South Africa General

Now I have to say from the very outset that I am “old school” and therefore know relatively little of the workings of Building Information Modelling (BIM), but being a keen observer of the built environment I am aware of the benefits that its methodology can bring to a building project with the aid of sophisticated computer software, which is now at the fingertips of the Architect, Engineer and Contractor, whether the project be “Greenfield” (new) or “Brownfield” (existing).

Now what is BIM?  As defined by The Institute of Structural Engineers, London “It is an approach centred on using digital tools to efficiently produce information to allow assets to be built, operated and maintained. It relies on all those involved in the project fully populating a central data base” (i.e. a three dimensional computer model). This brief definition does not fully convey the power of BIM and so in order to give more weight to the topic I refer the reader to the web site of the “BIM Institute” (www.biminstute.org.za), where he/she can be the judge of the usefulness of BIM in their own field.

The saying goes that “the only constant is change” and that is certainly true with regard to the building industry, where the competitive edge is of great importance in winning contracts. In the last 50 years there have been great strides  made in the way a building project is brought to completion and in my own experience I could never have anticipated the developments that...

There are many heritage objects housed in State aided or supported entities such as museums, governmental departments, and other state organisations. These institutions are responsible for safe-guarding and looking after the heritage objects in their custodianship on behalf of the public. Heritage objects portray material evidence of the people and their environment, as such, they should be cared for and conserved, due to their lasting value and provision of evidence of the origins of South African society. Heritage Objects are valuable, finite, non-renewable and irreplaceable, they must be carefully managed to ensure that they are accessible to future generations. However, applicable evidence in the management of heritage objects, especially housed in some State aided or supported bodies, present a worrying situation. This paper looks at some of the concerns regarding the management and conservation of heritage objects in the custody of State aided or supported bodies. It explores challenges and obligations within the applicable legislations facing State departments or aided entities, lessons learned from tertiary institutions, as well as possible partnerships to share knowledge in safeguarding heritage objects and collections.

Museum Africa has experienced several challenges over the years (The Heritage Portal)

1. Legal framework governing the management of heritage objects

It is intrinsic that museums are established to acquire and conserve heritage objects on behalf of the public. Public or State funded/supported museums draw their mandates...

Certainties during most of human history were famine, death and pestilence and war, as per the ‘four horsemen of the Apocalypse’. We have the Pestilence ‘horseman’ galloping across the world right now, as in the Covid-19 pandemic. During this pandemic we contemplate our exposure to this ‘pestilence’ with a certain raw, ancient fear. We are waiting for the vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 virus (Covid-19) with some anxiety, hoping that this disease can be brought to an end. That our global society should experience such an old-fashioned inconvenience goes against our culture of ‘having it all, now’ and the belief in the wonders of the modern world.

A section of Albrecht Dürer's 1497 famous wood cut from his Apocalypse series

In the 1960s, medical science announced that they had conquered disease. Infectious human diseases were to be a thing of the past because of the antibiotics being developed. The bad news is that we have not conquered infectious disease at all:  bacteria are evolving to be resistant to antibiotics, especially those bacteria to be found in hospital or livestock environments. Even viruses have upped their game, ever mutating. My microbiology textbook dated 1980 devoted about 300 words to a small insignificant group of viruses, the coronaviruses which...

In the article below, journalist Lucille Davie unpacks the complex and painful history behind the 1913 Land Act. The article was first published on the Brand South Africa website on 17 October 2013. Click here to view more of Davie's work.

In 1913 law-abiding people were dispossessed of their only means of earning a living: land. The Native Land Act of 1913 forced millions of black South Africans from productive farms across the country, when their cattle, their homes, their crops and their possessions, were taken from them.

Around 7% of land was then relegated to black people, spread along the eastern coastal area, from East London in the Eastern Cape, upwards, to the border with Mozambique, and dots of land in Limpopo and North West provinces. 

Map of the distribution of land according to the Act 

Prior to the act, most of these black farmers were tenants on white farms, ploughing a portion of land given to them, and giving up to 50% of the harvest to the landlord, to pay for their tenancy. Now the act prohibited them from hiring or buying land. The landlord-tenant relationship was now a criminal offence, for which farmers could be fined £100, a considerable sum in those days. The black tenants would then be given a stark option: become the...

In 1901 the Duke of Cornwall and York – the future King George V – and his wife embarked on the longest official tour ever undertaken by the British Royal family. The tour lasted for nearly eight months and most of it was spent in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, with brief calls at Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, Ceylon, Singapore and Mauritius. They travelled almost 50 000 miles.

It became one of the great media events of its day and was viewed by contemporaries as a ceremonial occasion of great and lasting importance. At the time it was viewed as being “undertaken at the express desire of Queen Victoria, as a mark of special appreciation for the part her colonies had played in the hour of the Empire’s need.” However, the truth was much more complex. Her death in January 1901 changed the attitude of Edward VII, once he became king, and he did not want the tour to proceed. Eventually it was agreed that the tour would go ahead, so long as Joseph Chamberlain (Colonial Secretary) would guarantee that there was no danger to the heir to the throne.

George and his wife left Britain in mid March. He was not particularly enthusiastic about visiting South Africa and at his request John Anderson, the Colonial official accompanying the royal party, wrote to Chamberlain from Aden in early May, with a request to cancel the visit to South Africa as there was a “serious outbreak of plague” in Cape...

Towards the end of 2019 I did some analysis of the numbers behind The Heritage Portal (click here to view). It was a powerful exercise so I thought I would repeat it this year...

Overall numbers:

• Founded: 2012
• Number of visitors / unique users: 1 539 160
• Contributors: 288
• Articles: 917
• Notices: 2 594
• Book Reviews: 148
• Threads: 227
• Images: 9 238

2020 numbers:

• Busiest month: September 2020 - 47 922 unique users
• Average monthly users 2020: 34 000
• Number of newsletters: 47
• Articles published: 134

The Portal would be nothing without the amazing community of contributors and readers. I am incredibly grateful that the platform is able to touch the lives of so many people across the country!

I know readers love to see the most viewed articles of all time so here is a potent list (as of 21 December 2020):

Most read articles

1) Mining Headgears - Pure Functionality Ruling over Beauty (Peter Ball)

2) Forbidden Images (1960s to 1980s) - Illegal photographs captured by young men conscripted into the South African Military (Carol Hardijzer)

3) Rediscovering the 1947 Royal Visit to South Africa (Kathy Munro)

4) Nongoloza: King of the Ninevites (Lucille Davie)

5) The Last Remaining Natural Waterfall in Johannesburg (William Gaul)

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Knowingly or unknowingly, South African historians and researchers would have come across a wide variety of original albumen print photographs captured in South Africa during the late 1890s, all of which are titled and numbered followed by the cryptic initials G.W.W.

These photograph titles and numbers with the G.W.W. initials appear in white capital letters across the bottom of each photograph. But who or what was G.W.W.?

The intent with this article is to reflect on the pioneering Scottish photographer George Washington Wilson (G.W.W.), his photographic firm and photographers employed by the firm who visited South Africa more than a 120 years ago. Their journey, with a commercial intent, has left an immensely rich source of historical South African photographic imagery.

Attached to this article is also the first known catalogue compiled (click here to download). The catalogue attempts to record all South African images captured by GWW. Cataloguing GWW images is simplified in that the company numbered each of the original images.

Cape Town and Table Mountain showing family on day outing – photograph number 40,007

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It is almost inconceivable to think the South African Air Force (SAAF) was established when T. E. Lawrence was still working on his much acclaimed biographical Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a history of the Arab Revolt during the First World War. Yet, this was indeed the case when Prime Minister Jan Smuts on 1 February 1920 appointed Lieutenant Colonel Sir Pierre van Ryneveld ‘Director of Air Services’ in the Union Defence Force (UDF). This date is now generally accepted as the founding date of the South African Air Force (SAAF), making it the second oldest independent air force in the world.

Ryneveld’s appointment was necessitated by the British Government’s generous offer in 1919 to each of the four self-governing dominions; Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, of a substantial donation of aircraft and equipment to establish their own air forces.

This donation, subsequently known as the ‘Imperial Gift’ comprised a wide range of surplus war material, including 100 aeroplanes, complete with engines and spare engines, workshops, tenders, motor cars, motor cycles, and trailers; hangars for housing aeroplanes and stores; radio, and photographic equipment for two squadrons; tools to equip the SAAF mechanics and thousands of litres of paints, fuel, varnishes and dope. ‘’Dope’ is a plasticised lacquer that is applied to fabric-covered aircraft. It tightens and stiffens fabric stretched over airframes, which renders them airtight and weatherproof, increasing their durability and lifespan. The 100 aeroplanes included 48 De Havilland DH9, 30 Avro K and 22 SE5a aircraft.

Jan...

Including Revised 1960s Alphabetical Directory of South African based Photographers & Studios (1846 to 1915) - Click here to download.

Shortly after the invention of photography, the camera was briefly referred to as a “Mirror with Memory”, whilst the resulting photographic image was initially referred to as a photogenic drawing.

1) Introduction

During the early 1960s, Doctor Arthur David Bensusan published the first and only record to date of South African based photographers between the period 1846 and 1900.

An updated version of this list has not been published for the past 57 years! Bensusan’ s 1963 list has been reproduced on ancestors.co.za, but sadly his work has not been acknowledged.

The author has made it his personal task over the past 25 years in updating the original Bensusan directory of photographers. In doing so, the vast Hardijzer Photographic Research Collection was established.

Other photograph collections that were established along similar lines by South African photo historians are the Killy Campbell (today housed at the Killy Campbell museum), Reverent Hopkins (today housed at the Cape Archives) and Bensusan (today housed at Museum Africa in Johannesburg) collections, but to mention a few.

Simonstown – Inscription on image states: “Secretary Brown in his dog-cart plus Photographic Saloon – 1876”. The large window of this corrugated iron building was put...

We South Africans are renowned for being sports fanatics and none more so than our rugby supporters, so we are looking ahead, with relish, to next year’s series between the Springboks and the Lions (2021 version). For those of you who are not Rugby Union aficionados, the Springboks are the national rugby team of South Africa and the Lions are a touring rugby team comprising players from the four home unions of the British Isles, namely England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Those players chosen for a Lions tour regularly play against each other in the annual Six Nations rugby championship and every fourth year they unite to play opponents in the Southern Hemisphere during their off season (their summer, our winter) and ever since 1989 the tours are spaced two years after the preceding Rugby World Cup on a quadrennial cycle (1989/1993/1997/....2021). In 1989 it would be Australia who hosted the Lions, then in 1993 it was New Zealand and in 1997 it was the turn of South Africa, thus we get the chance to play the best combined British and Irish side every twelve years (1997/2009/2021); it is a once in a lifetime chance for a South African to play against the Lions.

South Africa’s re-admission to international sporting competition was permitted after the release of Nelson Mandela (11-02-1990), with our subsequent participation in the 1992 Cricket World Cup and the Barcelona Olympics of the same year. Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as our President in the 1994 multi-racial elections paved the way...