Posted on September 16, 2010
As we all know, the past is an ugly place. That is to say the bits of the past that come down to us are often grimy - dead bodies, monstrous people, ruined sites. This is not to say there were no nice people in the past. But the people we often inherit from long-ago pasts as nice people are often national heroes. They are usually nice insofar as they did great things for nations. But most of these people were not all niceness. We just choose to remember them as nice, the not nice parts of them suppressed. The contest over how to remember Mother Theresa, Mahatma Ghandi and, by all indications, Nelson Mandela, will go on for some time. (And of course, there are different heroes for different people and according to differences of interpretation depending. That is why, for example, Shaka kaSenzangakhona is a hero to some, a villain to others and ambivalent to many.) Almost always, though, we are suspicious of narratives that tell us only nice things about nice people who did great things in the past.
The question of what pasts we inherit reminds me again this Heritage Month of Jamaica Kincaid's questions with which I began probing ancestral stories in this forum last year: "What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me? Should I call it history? If so, what should history mean to someone like me? Should it be an idea, should it be an open wound, and each breath I take in and expel healing and opening the wound again and again, over and over, or is it a moment that began in 1492 and has come to no end yet? Is it a collection of facts, all true and precise details, and, if so, when I come across these true and precise details, what should I do, how should I feel, where should I place myself?" ('In History', Callaloo 20(1), 2001: 620)
These are questions I have recently asked first year literature students at the University of Cape Town to ponder in relation to Zakes Mda's novel The Heart of Redness. It has been relatively easy for most students to talk about the characters in the novel and how they are implicated in the echoes that come from that ugly place called the past. It has been entirely another matter when I ask students to plot themselves into the events of the past and ask, 'Where was my family in all this?' - in succession disputes and realignments within Xhosa society, during the Cattle Killing movement of 1856-7, during the Frontier Wars and the concomitant dispossession and possession of land, and other such events. The past is an ugly place indeed. Many do not want to look back. 'What does it matter?', they ask. 'We are here now and let's get on with it'. But what does one make of the past when history is a wound that opens over and over again each time one is exhorted to move on and leave that ugly place to its pastness?
Our blogs this month present three ways to open the past up in order to make sense of the pathways of one's ancestors through history. On one hand, Emile Maurice tells us of his fascinating tribute to his father prompted by an invitation to participate in a school heritage project. On the other hand, David Slingsby tells of his journey to make sense of his family's past that was initiated by a family archive that simply fell on his lap. Then there is the activist spirit of Zainab Davidson or Aunty Patty who has founded and curates an entire museum in order to address the same absence of 'Coloured' people from museums to which Maurice makes reference.
David's initial archive was handed to him. It was the archive of the family as constituted by a few individuals. He has augmented it with oral narratives from family members. Emile started from the family archive - his father's papers, family photographs - and augmented these by asking about his father in order to return to telling the story of one individual - his father. It is a similar method followed by David James Smith in conducting research for his book, Young Mandela, as reviewed by Victoria Collis-Buthelezi. In contrast Aunty Patty's move was to tell the story of a widely dispersed community by inviting anybody and everybody to contribute material - photographs, newspaper clippings, items of clothing, shoes, etc. We wend up with three types of stories: the story of an individual - Edgar Maurice, Nelson Mandela; the story of a family - the Slingsby family, the story of a community - the Heritage Museum. The stories will be disseminated in different ways - Mandela 's told to a large reading public, David's in a book for his family, Emile's father's in an school exhibition, and the Heritage Museum to anybody who walks through the door or reads about it online. Different audiences, varied public lives for these stories.
In view of these stories, the archives and methods used to collect and tell them, and the pathways of their transmission, my question then this Heritage Month is: how do we not close off interpretations of the past? How do we resist the containment of the ugliness of that place called the past in sanitised narratives? How do we not turn our ancestors into heroes only? These are particularly important questions when it comes to iconic figures and national monuments. Finally, Victoria's review prompts the question: how might future generations remember our public ancestors when those ancestors' pasts are an ugly place, one that is recorded in books like Smith's? How do we not foreclose the possibilities for different interpretations of Nelson Mandela?
I hope some of you respond to some of the questions above.
Regards
Mbongiseni