This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

30th May 2009 

One of the more curious sights at the SA National Museum of Military History – it’s not a permanent exhibit, but can be seen most afternoons of the week – is the colourful spectacle of a children’s party. Mothers chat casually at tables piled with soft drinks and crisps, while tank barrels loom incongruously above their heads. Boys and girls leopard crawl across an emerald lawn surrounded by heavy artillery, under the instruction of a camouflage-uniformed soldier whose gruff voice belies a primary school teacher’s benevolence.

Here is no ideological conflict; the only observable source of disagreement is about the relative merits of favourite football clubs. Nevertheless, although the now-harmless military equipment on display provides an exciting playground, the uncomfortable question must be raised: do we want our children to have positive associations with weapons of war?

But the aim of this military museum, with its surprisingly tranquil – dare one say “peaceful”? – atmosphere, is not to celebrate war. Rather, it is to educate and to commemorate. These principles are implied in the quotations displayed on three panels at the entrance to the museum.

On one, under the heading, “Why study history?” is an extract from Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, which helped her compatriots come to terms with “the War to end all wars” of 1914-1918: she had “a desire to understand how the whole calamity happened ... to find out all about it, and try to prevent it, insofar as one person can, from happening to other people”. Of course, within a decade of her book’s publication, the next calamity was under way; the Great War was downgraded to the First World War and its scale of destruction dwarfed by the events of 1939-1945. The notion that we learn from history to avoid repeating our mistakes is not particularly convincing in this instance.

So, then – commemoration. Another panel displays Winston Churchill’s paean to those who died on the Somme in 1916. Churchill finds value in the senseless loss of life by pointing to the “virtue”, “loyalty” and “duty” of men who were “martyrs not less than soldiers”. You don’t have to be swayed by Churchill’s rhetoric to agree that some form of memorial is appropriate; thousands of South Africans (black and white) died during World War One, whether in the carnage of Delville Wood or onboard the doomed ship SS Mendi.

The museum contains exhibits on these events, and also boasts a number of WWI-era machines in its collection – some of them courtesy of the “Imperial Gift” (surplus aircraft donated to kickstart the SA Air Force in 1919). But the core of the museum is South Africa’s role in the Second World War; indeed, this was the impetus behind its establishment on the present site next to Johannesburg Zoo in 1947.

Which brings us to the third panel: a snippet from the speech delivered by Jan Smuts on that occasion. The general’s fervent hope was that the museum would remind South Africans “not only of the part we played in the recent great struggle” but also of “the horrors, the loss of life and the devastation” experienced during WWII. While Smuts was a key figure in the international Allied campaign – witness his statue on London’s Parliament Square – his role in segregationist policies will always tarnish his reputation at home. Yet the ousting of the Smuts government in the 1948 election, bringing the National Party to power, ushered in the altogether more oppressive measures of apartheid.

Moreover, for the military museum, this meant that just a year after being re-launched, the institution faced a government that resented its raison d’etre; the Nationalists had been vehemently opposed to South Africa’s participation in the war and wanted to expunge South Africa’s association with Britain. As a result, the museum’s access to funding and state resources was limited. With the active interest of veterans and their families, however, the collection continued to grow and year by year the museum received upwards of 100,000 visitors.

Other political challenges to the museum’s success subsequently surfaced – under apartheid, its collection was bolstered by material from the SADF, but this was obviously tainted by military activities both within and outside the country’s borders. There has been a sustained effort to rectify this legacy since 1994 (the museum now contains exhibits on UmKhonto we Sizwe and on black military icons from World War Two onwards) but, as museum director John Keene notes, the fact that “we don’t have a homogeneous military history” makes it difficult to get all South Africans interested in what the museum has to offer.

Keene and some of his colleagues have been in the news recently following their legal action against the Ministries of Defence and Safety and Security; in 2005, they were arrested for illegal possession of arms after allegedly failing to obtain permits for some of the museum holdings. Given that the arresting officers were accompanied by senior figures from the ministry of Arts and Culture as well as the Northern Flagship Institution (the umbrella body under which the museum falls), it’s clear that tensions between government and curators of military history persist.

Add to that the passing of the generation who lived through and fought in WWII and it’s not hard to see why – despite the school groups, the children’s parties, the museum’s conference facilities and the privately operated War Store selling military miscellania – the number of annual visitors has fallen steadily over the course of Keene’s forty-year association with the museum.

This is a great pity, he observes while puffing philosophically on a pipe, as the museum contains one of the best collections of military (and specifically WWII) artefacts and memorabilia in the world. “Our international visitors constantly remind us of this. We have, for instance, the ‘Mona Lisa’ of military equipment: a Messerschmidt ME262, the only one of its kind. We have a collection of German artillery that they don’t even have in Germany.”

The museum’s exhibits, from Spitfire airplanes to submarines to Sherman tanks, also demonstrate the sad fact that many technological advances are attributable to scientists’ wartime efforts. These specimens, impressive in their size and condition, mean that the museum does not rely on swathes of text to make an impact on the visitor: history is present in three-dimensional form.

There are also, however, informative displays on different manifestations of, or reactions to, “militarism” in SA over the centuries: the “coloured” Cape Corps, with its origins in the eighteenth century; the violent quelling of the Fordsburg Miners’ Revolt in 1922; and a section dedicated to “Rebels and Objectors”, depicting civilians who opposed the military – from conscientious objectors and the End Conscription Campaign to rebellions against the country’s participation in WWI and WWII (the former a principled stand, the latter due to the Nazism of the Ossewa Brandwag).

As with many museums, the holdings extend far beyond what is on display at any given time. There are some 20,000 volumes in the A.M.L. Masondo Library; of equal value to researchers are the shelves of photo albums, journals, newspaper clippings, maps, uniforms, medals and personal items that have been donated over the years, which – in opposition to the generalising effect of historical accounts – insist on the unique experiences of individuals in the theatre of war. There is also plenty of behind-the-scenes activity in restoring planes, tanks and other machines to their former glory.

Along with the unusual perspectives on WWII – South Africans in the Italian, east Africa and north Africa campaigns; or information on Mussolini in Africa, Italian prisoners of war in SA, the “Deutsches Afrika Korps” and others – there is also a substantial exhibit on the Anglo-Boer War.

Many who have driven past the museum and noted the grand arches of the monument visible from the road will be unaware that this construction is in fact dedicated to those who died in the “South African War” of 1899-1902. The name of the conflict has yet to be resolved, but as demonstrated at the military museum, it had a trans-racial and indeed globalised war-zone: black South Africans fought on both sides; the British army included Indian and Australasian troops; the Boer cause had the support of the Irish and other European nationals.

We can’t change history, and perhaps we can’t even learn from it. But it’s a lot more nuanced than we sometimes like to think. And, at museums such as this one, where history is made tangible, we come just a little closer to understanding it.