2 Jan – 8 Jan 2015

Johannesburg, the Magaliesburgs, Kimberley, Beaufort West

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Between, What is it? How to…

Between

It is a truism that letters have an ingrained in-betweenness as an integral and perhaps a definitional characteristic. I write, to you; we are separated in time and space; the letter or other form of epistolary communication travels, from me, to you. And if we are already, or we become, correspondents involved in a long-term set of exchanges, then the process starts again, for you take your turn and write (back), to me, and so on. In thinking in epistolary scholarship about this, the attention is usually on the moments (in Lefebvre’s sense of the word ‘moment’) of writing and reading. However, ‘between’ is elastic, can involve many things other than formal postal services, and may feature the travels of people, not just letters. A small for instance – here I am, writing this between: between Edinburgh and my first archival port of call in Kimberley (more exactly, this between is for a short time a farm about 20ks beyond Magaliesburg, in the mountains); I left Scotland with, and still have, an ‘epistolary communication’ to deliver to someone in Kimberley, and I have another for someone in Grahamstown. These travel with me, in the between that is stretching from my office in Edinburgh to their different delivery points in South Africa.

The complicated betweenness of just about all the letters that WWW is concerned with is sometimes straightforward and a matter of prevailing custom and practice, sometimes not. And at times it brings with it the betweenness of people situated nowhere in particular on each succeeding day of their travels, necessary places but not intentionally the focus of visiting. Good examples from collections WWW is researching are the long slow travels of David Forbes in the 1860s on trading trips in Natal, Zululand and the Transvaal, and the longer and at least equally slow travels of Bessie Price with her children returning from Britain by ox-wagon from Port Elizabeth to Molepolole in now-Botswana. Their letters bear the signs, not just of multiple dates, but of feeling cut off in the in-between, and relatedly worrying about not getting letters from loved ones and what might be happening to them.

What is it?

An encounter with something related to these thoughts about between has just occurred in working on the Kimberley Africana Library collections. One of these is variously labelled as the journal of Helmore’s travels, and the Helmore – Moffat letters (nb. both were missionaries, the date is 1880/1). They are both, or perhaps something else but incorporating elements of each, as sort of letters, written every few days, in a context in which ‘post’ was an opportunity that might occur weeks, months, away and so tracking time in terms of when letters/entries were made. And anyway, what survives is this, but a transcript made by a distant descendant of Helmore’s, in quavering handwriting. So what is it, this mode of communication so much marked by the in-between?

Also on the theme of ‘what is it?’, I’ve just finished re-reading Nelson Mandela Conversations with Myself preparatory to a Summer School on letters I’m running in a couple of weeks. It sounds that this is straightforwardly authored by Mandela, using extracts from his personal-political papers (letters, extracts from brief calendar notes, interviews and so on). However, it’s actually things selected and extracted by the Foundation, from all the papers they preside over. Also, in various of these extracts Mandela reiterates that there are things that should not be spoken of or only done so in guarded and bland ways. So all the time when reading these extracts two thoughts were in mind. The first is, the strong sense of what-was-not-spoken-nor-written; and the second is, what hasn’t the Foundation included and what were the criteria for selecting the things that were. Going to the Foundation website – this is interesting, polished, smooth, but I was unable to get a sense of how many papers of what kind exist in its collection – a calendar of the collection or a more detailed inventory of its contents is not a feature, or at least I was unable to find such. But what is the book, then? Its authorship is complicated, and it is ‘by-ish’ Mandela, with levels of gatekeeping from him, the ANC command structure, the editor/s, the Foundation, and with any editing of the extracted texts not specified. And if one wants to get beyond what is in the book, say for example to read whole documents not just extracts, the Foundation website is not so much a first research port of call, more a means to make contact with one of its librarians or archivists.

How to…

Arriving in Kimberley for two days of archive work scoping the possibilities of a new collection, the question of how work a collection very quickly so that some beginning questions can be answered arose. After the event, in Beaufort West, en route for Matjiesfontien and then Cape Town, I sit mulling this over and writing these ‘how to…’ thoughts.

The questions include:

• How is the collection organised?
• What are its main contents concerned with?
• Is it interesting enough (given a particular research topic or project) to want to do more work on it? And if so, on what exactly?
• Can anything specific be recorded now (in a note, on computer file, or using JPEGs if permitted and this is sensible?
• What if anything might be done in the way of more detailed work?

The collection in question concerns the papers of a well-known Kimberley man, a jack of all trades and entrepreneurial farmer turned diamond mine owner, George Paton. Paton was among other things for some years a close associate of Rhodes and with Rhodes one of the MPs for Barkly West. There are 16 over-sized boxes of papers. In around 7 very focused hours of concentrated work (no breaks, no lunch etc) I was able to (a) answer the above questions, (b) make some scratty working notes in a notebook, (c) write 4 pages of structured notes in a Word file, (d) jpeg key finding aids and some other things, and (d) make decisions about any future work. How to =

• Read the inventory
• Call up some materials from each of the main sections of the collection – personal & family letters, company papers, notebooks, letter-books and so on; skim-read files of documents from each section to get a sense of them and make notes
• Call up the boxes holding the earliest dated items, then skim-read through contents to get a broad sense of what they’re concerned with and make notes
• Ditto the latest dated items
• Decide provisionally what is the most interesting aspects = for me, this is (a) the early more open less controlled phase of diamond mining, (b) the Newlands Diamond Mining Company that Paton established and which later failed because of what he saw as a shareholders’ plot
• Call up more items related to these things, and read them more carefully, also making more notes
• Decide what to JPEG = the inventory, a scattering of letters about the land matters, the Diggers Revolution in early mining days, the Newslands Company. Before doing this I made a file structure with these headings, and each bit was jpeged then downloaded
• Search the catalogue for anything else on Paton or the company
• Read through what I’d written, add to it
• Sit and think, while going over my notebook scratty stuff, computer notes, and add some more bits

Some answers: Yes, it’s interesting, but just as a side-interest of mine in research terms (not enough family letters). It’s most interesting as documenting the rise and fall of a failed Randlord, with this deriving from the machinations of Rhodes and henchmen. It gives excellent inroad into the early days of diamond mining, land buying and deals, the later stage of company formation, and the ‘fall’ of Paton and what had been a successful diamond mining company. Paton died in 1914. However, the mine continued under other ownership for some decades before being declared unprofitable and the collection includes papers on this. Matters of ‘race’ and ethnicity are implicit in the organisation of mining and its hierarchies and divisions of labour. Some specific sections of the collection open this up for consideration. Future work, yes, but just for curiosity and interest’s sake, and also as part of working with a PhD student for whom this collection is highly relevant.

And now a storm is brewing, the wind and heat rising, sullen lightning flashes are starting, and I’m thinking forward to Matjiesfontein then Cape Town.

Last updated: 7 January 2015