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Family Stories or a Group Portrait? South Africa on Display at the KIT Tropenmuseum, 2002–2003: The Making of an Exhibition

This article examines the making of a temporary exhibition, Familieverhalen uit Zuid-Afrika (South African Family Stories) that was installed at the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (KIT) Tropenmuseum (Royal Tropical Institute Museum) in Amsterdam in 2002–2003. It does so in the context of collecting and exhibitionary histories at the Tropenmuseum and its recent attempts to reframe its ethnographic legacies. Familieverhalen is analysed through its team-based processes of production, the social discourses in which it was embedded and its efforts to construct a museum public in the Netherlands. This article argues that despite the aspirations to present complex South African social histories through nine families and their shifting identities, on their own terms, the exhibition may have implicitly relied on some of the racial and ethnic categories it sought to disavow.