Posted on November 21, 2010
Dear Colleagues

The contrast between Vivien Horler's and Tony Harding's ancestral stories is striking. Whereas Tony's family pops up in the South African historical record celebrated for their involvement in the colonial project, Vivien's forebears came to make a better life on a much smaller scale. The latter are the kind of people that need to be looked for very closely because they did not leave any legacies of great national or historical significance. Even before landing up in South Africa both the ancestors of both people were in the Americas. But they were there for vastly different reasons and with hugely different effects on the lives of others, it seems. Slave owners as compared to a miner and his family. And so reckoning with the two family legacies becomes very different in the present. Vivien's story rolls of her tongue fluidly. Tony's writing is laboured, the story difficult to tell.

Is it that our impulse is to make heroes of our ancestors, to place them on the right side of the collective sense that has been made of events of the past?

There certainly was a pronounced element of retelling a tragic past as heroic at the Zwide Heritage Celebration. Zwide died 185 years ago in approximately 1825 in a similar way to the story of abolitionism in Tony's family. His retreat from the Nongoma was repeatedly spoken of as Shaka's doing that caused the Ndwandwe a lot of hardship, but that hardship was turned to the Ndwandwe's advantage. The most celebrated aspects of that legacy at the event was the founding of the Gaza kingdom by Soshangane.

I am left wondering by this telling of the Ndwandwe umndeni's/isizwe's (family's/ 'nation's') past: what is papered over? What cracks in the heroic narrative would looking at the histories of individual families, and not that of the group as a whole which is understood as one extended family, make visible? Who has been marginalised in the history of the family? Which lineages have dominated?

The same questions can be extended to national narratives. Colonisation stands in for all the migration of people from Europe into South Africa in the 19th century and before. That is what received national(ist) wisdom tells us today. Yet such a singular sweep in speaking the past obscures many other stories of why people came from Europe to South Africa.
Is the corollary of making heroes of our ancestors finding appropriate enemies for them then?

There certainly isa way of seeing people of European descent as historical enemies of 'the people' that obtains in public discourse. While it is clear that the conditions of possibility for the migration of poor Europeans seeking opportunities were created by the British colonial presence all over the world and that in a way they were accomplices in imperialism and colonialism, seeing some individual families close up begins to make clear the holes in such sweeping narratives of the past.

How then do we speak the nation's past?

Mbongiseni Buthelzi is the Archival Platform's Ancestral Stories Coordinator