The Past Presently – Page 3 – Abigail R. Gautreau

The Real Africa – Pilanesburg National Park & Game Reserve

When you tell people that you’re going to South Africa*, everyone wants to know if you’re planning to go on safari. A lot of well-meaning people chimed suggesting that I go to Kruger National Park, not realizing that Kruger is about an eight-hour drive from Johannesburg or that it’s the sort of place you need to visit for weeks. It’s definitely one of my dreams to visit Kruger, but it was never going to happen in the amount of time or budget I had for this trip. I did, however, manage to squeeze in a trip to Pilanesburg National Park and Game Reserve, which is less well-known but only a two-hour drive from Joburg.

Landscape with water at dawn — On the way to Pilanesburg (photo by author)

Pilanesburg is a beautiful park. It is situated on an ecological transition zone, which means that it is home to a broad array of African wildlife. We saw lots of impala, elephants, zebra, hippo, wildebeest/gnu, giraffes, and warthogs, along with some harder-to-spot animals like ostrich, a white rhino, and even a leopard. Though I’m no photographer and of course I forgot my camera in the US (typical), I got some nice shots on my rented iPhone, especially when I held it up to the binoculars, because I am nothing if not resourceful.

white rhinocerus grazing beside a lake — A white rhino, THANKS INGENUITY. (author’s image–as if anyone else would take credit for that)

A lone gnu — The lone gnu. (author’s image)

Although I had a great time enjoying the natural landscape and seeing the animals, the heritage preservationist in me kept wondering about the history of the park. A few years ago, a friend sent me an old (but excellent) article on the formation of Serengeti National Park.** The article described how the formation of the park included the removal of evidence of human life, except for tribes that were deemed sufficiently “primitive” to not disturb visitor’s chance to see the “real” Africa. The author describes the impact of this decision not only on the displaced people, but on those who were forced to remain “primitive” so they would not lose their homes and land. Beyond this, he describes how this affected the way visitors see the park and their ideas about what Africa really is. This last idea in particular is something that has stayed with me, though of course it’s hardly unique to Africa–Frederick Jackson Turner conveniently erased Native Americans from the landscape for his frontier thesis, and scores of people were evicted from their homes in Appalachia to make way for national parks. This idea was brought home quite strongly for me when my tour guide mentioned that she thought of this place as the “real South Africa.”

scrubland with mountains in the distance — The “real” South Africa? (author’s image)

The problem with this idea is that the landscape at Pilanesburg, just as at Serengeti, is manufactured. Before it became a park, this land was home to Zulu warriors, Boer farmers, and later the re-settled Bakgatla tribe during apartheid. The land has been inhabited by humans and hominids for millions of years, and these people evolved alongside the animals in the park. When it was converted into a game reserve, much of the evidence of human habitation was erased, barring one remaining official building which has been converted into a visitor center. The animals that live in the park were reintroduced as part of Operation Genesis in the 1980s.

The thing is, for all its natural splendor, this place is no less a managed landscape than a city. It is stunning, but is it anymore the “real South Africa” than Johannesburg or Soweto or Cape Town? So much of South African history is fraught and intense, and the specter of apartheid lingers because for half a century it dominated people’s lives and the landscape. A place like Pilanesburg can seem like an oasis from these hard truths; after all, there are no people here. But apartheid was here, too. It’s why the Boer farmers are no longer here; they sold their land to the apartheid government, which used it to create a homeland for the Bakubung tribe where they would be racially and ethnically segregated. Pilanesburg is not what South Africa used to look like–it’s what it looks like now, with all of the layers of meaning that exist in any cultural landscape, and that’s worth keeping in mind whether you are walking through an informal settlement or staring in awe at a leopard casually surveying his territory.

Leopard lying on a rock — Leopard on a rock, through binoculars

*After they ask about Ebola, of course.
**Neumann, Roderick P. “Ways of Seeing Africa: Colonial Recasting of African Society and Landscape in Serengeti National Park.” Cultural Geographies 2, no. 2 (April 1995): 149-169. (I cannot recommend this article highly enough.)

The Cape Medical Museum

The thing about researching and working on difficult heritage is that it is difficult for a reason. Part of why I planned such a lengthy research trip to South Africa was that I knew I’d be confronting a lot of serious, emotional topics and sites, and I wanted to have time in between these more intense experiences to recover. I wanted to be sure that when I visited a site, I wasn’t emotionally exhausted from an earlier visit elsewhere. I want to be a thoughtful, engaged visitor, and that means not shutting down because I’ve spent the last three days confronting the horror that human beings inflict on each other. With that in mind, I made a visit to the Cape Medical Museum in Cape Town.

The Cape Medical Museum does not have a website, and they are actually a bit tricky to find. I happened to see it when I rode past in a taxi, and knew that I absolutely HAD to visit. I have a pet interest in medical history, and I enjoy learning about the past through the lens of disease and medical practices. I love a good medical history book, especially when the writer explores the intersection between disease, science, culture, social history, and race. I listen to a lot of medical histories when I’m driving (not always the best idea if you don’t feel well), and right now I’ve been listening to Rabid: A Cultural History of Rabies, which I recommend highly.

Anyway! The museum is in an attractive but unassuming historic house in the Old Hospital Complex in Green Point, Cape Town. There is no admission fee (though I made a donation), and there are no guided tours. In addition to an extensive collection of medical machines and equipment, the museum includes a fantastic exhibit on various diseases that have invaded the region. The multilingual panels connect the facts of diseases like typhus and yellow fever to their impact on society. In a panel on the bubonic plague, for example, one section describes how the practice of quarantining Africans suspected of having plague in camps helped create the idea for townships under apartheid. One of these camps later became the site of the Nyanga township. Unfortunately, there was no photography in the museum, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Folk Victorian house housing the Cape Medical Museum — Cape Medical Museum building (author’s image)

The disease room also had a display case with small windows where visitors could look in and see some of the medical models physicians in training used to learn how to identify diseases like diphtheria and gonorrhea. Though these were not as elaborate as the casts and preserved parts I saw earlier this year at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, they still conveyed the horrifying commonness of these types of conditions.

There were several rooms dedicated to particular types of medical equipment, like dentistry and ophthalmology, and a few period rooms set up as an operating room, a dispensary, and a delivery room. These rooms also included display cases full of medical equipment from different time periods, which was both fascinating and a little disturbing. One of my favorite displays was a series of respirators/ventilators showing the evolution of that technology, and culminating with a 1960s-era Bird respirator.

If you do happen to find yourself in Cape Town, this little gem is well worth a visit. It’s an easy walk in Green Point or from the V&A Waterfront, and I spent about an hour and a half, which included reading all of the panels because that is how I roll.

View of stained glass surround to front door from the interior — A little something for the hist pres crowd: check out this stunning entryway! They sadly did not interpret the house, but they did let me photograph this (really poorly, apparently). (author’s terrible image)

The Hector Pieterson Museum & Memorial

On June 16, 1976, some 20,000 students in Soweto (a township southwest of Johannesburg, South Africa) gathered to march in peaceful protest against the implementation of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction. The decree represented a significant attack from the apartheid regime on the already struggling education system available to students labeled “non-white.” Unlike white students, who received a free and mandatory education, parents of children classified as “non-white” had to pay tuition and for books send their children to non-compulsory schools where they were taught by teachers who were paid a pittance in appallingly poor conditions. The majority of students did not speak Afrikaans, nor did many of the teachers, so the transition to this new language would make it virtually impossible for many students to learn.

to hell with afrikaans — Reproduction of a sign from the June 16, 1976 protest. (via http://www.gutenberg-e.org/pohlandt-mccormick/archive/detail/DSCN2081.jpg.html)

The students planned to march from the Orlando West suburb of Soweto to Shap Stadium for a rally, but they encountered police led by Colonel Kleingeld. Kleingeld fired the first shot, and violence erupted as students fled or threw rocks at police, who in turn loosed dogs and fired tear gas canister and bullets at the students. A young man, Hector Pieterson, was shot, and photographer Sam Nzima snapped what would become the iconic image of the uprising, in which Hector’s body is carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo as his sister, Antoinette Sithole, runs alongside.** The violence led to more than 150 deaths, and in the following days students across the city and notably from the University of Witswatersrand joined in the protest. The decree was eventually repealed in 1979, but the student uprising is credited with reinvigorating the anti-apartheid campaign by organizing youth against the regime. If you want to know more, Helena Pohldant-McCormick has an amazing digital book project on the student uprising that is well worth checking out.

Hector Pieterson Museum (author's image) — Hector Pieterson Museum (author’s image)

I went to the Hector Pieterson Museum and Memorial twice during my visit to Johannesburg, both times as part of township tours of Soweto. I had no idea what to expect because the museum does not have a website or much of an online presence, at least not that I’ve been able to find beyond a few short blurbs on wikipedia and travel websites. I was impressed with the museum, which interprets the events of 1976 and contextualizes against both what happened before and after, and most impressively, includes discussion of lasting impact of the events and their interpretation and commemoration.

Memorial to fallen students in the courtyard at the Hector Pieterson Museum. (author’s image)

The museum constructs its narrative using extensive oral history testimony from many sides of the conflict; students, parents, and police. One of the things that stood out most to me was that there was a real effort to convey what happened in all its confusion and nuance. Contrasting interpretations are offered, as is testimony that complicated ideas about innocence in guilt. In particular, I was struck by the inclusion of the story of a young man who took part in the looting of a shop, probably because of how such reports in the US have been used to discredit the acts of rioters in Ferguson. The museum presents the participants as human beings with agency, and there is no effort to cast them as passive victims in order to make it clear that the violence committed against them was criminal.

For me, this was the most important aspect of the museum. In the US, we have a tendency to want to paint our conflicts in the most black and white terms possible; we like our heroes to be paragons of virtue and our villains to be flawed and malevolent. The problem is that history is made up of the acts of human beings who are inherently flawed and rarely all good or all evil. When we perpetuate these ideas in our presentations of history, we encourage the spread of these ideas in our larger culture. It perpetuates the idea that the only real victim is one who is totally innocent, not just in the context of the crime committed against him or her, but of anything ever. It’s why Trayvon Martin was labeled a thug. It’s why the Ferguson Police felt the need to inform the public that Michael Brown was suspected in the theft of a box of cigars on the day he was shot by Officer Darren Wilson. It’s the reason people wonder what rape victims were wearing.

Our cultural institutions are often reflections of the values we hold as a society. While they cannot single-handedly reform attitudes, they are uniquely placed to encourage dialogue about the past and the issues of race, class, gender, and justice that we still deal with today. When we visit these types of sites, we bring with us values and ideas that can be upheld or challenged by what we see. These sites should be places where we are encouraged to embrace complicated ideas and stories, and then carry that willingness to be uncomfortable and uncertain into the rest of our lives.

*South Africa had a number of racial classifications under apartheid, each of which conveyed a different level of privilege (all subordinate to white, of course). I place “non-white” in quotations because it is the language of the regime; I only use it here to refer to the laws of that period, as I recognize that it is no longer acceptable, and to convey the arbitrary nature of racial classification under apartheid.

**This photograph is widely available online, but I have chosen not to show it here because I do not have the permission of Sam Nzima. The image has a long history of incorrect attribution and appropriation of which I do not want to be a part. You can easily find it by clicking the link above or simply typing “Hector Pieterson” into the search engine of your choice.

A Trip to the Zoo

So I made it to Johannesburg, and I’ve now officially been here for a week. It seems like a lot longer, in part because it took two days to get here. I left last Sunday (Sept 28), flew overnight to London where I spent 14 hours (during which I visited the fantastic V&A Museum) before catching another overnight flight (10.5 hours) to Johannesburg. The trip to London was a bit rough; I didn’t sleep well, due to adrenaline and a bad seatmate, but I did get to see a great movie I’d been meaning to catch, Belle, which I recommend thoroughly. If you’re wondering why I don’t have any pictures from London, it’s because I left my camera at home, because of course I did. Fortunately, I am renting an iPhone while I’m in South Africa, so I have plenty of photos of my adventures here.

View down the street in the Melville suburb; walls and gates the entire way. (Author’s image)

After spending a day recovering from my journey, I decided to ease into my trip by starting out with a visit to the Johannesburg Zoo. One of the things that has really struck me about Joburg (or Jozi, as the locals call it) is how little public space there is. All of the houses are behind walls and fences and gates, so there’s very little to see when you walk down the street. Several tourism websites recommended the zoo as a place where it is possible to walk around and see things without concerns for safety that seem to be embedded into the physical space of the city elsewhere, and I definitely found that to be the case.

I took a taxi to the zoo (because everyone drives here), and I was pleasantly surprised. The zoo is laid out informally relative to a lot of zoos I’ve visited, by which I mean that there’s no clear direction of traffic or path to follow. There are some paved walks, but other walks are little more than dirt paths, though they are clearly meant for visitors since there are markers with information about the animals in each enclosure. One of my favorite things about the zoo was their work on historic preservation. Though the zoo has only limited space in which to expand, they have retained the historic animal enclosures and interpret them for visitors.

Old Polar Bear Enclosure Marker — Interpretive marker for the Old Polar Bear Enclosure and Old Polar Bear Enclosure (Author’s images).

Interpretive marker for the Old Polar Bear Enclosure and Old Polar Bear Enclosure (Author’s images).

Lion cubs (including a rare white lion) playing in their new enclosure (author's image). — Lion cubs (including a rare white lion) playing in their new enclosure (author’s image).

Some of the enclosures have been repurposed to house new species. The Old Polar Bear Enclosure (pictured above) is now home to the bushbabies. It’s a great lesson on the evolution of animal husbandry, though it’s a little horrifying to imagine some of these animals being kept in such small spaces. Along with the Old Polar Bear Enclosure, the zoo also still has the Old Carnivore Enclosure and the Old Elephant House. These sites all have interpretive markers that discuss when they were built, and acknowledge that these facilities were state-of-the-art at the time they were constructed. While the zoo still has lions and elephants, they are now housed in much more generous spaces.

Preservationists like to talk about the importance of protecting the layers of past embedded in the landscape, meaning that we want to protect the evidence of how the use of the physical landscape has changed and evolved. In a historic house, this means keeping additions made throughout the house’s life that show how various residents adapted the house to their changing needs. In the case of the zoo, it means keeping and reusing old structures so that visitors can see and appreciate how this zoo (and zoos generally) have evolved to provide better and better care for their animals. The approach used by the Johannesburg Zoo is a great example of an effective and low-maintenance way to expand the visitor experience to include education about history as well as animals. If you find yourself in Joburg on a beautiful day (like I did), it’s well worth a visit.

Friendly shire horse — Of course I made friends with this very sweet Shire horse from their farm exhibit (author’s image).

Getting kisses from a juvenile sable antelope — I also made friends with this juvenile sable antelope (author’s image).

obligatory zoo peacock — Obligatory zoo peacock (author’s image).

Watch This Space

You may (or may not) have noticed that it’s been quite a while since I last posted here. All of my good intentions about continuing to blog have fallen to the wayside as I have been dedicating my writing energy to the dissertation and, more recently, the dreaded job application process. It’s been a productive summer. I have two chapters out for review with my committee, and a third has just undergone its first review with my supervisor, and I’ve even found some positions to apply for. But I didn’t decide to start blogging again to bore you with the details of my academic progress; I want to share some exciting news.

c.1920 Cape Town travel poster, via http://www.posterteam.com/psmaler/poster.asp?thisId=1319960688#.VByQ_OeH2HY

On September 28, I will embark on a six-week trip to Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa to conduct research for my dissertation. I will be meeting with a few contacts, visiting historic sites, taking tours, and trying to remind myself that this is in fact real life. This trip has been in the planning stages for a long time, and it’s hard to believe that it’s actually finally happening. In order to make the most of my time, I will be blogging more actively from South Africa, mostly site reviews and observations about the heritage landscape. I’m even renting an iPhone while I’m there to make it even easier to document my trip! (Yes, I am one of those Luddites clinging desperately to a flip phone.)

So… watch this space!