3.3. METHODS OF DATA COLLECTION
3.3.2. The memories of other people
I engaged in what I have called ‘memory sharing conversations’ with my mother, Mrs Joan Jarvis and Mr Peter Morris, who was a friend at St. Stephen’s College. I chose them as they were able to journey with me back to my first days in Northern Rhodesia/Zambia, in the case of my mother, and to the beginning of my schooling career at St. Stephen’s College in Rhodesia, in the case of Mr P. Morris. Both were invaluable memory resources and data sources.
My mother responded with much enthusiasm to the idea of engaging in memory sharing conversations with me. We had four such conversations, beginning in January 2012 as I was preparing to begin my personal narrative. We continued through until May as the writing process unfolded.
We sat in the comfort of her home for the first conversation and in mine for the others.
We felt safe and comfortable to share with each other and agreed to proceed informally and allow the question, ‘Do you remember…?’ to steer what we talked about. The conversations rolled on easily, often for well over an hour at a time, and I was able to be very selective in what I settled to use, having taken notes of what I thought would be useful along the way. She remembered warmly and fondly since I was asking her to revisit what she regarded as a particularly happy period of her life. This inclined me to remember in a similar vein since it was also a happy time for me. O’Reilly-Scanlon (2000) notes that this is often the case when adults remember a past which is distant and warns that they may exaggerate the degree of ‘goodness’ and ‘happiness’ involved in the ‘good old days’. I shared this with my mother, along with O’Reilly-Scanlon’s (2000) suggestion that a sharing of memories has the potential to neutralise the tendency to exaggerate. She received this easily and readily submitted her remembering to a comparison with my own of the same events or experiences. There might have been a tendency for us to exaggerate a little, and comparison may have called us to order, but we agreed nevertheless, that the days in question were indeed mainly good days, for they were defined according to our white world view which was all that we knew at the time.
She remembered relatively easily and if she needed any assistance she readily accepted any ‘scaffolding’ (often just a name or an event) I was able to provide. She continued happily thereafter and was very proud of herself when she, in turn, was able to ‘scaffold’ my remembering. If there were slight differences between us, in respect of what we remembered, I realised it was probably because she was remembering a time when she was an adult whilst I was remembering my childhood. She was sometimes better at remembering in a more generalised, overarching way and sometimes needed help with the details. McAdams (2011) observes that this is fairly typical of the remembering of older adults. She was, for example, well-tuned into the broad sweep of political developments which unfolded in Northern Rhodesia/Zambia but less clear about many of the details which framed them. I was able to fill in the necessary information but it was because of my subsequent reading and not because of what I was remembering from when I was a child.
We had a few prompts at our disposal to assist our remembering. There were several old photographs, a tapestry which my mother completed when we first arrived in Northern Rhodesia and a few household objects and smaller pieces of furniture which had survived our many moves. Each was able to trigger and sustain conversation which in turn set many memories in motion.
As our conversations unfolded we tended to focus more on our times in Northern Rhodesia/Zambia. I had a sense that this might have been because these were buried deeper in the past and we felt a need to call as much to the fore as possible in case we lost it. We were both surprised, in fact, at how much we were able to recall. We spoke easily of our ‘Rhodesian way of life’, of the houses we lived in, our regular holidays to Scottburgh (Fig. 1), of my experiences at the various educational institutions I had attended and of my travelling between them and home. We spoke of the gardens my father established and of the Africans who worked as our ‘house boys’ and ‘garden boys’. As we did so we acknowledged that at the time we were completely oblivious to the conditions under which Africans worked and lived. As I consulted my notes I observed that at one point my mother had said, in this regard, that “…Northern Rhodesia was all along a black country and yet for the most part we didn’t even know it”.
I knew that I had to make contact with Mr Peter Morris. He was a senior at St. Stephen’s College when I arrived as a junior in 1965. He played an important role in helping me to settle into my new school, crossing the wide senior-junior divide and breaking convention to do so. I was not at the school for long before I learnt that he did the same for several junior boys and that his gesture towards me was not unusual.
Peter lives conveniently close to me in Pinetown (Fig. 1). When St. Stephen’s College was closed in 1975 he took over the running of the world-wide Old Boys Association. He has continued to chair the association to the present day. He has also been active in the affairs of the Rhodesia-South Africa Association and was once the chairman of the Durban branch. Upon the closure of St. Stephen’s College he became, because of his position and the uncertain political climate in Rhodesia, the repository of an enormous amount of archival material relating to the school. He has at least two hundred old boys on his register and this, along with all his archival material, makes him the custodian of a minefield of information.
Peter Morris and I had been in touch over the years as I had attended a number of the reunions he had organised. When I came to writing my personal narrative I knew that he would be of enormous assistance to me. When I telephoned him to ask if we could meet so that I explain my work to him, and to ask for his help, he responded most enthusiastically.
We engaged in four lengthy ‘memory sharing conversations’, each being scaffolded by an enormous variety of memory prompts consisting of such archival items as letters, documents, invitations, programmes, magazines, prospectuses, photographs, ties and badges. Nothing was ever thrown away and everything was meticulously stored and filed. I found him fascinating to listen to as we shared our memories. His focus was most often on people, whether they were past pupils or teachers, and it was here where we found his hundreds of old photographs especially helpful as memory prompts. It is observed by O’Reilly-Scanlon (2000) that many scholars have attested to the effectiveness of photographs in triggering memory. Walker (1991) notes that photographs are excellent tools for prompting questions in conversation and I found this to be so with Peter. Questions prompted by who or what we saw in a photograph played a crucial role in scaffolding the conversations we shared. Peter’s ability to recognize a face in group photographs and then to describe in detail what had happened to the
person since he left school was impressive indeed and his on-going contact with many old boys opened up further memory prompting conversations.
Peter revelled in the opportunity to engage with me about those aspects of our past which we had in common. Memories came to the fore readily and as they did so we spoke easily of what we had learnt at school and how we had learnt it, both formally and informally. We spoke of routines, forms of punishment, uniforms, entertainment and sport, along with how boys used to travel between their homes and school at the beginning and end of each term. As we did so we recognized that we were remembering an orderly white world and that to all intents and purposes Africans might well not have existed except as a servant class.
At times there was tendency to want to stay in the past that was being recalled.
Rhodesia and St. Stephen’s College meant much to Peter and he made it clear in conversation that he regretted their passing. His remembering was however, never clouded by sentimentality, bitterness or anger. He would often embellish a memory with a story, finish it, and then move on quite easily to the next face in a photograph or some other memory triggering item. He did much to trigger my own remembering.
We dwelt for a good while longer over one particular photograph. It was of the memorials to the school which were constructed at its entrance. The school was represented by stone pillars on to which plaques, detailing the names of principals and board members had been attached. They bear testimony to the white bourgeois institution it had been and speak to its pupils as having been raised as the ‘prefects of Empire’ I refer to in my narrative chapter (Chapter 4). The school that was once some five hundred metres or so behind the memorials cannot be seen. Peter and I both knew however, that it now served as a Zimbabwean military base which accommodated soldiers whose sole purpose in life was to sustain the very African majority rule and the very kind of African dictator, which Mr Robert Mugabe had become, we had all been taught, as prefects of Empire, to do all possible to resist. “What could be more ironic than that?” Peter remarked wryly. I remember that we packed things away quietly and concluded our interview soon after that.