Abstract
Oral historians and archivists in South Africa are extremely committed people. In the apartheid days some of them, working for the National Archives and other similar institutions, would have been committed to archiving material in ways that were of positive use to the separatist, discriminatory ideology. To acknowledge this is not to brand them racist. Rather, one is acknowledging that there were forces behind what they did, forces like the state, whose power neither they, nor anyone else, could simply overlook. After the April 1994 general elections and the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this commitment assumed a new face: rather than collect and document data and narratives for the apartheid government, these materials are now archived for other political purposes. Not only is the focus now on democratic governance and politics, it is also, as Verne Harris observes, ‘oral rather than documentary evidence [in this case the preserve of the apartheid state and its agents] which carries the story’.2 One sees in ‘democratic governance’ and the ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ a conflation of terms: democracy and truth go hand in hand in a rather unproblematised manner. It is as if now that the general public has access to channels of communication that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission can afford, the truth about numerous hitherto unexplained incidents and events that happened during the apartheid period will come to the fore, thanks to the fact that people can now literally speak for themselves. I am suggesting here that many people who want to hear it from the horse’s mouth, as it were, tend to believe that the horse’s mouth is a more reliable, more authentic source of information than written testimony. This authenticity of oral testimony is also often assumed to exist in oral literature, where some observers tend to associate oral literature like poetry with closeness to nature and greater closeness to culture than the written arts. It is for this reason that we need to pause and reflect on what goes on in oral history and literature projects. Who tells the story? Why is the story told in the firsr place? And how is it told?
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References
Herman Charles Bosman, ‘A Bekkersdal Marathon’ in Herman Charles Bosman at His Best culled by Lionel Abrahams (Cape Town and Pretoria: Human & Rousseau, 1965).
Verne Harris, ‘The archival sliver: a perspective on the construction of social memory in archives and the transition from apartheid to democracy’, paper presented at the Refiguring the Archive Seminar Series (University of the Witwatersrand, 1998), p. 1.
Terry Eagleton, ‘Nationalism: irony and commitment’ in Seamus Deane, ed., Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘“Wailing for purity”: oral studies in Southern Africa’, African Studies 54,2 (1995), p. 25.
According to Nielsen’s findings, ‘the story of the establishment of KwaNdebele suggests that the South African government was never, despite its rhetoric, primarily concerned to consolidate an ethnic “unit.” KwaNdebele’s establishment and its consolidation were not driven by an ethnographer’s vision or even by a divide-and-rule plan. Although elements of each were involved, the creation of an Ndebele homeland was an attempt by government to manage the effects of emerging economic and political dynamics in the region. Following its creation, ethnic criteria were similarly downplayed in planning for the fledgling bantustan’s growth and development. Through a series of government commissions and internal departmental proposals the “separate development” ideal of a “national unit” was increasingly ignored in favour of geographical, administrative and developmental concerns. The unstated, but clearly discernible, shift in government policy culminated in the government’s forced incorporation of Moutse into KwaNdebele.’ As Nielsen observes later, the ‘“relevant factors” cited by the government (for wanting to incorporate Moutse into KwaNdebele) were administrative and material in nature, including Moutse’s integrated road network, the Philadelphia hospital, and its many schools and clinics’. See Derrick Nielsen, ‘“Bringing together that which belongs together”: the establishment of KwaNdebele and the incorporation of Moutse’ (unpublished seminar paper presented at the Institute for Advanced Social Research, University of the Witwatersrand, 11 March 1996), pp. 3, 24.
Derrick Nielsen and Phaswane Mpe, Interviews, Moutse (1994–1996).
Ibid.
Department of Foreign Affairs, cited in Nielsen (1994), p. 24.
Nielsen (1994), p. 18.
Ibid., p. 21.
Those interested in reading about the media and their role as propaganda tools might like to read Henriette J. Lubbe, ‘The myth of the “Black Peril”: Die Burger and the 1929 Election’, Southern African Historical Journal 37 (1997), pp. 107–132. Lubbe’s investigation concerns itself with the way in which Die Burger had served as a propaganda machine for the National Party before and around the 1929 elections. A significant part of this propaganda entailed the dissemination of the notion of black South Africans as a danger to the political as well as economic interests of Afrikaners. The Afrikaner interests were also seen as threatened, to a lesser but nevertheless worrying extent, by the presence of the ‘brutal British’ in the country.
Isabel Hofmeyr et al., A Collection of Oral Poems and Interviews from Acomhoek on Video Cassette (Department of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, September 1993).
James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
Mosibihla I. Ramakgolo, Mmino wa Setšo (Radio Lebowa).
David Lebepe, Di Tla Le Meso (Thobela FM, 1998).
Duncan Brown, ‘Oral poetry and literary history in South Africa’, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 6,2 (1994).
Phaswane Mpe, ‘Sol Plaatje, orality and the politics of cultural representation’ Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa 11,2 (1999).
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Oxford: Heinemann, 1986 [1958]).
Chinua Achebe, Di Wele Makgolela (Things Fall Apart), translated by Maje S. Serudu, (Johannesburg: Heinemann, 1993 [1958]), pp. 102ff.
The stories of Herman Charles Bosman sometimes reflect critically on the importance of books (and the classroom), radio and newspapers to a community and the way in which these mediators of historical knowledge are often erroneously assumed to be more important than oral history, especially in the form of gossip. I find them absolutely worth reading in this regard. See for example, ‘The Music Maker’, ‘A Bekkersdal Marathon’, ‘Birth Certificate’ and ‘Day of Wrath’, in Herman Charles Bosman at His Best culled by Lionel Abrahams (Cape Town and Pretoria: Human and Rousseau, 1965).
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Mpe, P. (2002). Orality and Literacy in an Electronic Era. In: Hamilton, C., Harris, V., Taylor, J., Pickover, M., Reid, G., Saleh, R. (eds) Refiguring the Archive. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0570-8_14
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