Posted on February 14, 2011

Mbongiseni Buthelezi
Busi Mnguni talks about the opening of Mandela's private archive to give us another view of the man. The Durban Family History Centre encourages people to transmit oral histories in order to prevent the loss of memory. It also keeps records that can be accessed by the public, Musa Hlatshwayo tells us. And the descendents of European, Asian and Khoisan entrants into Xhosa culture pass down cultural memory in family/clan rituals, we learn from Janet Hayward Kalis. In each case there is a record in some form or another that is transmitted, stored, and rendered recoverable. We have tended to emphasise, even fetishise, the written record. Have we paid enough attention to other ways of keeping and transmitting knowledge of the past? What would properly paying attention to the knowledge about the past that is transmitted through cultural practices look like?

It seems to me that our problems begin at the level of language. English is the language in which we are governed, we work, and in which we teach and are taught in formal education. It is the language of knowledge production in universities. Even in instances where we study these so-called indigenous cultural practices, artistic forms, philosophical traditions, etc. we have not even begun to pay attention to the concepts and vocabularies in which people conduct their rituals. Here I am calling what people do rituals even. If I paid attention to the term imisebenzi, and the in which ways space, time, relationships with the living and the dead are conceptualised by practitioners of these family/clan 'rituals' I imagine I could learn a lot about the things I am trying to understand. Even in universities we do not yet insist on the learning of languages, letting students get away with studying cultures in translation. The terminologies we impose are too blunt. They obscure a lot that needs to be carefully considered for a better understanding of our society and its pasts.

I think if we begin paying attention to language we can open the path to giving the future back its pasts.

Mbongiseni Buthelezi is the Archival Platform Ancestral Stories coordinator.