South+African+Museum

South African Museum By: Haley Watson The Iziko South African Museum, established by Lord Charles Somerset in 1825, is the oldest and largest museum in the sub-continent. In 1897, the museum moved to its present building in the Company's Garden. It’s located in Cape Town and is home to important African zoology, paleontology, and archaeology collections. The museum contains over 1.5-million items of cultural and scientific significance. For nearly 200 years, scientists at the Museum have been adding to these collections.

Two very important past displays were the Bushmen Diorama and “Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of Khoi and San History and Material Culture.” The Bushmen diorama was comprised between 1907 and 1924, my museum modeler James Drury. The exhibit consisted of sixty-eight body casts of "pure Bushmen specimens." “Bushmen” refers to the San and Khoi indigenous groups, who were considered lowest on the evolutionary timescale. The goal of the exhibit was to express the thought that very little divided the animal world from the human subjects who were documented. Miscast, another display about the San and Khoi groups, was created in order to “counterpose the ethnographic discourse that had characterised the Bushmen in such a disparaging manner.” The exhibition featured Bushman material culture, thirteen casts of Bushmen bodies and body parts, and official documents and pictures of Bushmen from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Today, the museum has four floor levels of displays. The ground floor has six displays that include “People past to present,” which consists of three exhibits; The Power of Rock Art, African Cultures, and Lydenburg Heads. Level 1 hosts three exhibits and a planetarium, where the other two floors have a combined total of seven exhibitions. There are also many temporary displays.