Anticipating International Museums Day on Sunday May 18, STEPHEN GRAY visits the African Window
THE new African Window – part of a developing belt or mall of museums in downtown Pretoria – is the first suitable home there has ever been for that city’s vast Museum of Culture. Six exhibit spaces are already up, in a venue that will eventually hold tenfold. At the opening last March, Satour, together with the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, officially launched their three-year campaign to push from nature- based to cultural tourism. The new-look museum goes with the policy: stroll in, grab a heritage.
Certainly, museum styles need to change. Here is an Ndebele-style mural along the fine walk-in; a shining canopy overhead, inspired either by a Voortrekker wagon- train or a post-modern songololo, depending on your preferred old South African conditioning; a deputy director who strides out to greet one, wearing a ponytail. And baby-changing facilities, yes, also in the men’s toilet.
For the disabled the situation is good as well. Being none too computer literate, I tend to dread anything hands-on. I used rather to keep my own and everyone else’s culture at arms’ length. But multi- participation is of course the new way. If, while admiring the rainbow collection of representative holdings, I had not tapped out a tentative query on the keyboard, I would have been excluded, because in that machine is where the captions are. Makes a change from the days of curiosity cabinets and “Do Not Touch”.
I concede that, without that computer, I would have been denied access, as were most South Africans to their country’s treasures until recently. And now there they all are, accumulated over the last century and simply stored away. The extent is mind- boggling. There are an astounding 3,75- million items from which curators may select.
By sheer fluke I tapped out A15: a pair of buckle-up leather sandals. Well, it turns out those flat, flabby sandals had been worn by no less than General Smuts on his summer rambles. And who then had made them for him, as a gift, while he languished in one of the general’s prisons? None other than his coeval and adversary, that other lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi. I had found for myself the story I need to know.
Here is another. The African Window is in a building which, during the First Anglo-Boer War in 1880, the invading British called the Convent Redoubt, and which they fortified. There they were besieged for 100 days, before being evicted. Then in a neat reversal, after the Jameson Raid in 1896, President Kruger locked up all the reformers inside it. But there is more.
Once the Brits had thoroughly taken over, in 1922 the same building became a branch office of their Royal Mint. Eventually it was our own rand factory. Five years ago planning began for yet another change: the most secure building in Africa had to be converted from keeping the people out to inviting them in.
Now one of the exhibitions has actually been done by people’s choice, and the people have chosen – out of those nearly 4- million parcels ferreted away in brown- paper and string: making music. So there is all the range of African instruments – from the mbila and the phalaphala made from gemsbok horns, to music-boxes, violins and dome-headed steam-radios.
I was ready for the pith helmet and the original Stoney ginger beer bottle. At the Mazawattee Tea Tin I suddenly remembered what as a child I thought was happening to that granny and her tea-guzzling progeny (because they both wore glasses, tannin was rendering them blind). I could handle the glorious lacquered Twyfelaar Spider, which gets a niche of its own and is so named because you never knew if it went forwards or backwards.
I backtracked, spotted an engraved rhino on the huge rubbing stone, the beaded waistcoat, tried to find the miniature Jabulani Spaza Store (which is a radio set), ventured out again. I am happy to report to parents that for children, who are seldom embarrassed about getting lost, the staff organises treasure hunts.
Museum personnel, I learn, talk of their displays as having scripts. For the moment, at the African Window, such scripts are in the vehicular language of English (brave decision). Displays are also captioned in Afrikaans, Northern Sotho and Zulu, and guided tours are given in another three official languages. Why such scrupulousness, when everyone knows that all those tourists will speak American anyway? I would like to think that they are not what this wonderful place is really for. Mostly it is there for South Africans at last to meet themselves.
The African Window is on Visagie Street in Pretoria, with ample parking, open seven days a week, 9am to 5pm