Qualla: Iziko South African Museum

Iziko South African Museum: Introduction

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nkansah Rexford, CC BY 3.0. The word iziko means "hearth" in Xhosa, and the name was chosen deliberately. When the South African Museum was renamed in 2012, the new word was meant to signal warmth, gathering, a center of community -- qualities that had not always defined the institution. Founded in 1825 by Lord Charles Somerset, the governor of the Cape Colony, the museum in Cape Town's Company's Garden is the oldest in the country. Its collections span 250-million-year-old fossils, a foal of the extinct quagga, and the recorded song of the humpback whale. But the museum's most difficult story is about people, not specimens.

Image: Nkansah Rexford | CC BY 3.0

Iziko South African Museum: Deep Time in the Karoo

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nkansahrexford, CC BY 3.0. The museum's palaeontology wing houses therapsid fossils from the Karoo -- mammal-like reptiles that lived 250 million years ago, before the End-Permian Extinction wiped out roughly 90% of Earth's species. Reconstructions show what these creatures might have looked like, bridging...

Image: Nkansahrexford | CC BY 3.0

Iziko South African Museum: Casts, Dioramas, and Dehumanization

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nkansahrexford, CC BY 3.0. Between 1907 and 1924, under director Louis Peringuey, museum modeller James Drury took 68 body casts of San and Khoi people described in official records as "pure Bushmen specimens." The process was humiliating and painful for the participants. Drury's memoir, titled Bushman, wh...

Image: Nkansahrexford | CC BY 3.0

Iziko South African Museum: Reckoning and Revision

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Snelling, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1989, the museum began confronting the diorama's problems, adding an exhibition that investigated the casting project and tried to restore the identities of the people who had been cast. In 1996, curator Pippa Skotnes mounted Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of Khoi and San H...

Image: Chris Snelling | CC BY-SA 3.0

Iziko South African Museum: A Hearth for the Future

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nkansahrexford, CC BY-SA 4.0. Today the Iziko South African Museum operates as part of Iziko Museums of South Africa, an agency of the national Department of Arts and Culture. The collections span zoology, archaeology, and natural history across multiple floors -- from an indigenous knowledge exhibition to a ...

Image: Nkansahrexford | CC BY-SA 4.0