Posted on July 26, 2011
In June, the roads and paths of many historians from southern African led to Durban where the 23rd biennial conference of the Southern African Historical Society took place. The conference ran from 27 to 29 June. We at the Archival Platform also made our way to the Howard College campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal where we hosted two panel discussions, one on Ancestral Stories on the second day of the conference, and another on the State of the Archive on the final day. On the Ancestral Stories panel were Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, professor of history at the University of the Western Cape, Carolyn Hamilton, National Research Foundation chair in Archive and Public Culture at the University of Cape Town, as well author Jacob Dlamini. As coordinator of Ancestral Stories I chaired the discussion.
The discussion was framed around 'Remembering family': Should we be doing family histories?, a piece that Sean Field, director of the Centre for Popular Memory (CPM) at the University of Cape Town, wrote for Ancestral Stories in October 2010. In the piece Field probes of why family history is not studied in any serious way in South Africa. In line with the work they were then considering at the CPM, he proposes some of the issues that could be dealt with in beginning the work of investigating the effects of repression of 'family networks'. The panellists had been asked to open the discussion with short and crisp responses to Field's provocations.
Hamilton spoke about the artificial opposition that has been set up between memory and archive. Archive is often defined as largely stable and unchanging. This stability means that an archive can be mined for information considered much more reliable than what is held in memory. Memory is thought to be subject to much change. A method has been devised by historians to process oral accounts and arrive at historical facts that have been layered over time. However, Hamilton stressed, what this opposition misses is that certain archives that are transmitted in oral form are not as changeable as we seem to think. Her example was of family ceremonies in which the calling of names of ancestors in the correct order and addressing them by their correct izibongo (praises) should never be changed.
Dhupelia-Mesthrie tackled, among other things, how family history has tended to be regarded as in the domain of heritage. Heritage is not taken seriously by many scholars. Historians have been scathing of heritage and, by extension, of family historical research. Instead, biography has been the preferred mode of engaging with the pasts of individuals among historians. Where family has been considered has been in regard to fictive families that came into being as different forms of solidarity were forged in order to live under and resist apartheid.
Dlamini posed two main questions: firstly, considering that most of the families in the street where he grew up were headed by women, what does it mean to call families that do not have both a man and a woman at the head dysfunctional? It seems to be commonly accepted that functional families are headed by two parents, a male and a female. Discussion of the effect of apartheid on family structures often assumes that a normative family takes this form. Secondly, what cosmologies did Africans bring into the late nineteenth century, the period of some of the most intense social reorganisation of southern Africa, that made it possible to maintain continuity of family units? Practices of ancestor veneration and what records of the Native Affairs department, for instance, termed witchcraft and superstition require further investigation as modalities of modernity.
Several comments, challenges and questions were posed after these initial comments by the panellists in a discussion that lasted over an hour. Some of them were the following: someone wanted to know where fiction and creative non-fiction sit in relation to biography and family history research. Is fiction a way out of the crisis of representation that arises when someone tries to write factually about someone else or other people? Another person suggested that family history offers a way of making history more relevant to students as interest in studying history dwindles. If one starts off with a student's own biography as a way in, one can then go on to talk about biography more generally, that is, how an individual life interacts with the world and is shaped by the world at the same time as it shapes that world. This could then lead to teaching history more broadly. A very provocative suggestion was that the opposite of how ancestors need to be remembered accurately is also true. Ancestors come and go, are remembered and forgotten and then perhaps remembered again as circumstances change. Families fight over ancestors continuously.
The discussion concluded with a discussion of the possibilities of family history research to open up the past in ways that can help us dispel myths such as racial purity that are our inheritance from the past.
Mbongiseni Buthelezi is the Archival Platform's Ancestral Stories Coordinator
