James Ambrose Brown: A SECOND LOOK
If you were to tease my memory about the exhibits of the museum in the gardens of the library in Johannesburg, I would have to admit that I remember only two things – one is the reputed chair of Shaka, king of the Zulus; the other is a Zeederberg mail coach.
I dredge up this memory of half-a-century back in response to President Nelson Mandela’s rebuke of the country’s museums for glorifying white and colonial history and degrading by omission the majority of the people.
And no doubt there is truth in this — in the context of today. But, in the context of yesterday when the majority of museum collections were made, the museums are true reflections of this country’s social history.
Shaka’s chair, reputedly seized as a trophy of war and Zulu defeat, was an accurate depiction of that nation’s culture in the 19th century. So, also, was the Zeederberg coach used to transport pioneer whites to the Witwatersrand goldfields in the late 1890s.
Both artefacts look pretty crude to our eyes today. Actually, Shaka’s chair was a triumph of African improvisation and adaptation. Instead of being assembled in pieces, the Zulu monarch’s chair was a copy of a European chair cut out of a single block of wood!
The Zeederberg, made for the conquest of the American west, was the latest thing in pioneering travel technology. And, to the viewer, both are fascinatingly redolent of their period.
It may be a peculiarly European habit to collect what used to be called “curiosities”. Read Charles Dickens. And it may be a peculiarly European vice to have a desire to gaze on these things and muse on other days.
If one reads Mandela correctly, he – and his advisers – takes this selfish vice of ours as demeaning to themselves. It seems in our earnest endeavour to keep an accurate representation of our culture we have caused deep offence by ignoring them.
Is this because we did not depict African culture of the periods shown side by side with our own? Is this because in showing the porcelain and china and silverware of our fathers’ tables we did not show the contemporary beer calabashes and domestic artefacts of the Africans?
Surely not. I do not think we are glorifying ourselves by showing children what quaint spectacles great-granny used to wear and her copper pots and pans. No, we are saying: this is how we were. Had the white museums here shown otherwise, they would not have fulfilled their mandate to history.
It is a pity that this is now interpreted as glorifying ourselves at the expense of others, but, no doubt, in our selfishness, we were simply trying to remind our children where we came from and on what our culture rests.
It is also true that we spent large sums of money in housing our treasures in splendid buildings that reflected the heritage of our people. It could hardly have been otherwise because Europeans have this regrettable habit of bringing their culture with them when they settle in other people’s countries.
The Romans did it to the ancient Britons, establishing steam baths and marble statuary and stone roads for steel-shod chariots. And no doubt they decorated their studies in Rome with barbaric trophies of those wars with the blue-painted subjects of tribal Queen Boadicea.
Surely Mandela is misled when he depicts us as reflecting ourselves to the exclusion of others. Our white museums, as he calls them, have a great deal to say about the Africa found by the white interlopers: magnificent photographic records of tribal cultures otherwise totally lost, even to their own people.
It is true, as he says, that the Hlabisa women weave stories of their history into beer baskets and indeed Zulu culture has been enriched by the symbols in beadwork – though the beads themselves were brought here by traders – but these aspects of culture were for the peoples themselves to treasure and protect.
This, we are now informed, is about to happen in the restructuring of museums to “reflect history in a way that reflects the heritage of all our citizens”.
The government has taken up the challenge. No doubt note has been taken of the contents of colonial-style museums, and particularly itemised are the African artefacts that they carefully preserve. This will make a good foundation for the new museum collections.
Part of the problem will be that so much that was truly reflective of African culture has been destroyed by looting for overseas collections, and because the materials from which they were made – except pottery – degraded with time unless they were preserved in museums as objects – we are told – to humiliate the African viewer.
Now, it is understandable that the African majority in power is determined to create new forms of expression and thought that will demonstrate its cultural history – and where it intends to go from here. This is about time.
But I, for one, can’t imagine what earthly good the creation of black heritage museums will do for the millions of Africans who are living under sheets of corrugated iron and plastic.
How these must look back on the days when a pure African culture was not degraded by poverty and having to live half in one world and half in another – and having the benefit of neither.
But, of course, they know little of the world they lost to white culture, and the president’s advisers are all living the life of Western culture.
The president deplores that his ancestors are depicted in cultural museums as “people locked in time”. What he should be saying is that it is time to break the locks that are not of our making.
Perhaps we did a great wrong to Africa by intruding our presence here. No doubt the African psyche would have triumphed on its own and brought forth an uncontaminated culture.
The Chinese managed it magnificently – though there are vast areas of China still in poverty and ignorance. The Indians evolved splendid civilisations without contamination by European ideas until very late in their history. What a pity we butted in here.
But the real issue is simmering resentment against white cultural domination.
And that is understandable and ironical as the African intellectual uses the tools of the ancient civilisations the whites inherited from the past. No culture is an island, as John Donne might have said.
In any case, how many people do we know who ever visit museums? Ask any curator.
James Ambrose Brown is a historian, novelist and journalist of many years’ standing