Rebecca Mort, South Africa

Crafting Heritage and Reimagining Development With The Simon’s Town Museum

By Rebecca Mort, South Africa

Introduction

Public museums, as institutions of heritage, history, and culture, form an important part of development frameworks and agendas, particularly in post-conflict societies. Museums provide spaces for knowledge creation and restoration, community building, and the value shaping of broader development agendas. The Simon’s Town Museum tells the history of Simon’s Town, a small coastal town outside of Cape Town, South Africa that is renowned for its beautiful natural scenery and complex heritage. From its precolonial indigenous histories to the founding of the town as a colonial naval base, from its apartheid legacies and traumas, to the current tourist portrayal of idyllic beaches featuring South Africa’s only Penguin colony, the town is full of contested histories and heritages. This can be felt and engaged with ecologically, culturally, politically, socially, spatially, visually, and aurally throughout the Simon’s Town Museum. The lineage of the town’s heritage is traced from archaeological evidence of stone age tools found at different sites in the town, to artefacts of the town’s colonial naval history, to the oral histories of Black families who were forcibly removed under apartheid. The Museum holds this diverse history of the town and creates powerful meanings of belonging, development, and heritage through its work.

The museum and the history of belonging in Simon’s Town

The Simon’s Town Museum exhibits the historical origins of the town, particularly its colonial roots as the Dutch East India Company (shortened as the VOC) established the natural bay for its winter anchorage in the era of contested colonial merchant trade routes between the West and the East. By the mid-1700s, a small town began to form that comprised of “mainly indigenous Khoisan people, VOC officials, soldiers and slaves that had been bought to the Cape from China, Indonesia, India, Madagascar, Mozambique, Zanzibar, Angola and other parts of West Africa”, as well as small groups of Europeans who were starting to settle on the Cape coastline (Simon's Town Museum, n.d.). In the late 18th century, the British had wrested control of the Cape from the Dutch, and thereafter the British Royal Navy founded their permanent naval base in part of their broader colonisation of Southern Africa. Through the Royal Navy’s recruitment, sailors such as the Kroomen from West Africa and Muslim sailors from Zanzibar eventually settled in Simon’s Town. People migrated from islands such as St Helena and Tristan da Cunha, and traders from India set up businesses in the town. By the late 1880s amaXhosa people from the East coast of South Africa settled in the town after building the local railway and dockyards under British rule. More people immigrated and settled in Simon’s Town from across the world, including Italy, Lithuania, the Philippines, and more. The Museum writes in its section titled Descendants of Slavery. As a result of Simon’s Town’s global encounters with generations of travellers, settlers, slaves, indentured labourers, and our indigenous community; our families were closely interconnected and intermarried across racial and religious lines. (Simon's Town Museum, n.d.). The critical engagement with this colonial history enables the Museum to honour the diverse community that built Simon’s Town. The life of the small town changed drastically when the apartheid government began its process of forced removals of Black people from many urban parts of the country in order to racially segregate the country. In Simon’s Town, those residents classified as Black and Coloured were forcibly removed from the town in 1965 and in 1968 respectively, and were relocated to informal settlements far from their previous homes, businesses and jobs. The Museum explains how this process “irrevocably destroyed the multi-cultural fabric of Simon’s Town 67

society” and devotes much of its current work to engaging with this history. The Museum initiated the Albert Thomas Oral History Project which seeks to “ensure that the stories of human rights violations and its impact are recorded as a step towards restorative justice and healing from the violence of apartheid”, while also aiming to “build a comprehensive research and exhibition programme to make the story accessible as an intergenerational tool for dialogue, education and intervention to both local and international audiences” (Simon's Town Museum, n.d.). The Museum works with elders who were forcibly removed, as well as their descendants, in order to preserve the memory and knowledge that communities’ stories hold of this period of history. Through this work, the Museum creates new collaborative relationships with communities to the institution and relationships of belonging to town as well. In 1996, the Museum founded the Phoenix Committee, which provided a means for forcibly removed Simonites (former residents of the town) to develop heritage materials, educational programmes, family history archives and narratives, and memorialisation events and more that could honour the complex history of Simon’s Town. The Museum also initiated a memorialisation project called “Wag-n- Bietjie” benches (translated from Afrikaans into English as ‘wait a moment’, and which are a colloquial term for thornbush trees that commonly provide shaded rest-spots). There are several of these mosaiced benches placed across the town, and they serve as public sites of remembrance of the forced removals and the legacy of this period of history in the town today. A powerful theme across the Museum’s space is therefore that of the history of migration in the town. As the community of Simon’s Town was born from indigenous and enslaved people, migrants, settlers and travellers to their descendants today, the Museum explores how migration, through colonialism, apartheid, and beyond, has affected “the social construction of space” (Meinhof, 2011). The complex history of migration that has shaped the town in both constructive and destructive ways is analysed through the “networks of relationships” as they are formed in and through the town, with those who live there, were enslaved there, were brought there, worked there, were forcibly removed from there, and those who are present to the space today (Meinhof, 2011). The Museum works with the lens of migration to critically examine notions of belonging and heritage in the town today, and also explores the intertwined nature of the histories of mobility and coloniality. The Museum opens up questions for contemporary development in Simon’s Town – who belongs in the town, who shares in the town’s wealth and heritage, who determines what space means and for whom – and these are essential in analysing the post-apartheid development era of South Africa.

Heritage, museums and development

Museums play a critical role in the South African development framework, as they represent spaces for the democratic government’s intentions of preserving cultural heritage and curating knowledge that reflects the complex history of the country. The Western Cape Provincial Government provides funding for the Simon’s Town Museum, and the department’s statement reads as follows:

“The Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport (DCAS) encourages excellence and inclusivity. We unite people through sport and culture to ensure a creative and active Western Cape. We bind our communities as a strong and unified nation and create opportunities through funding and collaboration.” (n.d.)

The Museum Service of the Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport aims to promote respect for cultural diversity in South Africa and appreciation of our natural heritage. The Museum Service therefore sets out to build understanding and pride of our diverse heritage through the affiliated museums (Western Cape Government, n.d.). This discourse indicates how the curatorship of cultural, political, and ecological history and heritage through museums is seen as part of the provincial government’s mandate within a nationalist development strategy. The Simon’s Town Museum’s activities outside of curatorship and exhibitions 68

further emphasise the institution’s role within a development framework. It holds space for the public to engage with the history of the town, which is part of broader national and global historical processes, and hosts various activities such as historical walking tours, community markets, toy drives for neighbouring communities, educational activities for schools, and more. The institution thus engages not only with past history, but with the living community of Simon’s Town and beyond, through these projects that contribute to local development. The Museum is accessible and entering costs adults R10 (€0.60) and children R5 (€0.30). This affordability makes it possible for many people to engage with the Museum and the knowledge therein, and places culture and history within an accessible public domain of knowledge, and not just within tourism development for an international audience. The insights from the lenses of development studies, tourism work, heritage studies, conflict and memorialisation, community development, and international cooperation place the Simon’s Town Museum as an active institution within development discourses. Critical heritage studies provide an important framework to analyse the museum as an institution. In a mainstream development approach, the museum’s practices show how “heritage provides opportunities for job creation, infrastructure development, and education… through the promotion of heritage-based tourism” (Ndoro, 2021, p. 108). But in analysing the work of the Simon’s Town Museum deeper, it is clear that the institution goes beyond this. Its work reaches further than confines of the museum walls and spans across multiple temporalities. The Museum does not only consider a heritage of the past, it is community engagement work also fosters a “cultural heritage (that) also exists in the present…something that requires dealing with in our everyday lives” (Lane, 2021, p. 66). This is a development approach that does not focus solely on agendas of job creation, tourism or national identity construction. It also cultivates an understanding of development that is rooted the valuing of history, art as a healing process after conflict, and the restoration of culture, knowledge and heritage in building the path forward. The practices of memorialisation of various points of history form part of the post-apartheid democratic government’s strategies of nation-building and reconstruction. There has been substantial critique regarding the limitations of meaningful socio-economic transformation in democratic South Africa, and much of this nationalist heritage work lies within the country’s “liberal peacebuilding” agenda (Blackmore, 2021). But the radical transformative potential of museums and heritage sites are often miscalculated by this narrative. The Simon’s Town Museum works with memorialisation in a way that contributes to “the externalisation of memory as evidence within judicial witnessing, as collective memory in truth commissions, and as heritage enshrined through memorials” (Blackmore, 2021, p. 265). This kind of heritage work is valuable in periods of transitional justice, and is particularly relevant in post-conflict societies such as South Africa. Memorialisation within museology contributes to reconciliation and justice efforts that work beyond the formalised frameworks of the judicial and policy systems, and Blackmore (2021) shows how the concept of “aesthetic justice [which] offer(s) artistic interventions as means to illuminate injustice, recalibrate justice norms” can form part of memorialisation work within heritage practices (Blackmore, 2021). She notes the following:

“What emerges is an uncovering of an ethics of justice whereby accountability, acknowledgment, performance, and memorial production serve to create agreements about wrongs in both abstract and collective ways, divorced from the individualising nature of court proceedings and formal justice mechanisms” (Blackmore, 2021, p. 289).

The Simon’s Town Museum thus stands as an institution that promotes this kind of critical heritage work, while simultaneously offering collaborative spaces with a broad community to redefine their relationships to space, heritage, history, and development. This is an alternative practice of development that is not confined to formalist agendas or policy briefs, as it crafts social value within history into the present and celebrates the power of people’s stories in crafting new meanings of belonging in democratic South Africa.

The museum and decoloniality

Museums, as institutions of knowledge production and cultural heritage curatorship, present the opportunity for a public engagement of collective historical knowledge. The Simon’s Town Museum through its exhibitions, activities and community work does exactly this, and goes further in its exhibitions by critically presenting the history of colonialism while simultaneously challenging the coloniality of knowledge production in museums. Coloniality can be felt throughout Simon’s Town in the British architecture and naval base infrastructure that remains, and in the apartheid system’s legacy of racially-based spatial development and inequality. This forms part of a “coloniality [which] permeates all aspects of social existence and gives rise to new social and geocultural identities” (Nkenkana, 2015). It is critical for museums to engage with this heritage of coloniality, which is both tangible and intangible, by challenging the “colonisation of memory, and thus people’s senses of self” through decolonial curatorship and heritage practices (Lugones, 2010). The Simon’s Town Museum has developed exhibitions and historical timelines in collaborative processes with historians, artists, community members, development practitioners, archaeologists and young descendants of forcibly removed Simonites. The Albert Thomas Oral History Project, embodied space-making in the Wag-n-Bietjie benches, community food markets and family-tree workshops emphasise a decolonising museology in how it challenges, constructs, and restores notions of knowledge, history, and heritage. This has created a collectively owned sense of heritage and history not just within the Museum, but throughout the town itself. Public space is reinterpreted from its colonial and apartheid history and becomes the arena in which social interactions and values reconstruct common heritage (Apaydin, 2020). The public is invited to engage “in dialogue at the colonial difference” and so this heritagemaking is not fixed or strictly aligned to development agendas or a coloniality of knowledge and being but is constantly being reimagined by people in the town and in the Museum towards a lived experiencing of heritage (Lugones, 2010). This is a form of resistance that is also creative in how the Museum redefines knowledge, curatorship, and community participation in the construction of a collective heritage of Simon’s Town. It is as much a resistance against forgetting the past, as well as a resistance of re-creation of knowledge and heritage for the future. This politics of resistances “shows the power of communities of the oppressed in constituting resistant meaning and each other” against the power of coloniality, and it is clear that this is the value of the Museum’s collaborative approach to its heritage practice (Lugones, 2010). The Museum ultimately shows “the potentiality for heritage making to be seen as a form of justice” that contributes to development, challenges coloniality of knowledge, and builds generative resistances that create new meanings of belonging to space (Blackmore, 2021). The Simon’s Town Museum is an institution that derives its value from the people and history that it honours, and thus shows the power of reimagining development from the perspective of critical heritage practices.

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