Museums as Tools for Understanding Slavery and its Legacies in South Africa

This article explores how slavery is represented in South African museums and how this history is examined in relation to later histories of apartheid. The interconnected histories of structural racism and intergenerational dispossession are frequently portrayed as distinct and unrelated. Perhaps owing much to the decades of silence which clouded the subject, South African museums widely approach slavery with little reference to its contemporary legacies in the country. The state-funded flagship museums of Freedom Park in Pretoria and the Iziko Slave Lodge in Cape Town are considered as examples of sites whereby representations of slavery may be constrained by national narratives. The privately funded museums on the wine estate of Solms-Delta are then highlighted as an example of how memory work can help to form new understandings of self by focusing on the distant past. The article then considers how slavery is represented in Simon's Town as an example of how local histories have been selectively constructed in South Africa, and suggests that the approach taken at Solms-Delta could successfully function in other localities.