As world delegates descend on Durban this weekend for a historic heritage convention, South African experts are arguing about where the country’s national heirlooms belong and who should look after them.
Various local experts at the World Heritage Committee meeting — the first held in sub-Saharan Africa — insist it is time for treasures such as the Taung skull, Sterkfontein’s Mrs Ples, the Makapan apeman fossils and the Mapungubwe golden rhino to go ”home”.
Themba Wakashe, Deputy Director General of the Department of Arts and Culture, who is hosting the Durban gathering as chairperson of Unesco’s World Heritage Committee, supports the repatriation of treasures removed during the colonial and apartheid eras.
”What is the benefit to the African continent of these objects being colonised in Western institutions?” he asks. ”They should not be the preserve of intellectual research and scholarship; they are our source of pride and identity.”
World-famous palaeontologist Professor Phillip Tobias counters that rare and irreplaceable national treasures such as hominid fossils ”are research materials first and foremost” and should continue to be housed in institutions like Wits University and the Transvaal museum in Pretoria.
”The governing principles are that there must be secure custodianship, experts who know about the problems of looking after such specimens, and adequate facilities for research workers in South Africa and from abroad.” Tobias was finishing a paper this week on ownership and repatriation of fossil hominids.
He says it is global practice for high-quality casts of heritage treasures to be displayed at the sites of discovery. ”No other countries where there are large collections of hominid fossils are considering moving them back.”w
One of the main considerations should be making heritage treasures accessible to the global public, says Sian Tiley, curator of the Mapungubwe artefacts at the University of Pretoria. Moving them to remote areas where it would be difficult and expensive to see them would defeat this purpose.
Mapungubwe, in the far north of Limpopo province, is a World Heri-tage Site. Its rich collection of artefacts and human remains is scattered among various institutions, both local and overseas. Academic institutions have been accused of hiding the artefacts away during the apartheid years, in an attempt to cover up Mapungubwe’s pre-colonial history.
The head of the South African Heritage Resources Agency (Sahra), Phakamani Buthelezi, says it ”should not be the privilege of urban-based institutions to keep heritage objects for research”. Sahra was established in 1999 to look after the national heritage estate. ”If proper arrangements are made, security is supplied and the character of the objects is not compromised, why should we put up with replicas? It makes more sense for the objects to be stored on site,” says Buthelezi.
Sibongile Masuku van Damme, who is a member of the convention’s steering committee, points out that the 700-odd delegates are gathering in Durban for a week-long discussion of the protection and promotion of world heritage sites.
”But the question of who national treasures belong to is very much on people’s minds,” she says. ”Heritage objects need to go back to the communities where they belong, to re-install their sense of pride and identity. It’s a political question and the political leaders need to tells us how to deal with it and what to do about the people holding on to the objects.”