The use of models to enhance museum displays is hardly a new concept, but the Local History Museum in Durban, South Africa, can be particularly proud of a rather original twist it has added to this familiar theme. Instead of using models to display historical incidents or simply to illustrate costume, the Museum's collection in fact depicts some of the personalities involved with the city's past.

King Shaka kaSenzangakhona, founder of the Zulu kingdom. His military innovations, including the invention of the famed stabbing spear, were responsible for the rise of the Zulu kingdom in the 1820s. It was Shaka who first allowed whites to settle at the Bay of natal, which eventually became the city of Durban.

When you consider that these include such diverse personalities as the various Zulu Kings, Winston Churchill and Mahatma Ghandi - not to mention most of the significant British military personalities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who passed through Durban docks on their way to fight either the Zulus or the Boers - the scope for such a collection is breathtaking.

The models are all sponsored by local businesses or organisations, and are hand-sculpted by Charles Buchanan, a veteran of the Rhodesian Bush War who emigrated to South Africa and now lives in Durban. The models are about six inches high, and modelled on a wire armature using an epoxy modelling putty. Both Charles and the Museum researchers are painstaking in their efforts to ensure that each figure is an accurate portrait of its subject, in both facial appearance and costume, a piece of portrait sculpture in miniature.

Criteria

Because of this it has been decided limit the collection to only those subjects of whom some authenticated portrait exists. This has proved a significant limitation in a city like Durban, where many African subjects who played an important role in the region's history were never sketched or photographed. Nevertheless, the collection has deliberately attempted to represent the full range of Durban's cultural and historical experience.

Lt. Francis Farewell, RN, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, first established trade with the Zulus and established the settlement of Port Natal (later Durban).

The only other criteria for selecting a subject is that he or she should be dead; a museum does, after all; deal with the past, and in a country like South Africa, which is undergoing tremendous political upheavals, it was generally agreed that the selection of living subjects raised complex questions of objectivity which were best avoided!

Alexander Biggar, a former captain and paymaster of the 85th Regiment, left the army in 1819 after a scandal concerning regimental funds and settled in Durban. He raised the first short-lived volunteer unit amongst the white settlers. Biggar was killed fighting the Zulus on the White Mfolozi River in December 1838.

The first group of figures included an obvious selection of subjects - the Zulu kings, the first white settlers at Durban and so on - but aroused such interest that the collection has grown steadily ever since.

Indeed, new subjects are still under consideration, and Charles is still producing figures. These include both civilian and military personalities alike, but the collection is particularly rich in military subjects. It includes King Shaka kaSenzangakhona, who founded the Zulu kingdom in the 1820s through military conquest - Durban, then known as Port Natal, was originally Zulu territory - and a number of Zulu War personalities, including Lord Chelmsford, Colonel Anthony Durnford - the senior British officer killed at Isandlwana - and a splendid equestrian figure of Prince Dabulamanzi kaMpande, who led the Zulu attack on Rorke's Drift.

Andries Pretorius, one of the leaders of the Great Trek and the senior Boer commander at the Battle of Blood River in December 1838. Superior Boer weapons and his tactical skill defeated the Zulus with almost a thousand dead--the Boers suffered three casualties, including Pretorius, wounded in the hand.

Other military figures include Sir Benjamin D'Urban, the Peninsula veteran and Governor of the Cape, after whom the city was named, the officers of various local volunteer units, and Chief Bambatha Zondi, who led the last Zulu uprising in 1906.

Anyone who has the chance to visit Durban should certainly take in the Local History Museum, and savour something of its extraordinary and adventurous history. And allow plenty of time to enjoy the figure collection to the full; it really does bring the past alive.

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