Independent Museums and Culture Centres in Colonial and Post-colonial Zimbabwe

Non-State Players, Local Communities, and Self-Representation

Thomas Panganayi Thondhlana, Jesmael Mataga, Dawson Munjeri, Thomas Panganayi Thondhlana, Jesmael Mataga, Dawson Munjeri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000570571
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Independent Museums and Culture Centres in Colonial and Post-colonial Zimbabwe presents case studies that grapple with the issue of 'decolonising practice' in privately owned museums and cultural centres in Zimbabwe.

Including contributions from academics and practitioners, this book focusses on privately run cultural institutions and highlights that there has, until now, been scant scholarly information about their existence and practice. Arguing that the recent resurgence of such museums, which are not usually obliged to endorse official narratives of the central government, points to some desire to decolonise and indigenise museums, the contributors explore approaches that have been used to reconfigure such colonially inherited institutions to suit the post-colonial terrain. The volume also explores how privately owned museums can tap into or contribute to current conversations on decoloniality that encourage reflexivity, inclusivity, de-patriarchy, multivocality, community participation, and agency. Exploring the motives and purpose of such institutions, the book argues that they are being utilised to confront deeply entrenched stigmatisation and marginalisation.

Independent Museums and Culture Centres in Colonial and Post-colonial Zimbabwe demonstrates that post-colonial African museums have become an arena for negotiating history, legacies, and identities. The book will be of interest to academics and students around the world who are engaged in the study of museums and heritage, African studies, history, and culture. It will also appeal to museum practitioners working across Africa and beyond.

Chapter 1IntroductionMuseum diversity in Africa: museums, related exhibitionary institutions and non-state players

Jesmael Mataga, Thomas Panganayi Thondhlana, & Dawson Munjeri

DOI: 10.4324/9781003108238-1

Museum diversities in Africa

As we finalised the first draft of this book in the second half of 2020, the iconic District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa was facing a threat of closure due to the negative financial impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns. The museum appealed for public financial support to sustain its core functions and for it to remain open. The District Six signifies progressive museum practice, one that has been innovative in working with previously marginalised communities to deal with the atrocities of the past. Its establishment changed the museumscapes, challenging embedded, racialised museum practices entrenched in colonial and apartheid South Africa. Established in post-apartheid South Africa, the District Six Museum morphed into a space for community activism and a site for conversations, commemoration, and engagements on the apartheid wounds of racism, violence, and dispossession of black people (Rassool, 2006a, 2006b, 2010, 2018; Rassool & Prosalendis, 2001). Its missions and modes of engaging and working with local communities epitomise the envisaged redemptive aspects of museums in post-colonial societies.¹ However, amid financial challenges worsened by a pandemic in 2020, this independent museum had not received any relief funding from the state, the museum was struggling to sustain its operations. However, the museum eventually received relief financial support from the Western Cape provincial government; this precarious experience exemplifies a general trend globally, where governments get financially constrained to support museums services. Thus, while (national) museums are considered to be the “cultural soul of nations” (Arinze, 1999) in any modern nation-state, unfortunately, the reduction of public expenditure on museums is threatening the very existence of museums and other cultural institutions in many parts of the world (ICOM, 2018; Negri, 1995; Strydom, 2017).

The experience of the District Six Museum captures the experiences of many museums and heritage institutions discussed in this volume. Given this placing of independent museums, chapters of this book highlight not only the contributions but also the challenges and prospects facing these institutions. These museums exist at the margins of the mainstream, state, or corporate support systems; hence, they operate on thin financial and human resources bases. They are noble – and even groundbreaking – in their intentions and work much more closely with the grassroots communities, yet they remain largely threatened by challenges of sustainability and lack of resources. While these types of museums are increasing in numbers, attention to them has not been commensurate with their growth (Candlin, 2012, 2016). We argue that these museums, at the margins of normative museum formats, are the next frontier in museum practice and the processes of decolonising and democratising knowledge production in Africa (Simpson, 2007). They are located at the boundaries of indigenous models and parallel practices in the development of the post-museum.

These museums provide convenient, accessible, and more effective platforms for engaging and working with local communities, addressing the relevant issues among the grassroots and dealing with the legacies of colonial museums in Africa. These museums, which are structurally and financially autonomous from the state, face numerous challenges, mainly of financial sustainability. However, they also represent a resilient spirit from individual proprietors and local communities, who adopt museum-making approaches to deal with the everyday challenges among the local communities (Boonzaaier, 2018; Chikozho, 2015; Chipangura & Chipangura, 2020; Forni, 2015; Ndlovu, 2018; Rassool, 2006a; Silvester, 2011). They play a pivotal role in reversing the entrenched disavowal of local ways of knowing and knowledge practices in communities that have survived the test of time, and are firmly rooted within local practices, rituals, traditions, and ways of knowing.

Non-conformant to the standard structures or functions of museums, they adapt but deconstruct normative modes of curatorial practices of collection, naming, classification, and categorisation. Their methods are non-lineal and disrupt the disciplinary demarcations which we have in mainstream museums. Their methods and approach to knowledge production are unstructured and not abrogated by disciplinary experts, preferring the local connoisseurs of knowledge within the community who are organic experts, whose conception of time and materiality is non-linear and fluid. This happenstance and fluidity makes them more relevant to the local societies, as compared to the big state-funded museums that are always located in the urban metropoles and subscribe to universalised approaches to museum practice. Therefore, these small, independent museums present an opportunity for local communities to foreground their cultural selves, curate their own representation, and tell stories from their experience.

While on the one hand, the “private” museums continue to exist at the margins of the (state) structures and exist at the fringes of normative disciplinary practices; on the other hand, this marginality makes them unique and presents an opportunity for the museum fraternity to rethink the place, role, and function of museums at the community level. For Africa, where the history of the development of the museums is intricately entangled with colonial oppression, the independent museums, steeped within the local, offer a good platform to different forms of engagement – perhaps an opportunity to decolonise museum practice in Africa. They present opportunities for the decolonisation of museums because of the way they involve local histories and work with communities. However, their financial and resource bases are limited, and most struggle to sustain themselves. All this is in parallel to state-funded museums, which are relatively stable owing to sustained financial support from central, provincial, or local governments.

A central argument presented in this volume is that privately owned small/independent museums and culture centres should be viewed as sites where new/emergent perspectives in museum and heritage studies can be pursued. These institutions should not remain on the fringe of the academic discourse. Our way of working in compiling this volume points to possible ideas and strategies for effectively working with the “non-experts” in these museums. We adhere to Fiona Candlin’s (2012, 2016) suggestion that we need to shift academic attention and analysis from the big, formal museums, to smaller, independent museums, which she characterises as “micromuseums”. Given the increasing number of smaller, grassroots forms of museum-making, this shift is central to shaping our understanding of museums change and to challenge preconceived, long-held, and normative ideas about what museums are and how they operate (Candlin, 2012, 2016). These spaces allow us to rethink and foreground what these developments mean in the context of global debates on definitions, meanings, and relevance of museums and the link between museums, society, and issues such as cultural rights, decolonisation, and social justice in Africa. The cases highlighted in the volume, mostly written by or in collaboration with non-disciplinary players and non-museum experts, speak to a desire for critical scholarship on privately owned museums and related cultural institutions. The characteristics of some of these institutions challenge and unsettle the inherited, normative definitions and ideas about museums.

A note on terminology

Given the current and ongoing debates about definitions of museums, some attention should be given to terminologies used in the compendium. The current efforts, led by the International Council of Museums (ICOM), are aimed at coming up with a single and agreed-upon definition, covering the diversity of museums and the changing roles of museum institutions in the 21st century (ICOM, 2017; Sandahl, 2019). While we acknowledge the ongoing attempts at consensus, one aspect that lies at the contest is the ability of any new definition to be fully representative of the diversities that now exist in the world of museums globally. In our framing of this text, we move beyond the current ICOM definition, to consider other cultural institutions that draw from the concept and motif of a museum, but might not be perfectly fit to be called museums as per the ICOM definitions. This book deliberately focusses on “independent museums” (Candlin, 2012) which operate outside state funding systems; hence, they often enjoy a great deal of “autonomy”. We deliberately label them “independent” because they “are not administered directly by any central or local government agency or authority” (Candlin, 2016, p. 10), and they “are not answerable to a central authority” (Vella & Cutajar, 2017, p. 42). This book is concerned with institutions that are run by trusts, businesses, special interest groups, and private individuals, but they are still open to the “public” (Candlin, 2016, p. 12). In this book, the term “independent” is deliberately used to highlight that government has no direct control of the programmes and activities at these institutions.

Elsewhere, cultural institutions that are owned by individuals, trusts, and corporate bodies are referred to as private ventures, to separate them from government-owned ventures. Thus, “private museums” are usually separated from “public museums” which are state-funded (Xiangguang, 2008). Although the term “private museums” implies that these are privately owned ventures, we feel that it is an oxymoron to use the term “private” for institutions that are open to the public. Candlin (2016) prefers to use “micromuseums” to highlight the fact that these institutions operate at a comparatively small scale in terms of space, workforce, and visitor numbers. However, in Zimbabwe, we have small museum venues, with a small workforce, like BaTonga Community Museum that is state-funded. Using the term “micromuseums” also leaves out cultural centres that are not regarded as “museums” by their founders and sponsors, yet they engage in museum-like practices.

In this volume, we also present institutions that belong to grant-aided or quasi-government bodies but still classify them as “independent museums”. These include the Railway Museum, which is run by the National Railways of Zimbabwe, Rhodes Nyanga Historical Exhibition that is run by the National Trust of Zimbabwe, and Gwenoro Ecomuseum which belongs to Midlands State University. The core mandate of the parent organisations is not to run museums; thus, they do not receive public funds to run these institutions. They have been classified as “independent museums” because they do not fall under the purview of the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe (hereafter NMMZ). Institutions presented in this book come in diverse forms and the only common denominator is that they are not funded and controlled by the Government. There are significant variations under our banner of “independent museums and cultural institutions”. These institutions can be further subdivided acc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Museum diversity in Africa: museums, related exhibitionary institutions and non-state players
• PART I Colonial Museology, ‘Un-inherited Pasts’ and Decolonial Possibilities
• PART II Liberation Heritage, Museum-Making, 
and New Narratives
• PART III Independent Players, Communities, 
and Cultural Rights
• Index