Leslie Witz

The 1952 Jan Van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival: Constructing and Contesting Public National History in South Africa

For all approaches to the South African past the icon of Jan Van Riebeeck looms large. Perspectives supportive of the political project of white domination created and perpetuate the icon as the bearer of civilization to the sub-continent and its source of history. Opponents of racial oppression have portrayed Van Riebeeck as public (history) enemy number one of the South African national past. Van Riebeeck remains the figure around which South Africas history is made and contested. But this has not always been the case. Indeed up until the 1950s, Van Riebeeck appeared only in passing in school history texts, and the day of his landing at the Cape was barely commemorated. From the 1950s, however, Van Riebeeck acquired centre stage in South Africas public history. This was not the result of an Afrikaner Nationalist conspiracy but arose out of an attempt to create a settler nationalist ideology. The means to achieve this was a massive celebration throughout the country of the 300th anniversary of Van Riebeecks landing. Here was an attempt to display the growing power of the apartheid state and to assert its confidence. A large festival fair and imaginative historical pageants were pivotal events in establishing the paradigm of a national history and constituting its key elements. The political project of the apartheid state was justified in the festival fair through the juxtaposition of ‘civilization’ and economic progress with ‘primitiveness’ and social ‘backwardness’. The historical pageant in the streets of Cape Town presented a version of South Africas past that legitimated settler rule. Just as the Van Riebeeck tercentenary afforded the white ruling bloc an opportunity to construct an ideological hegemony, it was grasped by the Non-European Unity Movement and the African National Congress to launch political campaigns. Through the public mediums of the resistance press and the mass meeting these organizations presented a counter-history of South Africa. These oppositional forms were an integral part of the making of the festival and the Van Riebeeck icon. In the conflict which played itself out in 1952 there was a remarkable consensus about the meaning of Van Riebeecks landing in 1652. The narrative constructed, both by those seeking to establish apartheid and those who sought to challenge it, represented Van Riebeeck as the spirit of apartheid and the originator of white domination. The ideological frenzy in the centre of Cape Town in 1952 resurrected Van Riebeeck from obscurity and historical amnesia to become the lead actor on South Africas public history stage.

Family Stories or a Group Portrait? South Africa on Display at the KIT Tropenmuseum, 2002–2003: The Making of an Exhibition

This article examines the making of a temporary exhibition, Familieverhalen uit Zuid-Afrika (South African Family Stories) that was installed at the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (KIT) Tropenmuseum (Royal Tropical Institute Museum) in Amsterdam in 2002–2003. It does so in the context of collecting and exhibitionary histories at the Tropenmuseum and its recent attempts to reframe its ethnographic legacies. Familieverhalen is analysed through its team-based processes of production, the social discourses in which it was embedded and its efforts to construct a museum public in the Netherlands. This article argues that despite the aspirations to present complex South African social histories through nine families and their shifting identities, on their own terms, the exhibition may have implicitly relied on some of the racial and ethnic categories it sought to disavow.

Revisualising township tourism in the Western Cape: the Migrant Labour Museum and the re-construction of Lwandle

This article uses a case study of the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, 40 km outside of Cape Town, to discuss how places and their histories come to be reconstituted in and along tourist routes. It argues that responsible tourism cannot merely be analysed through a hosts/guests approach that relies upon investigating impacts. This formulation does not take into account the fundamental ways that tourism is always about appropriation, systems of knowledge production, and the making of signs and values. The ways that Lwandle has been re-visualised suggests that it is much more useful to consider how places, people, cultures and histories are made and re-made in an image economy. The vast visual apparatus of tourism, depictions of place through writers, travellers and officials, gender relations, allocation of resources, claims to expertise, local and national politics, institutional arrangements and previous histories of images, are powerful mechanisms in the establishment, production and circulation of visual tourist knowledge. The journey constructed through Lwandles past is one through a visual economy in which images are made, contested, altered and sometimes remain firmly in place.

Hunting for Museums

This article begins on the floor of the laboratory of the Kaffrarian Museum in King Williams Town, South Africa, in mid January 1949, where the body of the museum director, Guy Chester Shortridge, has just been found. The inquest found that he had died from ‘strychnine poisoning, self-administered’. Strychine was used in the museum as an insecticide and for the preservation of animal specimens. Many of these specimens had been obtained from the early 1920s on the 13 hunting/collecting expeditions that Shortridge went on with the museums skinner and taxidermist, Nicholas Arends. Funded at times by the British and American Museums of Natural History, these trips to Namibia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia provided these museums, together with the Kaffrarian, in the region of 25,000–30,000 specimens. Shortridge used the information he gathered on his expeditions to publish a two-volume directory titled Mammals of South-West Africa. Arends, who left the museum some time after Shortridges death, and in1960 secured an appointment as a technical assistant in the Zoology Department of the newly established University College of the Western Cape, co-authored Trapping Safaris, a vivid account of the museums collecting expeditions. Using these published works, together with correspondence from the museums in London, New York and King Williams Town, this article analyses how the Kaffrarian Museums expeditions into southern and central Africa established institutional knowledge and authority of mammals by making use of colonial structures of administration and supply chains in networks of international museums. Through examining these networks of empire and the narratives produced, this articles considers how the categories of history and the historical sciences were inscribed in and through the lives and deaths of these museum hunters and collectors.

Camp Lwandle: Rehabilitating a migrant labour hostel at the seaside

In southern African narratives of migrant labour, hostels and compounds are represented as typical examples of colonial and apartheid planning. Visual and spatial comparisons are consistently made between the regulatory power of hostels and those of concentration camps. Several of these sites of violence and repression are today being reconfigured as sites of conscience, their artefactual presence on the landscape being constructed as places of remembrance. In this trajectory, a space of seeming anonymity in Lwandle, some 40 km outside of Cape Town, was identified by the newly established museum, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as a structure of significance. The migrant labour compound in Lwandle, of which Hostel 33 is the last remnant, was designed by planners and engineers and laid out as part of a labour camp for male migrant workers in the 1950s. This article explores the ambitious project initiated in 2008, by the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum (and funded largely by the US Ambassadors Cultural Restoration Fund), to restore Hostel 33. Although Hostel 33 was not a very old structure, having been built in 1958/9, nor was it easily considered to have conventional architectural significance, its material presence in present-day Lwandle represents a reminder of the conditions of life in the labour camp. The article traces the work entailed in the restoration process through paying attention to both the built fabric and its materiality, and by giving an account of the explorations into finding ways to restore the hostel to the museum through making it into a site of significance. In place of the centrality of the building as the object of restoration, the work shifted to considering how the hostel could function most effectively as a stage and destination for the Museum’s narrations of the past. Retaining and maintaining Hostel 33 was less concerned with the fabric as an empirical fact of the past, than with its projection into an envisaged future for museum purposes.

A Nineteenth Century Mail Coach, a Fifteenth Century Sailing Ship and a Bus Crash: Re-Thinking Collection and Display in Transport Museums

Abstract This article was written originally as thought-piece in 2010 for the University of the Western Capes Transport Museum Preparatory Project. Funded by the social development and corporate responsibility arm of Hosken Consolidated Investment (HCI), the company that owns Golden Arrow Bus Services, the idea behind the project was to propose a process that could lead towards the development of a museum of bus transport in Cape Town. By drawing on an analysis of the collections and display in existing transport museums I suggest that such a new museum may be able to go beyond the limits of an accumulative and incorporative approach. It can begin to broach the very question of ‘whose history?’ by opening up the politics of acquisition, collection, classification, circulation and display. I present a possibility of accomplishing this by tracking histories of two objects, one in the Outeniqua Transport Museum in George and the other in the Dias Museum Complex in Mossel Bay. These objects are counterpoised with a set of photographs of a bus crash that took place before the 1988 Dias festival and are in the latter museums collection, but not on display in Mossel Bay. These photographs contain a multitude of interrupted pasts of production, reproduction, archival deposit and circulation that disrupt the conventional notion of history as linear change and challenge transport museums to move beyond representing a singular history in a sequential time.

Separation for unity: The garment workers union and the South African clothing workers union 1928 to 1936

Up until its demise in December 1984, the Garment Workers’ Union (GWU)proclaimed that it had always been committed to the principle of non‐racialism. This paper examines the validity of this assertion for the period 1928 ‐1936 when the workforce in the clothing industry in the Transvaal mainly comprised of white Afrikaner women and African men. It is argued that the GWU did not give the African workers in the clothing industry full support. Moreover, it committed itself to a policy of keeping white and black workers separate in order to keep the GWU united.

Red Assembly: East London Calling

Wedding at Cana, completed in 1563, filled the entire rear wall of the Palladian Refectory of the Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, placing through its formal depiction the architectural space in which the monks and their guests dined en abîme. In 1797, after the occupation of Venice, Napoleon seized the painting as spoils of war. Because of its size, the work was dismantled, cut up and re-assembled for the Louvre, where it still hangs today.

History Below the Water Line: The Making of Apartheid’s Last Festival

South Africa, at the beginning of 1988, has been characterized as a society at war (Cock 1989: 1). In response to sustained, organized and widespread popular rebellion from the early 1980s, the apartheid state had declared a state of emergency, set in place a series of measures to remove community leaders (through assassination or imprisonment), made attempts to silence the opposition press, and simultaneously provided for limited social and political reforms. These reforms, the state envisaged, would be the basis for the emergence of leaders who would cooperate with its structures as well as have community support, thereby ensuring the continuance of white minority rule (Cock 1989: 144–7). The South African Defence Force (SADF) was also involved in wars against the Angolan government, which had been going on for almost 13 years, and the anti-colonial liberation forces in Namibia.

History Making and Present Day Politics: The Meaning of Collective Memory in South Africa (review)

The efflorescence of scientific inquiry, which produced a number of important discoveries, thus unfolded alongside the creation of a particular colonial identity and the basic changes occurring at the time in the imperial relationship—especially the move toward representative rule. A good part of A Commonwealth of Knowledge rests on the idea of the rise of a colonial nationalism. Dubow argues, for example, that colonial nationalists in effect pried control from a conservative metropole. This may be slightly overstated. Given their experience in the American colonies, the British were already committed to devolving power, albeit within a broader imperial framework. The issue was never simply one of imperial subjugation or colonial nationalism; there was also the possibility of a broader imperial identity, a kind of imperial citizenship. What particularly complicated the matter during the first half of the nineteenth century was, of course, racial intolerance within the Cape and especially an expanding and very violent (not to mention costly) eastern Cape frontier. The remainder of A Commonwealth of Knowledge covers the period after 1870, a remarkably complex era. Here Dubows command of the material shines, particularly his understanding of the changes within South Africas rococo political landscape. Dubow works against the historiographical grain, which too often has seen the 1910 creation of a unitary state as something of an inevitability. Instead, he holds the focus on the Cape a while longer and looks at the idea of South Africa and how various intellectuals came to define its problems both internally and within the wider British imperial framework. These chapters are particularly rich and defy easy summary. What they do—and largely successfully—is to suggest the many possible roads South Africans could have traveled in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and the ways political debates shaped emerging conceptions of a South African identity in the context of increasing racialization. Here science and identity often moved dialogically, as researchers and institutions cast their attention to South Africas peculiar issues. But always there was a broader dimension, whether defined by the British Empire or later by an essentially Atlantic community. Dubow ends with the intellectual and institutional transformations after the end of apartheid, wondering whether cosmopolitanism will triumph over more exclusivist visions of intellectual work and its place in South Africa and in the wider world. Clifton Crais Emory University Atlanta, Georgia