Our Heritage

SANDY GRANT | Thursday June 17, 2010 00:00

 

My concern today is with the former which was described with breathtaking brevity by the Museum as a) a rain making pot and b) as being donated by Kgosi Linchwe II. Because this artifact, which must be one of the country's major cultural possessions I have been on and off battling for the last thirty years to obtain accurate information about it. My concern, however, has been shared at no time by the National Museum which has not only refused to become involved in discussions about it but has made claims which have merely served to ascerbate the matter.

Its decision to place this artifact on display, presumably because it is no longer aware that there exists any controversy about it - provides me with what may be my last chance to raise my concerns about it - which any professionally managed museum would have wanted to sort out long ago.

But to get to grips with this story it is necessary to return to the Mochudi that Isaac Schapera found when he first arrived there in 1929. Kgosi Linchwe had died five years earlier and there was an on-going power  struggle between Linchwe's 18 year old heir and his formidable uncle, Isang. Linchwe's daughter, Kgabyane had inherited her father's rain making apparatus but was reluctant to pass them on to either protagonist. In desperation, she wished one or more of those items on to Schapera who, also baffled, felt that the best he could do was to temporarily deposit what she gave him, with the museum in Cape Town. 

In 1975, when it was agreed in Mochudi to try and establish a museum, the first organizing committee agreed to ask the Cape Town museum to return the rain making equipment which Schapera had placed with it. When this transfer took place, I was in Edinburgh learning about the conservation of historic buildings and knew only, from its letter, that the interim Committee had placed those items with the National Museum for 'temporary safekeeping until such time as Mochudi had its own museum'. Having returned from Edinburgh and with the beginnings of its new museum established in the old Bakgatla National School, I informed the National Museum that the Phuthadikobo Committee was now asking it to transfer the rain making artefacts to Mochudi. It refused. I then placed a notice in its rain making display, which was there for many years, stating that the blank space was reserved for the rain making pot which had been 'stolen' by the National Museum. It never denied that charge which was of course seen by many hundreds of people, or was in any way bothered by it. On the other hand, it did tell us verbally that our concern about the pot was unjustified because it was not even a genuine artifact. But even then, it still refused to return the pot!    In an effort to sort out what seemed to me to be a major mystery, I therefore wrote to Professor Isaac  Schapera in London on 20th April 1978 explaining that,' a few years ago, John Speed wrote to Cape Town Museum asking for the rain making pot to be returned. This was done. Speed deposited it with the National Museum for temporary safe keeping. The National Museum now refuses to release it to us on the grounds that it is far too valuable to risk having in Mochudi...I am certain that Speed could not have given anything to the National Museum since it was never in his power to do so. I would simply like to know that a) we have back from Cape Town everything that you deposited with them and b) we push the National Museum to return everything to us that was deposited by Speed. As far as I know there is just the one small pot.'On 20th June 1978 Schapera replied saying that, 'as far as I can judge, you have received everything that Kgabyana let me take to Cape Town and she did so on my explicit undertaking that whenever the tribe wanted it back, it would be returned. It is definitely tribal property, and should be in Mochudi where it belongs.'

Five years later, after Schapera's visit to this country, I again raised the question of the pot with him. He replied as follows.' You ask about the rain pot in the National Museum.

Campbell, when he showed it to me, said the one on exhibition was a replica, the original being hidden away for safe keeping. I can't remember if he promised to let you have it. In any case, I don't remember, after 50 years, whether or not it is the one Kgabyana lent me. The one whose picture is reproduced on Plate II of my Rain Making book is the only one I recollect seeing; and if that is the one you have you need not worry about the one Campbell has.  The horn, as you will see from my book, was not entrusted to me. I have no idea at all what happened to it. Perhaps Kgabyana's daughter may know.' 

Long ago I came to the conclusion, very much supported by the late Francis Phirie, that it was better that the rain pot be kept securely in the National Museum but having no involvement with the Phuthadikobo Museum the location of this pot can no longer be my concern. I do believe, however, that obvious questions in this tangled story need to be properly answered and that it is in the interests of the National Museum and certainly of the general public it serves that this be done.

When the rain pot was returned by Cape Town it was deposited 'for temporary safekeeping' with the National Museum by John Speed, not by Kgosi Linchwe. If the National Museum now claims that Kgosi Linchwe made such a donation it must be possible for it to state from its accession records the precise date when that supposed donation was made and on what terms. It seems probable to me that the Museum invented this story after it had broken the conditions which Speed had set when depositing it and after it had refused to return the pot to Mochudi. How could Kgosi Linchwe have donated to the Museum what it already possessed?

The photo, reproduced from The African Photographs of Isaac Schapera, together with his own caption to the photo is, I believe, the same that appears in his Rain Making book. This photo clearly shows one pot inside another together with a sticklike object which is difficult to clearly discern. Neither of these two pots bears similarity to the one now on display at the National Museum. Where are those two rain pots today - if they still exist? What is the rain pot at the National Museum? Is it a replica? Is it not even genuine? How many of these genuine or phony Kgatla rain making artefacts  does it possess? What factual information does it really have about any of them?

What is its basis for stating that the pot on display is in fact a rain making pot? Why does it state that Kgosi Linchwe donated it, information that it nowhere else provides,  but is unable even to suggest its age, its style, or explain to whom the pot originally belonged and by whom it was  used?  The fact that it contains some goo-like substance is not in itself evidence that it was a rain pot.