Museums as Agents for Social Change

Collaborative Programmes at the Mutare Museum

Njabulo Chipangura, Jesmael Mataga

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000399301
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Art
• Sous-sujet: Museum Studies

Museums as Agents for Social Change is the first comprehensive text to examine museum practice in a decolonised moment, moving beyond known roles of object collection and presentation.

Drawing on studies of Mutare museum, a regional museum in Eastern Zimbabwe, this book considers how museums with inherited colonial legacies are dealing with their new environments. The book provides an examination of Mutare museum's activism in engaging with topical issues affecting its surrounding community and Chipangura and Mataga demonstrate how new forms of engagement are being deployed to attract new audiences, whilst dealing with issues such as economic livelihoods, poverty, displacement, climate change and education. Illustrating how recent programmes have helped to reposition Mutare museum as a decolonial agent of social change and an important community anchor institution, the book also demonstrates how other museums can move beyond the colonial preoccupation with the gathering of collections, conservation and presentation of cultural heritage to the public.

Museums as Agents for Social Change will primarily be of interest to academics and students working in the fields of museum and heritage studies, history, archaeology and anthropology. It should also be appealing to museum professionals around the world who are interested in learning more about how to decolonise their museum.

1 Beating the drums

Co-curatorship and the reconfiguration of colonial ethnographic collections

Introduction

Although Peter Vergo's (1989) concept of new museology was developed thirty years ago, the pace of change in museums in Africa has been slow and “new” practices are still being adopted. For our work, the idea of a “new museology” (Vergo 1989) is as crucial as it is a discourse around the social and political roles of museums that encourage new communication and new styles of expression in contrast to classic, collections-centred museum models. Vergo's ideas gave us a framework which allowed us to collaborate with communities, and this in turn informed how the drums were reorganized and subsequently presented in the museum. We adopted co-curation as a methodology which was underwritten by collaborations, shared authority and dialogue with the local community (Forster and Bose 2019; Macdonald and Morgan 2019; Mallon 2019; Schorch, McCarthy and Durr 2019; Thomas 2019.)

In the project, the first author, Njabulo Chipangura together with a team of other museum professionals, used collaborations and co-curation as methodologies that gave the community an equal voice in the process of reorganizing the drums. In light of this, Golding and Modest (2019: 94) argue that co-curatorship entails “taking an interest not only in objects as things but also in the people, changing practices and belief systems that lend them meaning.” Thus, in our project, through curatorial collaboration with locals, the spiritual dimensions of the drums were focused on just as much as their physical and material aspects. As a result of this participatory approach and use of interactive Information Communication Technologies a new interactive exhibition was born in which drums were juxtaposed with video recordings showing how they were used by communities in real time. Visitors can now select videos of various traditional dances and music performed in different parts of Eastern Zimbabwe. By embracing this multi-vocal and innovative curatorial approach through a new display of traditional drums, Mutare Museum managed to challenge and unsettle museological practices that treated important cultural relics as static, mute materials removed from their cultural settings. In terms of museological practice, this exhibition also points to the need for a new museology in Africa, one that embraces communities as respected knowledge bearers. Most importantly, this demands a deep respect for local knowledge that was so disparaged in colonial times. In the contemporary societies, through co-curation projects, local communities become producers of knowledge rather than powerless objects of study or sources of information. They become active players in curatorial practices and participate in processes of self-representation.

Colonial classifications and misrepresentations in the old Beit Gallery

Mutare Museum has five permanent display galleries: Eastern Districts, Mezzanine, Transport, Boultbee and Beit. The Eastern Districts Gallery depicts flora of the region with an emphasis on natural spectacles such as the Chirinda forest in Chimanimani, the Save River and the Nyangani Mountain. All these landscapes are presented in their presumably pristine status with no mention of indigenous communities whose cultures for many years left a fingerprint. Similarly, the Mezzanine Gallery specifically looks at displays of wild animals that are found in Eastern Zimbabwe with an elaborate representation of taxidermized and stuffed species such as the African python, hyena, leopard, pangolin and a bushbuck. The Boultbee Gallery is named in memory of Captain E. F. Boultbee, who was one of the first curators of the museum. The firearms collection in this gallery was personally donated by Captain Boultbee and comprises various types of European-made guns and pistols. The Transport Gallery comprises a vintage car collection with European or American origin. These cars were donated to the museum by white settlers during the colonial period. The Beit Gallery, named after Sir Alfred Beit, a British philanthropist who died in 1906, encapsulates the values of the early Rhodesian museums, which served the interests of the white settler minorities. Of note is how this proprietor's link and association with the museum has survived to the present, so much so that the Beit Trust, established in honour of Alfred Beit in 2015, gave the museum a grant to conduct research which led to the reorganization of ethnographic objects at Mutare Museum, part of whose gallery was established in his memory. The trust gives developmental funding to Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia (the former Federation countries).

The gallery contains a wide range of exhibitions that covers themes related to the traditional aspects of the Shona¹ culture in Zimbabwe. The Alfred Beit Gallery in its old format before it was reorganized in 2016 comprised transport accessories in a glass case on the immediate left side of the entrance. Opposite this display were zoological displays comprising an animal tree and two cases with different kinds of insects (see Figure 1.1). Next to this was a display of traditional beehives containing live bees. Along the length of the gallery, there were a variety of mixed objects including geological displays and different types of traditional objects. Close to these was a display case with beads, head rests, snuffboxes and a portrait of a traditional chief adorned with symbols of chieftainship, such as badges and ceremonial artefacts. In this old set-up, displays in the Beit Gallery did not represent any coherent or meaningful story. Indeed, one could easily think this was a storeroom because the gallery had a mixture of a lot of different types of exhibits with no clear-cut theme or storyline. Thus, ethnographic objects were exhibited in a manner that conformed to the traditional practice of presenting objects exclusively for visual observation. This type of exhibiting did not do justice to the social biography of the collection, which cannot be understood in terms of a single unchanging identity, but rather by tracing the succession of meanings attached to the objects as they move through space and time (Edwards, Gosden and Phillips 2006). The problem was worsened by an improper presentation of the objects, which were dumped on the floor, displayed as strange, exotic and devoid of any social and historical significance to the way of life of the people (see Figure 1.1). In many cases, just like at Mutare Museum, colonial exhibitions often removed human history from material culture on display by presenting objects as cold and lifeless and disregarding their meaning and purpose which are intimately tied to human stories (Catlin-Legutko 2019: 41). During the reorganization of the old Beit Gallery we were conscious of the fact that objects connect people, places and events and also represent histories of continuity and change (Mallon 2019).

Figure 1.1 Old ethnographic exhibitions in Mutare Museum. Photograph by Njabulo Chipangura.

For many decades, the Mutare Museum had not reorganized the “misrepresented” ethnographic exhibits, curated before the end of colonial rule. In light of this, in 2014, more than three decades after Zimbabwe's political independence, the Mutare Museum curatorial team wanted to highlight and tell richer stories following the end of colonial rule. For starters, the gallery, named after Alfred Beit,² itself pointed to the colonial origins of the institution and the role that such exhibitions played during the colonial period – one of collecting and displaying the local environment and culture for the information and amusement of a small white settler community. For example, Shona traditional drums were only acquired during the colonial period as part of a broader trajectory in the scientific study of cultures of the “other.” A display of these drums in the old Beit Gallery was premised on the idea of exoticizing cultures of the “other” by the colonial authority. However, this was done at the expense of their spiritual and everyday use. These objects were used for various rituals before they were dislocated from their original context and subsequently placed in the museum, and most of the rituals continue to be observed by local communities. As we were carrying out research for the new exhibition, we observed contemporary rituals in which the drums are still being used and are treated as living objects, cementing the project team's idea that the drums in the museum display could not continue to be disconnected from the past, but were to be seen and treated as enduring symbols that connect the past with the present and future (McCarthy, Hakiwai and Schorch 2019). This view is in contrast with how colonial ethnographers collected musical drums which were later displayed in the old Beit Gallery without an appreciation of where they came from and their original uses. During the colonial period, museum curators were endowed with authority in configuring ethnographic objects, thereby marginalizing local knowledge systems.

Being cognizant of their histories and connection to colonial forms of representing the “other,” a question that always hounds museums that is connected with thousands of collections retrieved from local communities during the colonial era is what to do with these cultural treasures in the contemporary era. Collected by missionaries, white settlers and partly by museum personnel, deposited in museum storerooms and displayed in museums that were patronized by only a small section of the community, these relics call for re-curation and reinterpretation to reconnect them with their true cultural meanings and contexts. Thus, in the decolonial turn, the museum curator – the expert – can no longer be a lone voice of authority but rather a facilitator of community engagement and collaboration (McCarthy, Hakiwai and Schorch 2019; Onciul 2019; Sandahl 2019). This can only work through collaborations, and in many cases, as in ours, these have transformed ethnographic museums from being places that were once regarded as displaying “others” to locations of cultural revitalisation, community voice and empowerment (Onciul 2019: 160). In our experience, co-curated projects have to be developed through collaboration between a museum and members of one or more communities, in a space where the authorities and voices are treated as equally as possible. It can, however, be argued that in such a setup the power dynamics are still asymmetric and skewed towards the institution – the museum – rather than the community. Yet in our experience, in all the engagements, the communities considered themselves to be the higher voice, the purveyors of their own culture and holders of knowledge that the museum sought.

Co-curation and the social biography of objects

We have in the ensuing chapter decried the almost obvious aspect that the development of museums in Africa coincided with the spread of colonialism and imperialism, and became part of a system that validated and justified oppression, dispossession and racial prejudice, where the study, collection and presentation of local cultures were seen as key aspects of exerting power and control over locals (Foucault 1998; Dubow 2006; Lord 2006). While acknowledging the contexts within which ethnographic collections were accumulated into the museum during the colonial period, we argue for looking beyond this tainted history to highlight how objects from this museum can indeed emerge in the postcolonial context, challenging inherited processes of confinement, classification and nomenclature entrenched by colonial museum practices. As argued by Mataga (2018), ethnographic objects have the potential to be retrieved from museums storehouses and thrust into the public sphere, allowing communities previously excluded from the museum space to enter the museum and influence curatorial activities (Mataga 2018). For this museum it was through co-curation and the development of collaborative exhibitions that museums are beginning to challenge the same ideas that they have been known to champion in the past. In doing so, museums are taking a leading role in decolonising, revisualizing, presenting alternative stories, interrogating intolerance and stimulating critical public pedagogies (Clover 2015). Though such activities, indigenous epistemologies and ontologies have also reshaped collecting and exhibiting practices in museums (Chipangura and Chipangura 2020). Co-curating as a methodology prioritises social history and the collecting of contemporary cultures in a dialogue with the community (Schorch, McCarthy and Durr 2019). Furthermore, in man...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Museum pasts and decolonised futures in Africa
• 1 Beating the drums: Co-curatorship and the reconfiguration of colonial ethnographic collections
• 2 Museum activism: Decolonised exhibition practices, public pedagogies and social change
• 3 Heritage, communities and collaborative involvement at Matendera archaeological site
• 4 Inclusion, collaboration and sustainable heritage conservation practices at the Ziwa archaeological site
• 5 Conclusion: Local communities and the future of the African museum
• Index