When you’re a youngster, music has a way of becoming communal. Well, it did when I was a teenager, which is why it didn’t matter that I never owned a tape deck in the Eighties. I had my roving box of tapes and there was always someone with a boom box.
Some of those cassettes were R6,99 blanks picked up at the local stationer, recycled through the shifting music du jour that backlights the changing seasons of capricious adolescence. Their white labels carried wiggly, hand-written artist names: Simon & Garfunkel or Magna Carta, scratched into the Tippex painted over a previous album name; gloomy Depeche Mode jettisoned Alice Cooper; Pink Floyd, the perennial favourite.
By the time I got to varsity, they were dusty, worn and some a little stretched. But one of them came in handy for a vac assignment. It was second year, I think, something about oral history and interviewing someone within the community.
My grandmother was down from Pietermaritzburg, so I popped one of those tapes into my sister’s rickety tape deck, propped my gran up at the dining room table with a cup of tea and hit the record button.
I didn’t know the woman well. With hindsight, I don’t think we liked each other much. But she obliged my fumbling questions and what followed was an extraordinary glimpse into a — well, an ordinary life. That glossy brown ribbon of tape captured the dredged memories of a British colonial girl growing up in India; shipped back to the UK for schooling; marrying a young South African doctor; boarding the RMS Carnarvon Castle for a new life on a strange continent; being wife to the Swaziland district surgeon in the decade before Richard E Grant’s Wha Wha world; relocating to Natal. Five children, one divorce, many more grandchildren.
An arbitrary assignment, perhaps, but an important one. Our lecturer wanted us to drink from the wellspring of historical sources.
Capturing oral history is the first offensive in that process of gathering history, just as today’s newspaper reports become tomorrow’s primary historical documents.
Researchers and students met at Rhodes University last week at the Historical Association of South Africa’s biennial conference. The topic of conversation was “history and crisis” — regional and global crisis, environmental crisis, cultural crisis, in the context of our colourful timeline. A question put forward by conference organiser Dr Alan Kirkaldy, though, was this: could the waning interest in the discipline of history among undergraduate students on many campuses be explained by its apparent lack of relevance to their lives today?
History probably does have a bit of a musty public persona — seemingly crusty, tweed-clad and whiffing faintly of mothballs — but that’s just a stereotyped veneer. It’s far more exciting than that.
After three years of undergrad history, I remember feeling as though I’d spent it sitting in on a communal therapy session. It was as if we’d put South Africa on the couch and asked it about its childhood. The process turned my world view on its head — sometimes painfully, always provocatively.
It was so very relevant. If Rwanda happened today, the historians were asking why the very next day. It was dynamic and radical and exciting — far from the dull repetition of the high school syllabus where the Great Trek and two World Wars reappeared each year like acid reflux, predictable and sour.
Granted, I’m biased towards the discipline. But it would be a poorer world if we didn’t have historians dusting off yesterday to help us understand today.
“History,” said American essayist Norman Cousins, “is a vast early warning system.”
This sentiment is probably at the heart of a new blog, History Matters, which went live last month, courtesy of South African History Online. Something happens today, and the site’s tame historians are blogging about it tomorrow.
My own grandmother’s part may have been small, but sitting with her while the tape deck laid her words down over the songs of some bygone Eighties pop group was part of a broader process of learning to observe and analyse the world.
By the end of Side B, the tape captured a muffled sob as she remembered a life that was coming to a close. It was only years later — when her eyes had waxed over with grey and failing health finally took her — that I realised the true value of that tape.
I kept meaning to transfer the interview to a CD, to give to my father as a memento of his departed mother. How sweet her words might have been, played back in her absence.
But when I finally looked for it, I found the tape had gone, probably thrown out during a spring clean.
One woman’s story, lost forever, but for the fading memories of her adult children.