Oral histories: The fire and the crowd

By Zdena Mtetwa

Towards the 2009 Human Rights Day celebrations, Sharpeville was a very busy township. What an experience it is, to watch communities take ownership of their own history!
The dynamics that come into play are fascinating. The old make fires at the side of the road. The young are invited to come and hear the stories that are told around the fires. Others, who may not know, pass by in cars or on foot and see the fire and the crowd. They stop to see what is going on and in the process, they hear.

Around those fires, the history of Sharpeville unfolds and the unsung heroes are celebrated. Each tells a story of his or her life at a certain time.
The roads that the young walk and the buildings they see suddenly take a different form. They see them for what they used to be as the stories unfold and the crowd goes back in time. The power and passion in the voices of the story tellers are towards one ultimate goal. The goal is to pass on the history of Sharpeville to the young, to tell it like it was, and celebrate what their blood was shed for. In the process, one experiences the township being split into two in so many ways. The young and the old, the ancient and the new, the present and the past.

The old tell the story, the young stand and listen. They point to the buildings and the places, ancient to them but new to us, seeing them both as they are and as they used to be. And meanwhile, cars pass on a tarred road, portraying the realities of the present. The storytellers and the audience are reminded that because of the past, this present on the other side of the road was made possible. They hope that this knowing remains; they hope simply, that we remember.

The richness and realness of this oral history sends a shiver down one’s spine. One is assured that indeed this history will pass on, as long as Imbaula stories are told.

Just then a young man raises his hand. He speaks, loudly and powerfully and captures the crowd. He makes a comment about the history, but he also makes a comment about his political party. He wins a cheer from the crowd, followed by a song from the struggle.

The story telling continues. Another young man raises his hand. Again he acknowledges the story, and again, manages to endorse his political party, a different one from the former endorser, before the next storyteller.

The past and the present are taken care of. The past is remembered and the present is experienced. But one has to imagine the future.

What is the future of this method of oral history in Sharpeville?

One has to first of all answer the question relating to whether the Imbaula storytelling will continue in Sharpeville. From the perspective of an optimistic member of the audience, one would say that the fire and the crowd may very well continue to exist. But what will the nature of this fire and crowd be? What will happen when these elders, who are the primary story tellers, pass on?

These determined young people may take over. But will the agenda completely be the same? In the midst of political rivalry and personal interest, will these young people, as secondary story tellers use this platform of the fire and the crowd solely for the purposes of passing on the history of Sharpeville? Or will the endorsement of political parties occur at shorter intervals between the story telling, until eventually the stories are told at intervals of what will have evolved into sophisticated political rallies?

Democratic South Africa is a young country, whose first born children are still available to tell the story and keep the memory. When they pass on, the story may still be told. But what is the role of agenda in the precision of oral history?

These were last year’s questions.

The year ended and a new year began. The time came for Imbaula; only this year there would be no Imbaula at Sharpeville because of the violent service delivery protests. The determined survivors found an alternative place to have the storytelling. For them, however, it still meant that this part of their human rights day celebration was not quite lost.

A few days later, on the 21st of March 2010, the actual day of the human rights day celebrations, the story of the Sharpeville massacre as survivors, who bear the scars in their minds, hearts and bodies remember it, was to be distorted for political reasons as ANCYL’s president Julius Malema declared that the march in 1960 was organized by the ANC and not the PAC as history has told us for so many years. After his declaration, the community later expressed the pointlessness of the distortion, stating that when they celebrated the day as a community, they honoured those who died fighting for the nation. They swept the graves as parents of the deceased; they told their stories as survivors of a terrible time. All this they did in a spirit of oneness, as parents, as friends, as survivors. Not as members of a certain political party, but as South Africans.

What then do we say then about the relationship between “remembering and forgetting” and agenda?

Firstly, in the process of remembering through storytelling, individuals with a different agenda manage to interrupt the remembering process to push their agenda forward. When primary storytellers are gone this may be worse than it is now. Secondly, we see how political figures can distort history for their political agenda, practicing individual selective remembering and imposing forgetting onto the listening crowd.

These processes lead to less remembering and more forgetting on a social level. The social effects of forgetting history are beyond the scope of this discussion. It is however interesting for us to build on this by investigating these effects in order to understand factors that threaten national memory and what the implication of this is.

Zdena is currently working for civil society and studying towards a MA in Industrial and Organizational Psychology