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A digitised copy of Uys Krige's Koning Lear (1971)
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A digitised copy of Eitemal's Midsomernagdroom (1974)
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A digitised copy of Andre P. Brink's Richard III (1969)
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A digitised copy of Andre P. Brink's Romeo en Juliet (1975)
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A digitised copy of Breyten Breytenbach's Titus Andronicus (1970)
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Make you way down to the empty pedestal where the statue of Cecil John Rhodes was formerly displayed.
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Find the Bataleur eagle egg that forms part of the Steyn collection. Collected when Steyn spent time in Zimbabwe, the egg is a link to the iconic stone carved Zimbabwe Birds which once stood proudly on guard atop the walls and monoliths of the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe, believed to be built between the 12th and 15th centuries by ancestors of the Shona. The overall shape of the birds suggests that of a bateleur eagle – a bird of great significance in Shona culture. The bateleur or chapungu is a good omen, the symbol of a protective spirit and a messenger of the gods.
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This selection of objects is featured on p175 of the catalogue for the exhibition Curiosity CLXXV. This exhibition was held on the Michaelis Fine Art campus in 2004 and was prompted by then vice-chancellor Professor Njabulo Ndebele, who wanted a celebration of some kind for the university’s 175th anniversary. The three artist-curators of Curiosity CLXXV – (then) director of the Michaelis School of Fine Art Pippa Skotnes, fellow lecturer Fritha Langerman and Michaelis graduate Gwen van Embden – presented an exhibition that drew together objects from every department ‘to curate the university’, using these objects and collections ‘to trace the historical development of knowledge and teaching at the university’ (Brown 2015: 124). This marked the first time the institution’s teaching, research and historical collections were brought into public view, along with university memorabilia, objects stored in lecturers’ offices and objects in storerooms awaiting disposal.
This particular curation consists of a map from the UCT Avian Demography Unit depicting the distribution of the raptor Bateleur Terathopius ecaudatus along political borders. The Bateleur is more frequently found where there is no formal farming. The Ngwato child’s oxhide sandals were collected by Schapera and are in the UCT collection housed at the South African Museum. Beneath them is a page from The Afrikaans Atlas, showing language distribution provided by Rajend Mesthrie of the Department of Linguistics and Southern African Languages.
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Make your way to the Niven Library of the Percy Fitzgerald Institute of African Ornithology.
You will be met by the librarian. She will show you a small, indescript, bespoke cupboard filled with an array of birds' eggs (almost 400 eggs). These labelled and blown eggs were collected between 1961 and 1977 by a self-taught ornithologist, Peter Steyn.
Consider this collection.
Oology – the collecting and documenting of wild bird eggs – was an obscure hobby and ‘science’ of the past. Collected eggs were pierced and ‘blown’ of their contents. The perfect shells, beautifully coloured with speckles and intricate patterns, were then placed in vast cabinet collections.
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In 2012, the Department of Archaeology invited Pippa Skotnes to curate an installation in the large foyer of their department on upper campus. No stranger to the department, having worked at the interface of archaeology, art and curatorship since the 1980s, Skotnes decided to reflect on the legacy of the department through the practice of its scholars, with the central exhibition reflecting on the Goodwin division of the history of the people of southern Africa into Early, Middle and Later Stone Age . To this end, Skotnes and her team used material from various sites excavated over decades of the study of archaeology at UCT.
The installation, titled 'Division of the world', includes materials from departmental storerooms, personal staff collections and documentation from fieldwork archives (CCA 2021). UCT houses huge storerooms of material excavated from the Western Cape – collections which in many ways tell not only the story of the city of Cape Town and the colony, but of the pre-colonial past stretching back to the Early Stone Age. As research in the discipline is based on excavation and the accumulation of material, the storerooms of the department overflow with boxes of research material assembled over the years of the department’s existence, many unopened for decades. Like an archive, the boxes physically represent the archaeological community’s memory bank. Scavenging through the storerooms and materials, Skotnes engaged with the material in innovative ways, selecting her displays along very different sets of criteria than those suggested by the labels on the boxes.
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If one inputs the term "ostrich egg" into the UCT depository for postgraduate research papers and dissertations - OpenUCT - the search delivers 116 results. The research spans different departments: Historical Studies, Biological Sciences, Environmental and Geographical Science, the School of Education, African Studies, the Centre for Film and Media Studies, Religious Studies, the Michaelis School of Fine Art and African Languages and Literatures. The largest bulk of this research (68 documents) have, however, been generated by the Department of Archaeology.
Make your way up to the third floor of the Beattie Building, where a postgraduate researcher of this department will chat to you about their research and, more specifically, about the ostrich egg shells that form part of their material collections.