MuseumAfrica is a museum of South African history that reopened in Johannesburg in 1994, shortly after the African National Congress (ANC) won the first post-apartheid elections. Its predecessor, the Africana Museum, was the 1935 brainchild of John Gaspard Gubbins, an Englishman transplanted to the South African veld in 1902. Gubbins was a liberal visionary who created an exhaustive library and collection of cultural objects from the region – predicated on the idea that all races in the South African Union had contributed to the young nation's history. Byala's book is an engaging and wide-ranging biography of Gubbins and the Africana Museum from its modest beginnings to its reimagining as MuseumAfrica.
Although Gubbins amassed the collections that formed the core of the Africana Museum, he died the very year it opened, leaving the actual shaping of his museum to other liberals. As apartheid became the law of the land, Gubbins's dream museum became the unwitting handmaiden of the racial state, enforcing rather than resisting segregation. A more hopeful chapter in the museum's history began in the mid-1970s in tandem with the struggle against and victory over apartheid. A new cultural politics emerged in Johannesburg, as citizens debated how best to define and display the nation's heritage. ‘Without stories such as Gubbins's that … force us to query neat divisions into black and white, good and evil’, Byala argues, ‘the past is flattened in the service of an equally mythologized present.’ (p. 20) Her dual biography is thus less about how museums function than about ‘how colonial spaces can be re-rendered useful in the postcolonial world’ (p. 15).
Gubbins was a Cambridge-educated eccentric who became a farmer in the Afrikaner hinterland in 1910. There he began inventing a new ‘three-dimensional way of thinking’ that rejected such prevalent binaries as black vs. white, cultured vs. savage, Boer vs. British, insisting instead that human progress lay in ‘the unity of opposites’ (p. 50) and ‘a mixture of cultural ways’ (p. 51). After the First World War, he zealously collected South African materials ‘now informed by the need to articulate three-dimensional thought’ (p. 53) about which he published an essay in 1924. Within a decade, he had convinced the young University of Witwatersrand to house his extraordinary library and the city of Johannesburg to create a museum in its new public library for his objects with the goal of creating a single inclusive identity for all South Africans. His untimely death meant that others took on the task of displaying his Africana in a period of rising racism, locally and globally. Head librarian R. F. Kennedy led the museum for the next three decades, abandoning Gubbins's ideal of social change. He divided Gubbins's cultural artifacts hierarchically along a history/tradition binary: whites produced the first, blacks the second. The staff retreated into scholarship and administration as their displays further reified the hardening color line.
Only during ‘the final act of apartheid’ (p. 150) did politics overtly re-enter the Africana Museum. In 1977, facing object over-run, its ‘ethnological’ collections were moved to a new temporary space – renamed the Africana Museum in Progress – with a larger and younger staff; white South African history remained where it was. The former embraced new forms of social outreach until 1989, when the city council decided to build a reunified and radically reconceived ‘modern’ museum that would reframe ‘historical narratives in a postapartheid world’ (p. 182). AfricaMuseum thus opened in 1994, with three exhibits on the history of ordinary workers in Johannesburg that targeted the ‘black, unmuseumed, low level of education, low income grouping’ (p. 193). A stunning success at first, fault lines soon appeared among personnel, municipal funding dried up, and the museum quickly deteriorated – tainted by its origins as a colonial ‘ethnographic’ collection and out of synch with the latest trends internationally that featured ‘objectless’ people-centered museums (p. 221). Nevertheless as a unique material storehouse of the entire nation's past – with over 800,000 objects and counting – AfricaMuseum's future cannot be written off.
This passionately argued and carefully researched book has much to recommend it. A meditation on how states (colonial, apartheid, and post-apartheid) use ‘culture’, it successfully demonstrates that colonial and postcolonial collections of artifacts have entangled histories that scholars have too often ignored. This said, the first two chapters are marred by the author's tendency to assert rather than critically analyze the content of her archives, to cite rather than to apply the insights of cultural theorists, and to fail fully to contextualize her fascinating material. Her portrait of Gubbins verges on hagiography. We are never told what exactly he collected, making it almost impossible to assess the nature of his antiracism. For all his laudable inclusiveness, Gubbins considered black Africans at an earlier stage of evolution, not as equals to white Africans. In these sections, Byala appears to rely too much on Saul Dubow's work on South African racism. These problems disappear in the other three chapters, where the documentation on the intentions of museum personnel is much richer. Despite these caveats, the author has done an excellent job tracing the history of one of the world's great collections of Africana. Counter-intuitively, she reminds us that yesterday's colonial museums contain not only the objects from which new framings of the past can emerge, but also the traces of earlier struggles against racism from which today's fracturing South African society can learn.
