Ditsong Natural History Museum: Not just the home of some bad taxidermy

It is terrible to die at the hands of men, and then be mocked as humans snigger at your corpse for years after you departed the earth.

If you are human, usually you are laid out in your best attire and maybe you get a nice haircut before you are sent into the afterlife.

For the animals at the Ditsong Natural History Museum of South Africa in Pretoria, the afterlife has them stuck in a rotten limbo, with their animal faces contorted with hilarious results.

If you have a sense of humour, the museum delivers a hilarious comedy show for just R35. A good deal. Too bad for the animals, right?

On Facebook, a page called Crap Taxidermy Official boasts over 200 000 likes, and it’s easy to see why.

Displays at the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History. Picture: Gallo Images

From cobras that have been fashioned into shoes, lions that look like they just discovered meth and monkeys that clearly got into the Late Harvest, the page speaks about the bad decisions of humans who stuffed these animals and chose to display them.

At Ditsong, you are treated to a multitude of these errors. A favourite is a leopard gouging out the eyes of a baboon, the mammal’s face similar to the reaction of somebody getting slapped in a Telenovela – overly dramatic.

Read the museum’s revised strategic plan for next year and they outline weaknesses like outdated exhibitions, poor condition of physical infrastructure, lack of coherent financial sustainability and insufficient market knowledge and poor marketing.

Combined, these factors will indeed turn people away – a travesty since museums offer South Africans information.

Except for a few ancient displays, if you care to take a peek, there’s a wealth of knowledge that continuously make it a value-added experience even at the Natural History Museum, where exhibitions like the Karoo Palaeontology Collection, which offers 6 000 fossil fish, plants, amphibia, reptilia and synapsida over a number of biozones.

Displays at the Ditsong National Museum of Natural History. Picture: Gallo Images

There’s also a stunning Coleoptera Collection featuring 1.5 million beetle specimens stored in more than 4 000 drawers. It becomes clear how valuable these items are, and not the sneering and balding cheetah at these hives of information.

Currently, the museum is reliant on the annual subsidy allocation from the Department of Arts and Culture, but to develop comprehensive financial sustainability the board is focused on growing revenue streams not reliant on government.

It’s a smart move. While international money ensured the existence of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) – the art museum has only been open for a little over a year and in that time it had more than 350 000 visitors. The focus there is also a unique experience, something that Ditsong provides by diversifying and growing its own revenue streams.

This strategy will further anchor the institution around leveraging on public and private sector collaborations and partnerships.

The Ditsong collects, preserves, carries out research, exhibits and presents public programmes through its cultural, military and natural history collections. That’s not something to be sneered at.

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