Settler Rocks: Sophia Olivia Sanan, ‘Rock art at the Iziko Museums of South Africa and its settler colonial imprint’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler Rocks: Sophia Olivia Sanan, ‘Rock art at the Iziko Museums of South Africa and its settler colonial imprint’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

15Feb25

Abstract: Rock art, as it was framed by formal South African cultural institutions, held an enduring appeal to the white publics of the apartheid era. In the post-apartheid era, this category of art occupies a prominent and contested space in South African museological discourse. Drawn from the authors’ doctoral research, this article examines some of the ways in which the Iziko South African Museums engaged the category of rock art over a 70- year timespan. It locates a tension between the institution’s need to acknowledge the deep roots of settler coloniality imprinted in the category of rock art, and the need to reframe the category in a way that makes space for indigenous ways of knowing. The latter concern is a project that extends far beyond the institution itself, as it requires a re- configuration of knowledge hierarchies to make space for new interpretive possibilities, and processes of dis-entanglement from problematic inheritances (cultural, political, governmental, epistemic). This paper makes a case for ongoing attentiveness the reproduction of settler colonial logics in contemporary cultural contexts and their role in shaping cultural institutions in order to continue working towards possibilities of unlearning and dismantling of such logics.

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