The J B Marks Municipality and more specifically, the city of Potchefstroom which was once the capital of Die Zuid Afrika, is home to a large number of museums and heritage sites that need to be celebrated, preserved and documented for archives and posterity.
However, the region has yet to nurture and inculcate an appreciation for its arts and rich cultural heritage, appreciating the socio-economic value the preservation of such heritage through creative practices can bring to under-resourced communities.
Over the past four years, a complex discourse has emerged concerning the ways in which cultural institutions in the Potchefstroom and South Africa at large, navigate questions of historical violence and systemic injustice in the context of colonial history. Artists, historians and academics continued to employed various strategies to urge cultural institutions such museums and heritage sites these to address these issues, often merging activism with their artistic practice.
As much as some of these actions have brought these matters to public attention, much of the discourse continues to unfold in private, with many institutions adopting cautious or noncommittal stances. The Potchefstroom Museums And Cultural Sites Committee, The NG Museum and The Totius House Museum such institutions, who in the face of political pressure and allegiances have opted to disengage from social engagement on matters of heritage preservation and presentation to communities that were excluded from these museums and institutions.
Sadly, this means that communal relationship with history is being compromised, as one observes biased and single-sided endeavours to preserve colonial history over the preservation and actual resuscitation of the heritage and historical archives of people of colour in the region.
White historical preservationists feel threatened by the encroachment of black curiosity into matters, artefacts and heritage sites held dear by the nationalist morality of the Afrikaner community, at the expense of the censored and erased histories of indigenous communities who people the region prior to the influx of settlers on their expansionist mission.
Black cultural practitioners and artists continue to struggle to access these institutions, where colonial art and cultural exclusivist morale thrives; these puritanical spaces have become havens for appreciation of white colonial history and contemporary art, neglecting the other voice less privileged.
Collectives of impassioned artists and festival organisers struggle to find municipal venues with cultural relevance because these venues cradle white heritage and history and black presence might contaminate these revered spaces. Bureaucratic strategies are employed to exhaust any efforts to utilise these spaces for contemporary artist expression as they embody the undying spirit of white supremacy.
And truly is unfortunate that the new generation of museum administrators and heritage site managers have not evolved a sense of urgency in regards to transforming these institutions into participatory and emancipatory spaces for social and cultural dialogue and exchange.
But can any contestation of a superstructure that we have inherited and which, as heritage professionals and artists, wish to dismantle entail methods that would eventual destroy the same heritage and art we yearn to preserve?
And knowing that no activist action should reach a point where they are characterized by desecration of these sites of collective memory, one wonders how; in light of the exclusivity that these sites enjoy in the face of the plurality of social narratives that were silenced.
These places were meant to to stimulate new processes of learning and understanding the diversity of our cultures, but it appears there are those shielded historical memorabilia that serves to legitimise white supremacist rule over people who of colour who needed to be forgotten and relegated to the oblivion of unrecorded pasts.
As opposed to the current protectionist stance taken by museums housing colonial memorabilia and artefacts, a discussion around new curatorial methodologies and the changing relationship between museums, artists, and audiences need be explored.
These heritage professionals aught be rethinking institutional models, forging new forms of collaboration, and expanding the role of art and heritage in public life, advancing a more collaborative and dynamic cultural exchange.
These institutions should be producing alternative forms of evidence, constructing archives that challenge dominant narratives and creating spaces for collective healing and remembrance. They must interrogate white literary practices that oppose or complicate narratives of black progress.
Yet, it always happens that with each yearly attempt to establish a festival dedicated to appreciating art and cultural output from black communities falls on deaf ears, met with blatant opposition and disregard because the festival is not Aardklop, a revue of white cultural appreciation patronised by banking cartels and white solidarity political movements.
And when a provincial Arts And Culture office and its staff are impotent to change the status quo, artists are left to take matters into their own hands, to hone independent strategies for expressing their views on socio-political issues assailing their communities.
Arts and craft markets are monopolised by white establishments who readily have access to these institutions and their facilities, yet black artists struggle to establish their own enterprises in those facilities, left with the despondent resolve for conformation and normally such acts tend to be destructive in the long run.
When these establishment direly need uniquely inter-historical approaches to cultural appreciation, they simply foster segregationist enclaves that stand independent of one another to the detriment of social cohesion and inter-cultural dialogue.
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And there is always an exception to the norm as is the case with the Klerksdorp Museum, which has being at the forefront to integrating communities through its activities that range from oral history discussion and collection of archives from communities around Matlosana for preservation in the museum archives.
To date, this museum has hosted portable skills training initiates and various learnerships that enrich the community, and the institution continues to be a haven for craft markets, performances and exhibitions that explore the artistic spirit of various communities in the region.
The museum continues to present exhibitions that question records of social movements and displacement, communal resilience, and cultural memory, blending history, craft, and participatory storytelling into a dynamic mix that engages audiences of all ages.
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Undeniably, there’s a plethora of managerially dysfunctional institutions syphoning funds for personal enrichment within the province, and MmaBana Art And Culture Foundation is a livid example of this misguided state institution that entrenches the erasure of black artistic expression in the North west province, but we watch.
Pantsula Dance competitions are ceaselessly held in the Matlosana region (crowds dancing their poverty away) and no theatrical play are produced, while AfriForum Theatre is inundating white audiences with propagandist sponsored art, where their white artists are fed while black fraternities are fighting over crumbs from the table of an arts minister and his minions.
White establishments conduct fashion shows in these cities, exposing and marketing white couture artists and their Eurocentric unsuitable fashion trends, without any input from black designers.
And where are the departmental heads who spend holidays in white-owned resorts, while community-based leisure and entertainment venues languish in under-resourced districts of crime-infested townships without security cartel who honed their skills in the South African military?
There are “koek-susters” and “hertzorg koekies” being sold to hordes of Voortrekker descendants each month, baked by black under-paid maids, munched with other delicacies flooding craft markets and festivals where boere culture is celebrated. Mothers and fathers unnamed, making an entire ultra-nationalist racist community rich from their labour; washing laundry for unrepentant slave-holders who perpetually undermine black effort for self-determination.
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But, returning to museums and heritage sites preserved for settler nationalist pride, I foresee a retaliatory epoch where all preservatories of colonial history are attacked and destroyed because of their reluctance to acknowledge black presences throughout history.
The Voortrekkers have to revisit their recollections of their journey guided by natives throughout this harsh terrain, and only through the torching of their falsified memorabilia, will they learn the truth of their unwelcome annexation of our ancestral lands.
Those snipers, religious zealots and militants who are on holiday in the African Safari, from their conscription in Israel where they killed thousands of Palestinian children, we should remind them of their vulgarity and bloodstained heritage.
Those Indians who still look at black folk as the untouchables, the Dalit, should now be taught what it means to be preservers of ancestral heritage. Africa cannot watch whites and Islamist vandalises marauding through the continent destroying any monument of an intelligence they can’t comprehend and deem diabolical.
Museums in Potchefstroom and across South Africa continue to preserve and exhibit specific art historical lineages, deeply divisive colonial memorabilia and stolen artefacts from indigenous peoples, as well as a variety of eerie and racially derogatory samples from anthropological collections. These collections have to be reassessed, to provide tools for these colonial structures and institutions to better reflect the communities with which they share space
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The power of visual erasure through the absences of photographic images of people of colour proves to date that it was a concerted mission to not represent black cultures in museums because they would bring into question the origins of trauma experienced by black people.
In these spaces, our perceptions are constantly called into question, reimagining collective mourning as a form of resistance against society’s expected reactions to our collective erasure, forcing us to see beyond boundaries of discomfort and pain.
Dismantling the artistic and architectural infrastructure of white supremacy housed in these museums and heritage should be our concern, but can retrieving and uncovering archives restore the erased peoples of South Africa, and re-energize the social stakes of heritage preservation within our present predicament?
Global uprisings against racism have come to the fore in recent years, and a notable shift in various heritage preservation and art institutions has been witness with the many moving toward decolonial exhibitions which reckon with racial discrepancies forged by past colonial experiences. The talk about inclusivity and diversity are rampant and
Operative methods have been employed to redress western colonial imbalances in exhibition spaces, thus allowing for a visibility of otherwise invisible cultural byproducts from people of colour, but there persists an absence of cultural knowledge from postcolonial experiences.
Historically however, collections in contemporary art museums have preserved and revealed specific art historical lineages. These stories, however, are ultimately influenced by the social and political context in which museums collect. Over the last few years, some have deaccessioned works—a practice of collection care where some objects are routinely removed from their collections—with the specific intent to make room for works by artists whose ideas and art have been left out of the established canon, especially artists of colour.
Conversations on decolonial repair as both a tool for and a method of engagement with the current state of the world are essential if museums and spaces of heritage preservation are to become authentic vantage points that bring together real and imagined worlds, both past and present.
Interestingly, the Klerksdorp Museum has found methodologies focusing on key questions regarding collecting, archives, and museum practice, inviting audiences to share their personal objects and narratives, instead of letting our differences separate us, creating new alliances within communities.
They have begun to question on how to address the fragility of their collections, their care, custodianship, preservation and eventual loss in the face of the climate catastrophe, in an attempt to quantify the impact of such loss on communities. Hence their drive to digitise most of their literary collection of letters, speeches and other paper based records that could be damaged by floods or fire, for an example.
Their commendable and exemplary move calls upon the rest of those “family” museums and their administrators to question their moral compasses, to ponder the demise of their well preserved enclaves in the face of the “global cancel culture”, and all decolonial efforts that will render all falsifications of history by the coloniser null and void.
Paul Zisiwe 2025
