Posted on January 19, 2011
Dear Colleagues
Compliments of the new year. We hope you had a restful festive season. Now that the lekker things we eat during the festive season are safely tucked away, we return to thinking about ancestral stories. Many of us repaired to places we call home to be with family in the past weeks. Home and family is what I want to dwell on here first. After that I'll then go on to think about the records that have been used by the people considered in this month's stories.
The common thing in all three of our stories this month is place: a farm, an island, a mountain. Place indeed, in three very different forms. Musa Hlatshwayo tells us about a pilgrimage of Qwabe people in December up a mountain near Empangeni in KwaZulu-Natal. Theirs is an attempt to reconnect the Qwabe kinship group whose history has become muddled over two centuries of the different forms of colonial occupation South Africa. In Merle Martin's story we learn how people from St. Helena have fanned out across the world. Many are now trying to establish what their connection to the island is since it has become faint with the passing of time and the loss of that memory due to stories not being passed down. And in Helene Retief Lombard's case we have a farm that has been her family's centre of gravity for over 300 years, making it comparatively easy to collect stories and giving her a very strong anchor for a possibly unwieldy narrative when she wrote the book.
To my mind, the sparseness of memory among the Qwabe and among the St. Helenian diaspora compared to the relative richness of archival records on the Retiefs is a sharp reminder that across South Africa (and the world) there are many people whose sense of historical self was disrupted by colonisation and migration in different forms. In the case of the Qwabe, they are attempting to refigure their identification as Zulu, which came into being with their colonisation by the expanding Zulu kingdom sometime around 1820. From the annexation of Natal to the Cape Colony and the arrival of the Voortrekkers in today's KwaZulu-Natal to apartheid, as well as the advent of missionary work, all of these historical happenings have done a great disservice to the transmission of Qwabe memory, leading to the gaps that attempts are being made to fill today. Similarly, much memory was wiped out by slavery in St. Helena and by migration to South Africa. Further, the bluntness of apartheid racial categorisation was not amenable to the transmission of ancestral memory among the St. Helena diaspora. If it did allow for transmission, it appears to me that the memory would have been quite distorted.
One thing best illustrates the problems of distortion and erasure of family group memory that I am talking about here, i.e. the kind of records that family historians have to go on. The Lombards have consulted archival records, books, oral historical sources and death notices. Merle Martin has so far used family mythology, books on St. Helena, and, strikingly, has tried to find some facts on her grandmother from the Home Affairs record to no avail. For the Qwabe, the oral record is all they are going on. The picture of the South African past that emerges from this view is discomforting: some have decent records, others don't; some have had relative security of tenure stretching way back, others have been displaced, some have a coherent sense of their historical subjectivity, many don't.
This brings me to a set of questions I want to end on. Helene, Merle and the Qwabes' attempts at speaking and writing their pasts generate archival records of their own, whether constituted as archives or not: documents, photographs, video recordings, Facebook and Twitter posts, etc. What becomes of these records? Helene says she doesn't yet know what to do with her archive. Should archival institutions be doing more to archive the upsurge in family history in this period in South Africa? The flip side of this questions is: what records do archival institutions hold that can be used by people who are working on the histories of their families, particularly those on whom the official record is thin? How can knowledge of such holdings be more widely disseminated? We'll take these questions up in the coming months.
As always, we invite anybody who would like to point the way to write to us.
Mbongiseni
Mbongiseni Buthelezi is the Archival Platform Ancestral Stories Coordinator
