Family history: An idea, a wound, or just details?

Mbongiseni Buthelezi looks at the personal ways in which people engage with the past and asks two questions: What does family history mean to contemporary South Africans? Where and how do we locate it?

In her essay “In History,” Antiguan novelist Jamaica Kincaid’s asks: ‘What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me? Should I call it history? If so, what should history mean to someone like me? Should it be an idea, should it be an open wound, and each breath I take in and expel healing and opening the wound again and again, over and over, or is it a moment that began in 1492 and has come to no end yet? Is it a collection of facts, all true and precise details, and, if so, when I come across these true and precise details, what should I do, how should I feel, where should I place myself? Why should I be obsessed with these questions?’ (2001: 620)

While Kincaid’s evocative questions are about the Caribbean and slavery, they are worth contemplating for thinking about the present in South Africa. How do we reckon with the past as individuals and as social units such as families in order to know how we have arrived where we are today? What should the past mean to me and my family? Should we build monuments to commemorate certain ancestors? Should we continue to practice family rituals in which we address ancestors about whom we know nothing? Should we investigate the past and find out who were the people named in Buthelezi izithakazelo (kinship group praises) that we use in ceremonies and as forms of polite address in daily life? Should we call ourselves Zulu or resist Zuluness given that our forebears are likely to have been forcibly incorporated into the Zulu kingdom in the 1810s? Should we simply be South African? And what should the collection of facts that we call South African history mean to us when our ancestors and those of all who look like us were for the most part left out of documents that make up the record of the South African past? Where should we search for our past when the archival record will yield very little? Why should I be obsessed with these questions?

I ask these questions as a way of pointing to the very personal ways in which we engage with the past. This as the Archival Platform moves towards launching its clan names project in 2010. There are many people in South Africa who are interested in making sense of their families’ pasts. Some of them have organised themselves into genealogical societies, religious institution-centred research groups, or kinship-based social movements as we all try to make sense of our pasts. Others have formed virtual communities on social networking platforms like Facebook where they exchange information. Interest in discovering who we are and how we have come to be where we are through finding out about our forebears is high at the same time as there are many official heritage projects to formulate a version of our collective past. Individual and small group versions of the past do not always synchronise with official narratives. Official histories and constructions of national heritage cannot take account of small detail. Hence the Archival Platform’s aim to begin a conversation about how to go about putting together the detail of one’s family’s past.

Some people have left records of their lives that pass down from generation to generation. Each generation adds its own details about itself that it wishes remembered by those to come. In many families, stories are told around the dinner table or the fire about heroes worth emulating or commemorating. And in yet more, the heroes are names in stories of great events such as battles or symbols in lines of poetry. In many cases we simply celebrate names to whom we have vague genealogical connections without knowing much about them. How do we find out about the people to whom these names belonged? To what age did great-uncle or babamkhulu so-and-so live? Did khokho or aunt such-and-such lead a full life? Were they happy? How many children did they have? What were their political views? What kinds of questions can we realistically hope for answers to? Where do we begin looking for information?

Some of the ancestors have left archival traces of themselves in books and official documents like birth and death certificates. What do we make of tainted records produced in times of colonialism and apartheid? Do these mean different things to the descendants of settlers and those of people who were at the receiving end of colonial authority? And there are many people on whom the written record is almost completely silent. To get to know anything about such people we have to excavate silence. It is especially difficult to learn about one’s ancestors in cultures where the oral record was, and is, the preponderant method of keeping information. Factors such as the porous nature of memory, and the malleability of the record, which means it changes with changing political and social circumstances, make accuracy hard to arrive at. Nevertheless, we continue the pursuit. The ultimate point may not be to trace precise genealogical connections, which often hardens into ethnic absolutism, but to develop a sense of the routes via which we have come to be where we are in British theorist Paul Gilroy’s view: who moved where, when, why? In my own family’s history, I am increasingly interested in learning about the female lineage: my mother’s mother was a Mthembu, my father’s mother was a Sibisi. Who were their mothers? What are implications of tracing our pasts through the maternal line for gender politics in patrilineal societies?

In mid-2010 we will be launching a virtual forum to discuss the questions I’ve raised above and many more, to share information, to find ways of using archival institutions – archives and records services, museums, etc. – and knowledgeable people, more effectively. Comments on this blog are most welcome as a way of getting the issues foremost in our minds out into the open.

Mbongiseni Buthelezi is part of the Archives and Public Culture NRF programme at the University of Cape Town, and is an associate of the Archival Platform.