A place where history can still be made

The past is another country, and the archive is the way to discover it, writes

THE archive: open to all, yet elusive to many and a secret to most. Very few dare move beyond its entrance hall, as stepping beyond it requires one to have the keys to its rooms, and a map to navigate its crowded spaces.

What is even scarier is that you, as a member of the public, do not physically enter those rooms, but write down what you want the archivist to retrieve for you.

But when the archivist brings what you’ve requested, it is all worth it.

You peruse fragments of history for better understanding, and set about making meaning.

Yet, the matter of what fragments make it into the archive jolts more questions.

Almost every city and town has an archive, containing a history of its own. But many people, young and old, and varying in hues, don’t enter or engage with these spaces, for various reasons.

Having worked in archives in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, I can posit a working explanation for this: these places are intimidating, and knowledge is a prerequisite for daring to enter them. Specific call numbers and references are needed to retrieve documents.

Having spent more than six years on various archival research projects for historians, I can safely say that archives hold as many questions as answers.

I signed up for these archival research gigs as an undergraduate student to supplement my monthly stipend. But I gained so much more.

As I perused once top-secret documents stamped “Geheim” (secret) at the Department of International Relations, paged through frayed Indaleni Art School files in the Richmond Museum in KwaZulu-Natal, and skimmed fragile documents about Salisbury Island in the Pietermaritzburg Archive Repository, I found access to the past as another country.

In these spaces I encountered amazing documents, which threw up questions that went way beyond the briefing for the research project.

While I was working on the Salisbury Island Indian School (a part of present-day Durban harbour), a most piercing sepia-toned photograph of a stevedore working on Salisbury Island in the early 1900s evoked many questions.

The photo collection was of the Durban shipyard, where ships were being built and repaired, and the photos showed white men, with their names carefully inscribed.

Other photos showed black men, scantily dressed and nameless.

One photo captured an unnamed stevedore, alone in the frame, staring straight into the camera. I took a picture of the amber photograph as it stirred something in me.

Professor Hlonipha Mokoena, in the book The Colour of Our Future, argued that “we [young people] are engaged in the process of rediscovering the ordinary”.

The unnamed stevedore posed so many questions: why did he, ordinary and nameless as he was, warrant a solo photo when all the other black men were photographed in groups? What of the recognition and history of black stevedores in the making of Durban harbour?

The photo’s tangential inclusion beckons us to ask about other fragments, which were not fortunately — and perhaps accidentally — included in the archive.

I recently attended a workshop at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, where Dr Victoria Collis-Buthelezi delivered the keynote address, titled “The Black Archive as a Problem Space”.

In the address, she described the archive as a process of curation because archives are constantly being reproduced to inform narratives. What are archives, though? South African historian Professor Carolyn Hamilton, in the book Becoming Worthy Ancestors, describes archives as “collections or store-houses of preserved historical resources which may be documentary, oral, visual, material, virtual or physical”.

She further tells us that “we can no longer think of the archive as a point of origin, or the contents of archives as embalmed”, as archival sources “have long histories of making before they are trapped in the archive, and they are further fashioned, in the archives, as archivists augment and excise, order and contextualise them”.

The process of curating an archive and selecting what gets included or excluded, and under which catalogue, creates shifts and dissonances, at times fragmenting the source’s meaning, to create new intended meaning.

With this in mind, it is important to remember that “history is not a place to find comfort, but a place to find meaning”, as the author of Askari, Dr Jacob Dlamini, said.

Hamilton further argues that “the archive proves to be a powerful way of separating regulated knowledge from uncontrolled knowledge”.

Mokoena writes that “it is a truism of South African history that black people have been ‘invisible’ for centuries — erased out of history, erased out of place, erased out of cities, erased out of mind”.

She adds that the younger generation needs to confront the “blank spaces” of our country’s history.

The experiences of earlier generations, such as the anonymous Salisbury Island stevedore, help us to question these “blank spaces” as they, too, need to be inserted into history — in this case, the history of Durban harbour.

We can read their inclusion as the “painting in, plastering over, colouring in” of history, thereby disrupting the danger of a single narrative.

In rediscovering the “ordinary”, we need to engage it with inquiring eyes and a questioning mind.

As intimidating as archives are, ways are needed to ensure they draw young and old people, varying in hues, into their spaces to engage, question, turn over and test their content.

There are many other “nameless” Salisbury Island stevedores that need to be discovered; in certain rooms, on particular shelves, in archives across South Africa.

But archives need to be experienced as inclusive, welcoming spaces, which are ready to be engaged with by all — those who might not already have the requisite knowledge of their content, but who are eager to search for meaning in their ordinariness.

Ngwane is an institutional researcher at the Gauteng provincial legislature

History is not a place to find comfort, but a place to find meaning