Hostels, Homes, Museum: Memorialising Migrant Labour Pasts in Lwandle, South Africa

Winner of:
2014 Michael M. Ames Award in Innovative Museum Anthropology
 
This book tracks moments in the making and remaking of a museum in Lwandle, some 40 kilometers from Cape Town. In 1998 this space of seeming anonymity, which was established in the 1950s under apartheid as a “native location” for the purposes of housing temporary migrant labor, surprisingly became the site for the first township museum in the Western Cape province. The authors explore the making of this museum, the creation of community histories through the oral and the visual, and a major project to rehabilitate a migrant labor hostel. It is a story of Lwandle and a museum, which is fixed and temporary, planned and providential, seen and unseen, settled and unsettled.