Hamilton and Leibhammer stir the pot in Iziko panel discussion
The Centre is now housed in a building designed by Sir Herbert Baker that has been renovated to include a nine-storey state-of-the-art storage facility to house collections of indigenous cultural material from southern Africa, artefacts from the colonial period of the Cape, including maritime and historical archaeology, as well as collections of world ceramics, furniture, coins and textiles, totalling over 250 000 objects. Its launch marked a significant shift in the institution's thinking and practice, with collections once separated by histories of colonialism and apartheid now being housed under the same roof.
Until recently natural history, precolonial archaeology and ethnography collections were housed in the South African Museum while collections of 'historic' material were housed in the SA Cultural History Museum (today known as the Slave Lodge). Collections, which have been packed away in storage since 2006, are now being unpacked and viewed afresh by researchers and curators.
Entitled Social History Collections: Registering Change in Iziko after Apartheid, the panel discussion was introduced by Lalou Meltzer, Director of Iziko's Social History Collections, who provided some insight into the institution's history and the way in which collections had been historically separated.
Admitting that, 'we have many skeletons in cupboards, literally, and accumulated baggage, metaphorically speaking', she made a brave and impassioned plea for participants to engage with the institution and support it as it moved forward in a new direction.
Hamilton, National Research Foundation Professor in Archives and Public Culture at the University of Cape Town, and Leibhammer, Curator of Southern Africa Traditional Collection at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, delivered a presentation, entitled Ethnologised Pasts and their Archival Future. They took the opportunity to introduce some of the theoretical ideas, methodologies and findings of the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative to the community of museum practitioners.
They noted that material objects were excluded from the archive, marking off regulated knowledge from uncontrolled knowledge. While they had hoped to convene evidence from collections scattered across a number of institutions they found that conditions within the institutions, and a general apathy towards precolonial material, made this almost impossible. Turning the focus of their attention to the activity of collecting they concluded that creating the 'biography' of a collection offered them insight into the way that objects change their contexts and are shaped by their contexts.
Other panelists included Professor Ciraj Rassool, Director of the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of the Western Cape; Professor Leslie Witz of the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape; Dr Noor Nieftagodien, Deputy-Director of the Wits History Workshop and Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Witwatersrand. [Edited from an original report by Jo-Anne Duggan and Xolelwa Kashe-Katiya]