Posted on September 4, 2012
For Dineo Skosana in this issue, grandmothers are archives. She probes how her grandmother carries and transmits information and knowledge. But what I wonder is whether these grandmothers are in the archive, any kind of archive, at all. Let us consider one hypothetical grandmother as an example. Born in 1950 in Thulamahashe in today's Mpumalanga province, she has a birth certificate and ID book, a clinic card, her voter registration records, a social grant card and a bank account. These are the dispersed traces of her existence that will remain in the record after she is gone - at the Departments of Home Affairs, Health and Social Development, and at her bank. There will also be a death certificate (and perhaps a few other pointers as in the case of Leonard Ndeya, (See Traces of a Humble Life - the archival fragment). It will all depend on whether the records are archived or not if in another fifty years her family's lone-ranger historian or a scholar who suddenly discovers the significance of her life will find these records when s/he looks for them. This grandmother has never appeared in a court of law, so there'll be no court record that records her date of birth, place of residence or marital status.
Yet the grandchild will have grown up hearing stories of how her grandmother changed the way local'traditional' courts perceive and treat women in cases of inheritance. The grandmother is a living legend in her community and beyond for her defiance of previous patrilineal inheritance norms that will have forced change in the system to allow women to be less under the heel of men. (The historian will only learn of this much later when she stumbles upon the story while looking for something else.) Her story will have lived in one form, travelling from mouth to ear under trees, in beerhalls and on buses. It will have changed with each telling before it settles into a written version that will itself still change with each interpretation in the future. After her relative obscurity in life, after her death, this grandmother will come to be known by a diverse set of people around the world: the story of her activism will be taught in courses on feminism, customary law, history and development studies. She will have entered the archive in one major way.
Contrast this to her age mate in Marikanna village. She was born at home before there was a local office to record births and issue certificates. She has had a great deal of trouble getting an ID book. At the local clinic there's a record of her that has scant details and not even her proper name. Her death certificate will be cobbled together by an official who can barely spell and will bear no resemblance to her clinic card. In a few years it'll be almost impossible to trace her through official records.
Despite their different entry into the records, there's an archive both these two grandmothers will enter in an even more incomplete and problematic way. While they will ceremonially be commemorated upon their passing and for some time after, their names will never enter the official canon of ancestors. Those whose names will be called out at future ceremonies of the kin group or clan are the great men who are said to have done heroic things in the group's past. Men are the ones whose names become the collective praises of their direct descendents or putative descendents. In most cultures, no mothers of a group are canonised in these most significant oral artistic formulations that are used daily as forms of polite address or on ceremonial occasions as a way of calling up the all the important ancestors.
While not all men are named and remembered again and again, the key issue is that by virtue of being men, they at least stand a chance of being canonised. Women never do. The history of many groups as stored in oral artistic forms and reiterated each time any person is praised after her/his ancestors is thus the history of great men. This is important because it is a crucial problem for gender equity in the present and the future.
It is true that in many cases changes in social organisation over the past century and a half have yielded unchanging clan address forms. In these forms it is ancestors up to the middle of the 1800s who are canonised. Yet the search for pasts which Ancestral Stories continues to bring into view is such that more and more people who otherwise would have addressed each other or themselves using clan praises are probing the meanings of these praises.
Through platforms like Facebook and the comment function of our website, many people are consciously seeking their group's praises and histories in order to use these praises with a fuller sense of what they signify. However, hardly anybody is asking why these praises do not remember our grandmothers. Cultural rediscovery and/or revival amounts to an entrenchment of gender inequity.
The search for the meanings of clan praises offers us an opportunity to think about these and other deeply meaningful symbols that underlie our basic understandings of relationships between men and women in society. In this Woman's Month (which ought to be called Gender Consciousness Month or something like that), I want to suggest that we have barely begun the task of thinking how to move towards a gender-equitable society. Sure, criticism of systems of marriage that disadvantage women or unequal schooling practices are warranted. However, at an even more fundamental level lies a conception of who women have been, are and will be as ancestors. It is this conception that licenses the self regard and the treatment of women that continue to make them secondary to men in deep-seated ways.
We must rethink ancestorship. Grandmothers cannot continue to be archives while they live and not get entered into archives of ancestors once they have passed on.
Mbongiseni Buthelezi is the Deputy Director of the Archival Platform and the coordinator of the Ancestral Stories initiative
