Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives

4. Ethnographic Elaborations, Indigenous Contestations, and the Cultural Politics of Imagining Community: A View from the District Six Museum in South Africa

106 4 Ethnographic Elaborations, Indigenous Contestations, and the Cultural Politics of Imagining Community A View from the District Six Museum in South Africa ciraj rassool On April 3, 2001, in a landmark moment in the history of cultural display in South Africa, the bushman diorama, exhibited in the South African Museum (sam) since 1960, was shut down. Amid strong feelings expressed by some staff members that the act of closure smacked of political correctness and that it appeared to be a knee-jerk reaction, the diorama was boarded up and “archived,” symbolizing the museum’s commitment to change.1 A few days before, on March 30, 2001, delegates of the Khoisan communities of South Africa had gathered together at Oudtshoorn for the first time in their memory to deliberate over various issues at a consultative conference, titled “Khoisan Diversity in National Unity.” At this conference, the tribes, their leaders, researchers, and academics assembled to discuss “how the Khoisan people and their leaders” would be “accommodated constitutionally.”2 But the central purpose of the conference was to take discussions forward, regarding “the next step in the National Khoisan Legacy Project, which strove to develop heritage resources significant to the Khoisan people.”3 On June 7, 2001, the Sixty-fifth Annual Conference of the South African Museums Association (sama) was held in Port Elizabeth around the general theme of museum ethics. At this meeting, representatives of three of the key museums in South Africa that hold collections of human remains, especially of the Khoisan, declared the interest and willingness of their institutions to pursue a discussion about repatriation.4 These processes and events reflect the tensions and contestations that Ethnographic Elaborations 107 are emerging over the place of Khoisan history and culture and the appropriate terms and frameworks of their representation, in the domain of heritage and public culture after apartheid. These struggles have occurred amid centralized processes of transforming old national museums and museum collections as well as attempts by the state to spearhead official heritage projects, in the form of the Legacy Project program, geared toward the transformation of heritage. At certain times these moves represented attempts to transcend older frameworks of ethnography and racial science; at other times they represented a quest to recover an Indigenous cultural history that had been distorted and obscured by colonialism and apartheid. Sometimes this has meant the reinvention of ethnicity in the name of Indigenousness. Often, as we shall see, these seemingly contradictory moves, of challenging ethnography and of appealing to ethnic identity , have occurred simultaneously. It is necessary for us to understand when and under what conditions ethnic frameworks are reproduced and when they are (potentially) transcended. These contradictions are reflective of broader challenges and contests unfolding in the sphere of heritage in the public domain more generally. Contrary to what some historians in South Africa might think,5 almost every sphere of heritage production has seen complexity, controversy, and contestation in relation to dominant discursive frames that have been crystallizing. Among the elements of this dominant discourse has been the framing device of the “rainbow nation,” where the concept of culture is largely in primordial terms. These dominant discursive forms have been contested. In significant cases, particularly in community museums and local cultural projects, certain initiatives had begun to push beyond these dominant narrations and to contest the constitutive elements of the nation , the cultural politics of tourism, as well as the signage systems and forms of memorialization that are attached to urban and rural landscapes. It is here that the concept of community has been approached outside of ethnic discourses of diversity.6 The discourse of many cultures, through which culture and heritage are more easily commoditized as spectacle, has continued to unleash itself upon the South African landscape. New cultural villages are positioning themselves for tourism virtually every day.7 While this has been the main character of cultural tourism, cultural festivals and cultural cam- 108 rassool paigns run by newspapers have also been characterized by the search for authentic culture. Elsewhere, the leading documentary photographer of the social conditions of apartheid and resistance, Peter Magubane, is now free from having to document the struggle and is thus able to focus on neglected heritage, continuing to promote his recently published book of photographs, Vanishing Cultures, which is little more than a collection of studies on tribes that are now addressed as authentic cultures.8 As cultural tourism...