The Isishweshwe Story Exhibition and the Politics of Occluded Histories

Museums have been crucial in public education, transforming knowledge about the past into accessible, visual, and typically object-centred narratives. Necessarily, they are sites of epistemic agitation. They have the potential to not only unsettle what we think we know and understand about the past and its relationship to the present. Crucially, they themselves generate epistemic insights that are partial and troubling. This paper builds on work exploring the history of a popular textile in South Africa. Specifically, it critically evaluates Isishweshwe Story: Material Women?, a multi-year exhibition that was mounted at the Iziko Museum in Cape Town, South Africa. In this paper, I argue that notwithstanding the museum’s attempts, through this exhibition, to reposition itself as a transforming and inclusive post-apartheid institution, the exhibition aestheticized – and, in important ways downplayed –isishweshwe’s deeply political story linked to the country’s imperial and settler colonial histories. Through this aestheticisation, Isishweshwe Story occluded rather than displayed troubling threads of the textile’s historical imbrication with settler colonialism, racialised economic exploitation, and visions for a South Africa in which Africans were gradually relegated to the status of non-citizens. The exhibition’s evasion of these politics undermined the museum’s opportunity to foster accountability through historical reckoning and its gestures towards transparency (by means of historical excavation), amounting to an exercise in historical occlusion and deception.