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DBL: Exhibition Histories

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  • Royal Pen

    Pen used by Queen Elizabeth when she signed the visitor’s book in the UCT library in 1947.

  • Sharpeville

    Stow’s discovery of coal deposits in 1878, found in the beds of the Vaal River, was of interest to the diamond magnate, Sammy Marks. Marks realised the importance of Stow’s discovery and the opportunity for using coal at the Kimberley diamond fields for energy generation (Leigh, 1968:112). He believed he could transport the coal from Vereeniging to Kimberley by floating it down-river by a series of weirs to his diamond claims. This turned out to be impractical and he had to resort to using ox-wagons as a method of transport instead (Leigh 1968:17). Marks & Lewis who at that time owned a quarter of all the Kimberley diamond claims sold most of their Kimberley claims to concentrate on the coal finds through their newly formed mining company, the Zuid-Afrikaansche en Oranje Vrystaatsche Mineralen en Mijnbouvereeniging (later to become the Vereeniging Estates Limited). In 1892, the small village of Vereeniging was formally established. Near Vereeniging the predominantly black community of Sharpeville was established where on the 21st of March, 68 years later, the Sharpeville massacre would occur.

  • H.4

    This object, a leather cartridge case said to belong to Sammy Marks, occupies a place in the Special Collections of the University of Cape Town. It forms part of the Sammy Marks Papers (BC770).

  • Sound from the Thinking Strings (installation detail)

    'Sound from the Thinking Strings' was comprised of twenty etchings created by Skotnes that drew on southern San mythology, archaeological and historical research and rock paintings; poems by the late poet Stephen Watson that interpreted extracts of nineteenth-century recordings of |xam cosmology compiled in the Bleek and Lloyd archive and pre-selected by Skotnes; and historical and archaeological contextualisations of these recordings in the form of essays by archaeologist John Parkington and historian Nigel Penn. The exhibition also displayed associated visual material that Skotnes sourced from the UCT and State Archives, the UCT Archaeology Department and the SAM.