British settler colonialism and the South African National Gallery

Abstract

The South African National Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa, was founded and functioned as a British colonial institution, designed to encourage cultural imperialism within the Cape Colony. It was forced to shift this founding focus as British influence in South Africa waned and the nation defined its own identity. This dissertation examines SANG’s proximity to the British settler colonial project and investigates how this proximity reveals the limitations of the latter in South Africa, from 1871 to 1961. It relies on records from SANG’s colonial archive, the National Library of South Africa and the Iziko Art Collections Library in Cape Town, as well as from the Tate Gallery, City of Westminster Archives and the National Archives, Kew in London. In reading archival sources through the framework of Anne Stoler’s “reading along and against the grain,” what is shown is how the gallery’s reliance on British visual culture and British arts institutions created tensions which mirror those in British settler colonialism. This dissertation is situated within the intersection of colonial museology, South African-British colonial history, and South African art history. It analyzes SANG’s founding and its imbrication with colonial land dispossession. It investigates the materiality and impact of gifts made by British industrialists including Alfred Beit and Alfred de Pass. It reveals the gallery’s shifting relationship with the Empire Art Loan Collections Society and the Tate Gallery. It examines SANG’s engagement with indigenous African art and its constructions of the “primitive,” supported by John Paris and Irma Stern. The artifice, fragility and hypocrisy of the British settler colonial project reverberating through South African constructions of white supremacy and nation-building is revealed. This dissertation reframes museums including SANG and their colonial archives as institutions which reveal the particulars of the construction and vulnerabilities of systems of colonization and white supremacy.

Date of Award	2 Jul 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Kate Cowcher (Supervisor)