The Mapungubwe Archive A site of contestation Art collection grows

Each year the Art Committee goes in search of worthy South African items to be included in the University of Pretoria Museum Collection.

Somewhere in between and not represented form #1, 2021

For more than two decades the Mapungubwe Collection has been on public display at the University of Pretoria (UP). The world-class collection, including a famous gold rhino and other significant materials, is a critical research collection for the precolonial era. It has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people since being made more accessible after 1999 at UP.

The same cannot be said for the associated Mapungubwe Archive, which for decades lay in departmental storerooms at the university in boxes, as old papers and ageing photographs.

It was only in 2018, when Dr Sian TileyNel, Head of Museums, submitted a grant application to the US Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation Grant via the US Embassy in Pretoria, that the Mapungubwe Archive was established as a formal repository and research site at UP.

Most disconcerting for Dr Tiley-Nel was the lack of proper care, conservation, preservation, access and active research. “Mass excavation was more important than preserving the material and associated records derived from the Mapungubwe Collection,” she said.

“The gaps, silences and missing voices in the Mapungubwe Archive indicated that highly selected material was deliberately not kept and is most probably in private possession, or was simply destroyed,” she informed. “There were missing letters, photographs and other content, with gaps in the archive chronology.”

Some of the Mapungubwe Archive material is related to when the site was used as a military terrain on the farm Greefswald. Many military records are tied up in the Department of Defence and some still have an embargo.

Other forms of missing narratives outlined in the book refer to the neglect of oral history and indigenous knowledge of Mapungubwe Hill as a sacred site by local communities.

There are also intentional gaps in the archive during the height of apartheid, mainly from the 1970s until the late 1980s. But even after democracy in 1994 this was happening in archives at many universities. It was largely as a result of departmental agendas, academic power