Selection - FHYA curation of a selection from the Anthropological Collection at the KwaZulu-Natal Museum

[Source – Carolyn Hamilton for the FHYA, 2017: The FHYA selected items of material culture in the Anthropological Collections collected by Father Franz Mayr around 1900 for inclusion on the FHYA.]

[Source - Chloe Rushovich for FHYA using material provided by Kevin Carnie-Thompson and Benny Bytebier, and KZNM materials, 2018: Reverend Father Franz Mayr was an Austrian missionary and collector active in southern Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. While living in southern Africa, Mayr was a proficient collector, amassing a wide range of different items, including examples of local medicinal plants, minerals, animals and ethnological artefacts, such as tools, household items, beadwork clothing and weapons, as well as recordings of local music He collected a substantial quantity of material objects – including items such as local beadwork and household goods – at the request of Dr Ernest Warren, director of the Natal Government Museum. Mayr wrote several educational and religious books, including isiZulu language manuals and scholarly articles on aspects of what was regarded as ‘Zulu’ culture related to his collections. The articles were published in the European journal ‘Anthropos’ and the ‘Annals of the Natal Government Museum’. The recordings went to the Phonogrammarchiv at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OAW), the botanical specimens to the Bews Herbarium in Pietermarizburg, and some items went into private collections.

The KwaZulu-Natal Museum holds approximately 47 cultural artefacts from Kwa-Zulu Natal which may be Mayr-related – some definitely collected by him, and others attributed to him with questionable certainty. Mayr collected various materials in the Natal region between 1890 and 1909, some of which he collected at the request of Dr Ernest Warren, the director of the Natal Government Museum at the time. In 2011 Nessa Leibhammer and Linda Ireland compiled a list of items which, for a variety of reasons, they thought may have been collected by Mayr. In 2014, Rosemary Lombard, assisted by Gavin Whitelaw and Thingahangwi Tshivhase, cross-checked this list with the KZNM electronic database, the physical catalogue cards, and the physical accession register information. Lombard photographed all of the objects that were verified as having been collected by Mayr, barring those that could not be found during her visit. She also photographed the accession register pages and the catalogue cards associated with all items.

One of the aims of the FHYA is to enable the digital reunification of items that were collected at a particular moment or by a particular collector and were subsequently separated. Thus the FHYA site includes the items of material culture along with the recordings from the OAW https://fhya.org/index.php/fhya-curation-of-selected-materials-from-the-phonogrammarchiv-at-the-austrian-academy-of-sciences and the botanical specimens. https://fhya.org/index.php/new-fhya-curation-of-selected-bews-herbarium-ethnobotanical-materials]