Museums play a key role in developing a national identity and consciousness.  Learn about South Africa’s Slave Lodge, a Cape Town museum confronting the double legacy of slavery and apartheid.

 

 

Museums and Memory: “Remembering Slavery” at the Slave Lodge

 

Heather LaChapelle

Carleton College

 

 

Abstract

 

            Museums presenting a complex history to the public are challenged to satisfy a multitude of voices in shaping exhibits to represent a collective identity of a community. This paper explores the historical and political significance of the Slave Lodge, a museum in Cape Town, South Africa by focusing on its exhibition “Remembering Slavery.” The paper reveals South Africa’s difficulties in translating the desired “rainbow nation” image into reality and its struggles to represent contested histories and identities. While creating an exhibit representing a community’s identity is possible, the process is slow and hampered by constraints out of the museum’s control.

 

 

 

Introduction[1]

 

 

In South Africa, projects in nation-building have struggled with the burdens of race and history since the end of apartheid in 1994.[2] In particular, South African museums have sometimes faced difficult historical questions of how the past should be interpreted. These questions took on a distinctive urgency in South Africa after the fall of apartheid in 1994 and raised issues about how to reunite the nation. The South African government and the people of South Africa have challenged cultural institutions to permit contradicting stories to be heard, putting extra pressure on public institutions. Museums now contribute to the process of nation building by incorporating exhibits that give a voice to peoples previously excluded from the national discourse. The change in government has caused museums to drastically change their visual and material exhibits to more accurately represent the past, contributing to the process of social transformation undertaken in the adoption of a truly democratic state.[3]

Museums have great power to influence the identity of a people. Not surprisingly, a debate has arisen concerning the portrayal of previously disadvantaged groups, such as South Africans with slave heritage. To that effect, history must recognize the complexity of the past, and public historians – in this case museum staff – are wary of oversimplification. Yet the struggle over how the history of slavery should be portrayed in South African museums goes beyond the statement of facts. During the creation of exhibitions, questions have arisen concerning how Cape Town slaves should be characterized and curators face the task of reconciling contradictory views. Part of the dilemma is deciding whether to portray slaves as helpless victims of a brutal and inhumane system, or to complicate that image and give the slaves agency without undermining the brutality of the system.

Museum staff also must create a history that best represents the people of Cape Town and take into account how the residents wish their heritage and history to be remembered. The controversy over these views becomes even more complex when considering the demands of the South African government, which provides the museum’s main source of funding and wants minority groups positively portrayed to facilitate the creation of a new post-apartheid national identity. These differences in vision have caused a battle over both the content of museum exhibits and the final resting place of creative control over these exhibits. Analyzing the changes that the Slave Lodge, a museum in Cape Town focusing on slave history, has undergone and examining its new exhibitions will identify how South Africa’s public institutions have chosen to remember and conceptualize their slave past. Looking at the Slave Lodge as a case study and examining the exhibition “Remembering Slavery,” this paper will argue that the real challenge for museums presenting a complex history to the public is satisfying a multitude of voices by shaping an exhibit that will represent a collective identity of a community. Though possible, the process is slow and hampered by constraints that the museum often cannot control.

In order to understand current debates surrounding museum exhibitions, an overview of the museums’ evolving role in the public sphere and their interpretive power will be presented, followed by an explanation of why the South African government and the people of South Africa contest the slavery discourse in South Africa. Then, to appreciate the complexity and difficulty museum staff encounter when creating an exhibition on slavery in Cape Town, an account of the historiography of slavery as well as a summary of the complicated history of slavery and settlement at the Cape will be presented. Additionally, an examination of the legislation passed by the South African government during and after the 1994 political transition will identify the administrative changes made to the Heritage Sector of South Africa and the Cape Town Iziko museum system (which the Slave Lodge is a part of) over time. Having a background in these areas is crucial to understanding Cape Town’s struggle to rebuild and rethink how they see themselves as a people living with the legacy of slavery and institutionalized racial discrimination.

The absence of a prior official narrative means that South Africa’s Slave Lodge is the synthesis of a story that has never been told before, one that both draws on preexisting narratives as well as presents its own unique case.. Additionally, looking at the Slave Lodge as a case study will inform museum studies about the complex controversies involving various stakeholders that precede the presentation of an exhibit. Finally, examining the controversy over museum exhibits at the Slave Lodge will reveal South Africa’s difficulties in translating the desired “rainbow nation” image into reality and the struggles to represent such widely contested past histories and identities. [4]

 

 

Slavery and Public History in Cape Town

 

 

The inhabitants of Cape Town, South Africa have had a turbulent and complex history of violence and discrimination. Beginning in 1652, the significant influx of slaves and settlers from the Indian Ocean and Europe extensively altered the culture and structure of the native Khoikhoi society. This paper specifically focuses on the legacy of the Muslim slave population brought to Cape Town, South Africa, and how that legacy has been displayed and presented to the public at the Slave Lodge museum, a building in Cape Town that formerly acted as the home of the majority of slaves imported from Indonesia, India-Ceylon, Madagascar, and Mozambique from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century.

What is unique about slavery at the Cape is that, unlike slavery in the United States, the majority of slaves were not African. Instead, the VOC (the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, also known as the Dutch East Indian Company) imported slaves from various countries in the East Indies. Cape Town’s cosmopolitan composition complicated the racially stratified society that developed. Instead of having a hierarchy with the colonists at the top and the subjugated natives at the bottom, the presence of a myriad of other groups whose religions and skin tones varied presented an obstacle for the creation of a classificatory system.[5] The majority of these people later came to be classified as Coloured under the apartheid government, as they neither fit into the category of Black nor White. The subsequent racism and segregation of these peoples became increasingly institutionalized with the development of apartheid in the second half of the twentieth century, a legacy that has continued to play a defining role for the people of South Africa and Cape Town well into the nation’s new era of equality and inclusion in 1994.

This complicated categorical history is reflected in the current debate over what is to be done with the Slave Lodge today, and to better understand this struggle, it is necessary to recount a brief history of the building itself. Colonists constructed the Slave Lodge in 1679 to house slaves, but through the years the building has been known as the Slave Lodge, Government Offices Building, and Old Supreme Court. Designated as the South Africa Cultural History Museum in 1966, the South African government renamed it the Slave Lodge in 1998 and transformed into a cultural history museum of slavery with exhibitions that focus on “family roots, ancestry and the peopling of South Africa.”[6] The complicated history of Cape Town and its inhabitants has been portrayed to the public through exhibitions held in the Slave Lodge, and the recent transformation of the museum (that is, how the exhibitions have evolved in their depiction of Cape Town and its inhabitants) reflects the post-apartheid attempt of the South African government to create a national consciousness that incorporates its citizens in an all-inclusive “rainbow nation.”

The literature on the Slave Lodge itself is scarce , as few scholars wrote about the Lodge until fairly recently. With the end of apartheid, however, scholars freely delved into the personal histories of slaves in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. South Africans published few books concerning the history and restoration of the Slave Lodge as a building, among them Helene Vollgraaff’s The Dutch East India Company’s Slave Lodge at the Cape, and even fewer items have been published dealing with the Slave Lodge as a museum.[7]  A majority of this literature is written about the exhibition entitled “Remembering Slavery” designed to commemorate the bicentennial of the abolition of slavery in 2007.

 

 

Museums and Memory

 

 

An understanding of the changing role of museums and their interpretive power is needed to fully appreciate the debate surrounding the museum exhibitions at the Slave Lodge. Gary Baines defined public memory as a “body of beliefs and ideas about the past that help a public or society understand both its past, present, and by implication, its future.”[8] According to Benedict Anderson, a shared public history serves as the crucial element in the construction of an “imagined community,”[9] which facilitates identity formation and enables individuals to see themselves as members of a group with a common past, present, and future. The political questions of whose history gets disseminated and institutionalized frame the shaping of a common past. Accordingly, historiography is an important part of a nation’s collective memory and historian Hans Erik Stolten argues that history is not simply a product of the past, but often an answer to the demands of the present.[10]  Baines further writes that

 

“whenever national identity is contested, collective memory is the key to legitimating the status quo in terms of the past…The past becomes an excuse for the present, justifying the social or political order on the grounds that it was ordained by history. Accordingly, historical memories are constantly refashioned to suit present purposes.”[11]

 

By undertaking to represent public memory, museums become one of the most controversial agents for shaping national identity.[12] Historians Patricia Davidson and Ingrid de Kok argue that museums often shape national identity and can be tools to further the national interest because of the pivotal role museums play in the way a community remembers and thinks about their past and their identity in the present.[13] The artifacts and exhibitions displayed by museums can shape individual memory by triggering experiences the viewer has undergone, but the displays can also shape collective memories through the collections museums choose to preserve and how these collections are interpreted and presented. Choices of what and who is represented and forgotten are crucial because through the memory-making process these displays acquire validation as they become widely accepted versions of the past.

As an identity of a people evolves, museums and other heritage institutions play a central role in re-shaping and re-interpreting history. The debate surrounding public memory is especially contentious in South Africa because of the recent political transition with the fall of apartheid in 1994. As state-funded institutions, museums in South Africa give material form to authorized versions of the past, which in time become institutionalized as public memory. Since 1994, South Africans have been transforming their national identity to reinvent themselves by means of showcasing the country’s historical narrative. Stakeholders and cultural brokers from a variety of political persuasions and communities currently try to realign collective memory with a new national identity, and thereby redefine what it means to be “South African.” New sites of memory, such as the Slave Lodge, have been formed by the post-apartheid government to forge national consciousness and anchor official memory.[14] Analyzing how Cape Town’s slave legacy has been portrayed in the Slave Lodge both during and after the apartheid era reveals the ways in which the Slave Lodge reflects the inclusion and portrayal of multiple histories and the changing agenda of the national government.

 

 

The Discourse on Slavery at the Slave Lodge

 

 

To understand why the multifaceted debate over why so many diverse groups of people contest the ways in which people remember slavery in Cape Town, one needs to have an understanding of why the South African slavery discourse is so hotly debated. This unique story of suffering and dispossession framed an identity for a whole section of society. The slavery discourse became the central device in explaining and restoring an identity for people classified as Coloured under apartheid. Coloured developed as a term for a person neither black nor white, thereby creating a system that allowed colonial immigrants “dealing with a new and uncertain colonial social universe” to make the world seem a much more predictable and therefore comfortable place.[15] The apartheid government combined all mixed-race peoples, who often had substantial ancestry from Europe, Indonesia, India, Madagascar, Malaya, Mozambique, Mauritius, Southern Africa, and more, into the Coloured category. Discussing slavery gives these people a right to claim victimhood, trauma, and the post-apartheid need to heal. Without discussion of their story, “Africans generally believe that coloured people never really suffered and coloured people in turn internalize that myth.”[16] 

Additionally, claiming slavery as part of the Coloured people’s history gave them an identity not defined on negative terms – that is, they could claim a concrete history accepted by society. Because Coloured historically often did not classify as a category in its own right[17], the trend of thinking of Coloureds as having a mixed identity continues into the post-apartheid era. Presenting slavery in identity terms attempts to find a positive place for the Coloured people in the discourse about South Africa. Rediscovering slavery as the cornerstone of the history of a whole community allows for the discovery of an identity of a people, however scarred their past might be. However, the complexity of South Africa’s history causes some to oppose the discussion of slavery as a means of identity. Critics claim that it repeats colonial and apartheid discussions of racial categories, which is exactly what the state wants to avoid while moving towards its vision of a “rainbow nation.” Additionally, constructing a single narrative undermines the complexity with which Cape Town residents conceptualize themselves. The slave narrative “ignored the manifold ways people make sense of their present and past [by] pressing diverse patterns of identity formation into a single narrative.”[18]

Capetonians and scholars discussed slavery mostly in terms of identity politics, but proponents teaching and researching Cape slavery also argued that all Capetonians would benefit from learning about slavery because it would enable them to better understand the city’s collective identity. Historian Nigel Worden, advocating for a broader definition of slavery, asked, “And who has the right to speak for slaves? Who has the right to claim purity of slave ancestry in a society which has been characterized by so much intermixture?”[19] Discussing slavery in this framework unifies all Capetonians in accordance with the national agenda of creating an inclusive nation where all people are represented regardless of racial or ethnic background. Moreover, discussions regarding slavery also led to broader considerations of human rights in South Africa.  Proponents argued the discussion and depiction of slavery necessary because of the importance of its history to “South Africans today who place great value on the concepts of freedom and human rights.”[20] Therefore, slavery becomes relevant to the lives of all Capetonians and humanity in general.

Because the memory of slavery is linked so closely with the discourse on Coloured identity, creating an exhibit on slavery became a difficult task, “deeply entangled in controversial identity politics.”[21] Other voices complicated the mission further, claiming that the Cape’s slave history played a central role in the discovering and exploring the identity and legacy of South Africa. To have a Cape Town museum create an exhibition that would satisfy all of these voices would be intensely challenging. When the Slave Lodge took on the task of representing the history of Cape Town slavery, it also took on the difficult task of considering all sides of the debates and attempting to represent slavery in a manner acceptable and relevant to all South Africans.

 

 

The Historiography of South African Slavery

 

 

An important vector for the ongoing development of the complex debate over slavery and race in South Africa has been historiography, which has fed into the debate over how history should be portrayed within museums. Earlier generations of historians argued that the Cape Town slave experience should receive little attention because the physical abuse of slaves in South Africa paled in comparison  to the brutal forms of slavery in the New World, and as a result, historians attached relatively little importance to slavery in the explaining the making of South Africa.

  In the 1980s, however, this interpretation came under attack as academics began researching slavery at the Cape and complicating the notions of the slave experience.[22] Revisionist historians Nigel Worden’s Slavery in Dutch South Africa and Robert Ross’ Cape of Torments argued that racism did not originate at the frontier, as well as for the brutality of the system.[23] In contrast, Andrew Bank’s The Decline of Urban Slavery drew attention to the differences and similarities of South African slavery throughout the regions as the system developed..[24] In addition to these studies, Robert Shell’s Children of Bondage, analyzed the linguistic, cultural, economic, and psychological impact of slavery at the Cape. He recognizes the importance of the Slave Lodge as the space where the former slaves of Cape Town lived their daily lives.[25] A renewed interest in the Dutch period at the Cape coincided with the dismantling of apartheid in the 1990s. Nigel Worden, Elizabeth van Heyningen, and Vivian Bickford-Smith’s Cape Town: The Making of a City, an Illustrated Social History identified Cape Town’s pre-indigenous communities that the Dutch forcibly displaced, and critiqued the Eurocentric vision of Cape Town as a benevolent society.[26]

As apartheid ended, these developments led to the eventual reinterpretation of  major national monuments and spurred a revitalized interest in the history of the Cape in the imperial context of the VOC.

[27] “Since the late 1990s a range of public projects around slavery as well as the publication of historical accounts and novels on slavery indicate increased public interest and awareness.”[28]  Though increasing in quantity and quality in recent years, the resources available only begin to account for over 350 years worth of the experience of slaves and slave descendants at the Cape. The challenge for the museum staff of the Slave Lodge was ensuring that they could find the necessary information for their exhibit and to fill in the holes of that history. The scarcity of resources meant that museum staff had to attempt to track down the missing pieces of slave history, resulting in less time to work on other aspects of “Remembering Slavery.”.

 

 

A History of Slavery in Cape Town

 

 

An examination of the history of slavery in Cape Town delves into a turbulent world of violence and discrimination encompassing a variety of skin tones, ethnicities, and cultures. The Slave Lodge wrestles with these themes in presenting the history of slavery to the public and engages in debates about how exhibitions should portray this diverse history to contribute to an understanding of a unified national identity. Comprehension of this previously obscured and complex history is crucial to fully appreciate the constant struggle the Slave Lodge endures when creating an exhibit responsible for representing the contentious history of a diverse segment of society.

The VOC instituted the practice of slavery in Cape Town immediately after its arrival in 1652. Establishing itself as the world’s largest trading corporation in the seventeenth century, the VOC quickly became the dominant European maritime power in Southeast Asia. The VOC saw that the Cape of Good Hope provided the perfect location for ships to restock supplies and for their crews to rest on journeys between Europe and the East Indies. The landing provides a context for a moment that some consider the beginning of South Africa’s history because it represents the beginning of segregation and racial discrimination, the beginning of colonialism, and the beginning of significant European influence in South Africa.[29] VOC members, and later colonists, began to settle on the land and raise cattle, grow vegetables, and collect the fresh water the Cape settlement and passing ships needed. They also bartered for other goods with the local Khoikhoi, a herding group of Africans. Jan van Riebeeck, the merchant who put up the initial fort to secure the refreshment station, later requested slave labor to build the basic infrastructure of the colony. The VOC imported slaves and initially discouraged the use of Khoikhoi as slave laborers because they depended on them as trade partners.[30] 

From the beginning of the VOC’s involvement in Indian Ocean, slavery played an important role, especially since the VOC consistently lacked adequate manpower. By the time slavery arrived at the Cape it was a fully developed system, overseen by the VOC through the laws and experiences they had elsewhere in the East Indies. Between 1652 and 1808, the VOC imported 63,000 slaves to the Cape, and the colony’s dependence on slavery only increased until the British abolished its practice in 1834. Before the landing of van Riebeeck in 1652, no indigenous forms of slavery developed at the Cape, while 36,169 slaves lived there at the abolition of slavery in 1834. In 1732, 3,157 people occupied Cape Town, and 44.22% of them were slaves.[31] Slavery acted as a defining component in Dutch colonial settlements throughout the Indian Ocean, partly due to the fact that the native societies in Southeast Asia already had an open system of slavery with an established hierarchy placing slaves at the bottom of the social order. Slaves came to the Cape from places such as Mozambique, the East African coast, Zanzibar, the West African kingdom of Dahomey, India, and the East Indies, but the majority came from Madagascar. Later under apartheid, the South African government would classify the descendants from these immigrants as Coloured. These slaves brought with them an eclectic mix of cultures and languages and soon the colonists developed ethnic stereotypes of their slaves, distinguishing between those of Indonesian, Indian, Malagasy, and African origin.[32] These developments signify the beginning of a classification system based on origin, and over time Europeans established racial hierarchies that would persist into the twenty-first century.

 

 

 

Places of origin of Cape Slaves. Image taken from An Unsung Heritage, p. 22.

 

The slaves proved valuable to the VOC in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries since the small number of convicts normally employed for slave labor could not supply an adequate source of labor and in most cases the Dutch could not force the Khoikhoi to work since they were much too small and weak to crush any of the Khoikhoi tribes. By the late 1780s the impoverished Khoikhoi began to appear as laborers on freeburgher farms. But later as the Khoikhoi became indentured farm laborers to farmers, their conditions paralleled slavery as they worked and lived under extremely brutal conditions and lost all bargaining power.[33]

As in a true slave society, Cape Town slaves played an important part in both luxury and productive capacities. They empowered white elites, influenced cultural development, and comprised a high proportion of the total population.[34] Such a high enslaved population contributed to the diversity of the slave experience in Cape Town. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, slaves worked in a number of industries at the Cape including laboring in town as artisans or domestic servants, or as field laborers on wheat and wine farms in the region. The vast majority of slaves tilled the forty-acre urban vegetable garden in Cape Town. [35] 

Over time, Cape Town slave society became increasingly multicultural. Since the mortality rate was higher than the fertility rate, the VOC continued to import the majority of the slaves, bringing even greater diversity to Cape Town.[36] For example, in the seventeenth century an Islamic slave community appeared, growing slowly in the eighteenth century, and expanding rapidly in the nineteenth. While this growth was partly due to the importation of Muslim slaves from Indonesia, many slaves turned to Islam after explicit exclusion from the mostly white Christian community.[37]

The VOC owned the largest group of slaves and housed them in the Slave Lodge, and women and children who inherited their mother’s status accounted for almost half of them. VOC slaves worked in all VOC facilities, performing domestic and clerical duties in the offices and hospitals and manual labor at the workshops, building sites, and outposts. In the hospital, slaves attended the sick, prepared food, and even dug graves for those who had died. Some slaves, usually those born in the Lodge, learned a trade and worked with the VOC carpenters, coopers, smiths, and potters. A mandoor, a slave who had risen to a position of trust, usually served as an overseer. Each night the VOC locked the slaves into the Slave Lodge, where there they slept in crammed rooms with few hammocks. The Lodge also housed lunatics in special rooms, and occasionally patients of the neighboring hospital, as well as criminals sentenced to hard labor for periods ranging from six months to life. In addition to the VOC, private households owned other slaves, and by 1731, 66% of the free-burgher households included slaves.[38]

 

 

 

Slaves at the Slave Lodge. Image from Diaspora to Diorama, 550.

 

As the colony expanded, slaves were not the only group to face subjugation, and the native Khoikhoi population witnessed their power wane and their status decline to that of the slaves. Despite being officially recognized as free, the Khoikhoi lacked burgher rights, including the right to private ownership of land because the newly established South African government feared that land ownership would offer the Khoikhoi an escape from laboring on farms. While the Khoikhoi’s liberties eroded, the small privileges slaves enjoyed had become increasingly limited as well. Aware of the dangers a large crowd of slaves could pose to the security of the town, the authorities passed resolutions to control the them which cumulated in a major ‘slave code’ in 1754. This code required slaves found in town or on Table Mountain to show passes signed by their masters, and forbade slaves from carrying arms, among other restrictions. Yet despite the increasing limitations on the freedoms of non-whites, owners manumitted a small number of slaves and those who had been freed in the wills of dead masters bought family members still in slavery.[39] 

By the 1820s when abolition movements began to gather momentum, slave classification had changed from that of origin to one based on descent and race. New ideological forces, both from Britain and the Cape, led to the general emancipation of slaves in all the British colonies in 1834 and the British government advocated assimilation through education and Christianization. Colonists created a new racial order through discriminatory laws and practices wherein the newly freed slaves alongside the Khoikhoi occupied the lowest level of a society dominated by whites. The abolition of the slave trade coincided with the word “Coloured” being introduced into the South African vocabulary as a category encompassing people of a wide range of skin tones, origins, ethnic traditions, and slave experiences. Historian Robert Shell argues that in this process of positive and negative stereotyping, “the identities of all people not from Europe were greatly diminished and hierarchies were established. This way of thinking was more pronounced at the Cape than anywhere in the New World.”[40]

As a new social order took root, the country itself underwent substantial transformation, resulting in even more change for the Coloured segment of society. The mineral discoveries in South Africa beginning in the 1860s coincided with a new era of imperialism and the European scramble for African land. Due to the emergence of an urban and industrial society at the Cape in the nineteenth century, the number of slaves steadily declined, and opportunities for wage labor materialized. Capetonians hired both Africans and ex-slaves to perform domestic or trade work. Furthermore, conquest, land dispossession, and taxation, when combined with demand for labor in the mines and increasing white demand for land, were all impetuses that forced non-White men off the land and into labor markets.[41]  Meanwhile, political developments built upon economic developments to continue to deprive Cape Town Coloureds of liberties and bring South Africa closer toward an officially sanctioned racial caste system.  Perhaps more than any other factor, the Anglo-Boer War led to the development of Afrikaner nationalist policies, which played a dominant role in the country’s politics for the next half century.[42] In 1909, the Act of the Union established South African independence from Britain and instituted an all-white government. The notion of being an Afrikaner became “more exclusive, incorporating a racial element of European ancestry and barring ‘non-Europeans.’”[43] 

When the National Party came to power in the 1948 elections, apartheid became the governing political policy for South Africa and remained so until the early 1990s. Political architects built apartheid on a long history of racial segregation and discriminatory laws intended to secure white supremacy. The South African government passed an apartheid policy that classified “Blacks,” “Whites,” “Indians,” and “Coloreds” into racial groups. Both the colonial governments and the white minority government in South Africa used their power to create “official” versions of the country’s past to justify their positions of power, which effectively minimized the Khoikhoi’s role in the country’s founding and ignored any mention of slave heritage altogether.  Rather than uniting the people of South Africa, the apartheid system accentuated the differences between the racial groupings, including among Capetonians.[44] 

During the apartheid era, the limitations imposed by discriminatory laws continually increased, and people of slave descent experienced extreme prejudice and inequality in their everyday lives. Legislative actions, such as the Group Areas Act of 1950, divided the country into racial zones. As capitalism developed in South Africa, the structures of racial domination in the political sphere made the discriminatory practices in the workplace that had occurred during the colonial period legal under apartheid regulations. The policies of the apartheid state also gave incentive for people of slave ancestry to claim descent from original inhabitants rather than as imported slaves. For example, land claims on the basis of original ownership became a possibility in the 1990s for descendants of original inhabitants rather descendants of imported slaves.[45] Crucially, by neglecting their slave heritage, the slave descendants could distance themselves from the ‘Cape Coloureds’ whom the South African government quickly excluded from political and social status during the apartheid era.  It became advantageous for people classified as Coloured to ‘forget’ their slave ancestry and claim European heritage to reap the benefits of rights granted to White citizens.

At the time of the initial abolition of the slave trade in 1834, remembering the experience of slavery and emancipation became an important annual activity for members of the Coloured class, a tradition which lasted for several generations into the 1900s. Every year, slave descendants celebrated both their heritage and the anniversary of the Act with lively parties, sometimes lasting an entire week. In the first half of the twentieth century these celebrations began to disappear, as the South African government’s segregation policies forcibly removed African Capetonians from the city center. To avoid a similar eviction, Colored people struggled to identify themselves with the advantaged whites rather than the black South Africans who experienced increasing discrimination. For example, in the mid-1930s, the African People’s Organization (APO) strove to identify itself with the white rulers of South Africa in order to share their privileges. Additionally, in the 1952 pageant celebrating van Riebeeck and the VOC’s landing, planners completely excluded the emancipation of slaves from the celebration—a choice that intentionally ignored the significant role slaves and their descendants played in the settlement of Cape Town. Although both of these events generated negative feedback from a few members of the Indian community in Cape Town, the majority of the population, including the descendants of slaves, remained publicly uninterested in these conscious choices to ignore the legacy of slavery at the Cape.[46] The pageant is one of many examples demonstrating the manipulation of public memory by the South African government, as well as by the Cape Town residents themselves, in order to obscure the authentic slave experience and bolster Afrikaner nationalist policies. The apartheid state took measures to suppress the memory of slavery, but the descendants of slaves themselves also ‘forgot’ slavery.

Similarly, the resistance and struggle against apartheid took place largely without the story and historical experience of slavery. This was true for two main reasons. First, most people saw slavery as an issue specifically confined to the Cape, and they believed focusing on slavery would divide those claiming slave heritage from their “Black” fellow sufferers across the country. Secondly, being a slave descendant could undermine the notions of belonging to the Cape and its community and holding historical rights to the land. “The state, the slave descendants themselves, and most liberation movements…were complicit in the submergence of the slave-memory during colonialism and apartheid.”[47] Slave descendants and the state disowned the history of slavery as the Coloured community became increasingly victimized based on heritage and race. In the struggle to redress issues of inequality and institutionalized discrimination, society ignored the history and memory of a whole segment of society because of the absence of the slavery narrative. The denial and forced forgetfulness of slavery did not end with the end of apartheid, and notions of shame associated with slave ancestry lingered on long afterthe policy was dismantled.[48]

The South African government continued to ignore the history of slavery until the close of the century. Those eligible to vote elected F.W. de Klerk President in 1990 amidst an atmosphere of continued discrimination, lawlessness, violence, and polarization. Due to internal and external pressures, de Klerk reinstated the African National Congress and released Nelson Mandela after twenty-seven years of imprisonment. For the first time in the country’s history all races participated equally in the political sphere. With fair and free elections, the people of South Africa voted Mandela President in 1994.[49]

During this period of political transition the new government set out to eradicate apartheid policies and for the first time experienced consensual decision-making. The country aimed for national unity by including all of its citizens fairly in the political process and giving all minorities, including those of slave descent, equal opportunities for success. The South African government employed a variety of programs, such as the Reconstruction and Development Programme and the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, to achieve socio-economic transformation and help the people of South Africa heal and peacefully adjust to the new democratic government from the apartheid policies of the previous regime.[50] 

 

 

Restructuring and the Heritage Sector in South Africa

 

 

Today, the South African government strives to move forward towards healing and racial understanding, and  post-apartheid legislation transformed the heritage sector and the museums of South Africa to reach this goal.  Thus, th state played an important role in the transformation of the Slave Lodge because the post-apartheid national agenda called for the representation of all people in South Africa, regardless of ethnic background or skin color, to be portrayed in its institutions of public memory. The South African government dictated not only the funding and structure of the museum, but also, in part, what the museum memorialized. As South Africa’s government transitioned from an apartheid regime to a participatory democracy, the face of public history and public institutions changed as well. Public institutions, such as museums, had been absorbed into the apartheid system, and the restructuring of museums shortly before 1994 “reflected the last phase of apartheid’s own struggle for survival.”[51] The apartheid regime used museums and public institutions to display the memory that the South African government’s agenda supported. As one scholar put it, the official version of South African history during the apartheid era was:

 

“that white and black reached South Africa at the same time, little more than three centuries ago, prior to which South Africa was largely or totally uninhabited; that black and white first met 500 miles east of Cape Town in 1770 as both groups were expanding; that they somehow settled quite different areas without conflict and without the whites taking any land that was originally black; that 87 percent of South Africa is therefore historically white because the whites were the first to settle it; and that the whites now generously allow the blacks to leave their homelands and work in more prosperous areas – ‘white’ South Africa.”[52]

 

This account excludes the Coloured segment of society completely and presents an inaccurate and reductionist history of South Africa to the public. As material forms of the collective consciousness, museums are heavily influenced by the curators who choose which memories get authorized and institutionalized as public memory. During the apartheid era, all museums at Cape Town limited the meaning and interpretation of the objects in its collections to those imposed by the curators. Apartheid-era museums focused on bringing order to the collections through systems of classification often based on ethnic groupings or “on definitions devised by outsiders of what constituted ethnic or cultural groups.”[53] Through the classification process, staff and visitors lost many intangible aspects of meaning. Visitors of museums during the apartheid era perceived history in Euro-centric terms and related to imperial and colonial history. Museum staff had reduced African history to tradition, and usually ignored Coloured history all together.[54] For that matter, visitors considered museums uninviting, privileged spaces that did little to cater to or attract Black, Coloured, or poor audiences.

After the political transition of 1994, the government took began a general reallocation of skills, resources, and infrastructure in the country. These changes extended to areas of arts, culture, and heritage, and thus significantly impacted museums, including the Slave Lodge. Scholars, concerned citizens, and government officials raised critical questions concerning whose heritage museums should preserve and who had the right to decide what should be on display. In response, the South African government created the “heritage sector” to address these questions. It includes institutions such as museums, archives, and heritage resource agencies set up to manage what has been termed as “cultural capital,” which consists of historical places, objects, and practices that have heritage value and are preserved in the public interest. [55]

In 1996, the South African government passed the White Paper on Arts, Culture, and Heritage, significantly endorsed by and written with the help of the Arts and Culture Task Group, which represents the views of the major part of the arts and culture community, which includes practitioners, educators, and administrators. The White Paper preceded a number of heritage-related Acts of Parliament towards the end of the decade. This critical piece of legislation acknowledged, among other issues, that means must be found to “enable song, dance, story-telling and oral history to be permanently recorded and conserved in the formal heritage structure,” allowing new methods for museums to utilize when creating exhibits.[56] The heritage sector of the of post-apartheid South African government encompasses, among other things, physical sites important to the history of South Africa, such as the Slave Lodge. Still in its transitional phase, the sector helps the government formulate policies and re-imagine institutions to house and explore the history of South Africa. Since the political transition in South Africa, the White Paper and other Acts of Parliament have demonstrated the changing policy of the government. The South African government now recognizes stories of significance to the history and memory of all the people of South Africa, not just those of European descent.

Accordingly, in July of 2001, the South African government amended the Cultural Institutions Act to cluster all of the museums of Cape Town, including the Slave Lodge, under the management of Iziko Museums of Cape Town, an organization created to “manage and promote Iziko’s unique combination of South Africa’s heritage collections, sites and services for the benefit of present and future generations.”[57] “Iziko” itself translates from ¡Xhosa to “hearth,” the traditional center of the African hut. The name alone signifies a shift away from a Eurocentric ideology as it is in a native language. Before becoming a part of Iziko, each of the institutions functioned as independent entities and each had their own council, director, and staff. The Act “dissolved [the councils] and appointed a new council in April of 1999 to oversee the amalgamation and transformation of the institutions.”[58] Besides creating new, diverse councils, the Slave Lodge and other museums under Iziko have begun to undergo a transformation process by which the meanings of exhibitions and an interpretation of the meanings of heritage objects are reinterpreted within the context of Iziko’s vision to be “African museums of excellence that empower and inspire all people to celebrate and respect our diverse heritage.”

 

 

Transforming the Slave Lodge

 

 

After 1994 museums began to transform how they portrayed South Africans.  The late 1990s saw an increased output of books, movies, and scholarly works regarding slavery at the Cape. As a result of their media coverage, the South African government put pressure on museums to address the imbalance of slave information in the heritage sector.[59] During the political transition in 1994, the Slave Lodge, known then as the South African Cultural History Museum (SACHM), only displayed artifacts that related to White culture. The South Africa Museum (SAM) in Cape Town displayed anything relating to indigenous cultures in the anthropological section. These displays were “clearly a reflection of racist colonial thinking, disassociating history and cultural development from indigenous societies, who were seen as ‘primitives’ living in a timeless past, devoid of change.”[60] That the Slave Lodge did not represent slavery anywhere in the museum even though the building once housed the largest amount of slaves in Cape Town triggered controversy and debate after 1994. SACHM established a planning committee to redress these issues and to rethink the history of the country the museums reflected.[61]

Though moving in the right direction, change came slowly. Museum staff attempted small changes, such as exhibitions in 1996 and 1997 which sought to give previously disadvantaged peoples a voice (on land struggles and Khoikhoi culture respectively), but by 1997 advertisements in the papers still encouraged visits to the SACHM to “see collections of ceramics, silver, toys and textiles as well as artifacts from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome and the Near and Far East.”[62] Besides a booklet published in 1997 on the early history of the Slave Lodge, few traces of the slave past of the building existed. The museum had no permanent displays or temporary exhibitions directly addressing slavery until 1998, and historian Robert Shell called the SACHM “the worst museum in South Africa.” Finally, in 1998 the South African government renamed the museum the Slave Lodge to recall the history of the building and by 2000 Iziko historical archeologist Dr. Gabeba Abrahams began excavating the Slave Lodge to discover material evidence of the slaves. Still, the exhibitions at the Slave Lodge did not prominently display information about slavery and many Capetonians advocated putting slavery at the center of the museum.

Why, after six years, did the Slave Lodge manifest so few changes? The museum still had its old collections related to the European settlers and it took time to re-construct a new history without artifacts relating to slavery. As an Iziko social history museum, the Slave Lodge had to collect new artifacts as well as oral narratives. Additionally, it took time for Iziko’s relations with the public to change. Instead of producing exhibitions that would inform, educate and perhaps instruct, Iziko and the Slave Lodge now had to “re-imagine the museum as a space of interaction and dialogue—as a place where history is produced through the exchange among many agents, including the public.”[63] As discussed earlier, slavery represents a sensitive and contentious subject in Cape Town partly because its history has been masked for so long.  Given the recent apartheid past and the arduous efforts that have gone into ‘forgetting’ slave heritage, the Capetonians’ reluctance to fully engage in a dialogue with the “Remembering Slavery” exhibit is understandable.A third reason for why the transformation of the Slave Lodge took so long lies with the curators and the staff of the museum, who had educational backgrounds qualifying them as specialists in the old collections (such as textiles, weapons, coins, etc.) and lacked an academic knowledge and research expertise on the history of slavery at the Cape. Though some changes occurred, the staff and curators remained largely in place, complicating the transformation process. On a bureaucratic level, change took place in 2000 when Iziko appointed Jack Lohman as its CEO. He streamlined the institutions and rearranged personnel structures and downsized the staff. All of these factors finally resulted in formalized structures to plan and implement permanent change in 2001.[64]

 

 

Creating an Exhibition on Slavery at the Slave Lodge

 

 

            In 2006, the Slave Lodge put its first permanent exhibition on display entitled “Remembering Slavery”. The exhibit intended to reflect the slave past of the building; an important milestone for both Iziko and for the country. For Iziko it represents a visible attempt to overcome its formerly classificatory system and give a voice to the non-white population of Cape Town. In South Africa the history of slavery has been silenced, denied, and submerged both in academic and public history, but “Remembering Slavery” proposed to change all that.

In 2002, Jattie Bredekamp, the new CEO of Iziko, appointed Gabeba Abrahams as project coordinator for the redevelopment process. She had been involved in the excavations at the Lodge, and as a person of color she signaled Iziko’s willingness to transform. In 2005 the actual planning of the exhibition began, but numerous logistical obstacles rapidly surfaced. Museum staff quickly discovered that they lacked  sufficient time to design all of the galleries, to do adequate research or to collect the images and information needed, or enough money to finish all six galleries, and ultimately only four actually opened.[65]

            Given that museums interpret material through the visual placement and framing of the artifacts, it was no surprise that members of the museum staff contested the script of the exhibition from the beginning. Lalou Meltzer and Robert Shell, two social historians, criticized Abrahams for her lack of analysis in the text and argued that emphasizing the brutality and cruelty of slavery was not only inadequate, but also represented and remembered slaves in their roles as victims, thereby stripping slaves of any agency. Abrahams responded to this challenge for a higher level of analysis by opposing a story that “evaded abolitionist rhetoric and drew more attention to achievements, creativity and negotiating powers of slaves as attempts to create a sanitized version of the past.”[66] However, before the argument could be resolved Abrahams became sick and Lalou Meltzer took Abrahams’ role in heading the project and rewrote the script, assisted by Robert Shell and Susan Newton-King, a UWC historian. The main changes included de-emphasizing the brutality towards slaves and not presenting them as helpless victims. For example, using the words “miserable” and “unbearable,” and so on instead of “horror” or “cruel,” resulted in a script that had a more neutral and academically detached tone.

Perhaps due to time pressures, further discussions among museum staff or among members of the Cape Town community never took place before the opening of the exhibition.[67] As Iziko evolves, hopefully museum staff will engage the public in a meaningful way as their exhibits change from being a set of facts laid down by a committee to a malleable history that is constantly challenged and reassessed. Museum staff intended “Remembering Slavery” to present a meaningful and interactive history to the public, and the next section will illustrate how museum staff physically laid out the exhibition.

 

 

A New Past on Display:

“Remembering Slavery” at the Slave Lodge

 

 

“Remembering Slavery” evolved into an exhibition that relies on spatial and audio-visual installations, rather than artifacts. Because relatively few artifacts have been found, the exhibit centers on the reconstructions of places, events, and scenes to tell its story. In addition, because museums have to compete against “a growing variety of other leisure activities and a tourism industry that privileges adventure and immediacy for visitors,” the Slave Lodge felt that object-centered exhibitions would not attract a large audience. As a result, the experiential design acts as the central feature of the exhibit and constructs and conveys its meanings.

            The exhibition includes four galleries and an auditorium, which features a sixteen minute film introducing the visitors to slavery. Visitors waiting to see this film wait in the first gallery, which further introduces slavery and outlines the history of the Slave Lodge as a building (both in terms of function and in architectural changes). The gallery places the four galleries in the context of the overall transformation of the Lodge and announces future exhibits. The second gallery explains the slave ship voyages to the Cape, both from South and South East Asia and East Africa, by reconstructing the Meermin, a ship specially built for slave service to the Cape. It also features a “column of light” with names of slaves engraved upon it, along with information on the practice of renaming the newly-arrived slaves. An audio poem entitled “Slave Dream” plays in the background.

            The third gallery, entitled “Origins and Arrival”, illustrates the practices of slave auctions at the Cape, linguistic traditions (with an emphasis on Afrikaans), and biographical sketches of seven Cape slaves. It also focuses on where the slaves came from with maps and a small plasma screen displaying images relating to the regions of origin. The fourth gallery reconstructs “Life at the Lodge.” Audio supplies information on conditions and events at the Lodge, and glass panels set up on the wall reflect images supporting the audio. The room is dark except for the middle, where a spotlight shines down on a physical model of the Lodge. Museum staff never completed the fifth and six galleries, but the fifth gallery, originally intended to display the findings of Abrahams’ excavations, displays the “certificates of the fourteen slaves who were posthumously honored with Western Cape Provincial Honours ‘Order of Disa: Officer’ in a ceremony held in 2005.”[68]

 

 

“Remembering Slavery”: a Balanced Narrative?

 

 

As discussed earlier, the exhibition underwent fundamental changes in the script when Meltzer took over the project. Meltzer veered away from telling a story of victimization, but understood the need to acknowledge the brutality and cruelty of slavery. Her script “takes on a rather detached and academic style, and clearly avoids abolitionist rhetoric and any sensationalist, emotional language.”[69] The problem with this approach is that most visitors view slavery as an emotional topic. The failure to stress the brutality of the system causes some visitors to echo Abrahams’ claim that the exhibition presents a sanitized version of the past.

The designers faced a challenge in dealing with the dilemma in the script. Of the four galleries in the exhibit, gallery one functions primarily as a waiting room and gallery four concentrates more specifically on the artifacts found while excavating the Lodge. Therefore, these galleries do not provide as many opportunities for presenting a balanced narrative. The following evaluation is based off of the observations and assessment of Historian Anne Eichmann who spent a significant amount of time interning at the Slave Lodge during the construction and completion of “Remembering Slavery.”

            Gallery two provides an example of the deftness with which the designers attempted to portray both the brutality and agency of the slaves. The room depicts the voyages of the slave ships, and upon entering one’s attention is directed towards two images on the right. The first illustrates a group of Prize Slaves from East Africa. “The postures and facial expressions of the captured slaves, among them many children, convey feelings of exhaustion and hopelessness as well as of fear regarding their unknown fate,” and conveys the cruelty of the slave trade. While the first image conveys a sense of the slaves’ humanity, the second does the exact opposite. Depicting an unnamed ship bringing slaves to Mauritius and to the Cape with slaves packed together tightly for the voyage, the second image suggests the commoditization and inhumane aspects of the slave trade.[70] 

 

 

 

Image from gallery two. Taken from Diaspora to Diorama, 45.

 

            The section of gallery two which displays the partly reconstructed slave ship continues to incorporate both viewpoints. Covering the entire upper half of the wall to the left of the ship, a drawing depicts life below deck on a slave vessel. The slaves are presented as powerless, helpless, and passive victims. Emotions of fatigue, exhaustion, hopelessness, and despair are evoked by the drawing. Historian Anne Eichmann writes,

 

“The space of the partly reconstructed ship is envisioned to engage visitors strongly on an emotional level by placing them into a participatory performance role. The darkened and closed space has been designed to evoke the crammed conditions on a slaver, so as to convey the slaves’ experience of physical confinement on the long journey towards a destination unknown. So, the spatial design of the gallery too complements the images in attempting to highlight and convey the cruelty and dehumanizing character of the slave trade and in prioritizing the slaves’ suffering and their role as victims.”[71]

 

Despite this imagery depicting the cruelty of slavery, the designers also attempted to avoid painting the slaves as victims. The poem “Slave Dream,” played in the background, “recounts the thoughts and feelings from the perspective of the slaves.”[72] The poem not only contradicts the commoditization process, but also draws attention to the strength of the slaves that survived the journey; in recognizing their “refusal to give up hope and dreaming—it acknowledges and celebrates the ‘triumph of the human spirit.’” Themes of strength and identity continue with the column of light. A luminous pillar placed inside contrasts with the dark room because it literally lights up, and could signify the hopes and dreams of the slaves. The names engraved on the pillar humanize the slaves, as well as show the various identities they came with. Both the poem and the column deny “notions of a cultural and social death” for the slaves.[73]

 

  

 

Pillar of Light. Image taken from Diaspora to Diorama, p. 773.

 

The screen shows an eight minute long video clip intended to discover the layered histories of the slaves brought to the Cape. The first two minutes of the video clip focus on the VOC in the Netherlands and at the Cape, and are followed by maps, pictures of plants and spices, and colonial drawings which do little to emphasize the cultural backgrounds of the slaves. Eichmann writes,

 

“Having a gallery that conveys culture of regions slaves came from is important. A failure to do so only allows those brought to the Cape ‘into history’ as they become slaves – wiping out their past and previous inheritances, traditions and customs. Eventually the opposite of the declared aim is achieved: slaves are again dehumanized and stripped off any identity.[74]

 

While the map and video fail to adequately portray the cultural traditions and origins of the slaves, a smaller map in the gallery illustrates all of the known places of origin of the slaves (towns, ports, and villages). This map provides a far better sense of the multitude of cultures the slaves came from than anything else in the gallery. While gallery three began with good intentions, the final result fails to display concrete information on the regions. However, the question of how a gallery can be designed to represent all the cultural and historical background to slavery without succumbing to reductionism is a challenge to museum staff. Overall, the design team has found a “thoughtful and balanced way to address the debate around brutality and victimization.”[75] Despite the shortcomings of gallery three, “Remembering Slavery” resolves the disagreement concerning the history of slavery, as it balances narratives of victimization and agency.

 

 

Conclusion

 

 

“Remembering Slavery” demonstrates that memory in South Africa today remains a fiercely contested issue. Museums play an instrumental role in displaying the newly interpreted history of South Africa, and while the museum staff attempts to create historically neutral exhibits, the final products cannot avoid a degree of political bias. South African museums are caught between two goals: that of being factually accurate and at the same time meeting the political needs of the “rainbow nation.” Museum politics operate in every country, but perhaps most visibly in a country such as South Africa, where the heritage sector and museums are undergoing a complete transformation. As the nation begins to redefine its history, arguments have focused on the role of slavery in the formation of modern South African identity. The Slave Lodge promotes nation-building today by showing exhibitions featuring previously-marginalized peoples. By bringing their stories to light, museum staff and the South African government hope to include them in the history of the nation and acknowledge their role in the formation of South Africa. Yet the making of “Remembering Slavery” illustrates the difficulties of re-presenting the contested history in Cape Town. It is essential that South Africans explore, debate, and discuss their slave past because it is an integral part of their present identity and will play a defining role in the ongoing reformulation of their national values.

South Africa’s unique legacy of conquest, slavery, racial segregation, and conflict make for a case study on the difficulties of incorporating a multitude of voices to create a collective identity within the confines of a museum exhibition.  Museums wield great interpretive power as they strive to create meaningful histories and shape a collective consciousness. As such, museums play an important role as makers of memory and must welcome conflicting and competing narratives, as well as engage the public in a meaningful way to make their exhibitions reflect an accurate and agreed-upon interpretation of the people they represent. As museums around the world continue to create exhibitions that allow different points of views to coexist, “Remembering Slavery” demonstrates the possibility of creating displays that recognize competing narrative voices, even when the history on display has many stakeholders and contains examples of turbulence and controversy. Despite some shortcomings, the museum staff created an exhibition that attempted to balance depictions of slavery as a brutal system while at the same time giving slaves agency. “Remembering Slavery” reveals the possibility for museums to balance these two narratives, but their success often depends on factors often out of their control, such as funding, time available for exhibition development, the message the national government would like the exhibition to send. Although people must remain wary of political agendas manifesting themselves through museum exhibitions, these findings demonstrate the enormous opportunities for museums to function as forums where competing narratives coexist, challenging visitors to re-imagine their own histories and memories.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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