Fri 15 Aug: On Tues afternoon from 2.30 to 4.30 and Wednesday from 8.45 to about 1.30 I read the eight years of Pringle diaries listed in yesterday’s blog. This wasn’t a hovering over every word kind of reading, it was a gallop though. What kind of diary is this: opinion, reflection, everyday detail? What is he interested in? How much does the man write and is it always the same kind of things or not? He’s a farmer in a farming area and so who are his workers and how does he (does he?) describe them? Does he name them and how? What is one diary ‘like’ in all these respects compared with others? How do the diaries change over time? What else about each diary stands out? And I write short notes about each year’s diary-entries accordingly.

Having done this, what do I make of these diaries? The early ones contain schematic entries primarily concerning farming tasks; later ones have more everyday events and people; and Pringle’s workers are briefly included via mentions of three men in particular, but generally the activities are just done seemingly without agency. Apart from very brief mentions, the Pringle workers and black people more generally are absent, silenced, their presence not recorded. The last diaries contain many recordings of disasters and deaths – miners trapped underground in Chile, car deaths on South African roads, ‘Natives’ beaten to death, women (implicitly white) brutally attacked, thousands killed in earthquakes, and the lists go on and on and across the globe as well as specifically South Africa. Mr Pringle in his 80s has been reading books ‘on the Native-European problem’; and his mentions of sermons and bible readings are more and more frequent and detailed. The crescendo comes in 1960 and includes the shooting of Vorwoerd and the Sharpeville killings along with many other grim occurrences. My conclusion is that I am not going to incorporate these diaries as a group into the WWW project datasets, although I may look in more detail at the 1960 diary as part of something focused on Sharpeville.

Do I mind or regret the time spent on scoping the Pringle diaries over these 49 years from 1911 to 1960? Absolutely not. I have a broad view of them and their contents, and I can certainly comment on them within their parameters and go back to my notes and the jpegs I have taken for more detail if needed. And, if their content or style had been otherwise then they would have become a major part of the project. If I han’t explored them  and taken a chance, I wouldn’t have found out whether they were directly relevant and important or not. And if I later think that my conclusion here is incorrect, I can return to them much more knowledgeably.

Last updated: 15 August 2014