Leslie Witz is one of the leading South African historians studying museums and heritage. He and his colleagues at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) have also played critical roles in the making (and remaking) of that country's museums since the 1990s. Witz describes this book as “a somewhat disjointed, interspersed account of the self, a highly selective autobiography of sorts” (227). It is that, but it's also a much-needed reflection of the transition of South Africa's postapartheid museums from the perspective of someone who was deeply immersed in that process. During this period of transition, as Witz points out, older history museums were under renovation or transformation, while newer museum seemed to spring up from every corner, including unexpected sites like Hostel 33 in Lwandle in the Western Cape, a humble structure that is one of the last remaining from the migrant labor system that ensured cheap labor in the mines during the colonial and apartheid regimes. In this vein, Witz considers how the public mandate to transform the country's museums to reflect a shared history led to a push to reenvision the country's memorial landscape to include otherwise excluded sites like hostels and places of detention and incarceration. This mandate also involved the transformation of older museums which has meant recasting, reframing, and expanding existing collections, while seeking new expertise. While it's easy to get lost in the abundance of detail about museum exhibitions, policy changes, and community workshops, Witz chronicles an important chapter in postapartheid South African museum work while also delving into a more abstract set of questions about the construction and limits of public history, memory, and time itself.
Museum Time is retrospective: part autobiography and part historical case studies. The case studies revolve around museum work nationally, but focus primarily on the Western Cape where Witz and his collaborators have been most deeply involved. They include the realization of an idea that Witz's student Bongani Mgijima had to preserve a hostel in Lwandle (Chapter Two) to memorialize the apartheid past while also stimulating the local economy; the complicated history of preserving Robben Island (Chapter Five) from prison to museum and ongoing issues around the museum itself as a site of discipline and power as new narratives are rewritten, managed, and contested. The other case studies about reimagining museum spaces created during the colonial and apartheid periods: the Bartolomeu Dias Museum (named after the first European to sail around the southern tip of Africa) in Chapter Three; the Amathole Museum of natural and cultural history in Chapter Four, and a new take on the Van Riebeeck Festival in the Y350? exhibition, which featured an inverted and defaced statue of the Dutch explorer in Cape Town.Footnote 1 Drawing on his personal involvement and experiences, in each case, Witz considers how curatorial questions of time — dates and anniversaries for example — intersect with political interests, competencies, and funding (from local and national government, as well as the interests of international foundations).
With a broad historical perspective Witz is able to locate his look at the postapartheid museum moment within a longer trajectory of colonial museological practice. He shows how the cultural and social museums that began to be founded in the 1960s involved a shift away from an emphasis on the country's natural history. This shift involved, and continues toward, a push to tell the story of nation, or one of them anyway, that explained what the country is and who its people are. Witz offers a bird's eye view of this transformative work that is as imaginative as institutional, political as curatorial, in Chapter Two. The reader can see how this played out in specific locales later in the book, like in Chapter Four's treatment of the overhauling of the former Kaffrarian Museum into the current Amathole Museum in the Eastern Cape. By asking questions of this transformed site, especially the addition of the history display, African Frontiers, Witz considers the repositioning of the objects — here depictions of mammals and hunters — as a particular type of artifactual evidence of how social relationships and land were imagined as part of European expansion and colonial rule. Even in the postapartheid era, new histories still find themselves locked into the time-making logic of past regimes. Here it becomes apparent that one of the real projects is how to establish narratives and curatorial practices that are less reactive to older problematic and racist ones, whether it's possible to create history anew in the midst of lives and knowledge systems that remain deeply influenced by the past.
Beyond the specific histories of these changing museums, both Witz's overview of museological practices in Chapter Two and the book's introduction are worth a close read. In these sections we see the benefits of Witz's approach that blends memoir and reflection with historical analyses, including the histories of museums, local communities, and South Africa's various national histories from colonial and apartheid through liberation. In the introduction, Witz presents specifics about the museum case studies that the rest of the book will focus on as well as plenty of others: traces how he became involved in some, and perhaps most usefully or uniquely, places them within a wider conversation about the museum at a peculiar site of memory, where time and memory are accelerated or slowed down depending on who's doing the curating as much as the wider sociopolitical context. Witz introduces what he calls the “dilemma label” (7), a note left for visitors indicating some change is underway or explaining the reasoning behind showing an outdated, offensive, or otherwise objectable object or display. Via the dilemma label, the museum itself is reframed, less authorative than self-reflective and questioning. While these themes are most fully elaborated in the introduction, Witz revists them in the case studies and they offer a different sort of lens for thinking about what happened across each site.
In the postapartheid period, museums are still involved in classificatory projects of marking time and the objects, places, events, and people that matter most. Yet since 1994, their focus has shifted as museums try to do more not less, to represent more, and be accountable to more people. This new democratic urge is reflected in curatorial practices; throughout the case studies, we see a turn to everyday life to tell national stories.
While he is very much present throughout the book, Witz might have reflected more deeply on his role in these museum projects, as well as the role his disciplines — public history and heritage studies — are themselves part of the postapartheid “museum moment.” Public history and heritage studies have become massive industries since 1994, linked to jobs, tourism, and political posturing, as well as knowledge production or memory (re)making. While there are countless personal accounts of collaborating with other colleagues, local community members, museum staff, and at times students, they are not interrogated as much as they could be. It would have been useful, for example, to think more systematically about his role as the public historian, how he was situated in the classroom as much as at the museum or in communities of which he's ultimately not a member. Such an investigation of his personal involvement, rather than a description of it, would have added even more to the book's unique blend of personal, community, and institutional perspectives.
The book is ambitious in its attempt to both survey broad processes alongside more detailed case studies all the while tending to more abstract questions museums find themselves ensnarled in concerning the nature of time, power, and memory. Witz refers to his approach as “disjointed,” as his experience is sometimes centered and at other times in the background or missing altogether. But there are moments of symmetry and a logic that unfolds with the cases as he provides dates for these projects, when he was first approached to work with a group on a museum project, when they hit snags, and what lessons he and his collaborators seemed to take with them to the next one. While it's not his central concern, it's hard not to question the outsized influence of universities like the University of Cape Town and, especially, the University of the Western Cape through their museum studies and public history departments on public memorial space, particularly in the Western Cape. We see the relationship between these progressive academics and resistance movements, local activists, community organizers, and politicians. None of it seems inevitable, all of it contigent on personal and professional relationships, access to resources, and political will.
The conclusion of Museum Times considers where the “museum moment” is heading next. Witz assesses how the museums that took shape and the ones that transformed during the 1990s have had to keep changing to stay relevant and operable, responding to the whims of politics and cultural attention, as well as tourism trends. Some of these projects, like the Red Location Museum in Port Elizabeth, have been unable to keep pace and have had to shut their doors, while others have developed vocational and technical skills training for local youths to reinvent themselves anew. Again, it's easy to get lost in the detailed survey of these museums across time, but Witz is making an even broader point about the ever-shifting future of publicly counting time with objects and stories.
