Coetzee´s report was part of an investigation to prepare the Cultural Institutions Act 29 of 1969 that was similar in many ways to the State-aided Institutions Act 23 of 1931. In the new act the council´s main area of responsibility was to receive, hold and preserve collections that were placed under its care and management. In the act the objects are specified as given to the government and the Republic´s inhabitants to benefit them, so that museums at this time clearly functioned as repositories of important objects. The status of the museum in relation to the government cannot be doubted in this case. This must be considered in relation to the fact that Whites were regarded as members of the republic. In this context the objects that were preserved in the museums can be read as benefiting Whites.
culture. This was further institutionalised and reinterpreted to match research objectives.
Shepherd (2003: 836) holds that in the 1970s professional and amateur archaeologists opposed each other as archaeology became more professionalised. These debates coincide with the decrease of donated archaeological objects in the Natal Museum. I hold that when national Transformation started, the museum collection was not a scattered Victorian collection to subjugate Africans, but a professional collection with research objectives.
Following Lowenthal´s (1996) division of history and heritage, I conclude that the Natal Museum developed according to governmental requirements of scientific research while the Msunduzi Museum (VM) continued to be a heritage site located in between a professional and voluntary management. In the 1970s the Msunduzi Museum (VM) encouraged the people to donate objects and therefore established a group to try and enhance its collection (VMAR 1972). In the museum heritage was connected to the public and was therefore an extension of the self. The Natal Museum represented a White scientific culture, and the professionalisation prompted an unexpected critique of previous history-writing. There was a discrepancy between the state´s intended heritage development and the outcome of research. This has not been acknowledged in Transformation and it calls for an investigation of apartheid cultural heritage policies and how they were interpreted by the advocates of Transformation.
The Niemand Report (1975: 2) stated that most cultural history collections in the country were inadequate, or at best incomplete, either because of a scarcity of cultural items or because the desired items were no longer donated and had to be bought at auctions. The report stated that material (except for that in the Natal Museum) was stored inadequately and described the conditions as appalling. The critique during Transformation portrayed the museums as static institutions pleasing to the government and which did not need to be changed. But the Niemand Report shows harsh criticism of museums and holds several similarities with the critique proposed during Transformation. This means that the critique was not time-specific, but place-specific. This means that the critique was specific to the conditions of the museums and not specific to Transformation and departure from apartheid. The Niemand Report gives an understanding of how collections could ideally have functioned during apartheid, and it needs to be acknowledged as leading up to rather than hindering Transformation.
At the same time as the Niemand Report, the Natal Museum established a department of ethno-archaeology in 1975. According to Demmer (2004: 11), the department was to better
care for the ethnographic collection and investigate the similarities between society and patterns in the material culture of the Nguni-speaking people. According to Maggs (1993: 73), this was to explore the boundaries between archaeology and anthropology. Now the two collections were integrated in scientific research projects and became part of a larger flow of knowledge.
In 1978 the Natal Museum realised that porcelain could be dated to within a few years, coinciding with the discovery of shipwrecks along the Natal and Transkei (Eastern Cape) coast that predated 1655109 (The Natal Witness 1978-12-16). These shipwrecks did not just give an account of Whites, but of how groups interacted and exchanged knowledge and goods with each other. The archaeologist could, through White material culture, research the development of African groups. This repositions the porcelain from being White material culture to giving accounts of African heritage. It demonstrates how material culture can travel through value spheres, how it can be reinterpreted numerous times, and how it is socially constructed and depends on socio-political structures. Drawing on Jordan (2003: 21), I suggest that interpretations of material culture across time-space are a network of power and knowledge to gain a sense of selfhood. The narrative that the curator constructed of these objects represented an embryo to the nation-building agenda that would form around 1994.
Change was therefore dependent on an individual decision materialised in collections. For Transformation these aspects became important and difficult to deal with, because curators were used to the polarisation between races.
At present the concept of African heritage is far from resolved and shows that multiculturalism did not fit the concept of Transformation. For my informant, African heritage was material from indigenous people in South Africa; he held that museums should reflect African and not White material culture since people would be confused by coming to the museum without knowing the context in which it existed, whether African or European (Thabang 2006-04-04). This view was shared by the Director of Heritage and Museums Service in KwaZulu-Natal, Dolly Khumalo, who said in an interview in The Witness that ‘you should not go to a museum in this country and see someone else’s culture and not your own’
(Von Klemperer 2005-03-18). This view shows a static approach to heritage as separate and segregated with no room for multiculturalism. The classification of culture that my informant
109 The year South Africa was allegedly founded.
and Khumalo represented is very close to the entrenched ideas of apartheid and far from the multicultural approach that DAC emphasises. The multiculturalism promoted by DAC had not yet crystallised in collections because people (no matter their race) have a strong entrenched thinking of group identity that they apply to material culture and because the boundary of classification hindered multicultural material which had to be classified in the Natal Museum between different groups.
There was a discrepancy between the development in the Natal Museum and the Niemand Report (1975) which suggests that cultural history – White history – should form separate museums. This suggestion was the embryo of the ‘own affairs’ and ‘general affairs’ concept and a way to safeguard White heritage. It was an expression of power and borderlines and a way to separate White heritage from African heritage. The Natal Museum reacted to the report in 1981 (Stuckenberg 1981) and made suggestions to develop a collection along academic, curatorial and acquisitive lines and to incorporate Indian material culture in the collection. Opening the cultural history collection to Indian material was one of the museum´s first steps in deconstructing the collection´s classification of cultural history and ethnography and in acknowledging Indian heritage as self-expression. The Natal Museum suggested a focus on (KwaZulu) Natal, similar to a recommendation of the Du Toit Report (1949) and a focus on domestic, ephemeral objects, but states that agricultural equipment, machinery and buildings should not be accessioned.
The focus on Natal was a professionalisation but also a way to define anglophile White heritage. Emphasising domestic appliances could be a way to resolve a problem of lack of space. Collecting domestic appliances was a way of connecting to the home as a safe place in the world in the turbulent 1980s. Disregarding farming equipment, which has strong symbolism in Afrikanerdom, was a way to manifest anglophile urban heritage. The Niemand Report (1975) made provision for a cultural history department, established in 1989 in Natal Museum. In time the cultural history department would also challenge White dominance, but during its inception it would focus on colonial military aspects which could be seen embodying an enlargement of patriarchal anglophile identity.