120 Years in 120 Objects

Join the KwaZulu-Natal Museum in celebrating the museum’s 120^th year of orbiting the sun. Staff and guest curators have chosen one object or item per year of our existence to highlight to the public. Visit the website and our social media platforms regularly to see the latest object and keep an eye out for information about a physical exhibition later this year!

Today’s Object is from 2006

Madiba Shirt by Heather Frost, Senior Exhibitions Officer

In 1994, the father of the nation, Nelson Mandela, wore a hand-printed batik shirt designed by Desre Buirski to a dress-rehearsal for the opening of the first democratic parliament. Over the years, Madiba would wear many printed, embroidered and hand-painted shirts that became iconic of the man himself. This shirt, designed by Sonwabile Ndamase, is a replica of the shirt Mandela wore when he received the Freedom of the City of Pietermaritzburg in 1997. Ndamase was the keynote speaker at the opening of the Mandela Centenary exhibition in 2018. He kindly donated the shirt to the museum collection.

The Director of the KwaZulu-Natal National Museum, Mr Luthando Maphasa (left), greets Sonwabile Ndamase (Right), the designer of the Madiba Shirt on exhibit at the museum.

120 Years in 120 Objects

Join the KwaZulu-Natal Museum in celebrating the museum’s 120^th year of orbiting the sun. Staff and guest curators have chosen one object or item per year of our existence to highlight to the public. Visit the website and our social media platforms regularly to see the latest object and keep an eye out for information about a physical exhibition later this year!

Today’s Object is from 2006

A New Family of Flies by Kirstin Williams, Chief Curator of Arthropoda

In 2006, Dr David Barraclough, a former employee in the Natural Science department of the museum, together with Dr David McAlpine of the Australian Museum, described a new family of flies–Natalimyzidae–together with a new genus, Natalimyza. New species are often described in the field of entomology, but the description of a new family is extremely rare which makes this a really important event! The name Natalimyza refers to the Natal Museum and the former Natal Province where most of the specimens were collected. The first species in this new family and genus is Natalimyza milleri which is named after Dr Ray Miller who collected the specimen that is designated as the holotype. The holotype and 45 paratypes are housed in the KwaZulu-Natal Museum entomology collection. These flies are extremely small – being between 2.5 and 4.5 mm long.

120 Years in 120 Objects

Join the KwaZulu-Natal Museum in celebrating the museum’s 120^th year of orbiting the sun. Staff and guest curators have chosen one object or item per year of our existence to highlight to the public. Visit the website and our social media platforms regularly to see the latest object and keep an eye out for information about a physical exhibition later this year!

Today’s Object is from 1948

Vinyl Replaces Shellac (Gramophone & Records) by Geoff Blundell, Principal Curator: Department of Human Sciences

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 and throughout the 1880s, Alexander Graham Bell and team improved it, eventually producing the graphophone. The graphophone used wax-coated cardboard cylinders and a stylus that ‘read’ the grooves on the cylinder. In the following decade, Emile Berliner introduced flat disks with spiral grooves running from the periphery toward the centre of the disk and the gramophone was born. Audio disks or records for the gramophone were made from shellac, which is a resin secreted by Kerria lacca, the so-called lac bug, which is found on trees in India and Thailand. The insect produces the resin as it creates tunnels in the bark and the material is harvested by scraping the bark. Large numbers of insects are needed to produce enough of the resin for commercial use.

In the nineteenth century, the resin largely replaced oil and wax based products as a wood finish. Its properties, however, make it a type of natural plastic and its most common use would be as a material for making records. In the inter-war years of the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of records were pressed on shellac. During the second world war, the US military pressed records for troops on vinyl as it was lighter, cheaper and more flexible than shellac. Shellac records easily shatter if dropped.  After the war, the move to vinyl extended to the commercial sector and in 1948, shellac records ceased to be produced commercially and vinyl became the most common audio format until the early 1990s when digital recordings supplanted records. In recent years, vinyl records have re-emerged as a medium among audiophiles.

The KwaZulu-Natal National Museum has several gramophones and shellac records in its collections. This particular gramophone appears to have been purchased from the MacKay Brothers, who sold musical instruments and records. In 1914 they were the first to import records from the UK into South Africa; they sold these records from ox-waggons initially but eventually they opened a store on Rissik Street in Johannesburg. Until the late 1930s, the brothers were the local agents for EMI. Between 1936 and 1937, one of the brothers (Donald William), was the mayor of Johannesburg. Although their music instrument and record store was leased out in the 1950s to furnishers, the building still stands in Johannesburg today.