Oral History and South African

Historians

Paul la Hausse

In 1961, Jan Vansina elaborated a methodology by which

African oral traditions could be gathered, transcribed, and com-
pared to produce raw material for the construction of a new African
history. As the methodological backbone of the new discipline of
African history, oral history promised to recover the ”lost voices” of
the African past. Vansina’s seminal work (translated into English in
1965) captured the imagination and helped mold the concerns of a
new generation of historians working in Africa at a time when large
parts of the continent had only recently achieved independence
from colonial rule.’ David Cohen, Stephen Feierman, and Joseph
Miller, among others, employed the techniques of oral history to
produce pioneering studies of precolonial African kingdoms which
appeared to justify the value of oral tradition as a historical source.2
This new concern with oral tradition as history made itself felt
among a small but influential group of South African historians,
most of whom were based in the School of Oriental and African
Studies at the University of London during the late sixties and
early seventies. Their collective concern was to explore the emer-
gence and dynamics of African polities in the region and their
transformation under the impact of colonial rule. One of the first of
these scholars to enter the field was Philip Bonner, whose work on
the evolution and dissolution of the Swazi state bore the imprint of
a wider Africanist concern with oral t r a d i t i ~ nSimilarly,
.~ the work
of Jeff Peires on the Xhosa, William Beinart on the Mpondo, and
that of Peter Delius on the Pedi all attempted to weave chiefly, clan,
and other oral narratives gathered in the field into their respective
studiesS4All these histories, however, employed oral tradition less
extensively than had been the case among scholars of Central and
East Africa.
At one level the explanation for this can be found in the nature
of the colonial experience in South Africa: one legacy of an ex-
tended colonial presence was a uniquely rich and substantial body

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 ORAL HISTORY / 347

of government and mission records which historians put to exten-

sive and imaginative use.5 But it was not simply that historians
retreated into the uniquely musty security of South African ar-
chives. While field research in the subcontinent exposed rich veins
of oral tradition, in many regions this was not the case? Particularly
among African communities which had been radically fragmented
by industrialization, oral traditions bore traces of written historical
sources to a degree seldom encountered elsewhere in Africa. To
some extent these more intractable problems associated with oral
tradition presaged a shift in South African historians’ engagement
with oral history: Beinart‘s research on Pondoland, for example,
which extended well into the twentieth century, indicated the
value of life histories in exploring broader structural processes of
rural differentiation and labor migrancy. Similarly, Delius, on the
completion of his research, pointed to life history interviews as ”the
most potentially fruitful area for oral research in South Africa.”7
The intellectual terrain upon which early work on precolonial
and colonial South African societies had been founded was being
rapidly transformed, not least due to the emergence of a critique of
liberal South African historiography which changed the face of
southern African studies.’ By the late seventies, South African re-
visionist historians, variously critical of and influenced by a rising
tide of dependency theory, Marxist political economy, and French
structuralist anthropology, were already seeking to redefine their
original Africanist project within a Marxist mold.
The new body of radical literature profoundly challenged pre-
vious explanations of the trajectory of capitalist development in
South Africa. At the same time, the new radical preoccupation with
questions of capital and the state tended to obscure an understand-
ing of those conflicts, struggles, and experiences through which the
African working and middle classes were forged in industrializing
urban and rural South Africa. The resurgence of African working-
class organization during the seventies provided an impetus for
historians to move beyond political economy and to explore the
relationships between class formation, political consciousness, and
culture. A new ”history from below” was thus born of the realiza-
tion that the black working class had its own traditions, cultural
consciousness, and forms of self-organization.The new history also
owed an important debt to a particular Marxist intellectual tradi-
tion embodied in the labor and social history of British and
American scholars: most notably,.E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm,
Eugene Genovese, and Herbert Gutman.

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For oral history, the implications of these developments were

significant. As historical research shifted its focus to industrializing
South Africa in the twentieth century, it revealed the rich potential
of oral testimony in the writing of histories which recovered the
subjective popular experiences of social change wrought within
living memory. The value of oral testimony in general, and life
histories in particular, was also anticipated during the seventies
from a less immediately obvious direction. Thomas Karis and
Gwendolen Carter's documentary history of opposition groupings
in South Africa-and particularly their biographical profiles of
political figures often forgotten or unknown-drew renewed atten-
tion to the unevenly explored history of black political organization
and protest in South A f r i ~ a .Perhaps
~ even more significant in
retrospect was the extended oral research of Tim Couzens in
recovering the life and work of South Africa's first major black
playwright, H.I.E. Dhlomo, and that of Brian Willan in his biog-
raphy of pioneering African nationalist, Sol Plaatje." These efforts
to gather oral testimonies coincided with increasing international
debate around the practice of oral history," and were rooted in a
wider impulse to retrieve the frequently hidden history of largely
illiterate underclasses in a society where the past has been sup-
pressed, forgotten, and distorted in a variety of complex ways.12
During the course of the eighties, the techniques of oral his-
tory, used largely in conjunction with more conventional archival
sources, have not only illuminated aspects of popular experience,
culture, and political organization, but have also exposed new areas
of historical investigation and served to mold the theoretical con-
tours of an emergent South African social history. The value of oral
history has been most clearly demonstrated in historical research
on the South African countryside, an area in which conventional
archival records reveal little about the nature of social relations. In
the work of Tim Keegan, for example, oral testimonies of members
of the rural underclasses-peasants, sharecroppers, labor-tenants,
and laborers-are used to surfort discussion of wider processes of
social and economic change. Perhaps the most ambitious project
in this regard is the current research of Charles van Onselen, which
explores rural production and social relationships in the indus-
trializing Southwestern Transvaal for the period 1914-66 through
an extensive series of biographical interviews with Kas Maine, a
black ~harecropper.'~
Moving beyond biography, the recent studies of Patrick Har-
ries and Jeff Peires record and reflect critically upon regional and

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 ORAL HISTORY / 349

community-based oral narratives of particular processes of rural

impoverishment and dispossession which have been so central to
the experience of black South Africans.” In recognizing the uneven
impact of industrialization and capital accumulation in South
Africa, recent historical work supported by oral testimonies has
begun to explore the implications of differential processes of prol-
etarianization for particular forms of rural political organization
and struggle. Notable in this regard is Helen Bradford‘s study of
the largest mass movement in South African history-the Industrial
and Commercial Workers’ Union.16 Bradford is able to move well
beyond the formal institutional confines of the I.C.U. by employing
a series of interviews with elderly men and women who witnessed
the spectacular spread of the union’s branches in the countryside.
Used in conjunction with especially rich archival records, these
testimonies provide a powerful sense of the variety of ways in
which the rural poor in different parts of South Africa interpreted
the message of union organizers in terms of local traditions of resis-
tance, inherent ideologies, and particular shared historical ex-
periences. ~

In situations where people remained fiercely attached to their

rural identities and productive resources, the uestions of land and
livestock dominated their political responses.” This was no less the
case for labor migrants, as the current research of Peter Delius on
the Sekhukuneland revolt (1958-a), and William Beinart on the
Pondoland revolt (1960) suggests. Both Delius and Beinart rely on
extensive oral evidence as one of the few ways of reconstructing
the world of African migrant experience. They explore the often
contradictory nature of migrant consciousness, as well as the forms
of migrant association which provided a crucial context for the
revolts and limited the role of national political organization within
them.”
The notion of limits imposed on formal worker organization by
forms of migrant association and modes of consciousness is at the
heart of Dunbar Moodie’s reappraisal of the 1946 mineworkers’
strike. Supported by the oral testimonies of Mpondo migrant wor-
kers, Moodie charts the rise of the African Mine Workers’ Union
and the events of 1946 within the framework of the particular moral
economy, repertoires of collective worker action, and migrant net-
works which characterized the milieu of mine and compound.”
The use of oral history has enabled South African historians to
construct a culturally sensitive understanding of class, compelling
them to relate issues of class formation to those of ethnicity, com-

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munity, gender, youth, and the family. In Jeff Guy and Motlatsi
Thabane’s study of the way in which Basotho mineworkers mobi-
lized their rural ethnic identity to gain control of shaft-sinking on
South African gold mines, the authors’ starting point was to take
subjective expressions of such identity seriously.20 Similarly, Ari
Sitas’s study of migrant cultural formations and trade unionism on
the East Rand during the post-1972 period pays close attention to
the ways in which workers understand their world in terms of
commonsense ideas and creatively respond to it through a collec-
tively-constituted moral order and the formation of defensive cul-
tural networks.21 The studies of Jacklyn Cock and Eddie Webster
echo Sitas’s concern with the working lives of people. Both use
individual life histories to uncover the nature of working experien-
ces in the household in the case of Cock) and the metal foundry (in
the case of Webster). 6
Among a growing number of urban social historians, oral his-
tory is being used in an effort to deepen understanding of urban
communities and the fabric of their social, economic, and cultural
life. Philip Bonner‘s remarkable research uses oral material to ex-
plore the history of a criminal Basotho migrant organization within
the context of the changing forms of social life, family structure,
youth organization, and political stru le which characterized the
Witwatersrand in the post-1930 period? In some of my work I have
used interviews to understand the patterns of migrant youth or-
ganization in an early urban setting, now largely obscured by the
emergence of ahFAfrican youth culture rooted in South Africa‘s
sprawling urban townships.w
Finally, retrieving the history of working-class life in urban
communities destroyed by the apartheid state after 1%0 would have
been inconceivable without the insights of oral history. Two such
communities have been the subject of research by Iain Edwards and
Bill Nasson.25 Edward’s research on Cat0 Manor in Durban and
that of Nasson on Cape Town’s District Six depict socially differen-
tiated communities which nevertheless forged a powerful sense of
their own identity, based on largely defensive cultures, networks of
self-help, and populist, sometimes undemocratic, politics.
The growing preoccupation with oral history since the mid-
seventies has resulted in the establishment of regionally-based oral
history projects concerned to document aspects of popular ex-
perience in industrializing South Africa-particularly where these
have passed unrecorded in archival records. The first oral history
project was initiated by the African Studies Institute at the Univer-

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 ORAL HISTORY / 351

sity of the Witwatersrand in 1979. The major part of what is now

known as the M.M. Molepo Oral History Collection comprises an
oral history of proletarianization in the countryside. For nearly a
decade, the life and work experiences of the rural underclasses, as
recalled for the period 1890-1945, have been extensively recorded.
The gathering of oral testimonies has been concentrated in the
Transvaal countryside, where interviews have been used to refract
the changing nature of social relations and productive forces in the
wake of South Africa's industrial revolution. In the western Trans-
vaal in particular, these processes have been mapped through an
extensive and richly detailed series of interviews.
The project also incorporates collections which explore par-
ticular dimensions of rural experience. For example, there is now a
set of fifty-eight in-depth interviews with African women from
Phokeng which explore, among other things, family structures, the
economic history of the family, and the nature of migratory ex-
perience. The collection now comprises well over six hundred inter-
views. More than two hundred of these have been transcribed,
translated (mostly from Setswana and North Sotho), and typed up
in standard format. The second part of the project comprises a more
broadly-based collection of around 450 interviews. Among these
are trade unionists, political activists, literary figures, urban
workers, and township gangsters.
The realization by the Killie Campbell Africana Library in Dur-
ban that oral history was a notable Iacuna in its otherwise rich
documentary archival holdings on Natal and Zulu history
precipitated the creation of the University of Natal Oral History
Project in 1979-80. The project originated in an attempt to "fill out
the picture of evolving patterns of conduct of African people in the
social, domestic and working spheres in the Greater Durban area
and selected rural areas of Natal for the period 1900 to 1970."26
Between 1979 and 1982 (when the project was terminated), 2.40 in-
terviews were conducted. During the course of fieldwork, the focus
of the project was broadened to include, for example, interviews
with members of the Zulu royal family, township administrators,
early African National Congress politicians, and members of Kwa-
Zulu government. Many of these interviews were conducted in
Zulu and all of these have been translated. Most of the interviews
have been transcribed, indexed, and, as is the case with other oral
history collections, the material is available for consultation by re-
searchers, except where informants have requested confidentiality.

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The potential of clearly focused oral history projects to gen-

erate particularly useful documentary material is demonstrated by
the South African Institute of Race Relations Oral History Project
(1982-84). This project comprised three discrete interviewing
programs on Hurutshe resistance to state policies in the Western
Transvaal during the fifties, African dockworkers in Durban, be-
tween 1940 and 1980, and Indian hawkers in the Transvaal from the
1940s. In all cases the interviews were edited and published in
booklet form in order to make the collective experiences which they
recorded accessible both to the social groupings from which they
derived and to a non-academic audience in general.27
The attempt to recover the history of urban and rural com-
munities, sections of an emergent working class or members of a
fractured middle class-most of whose voices remain indistinct or
silent in archival records-is not simply rooted in sentimentality.
The historical contribution of many groupings to the making of
modern South Africa has been significant but often unrecognized.
The Oral History Project established at the National University of
Lesotho in 1982 aimed to recover one of these unwritten histories:
that of Basotho workers on the South African mines. Its objective
has been to record, transcribe, and translate the personal testi-
monies of men from Lesotho who had worked on the South African
mines, "in order to gain not only a greater knowledge of the chang-
ing work experience of Basotho miners in South Africa but also new
insights into the history of mining itself-from the viewpoint of
those who did the mining."28
As has been previously noted, the rise of organized labor in the
early 1970s encouraged historians to use oral testimony to refine
their understanding of the processes and struggles which shaped
the development of social classes in South Africa. The massive ur-
ban popular protest which characterized the early eighties made
this task-particularly the exploration of class in relation to culture
and community-more urgent for many historians. In 1985, his-
torians at the University of Cape Town launched the Western Cape
Oral History Project which aims firstly, to collect life histories of
residents and ex-residents of inner Cape Town, an area of tremen-
dous social and economic change in the last eight decades and
composed of a rich diversity of social activities, ethnic groups, self-
employed people, and working-class patterns of life. Secondly, the
project has undertaken an oral history of African immigration and
informal settlement in Greater Cape,Town. Bill Nasson anticipates
that participants in this project "will hopefully see more and more

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of the history of [Cape Town’s] working people from their own

perspectives: not just buckling under the weight of capitalist ex-
ploitation and class oppression, but making their own cultural
worlds and attempting some self-realization within them.”B No
doubt these are expectations which have been at the heart of the
various oral history projects over the past ten years.
If the value of oral history has been increasingly evident in
local historical research over the last few years, so too have the
problems involved in gathering and utilizing oral material. Where
the researcher is unfamiliar with the vernacular or local patois, the
question of accurate transcription of recordings and the implica-
tions of the use of interpreters have emerged as most obvious
problems. In a society where interviewing can be potentially haz-
ardous for both interviewer and informant, the conditions under
which interviews have been conducted are seldom indicated in
research.30
For South African historians who have only relatively recently
begun to explore and debate the value of oral testimonies as an
historical source, it is perhaps hardly surprising that the local his-
toriography does not evince the same level of methodological
engagement to be found among oral historians in the United States,
Britain, and Europe. No doubt part of the reason for this also stems
from the fact that oral sources have invariably been used in con-
junction with a range of more conventional archival sources. In-
deed, where oral testimonies have provided the bulk of primary
sources for historical studies, South African scholars have been at
pains to use this material critically. The tendencies toward the
romanticization of the past, the elision of class differentiation in
accounts of community life, the blurring of myth and reality and
the ways in which evidence has been molded by the ends of both
interviewer and informant, have been explicitly raised and ex-
p10red.~’Through the practice of their craft, historians have begun
to confront a range of complex methodological issues raised in the
large comparative literature on the use of oral testimonies as his-
torical sources: the structure of memory and its relation to social
process, narrative forms, and conventions; issues of representation;
the role of the unconscious in oral history*32In the South African
context some of these concerns have been raised in the work of
literary critics such as Isabel Hofmeyr and Stephen C l i ~ ~ g m a n . ~ ~
Of course there are still large areas of historical enquiry in
South Africa which would benefit from the careful use of oral evi-
dence, perhaps the most obvious being the story of rural Afrikaner

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proletarianization and the making of South Africa's ruling classes.

It needs to be recognized, however, that the use of oral history,
while still in its early stages, has established significant roots in a
new South African historiography.

Notes

1. J. Vansina, Om1 Tmdition: A Study in Historical Methodology (Chicago, 1%5)

remains the classic study of oral tradition as history. Over the last twenty-five years,
Africanists employing oral tradition have been compelled to defend and refine their
methodology.For a more recent discussion of issuesrelating tooral tradition and history
see Joseph Miller, ed., The Afrkan Past Speaks (Folkstone, 1980).
2 David Cohen, TheHistorkafTraditionof Busogu (Oxford, 1972);Stephen Feierman,
The Shambaa Kmgdom (Madison, 1974); and Joseph Miller, Kings and Kinsmen: Early
Mbundu States in Angola (Oxford, 1976).
3. Philip Bonner, Kings, Commoners andCmessionairtx The Evolution of and Dissolu-
tion of theNineteenthCentury Swazi State (Cambridge, 1983).
4. J.B. Peires, The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of their
lndependew (Johannesburg, 1981); William Beinart, The Politicnl Economy of Pondohnd
(Cambridge,1982); and Peter Delius, The land Belongs To Us: The Pedi Polity, the Boers and
the British in the Nineteenth-Century Transvaal (Johannesburg, 1983).
5. Significantly,Jeff Guy's pioneering The Destruction of theZulu Kingdom: The Civil
War in Zululand, 1879-1884(London, 1979), relies largely on written sources.
6. The case of the Swazi is perhaps most impressive in this regard. The Swaziland
Oral History Project coordinated by Philip Bonner of the University of the Wit-
watersrand is currently engaged in gathering an extensive body of precolonial Swazi
oral tradition.
7. Peter Delius, "Report on Research on the Nineteenth Century History of the
Pedi," unpublished seminar paper, African History Seminar, university of London, 1977.
8. See Colin Bundy's article in this issue.
9. See T Karis and G.M. Carter, eds., From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary
History of Afriuzn Politics in South Afria 1882-1964,Volumes 14 (Stanford, 197277).
10. Tim Couzens, The New A f h n . A Study of the Lqe and Work of H.1.E. Dhlomo
(Johannesburg, 1985); B. Willan, Sol Plaatje: A Biogmphy (Johannesburg, 1984). Couzens
began his oral fieldwork in 1973.
11. See, for example, Raphael Samuel, ''Local History and Oral History," in History
Workshop 1(Spring 1976); and Paul Thompson, The Voiceof thePast-Ord History (Oxford,
1978).
12. See Belinda Bozzoli's article in this issue.
13. See Tim Keegan,Rurd Transformationsin Industridismg South Africa (Johannes-
burg, 1986); and also his Facing the Storm: Portraits of Black Lives inRurd South Africa (Cape
Town, 1988).
14.See Charles van Onselen, "Race and Class in the South African Countryside:
Cultural Osmosis and Social Relations in the Sharecropping Economy of the South-
Western Transvaal, 1900-1950," unpublished paper presented to the African Studies
Institute Seminar, University of the Witwatersrand, 1988.
15. See l? Harries, "'A Forgotten Corner of the Transvaal': Reconstructing the
History of a Relocated Community through OralTestimony and S o n g 3 and1.B. Peires,
"The Legend of Fenner-Solomon," in Belinda Bozzoli, ed., Class, Community and Conflict
(Johannesburg, 1987).
16. Helen Bradford, A Taste of Freedom: TheI.C:U. in Rum1 South Afriuz, 1924-1930
(New Haven, 1987).

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 ORAL HISTORY / 355

17. For an extended discussion, see William Beinart and Colin Bundy, Hidden
Struggles in Rum1 South Africa: Politics and Popular Mwemmts in the Tmnskei and Eastern
Cape, 1890-1930 (Johannesburg, 1987),1-45.
18. See Peter Delius, "Sebatakgomo: Migrant Organisation, the A.N.C. and the
Sekhukuneland Revolt," Journal of Southern African Studies 15 (October, 1989); and
William Beinart, "The Rise of the Indlavini" unpublished paper presented to Conference
on South Africa in the Fifties, Oxford University, 1987.
19.T Dunbar Moodie, "The Moral Economy of the Black Miners' Strike of 1946,"
lournal of SouthernAfrican Studies (October 1988).For Moodie'sdiscussion of other forms
of migrant association on the mines, see "Migrancy and Male Sexuality on the South
African Gold Mines,"Journal of Southern Afrkan Studies 14 (January 1988).
20. J. Guy and M. Thabane, "Technology, Ethnicity and Ideology: Basotho Miners
and Shaft-Sinkingon the South African Gold Mines," Journal of Southern A f r h n Studies
14 (January 1988).
21. Ari Sitas, "From Grassroots Control to Democracy: A Case Study of Trade
Unionismon Migrant Workers' CulturalFormations on the Fast Rand," Social Dynamics
11 (1985).
22 See J. Cock, "'Let me make history please': The Story of Johanna Masilela,
Childminder," in Bozzoli, ed., Class, Community nnd Conflid; and E. Webster, Cast in a
Racial Mould: Labour Prccess and Tmde Unionism in theFoundnes (Johannesburg, 1985).
23. Philip Bonner, "Family, Crime and Political Consciousness on the East Rand,
1939-1955,"]ournal of Southern African Studies 14 (April 1988); and "'Desirable or Un-
desirable Sotho Women?' Liquor, Prostitution and the Migration of Sotho Women to the
Rand, 1920-1945,"unpublished paper presented to the African Studies Institute seminar,
1988.
24. Paul la Hausse, "'Mayihlome!': Towards an Understanding of Amalaita Gangs
in Durban, 1900-1930,"in Stephen Clingman, ed., Regions andRegertoires: Topics in Politics
andculture. Southern African Studies, Volume 6 (Johannesburg, forthcoming).
25. I. Edwards, "Swing the Assegai peacefully? New Africa, Mkhumbane, the
co-operative movement and attempts to transform Durban sodety in the late 1940s";
and B. Nasson,"'Shepreferred livingin thecavewith Harry thesnakecatcher': Towards
an Oral History of Popular LeisuF,,qnd Class Expression in District Six, Cape Town, c.
1920-1950,"in Philip Bonner, et al, eds., Holding their uwn Ground: Class, b l i t y and
Conflict in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century South Africa (forthcoming).
26. SeeOrulHistory Project relatingtothezulupeople: Cafalogueoflnferviews(Durban,
Killie Campbell Africana Library, 1983).
27.A. Manson, The Troubles of ChiefAbram Moilwa: TheHurutsheResistanceof 1954-58
(Johannesburg, 1983); T Sideris, ed., Sfuna I m d i Yethu: The Lifeand Struggles of Durban
Dock Workers, 1940-1980 (Johannesburg, 1983); and C. Cachalia, ed., From Survival to
Defiance: lndinn Hawkers inlohannesburg, 1940-1980 (Johannesburg, 1983).
28. Guy and Thabane, "Technology, Ethnicity and Ideology," 258.
29. Bill Nasson, "The Oral Historian and Historical Formation in Cape Town," in
C. Saunders, et al., eds., Studies in the History of Cape Town (Cape Town, 1988), 21. For a
discussion of this project also see S. Jeppie, "Briefing: Western Cape Oral History
Project," unpublished paper, University of Cape Town, 1988.
W.Forexample,ina recent interview Iconducted inaNatal township,aburned-out
bus stood in front of the informant's house while army troopcarriers trundled past the
window at regular intervals.
31.For a particularly acute discussion of this last issue, see J. Guy and M. Thabane,
"The Ma-Rashea: A Participant's Perspective," in Bozzoli, Class, Community and Conflict,
436-56.For some more general comments, see A. Manson, D. Cachalia, and C. Sideris,
"Oral History Speaks Out," Social Dynamics 11 (December 1985); and Bozzoli, "Migrant
women and South African social change: biographical approaches to social analysis,"
African Studies 44 (1985).

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32.For discussion of a few of these issues see Paul Thompson's revised edition of
Tlie Vote of the Ihsf (Oxford, 1988); R. Renaldo, "Doing Oral History," Sochl Analysis 4
(September 1980); E. Tonkin, "Steps to the redefinition of 'oral history': Btamples from
Africa," Social History 7 (October 1983); and K. Figlio, "Oral History and the Uncon-
scious," History Workshop 26 (1988).
33. See I. Hofmeyr, "The Narrative Logic of Oral History," unpublished paper
ptesented to the African Studies Institute Seminar, University of the Witwatersrand,
1988; and Stephen Clingman, "Biography and Representation: Some analogies from
Fiction," unpublished paper presented to the History Workshop Conference, University
of the Witwatersrand, 1987.

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