Cape Town, Day Four

February 27

Vicki:  Today Maeve was showing signs of exhaustion. She was screaming like a maniac when things didn’t go her way, and she was averting her gaze in irritation when people smiled their greetings. If you know her, you know that this kind of thing is highly unusual.

She stayed home – or, rather, on the ship! – with John while Aidan and I ventured out to visit the Iziko South African Museum, which sits on one end of the gorgeous Company’s Gardens in the middle of the city. It’s the nation’s natural history museum, featuring life-sized dioramas of extinct animals and taxidermied tableau of still-existing species. They have a couple of fossilized skeletons, too, including that of a mid-sized Apatosaurus (still massive) and a blue whale. Aidan determined our route, and he was scrupulous that we didn’t get distracted by the shiny exhibits in any other section of the museum before we had finished viewing the section we were in. Kept us on track, he did.

 We each found exhibits we enjoyed:

Aidan: I can’t really decide what my favorite part is between the mammals and water world exhibit. They both had animals, which I really like, and I just got really interested in both of them. In the mammals exhibit, the interesting thing was that you get to see what the animals look like, but it’s not dangerous. The monkeys all had walking sticks, so I think it was kind of funny. I’d always thought that monkeys were things that wouldn’t really have walking sticks. I guess they had walking sticks because people wanted them to look like humans, because they’re our old ancestors. In water world, you get to see the animals without being in danger of drowning. I got interested because I didn’t know that there were so many different kinds of dolphins. It turns out that there are quite a lot. I only though that there were two or three kinds. In the whale part, I stood in a whale jaw. I wasn’t scared of being in the jaw, but I was scared because there was a gigantic whale skeleton right above me, and I was scared it was going to fall down. I saw quite a lot of things. There was a penguin exhibit. The water exhibit was pretty much, “Name a sea creature, and it was there.”

Vicki: I was amazed by the exhibit on the rock paintings of the southernmost part of what is now South Africa. The most ancient examples were mind-boggling by virtue of their sheer and practically incomprehensible antiquity. Recent evidence – genetic, and linguistic, and archaeological – point to southernmost Africa as the probable location where modern humans first developed a little over 100,000 years ago. The piece of evidence I got to see with my own eyes was an archaeological find, made in 2008, of the oldest known painting kit found close to the scene of the oldest known rock paintings. The kit is stunning in it’s completeness. It includes a mollusk shell used to hold the paint, various flints used to grind the pigments, a small stirrer used to mix the pigments with animal fat and blood, and a seal scapula that shows signs of charring on one side and pigments on the other, suggesting that it served as a surface for cooking the ingredients together into a batch of paint. It was also stunning in its age – 100,00 years old. A sandstorm that filled the cave soon after the painting kit was left preserved it almost perfectly.

The cave paintings found near it are the oldest physical evidence of humans rendering ideas or concepts in symbolic form. The practice of rock painting with ochre in this area of the world, though, continued until very recently. The museum had examples from a mere 200 and 300 years ago, one depicting a British soldier pulling a cart. The displays included late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century testimonials explaining rock paintings from some of the Khoisan people (the current name for a diversity of  aboriginal groups of southern Africa), who were shown both ancient and recent paintings. It’s hard to generalize, but a number of testimonials described the paintings as renderings of the visions experienced in shamanic trance states, during which the entranced people caught animals capable of bringing the rains and brought them to places in need of water.

Visiting the museum, it turns out, can tell us at least as much about our own current-day practices of representation as it can about ancient ones. As an anthropologist on our voyage pointed out, rock paintings and artifacts from Khoisan cultures more generally are displayed in the natural history museum, with the stuffed dead animals, while European paintings are displayed in the art and cultural history museums. This was very much the way that indigenous cultures were displayed – as part of “nature” rather than “culture” -- in U.S. museums well into my childhood. I remember clearly the ethnographic exhibits in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural history, featuring mannequins arranged around sample huts with sample artifacts. Those are now gone, and as our anthropologist friend told us, South African museum curators are attempting to find more respectful ways to display indigenous cultures.