'Representing Difficult Pasts within Complex Presents ... - T2M

asked to move out, consequently demonstrating that controversies of property and ownership run into the
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present in Lwandle. Opposite Hostel 33 are other, now converted,
hostel buildings that families live in.
Figure 9 Interior of Hostel 33, Lwandle
The Worker’s Museum, alternatively sited in the centre of
Johannesburg, not in a township, was also a hostel for migrant
labourers. For the museum exhibition, the City of Johannesburg
assigned an outside design team 27 - the outcome being a more
‘glitzy’ exhibition providing a history of migrant labour through the
use of video, sound, installations and photographs. The emphasis,
again, was on people’s experience. For example one of the rooms
depicted a rural backdrop with photographs of migrant labourers in
the foreground, suggesting both the urban and rural origins of these
persons. The living quarters were not as originally constructed, but were painted a bright red, with less
emphasis on the ‘authenticity’ of the past, and more on design aspects - certainly not created to replicate a
sense of being ‘lived in’ as in Hostel 33 of Lwandle Migrant Labour museum.
The curator, Anne-Kristin Bicher, pointed out that the museum does not specifically concentrate
much on the actual journeys to and from the workers’ compound through public transport networks, such
as the railways. However, there were references throughout the museum displays that referred to aspects
of transport and mobility. For example one of the video displays portraying memories of people arriving
in the worker’s compound, had one narrative filmed on a train. Furthermore, one large photograph, on the
wall outside, portrayed people apparently having just arrived from the train station in Johannesburg,
carrying their luggage across the street.
The Workers’ Museum timeline contrasted with the James Hall Museum’s timeline, being not
one of coca cola and Barbie dolls but one which focused specifically on a South African historical
apartheid and resistance context. The museum also contained artefacts people brought and made at the
hostel, and apparently the compound was a site of creativity for performances and music in the past. Also
of interest, possibly in relation to recent issues of xenophobic violence in 2008 and since, was a map
27 This has its drawbacks - one artefact exhibited inside a glass case had fallen down but the museum had
not managed to get hold of the designers to fix it and the exhibit had been broken for a long time