2 March 2015
Times, places, puzzles, archives
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How strange to be back, and what is odder is the journey sardine-like in an encasing of metal which hurtles through the skies that has accomplished my being so. The last plane was late and the flight took much longer than scheduled. My very first thoughts were, it’s very cold, Scotland is astoundingly white, and thoughts about ‘home’ are very complicated. It’s now the next morning and of course far too soon for considered reflections, so rather than sharp images in a golden eye, some murky ones through a glass darkly now follow.
The continued normalisation of South Africa. It looks, feels, is a much more ordinary place than when I first encountered it 20 years ago. There isn’t that instant suspicion from them when people of all skin colours meet strangers that there used to be. There is much more public space mixing of people, although beyond that there are still many degrees of separation. And there is still that continued archival double take, when thinking back and forth between the present day and the remaining documentary traces of the past as I go about my daily archival business.
Times, and the overlappings of times. My immersion in their times (many of them, stretching this trip from the 1790s to the 1930s) as these unfold letter by letter, as I have read and engaged with them in their thousands over the last 8 and a bit weeks. The semi-connected way that their times in epistolary form intersected with my time as I sat reading in archives, and also thinking about this in life beyond the working days narrowly defined. There is a definite feeling of temporal overload at the moment, so I need to methodically work through everything we’ve done and separate it out in my mind.
Space and place. The distinctiveness of the many places in which the letter-writers lived their lives and that these places made discernible difference – New Rush/Kimberley, Ceres, Baviaans River, Cradock, Fraserburg, New Scotland/Amsterdam, Grahamstown, Taung, Pretoria, Zinqwazi, Cape Town, were all distinctive, enabled or inhibited possibilities in their own particular ways at different points in time. How on earth did notions of the general come about when people were so immersed in the specificities of the local and particular in an age where news of other places was so restricted? One answer is, people got themselves about in the most astonishing way, so places weren’t so isolated as first thought might suppose, something that the letters and other papers of, in order worked on, George Paton, the Schreiners and Hemmings and Browns, Harriet Townsend, Mark Pringle, the Forbes and their myriad connections, all convey.
Puzzles that resound: The puzzles are a combination of what is it to know and how things are, how they are constituted, and in a sense they are not resolvable. What is Schreiner-Hemming-Brown? What is ‘a copy’ and how to tell it apart from ‘an original’ that is marked by total absence apart from in that word ‘copy’? I can say by fiat how I conceive of this, a solution of a kind, but the trickiness is inherent and persists.
The diverse character of archives. By ‘archive’ I mean an organisational entity which holds one or more collections, so I’m not using it as a synonym for power or things I don’t approve of (eg. ‘the imperial archive’), nor as a term for a particular collection (eg. ‘the archive of Cardiff Mothers’ Union’). Beyond the brief comments below, the archives we’ve worked in each have distinctive ways of organising and curating their collections, so knowledge needs to be built up about each separately. Of those below, with the exception of UCT Manuscripts & Archives little is available on the web. Re the National Archives system (composed by the Cape, Natal, Free State and Transvaal provincial archives plus the National Archive in Pretoria), the website information dates from 1996.
Kimberley Africana Library: Efficient, friendly, helpful, organised, focused. Great collections, on a specialist range.
UCT Manuscripts & Archives: Now in the Jagger Library this is rather anonymous, while before it moved it was certainly in cramped quarters but was very hands-on and hopefully may recover its user-friendly aspects. Has a vast number of wonderful collections, and a lot of information is available electronically.
Cory Library: Efficient, extremely helpful with an interesting mixture of co-users. Fascinating collections, some unsorted. Little online information. Should proclaim its wonders more.
Free State Archives Repository: Part of the National Archives system. Small, helpful, efficient, and just about to experience a change at the top through retirement so fingers crossed that this survives. Focused collections, some of incredible significance.
National Archives Repository, Pretoria: Collections of incredible significance, BUT….. This is the most dysfunctional, noisy, badly run place I’ve worked in. The staff shout, spend a lot of the day noisily socialising with other workers in the building, have lost or mislaid key finding aids; the stack staff often can’t find things that should be there, at a rough guess because these have been nicked, or they tell you collections don’t exist when they do and you’ve previously worked on them; and various of the regular users go mainly to socialise, which they do loudly and intrusively (including with library staff as well as each other) so that for a large chunk of each day concentration is not possible without wearing headphones – and sometimes not then. A national archive? South Africa’s petrol stations are better run, less noisy and do it more credit. Such a shame.
Last updated: 4 March 2015
