Re-Claiming the Past by Re-Living in the Present: The ≠Khomani San Living Museum and the Restoration of Dignity in the Southern Kalahari

Abstract

This article critiques dominant development frameworks by examining the ≠Khomani San of the Southern Kalahari, who despite winning one of South Africa's largest post-Apartheid land claims, remain marginalised and impoverished. Mainstream approaches continue to frame their future through Eurocentric binaries of “traditional” and “modern,” forcing the community to navigate imposed categories that fracture social cohesion and commodify identity. Development framed as economic progress reproduces the very marginalisation it seeks to overcome. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we analyse the ≠Khomani San Living Museum as an act of resistance to developmentalist logics, a resistance that unsettles the epistemic hegemony of development discourses. The Museum is symbolic of the need for an alternative that builds collective action for emancipation, rooted in a reclamation and reconnection with the past as well as dignity and social cohesion for the future. The museum demonstrates that development projects must centre reparative justice, dignity, and the restoration of social fabric to be meaningful for historically dispossessed communities.