Iziko South African Museum

This guide to the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town follows James Drury, a Perth-trained taxidermist who arrived in the city in 1900 and became the museum's staff taxidermist by 1902. It traces how his ordinary work with birds and antelope changed after 1907, when museum leadership sent him out to the Northern Cape to cast the bodies of living San and Khoi people using wet plaster, among them shepherds, farm labourers and convicts with no way to refuse. Those cast figures went on to stand in the museum's ethnographic gallery for decades.