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south africa golden visa

One of Africa’s greatest treasures, the 800-year-old golden rhinoceros of Mapungubwe, is to leave the continent for the first time as part of a British Museum exhibition exploring 100,000 years of South African art.

More than 200 exhibits will be displayed at the show, opening in October, but securing loans of the rhino and other extraordinary gold objects is particularly significant.

“The curator in charge of those objects has called them Africa’s crown jewels and I think she is right in saying that,” said John Giblin, head of the British Museum’s Africa section.

“I got to see them for the first time last year which was incredibly exciting, and to bring them here, for them to be part of a story for new audiences, is a fantastic thing.”

From 1220 to 1290, Mapungubwe, near the border with present-day Botswana and Zimbabwe, was the capital of the first kingdom in southern Africa.


The British Museum did a year of conservation on the golden bowl, the only one of the objects to have ever left South Africa. Photograph: Mapungubwe Museum

The gold foil figures, discovered in royal graves at Mapungubwe, were actually found in the 1930s but were denied, hidden and marginalised by the apartheid government because it contradicted its racist narrative of terra nullius, the myth of an empty land, which was used to legitimise white rule. The objects testify to the sophisticated, settled society which traded gold and ivory with China, India and Egypt many centuries before settlers from Europe arrived.


The British Museum is borrowing golden figures of animals of high status, such as a cow, a wild cat and the rhinoceros; and objects associated with power including a golden sceptre and golden bowl. The only one to have ever left South Africa is the bowl, which underwent a year of conservation work at the British Museum – a connection which has helped to secure the new loans.

The golden rhinoceros, described as the South African equivalent of Tutankhamun’s mask, has taken on added significance in South Africa as it is now the symbol of the Order of Mapungubwe, South Africa’s highest honour that was first presented to Nelson Mandela in 2002.

Giblin said they were delighted to have the golden figures which “have become some of Africa’s and arguably the world’s most iconic sculptures”. But they are only one part of a show that tells the story of South African art, which stretches back 100,000 years.


The golden sceptre, a symbol of power in South African art. Photograph: Mapungubwe Museum

One of the oldest objects will be a 77,000-year-old shell bead necklace discovered at Blombos cave in the Western Cape. It makes the region one of the earliest symbolic cultures anywhere in the world, going back much further than what we know was happening in Europe.

“People used to think that real artistic practice began in Europe, 30,000 or 40,000 years ago; they typically cite the French cave paintings,” said Giblin. “These kinds of finds really push that back a lot earlier, and it is only really in the last couple of decades that the tradition has been identified, so it is a really nice time to be telling this story.”

The exhibition will be divided into sections which will also include the influence of European and Asian settlers and resistance art from the apartheid era. Each section will also feature work by contemporary African artists, which the museum has been collecting for over 20 years, providing fresh perspectives on South Africa’s past.


One of the most recent acquisitions is a two-metre wide textile called The Creation of the Sun (2015), a collaborative piece from Bethesda Arts Centre, made by descendants of South Africa’s first peoples.

There will also be contemporary art loans including a self-portrait by Lionel Davis, a political prisoner under the apartheid regime, and a 3D installation by Mary Sibande.
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Giblin said there had never been a UK exhibition on South African art which had such variety and he hoped that it would illustrate its remarkable diversity. “What underlies the story is that South Africa’s art heritage is the art heritage of many: many different peoples, whether South Africa’s first peoples, San bushmen or Khoekhoen herders. Or the Bantu language speakers who arrived around 500AD and are responsible for the Mapungubwe gold objects, and their descendants who make up the majority of black South Africans today.

“Or European and Asian people who arrive from the 17th century, including Dutch, British, Indian, Indonesian and Chinese and all of their descendants.”

Hartwig Fischer, the museum’s director, hoped it would “challenge audience preconceptions in the way our visitors have come to expect from a British Museum exhibition”.

• South Africa: the art of a nation, sponsored by Betsy and Jack Ryan, is at the British Museum from 27 October 2016 to 26 February 2017.

• This article was amended on 9 August 2016. An earlier subheading incorrectly described Mapungubwe as the site of the first African kingdom. The article was also amended to correct a description of a 77,000-year-old necklace and make clear the curator is female.

British Museum and BBC team up to explore belief through objects

Patterns of shared belief and ritual over 40,000 years, from the ice age to the present day, are to be explored in an ambitious 30-part radio series and exhibition at the British Museum.

Living With the Gods, presented by the former British Museum director Neil MacGregor, will air over six weeks, beginning this month, on BBC Radio 4. An exhibition of objects that form the core of the series will open on 2 November.

MacGregor – an acclaimed art historian, curator and devout Christian – examines shared rituals, festivals, pilgrimages and sacrifices and the relationship between belief, society and politics.

He said: “Questions of faith have, in recent decades, moved to the centre of the global political stage – an unexpected return to a centuries-old pattern.”

Using objects from the British Museum and talking to experts, MacGregor looks at the connections between structures of belief and structures of society.

Speaking at the launch of the series, he said it was about “belonging and believing. It’s not about individual belief, it’s about how patterns of belief have shaped societies and given societies coherence.

“It’s about what we do on our own and what we do together, and how communities are shaped by rituals organised around an idea.”


A 40,000-year-old sculpture carved from mammoth ivory representing a human body with a lion’s head. Photograph: ©Trustees of the British Museum

The first object examined in the series is a statue found in a cave in south Germany, dating back 40,000 years, with the head of a lion and the body of a man, created from a mammoth’s tusk.

The object, said MacGregor, had “led us all to think about how ideas, beliefs and communal practices have shaped the way we think about each other”.

Jill Cook, a pre-history expert at the British Museum, said the figure was a masterpiece. “It is hugely original, it shows great technical virtuosity, and it has incredible spiritual presence. It looks at you, it watches you … It’s a very powerful object.”

People at the time were “living on the edge. What they most need to do is find food and keep warm and yet they allow someone amongst them to spend over 400 hours making a sculpture … Clearly, people are trying to come to terms with their environment, to reshape or transcend their environment. They’re thinking, believing, trying to transcend the daily grind of keeping their lives together.”

The object, Cook said, was “the oldest known evidence we have of religious belief within our own species … It’s a wonderful place to start a journey not just of how we believe but that we believe. There is no known society across the world that does not have belief at its base.”
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Despite starting in the ice age, MacGregor said the themes of the series were relevant to contemporary societies. “We can’t really make sense of the world today without trying to think about why it is that religion plays such a big part in the construction of group identity, and what appear to be debates about faith are actually debates about communities, identities and when those are under threat how people respond.”

For most of history, he said, “the idea of separating religion and politics is impossible. Both are about how you live with the world around you. It’s a very European, 18th-century idea that you can separate the two.”

Religion is an important force in politics, but less so in the UK and western Europe than elsewhere, he said. Although the series and exhibition was called Living With the Gods, it was really about living with each other.
A Qibla indicator designed to locate the direction of Mecca, made in Egypt in 1582-83.



Among the objects to be displayed in the exhibition are Zoroastrian tiles showing the centrality of fire to the ancient religion; a 20th-century embroidered “hundred-bird coat” created by the Miao people in south-west China for a festival to reinforce spiritual links with community ancestors; an inscribed mosque lamp from Aleppo in Syria dating from the 14th century and a model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, on the site in Jerusalem where Jesus is believed to have been crucified, made by Franciscan monks in the 1750s.
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Living With the Gods is MacGregor’s fourth collaboration involving the British Museum and the BBC in which he tells stories through objects. He has previously made series about Germany, Shakespeare and world history.

MacGregor was appointed director of the British Museum in 2002 and, over the next 13 years, was credited with transforming it into one of the most dynamic institutions of its kind in the world.

When he arrived, the finances of the 265-year-old museum were in a parlous state and visitor numbers were falling. By the time he left, it was the leading visitor attraction in the UK and the second-most visited museum in the world after the Louvre in Paris.
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On his retirement, MacGregor said his tenure at the museum had been “the greatest privilege of my professional life”.

He was succeeded by a German, Hartwig Fischer, the first non-British head of the museum since 1866.

Fischer said Living With the Gods was “about society and communal expressions of belief through objects”. Some showed how societies marked key life experiences such as birth, coming of age, marriage and death.

“The history of conflict and coexistence between different religions and beliefs will also be explored,” he added.

The first episode of Living With the Gods will be broadcast on 23 October at 9.45am and 7.45pm. The exhibition will run from 2 November until 8 April 2018

taking Mayan culture

More than a century after the British explorer Alfred Maudslay took pioneering photographs and casts of some of the most incredible ancient Mayan objects and sites, digital technology is ensuring they can finally be widely seen.

The British Museum and Google announced the results of a project to digitise and disseminate Maudslay’s incredible collection, one which has largely kept in storage unseen for more than 100 years.

Jago Cooper, curator of the museum’s Americas department, described Maudslay, one of the first Europeans to explore and study Mayan ruins, as a “visionary” and a “pioneer in visual communication”.
Alfred Maudslay created many replicas of Mayan artefacts.
Alfred Maudslay created many replicas of Mayan artefacts. Photograph: British Museum

Unlike many European adventurers and explorers in the 18th and 19th centuries, Maudslay mostly left the archaeological sites intact. Instead of simply taking objects he used the latest photographic technology to record discoveries and made plaster casts of the monuments.

The British Museum has more that 250 glass plate negatives from Maudslay’s travels and hundreds of casts. They are fragile, and most have been permanently in storage, but they represent some of the world’s best preserved imagery of the Mayan monuments. The Google collaboration means anyone, anywhere can now access them.

Cooper said Maudslay was the man who helped introduce the Maya to the world. “He knew that these would be the best preserved examples and now 130 years later we are tapping in to that vision, we are carrying on his legacy in the 21st century,” he said.

Maudslay was part of a family that made its fortune in machine tools and bolts giving him an inheritance which allowed him to pursue his true passion: exploring for lost cities.

Mayan hieroglyphs were first translated in the 1980s. Photograph: British Museum

He travelled to Guatemala in 1880 and was in charge of seven subsequent expeditions to the Mayan sites of Tikal, Yaxchilán, Copán, Quiriguá, Palenque, Chichén Itzá and Ixkun.

The ancient Maya was a vast civilisation that emerged in an area encompassing Guatemala, southern Mexico, Honduras, Belize and El Salvador, with the “classic Maya” period spanning AD250 to AD900.
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“They were an extraordinary civilisation who developed an extremely complicated urban landscape involving millions of people,” Cooper said.

Maudslay’s casts of Mayan monuments still have untold stories, said Cooper, as the Mayan hieroglyphs were first translated relatively recently, in the 1980s. Only a handful of people are able to decipher them.

Preserving Maya Heritage, a dedicated page on Google Arts and Culture, has been created to allow visitors to view the Maudslay photographs, casts and other documents. With Google Cardboard, people can go on immersive Google Street View tours of Quiriguá and Tikal.


A photograph from Maudslay’s mostly unseen collection. Photograph: British Museum

The British Museum director, Hartwig Fischer, said the collaboration offered a new dimension to how the gallery engages with the public, one which would encourage more people to come to the museum in London.

“Digital, virtual and analogue, here at the museum, coming here to engage with the objects themselves, do not exclude each other, they help each other,” he said.

If visitors to the museum want to see evidence of Maudslay’s travels they must go to a fire escape on the ground floor, off the Enlightenment Gallery, where two Mayan monument lintels – plaster cast versions of the real things – stand opposite the stairs.

Cooper hopes one day there will be a permanent gallery in the museum for Latin America so more objects from the collection could be displayed.

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