cape town

Biologists at two South African museums are disturbed at government plans to downgrade their institutions from national to provincial status, which they fear could threaten the survival of their collections.

Earlier this year, the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology decided to implement proposals by a 1995 task force to group most of the country's 18 national museums into two institutions from April 1998. This would create two national museums, one in each of the twin capitals of Pretoria and Cape Town.

But some institutions will not be included. In particular, both Natal Museum and the National Museum in Bloemfontein will be downgraded to provincial status, and will in future be funded by their respective provincial governments. The KwaZulu-Natal government, which will be responsible for funding Natal Museum, cut its museum service operating budget this year by more than 51 per cent.

Both museums hold collections of scientific interest. The Natal Museum's mollusc collection, in particular, is by far the largest both on the African continent and on the entire Indian Ocean rim. George Branch, professor of zoology at the University of Cape Town, says: “There is no doubt that this is a national resource which all marine ecologists in the country use for reference purposes. If its funding is reduced, then we risk losing both the collection itself, which requires maintenance, and the taxonomic expertise of those who work on it.”

Two researchers at the Natal Museum, Dick Kilburn and Dai Herbert, have requested colleagues worldwide to appeal against the decision, which they claim has been taken without any assessment of the significance of the museum's collections.

In fact, a review committee set up by the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology last year to review the status of the country's museums did not assess the geographical representativeness of the collections at either of the two museums whose status is to be downgraded (see Nature 384 15; 1996). Nor did it make such an assessment of the two natural history museums that will be incorporated into the new national museums, the South African Museum in Cape Town and the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria.

Credit: Natal's museum: mecca for molluscs.

The fate of the fifth natural history museum with national status, the J. L. B. Smith Institute of Ichthyology in Grahamstown, appears undecided. Its collection of 750,000 fish specimens is widely regarded as being of national importance.