I wrote this a while ago, when I was finishing my book proofs. I wasn’t sure whether or not I was going to share it. But as I worked through Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimonies today for a project, I felt compelled. I was reading the Commission’s decision on South African Police officer Brian Mitchell’s amnesty application. I approached it rather methodically, looking for details about Pietermaritzburg’s infamous Riot Unit 8, when I came to the Commission’s conclusion: that Mitchell be granted amnesty for the murders of eleven individuals—eleven people caught in the crossfires of South Africa’s transition-era civil war at Trust Feeds: Mseleni Ntuli, Dudu Shangase, Zetha Shangase, Knoyeni Shangase, Muzi Shangase, Filda Ntuli, Fikile Zondi, Maritz Xaba, Sara Nyoka, Alfred Zita, and Sisedewu Sithole. I felt sick. This week, the 27th anniversary of Mhlabunzima Maphumulo’s death, I share some thoughts on studying violence, doing oral history, and mourning.

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When Mhlabunzima accepted those people who ran away from their places, then [his neighbors, the Nyavu] said “Mhlabunzima is a comrade; he is together with Mandela.” But he put these people in his own place. The people of KwaNyavu refused to welcome people who left their places because of the war; they are all still alive. Mhlabunzima was a great chief because he was able to welcome people who suffered from their places.

–Mantombi Goba

They are still alive. Mhlabunzima Joseph Maphumulo is not. He was a flawed man—my book shows this—but in the last years of his life he worked to end the violence that plagued KwaZulu and Natal. He did not want people to suffer. And yet he witnessed and experienced tremendous suffering; his family did too. I have been drawn to his life, thought carefully if not obsessively about his actions, his choices, his career. I’d read this quote many times. This time, Mantombi Goba’s reflection stopped me in my tracks.

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I recently read Clifton Crais’s History Lessons and was particularly drawn to his description of this career we have chosen:

In my professional life, I have a vast collection of evidence from other pasts… Virtually all of this evidence concerns misfortune. Like many of my colleagues I have been drawn to the study of conflict, oppression, suffering, slavery, peonage, landlessness, poverty, death, infant, mortality. I have spent a career among the dead, and more precisely among those who died before their time. Historians are drawn to tragedy, though we usually disavow what we find when we go looking into the past. This is our professional conundrum, running to the past and then running away from its horrors. We are students of trauma, of wars, murders, genocide, and human suffering. Ours is a prose both of longing—to witness what has happened—and of mourning—for our inability to be there (50-51).

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As I read these book proofs, Mantombi Goba’s words send my mood spiraling downward. The heart feels heavy despite the sun on my shoulders that makes one forget the unusual cold spell that has us bundled up in Dallas. Moments ago I sat down and reveled in this sunshine—how the light hit the café tables, the shadows it cast. The joy I felt that this book is so close to being done, the motivation I felt to tackle the last chapter of the proofs. But a light went out in 1991. Maphumulo was brash; he didn’t always make wise decisions and he didn’t always do right. But he struggled to make life better for thousands in the Natal Midlands. As a historian, I’ve struggled to respect and give insight into his life—the good and the bad.

This moment I need to mourn for him.

This feeling is not unusual. It comes often as I read, research, write about this long history of violence and dispossession. It also comes when a friend writes to me to inform me of the death of someone we’ve interviewed. You think momentarily that it is maybe strange to be so affected by the death of someone with whom you’ve only spent six or eight hours. But measuring this in time does not do justice to the intimacy of those hours—hours spent sharing life’s details, life’s losses, driving around rural areas devastated by violence or shaped by colonial and apartheid rule. Or to the impact of another man, now gone too, who helped awaken a love for oral history, a love of the method that on good days outweighs the harder interviews and difficult tasks. These losses take you to that moment; you can see so clearly their joy or pain in sharing these stories.

History is a humanities discipline. These humans are everything.

This is the fourth of an oral history scraps series.* 

When commentators consider the contemporary state of South Africa, they discuss it as a country still transitioning from apartheid. Not enough is made of the fact that parts of the country are also recovering from civil war sponsored by the apartheid state. Between 1985 and 1996, at least 20,000 people died; 13,000 in KwaZulu-Natal alone. Conservative estimates suggest 200,000 were made homeless, internal refugees in their own country.[1]

Less then twenty years since the end of the war, my oral history interviews were riddled with insight into how people are–or are not–rebuilding their lives in the wake of war. Many spoke to human losses and the financial ramifications. They attested to the need to start anew, building new homes, buying new wardrobes, but never being able to recover wedding keepsakes and photographs of children. One person remembers being forced to continue to make payments on new furniture long after that furniture was destroyed by fire. Some still are unable to return home after the war, where new residents built on their homestead sites.

In light of the upcoming August local elections in South Africa and recent political violence (such as the political killings of ANC politicians in the Natal Midlands earlier this month or this past weekend’s shooting in Pretoria), I offer some oral history insights into how rural South Africans connect elections to the country’s civil war.

One woman suggested that every election cycle brings fear and unwanted memories:

Every time when we go for elections, I get nervous because people are getting emotional.

Another woman spoke to her subsequent ambivalence about voting:

I did not understand anything about the [political] parties [during the war]. Even today I still do not have any idea about the organisations’ issues. I do vote because everyone has a vote. What made me hate the organisations is that many people died. Those who knew what they were fighting for are living a life of luxury while we are still suffering and they got this life through other people’s blood. Personally, I do not know why I am voting. I accompany those who know what they are doing and I do not want to know because it is not going to help me.

And as the continuing assassinations of candidates and ward councilors suggest, political violence is still a very real phenomenon in South Africa, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal.

While many rightly make connections between these attacks and those of the civil war, the less obvious legacy is the prevalence of weapons in these communities. One man, who asked to be anonymous due to the sensitivity of our conversation, made this explicit:

A: There are still many guns that were distributed by Philip Powell [a white apartheid agent connected to the IFP and Eugene de Kock]. He gave them to someone [affiliated with Inkatha] who was going to help distribute them. That was XX. Then other guns were given to this boy XX.

Q: The guns were only distributed to IFP members?

A: Yes and a lot of people received them. XX still has G3s. I have no idea how the police do not get a hold of those guns.

The legacies of South Africa’s civil war are as much a part of contemporary life as apartheid.

*Everyone who participated in the oral history project gave oral or written consent for use of their interviews in publications and eventual archival deposit.

[1] Mary de Haas, “Violence in Natal and Zululand: The 1980s,” in The Road to Democracy in South Africa, vol. 6 [1990-1996] (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2013), 88–152.

For more on the recent assassinations, check out these Mail & Guardian stories:

“Killings Signal the Start of the Battle for Power,” May 27, 2016

“Politics Becomes a Deadly Game in KZN,” May 27, 2016

“Special Police Task Force to Probe Political Killings,” June 6, 2016

This is the second of an oral history scraps series.* 

In this, and the next post, I want to talk about my favorite interview–favorite for the friendships, for the laughs, and for the research breakthroughs.

Before kicking off the oral history portion of my fieldwork, my host family took me to the chief for a proper introduction. The chief assigned an induna (headman) to assist in the identification of potential interviewees. Working through these local structures was only one part of interview recruitment; I was concerned that working with such political figures might influence who we interviewed and what was said. I was in the field during local government elections, heightening community tensions between Inkatha and ANC. While Inkatha established dominance in the entire region during and immediately after the transition-era civil war, the ANC began to gradually erode Inkatha’s support after 2004. In the run-up to the elections, the parties campaigned intensely, aware of the potential for an ANC victory. The splintering of Inkatha and the establishment of the National Freedom Party (NFP) in 2010 further increased existing tensions and resulted in the death of a local NFP candidate prior to the 2011 elections.[1]

On this particular morning, only several days into meetings, Thandeka and I showed up at Induna Ndlela’s house on the arranged morning, where several men and women waited to be interviewed. Ndlela encouraged us to start with Balothi Goge. We asked about his standing in the community: was he another induna or political party representative?

“No, he’s just old,” said Ndlela. We all laughed, but his answer was prescient.

Balothi Goge, born in 1935, was a treasure trove. His father, July Goge, was one of the chiefdom’s councilors during the construction of the local dam and the chiefdom’s establishment of the apartheid-era Tribal Authorities. July paid rent for a piece of land to an absentee landowner. When the land was sold, he was evicted to another part of the farm where he served as a labor tenant (providing labor for the white farmer in return for land access), and then worked with the local apartheid Bantu Affairs Agricultural Officer. Balothi  grew up on that farm, herding cattle and briefly attending school. He later worked as a migrant laborer in Durban before returning home to retire.

When the interview started, Baba Ndlela was sitting with us, and in the beginning was piping in with questions. Keenly aware of the political context, at first I was a bit nervous that he was directing the interview towards some particular motive… but  it quickly became apparent that he was simply curious. We asked him to move closer to the recorder, because he proceeded to  take over the interview. We couldn’t get words in, but it didn’t matter. Their conversation covered ground that at that stage I would not have known to cover. Goge provided keen insights into the history’s region that even izinduna did not know. Ndlela asked him incredulously:

NM      When were you planning to tell us about this history? Because if these young ladies did not come here, we would not know about our history.

GB      I was going to die with it because I could not tell anyone. I grew up living under my father’s regulations. If ever there was a meeting at Mazambane’s place, I used to go there to listen.

NM      But now you realise that we were living in the dark because we have no idea about things happening in this place?

GB      Nobody asked me about it, but now I am talking because someone wants to acknowledge the history, because there was nobody I was going to tell that this thing was known years ago.

The conversation between Ndlela and Goge lasted over an hour and a half, book-ended by the few questions we had asked to start the interview and to cover the (very few) things Ndlela missed. They covered history, culture, and politics, as well as everyday life — romantic courtships and wild foods young men ate while herding cattle.

Their conversation was a reminder to me, however wary I might have been of the powerful political context in which we spoke, to put down some of those suspicions and follow Baba Ndlela’s lead. While Goge acknowledged that our interest prompted him to share, Ndlela’s eager participation made clear that the conversation was about more than research.  I could think of their conversation as a “breakthrough in performance” (Hymes, 1975; Ibrahim, 2001) in which the performance was not for me. [2]

*Everyone who participated in the oral history project gave oral or written consent for use of their interviews in publications and eventual archival deposit.  Goge passed away sometime between our 2011 conversation and my 2013 return.

[1] “Camperdown: masked men shoot councillor,” Natal Witness April 14, 2011; “End intimidation, MEC tells parties,” Natal Witness May 3, 2011.

[2] On being flexible and attentive to oral historians’ knowledge and motives,  see Abdullahi A. Ibrahim, “The Birth of the Interview: The Thin and Fat of It,” in African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 103–24; Susan Geiger, “What’s So Feminist about Doing Women’s Oral History?” Journal of Women’s History 2:1 (1990); Dall Hymes, “Breakthrough into Performance,” in Folklore: Performance and Communication (1975); Luise White, “True Stories: Narrative, Event, History, and Blood in the Lake Victoria Basin,” in African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 281–304; Nwando Achebe, Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings.