PHAKAMISA MAYABA / So we got word that we’d been booked for the SAMAs this year. Stoked, we imagined a red carpet rolled out at our feet, Louis Vuitton man bags, and an up close and personal glimpse at the music artist of the year. Maybe, we gushed, a seat next to Robbie Wessels, who might be fuming under his breath at the late Mandoza, wondering why he (Wessels) hasn’t gotten the nod for a lifetime achievement award yet. Nkalakatha may have been the crossover hit of post-democratic SA, but Leeuloop remains the firm go-to treffer at the local jukebox or braai, not so?
Well, it turns out there’s more than one SAMA. Perhaps fortunately, the crowd due at this year’s South African Museums Association (SAMA) national conference are mostly camera-shy researchers with spectacles and sensible shoes, whose idea of entertainment is to sit, write and plan quietly behind closed doors. This year’s theme, Digital Revolution: South African museums and the fourth industrial revolution – foregrounding relevance and securing the future of museums’, is perfectly timed. The 4IR is already running laps around the norm; killing traditional media, changing ways of doing, obliterating jobs, and forcing everybody to get with the programme lest they should get left behind.
The president of SAMAS, Talita Fourie.
Rankled by what this could ultimately mean for the preservation space and the community it serves, on the Association’s working programme we find speakers and thinkers who are pondering the inevitable: establishing a steady foothold in this bold digital age. Among conventional talks on heritage, culture, art, archaeology, bridging the gap between museums and communities, we find a strong inclination towards incorporating digital technology and the ubiquitous social media in keeping the sector relevant and thriving despite the challenges. Judging by the motley array of speakers, attendees can expect the language of academia – from the innovative through the dour to the downright eccentric. But no one could walk out and say they’ve learnt nothing new.
For Prof Doreen Atkinson, Programme Manager at the Karoo Development Foundation (KDF), this is one appointment she cannot miss. For decades she’s been a punctilious pop-up on the evening news as one of the crusaders for a more economically inclusive and viable Great Karoo. ‘The [SAMA] conference,’ she writes, ‘addresses an important topic for rural communities – oral history and the digitisation of local family histories. This will enable further research and community resilience, as people get to know their own local histories. The KDF is already working on the Forgotten Highway Route in the Northern Cape and Western Cape, and this will add value to our efforts in these heritage-filled towns and villages’.
Prof Doreen Atkinson with Jaco Spies from the ATKV at the Forgotten Highway Summit, May 2023
The Forgotten Highway Route, you’ll recall, is the 18th century ‘sunburnt odyssey’ that set out from Ceres and Tulbagh, spanning ‘hundreds to a staggering thousand kilometres over terrains that were lush and green, growing ever more arid and desert-like the further one delved into what is today known as the Karoo’, which we’ve written about. Atkinson and a few fellow travellers have resurrected the journey. It is projects of this nature that keep Atkinson on the move, knocking on doors for funding and – when donors are taking too long – going ahead anyway in the hope that they’ll find her there.
It’s gonna be a long week for us between 2 and 6 September as the SAMA conference gets under way at Bloemfontein’s Tempe Military Base. The programme promises extensive talks on museums, culture, developmental projects, heritage – all those seemingly trivial non-starters that may not count for much now, but just you wait until a few years on. These are the insights that will assist us to account to coming generations, and the sort that – in a Karoo that often plays second fiddle to the country’s major economic hubs – could be the game-changer for the semi-rural underclass.
Founded in Kimberley in 1935, the SA Museums Association was intended to ensure better cooperation and communication between museums. ‘Over the years,’ reads their website, ‘SAMA has constantly adapted to the needs of a changing society and encouraged the transformation of museums in South Africa.’ Furthermore, it says, the Association ‘strives to protect, manage and create awareness of the cultural and natural heritage of all South Africans.’
Transformation, I thought, often amounts to nothing more than PC claptrap with no real bearings on the ground. SA’s history, for so long told through white voices and personified by white faces, I wondered whether said transformation might translate in a real life museum. So there I was at my local museum – a harbinger of history, the mausoleum of its artifacts and stories – an intriguing little building.
That’s the impression I get as Zezethu Sigaqa takes me on a free walkabout of the Colesberg Kemper Museum. Zezethu smiles easily, is on a learnership programme as a ‘tourism monitor’, and despite this being only her second shift on the job, she’s as cool as a rap song.
Zezethu Sigaqa during a tour of the Kemper Museum.
One of the things that strike even the uninitiated eye are how the collections are gradually turning into a reflection of the surrounding society. Definitely not as underrepresentative as it was back in one’s primary school days in the nineties. On two floors the museum houses a little of everybody’s history. From UNISA’s Prof Mike de Jongh’s work with the Karretjie Mense – the Karoo’s nomadic seasonal farm workers on their donkey-drawn carts – to the beret-clad anti-apartheid activists. There are relics that hark back to the Stone Age, bombs and bullets left behind by the South African War. KhoiSan bows and mortars, a duplicator, newspaper cuttings of important men now long-dead, dolls from the children of working class Afrikaners, the early beginnings of a frontier stopover before it was even called a town.
Although one could credit the apparent changes to shifting political dynamics, one cannot dismiss the stellar contribution of a certain Belinda Gordon. Curator at the museum for many years, Gordon was the sort of woman whose work went well beyond the call of duty. Always on the lookout for new artifacts to add to the place’s collection, she was also a great writer and historian who co-authored at least one important book on the Anglo-Boer War (South African War) titled The Forgotten Front. Urban legend has it that, despite the prevalent practice of cadre deployment, Gordon insisted on sitting in on the panel that would appoint her successor. With Gordon’s blessing, the position ultimately went to a certain Lungile Mphemba, and decades on the Kemper Museum seems to be doing just fine.
FEATURED IMAGE: The Kemper Museum in Colesberg.
This is an edited version of an article that first appeared on Phakamisa Mayaba’s website, eParkeni. Used with permission.