Bringing Back the Archive – one step at a time
From October 9th-23rd, , 2024, !Khwa ttu had the great pleasure of hosting our US Marshall project partners, Ilisa Barbash and Kimberley Allegretto, from Harvard’s, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and Alice Apley and Frank Aveni, from Documentary Educational Resources (DER), Massachusetts, USA.
In the spirit of, ‘nothing ventured nothing gained’, about 8 years ago I knocked on Ilisa’s Peabody door, to introduce myself as the principal planner in setting up !Khwa ttu Heritage Centre. I was interested in her museum’s archival holding of photographs taken by the Marshall family, largely in the 1950s and 1960s among San and other groups in southern Africa (see previous posts).
From that spontaneous gesture grew two mutually supporting exhibitions, respectively in the US and at !Khwa ttu (ongoing!), alongside this current outreach initiative to assess how the Marshall photographs and film might be made available to the communities among whom the material was made.
After experiencing !Khwa ttu hospitality and seeing our Marshall exhibition, we headed north to Namibia to discuss ideas with Nyae Nyae community members. I am delighted to say that we had a fabulous and extremely valuable time together, despite the complexity and scale of the ambition seeming greater the more we drilled into it. We are convinced that the Ju|’hoansi, among whom we worked, are enthused by the Marshall archive and consider access to it extremely valuable. On the back of this, we are working hard with the wider Nyae Nyae community to find an appropriate and sustainable archival solution.
Chris Low
Our Peabody and DER colleagues meeting San interns at !Khwa ttu
Entering Nyae Nyae Conservancy. From left, Kimberley Allegretto, Alice Apley, Frank Aveni, Lisa Barbash
US colleagues sharing photographs and film with !amace and family, Tsumkwe
Chief Bobo of Tsumkwe is shown family photographs by Lisa Barbash
US team filming Ju|’hoansi with personal connections to John Marshall, under a Baobab tree recorded by John Marshall in Nyae Nyae Conservancy.