A Day at the Museum: bringing indenture history and the liberation struggle to young hands
By Durban Local History Museums
Everyday indenture-era heritage, of the kind now being shared with a new generation of young visitors
Over the July school holidays, KwaZulu-Natal's 1860 Heritage Centre opened its doors to a new generation of history-makers. Its "A Day at the Museum" programme, run under the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Sport, Arts and Culture, gave children aged 8 to 18 free, hands-on access to exhibitions tracing South Africa's journey from indenture to democracy.
Guided tours took learners – including a group from Pietermaritzburg Girls' High School – through displays on the arrival and daily lives of Indian indentured labourers, the story of Curries Fountain as a site of sporting and political resistance, and the often-overlooked role women played in the liberation struggle. Further galleries introduced young visitors to Nelson Mandela and Chief Albert Luthuli, alongside Mahatma Gandhi's early years in South Africa, including his removal from a Pietermaritzburg train and his refusal to take off his turban in a Durban courtroom – formative moments in his political awakening.
Heritage was not only something to observe, but something to perform. Cultural practitioner Professor Suria Govender led participants through the movements of Asimbonanga, the same piece she performed at President Nelson Mandela's 1994 inauguration, showing how music and dance can carry memory in ways a display case cannot.
Cooking up living heritage
The day closed with a hands-on cooking demonstration, in which children learned to prepare roti and bhaji – simple, filling dishes that sustained indentured Indian families through generations of hardship. Centre director Selvan Naidoo told the programme's young cooks that these recipes are more than food: they carry the resourcefulness and care with which earlier generations looked after one another, and keeping them alive in the kitchen is as much a heritage act as preserving a photograph or a document.
Breaking the mould of the "static museum"
For Naidoo, days like this are about more than a single outing. He has spoken of wanting to move museums beyond glass cabinets and information boards, meeting young people instead with things they can touch, taste and sing along to. In a country still working through a layered and often painful past, he argues that this kind of programming helps children growing up in a diverse, pluralistic society lay claim to a history that was, for many of their families, denied to earlier generations.
It's a principle that resonates closely with the work of Durban's own network of local history museums: that the stories held in our collections are best kept alive not behind rope barriers, but in the hands of the young people who will one day carry them forward.
Source: adapted from reporting by Rakesh Ramdhin for The Post (IOL).