ABSTRACT
This is a study of the challenges of making Iziko Museums of South Africa, as a new, amalgamated and integrated national flagship museum, out of divided and troubled colonial collections. Far from being a mere bureaucratic process of unifying and reorganizing different museum sites, structures and collections, it shows how this was also an epistemic project. This entailed the unification of previously segregated collections formerly designated as cultural history and ethnography under the new category of “social history” and the reassessment of the place of human remains and body casts, as collecting legacies of racial science. These developments have even involved rethinking museums outside of the benign frames of humanitarianism and stewardship. Despite its governance by a council being rooted in notions of “arms-length” management, we show how the operations of Iziko had become increasingly subject to tighter, centralized national regulation, with Iziko turned into an arm of the state, almost as a state museum. This regulatory regime was poised to erode the significance of what Iziko had achieved in charting a new museological direction of deracializing and untribing its collections and displays.
