01 Jun 2014

The Friends of the Museum (FOM) is appealing to the public and the media fraternity to assist the Botswana National Museum to achieve its mandate.

Briefing members of media recently, the society's chairperson, Thulaganyo Mogobe, said the museum needed to go beyond its frontiers of the traditional limits of education and information and emphasise on its value, role and contribution through full productive collaboration and quality relations with its stakeholders.

“In an endeavour for the museum to contribute meaningfully to the community, a proposal to form an organisation to support its function was adopted in 1979,” he said. He said Friends of Museum’s aim was to establish collaboration and enhance the museum’s existence in furthering its mandate.

Mogobe encouraged more people to join the FOM in an effort to assist the national museum to protect and preserve the cultural heritage.

He said members can join as family, individual, corporate and junior, adding that the support cannot be materialistic but one can come up with ideas on how to improve and conserve the heritage. “Anybody can join and we need diversity of experience,” he said.

The deputy director of national museum, Steve Mogotsi, said they have various units, programmes and projects which encourage the public to take part in the conservation of the cultural heritage.

He said some galleries, like the Bonnington, Okavango and Tsodilo were not in a good state now encouraging the public to put a helping hand to renovate them.

“We would like to see the business community partnering with us because if these are not protected now they will be lost,” he said. 

The Friends of Museum was established in 1980 but later went into a period of dormancy until it was resuscitated in 2008 and formally launched in September 2011.

The society is a voluntary organisation that supports the museum in its work and currently it is in the process of mapping a way forward in terms of achieving growth and sustainability with the aim of building a bright future for Botswana’s national museum and for itself. Ends