3.3. METHODS OF DATA COLLECTION
3.3.3. Archival material
3.3.3.1. Archival material relating to St. Stephen’s College and to
memories and were extremely informative. Of particular interest, as I have noted above, were the details of the plans to both open and close the school and also those which were intended to ensure that people who would come after it would know how good a school ‘we’ once had. This is a reference to the ‘time capsule’ that is buried on the site and which is referred to in my narrative.
I was fascinated to come across, among the Sanderson Papers (1955 - 1975), a newspaper clipping (Bulawayo Chronicle, 29 November 1975) which made direct reference to this. It read:
The sentimental treasures of school life at St Stephen’s College, Balla Balla- which closes today-have been sealed and buried in a vault at the college.
They include the honours boards, framed photographs, rugby touch flags, house shields, house lists, books, annual magazines and news sheets. The initiative was taken by Sanderson House, the school’s oldest house. Only 4 of the 46 boys in the house were Rhodesians. The others were from Zambia, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland and Kenya.
The reference to the small number of Rhodesians is interesting in that I make several references to the same in my text.
I was also interested in the Fuller Papers (1963) which consisted of the notes Mr John Fuller had begun to write for what was intended as his full memoirs. Mr Fuller was a founding member of staff and served as the school’s headmaster for a time. When I was at the school he was my housemaster. He also taught me English and Geography and was a man for whom I came to develop much respect and admiration.
The point is made by Squire, Andrews and Tamboukou (2008, p. 15) that photographs have a particularly strong memory evoking power invested in them and that often they are the only link “…to an intangible and sometimes mythologized past”. This is supportive of the assertion by Hurworth (2003) that photo elicitation can serve as a powerful means of provoking responses from those who view them. I certainly found this to be the case with the many school photographs which were part of the Sanderson Papers (1955 – 1975) as well as a few photographs of my own (some examples are included in Appendix I). Many were of particular interest. Some photos were of different buildings, others were of individuals. Most photos however, reflected groups, most typically class, team or house-group photographs. Other photos were of old boy reunions.
It is also the case that photographs have the potential to speak as much about the people or objects that are not included as those who are (Walker, 1991). I felt this to be the case when I came across two photographs of the Porter’s Lodge at the entrance to the school. In the one the Southern Rhodesian flag was flown alongside the Union Jack.
In the other, which was taken later, the Rhodesian flag was flown on its own. The pole which previously accommodated the Union Jack was empty. I remembered that this change had happened after UDI and that it had been a controversial development for many of the masters.
It is observed by Spence (1995) that photographs are not merely representations of fact. Individuals generally do not take photographs of difficult or unhappy times in their lives. The move is much more towards harmony and beauty. All of the many photographs in Peter Morris’ collection were of happy, commemorative times or occasions, except those of the memorial to the school to which reference has been made above, and in this sense they presented a particular view of school life. There was nothing of homesick juniors, for example, or teasing and bullying, or the disappointment in not having been included in a particular school-team. This was not entirely unproblematic. Memories relating to such experiences needed to be triggered by other means.
I was fascinated to see that Peter Morris had a nearly complete set of weekly news sheets which were known as Telstar, the more so since I edited the publication during my last year at the school in 1969. I was immediately reminded of the type of work that the job entailed as I perused the copies, and also of some of the many details of school life, some of which were rather mundane and routine in nature. This being the case, I find O’Reilly-Scanlon’s (2000) reminder quite pertinent that it is often such material that goes unnoticed in the memory mining business. The mundane is, furthermore, extremely important in autoethnographical work.
Peter Morris also had copies of the annual school magazine. I was particularly interested in the 1969 edition for this was my final year at the school. Furthermore, I had written a piece, ‘Trek to Rhodesia’, in it. I make reference to it in Chapter 6.
I was intrigued to find among the St. Stephen’s College memorabilia a number of books which recorded ‘film detentions’ and other punishments. They were for the year 1973 and provided an invaluable insight into what boys were punished for and what they had
to do to ameliorate their punishment. The offences were of a relatively minor nature, namely those that did not warrant the administration of corporal punishment. They seemed to be related to work which was unsatisfactorily completed, or not attempted in class, or for ‘prep’ (homework). It was intriguing to observe the detail with which everything was recorded in the neat long-hand of the various duty masters. As I paged through the books and read the various entries I was reminded of the disciplinary regime which prevailed when I was at the school. I thought of myself as the recipient of several punishments. I also thought of myself as a prefect, as one who both assigned punishment and, to a large degree, implemented the punishments boys received. It seemed that the masters had become more involved in the implementation of discipline in the years since I had left.
As I worked my way through the abundance of school archival material I found that an emotional response to what is being remembered can in itself be a memory trigger.
Some of the memories evoked a sense of warmth and pride to the extent that I found myself remembering more than I think I might otherwise have done, if for no other reason than I felt I wanted to pause in the particular moment of the past.
I found that I was unable to work my way through the abundance of material in one sitting and that it was necessary to return to it on several occasions. Each time additional memories were added. When I mentioned this in one of my memory sharing conversations with my mother she remarked that she was hardly surprised since she recalled times when I was at school when it seemed that I allowed myself to become thoroughly absorbed by what school life seemed to require of me. I reflected on this as I drew my trawling through the archival material to a close. As I did so, the more so as I began to write this thesis and draw my remembering together, so I came to realise the degree to which the archival material spoke of a highly organised and ordered world which seemed as if it would never end, and indeed one which seemed to be all absorbing. I was interested to read that Peter Morris, in his response to my narrative, referred to school life in a similar way (Appendix C). This was, for us, the normal world and everything revolved around it. It was, above all, a white world, a world of privilege, and yet we did not see it as such. By the time I left the school I had become one of its agents.
3.3.3.2. Archival material relating to Northern Rhodesia/Zambia and South Africa
I also had access to archival material that was relevant to parts of my life which both preceded and followed my stay at St. Stephen’s College and in Rhodesia. In respect of the former, I was able to borrow a set of Horizon magazines from a person I had met at church who had spent some of his adult life in Northern Rhodesia/Zambia. Horizon was a monthly publication of the Rhodesian (later ‘Roan’, to keep the ‘R’ in ‘RST’) Selection Trust mining corporation which had interests on the Copperbelt, principally in the towns of Luanshya and Mufulira. It was aimed at white employees, but after independence in 1964 it quickly morphed into a publication for people who were known simply as
‘salaried employees’. The editions contained a wide variety of material of local interest and focused primarily on the employees, their activities and achievements as well as mining developments with which the company was involved. I remember eagerly awaiting their arrival at the beginning of each month. Paging through them some forty or fifty years later evoked many childhood memories. The photographs were particularly effective triggers.
I also used a number of my own personal photographs as memory prompts and some which belonged to my mother (some examples are included in Appendix I). They were primarily of family members and were taken at our homes or of me at school or university or when we were on holiday. As I reflected upon them I found that it was often certain objects or background scenes which were more ‘memory prompting’ than the people themselves. A building or a bicycle and garden or school settings, for example, were quite effective in setting the remembering process in motion. When individual people were the focus it was sometimes quite jarring to realise that they had died.
Personal photographs were also invaluable in triggering memories which belonged to my earlier and later adult life in South Africa, once I was married and living in Pinetown, New Germany and Kloof. Those of my daughters, Carin and Laura, were especially evocative as were those of my wife, Glynne, whom I lost to cancer in 2000. In 2002 I married Janet who is a prolific photographer and as a result, I had access to many more photographs in the post-2002 phase of my life than at any other.
As my personal narrative indicates, I spent thirty-one years working at the Edgewood College of Education and the Faculties of Education of the Universities of Natal and KwaZulu-Natal on the Edgewood campus. When the College was closed, prior to the
incorporation into the former University of Natal, employees who terminated their services with the provincial education department were handed their personal employment files. Mine contained every conceivable record, from letters of appointment and promotion, to copies of my qualifications, reports of my progress, payslips and housing subsidy statements. I worked my way through it all prior to starting to write my narrative and was fascinated to be reminded of aspects of my career which I would otherwise have forgotten. The payslips were especially interesting as were the housing subsidy details relating to each of the houses I once owned. I was also interested to read what had been said of me by my seniors at different stages of my career. It was a strange feeling to have my career compressed in this way and many memories were triggered.
As I reflected on what I gleaned as I paged through my file I was reminded afresh that I was remembering a white world of privilege and what seemed at the time to be a world of order and stability. The old Natal Education Department was a small department which catered for the needs of a small white minority with relatively few educational institutions. One could telephone departmental officials and have a query responded to immediately. I found at least two notes in my file to the effect that I had been telephoned by an official and I was able to remember that it had been in relation to a query about my housing subsidy. There was much care and attention to detail and I found myself wanting to know if the files of Africans, which as far as my file was concerned might well have been in another country altogether, were treated with such care. I was reminded also that the salaries and service conditions of African teachers were nothing like those of white teachers, and nor were their qualification requirements. My file served to highlight the degree to which I had indeed been a privileged white educator.
The annual magazine of the Edgewood College of Education, Insight, triggered similar memories. The magazine was intended to celebrate everything that the college represented and there was invariably a strong focus on the activities and achievements of staff and students. Once again photographs were effective triggers, such as that in Appendix I of me at the signing of the agreement in 1991 between the governments of South Africa and the KwaZulu Bantustan which allowed Africans to study at Edgewood.
The written word was also responsible for illuminating aspects of my past at the College, especially when there was reference to certain events or people.
I had access to all of the copies of the magazine and as I reflected upon the content that was encapsulated by them I found myself, as in the case of the archival material relating to St. Stephen’s College, wanting to reach some sort of conclusion as to what it all meant. Once again I reasoned that it was reflective of a highly organised white world, a world of white power, and predictability. Whites clearly defined that which was normal in education and the broader society.
Mentor was the quarterly magazine of the Natal Teachers’ Society (NTS) which became the Association of Professional Educators of KwaZulu-Natal (APEK) after 1994. I made a point of paging through the copies I had in my possession shortly before embarking on my personal narrative. I did so because I had been intricately involved in the affairs of both organisations for the time which spanned most of my career at the Edgewood College of Education. I served on the Executive and Management Committees, and chaired the Education Committee for many years. It was this involvement which thrust me into the heart of those political developments in South Africa which affected education, especially in the build-up to the 1994 elections when a new national education policy was being formulated.
As I paged through my copies of Mentor, I remembered afresh this political side of my professional career and how political developments in South Africa had caused it to unfold in ways which were quite different from the plans I had for myself when I started out as a teacher in 1975. I remembered the many executive and management meetings and the conferences I organised and attended. I was reminded of the many people who had also been involved and my many trips away from home.
3.3.4. Published material