Posted on October 27, 2010
In the past month we have held the first two in a series of face-to-face interactions with colleagues in the archival sector. On 28 September we joined the annual meeting of the South African Museums Association in Durban. Jo-Anne, Xolelwa, and I introduced the Archival Platform and hosted a panel discussion on family history. The panel was made up of Pearl Sithole from Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, activist and author Zuleikha Mayat, and Troy Meyers, an entrepreneur who is descended from one of the founders of Durban.
The panellists had been asked to answer these two questions in five minutes each: How important is family history in the communities where you work? What archives do people in those communities use to collect family history? Each of the speakers delighted the audience with their fascinating stories after which we were treated to a lively discussion with the conference delegates. Sithole proposed that oral history as a source is as important as documentary evidence. Sithole felt that oral history has for too long been sidelined in favour of documents. As such, the stories of people who are not represented in records have been and continue to be silenced because in the main academic historians remain dismissive of oral narrative and poetry, and of the practices of naming places and people, as well as remembering and commemorating, as carriers of historical information. The validity of the information transmitted as common knowledge, as hearsay and rumour is questioned and hence its reliability found to be shaky or non-existent. But, according to Sithole, this method leaves out a critical aspect: that for the people who transmit and live by this information it means something and is valid. Academics are thus dismissing people's interpretive practices and failing to recognise processes of meaning making when they apply their predetermined criteria of evaluation in the manner that they do.
Mayat supplemented Sithole's argument when she told us why she sees the telling of stories as important. A crucial reminder she gave us is that to find out about one's family one should not only ask old people to tell one about the family. Instead asking about mundane things - the stuff of daily life - can open a treasure trove of memories, to borrow from the title of one of Mayat's books, in which will be embedded the story of one's family.
Meyers delighted all of us with his story about helping his daughter with her school project to put together their family tree. When his daughter presented the family tree her teacher discovered (and would not believe) that a Coloured and a white student shared the same ancestor. Meyers has intensified his research since then in order to counter such dismissals.
In the subsequent discussion we learnt that some museums around the country have been collecting family narratives, particularly those of people of Indian descent since this year marks 150 years since the arrival of the first indentured labourers from India in South Africa. We also learnt that there are further groups similar to the Khumalo and the Ndwandwe, on which we have posted blogs in the previous months, that are organising themselves in KwaZulu-Natal. You can expect to hear about the activities of groups such as the Ntuli, Ngobese, Sithole, Mbatha and Qwabe on this forum in the future. We also heard about the existence of family history centres in different parts of KwaZulu-Natal which we are also going to invite writing on.
At the annual conference of the Oral History Association of South Africa in White River, Mpumalanga, we again introduced the Archival Platform on 13 October to oral historians from museums, schools, universities as well as officials from Departments of Arts and Culture, and Education. Professor Philip Bonner from the History Workshop at Wits University joined Xolelwa and I on the panel. Bonner had earlier presented a paper on the oral traditions and oral testimonies (life histories) of the Ga-Mphahlele in Limpopo. In the paper he pointed to the coherence of the traditions today, similarly to how they were in the 1940s, countering the notion that traditions are undergoing erosion in the age of new technologies.
In open discussion the importance of considering different configurations of family was raised. It was also pointed out that obituaries are an important source of family history, particularly in cases where people have written their own obituaries before they died. One speaker told us how she found out an extensive set of information about her father and her family from the obituary her father wrote. Furthermore, we found out that there are many people who have written their autobiographies, but they cannot find publishers for them.
We welcome any suggestions on how we can create spaces for engagement between people who are interested in these forms family narrative and/or make the narratives accessible.
Our profiling of different takes on family history continues with our blogs this month. Sean Field poses a rich challenge to colleagues working on history and memory to take family history more seriously. He tells of the direction the Centre for Popular Memory is taking to begin to address this lacuna. Troy Meyers recounts his findings over years of investigating the history of the Biggar family. That he, self-identified as Coloured, is a direct descendent of one of the prominent English settler families and that his ancestors intermarried with local ‘Zulu' people in early Durban, helps put to rest any idea that people can be separated into neat racial categories. Finally, I report on the difficulties the Nelson Mandela Foundation has encountered in putting together Madiba's genealogy. You can look forward to a follow-up story on other versions of Madiba's family tree in future.
Sincerely
Mbongiseni
Mbongiseni Buthelezi is the Archival Platform Ancestral Stories Coordinator
