The Workers' Library and Museum was a non-profit labour service organisation (LSO) active in Johannesburg, South Africa between 1987 and the early 2000s. The organisation provided a meeting and learning centre for labour activists as well as students from the nearby Alexandra and Soweto areas. In 1994, it was expanded into the Workers and Museum in Newtown, Johannesburg, with the only museum in South Africa focussed on working people other than the Slave Lodge, Cape Town.
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Transcription
Hello, everyone. Let's begin our guided tour. Welcome to the Museum of Museums. Museums have been a part of human history for over 2000 years. But they weren't always like the ones we visit today. The history of museums is far older and much stranger than you might imagine. We'll start over here in the Greek wing. Our word museum comes from the Greek mouseion, temples built for the Muses, the goddesses of the arts and the sciences. Supplicants asked the Muses to keep watch over academics and grant ingenuity to those they deemed worthy. The temples were filled with offerings of sculptures, mosaics, complex scientific apparatuses, poetic and literary inscriptions, and any other tribute that would demonstrate a mortal's worthiness for divine inspiration. We have arrived at the Mesopotamian wing. The first museum was created in 530 B.C. in what is now Iraq. And the first curator was actually a princess. Ennigaldi-Nanna started to collect and house Mesopotamian antiquities in E-Gig-Par, her house. When archeologists excavated the area, they discovered dozens of artifacts neatly arranged in rows, with clay labels written in three languages. She must have had interesting parties. The tradition of collecting and displaying intriguing items began to be mimicked, as you can see here in the Roman Empire wing. Treasure houses of politicians and generals were filled with the spoils of war, and royal menageries displayed exotic animals to the public on special occasions, like gladiator tournaments. As you can see, we have a lion here and a gladiator, and, well, the janitor ought to be in this wing clearly. Moving on, hurry along. The next step in the evolution of museums occurred in the Renaissance, when the study of the natural world was once again encouraged after almost a millennium of Western ignorance. Curiosity cabinets, also referred to as Wunderkammers, were collections of objects that acted as a kind of physical encyclopedia, showcasing artifacts. Just step into the wardrobe here. There you go. Mind the coats. And we'll tour Ole Worm's cabinet, One of the most notable Wunderkammers belonged to a wealthy 17th-century naturalist, antiquarian, and physician Ole Worm. Ole Worm collected natural specimens, human skeletons, ancient runic texts, and artifacts from the New World. In other curiosity cabinets, you could find genetic anomalies, precious stones, works of art, and religious and historic relics. Oh my. You might not want to touch that. These cabinets were private, again, often in residencies, curated by their owners, rulers and aristocrats, as well as merchants and early scientists. Now, who hears a circus organ? In the 1840s, an enterprising young showman named Phineas T. Barnum purchased some of the more famous cabinets of curiosity from Europe and started Barnum's American Museum in New York City. A spectacular hodgepodge of zoo, lecture hall, wax museum, theater, and freak show that was known for its eclectic residents, such as bears, elephants, acrobats, giants, Siamese twins, a Fiji mermaid, and a bearded lady, along with a host of modern machinery and scientific instruments. Museums open to the public are a relatively new phenomenon. Before Barnum, the first public museums were only accessible by the upper and middle classes, and only on certain days. Visitors would have to apply to visit the museum in writing prior to admision, and only small groups could visit the museum each day. The Louvre famously allowed all members of the public into the museum but only three days a week. In the 19th century, the museum as we know it began to take shape. Institutions like the Smithsonian were started so that objects could be seen and studied, not just locked away. American museums, in particular, commissioned experiments and hired explorers to seek out and retrieve natural samples. Museums became centers for scholarship and artistic and scientific discovery. This is often called the Museum Age. Nowadays, museums are open to everybody, are centers of learning and research, and are turning into more hands-on institutions. But the question of who gets to go is still relevant as ticket prices can sometimes bar admission to those future scholars, artists and targets of divine inspiration who can't afford to satisfy their curiosity. Thank you all for coming, and please, feel free to stop by the gift shop of gift shops on your way out.
History
The Workers' Library was founded in 1987 as an alternative to the racially segregated public library system under apartheid.[1] Under apartheid, black workers and writers were "forbidden entrance into some of the basic institutions required to practice history, such as archives and public libraries."[2] It was preceded by the Trade Union Library, founded in Cape Town in 1983:[3] both were part of a larger wave of LSOs that emerged from the 1970s. Often initiated by politicised university students and graduates, these worked with the rising unions of the 1970s and 1980s.[4] The "gathering strength of the labour movement" with its "exciting potential" for social change attracted academics who combined scholarship and "working-class perspectives."[5]
In 1994, the Workers' Library was relocated to premises in the Newtown district, adjacent to Mary Fitzgerald Square, and near the Market Theatre, MuseuMAfricA and the national offices of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA). It was renamed the Workers' Library and Museum to reflect an expanded role: the new premises were a refurbished municipal compound (hostel) for black African migrant men workers, part of which was converted to a museum, part of which hosted the library collection, and part of which provided large venues for meetings; nearby cottages for skilled white workers were included, to be used for office space.[1] The buildings housed employees of the now-defunct Jeppe Street Power Station and were a National Monument. The redesign was undertaken by the architect, anti-apartheid activist and radical Allan Robert Lipman in association with Henry Paine, for which they were awarded the South African Institute of Architects Award (SAIA) for Excellence.[6] The Newtown area, including the power station and the Square had a long history as a site of worker protests and rallies, and was "intrinsically linked" to the working-class culture of the area [7] that the Workers' Library and Museum now commemorated.
Activities
The Workers' Library hosted numerous workshops and provided meeting space for unions. This continued in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the venue was also used by the new Anti-Privatisation Forum. Relations with unions were maintained through representatives attending the Johannesburg Local of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and running tables at union congresses, and the launch of a bookshop and t-shirt printing project directed at workers [8] In the late 1990s, the Workers' Library and Museum formed a partnership with Khanya College, another Johannesburg-based LSO, which rented office space, refurbished part of the premises and provided some administrative support for venue bookings.
The Workers' Library and Museum was non-sectarian and inclusive in its approach. [9] Its activities in the 1990s included Saturday afternoon workshops "typically attended by over 35 people, overwhelmingly drawn from the shop steward layer and community activists."[10] The organisation was run by an elected committee of members, who were unpaid volunteers, including anarchists-syndicalists, COSATU members, people from the South African Communist Party (SACP), and Trotskyists .[11] Likewise, the Workers Bookshop included a wide range of materials, from union (mainly but not only COSATU and its unions) and SACP materials, to Trotskyist newspapers and publications from the anarchist-syndicalist Bikisha Media / Zabalaza Books. It the only left-wing bookshop in Gauteng province in the late 1990s and early 2000s.[8]
Unlike LSOs such as the International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG) in Cape Town, the Workers’ Library and Museum was not actively involved in research and publishing, the main exception being an oral history project in the 1990s with former residents of the municipal compound. Its Board was a mixture of trade unionists, like Petros Mashishi, president of the South African Municipal Workers Union and academics linked to the unions and the larger national liberation movement, like Sakhela Buhlungu and Luli Callinicos.
Closure
In the early 2000s, the Johannesburg Municipality withdrew its previous subsidies to the Workers' Library and Museum, which had taken the form of rebates on service charges, rent and taxes. Like other LSOs at the time, [12] it was meanwhile hit by the drying up of donor and solidarity funding after the end of apartheid, and displacement by unions' own expanding research and service departments. Although it had links to the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU), partly through Mashishi and through its highlighting of black municipal workers' history at the museum, there was no formal relationship or ongoing financial support.
Faced with growing debt and unable to pay municipal levies, the Workers' Library and Museum closed in the early 2000s. This was part of a larger decline in the LSO movement, and of left spaces and infrastructure countrywide post-apartheid.
The library collection is now housed at the offices of Khanya College, which relocated to Kerk Street, while the premises are now a separate Workers' Museum, run by the municipality for tourists and schools.[13][14]
References
- ^ a b "The Workers' Library and Museum, Newtown, Johannesburg, South Africa: Advancing workers' education and culture". Archive.org. Workers' Library and Museum. 2002.
- ^ Bozzoli, Belinda; Delius, Peter (1990). "Radical History and South African Society". Radical History Review. 46/47: 16.
- ^ Young, Gordon (1983). "Cape Town Trade Union Library Opens". South African Labour Bulletin. 6 (6): 21–22.
- ^ Sakhela Buhlungu, 2009, "From Labour Service Organisation to Social Justice?" in Vaun Cornell and Jon Berndt (eds.), Internationalism Then and Now: ILRIG's 25 Years of Workers' Education, Cape Town: International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG), pp. 57–58
- ^ Luli Callinicos, 1993, "Labour History and Worker Education in South Africa," Labour History, number 63, pp. 169–170
- ^ "Alan Robert Lipman". South African History Online.
- ^ Reneé Grawitsky, 2002, "Recognising Working Class Culture [interview with Luli Callinicos],"South African Labour Bulletin, volume 26, number 1, p. 85
- ^ a b "[UPDATED] Adverts for Workers Library and Museum mention Bikisha". Southern African Anarchist & Syndicalist History Archive. Zabalaza Books. 22 October 2014.
- ^ Lucien van der Walt, 2001, “Advancing Workers’ Education and Culture: Workshops and Bookshops at the Workers’ Library and Museum,” Debate: Voices from the South African left, number 6 (second series), pp. 78-79
- ^ Lucien van der Walt, 2001, “Advancing Workers’ Education and Culture: Workshops and Bookshops at the Workers’ Library and Museum,” Debate: Voices from the South African left, number 6 (second series), p. 79
- ^ "Notes and posters from the Workers' Library & Museum that was". Southern African Anarchist & Syndicalist History Archive. 12 May 2018.
- ^ See Sakhela Buhlungu, 2009, "From Labour Service Organisation to Social Justice?" in Vaun Cornell and Jon Berndt (eds.), Internationalism Then and Now: ILRIG's 25 Years of Workers' Education, Cape Town: International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG), pp. 58-59
- ^ "Getaways: The Workers Museum". Why Joburg.
- ^ "Workers' Museum". Newton Heritage Trail.
This page was last edited on 26 November 2023, at 21:03