Wandile Kasibe
The month of September is an important period on our national calendar in that it is dedicated and set aside to commemorate the country’s heritage.
Not only this, but it is also a crucial period for reflection, to take stock of the journey we have travelled as a nation, one born out of a political milieu in which one race of men superimposed itself over another through a dehumanising process of colonisation, imperialism and later apartheid.
All of these oppressive systems were intentionally designed to produce the asymmetries that our society is suffering from today.
To understand the history of race and racism in South Africa is to understand the genesis of pseudo race “scientific” theories that were perfected in museums through the acquisition of skeletal remains and anthropological displays, and then later put into apartheid legislation to dislodge the African from humanity into what Frantz Fanon calls the “zone of non-being” as “lesser” human beings.
Bernard Magubane crystallised this correlation between colonial violence and its sociological effects when he argues that the dehumanisation of the African “was in conformity with the laws of evolution theory and natural history”.
“Any ideological crutch, from the fall of man to the kinship of negro and ape, was used to justify the brutality of slavery.”
I want to take Magubane’s reasoning further to argue that the South African Natural History Museum, as a colonial institution, in fact became complicit, entangled and colluded in the perpetuation of colonial “crimes against humanity”, thereby rendering its own institutionality a colonial “crime scene” that requires rigorous “de-colonial” investigation in the “post-colonial” era.
And this critique should not be understood as an attack on the institution, but a critical assessment of its colonial baggage, which it carries from the time of its establishment till today.
The South African Museum’s collection dates back to June 1825, when Lord Charles Somerset directed the establishment of the South African Museum (SAM) for the reception and classification of various objects of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms that are found in South Africa.
According to The Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser, in which this information first appeared, the establishment of this museum collection would present an opportunity to the colonists to become acquainted with the general and local resources of the then colony.
Having announced its establishment, Somerset nominated Dr Andrew Smith to be the superintendent of this newly established institution.
The advertiser goes on to further state that: “His excellency has selected an apartment in the public library, to place the collections in for the present, and it is his intention that the museum should be opened to the inspection of the public, at stipulated hours to be hereafter fixed. Cape of Good Hope, June 10, 1825. By His Excellency’s Command, (signed) R Plasket, Secretary to Government.”
About 15 days later, after his appointment as head of the institution, Smith released his first public notice, inviting the public to contribute collections to the newly founded museum, “the South African Museum being now open for the reception of objects belonging to all the branches of Natural History, such individuals therefore as may feel an interest in forwarding, by donations, the intention of the said establishment, are requested to make them whenever they may find it convenient.
“Those persons who reside near or in Cape Town will be pleased to forward them directly to the Museum, while those in the country can send them to the landdrost nearest to their place of abode.
“As not only absolute instruction, but also considerable experience, are necessary to enable individuals to prepare and preserve Objects of the Animal Kingdom, in such a manner as to be useful for exhibition, it is therefore particularly desirable that as many living specimens be obtained as is possible.”
Smith’s very first announcement gives us a much clearer picture of the curator’s interest in the “objects belonging to all the branches of natural history”, but not only this, it also uncovers what Somerset and Smith had in mind about the founding mandate of the museum, as an institution whose main task would be to display varieties of the natural history.
In simple terms, this would be a museum that would showcase the fauna and flora of the colony, including minerals and other natural history-related objects and specimens.
For us to establish the original intention of the establishment as a natural history museum is very important, especially when we shall later look into how this very same museum shifted from that mandate and started collecting and displaying human “subjects” only to “thingify” black African indigenous people as “sub-human” species that belonged in the animal kingdom, hence their juxtaposition with animals in the museum.
This understanding of what constitutes natural history also hinges on the ideas of when indigenous and native people began to be classified and understood to be part of the natural history order of things as “children of nature”.
It is also a matter of curiosity to establish whether Somerset included indigenous and native people in his description of natural history as it happened to have been the case with colonial “scientists” at the rise of anthropology as a “science”.
Sliding back to Kirby, it is only on Friday, July 8, 1825, that Kirby (Professor PR Kirby) introduces us to the first list of donations to the South African Museum. These specimens ranged from quadrupeds, birds, reptiles, various kinds of fish, shells, insects, minerals etc. And “the Gazette of Friday, August 12, 1825, contained a second list of donations, together with the names of the donors”.
In addition to this, we also learn from Kirby’s account that, “a third list of donations with the names of the donors, appeared in the Gazette of Friday, September 23, 1825”.
And “a fourth list of donations to the museum was printed in the Gazette of Friday, November 4, 1825”. Subsequent to this, the fifth and other lists of donations appeared in the following year, 1826.
In this above passage, Kirby helps us establish yet more important information about the nature of the collections that people had donated to the museum in 1825, the year in which it was established.
So not only do we understand 1825 as the year of its establishment, but it also unveils the nature of the collection that was to define the “museumness” of the South African Museum. After Smith left for England, the collection was left in disarray for many years.
In locating the institutionality of the SAM within the grandiose idea of the British empire’s colonial domination, it is not only by default that I critically engage the colonial “DNA” that it carries and the centuries-long indelible colonial legacies that it exudes, but there is something else that deepens it into the coloniality of presence, and that is its human remains and ethnographic collection.
Historical records suggest that as far back as 1855, the museum had already acquired human remains of the “vanquished” native peoples for race “science”.
He records the “Cranium of Gaika K****, named Tengello, an attendant of the K**** Chief Kona, son of Macomo, son of Jaika. Aged about 25, he was killed on January 21, 1851 while engaged in an attack made upon Alice and Forth Hare by Sandile, the Great Chief of the Gaikas, with 3000 warriors.
Through Layard’s account, we are also able to locate the earliest collections, which included, among other things, human skulls, leather made from human skin, ornithological collections, minerals, mammalians series, etc.
The human casting project that began in 1906 added to the notions of race construction that had already taken shape 51 years earlier in 1855.
As the oldest museum in South Africa, the SAM laid a strong foundation and set a precedent for other museums, such as the Albany Museum in Grahamstown, now Makhanda, and the Kimberley Museum in the Northern Cape, to also collect the remains of the native people for race “science”.
Cape Times