Oral history and archives in the new South Africa: Methodological issues

Archivaria

Volumn 52, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 100-125

  Klopfer, Lisa ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

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EID: 84880574503     PISSN: 03186954     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (128)

1. While the author did not visit all these projects, they include the District Six Museum, the Western Cape Oral History Project (see )
2. The Oral History Project at the School Theology, University of Natal (see )
3. The research of Julie Wells at Rhodes University (Grahamstown) and oral history projects at the National Archives (Pretoria), Free State Archives (Bloemfontein) (see )
4. KwaZulu-Natal Archives (Ulundi). The author is grateful to an anonymous reviewer for some of this information.
5. In particular, the National Archives of South Africa Act (Act No. 42 of 1996), the National Heritage Resources Act (Act No. 25 of 1999)
6. Promotion of Access to Information Act, 2000 (Act No. 2 of 2000).
7. See South Africa Government Yearbook, arts, culture, and religion: http://www.gov.za/yearbook/culture.htm
8. http://www.gov.za/acts/1999/a25-99.pdf
9. http://www.parliament.gov.za/acts/1996/act96.043
10. Department of Arts, Culture, Science & Technology, five-year report by the previous Director-General Roger Jardine (no date on page).
11. Australia is an exception to this generalization. There, the National Library actively supports an oral history programme, and aboriginal oral records have been accepted in the courts as admissible evidence.
12. See Shauna McRanor, "A Critical Analysis of Intrinsic Value," American Archivist (1996), pp. 400-411.
13. "Maintaining the Reliability of Aboriginal Oral Records and their Material Manifestations: Implications for Archival Practice," Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997), pp. 64-88.
14. Aletta Norval, "Truth and Reconciliation: The Birth of the Present and the Reworking of History," Journal of Southern African Studies 25, no. 3 (1999), p. 500.
15. I use heritage throughout this paper in counter-distinction to history. Heritage is understood here to mean a valorized historical narrative, one usually associated with a group identity, rituals of commemoration and monuments. In contrast, history is understood to refer to a wider range of possible narratives concerning the past, or a set of these (heterogeneous, even conflicting) narratives. For further discussion of these concepts, see
16. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago, 1992)
17. David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge, 1996)
18. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: the 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988).
19. See, for example, Charles Van Onselen, "The Reconstruction of a Rural Life from Oral Testimony: Critical Notes on the methodology Employed in the Study of a Black South African Sharecropper," Journal of Peasant Studies 20, no. 3 (1993), pp. 494-96
20. Robin Cohen, Yvonne Muthien and Abebe Zegeye, eds., Repression and Resistance: Insider Accounts of Apartheid (Hans Zell, 1990), pp. 1-4
21. Isabel Hofmeyr, 'We Spend Our Years as a Tale is Told': Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom (Heinemann, 1993), pp. 1-3.
22. Harold Scheub, The Tongue is Fire: South Africa, Storytellers and Apartheid (Wisconsin, 1996), p. 16.
23. Richard Bauman and Joel Scherzer, eds., Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 6-12 and 89-91.
24. Folkloristic approaches need not be conservative or exoticizing, however. Recent work by both Hofmeyr and Scheub demonstrates sophisticated efforts to bring poetics and historicity together.
25. See Belinda Bozzoli, "Intellectuals, Audiences and Histories: South African Experiences 1978-88," in History from South Africa, Joshua Brown, et. al., eds. (Temple University Press, 1991).
26. Van Onselen, "The Reconstruction of a Rural Life," p. 513.
27. Neville Dubow, "District with a View of the Bay," .
28. "Refiguring the Archives," Update (August/October 1998), viewed at .
29. Anton Skotnes, "People's History and the South African Struggle," Radical Historians Newsletter 73 (November 1995).
30. Paul La Hausse lists major oral history projects from the 1980s at the National University of Lesotho, University of Cape Town, and University of Natal: "Oral History and South African Historians" in History from South Africa, J. Brown, et. al., eds. (Temple University Press, 1991), pp. 348-9.
31. "Banner," .
32. "Robben Island Museum Declaration," .
33. Informal conversation with official guides, Summer 1999, Robben Island.
34. Christopher Merrett, "What's Public is Propaganda, What's Secret is Serious: Official Secrecy and Freedom of Information in South Africa," Progressive Librarian 9 (1995), pp. 1-21
35. Verne Harris, "'They Should Have Destroyed More': The Destruction of Public Records by the South African State in the Final Years of Apartheid, 1990-1994," available at (2000).
36. Letitia Coetzee, "Die Argiefwese en Plaaslike Geskiedenis; 'n Verwysingsraamwerk," Mousaion 12, no. 1 (1994), pp. 103-25
37. Van Herma Niekerk and Jan A. Kruger, "Die Ontwikkeling van die Staatsargiefdiens in Suid-Afrika, 1876-1910," Mousaion 14, no. 2 (1996), pp. 103-19
38. Verne Harris, "Redefining Archives in South Africa: Public Archives and Society in Transition, 1990-1996," Archivaria 42 (Fall 1996), pp. 6-27.
39. Among these is the stunning book by Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull (1999), in which she provides ambivalent, bruised witness to the witnessing. For a collection of documents on the TRC and its effect on South Africa, see .
40. Nigel Worden, "Missing Heads: Public History in South Africa," Itinerario 20, no. 3 (1996), pp. 125-32.
41. Martin Terre Blanche, Alex Butchart, and Mohamed Seedat, "Community Psychology and Oral History in Eldorado Park: A Case Study in Surveillance, Confession and Resistance," presented at The Advanced Social Research Seminar Series (University of Witswatersrand, 1994), pp. 2-5.
42. Ibid., pp. 8-9.
43. One cannot help noting the irony of this reversion to what has recently been reviled as an infantalizing romantic stereotype (White = written history; Black = oral poetics).
44. Further, it is not clear how the government plans to fit in, if at all, the South Africans who were defined as Coloured, Malay, Asiatic, Indian, etc.
45. Verne Harris, "Redefining Archives in South Africa: Public Archives and Society in Transition, 1990-1996," Archivaria 42 (Fall 1996), p. 16.
46. Andor Skotnes, "People's History and the South African Struggle," Radical Historians Newsletter 73 (November 1995).
47. Eric Ketelaar, "Can We Trust Information?" The International Information and Library Review 29, pp. 333-38
48. reprinted in Eric Ketelaar, The Archival Image: Collected Essays (Verloren, 1997).
49. Scheub H., The Tongue is Fire, p. 17.
50. Peter Delius, A Lion Amongst The Cattle: Reconstruction and Resistance in the Northern Transvaal (Heinemann, 1996), p. 234.
51. P. Reynolds, "Not Known Because Not Looked For: Ethnographers Listening to the Young in Southern Africa," Ethnos 60, nos. 3-4 (1995), pp. 159-81.
52. Claudia Koontz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (St. Martin, 1987)
53. Kathleen Blee, "Evidence, Empathy and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan," The Journal of American History 80, no. 2 (1993), pp. 596-606.
54. Stephen Ellis, "The Historical Significance of South Africa's Third Force," Journal of South African Studies 24, no. 2 (1998), pp. 261-99.
55. CSVR "Aims and Objectives," http://www.wits.ac.za/csvr/aims.htm
56. see also .
57. See Marita Sturken, "Imaging Postmemory/Renegotiating History," Afterimage 26, no. 6 (1999), pp. 10-12
58. Karein Goertz, "Transgenerational Representations of the Holocaust: from Memory to 'Post-Memory'," World Literature Today 72, no. 1 (1998), pp. 33-38.
59. This was the case for E.V. Daniel, who went to a different violence-torn place, Sri Lanka, to gather plantation folk songs, and was drawn into stories of terror, agony, and death. Daniel struggled with the meaning of the silences with which some of his informants answered him.
60. Telling about extreme experiences, whether as victim or perpetrator, places both the teller and the listener in a dilemma: stories of violence are vulnerable to "prurience," he notes, so that anthropology risks becoming pornography.
61. Yet at the same time, not to record the story is to betray the teller, "who wished to communicate... some part of the experience of the passion and pain of violence in its brutal immediacy." For others, it is exactly that brutal immediacy which makes the pain impossible to tell.
62. To fit it into a narrative is already to step away from it. In some cases, victims are still living in the suspended present of shock, terror or pain, and thus have no access to narrative devices.
63. E. Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence (Princeton, 1996).
64. William Cronon, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative," The Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (1992), p. 1366.
65. For examples of the various kinds of works considered to be oral histories, see
66. Saliou Mbaye, "Oral Records in Senegal," American Archivist 53 (1990), pp. 566-74
67. Bill Schneider, "More Than Words on Tape: the Problematic in Converting Orality to Material Custody," South African Archives Journal 37 (1995), pp. 94-100
68. Motlatsi Thabane, "Personal Testimony as an Historical Source in Lesotho: some Methodological Guidelines" (Masters Thesis, National University of Lesotho, 1986)
69. Hugo Slim, Paul Thompson, et al., "Ways of Listening," in The Oral History Reader, Robert Perks and Alistain Thomsen, eds. (Routledge, 1998), pp. 114-25
70. Ruth Finnegan, "Problems in the Processing of 'Oral Texts': Some Reflections on the Researcher's Role in Innovation and Consolidation," in Oral Tradition and Innovation: New Wine in Old Bottles? Edgard R. Sienaert, A. Nigel Bell, and Meg Lewis, eds. (Natal, 1991), pp. 1-23
71. Christopher Ann Paton, "Appraisal of Sound Recordings for Textual Archivists," Archival Issues 22, no. 2 (1997), pp. 117-32.
72. Eric A. Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences (Princeton, 1982)
73. Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Atheneum, 1976)
74. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the World (Methuen, 1982)
75. Jack Goody, Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1968).
76. Rosalind Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 1992).
77. Ibid., p. 20.
78. Ibid., passim.
79. Stanley Frielick, "Orality and Ecology: Steps to a New Paradigm of Knowledge," in Oral Tradition and Innovation: New Wine in Old Bottles? Edgard R. Sienaert, A. Nigel Bell, and Meg Lewis, eds. (Natal, 1991), pp. 420-21 (ellipses represent an elaborative sentence fragment).
80. Isabel Hofmeyr, "'Wailing for Purity': Oral Studies in Southern African Studies," African Studies 54, no. 2 (1995), p. 16.
81. Hugo Slim, Paul Thompson et al., "Ways of Listening" in The Oral History Reader, Robert Perks and Alistair Thomsen, eds. (Routledge, 1998), pp. 114-25.
82. Saliou Mbaye, "Oral Records in Senegal," American Archivist 53 (1990), pp. 566-74.
83. Of course, paper diaries, memoirs, etc. are often accessioned into manuscript collections, where they play a similarly ambiguous role.
84. Terry Cook, "Electronic Records, Paper Minds: The Revolution in Information Management and Archives in the Post-Custodial and Post-Modernist Era," Archives and Manuscripts 22, no. 2 (1994), pp. 301-02.
85. Helen P. Harrison, "Section I: Introduction to Audiovisual Archives," Audiovisual Archives: A Practical Reader (UNESCO, 1998). Available at .
86. Terry Cook, "Electronic Records, Paper Minds," p. 310, emphasis in original.
87. M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1993).
88. Shauna McRanor, "Maintaining the Reliability of Aboriginal Oral Records and Their Material Manifestations: Implications for Archival Practice," Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997), p. 66.
89. Ibid., p. 75.
90. David A. Wallace, "Preserving the U.S. Government's White House Electronic Mail: Archival Challenges and Policy Implications," presented at the Sixth DELOS Workshop: Preserving Digital Information (1998).
91. Verne Harris, "Claiming Less, Delivering More: a Critique of Positivist Formulations on Archives in South Africa," Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997), p. 139.
92. Peter Mazikana and William W. Moss, "Section III Oral History: Collection and Management: 3.2 Oral Tradition and Oral History," in Audiovisual Archives: a Practical Reader, Helen P. Harrison, ed. and comp. (UNESCO, 1998), paragraph 2.1.1.
93. Jean-Pierre Wallot and Normand Fortier, "Archival Science and Oral Sources," in The Oral History Reader, Robert Perks and Alistair Thomsen, eds. (Routledge, 1998), p. 364.
94. Clive Kirkwood, "The National Archives' Appraisal Programme," South African Archives Journal 40 (1998), p. 43.
95. Sean Morrow, "Dakawa Development Centre: An African National Congress Settlement in Tanzania, 1982-1992," African Affairs 97 (1998), pp. 497-521.
96. Carolyn Hamilton, "James Stuart and 'The Establishment of a Living Source of Tradition'," presented at the Institute for Advanced Social Research Seminar, University of Witswatersrand, South Africa (1994), p. 3.
97. Aletta Norval, "Truth and Reconciliation: the Birth of the Present and the Reworking of History," Journal of Southern African Studies 25, no. 3 (1999), p. 515.
98. Motlatsi Thabane, "Personal Testimony as an Historical Source in Lesotho: Some Methodological Guidelines," (Masters Thesis, National University of Lesotho, 1986), p. 2.
99. Hayden White has argued that historical texts rely on certain "linguistic protocols" to indicate their particular trope, and that they are evaluated and justified, in part, on the match between the trope and the data or information presented. Following this logic, it could be argued that oral histories have been rejected by historians in part because their structures and poetics are unfamiliar.
100. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), p. 426.
101. I use the term "societal" here in distinction to "social" as a matter of relative emphasis rather than sharp definition.
102. The term social has come to take on meanings of interdependent relationships ranging from friendships to small institutions such as clubs, up to larger institutions generally understood as societies.
103. In using "societal" I hope to lay more emphasis on the concept of society as an enduring set of social groups and institutions with an organized pattern of relations.
104. James O'Toole, Terry Cook, and Verne Harris have all supported the latter point of view, with slight variations in emphasis.
105. The term "speech act" was coined by sociolinguists in the 1960s to refer to speech that is "illocutionary," that performs a meaning that is not simply contained in the words spoken, but in socially accepted rules of performance, proposition, intent, and so forth. For example, making a promise, invoking a blessing, and stating an oath are all speech acts.
106. See Richard Bauman and Joel Scherzer, eds., Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking (Cambridge, 1974)
107. Pier Paolo Giglioli, ed., Language and Social Context (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1972).
108. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988).
109. Terry Cook, "Electronic Records, Paper Minds: the Revolution in Information Management and Archives in the Post-Custodial and Post-Modernist Era," Archives and Manuscripts 22, no. 2 (1994), p. 304.
110. According to Andor Skotnes, South Africa does have a national register of manuscripts and a national register of audiovisual material, but they are not widely used. "People's Archives and Oral History in South Africa: A Traveller's Account," South African Archives Journal 37 (1995), p. 61.
111. For thoughts on total archives, see Terry Cook, "From the Record to Its Context: The Theory and Practice of Archival Appraisal Since Jenkinson," South African Archives Journal 37 (1995), pp. 32-52
112. Terry Cook, "What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift," Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997), pp. 17-63
113. Joan Schwartz, "'We make our tools and our tools make us': Lessons from Photographs for the Practice, Politics, and Poetics of Diplomatics," Archivaria 40 (Fall 1995), pp. 173-81.
114. Nigel Worden, "Missing Heads: Public History in South Africa," Itinerario 20, no. 3 (1996), pp. 125-32
115. Clive Kirkwood, "The National Archives' Appraisal Programme," South African Archives Journal 40 (1998), pp. 41-44
116. Verne Harris, "Redefining Archives in South Africa: Public Archives and Society in Transition, 1990-1996," Archivaria 42 (Fall 1996), pp. 6-27.
117. Jean Dryden, "Oral History and Archives: The Case Against," Canadian Oral History Association Journal 5, no. 1 (1981-1982), pp. 34-37
118. David Bishop, "The Role of the Archivist in the Collecting of Oral History" (Masters Thesis, University of Liverpool, 1998), available at .
119. Derek Reimer, "Oral History and Archives: the Case in Favour," Canadian Oral History Association Journal 5, no. 1 (1981-1982), p. 32 as cited by Bishop in his chapter section 3.2.
120. Bishop D, "The Role of the Archivist in the Collecting of Oral History," chapter section 3.5.
121. Kathy Eales, "Community Archives: Introduction," South African Archives Journal 40 (1998), p. 13.
122. One could argue further, in fact, that the state is always a contestant, whether it admits it or not.
123. Kirkwood C, "The National Archives' Appraisal Programme," p. 44.
124. McRanor S, "Maintaining the Reliability of Aboriginal Oral Records," p. 75.
125. Bill Schneider, "More Than Words on Tape: The Problematic in Converting Orality to Material Custody," South African Archives Journal 37 (1995), p. 97.
126. Cook T, "What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898," p. 18 and p. 46.
127. "Introductory Essay: Refiguring the Archive," pp. 139-140.