The girdled lizards (genus Cordylus) are a group of 21 species of well-armoured insectivorous lizards found only in sub-Saharan Africa. These diurnal and mainly rupicolous lizards occur from the south-western Cape of South Africa northwards through Botswana and Namibia to Angola, and elsewhere to Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, south-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania and Kenya, with an isolated population in southern Ethiopia.
The Department of Archaeology at the National Museum, Bloemfontein, is involved in several projects aimed at reconstructing the behaviour and biology of past human populations, from the start of the archaeological record in the Pliocene period up into the ethnographic present of southern Africa.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines traditional medicine (TM) as “the sum total of knowledge, skills and practices based on the theories, beliefs and experiences indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, that are used to maintain health, as well as to prevent, diagnose, improve or treat physical and mental illnesses” (WHO 2008).
What do Emily Hobhouse and Charlotte Newman have in common?
In July 2019 the National Museum in collaboration with the Leeds Becket University (England) hosted a satellite exhibition on Emily Hobhouse and the home industries as part of the War Without Glamour: the Life and Legacy of Emily Hobhouse exhibition presented at the Free State Arts Festival in Bloemfontein.
The discovery of diamonds in 1869 and of gold in 1886, and the influx of several thousand fortune seekers which followed these events created new markets for grain products in Kimberley and the Witwatersrand. This, in turn, encouraged the cultivation of wheat and mealies in the Free State and Basutoland (Lesotho).