The country's museums needed to decolonise and transform
urgently, President Jacob Zuma said in the Northern Cape on
Sunday. "Our museums must be transformed to become centres of
heritage and expertise which respect all peoples and cultures,"
Zuma said in a speech prepared for delivery at the reburial of
Klaas and Trooi Pienaar in Kuruman. The bodies of the couple,
who were Khoisan descendants, were dug up and sent to Vienna by
Austrian scientist Rudolph Pöch in 1909. They were workers on
the farm Pienaarsputs, and died of malaria fever in May and June
that year. Their bodies were dug up in October 1909, wrapped in
linen and forced into a large barrel, which was filled with salt
to preserve them. Zuma said processes were underway to address
the legacy of racial science in museums. "No museum must have a
collection of material that depicts any section of our
population as colonial objects, especially indigenous people."
He said the Iziko Museum in Cape Town had already investigated
the ethics of its collection