3.3. METHODS OF DATA COLLECTION
3.3.6. Visits to key places
Given the importance of place in the process of identity formation, it seemed to me that it was important to re-establish contact with the significant places of my past where it was possible for me to do so. Being able to visit places helped me to link my knowledge of them ‘now’ with my knowledge of them ‘then’. Visiting a spread of places I had occupied over many years in a period of just a few months helped me to gain an
overview of them and of the links between them in my past. This helped me in the writing of the context of my narrative.
3.3.6.1. Parkview Primary School, Haselmere Court and Glenashley, Durban
I had often passed the school I used to know as Parkview Primary School by car but I made a point of visiting it and its environs as I prepared to start writing my personal narrative. I attended the school towards the end of 1964 after my parents and I had left Luanshya in Northern Rhodesia just before the colony became the independent Zambia. The school is now called Glenwood Preparatory School and it has been attractively restored to reveal the best features of its Natal Victorian architectural style. I walked into the grounds and passed the classroom where Mrs Titlestad had been my class teacher. I peered into the hall and the entrance foyer to be reminded that Mr Eric Edminson, who was the headmaster when I was there, had moved on to become the second rector of the Edgewood College of Education, after the founding rector Miss Margaret Martin, and before Dr Andre le Roux, to whom I make frequent reference in my personal narrative.
I walked around the immediate neighbourhood of the school and followed the route I used to walk along to Haselmere Court in Clarke Road, which was where my parents rented a flat whilst looking for a property to purchase in Durban. I drove out to Glenashley which was where my parents had wanted to buy or build a home of their own. In 1964 Glenashley was empty sugar cane land with residential plots marked out with white wooden stakes. Now it is completely built up, but I did manage to work out where some of the plots were that my father had considered buying. I remembered the hope in the future that developments such as those at Glenashley represented. Houses and plots sold almost overnight as white immigrants from elsewhere in Africa and elsewhere settled in Durban in large numbers.
3.3.6.2. Stilfontein and Milner High School
My parents and I only stayed in Stilfontein (Fig.1) for a few months at the beginning of 1965 and I attended Milner High School for just the first term of that year. I wanted to visit the area nevertheless, because those few months constituted something of a watershed in my life, taking place before my terrible Jameson experience, before St.
Stephen’s College, and before Rhodesia and all that that came to mean in my life.
These are all referred to in my narrative. I made the visit to Stilfontein in August 2012 together with my wife, Janet.
I remembered Stilfontein as a modern, thriving mining town. Everything was new and clean. The business centre had been designed according to ‘new town’ planning principles and there were pedestrian malls, manicured gardens and fountains. Cars could park in designated areas only. It was a white town and most of the whites worked on the surrounding gold mines. They lived in neat little miners’ houses, spread out along streets lined with recently planted trees. Africans who worked on the same mines lived in hostels in nearby ‘compounds’.
We visited 44 Buffelsfontein Street which was where my parents and I lived during our short stay. I looked across the road to the spot where we had witnessed an African man being beaten and thrown into a police van for breaking the 9pm curfew which was enforced to keep Africans out of white residential areas at night. I noticed that Africans now lived in the house closest to where the incident had occurred.
I remembered the daily trips to school in Klerksdorp some 15kms away. We drove along the route I used to follow, usually by bus, but sometimes by car when my Afrikaans teacher, Mr van den Berg, used to offer me a lift in his little old two-stroke DKW (an ancestor of the modern day Audi) motor car. In1965 Milner High School was just a few years old and the only high school in the area for English-speaking whites. It stood alone on the bare veld just outside Klerksdorp on the Stilfontein side of town.
When Janet and I arrived in August 2012 we went into the grounds of the school and I observed that the school had changed considerably. Hostels had been built and trees had grown and matured. The surrounds were also quite altered and there was little sign that the school had once stood on bare veld. A road which passed between the classrooms and administrative buildings and the hostels bearing the name of the first principal, Mr Tommy Stevens, was also new and unfamiliar, but the road name, Tommy Stevens, immediately triggered a host of memories.
I remembered that this was where I had had my first exposure to CNE, although I did not know what that meant at the time. I clearly remembered the cadet drills, and having to learn the national anthem during Youth Preparedness lessons. Had I stayed for longer I was due to go on a ‘veldskool’ camp (bush retreat school) the following term
and my mother was compelled to complete an indemnity form for this camp. I certainly remembered the difficult Afrikaans lessons I was forced to endure. Mr van Den Berg demonstrated great sympathy for me, so much so that we became friends and that was why I sometimes obtained a lift with him to school.
3.3.6.3. The Cutty Sark Hotel in Scottburgh
The Cutty Sark Hotel in Scottburgh (Fig. 1) was our favourite holiday hotel whilst we lived in Northern Rhodesia/Zambia. My mother and I worked out, during one of our
‘memory sharing’ conversations, that we had had eleven holidays there, each lasting about a month. I had been to the hotel on a few subsequent occasions but felt the need to take another more purposeful visit, prior to beginning to write my narrative. As I reminisced I found it difficult to distinguish one holiday from the next as they seemed to merge into one. I walked along the passages and wandered into the lounge and dining- room and the games room. I walked to the swimming pool and followed the path we so often walked along on our way to the beach. I remembered many fun times, including my exposure to the world of girls.
When I went out into the car park I remembered the little Wolseys and Fords in which we used to undertake the long and often treacherous journeys to reach this much favoured ‘Rhodesia by the sea’, as it was fondly regarded. I remembered the many miles of strip roads, in both Northern and Southern Rhodesia, which we had to travel on and was interested to note that my mother also mentions them in her response to my narrative. Godwin (1996) mentions them as well, as does Lessing (1992). These Rhodesian inventions (Lessing, 1992) consisted of “…fragile foot wide ribbons of tarmac” (Lessing, 1992, p. 306) and “…when you encountered oncoming traffic, each vehicle had to pull off so that only the right hand wheels were on a strip and the left side skidded along the gravel…” (Godwin, 1996, p. 134). My mother recalled how dangerous the roads were. Godwin captures the essence of her fears when he says, “…it was quite easy to lose control when coming off the strip, because the gravel on either side was usually pitted and eroded” (Godwin, 1996, p. 134). I remember that my father damaged his tyres on more than one occasion.
I remembered the motels we used to stay at en route, not all of which were connected to the national electricity grids. The motel at Makuti, deep in the Zambezi valley close to the Chirundu border post, came to mind in particular (Fig. 1). My mother mentions this
too in her response to my narrative. I thought of the time later when this same motel found itself in the middle of the bush war/liberation war that is referred to in my narrative.
3.3.6.4. Victoria Falls
My wife Janet and I visited the Victoria Falls (Fig.1) in 2010. I was last at the Victoria Falls on holiday in 1972 and was keen to see them again, both to share their magnificence with Janet and to engage in the memory journey I knew they would inevitably invoke. Knowing this, Janet was as excited as I once we had booked our flights. When we caught sight of the full span of the Victoria Falls for the first time we both experienced a variety of emotions, and I felt a strange sense of being reconnected with a part of Africa I thought I would never see again.
We visited for three days which included a sunset cruise along the Zambezi River. We enjoyed a day trip to the Chobe National Park in Botswana upstream from the Victoria Falls. A particular highlight was our helicopter flip over the Victoria Falls and their environs. Many memories were triggered. I immediately recognized the very typical Msasa trees which grew in abundance, and the baobabs. The accents of the African people, as they spoke in English, were also immediately familiar as I remembered people who I had known only as a servant-class in Luanshya and Mufulira and at St.
Stephen’s College. We visited the town of Victoria Falls where I bought a copy of the Bulawayo Chronicle which was the newspaper I used to read as a pupil at St. Stephen’s College. I noticed immediately that the type of newsprint was of the same quality as that which was formerly used when the Rhodesians were making their own newsprint in an endeavour to circumvent sanctions. It was the same off-white colour and it smelt just the same. In the corner café where I purchased the newspaper I noticed that Mazoe orange juice, a childhood favourite of mine, was still being produced locally and bottled in the same way.
We walked on to the rail and road bridge which crossed the gorge immediately opposite the main Falls, and as we did so I could hardly cope with the memories as they flooded into my mind. I remembered my crossing the bridge many times, in different ways and in different circumstances, even when the tension between Zambia and Rhodesia was such that the bridge was periodically closed and the surrounding area declared unsafe. I was reminded afresh of the significance of the Victoria Falls in the evolving history of
Zambia and Zimbabwe and how they had sometimes served as a bridge to draw these countries together and at other times served as a divide intended to keep them apart. I thought of the meetings between prime ministers and their delegations7 sometimes taking place in trains spanning the width of the bridge. I thought of what the Victoria Falls had come to mean to me and of how I had taken what they represented politically, into my own sense of being.
We travelled to the Victoria Falls via Livingstone, on the Zambian side, which was where our flight from Johannesburg landed. From the airport we travelled through the town and then crossed over into Zimbabwe via the bridge which has just been discussed. This was my first visit to Zambia since I left the country at the end of 1973.
Livingstone airport was immediately recognizable although the town was much changed. We passed the railway station which was still recognisable as were the road side ‘lay-byes’ for which the roads of Northern Rhodesia used to be well-known. We passed two on our way to the Victoria Falls Bridge. The local currency, which consisted of Kwacha and Ngwee, which I noticed our driver using, was immediately familiar and evoked many memories.
3.3.6.5. Edgewood College of Education/Edgewood campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal
Having worked at Edgewood for thirty-one years I felt no need to revisit a place which had become so very familiar to me. When I arrived in 1980 several of the buildings were still being completed. I ‘felt’ my thirty-one years when, shortly before I retired, architects who had been engaged to design extensions and alterations to some of the tutorial buildings were advised to ask me, being unable to find some of the original plans, if I could remember the locations of certain of the underground pipes and cables.
In 2012, a former rector of the Edgewood College of Education, Dr Andre le Roux, visited me and asked me to show him around. He had left in 1993 and was keen to see how things had changed. It was interesting for me to see Edgewood through his eyes.
My familiarity had caused me to miss some of what he was seeing and noticing. Talking
7 Examples of such meetings included those in 1949 and 1951 which were called to explore the possibility
of establishing the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Another example was the famous meeting in 1974 between Dr K, Kaunda, the President of Zambia, and Mr B.J. Vorster, the Prime Minister of South Africa, who met in a train that spanned the length of the Victoria Falls bridge to try to ease tensions between their two countries.
to him as we walked around proved to be most enlightening in respect of what I found myself remembering. We effectively became engaged in a ‘memory sharing’
conversation, with much of what we saw serving as invaluable memory triggers. As we talked he began to ask about developments subsequent to his departure. My explanations, and the need to engage with him as he asked me questions, proved to be useful in triggering additional memories. As we talked we also shared our knowledge of what we knew of past members of staff and past students. Many names came up and we each had many memories to deal with.
When we arrived at the entrance foyer of the main tutorial building, where his portrait used to be displayed, he wanted to engage with me as to why it had been removed. As we talked, further memories were triggered, the more so as we made reference to the book, Edgewood Memories: Memories of the Edgewood Campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Wassermann & Bryan, 2010) which had been launched in the tutorial building just a few months previously. This book consisted of a compilation of twenty-six pieces of memory work which covered the Edgewood campus from its inception as a college of education to its emergence as a faculty of education. The intention was to leave an enduring memory and as I read the contributions a great number of memories were indeed triggered for me. Dr Le Roux had had the same experience and we brought our conversation to a close by sharing something of what we had both found the most interesting.
3.3.6.6. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg Campus
I had visited the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg on many occasions since having left in 1974. With the writing of my narrative in mind I made a purposeful visit to the campus (now a campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal) at the beginning of 2012 and I spent a morning walking around the campus, visiting places I knew would trigger memories.
In William O’Brien Residence I visited the rooms in ‘F’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ blocks which I had once occupied. I went into the dining-room and the lounge and into what was formerly the mail-room where our letters were delivered in our pigeon-holes. While the dining- room was no longer used as a dining-room, since meals are no longer provided to students in residence, but rather as an examinations venue, there were still several
large prints hanging on the walls and I immediately recognized them. They now showed the full signs of their age as they hung in the same places as they did when I was there as a student. I went into the reception area which was where we had to place our ‘fixed time’ telephone calls. I walked along the path from my old residence to the Sports Union which was where we wrote exams and partied along to the music of the 1960s and 1970s. From there I walked to the Library and although it had been altered somewhat, I managed to locate where I used to sit for hours on end studying. I went into the old Arts block, there to sit in the very seats, in the very rooms where I had had so many of my lectures and tutorials. In Appendix I there is a photograph of me in front of this building. I did the same in the Main Science Building which was where I went for my Geography classes. Finally, I visited Dennison Residence on the old Pietermaritzburg golf course site where I spent the last two years of my stay at the university.
3.3.6.7. Virtual visits to places via Google.com
I visited Luanshya and Mufulira via recent You-Tube postings. Both towns are particularly rundown and neglected, particularly Luanshya, which looked largely abandoned. Footage was, in both cases, confined to the main entrances, the business centres and some of the residential avenues, and was not of a particularly good visual quality. In the case of Luanshya, there were scenes of the Mine Recreation Club, including footage of the thoroughly dilapidated swimming pool where I spent many afternoons as a child. The buildings were completely unkempt, the water was green and filled with plant growth, and the surrounds completely overgrown. I would have liked to have viewed more of the town, but the clip ended after only a short while. I have wondered whether I have been guilty of employing a white, middle class aesthetic here and was therefore interested to stumble upon a similar assessment in the Zambian daily newspaper, The Times of Zambia (4 April, 2001), (cited by Ferguson, 2006). In the report Luanshya is described as an unkempt and run down town which had endured a long period of neglect and a series of crippling problems as a result of the Indian based mining company, which acquired ownership of the Roan Antelope Mining Corporation in 1997, having gone bankrupt in November 2001.