The author of these words, John Scott, was appointed special magistrate on the northern border of the Cape Colony in 1880 and served there until 1887. In presiding over the Baster settlement established in Gordonia, amongst his duties was dealing with the Bushman inhabitants of the area. Through an examination of his relations with Bushmen it is possible to see the transformation of Scott's Cape liberal ideology into one approximating turn-of-the-century racism. Imprisoning them for breaches of colonial law, essentially because the Bushmen refused to become a part of the cheap black labour force required by the colony, Scott also became involved in organising them as objects of ethnographic research and objects of exhibit and display.

In his book The Birth of the Museum, Tony Bennett takes issue with Douglas Crimp for describing the museum as another Foucaultian ‘institution of confinement’. While the museum and the prison are both articulations of power and knowledge relations, the museum, he insists, is an institution not of confinement but of exhibition. In contrast to the withdrawal of objects and bodies from the public gaze, ‘[the] institutions comprising the “exhibitionary complex”… were involved in the transfer of objects and bodies from the enclosed and private domains in which they had previously been displayed… into progressively more open and public arenas where, through the representations to which they were subjected, they formed vehicles for inscribing and broadcasting the messages of power’.