Wednesday, 01 July 2009 20:19
I went up to Lesotho a couple of weeks back on a research trip and visited the Morija Museum and Archive. It is located about an hour from Maseru, in a charming little village, and well worth a visit.
More on the Museum and its place in Lesotho's cultural landscape:
The Morija Museum & Archives was formally constituted in 1956, as a result of the discovery of important dinosaur remains. These fossilised dinosaur bones, about 180 million years old, open up to us a whole new understanding of the earth and the vast transformations that have taken place over the ages: continental drift, the evolution of plant and animal species, human kind's rather recent but dramatic entrance upon the scene and its growing impact on the ecosystem. This ecological impact has been far-reaching in Lesotho, where fragile soils and intensive pressure on the land during the last 125 years have led to extensive land degradation.
By contrast, the early human communities that lived a purely nomadic hunter-gatherer existence (until about 8 000 years ago) made little long-term impact on the environment. But these communities, however, gradually learned to plant crops, domesticate animals, forge iron and build more complex societies, which did eventually make significant impacts on the environment.
The museum displays samples of hunter-gatherer cultural material including early stone tools, weapons and San rock art. The beauty and vitality of the paintings and their rich symbolism and imagery help us to understand hunter-gatherers as fellow human beings, striving for wholeness although under circumstances very different from our own.
KZN Literary Tourism and the eThekwini Municipality invite you to join us for the launch of the INK (Inanda, Ntuzuma, KwaMashu) Writers Trail. 
