Amid a clutter of pensioned battle tanks, the 88th installment of the SA Museums Association national conference convened at Bloemfontein’s Tempe Military Base timeously with the start of Heritage Month. This against the backdrop of notable headlines fitting neatly into the scheme: a four-year old child shatters a Bronze Age jar believed to be some 3 500 years old in Israel. A meteorite explodes over parts of South Africa. The remains of a prominent liberation struggle hero are discovered in Zambia.
Because this year’s theme, Digital Revolution: South African museums and the fourth industrial revolution – foregrounding relevance and securing the future of museums was described as a critical ‘no-brainer,’ the papers presented were a companionable wellspring of tech-savvy addresses, sometimes with a disarming eccentric edge.
Sure, there were the archetypal personalities of academia; ecologists, curators, doctors, researchers and post-graduate students, right up to bespectacled professors with rounded jargon. But there was also the entymologist who calls flies ‘beautiful,’ a taxonomist who thinks of earthworms as unfussy diners and at least one graybeard ornithologist who hikes up mountains to record birdsong. How about the born-free PhD candidate who’s casual enough to identify as ‘an Australian woman breakdancing at the Olympics’ and the Northern Cape chief in colourful garb who moonlights as a writer?
During the four-day event teeming with presentations, they were the ones who mostly inspired the 150-or-so delegates to tough it out through the graveyard shift – the overtime early-evening sessions; a devotion that earned them the moniker ‘bittereinders.’
The Free State Department of Sports Arts and Culture representatives were enthusiastic participants, often taking their seats amongst the audience and jotting down notes from the projector. Always a promising intersection when government, civil society and the NGO fraternity look each other in the eye and play open cards. More noteworthy was the racial, gender and content diversity which culminated in a multi-cultural motley straddling across various disciplines of study. Although tailored around the digital revolution, topics would touch on marginalised communities, people with disabilities, heritage, restitution, wormeries, photography, the Holocaust and so much more.
Take Thembeka Nxele introducing primary school learners deep in rural KwaZulu-Natal to the concept of using earthworms to ensure food security. Or Professor Neo Lekgotla Ramoupi and his three students venturing into the community of the Ikgomotseng in Soutpan to conduct research as unobtrusive ‘observers’ than the usual paternalistic approaches that these academic sojourns often assume. Ramoupi is a disciple of indigenous knowledge systems and his motto in these situations is an admirable ‘to simply go there and listen.’
This tied in well with the overarching message around decolonisation and its contemporary offspring – digital colonisation. Africa Media Online’s David Larsen believes that inasmuch as colonial powers were scrambling to get their hands on raw materials in the colonies, the same is happening with data, nowadays a high-fetching raw material.
Larsen’s comments that a Darwin-ish ‘worldview’ more than race or culture was the motivation behind roughshod colonialism is somewhat echoed in S’nothile Gumede’s well-written paper on colonial photography. Contrasting images of how African monarchs were often misrepresented and maligned in colonial photography, the PhD candidate’s angle was a reflection of the growing calls at various higher learning institutions to ‘decolonise’ education so as make it more inclusive to the broader society.
In various peripheral towns, the Karoo Development Foundation has been out putting together strategies that could help these communities get their own projects off the ground. Collating the oral histories of residents with church records, the Foundation is now in the process of trying to digitise these family histories through the University of the Free State. This is doubtlessly a panacea in towns where people are often too poor to afford a tombstone and where unmarked graves gradually disappear.
‘The KDF’ writes Prof Doreen Atkinson, ‘is creating a 1000-km heritage route from Tulbagh in the south to Kuruman in the north, and museums play a critical role in this project. Hence the KDF brought eight local museum champions to the SAMA conference – a trip the participants call the Museum Safari.’ (For transparency: eParkeni’s participation at the conference was funded by the KDF).
With digitization being the buzzword of the times, the recurring leitmotif of the gathering was how the various aspects of museology could be digitised so as to preserve them far more securely than the fragile survival of physical objects. After all, everything comes with a limited shelf life but by design, museums attempt to extend this lifespan so as to preserve these artefacts indefinitely. Effectively applied, digitisation could change the museum space from mere ‘buildings for storing objects’ into, according to UNISA speaker Anneliese Mehnert, ‘far-reaching and inclusive museums [that] demand democratic access.’ Places where, through the internet and digitalisation, the entire world is a potential visitor to your museum.
In his captivating paper, drawn from more than three decades of study and work experience, keynote speaker Roger Layton’s talk was a boon. A computer scientist, Layton’s Ether (Eternal Heritage) Training has for nearly twenty years been in the business of ‘providing training to the heritage sector … to ensure we keep abreast with emerging skills.’ Having visited numerous museums across the country that sadly still rely on outmoded methods of inventory, he agonises that we may not be embracing the available technologies fast enough.
More recently, his company has digitised copious data for the National Film Archives – a mind-blowing two to four terabytes a day at their peak. But what truly won the day for him was the rare black and white video dating back to the 1940s of the Struggle-era version of Nkosi Sikelela, complete with the mournful ‘woza moya oyingcwele’ (holy spirit come down) bridge at the end that he played to a visibly moved audience.
Another of Layton’s standout distinctions is how he navigates the fine line between transferring skills on to the younger generation in general but young black women in particular. This while retaining older hands so as to tap into their years of indispensable institutional memory. In many ways his opening talk set the tone of the speeches that would follow in the coming days.
If one had gone in there expecting dour speeches on museums and MacBooks, they would’ve walked out pleasantly surprised. If you factor in words like ‘heritage,’ ‘restitution,’ ‘artificial intelligence,’ amongst others, you realise that museums go far beyond old buildings that store old things. They are organic vessels of society, it’s history, present and future. They are science, biology, art; they are political, religious and gentile all wrapped up in one. Pitiful how it took this writer that long to realise their crucial place in this world and the parallel one online. Imagine if the provincial Departments of Arts and Culture budgeted for their own town-based museum staff to attend this event in years to come. The insights, innovation and general camaraderie they’d rub shoulders with here would likely change the way they see and do things to the benefit of all.
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An aside: thanks to 3D and high resolution technology, the broken ancient jar is due to be mended in a few weeks and the 4-year-old boy has since been invited back to the museum to learn about other artefacts.