Two-and-ahalf years ago, I returned home to South Africa after more than a decade in Europe and North America in the museum sector.
I came home exhausted; tired of taking on battles that often felt unwinnable.
I felt as though I had spent all my time fighting for African visibility and restitution and explaining that we were fully human. I was relieved to be back home.
This is where I started my museum career 15 years earlier, setting up some of the new post-apartheid museums during the ambitious period of Thabo Mbeki’s Presidential Legacy Projects.
I wanted to see how these public heritage projects and others were faring.
Disappointing.
Needed is an ecosystem, a community of interconnected and interdependent organisms, where each element does its part so that the whole stays healthy.
When it comes to safeguarding, stewarding, and producing our cultural heritage of today and tomorrow, we need more than the intent of policies, the imagination of cultural producers, or the participation of communities.
We need well-funded, effective, and accountable institutions that get the basics right.
