CHAPTER 6. COLLECTIONS CAPTURED IN TIME
6.9 What was Transformation in collections?
museological discourse over time and acknowledged a reclassification of objects and was dependent on agents, time and space. Policies and classification systems fused academic and museological discourses and the result became visible in research and displays.
of apartheid, and with the professionalisation of the museum and general academic discourse.
Classification systems provide an infrastructure for meaning-making, a context and possible interpretation. They depend on questions asked ‘in’ the time of classification, reposition objects and information and reveal details about society. Reclassifications were seen as part of Transformation, since they renegotiated material culture though the classification systems used which were eurocentric. Only a classification based on all heritage expression would suggest complete Transformation.
The museums relied mainly on donations from Whites. This embodied relations, interest and knowledge of the past and the other, and created relations and belonging between the museums and Whites. Donations emanated from private donors and institutions such as the Union defence forces, governmental institutions, monasteries and police authorities. African material donated in this way could entail loss of cultural rights and power. Struggle material was acquired in the same way, but was overlooked due to its associated meaning and connection to Transformation. Donated objects resulted in minor documentation and loss of information which, in regard to African material culture, has been criticised during Transformation as a misinterpretation of heritage. Yet the same material is used to empower African heritage and to bolster African Renaissance to argue against White domination; this visualises the ambiguous position of Transformation. During Transformation community projects, amasiko and a greater awareness of the museums has resulted in donations from Indians and Africans. This is considered important for Transformation.
Transformation has regarded Whites during colonial, Victorian and apartheid times as a static centre, but my research has shown that anglophile and Afrikaner museums differ and that museums changed with time and are not static. The Du Toit Report (1949), Rood-Coetzer (1966) and the Niemand Report (1975) were not pleased with the Msunduzi Museum’s collection. During Transformation the museum would come to fulfil government requirements for collections especially after 2002. The Natal Museum was in line with government standards and also changed its collection objectives more. The museum was mostly interested in African material culture, but in the 1960s and 1970s the focus shifted to White material culture in keeping with the increasingly segregated socio-political environment. It was a nationalistic anglophile expression manifesting traditional values and preserving White heritage. This collection contributed to the museum becoming an ‘own affairs’ museum during the 1980s. Nationalistic expressions and apartheid history-writing were challenged in
the 1970s with the appointment of archaeologists who renegotiated material culture, resulting in a drop in donations. Archaeology during Transformation came to serve nationalistic purposes and was therefore not challenged in the same way as the ethnographic collection although it posed the same bias as Whites collecting the African other. In the 1980s, affected by the tricameral parliament, Indian heritage was of interest. It was not until the Threads in Time project, however, that South African Indian material culture was collected and not ancient exotic artefacts from India. The Amandla project initiated a collection of struggle material which became a norm during Transformation. This came to develop into a nationalistic expression during Transformation and was considered nation-building.
The two museums collected according to a set of standards that they developed at inception.
These were considered representations of society and were institutionalised. Representations are a symbolic dimension linked to a wider set of ideas related to the self and other. They include ideas about gender roles, class and age and are not free-floating but are situated in time and space. Whites used their experience of the self as a means of classification and applied this to the other to comprehend heritage expressions. They embodied the other culture within their own classification system and acted it out within a eurocentric norm. In order to understand why objects were collected, they have to be positioned in relationship to the socio- political structures.
MUSA (1994) located museums as collection-based, as criticised by Odendaal (1994b) and Odendaal et al (1994), but the ANC policy (Wilmot 1993) had few practical solutions and suggestions for collections and the issues along ideological lines. The RDP (ANC 1994) suggested that collections must fully represent the entire South African heritage. ACTAG (1995) and the White Papers (1996) defined museums as collection-based but also suggested amasiko, which had not yet been legally protected. Amasiko was proposed as a way to deal with the material representation of heritage in collections. Instead of collecting material culture, museums should document events and intangible aspects. The method attempted to deconstruct eurocentrism and proposed a multicultural perspective. Museums, however, collect material culture as symbols of amasiko. The method has resulted in donations from the groups that were documented. During the 1990s the Msunduzi Museum (VM) tried to establish a music collection to avoid political implications, and the Natal Museum started to fill gaps in their ethnographic collection through research programmes and connections with African artists and dealers. Yet both museums explored heritage along traditional lines and
overlooked multicultural South African heritage expression. Transformation has mainly had an African focus and has to a large extent neglected Indian and Coloured heritage.
Transformation and apartheid reveal similar interest in heritage expressions; both periods attempted to show nation-building, origin, self-governance and traditionalism. The nationalistic expression of Transformation has not been criticised, but is celebrated in museological literature which has not acknowledged that Transformation builds on a similar basis to that of apartheid.