Biography

South African photographer and curator. Japie Dekenah was known locally as the "walking encyclopaedia of Riversdale" for his knowledge of the nature and history of the district where he lived his entire life. At the age of 12 he started working in the afternoons as a photographer and in 1926, when he failed to matriculate after years of neglecting his schoolwork, he set up his own business. He was introduced to botany and archaeology through his friendships with Dr John Muir, a local naturalist, and Dr C.H. Heese, an amateur archaeologist who had achieved some fame through his discoveries at the Blombos Cave site.

Japie Dekenah became a dedicated collector of shells, plants, minerals, and Africana, and assembled a wide collection of San stone implements, which he later donated to the Cape Town Museum. When the Julius Gordon Africa Centre opened in Riversdale in 1975, he became its first curator. The museum now holds his collection of shells, Stone Age implements, Africana, and reference books, as well as his slide transparencies of indigenous South African flowers and plants.

He is remembered by a fellow curator, Mrs Baba Burger, as a very modest, rather solitary man who walked long distances in the Riversdale district on Sundays looking for plants and stones. He sent plant specimens, many of them previously undescribed, to Kirstenbosch and to leading specialists: Aloe to Dr G.W. Reynolds, Euphorbia to R.A. Dyer and Haworthia to G.G. Smith. His photographs have appeared in American Cactus Journal and he published several illustrated articles in African Wildlife between 1950 and 1952. Severla species including Haworthia dekenahii G.G. Sm. (= Haworthia magnifica Duval var. dekenahii ( G.G. Sm. ) M.B. Bayer) and Mesembryanthemum dekenahii N.E. Br. (= Antimima dekenahii ( N.E. Br. ) H.E.K. Hartmann) were named in his honour.