UWC History Doctoral Alumni, Dr Sipokazi Sambumbu Madida and Dr Olusegun Morakinyo, presenting at the ISAM 200 Conference. Image: Ciraj Rassool

As South Africa marks 200 years since the founding of its oldest museum, scholars are questioning not only what museums display - but whom they serve.

At the Iziko South African Museum’s bicentennial conference, University of the Western Cape (UWC) academics and alumni led a critical conversation that reframed “repatriation” as an act of rehumanisation - a moral and political reckoning with how institutions remember, return and restore dignity to the dead.

The gathering, co-hosted by Iziko and its long-time partner, UWC, brought together historians, curators, policymakers and descendants to confront the lingering legacies of colonial collection practices and to envision museums as spaces of justice, mourning and community repair.

Namibian senior curator and former UWC senior lecturer, now affiliated with the University of Namibia (UNAM), Golda Ha-Eiros, spoke on restitution. She said there needs to be a shift towards descendant communities and incorporating them into the museum's processes. Speaking in place of UWC alumna and UNAM scholar, Professor Napandulwe Shiweda, who was unable to attend, Ha-Eiros gave a presentation on the recent history of stolen artefacts from Namibia and the process of returning them to the communities from which they originated. 

Former Sports, Arts and Culture deputy minister, Nocawe Mafu, reflected on questions of policy, practice, culture and family participation in the processes of repatriating the remains of fallen exiles, particularly those who died in the frontline states.

She said that as South Africa marked the 200th anniversary of the Iziko Museums, a question that needs to be asked is: “What and who are we?” “In any conflict or war, soldiers are buried in the countries in which they fight, and it may be the result of the intensity of such wars that they take months or a few years for their returns and reburials to be resolved. In our case, the liberation struggle took nearly three decades of armed struggle before negotiations took place to resolve the national question of South Africa,” said Mafu.

Mafu said the result of the armed struggle is that many cadres from the liberation armies who were posted in different countries were either killed or passed away while in exile. 

“There was a cry from their families for the remains of their children to be returned home. This placed the state in a dilemma because the countries in which they were buried also regarded them as being at home,” said Mafu.

She said pressure is increasingly being placed on provincial governments by the families to repatriate the remains of their loved ones from some of the frontline states. “As a result of this, in the past, provinces responded in an uneven fashion and without any policy guidelines either from political parties or from the state. It was inevitable that this would result in confusion.” 

This chaos prompted the South African government to adopt a policy on repatriation and restitution of human remains. 

In his presentation, UWC senior professor, Ciraj Rassool, stated that a misunderstanding remains about the meaning of restitution.

“We all misunderstood this issue when we started doing this work 25 years ago because we were influenced by our colleagues in Australia and New Zealand, who used the term repatriation,” said Prof Rassool.

“Recently, Australian colleagues admitted that they might have made a mistake strategically deploying ‘repatriation’ for the return of the remains of indigenous people because they wanted to liken it to the return of dead soldiers.” 

He said in settler colonial societies like the United States of America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, “repatriation” might be appropriate because there is a question mark remaining over sovereignty in the relationships between indigenous people and their national governments. As practitioners, he said one of the first things they had argued for in the work of restitution was the principle and practice of “rehumanisation”.

“Our colleagues at Iziko Museums of South Africa took up the question of rehumanisation. They inquired into their collection, and they agreed with the arguments we put forward that the dead whose bodies had been stolen from their graves and sold to museums, and that had been collected for racial research, did not belong in their collections,” said Prof Rassool.

Those remains were then “de-accessioned” and placed in a special space where they could not be accessed by researchers or the public. “This was a significant example of rehumanisation because it said that the museum had no authority over those remains any longer, because that was a space of mourning and community engagement. The museum should not govern the dead,” said Prof Rassool.

In his presentation, Historical Studies emeritus professor, Leslie Witz, raised questions about the politics and meanings of commemoration. The conference was supported by the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at UWC and included talks by Prof Maurits van Bever Donker and Dr Valmont Layne. Both spoke of the intellectual resources that are available but seemingly underutilised in the remaking of public institutions in South Africa.

The conference revealed the complex nature of institutions such as the South African Museum and the challenges of transforming them into institutions of post-apartheid reason. The Iziko 200 conference was an occasion for the launch of two edited volumes detailing the significant strides made by the museum over the past two centuries. The volumes were edited by Dr Bongani Ndhlovu, a UWC History doctoral graduate and CHR postdoctoral fellow, and currently Executive Director for Core Functions at Iziko Museums. 

In the foreword to one of the edited volumes Prof Premesh Lalu, former Director of the CHR and NRF/British Academy SA-UK Bilateral Digital Humanities Chair in Culture and Technics,raised the question of whether the simultaneous birth of the museum and the Koue Bokkeveld slave rebellion in 1825 might encourage us to more deliberately consider how subjects were transformed into agents.