Two years ago I made a return to the Iziko South African Museum, situated toward the upper right shoulder of the Company’s Garden in Cape Town. Having not been since I was a child, I was looking forward to seeing what had changed from the passing years and what significance it had managed to maintain. Well, I’ll save you the time and say that it has solidified itself as one of the more depressing experiences I had that year.

Dust graced the many faces of animals across the 4 floors, some had started to slouch due to the lack of attendance toward their fixed poses. Lights flickered on and off for an additive undesirable effect, and a child cried out in an existential reckoning while his parents tried to gently soothe him away and out of the museum doors. There was a hilarity to the lifelessness of this experience at the time, only made manageable through having a close friend along with me to find fun in the comedy of errors.

I ended up doing a piece of creative writing in the wake of the whole thing, which has helped solidify the moments in my head – almost scraping some minor value out of the visit. Returning to the writing last week made me want to go back, and see if it was really as bad as it had seemed at the time. It was in the infancy of Covid’s aftermath after all, so maybe there was a bleakness that crept into the general energy of that day.

So last week I convinced another dear friend of mine and his fiance to tag along with me for another peek past the dusty doors of Iziko Museum, in an attempt to give a final verdict on the saddened space. The immediate atmosphere was weird, with receptionists making jokes amongst themselves, echoing an instant sense of abandonment for the building and its many sprawling rooms.

The first area of the museum you walk through is dedicated to cave art, and it’s continued to be the highlight for me. It’s one of the few themed areas that genuinely create a sense of passing time and exemplify the value of documentation. There are quite a lot of impressive depictions of animals and cultural importance shown in the form of rock paintings, hand-made masks and tools. It’s an appropriate introduction into South African culture and a remembrance of the people who came before us, as well as the similarities and differences in our ways of living.

This lasts for about two rooms before you’re then thrown into the big central open space of the museum, where everything slows down and the rhythm of your viewing becomes quite repetitive for the duration of your time spent. It’s pretty much just back-to-back models of plastic fish transitioning into taxidermied animals and eventually fossils – with a sprinkling of confusing trinkets and jarred reptiles to break up the monotony of it all.

The second floor kicks off with the whale sound machine, which used to be a go-to when I was a kid – sadly it has remained out of order for the past two years. I’m really not sure why they keep it there, as it’s becoming an artefact of its own.

From this point on you start to gain a bird’s-eye view of the dust building across the backs of the whale fossils and other sad plastic sea creatures as you move up to the mineral section – which is also currently shut down, but this time for health and safety reasons – there’s no further information beyond that. It is an open-air exhibit so I hope it’s nothing contagious. Although I’m sure they wouldn’t mind a couple of new fossils, after-all there is weirdly a human skeleton exhibited, with the word human plastered across the top of it in case you weren’t aware – just there to fill space I suppose.

Filling space becomes a theme with their newest exhibit, which is genuinely one of the most confusing things I’ve ever experienced. It’s a vague room with the words “What would you save in a museum fire?” painted very small on the wall. Apparently it’s a group exhibition held by UCT, in order to provide a space for the museum artefacts that are in purgatory, which I imagine means that they’re constantly being looked after or unable to be presented for some reason. None of the artefacts were present, but the doors were open to the public – with the walls decorated by objects you would use to preserve artefacts, making this act as some kind of miscommunicated attempt at meta-commentary on the museum itself.

This carries on past another doorway pulling you into the hollow backrooms of the museum, where a single giraffe stands in a giant open space – which I don’t think is meant for anyone to see but you’re given access to it in any case. The whole thing feels unfinished and confusing but nothing communicates whether or not anything is missing or if the exhibit is in progress. It’s a complete mess but also pretty funny to engage with if you go with the right people.

We did a quick walkthrough briefly scanning the final few species that time forgot, but with ten minutes left till closing time they had started shutting off the lights, so we were in a bit of a rush to not be left in the forsaken space – we reached the exit hurriedly and all the staff we’d seen before were elsewhere, probably doing the last bits of packing up and trying not to think about being back in this building tomorrow. On our walk out we lightly reminisced on the poor efforts of the museum, once again only made manageable by having friends along for the stroll – but the Iziko museum is genuinely sad, it’s barely a museum at this point – it’s more of a reminder in how people can mismanage history and it’s sense of scale. Everything feels like it was brought in 25 years ago and hasn’t been cared for since. It’s a joke that this is even a paid for experience, I’m more so paying for the relief of leaving than viewing anything that’s in there.

Entire lifespans of species that are represented by sad models and aged taxidermy settling as draw cards for entry into a building that doesn’t really give a shit.

I don’t think it’s the lack of legitimate artifacts that are the problem either, history is managed and preserved so much more in a digital sense these days that I think it becomes easy to dismiss the importance of expressing historical significance in a physical form. Nobody in their youth is probably going to be as interested to view all this stuff as they would’ve been 20 years ago.

This format for engaging with information through small plaques and objects behind glass cases feels secondary to the intimacy we have with a personalized device containing everything we’d ever want to know. I’m not for these spaces becoming obsolete either, but if they want to survive and maintain a level of cultural significance and purpose, I think they simply have to have more of a modern approach. Either by creating more involved and interactive formats for exhibition, or at least by having some sense of atmosphere that helps you separate yourself from the world that you put on hold when you walk through their front doors.