Posted on August 10, 2010
A Mother Remebers. Photo by Alf Kumalo
Dear Colleagues
August being Women's Month, the place of women in the histories of families that I suggested as a potential thread to follow earlier this year comes to the fore. This month's posts open the matter up well. The goals and activities of the Cape Town Family History Society, as elucidated by David Slingsby in the accompanying post, point to how we can collect facts - people's names, place names, dates, etc. We can dig through archival records, books, landscapes, graveyards, and oral stories for these facts. We can then plot these into family trees using the various types of computer programmes to which David refers.
Yet because of the structures of gender power that have prevailed in most societies the world over until today, women have been either absent or peripheral in most records. The histories of families continue to be the histories of male lines in most cultures. Just think of the surnames children take. It is the male line that transmits the family name and it is the family name through which ancestral stories are told.
But two of our posts articulate a radical departure from this norm. Xolelwa Kashe-Katiya's story of her family shows us one way in which traditional notions of what is a family, whether in cultures that value the small nuclear family or those in which the extended family is the common form, hardly hold. Cultural norms of the transmission of the story of her family have been turned on their heads such that the story she tells, and no doubt the stories other members of her family may tell, challenge the practices of transmitting family history. Xolelwa's story is a remarkable for the way it places women centrally in ancestral stories. And as Xolelwa reminds us, there are many families where women are the most consistent presence in the lives of generation after generation of children. Yet the norms of our society repeatedly tell us that when we search for the story of our ancestors and of our families, we trace the paternal line. Does Xolelwa's way of telling the family's story mean we also need to revisit how kinship group or clan praises (iziduko/izithakazelo) function? In most cultures that use them, the praises name and praise the significant male ancestral line of the group. Is it perhaps time to canonise our foremothers in the same way and call them up during family ceremonies along with the male ancestors whose preserve it has been to be called up?
The other post that offers another kind of radical alternative to our societal gender norms is Michael Worsnip's. In his post Michael speaks of telling his children about his parents, the children's grandparents. Michael's children have two fathers and no mother. They have white fathers when they are black. One day Michael and Leon will be ancestors and stories will be told about them. As in Xolelwa's family, the stories of the family will not rest on bloodlines and the DNA testing to which David refers will never be able to connect the family. The connection will happen through the ancestral stories passed down.
Michael's and Xolelwa's stories return us to the question: what is a family? To add a different instance to the mix, how will Nelson Mandela's descendents tell the story of their family in light of the recent article in the Mail and Guardian, 'I am Madiba's Lost Daughter', about Mpho Pule who died knowing that Madiba was her father? Similarly, in his recent book, Young Mandela, David James Smith he writes about the alleged tensions between Mandela's 'first' and 'second' families, and about an allegation that Mandela has at least one ‘illegitimate' child. The neat family story of any family, if ever there was one, gets very complicated indeed.
There is also the complicated family story that involves the restitution of dignity told by Tony Harding in his forthcoming book, Lekgowa, that was excerpted in the Sunday Times on 25 July. Harding's father-in-law had dealt with no longer being able to be the kgoshi (chief) after being driven from his ancestral land under apartheid by changing his surname and going to work on farms as a labourer. Had he not been able to return and claim his status, how would the story of the family have gone if one of its people had vanished? What ancestral stories would he have been told by generations of his descendents had he kept the new surname and not reclaimed his status?
There are further potential complications to the story of the family, any family. Even if we can plot all the 'true and precise details', to borrow again Jamaica Kincaid's words from my very first post in December last year, of our foremothers and forefathers into a family tree, it will still precisely be in these details that the complications of family history inhere. If you tell the story of your family through focusing on certain individuals, it is inevitable that at some point you will get into the muddle of what the relationships of those individuals to other people in the family circle were. Take Maanda Mulaudzi's conversation with his 'uncle' in his post last month. He wanted to know the story of the family and the question of inheritance got in the way. How do we get past such problems in telling the stories of our ancestors? When we find out about family rifts in the past, how do we tell such stories without taking sides when some of the people involved are close to us?
Women's Month calls us to rethink the practice of family history in radical new ways. It opens up a host of questions about family that I hope more of you out there will take up. We would like to hear how different kinds of families have dealt with telling their ancestral stories.
We invite you to send your stories to ancestralstories@archivalplatform.org or contact Mbongiseni on 021-650 2837 if you would like to submit your story in another way.
Mbongiseni Buthelezi