MuseuMAfricA: the inner city's soul
Bongani Majola
19 August 2002
Step into a typical 1950s shebeen at MuseuMAfricA in Newtown, downtown Johannesburg, and an automatic motion monitor churns out a Marabi tune. Complete with mannequins in Stetson hats, a gumba-gumba record player and inescapable pub atmosphere, the shebeen comes alive.
For those whose collective cultural memory is embedded in the permanent exhibition, MuseuMAfricA is pregnant with nostalgia.
Housed in what used to be the city's main fruit and vegetable market, MuseuMAfricA is Johannesburg's premier cultural history museum. The structure of the original building, erected in 1913, has been imaginatively built into a modern arch building, with pillars driven into the clay soil to support several floors without connecting to the original outer skin of the building.
The museum's collections have been accumulated and preserved since 1933, when an impressive collection of Africana was bought from J C Gubbins by the Johannesburg public
library, turning the museum into the Africana Museum in Progress, with most exhibitions showing collections of black traditional culture.
With funds from the City of Johannesburg, the Africana Museum reopened in 1994 as MuseuMAfricA with new displays and a mission, according to curator Diana Wall, "to tell stories that had not been told before".
Themes for the museum's permanent displays are chosen to reflect the complex geological, social, political and economic history of South Africa, with a particular emphasis on urban life in Johannesburg since the discovery of gold (see more on these displays below).
The museum has also put together displays aimed specifically at tourists and delegates to the World Summit on Sustainable Development, which takes place in Johannesburg from 26 August to 4 September.
FNB Vita Crafts Now Awards Exhibition
The FNB Vita Crafts Now Awards Exhibition, the biggest craft show the country has ever
seen, was opened on 17 August by veteran journalist and documentary artist Denis Beckett.
Co-hosted by the Association of Potters of Southern Africa's African Earth, the show is an adjudicated exhibition, putting only the best on display.
Sponsored by the First National Bank, the Royal Netherlands Embassy and the City of Johannesburg's Cultural and Heritage Services, the exhibition carries prizes totalling more than R80 000, and includes entries from the rural areas and disadvantaged craftspeople of South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe.
Bonani Africa
Bonani Africa is a festival of South African Photography, showing photographic essays by 40 of the country's best photographers and covering all major issues affecting South Africa today, from poverty and HIV/Aids to questions of identity.
The exhibition is accompanied by a conference entitled "Photography: Identity and History in Africa", bringing together leading
academics, documentary photographers and students from across the continent. Making an argument for the World Summit to pay attention to the impact of poverty and globalisation on developing countries like South Africa, the exhibition is organised by South African History Online, and curated by Omar Badsha.
African Nights
Lori Waselchuk, a freelance photojournalist and documentary photographer with a special interest in Africa and South Africa, will exhibit her work African Nights, a collection of 50 images from Angola, South Africa, Swaziland, Uganda, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Mozambique, Kenya and Zambia.
"Two years ago," Waselchuk says, "I began to document the life at night in the villages and cities I visit in Africa. As a journalist I often photograph the tragic and the extraordinary. But African Nights is one attempt to document ordinary life, ordinary people.
"I am drawn to the colours and textures of artificial
light. Light is minimal, often the only light source is a single candle or lightbulb. Yet this low light creates unexpected colours and shadows."
Seven permanent displays
MuseuMAfricA has seven permanent displays. "Gold" considers the monetary, decorative and symbolic importance of the precious metal that spawned eGoli, the city of Johannesburg.
"What about the Workers?" recreates the noise and confusion of a rockfall in a mine tunnel. The display also contrasts the living conditions in a mine compound with a mine manager or randlord's house. It looks at the world of domestic work in South Africa, and how the interaction of capital and labour has shaped the country's social and political landscape.
Perhaps the most evocative of the displays, "Sounds of the City" traces South African music from the Marabi music and dance of the 1920s slumyards to the township jazz of Sophiatown's shebeens.
Born in the city's slumyards in the
1920s, Marabi gave birth to many kinds of music in the 1940s and 1950s, including "kwela", "tsaba-tsaba", "mbaqanga" and township jazz. This mockup of the country's truly first cosmopolitan setting, Sophiatown, takes your breath away.
Then there is "Birds in a Cornfield", which deals with the fight for adequate housing for all. An actual shack from Alexandra township, previously used as a shebeen, with real sounds, shouts, conversations and music recorded during a shebeen's "happy hour", complete with a baby's wail in the background, features in the display.
"There he is, Nelson Mandela, taking his first steps to freedom after 27 years in prison", bellows from the speakers as you enter "The Road to Democracy". This display plays out the two roads taken by formal white politics and black resistance movements that finally met in the first democratic elections of 1994.
An interesting dimension of the politics of race in South Africa comes alive around the figure of
Indian-born lawyer Mahatma Gandhi. "Gandhi's Johannesburg" shows over 30 Johannesburg buildings and places associated with Gandhi. His experiences in Johannesburg from 1903 to 1913 shaped his philosophy of Satyagraha - passive resistance - and it was from here that Gandhi's ideas of peaceful struggle spread across the world.
The final permanent display is named "Tried for Treason", after the four-year trial of 156 people opposed to apartheid, including Nelson Mandela. The trial was a turning point in the consolidation of racial discrimination and resistance to it, with many of the eventually acquitted trialists being prominent politicians and leaders in South Africa today.
Other displays capture fossil evidence of early human, stone and iron age communities in the Johannesburg area, as well as the first white settlers. The highlight of these exhibitions, as evidenced during the Centenary of the Anglo-Boer War in April this year, has to be the real leather jacket and
pants worn by a Boer commander.
Entrance to MuseuMAfricA costs R7 for adults and R2 for children, students and pensioners. Exhibition hours are Tuesday to Sunday from 09h00 to 17h00. The museum is closed on Mondays.
Source: City of Johannesburg web site
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