“There could be no better place than South Africa with its turbulent colonial history, past institutionalized racism, and postcolonial conditions that want to forgive the past to carry out such an informed study. Byala demonstrates the power of culture in understanding the history of people and a modern nation, however problematic this may be. . . . This book achieves high standards of academic excellence and offers a critical analysis of an institution, a person, and a country within a rich theoretical framework. Byala succeeds in opening up hidden histories in an arena of political and cultural interplay that has created and shaped one of the great and complex nations in Africa. It is a must read for heritage professionals, political scientists, and those interested in the politics of heritage in nation-making.”

Museum Management & Curatorship

“Byala shows in sharp detail that the nature of power redefines the nature of exhibits and their format.”

Museum Anthropology

“Byala’s book is a significant study of how a major cultural institution developed and changed over the last century. Her careful research makes the most of a rich archive of letters, manuscripts, and museum records, supplemented with interviews for recent periods. She particularly brings insight into the ways that Gubbins and MuseumAfrica can illuminate shifting liberal politics and white identities, the nature of colonial and postcolonial institutions, and the heritage landscape that has developed in recent decades.”

Corinne A. Kratz | International Journal of African Historical Studies

“Sara Byala has given us a meticulously detailed and researched account of the history and transformation of a single institution: MuseumAfrica. In so doing, she reminds the reader of the value of micro-history as a tool for comprehending the broader issues raised by museological developments in South Africa today.”

Annie E. Coombes, University of London

“There is something fresh, rewarding, and even courageous in Sara Byala’s approach in A Place That Matters Yet. She not only manages to reconstruct the history of MuseumAfrica but also demonstrates quite clearly that none of the new museums in South Africa today were created without some institutional (or bureaucratic) connection to it. In other words, the cutting-edge community of new historiography museums that have so captured the imagination of recent scholarship did not appear in an institutional vacuum but rather must be understood and framed within the context of a deeper museological past. It is this longue durée that Byala gives us in A Place That Matters Yet, and we should be grateful to her for having done so in such an elegant and extraordinarily interesting way.”

Christopher B. Steiner, Connecticut College