31 Jan – 6 Feb 2015
Cape Town, Oudtshoorn, Grahamstown
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Saturday 31 Jan, Sea Point Cape Town to Oudtshoorn, 430 kms
A good dinner, the week ahead, what is Schreiner-Hemming…
A day’s drive, leaving at 8am with the Grail of dinner at Jemima’s in Oudtshoorn before us (and also the much nicer drive on the R62, rather than the so-called Garden Route). It rained last night in CT, it cascaded down several times on the way, and today Oudtshoorn is actually cold! Yesterday it was a touch under 40c, today it’s a cool cloudy 25c… It’s been an expensive day, as I misjudged the speed zone after leaving a petrol stop and got pulled up and fined R600 (about £35); my mistake, and an annoying one as I’ve been being so careful not to go over any speed limit. Arrived about 4pm. Dinner awaits us in a few of hours. Jemima’s is an institution here. I first ate there in the first month it opened, when it was owned and run by three sisters, a wine-maker, a baker and a restauranteur. They moved on a few years ago. Two years ago it was still very good; I hope it still is.
Head-space is mainly thinking about food and wine, to be honest. Two other things going on are research-focused. One is, thinking about how to organise what work we’ll be doing in the Cory Library next week, with three items on the list. Two are related to things done on the last trip in July 2014 (see Great Cory Fieldtrip blog) but with some additional tweaks needed; and the third is something new for Cory but related to a collection I’ve worked on in the Bodleian collections in Oxford. The other is, that an epistolarium can take different forms, depending on its composing letters. If the Forbes Family (which we’ll be returning to work on in Pretoria in two weeks time) can be characterised as a scriptural economy, as I argue in an article being published in Sociology later in 2015, then how should the Schreiner-Hemming collection which we’ve just finished working on at UTC be characterised?
I’m perplexed about this. There are actually three families (Schreiner, Hemming, Brown of Taung) involved; well, there are actually key nodes of letter writers/recipients involving half a dozen people from these families rather than the families as such. However, and quite unlike the Forbes and the Findlay Family papers, which latter we’ll return to in Jo’burg at the end of the year, they have no over-aching features, certainly none that has struck me so far. I need to think harder about this, once we’re in Grahamstown.
Sunday 1 Feb, Oudtshoorn to Grahamstown, 487kms
Jemima’s was indeed good – grilled kudu and ostrich, preceded by a tomato and pesto tambale. Stayed in the Gumtree Lodge, which was also really good, indeed outstanding, and the tree itself immense and venerable. However, it rained – or rather poured – all the way to Grahamstown, so not such a nice drive. Grahamstown? A million unfilled potholes, some large enough to wreck an unwary car. It seems its usual run down shabby living on former glory days self. Where we’re staying – A White House – is supposed to be one of the 3 best of the accommodation available, but features shabby castoff furniture and has just a trickle of water for a shower. The list of oh dear comments goes on, headed by three barking dogs… Many people will descend at the end of this week – the Rhodes academic year starts, so a couple of thousand first years plus parents and siblings are arriving.
Monday 2 – Friday 6 Feb, Cory Library, Grahamstown
The three tasks for the Cory visit focus on Robert White letters, Mark Pringle diaries, Townsend Pringle accounts. Also, ‘what is Schreiner-Hemming’ still rattles around at the back of the mind.
The Mark Pringle diaries run from 1911 to 1960 (he died at the end of the year). They or at least the earliest are that interesting sub-genre, the farming diary. How often things burst the ontological bounds, as with letters-like-journals, and cards-like-letters, while these are diaries-more-like-time-budgets and rather different from how convention depicts diary writing. They have been sampled – all entries for eight separate years, and every reference to ‘race’ and ethnicity has been recorded. There are discernible changes to the moral order of ‘race’ over the years, although whether these are ’caused’ by external factors like the 1913 Land Act remains to be explored. Watch this space.
The Harriet Townsend later Pringle papers are riveting. She is a frontier woman with a set of accounts, import and sales ledgers and over 300 regular customers on her books, rather than a farmhouse, the domestic round and a gun for when the patriarch is absent. I’ll be writing about this when we get back – it casts a whole new light on frontier life in the 1830s and early 40s and women’s part in it.
There are 40 Robert White letters to his business partner and uncle Robert Godlonton here, which nicely supplement the circa 80 of them in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and are mainly written from 1850 to the 1860s. Also fascinating – apart from in times of war, there are next to no references to anyone other than the networks of white settlers. Whiteness is the privilege of silence? But there are also other factors to be reckoned with – like, Robert White and Robert Godlonton as particular kinds of settlers, and also the separations of peoples that had been and still was (just about) policy for local colonial governance. Hmmm. Another knotty problem that remains rattling around in the mind.
On Saturday we leave for Bloemfontein, for some events at the University of the Free State and also some scoping activities in the collections in the Free State archives. Should be interesting.
Last updated: 4 February 2015
