EL Museum’s vital function celebrated on world day
Museums are bastions of knowledge and annually across the world on May 18, they are celebrated for their role as primary resources in the cities and communities they are located in.
The East London Museum is heralded across the world and to celebrate Museum Day, the levy on the entry fee was lifted, which encouraged patrons from far and wide to visit.
A visitor who preferred to remain anonymous said, with tears in her eyes, that she was so impressed with the care the museum had taken of its collections.
“My family donated my great grandfather’s army regalia from the siege of Mafikeng to the museum in Mafikeng a long time ago but without us knowing the museum workers went and sold all of those things to people from overseas who came here looking for precious things,” she said.
Collecting, preserving, protecting and contextualising history are important functions of a museum to ensure future generations are able to reflect on and learn from the past.
Through the plundering of museums, chasms are left that enable division in society to grow.
East London Museum anthropologist, Nandipha Mlonyeni, believes that in addition to bearing witness to history, museums are also the centre from which cultural understanding and social cohesion should emanate.
“Buffalo City is home to diverse groups of people and this cultural complexity leads to friction or manipulation when people are not versed on the correct procedures for rites, symbols and rituals within a cultural groups,” Mlonyeni said.
“Years ago, there was a sangoma in the Eastern Cape who killed his clients and I believe that in instances like that, museums must play a role in educating people so that they will be able to recognise when criminality or scams have infiltrated their cultural practices.”
Museums promote tolerance and acceptance among culturally diverse people, primarily through education and awareness initiatives.
The East London Museum has led workshops, seminars and live dramatisations of cultural and social rites and rituals practiced in communities across Buffalo City. Natural scientist at the East London Museum Kevin Cole adds that “the museum has been involved with many community projects since its inception”.
“Heritage projects such as building restorations, the Town Hall as an example, strengthening ties with the rich boxing history of the region, promoting cultural tourism in spaces like Heroes Park and highlighting important themes in our history such as the Soccer World Cup temporary display a few years back.”
The museum has launched two new exhibits that differ from previous collections in that they display the relationship between cultural practices and their effect on the natural environment.
The Imifuno collection demonstrates the process of making imifuno from plants and the role this dish has played in shaping Xhosa heritage in the Eastern Cape.
As the impact of human life on the environment grows more complex, Mlonyeni believes more exhibitions indicating the connection between culture and nature will emerge.
Cole says “the museum has promoted and actively driven many environmental projects over the decades such as the establishment of the Gonubie Wetland Reserve and more recently the Nahoon Point Nature Reserve, with a multitude of inputs ranging from impact assessments to environmental awareness to protect of our marine environment”.
Whale and dolphin research is also undertaken by the institution.
A number of museum staff assist on various committees which serve the community of Buffalo City in cultural and natural history endeavours.