We recently had some interesting lessons shared from the Humanity Exhibit at the Iziko South African Museum.
Amy Sephton and Wendy Black joined us for our monthly webinar series to share what they learned from the development of the Humanity Exhibit in South Africa. This exhibition was to be truly Afrocentric, needing to include local stories, challenge biases and figure out how to translate and present the text for a country that has 12 official languages.
Not only was it highlighted that the evolution of humans is not linear, but they also showed that the perception of humans having come from apes (specifically people with a darker skin colour) is actually incorrect and racist. A brave step toward correcting the science that we think we know! The themes of skin colour, racism and social identity were highlighted with some fun interactives to make the topics a little easier for audiences to take in and discuss.
Amy also discussed how locals were not just invited to share their stories, they were also asked for their opinions on the exhibit themes during the planning process. A step that takes more time, but is worth it when you see that your audience appreciates what you have done and develops a greater sense of ownership.
It wasn’t just the good stuff that they shared with us in this webinar: a hiccup in the planning process occurred when, during translations, they realised that there is a major problem with scientific language use in most of the official languages in South Africa. Many scientific and taxonomic English words just don’t exist in Sotho, Xhosa, Tswana, etc. This led to the exhibition adding to the growing new African language scientific lexicon!
We’re so glad that they were willing to share the good, the bad and the ugly with us. An hour-long webinar always feels too short and in this case we could have discussed this exhibit for longer, but it was a great behind-the-scenes look at what is done, how it is done and what is learnt during the exhibit development process. If you would like to find out more about this exhibit, please feel free to reach out to Amy or Wendy at: asephton@iziko.org.za or wblack@iziko.org.za.
Keep an eye on the IE website and your inbox for details of our upcoming webinars. We present a changing programme of topics and hope that you will find something of interest to you. Don’t forget that IE members also have free access to the recordings of all past webinars so you can watch again or go and catch up on any that you have missed. Just log in to your account in the members’ area of the website: https://members.interpret-europe.net/login/.
Heidi is IE’s Webinar Officer. She can be contacted at: heidi.demaine@interpret-europe.net.
To cite this article: Dimitrovska, Vasilka (2025) ‘Hands-on with the Romans: Re-imagining Stobi through live interpretation’ in Interpret Europe Newsletter 3-2025, p. 17.
Available online: Newsletter autumn 2025
