Place That Matters Yet

John Gubbins's MuseumAfrica in the Postcolonial World

Byala Sara

"A Place That Matters Yet" unearths the little-known story of Johannesburg's MuseumAfrica, a South African history museum that embodies one of the most dynamic and fraught stories of colonialism and postcolonialism, its life spanning the eras before, during, and after apartheid. Sara Byala, in examining this story, sheds new light not only on racism and its institutionalization in South Africa but also on the problems facing any museum that is charged with navigating colonial history from a postcolonial perspective. Drawing on thirty years of personal letters and public writings by museum founder John Gubbins, Byala paints a picture of a uniquely progressive colonist, focusing on his philosophical notion of "three-dimensional thinking", which aimed to transcend binaries and thus – quite explicitly – racism. Unfortunately, Gubbins died within weeks of the museum's opening, and his hopes would go unrealized as the museum fell in line with emergent apartheid politics. Following the museum through this transformation and on to its 1994 reconfiguration as a post-apartheid institution, Byala showcases it as a rich – and problematic – archive of both material culture and the ideas that surround that culture, arguing for its continued importance in the establishment of a unified South Africa.

About the Author

Sara Byala is a historian and senior writing fellow in the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reviews

"Sara Byala has given us a meticulously detailed and researched account of the history and transformation of a single institution: MuseumAfrica. In so doing, she reminds the reader of the value of micro-history as a tool for comprehending the broader issues raised by museological developments in South Africa today" – Annie E. Coombes, University of London

"There is something fresh, rewarding, and even courageous in Sara Byala's approach in 'A Place That Matters Yet'. She not only manages to reconstruct the history of MuseumAfrica but also demonstrates quite clearly that none of the new museums in South Africa today were created without some institutional (or bureaucratic) connection to it. In other words, the cutting-edge community of new historiography museums that have so captured the imagination of recent scholarship did not appear in an institutional vacuum but rather must be understood and framed within the context of a deeper museological past. It is this longue duree that Byala gives us in 'A Place That Matters Yet', and we should be grateful to her for having done so in such an elegant and extraordinarily interesting way" – Christopher B. Steiner, Connecticut College

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