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"The Bushman — Life in a New Country" by Edward Wilson Landor. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre.
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We are begging you to talk to president Khama and ask him to stop persecuting us," said the letter. Van der Post, who died in , was also Prince William's godfather.

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After visiting the bushmen, Charles wrote that they had greatly influenced his thinking about the environment. We all lose if the bushman disappears. But it has emerged that he and Prince William may have unwittingly encouraged president Khama to stop the bushmen hunting. In January, Charles and William hosted an international meeting to draw attention to a crisis of illegal poaching of animals like elephants and rhino at Clarence House, Charles's London residence.

With the UK government, the royals are said to have helped persuade 46 countries to take new initiatives. Khama, whose family owns a large tract of the Kalahari desert reserve and whose nephew has shares in one of the most expensive game lodges, was present at Clarence House in London and used the occasion to pledge to protect wildlife.

His family is making money out of this," says Kakelebone. We are not going to stop hunting. My fear now is that they will arrest us and use the ban to put us in prison and drive us out of our homeland. The government is not telling people about this. We think they want a pretext to arrest us drive us out," said Kakelebone.

The Bushman, Life in a New Country

In a series of evictions after , the Botswana government removed several thousand San from the Kalahari reserve, claiming they were a drain on Botswana's financial resources and that the families were happy to give up their hunter-gathering. But, say human rights groups like Survival International , the evictions were intended to allow in conservation groups, tourist companies and diamond mining. Around San people now live in seven "settlements" in and outside the game reserve, many of which are in appalling conditions.

It's like holding your arms and expecting to be fed.

They treat us as stupid. We are given clothes and food. It's racial discrimination. They look down on us. They say 'they are only bushmen'. We can see here a critical shift from an informing museology the exhibit as a neutral vehicle for the transmission of information to a performing museology the museum itself is on display Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, , p. The life-like presence of the casts and their historical connection with scientific racism formed one of the key concerns in relation to the future of the diorama.

The issue of consultation was complex as there was not a single descendant community but a number of diverse stakeholder groups with different perspectives. A successful example of consultation with community stakeholders took place in relation to the development of a new exhibition of Bushman rock paintings and engravings that had been in the SAM for almost a century but had not been adequately displayed or interpreted. Archaeologist, Dr Janette Deacon, who was responsible for scripting the exhibition texts, worked closely with indigenous groups and allowed the ancestral voices of Bushmen to be reflected in the exhibition.

The Bushman, or Life in a New Country (Classic Reprint) (Paperback)

The exhibition is significant in that it both acknowledges and honours the San people, past and present. Unlike the diorama which was an idealised construct based entirely on the views of outsiders, this exhibition sought to respect indigenous knowledge and beliefs. His analysis showed that, far from being primitive, the iconography of the art was complex, multi-layered and deeply spiritual Lewis-Williams, This insight was entirely absent in the narrative of the diorama, as well as in the explanatory labels of the rock art panels that had been exhibited at the SAM since Davison, There is an inverse relationship between space and object, whereby awareness of emptiness heightens the presence of the rock art on display and projects the body of the viewer into a visual experience of an imagined landscape.

Contrary to the diorama which was characterised by the presence of the body-casts, the design of the rock art gallery invites a sensory and poetic engagement with absence and poignant loss of a cultural heritage. By exhibiting the rock art of the Bushmen in a way that inspires respect for the artists, it was hoped that the negative racial stereotypes associated with the diorama would be countered and replaced with empathy for their culture.

The project to make the life-casts in the diorama had also taken place at this time and was linked conceptually to the precepts of racial science that were later discredited. In a series of workshops, descendant communities were made aware of the holdings of the SAM and of the possible processes of return and reburial.

A draft policy on the management of human remains was circulated for comment to stakeholders and the final policy was ratified by the Iziko Council in Bredekamp, Thus far, no requests for reburial of human remains have been received by Iziko but the Advisory Committee set up in terms of the policy guides access to these sensitive collections and how they are curated. All human skeletal material is restricted from being on public exhibition. One of the main reasons for closing the diorama had been the absence of historical interpretation regarding the early history of colonial violence and dispossession, as well as the twentieth-century history of racial science in which the casts had been made for the SAM.

Both contexts had been humiliating for the Bushmen. One of the speakers at the forum proposed that the intellectual history of the SAM as a colonial institution, including the diorama, should be presented in an exhibition.

A spokesperson for indigenous communities argued for greater dialogue with the people whose culture and history were being represented, so that their voices could be heard directly, rather than being interpreted by those who controlled the exhibition process. Here the issue of power relations and sharing curatorial authority was raised and accepted in principle but remained to be taken forward in practice. Although this made sense at the institutional level, it deflected the specific focus away from the diorama to larger, more diffuse issues that would take time to resolve.

The following year, in November , a temporary exhibition curated by Pippa Skotnes on George Stow and the rock art of the San was opened by historian, Nigel Penn, who made reference to the impasse regarding the diorama. Between and November , when Prof Bredekamp retired as CEO of Iziko, a number of panel discussions about the diorama were held but no decision was taken. However, the proposal to re-imagine the diorama using creative techniques to convey multiple voices did not prevail as it was deemed necessary to address the bigger issue of colonial bias in all the ethnography displays.

The Bushman-The Way of the Hunter

Led by historian, Prof. Ciraj Rassool, a member of the new Council, the institutional priority shifted towards addressing the issue of human remains in Iziko collections. This resulted in the plaster-casts being conflated with human remains and thus precluded from exhibition on ethical grounds. In June , the Iziko Council accepted the recommendation from of the sub-committee on Human Remains that all body casts made in the interests of racial science by James Drury should be deemed unethically collected human remains Rassool, , pp.

It followed that the diorama would be closed permanently. But this was not the end of the public discourse on the diorama or the Ethnography Gallery of which it had been a significant part. At the same time a series of additional labels and objects were added to the gallery to mark the centenary of the Land Act which had greatly reduced the land available to the African people of South Africa. Other labels were introduced to explain the changes in the gallery but these were intended as temporary measures.

Four years later, they were still in place, highlighting the distance between intention and reality. As George Stocking wisely noted, large museums tend to be institutionally prone to paradigm lag and thus exhibitions often outlive their conceptual currency. At one level, the diorama also proves this point but, none the less, it has retained iconic status and occupies a unique place in museum history in South Africa. It resonated with viewers and remained vivid in the collective memory despite, or perhaps because of, being contested.

A commitment was made by the museum curators that new exhibitions would be planned in discussion with source communities and that responsibility to redress omissions and errors of interpretation would be shared. This commitment, however, has yet to be tested in practice and balancing community interests with those of museum professionals may prove challenging. An issue that makes working with communities complex is that community groups seldom speak with a unified voice and contesting views can be difficult to reconcile.

This was the case when negotiating with stakeholders about the future of the Bushman diorama. The outcome was inertia on the part of the museum, and a lack of decision-making and action. Although the diorama installation remained closed to the public for 16 years, the discourse surrounding it did not dissipate but remained relevant to current debates, especially those focused on the transformation and de-colonization of museums. Contemporary students of museology and heritage have only seen images of the diorama but they engage actively with the discourse and continue to interact critically with it.

The event took the form of a performance, in the Xhosa language, in which a restless spirit from the past who had taken the form of an old man bore witness to various crimes perceived to be inherent in the ethnographic displays. Despite being closed for over a decade, the diorama was invoked as a crime of ethnographic violence. The intervention appealed to the emotions more than the intellect and the visual presence of the performers in the gallery was compelling and intriguing; they enlivened the space and triggered the imagination.

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Ironically, the power of the museum as a cultural domain was not undermined but affirmed by the intervention. Grewcock , p. This was affirmed in the intervention described above. Understanding and revealing how relations of power work in museum practice remains important but as Witcomb , p. In fact, as this case study shows, the reality is more complex.

Bredekamp, H. Goodnow, Challenge and transformation: museums in Cape Town and Sydney pp. Cameron, D. The museum, a temple or the forum. Curator, 14 1 , Clifford, J.


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