Ethnological Collections in Selected South African Museums - Past Issues and Current Challenges

The paper examines the state of ethnological collections in two post-apartheid South African museums and is based on, inter alia, an appraisal of anthropological discourses that informed the collections. It focuses on the cataloguing of indigenous objects, which is generally inadequate and, in many cases, absent. This not only hampers the proper functioning of museums, but threatens the preservation of ancient, culturally significant items. In this context, a discussion of the artefacts’ background would be of importance to establish their origins, the motives for their presence in collections, and their current state. Presently, however, such information is difficult to obtain, since persons who have knowledge regarding the makers, donors and collectors of artefacts are no longer part of the museums’ establishment. Besides, many ethnological collections result from fieldwork trips by anthropologists and persons with an interest in ethnology but, sadly, many of their contributions lack identification and other pertinent information. Anthropologists, museum workers, and donors who have contributed to the presence – and, hence, survival – of artefacts in social history and cultural history museums have failed to provide them with tangible records. With only patchy information available, it is evident that present curators face a huge challenge in cataloguing such materials so that they can be better preserved and further researched. Using postcolonial theory to provide a critical analysis of the current situation, based on available archival records and unstructured interviews with museum officials and researchers, I contend that the lacklustre manner of assessing items of indigenous material culture in museums of ethnography, and the accompanying decontextualization, are irreconcilable with their original socio-cultural and environmental significance, their meanings and technological trends. The question is how to reverse this neglect of collections of rare indigenous material culture so as to arouse the warranted interest of local and wider audiences and restore the connection with indigenous histories that in the colonial and apartheid era have been ignored and deemed irrelevant to the ‘grand march of Western historicism’ (McClintock 1994: 292).