Traces analysed

‘The trace’ is what remains, the flotsam and jetsam of the past that ends up in archives, special places for conserving them, and which also accumulate in our lives. Traces are the kind of stuff found in handbags, cupboards and attics, as well as in museums, libraries and archives. They include letters, wages-slips, photographs, shopping lists, appointment diaries, sketch-maps, draft Wills, notes and copies… The traces that remain are wider than just written documents, certainly wider than letters alone. Discussions of many traces can be accessed from the links below, with new traces added regularly. The companion is the Curiosities section of the WWW website, which provides analyses of particular kinds of traces, ones that stretch the boundaries of what ‘a letter’ is.

• The trace
• Analysing traces: texts in action
• Reservation of Separate Amenities Act 1953: whites only
• It’s most unjust: Shepherd to Klazo, 20 July 1960
• Where our country is going: Goldberg to Botha 13 February 1985
• Olive Schreiner’s Address to the Universal Races Congress, 1911
• Seeing race, seeing Mrs Brown, 1890s
• 30 May 1808, concerning the Bosjiesman Nation
• 4 June 1948, Dr DF Malan addressed the voters of S Africa
• 1837, drawing a colour line
• Give that Boy 1 lb of Sugar, 17 November 1883
• Lady Anne Barnard to Henry Dundas, 11 June 1798
• My dear Shepstone, 11 January 1857
• Mrs McCorkindale, Muslatinzan, Couzan and an 1876 pass
• The Transvaal pass system, 1880
• Galy’s pass, 20 February 1844
• De Beers compound c1886
• Tepa’s contract of hiring and service, 20 Sept 1845
• Sweetest of young persons, 24 March 1907
• Traces of traces: a list and the archive of the other archive
• Hear the trace, 15 December 1915
• ‘I tak up my pen’, 8 December 1830
• ‘Natives’ Land Act, 1913 
• ‘An admixture of Native blood’, 22 February 1933
• Draft Treaty of Vereeniging clauses, May 1902
• Townsend/Hockly marriage record, 20 Dec 1836
• Lovedale riots 1920, 1946
• The 1820 Settlers arrive, 15 & 16 May 1820
• From John Montagu, Colonial Secretary, 14 February 1844
• Two messengers (kaffirs)…  waylaid and killed, 13 March 1852
• ‘Afford my Country an infinite Advantage’ 9 June 1795
• Get the boys for me, 14 February 1898
• All the whites are to be killed, Jan/Feb 1914
• Communicate to the King, 25th January 1884
• In the Supreme Court of the Transvaal, 13 Nov 1902
• Cattle pass, 23.11.1902
• Send the coolie on: nd but 1889
• ‘I send this boy’, 21.9.1896
• 10 December 1896 telegram: D. Carnegie To LMS
• Receipt for £5 to JHL Findlay per EB Quirk 1907
• Indebted to your indulgence, a 1795 letter
• A diary, tracing change 1960
• Ringing silences in Jan Smuts’ letters to May Hobbs, 1919-50
• Prosecution for Libel: An 1840 News Item
• Whiteness, now you see it, now…, 1908
• Indiscriminate slaughter? 1851
• The ‘n word’: Le Sueur’s note, Sept 1901
• Indentures of the Apprenticed Labourer Anna, 4 June 1835
• A letter and three lists: Hawksley to Rhodes, 9 February 1901
• Letters by Njube son of Lobengula, 21 Sept-21 Oct 1898
• Two Cecil Rhodes letters 1891 and 1895
• The Forbes, the Men and Nomalanga’s Baby, Forbes Diaries 12-18 July 1904
• The Wills of Elizabeth Hockly and Dods Pringle 1857 and 1876
• Forbes Diary, 24 May 1904
• William Gilfillan to W. Dods Pringle, 23 January 1851
• ‘Kaffir Employment Act’ 1857 no.27 1857
• Robin and the cuts, 15 November 1911
• On the panikin filled to the brim, no date
• The rings of Umquaka and Nellie: two 1880s photographs
• Seeing Soweto 1976, Re: Seeing Sharpeville 1960
• “The Kafir would not go with me…” 15 July 1868
• The ‘K word’ and the Forbes diary, 13 July 1904

Last updated: 4 August 2022