7 Feb – 13 Feb 2015
Grahamstown, then Bloemfontein
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Sat 7 Feb Grahamstown to Bloemfontein, 590 kms
In our six days residence, Grahamstown had three electricity outages in two days, low water pressure for the whole time, and also a lengthy complete water outage. Folks treat it as ordinary but mainly don’t have basic things to cope. The 4 star accommodation we were in didn’t have a generator or backup water and there weren’t even candles in the rooms we were in. Luckiy (aka forethought) we brought 10ls of water and torches with us… Anyway, good to get out and go somewhere where the municipality is hopefully better run. Also to leave behind four barking and whining dogs, some of which kept me awake most of last night, whining whining whining. Unfortunately Sue now has the terrible throat infection I had in Cape Town and has paroxysms of coughing, so has been unable to drive. Leaving GTown at 8.15am this morning, we arrived in Bloem at 3.30pm, me in a fairly zombie like state.
Sun 8 – Fri 13 Feb What is it?
I’m still thinking about ‘what is it?’ in relation to the (mis-named, please see earlier blogs) Schreiner-Hemming collection. Where my puzzling out has got to at the moment is that thinking about these letters in terms of the three families (the above two plus Brown of Taung), and also in terms of the major writers of letters it contains (which I did in the previous blog), is not helpful. Most of the letters are in fact to and by Ettie Stakesby Lewis nee Schreiner. There are other groups of letters – by and between Arthur Brown and Effie Brown nee Hemming, and involving Winnie Hemming in particular regarding care of her brother Guy Hemming (who was in an asylum 1907 to the 1950s), and her management of a house in Blauuwberg Strand left jointly to her and her cousin Alice Findlay. But by far the largest component are the letters to and by Ettie – for instance, of the 189 Olive Schreiner letters in the collection, about 170 are to Ettie; most of those by Fred Schreiner and Alice Hemming nee Schreiner are to Ettie; and so on. Consequently I’m mulling over if there are characteristics these many hundreds of lettershare, so that they might be seen as connected in some way in addition to them being to or by Ettie. What I need is the minimum of a day’s worth of time to read through all the work done at UCT, and alas this isn’t available until after we return to the UK in March. So instead there are these rattling around kinds of thoughts and surmises in my mind, which I can’t explore in a thorough-going and systematic way yet. It’s very tantalising.
That is last week – what of this one?
The Free State Archives Repository is small, helpful, edficient, quiet (apart from Saturday mornings, which tend to attract many family researchers having a nice but noisy time), and is in some ways an archetype. It was formed with clearly political purposes in mind and focused on assembling collections of the politically and militarily ‘great and good’ of the Free State. Previously I read every finding aid, in search of some ‘ordinary family’ collections like Forbes and Findlay ones, but to no avail. The complication that has exaccerbated the political underpinnings of the repository collections is that, unlike poor migrant Britons, who generally had a degree of at least functional literacy, local Boer farmers did not. This is in significant part because they spoke a vernacular, ‘Taal’ (language), that combined Dutch, English, Khoi and other languages and at that time had no generally accepted written form (smartened up and ‘purified’, it later became Afrikaans). And so, if there are no ordinary family collections, what are we working on while here? Some unordinary ones, in particular the Frasers, who spawned both an NGK dominee and Free State nationalist closely linked with the Presidency AND an entrepreneur politician with strong pro-Britain convictions. But, more importantly, we are focusing on the South African War (1899-1902) concentration camp records for the Free State camps building on some work I did for Mourning Becomes… Post/Memory & the Concentration Camps of the South African War (Manchester UP). This war was certainly a major dividing point in South African history, and so the classificatory practices of the military and camp authorities are potentially important with regard to representations of the moral order of ‘race’ and ethnicity. We’ll see about this suggestion that ‘it changed everything’ later on, when more WWW data has been analysed. However, officials at local camp and annexed colony levels certainly recorded everything, as did, at even more local levels, the doctors, teachers, clerks and others carrying the day to day activities of feeding people, treating those who were ill (particularly when epidemics raged their way round the camp system), teaching children and so on. The week in Bloemfontein has been busy in other ways too, and more about this after we arrive in Pretoria tomorrow (Sat 14 Feb) and I’ve had a chance to reflect on its events. But for now, Friday, I finish this at 7am and as a mega-storm and welcome rains are happening, after a week that has been hot, hot, hot.
Last updated: 13 February 2015
