Read an Excerpt
... so they understand ...
Cultural Issues in Oral History
By William Schneider Utah State University Press
Copyright © 2002 William Schneider
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-87421-550-2
Chapter One
Introduction
The setting is northern South Africa at graduation ceremonies for the University of the North (UNIN) in the fall of 1997. The university's red brick buildings stand out against the parched fields and modest homes. Beyond the fence and entry gates, cows and donkeys graze. This is an economically poor part of the country, and this university was designed and built during the years of apartheid to educate the people of the region. Little did the authorities know that this place would become a center for resistance to the government, a place where many of today's leaders would gather to rally support for change. During those years police intervention was common and students were jailed. UNIN has not recovered from the revolution; students still agitate for change; boycott and protest are often the first and only course of action.
The chancellor of the university is Nelson Mandela, who at that time was the president of South Africa. President Mandela has come to the campus to meet with the administration and faculty, to confer the degrees at graduation, and to address the graduates and their families. He is a tall, dignified looking man, and his warmth and interest in the people is evident. As he makes his way down the aisle to the stage, he stops frequently to greet and reach out to the older people and the young children. On the stage, he looks out into the auditorium of excited guests, elders, parents, and young children. He shakes hands with each graduate and offers his personal congratulations.
But now, he has completed his formal remarks, removed his reading glasses and begins a story. I am situated with other faculty behind him on the stage, and it is a bit hard to hear his comments, so in this recalling, I rely on a video made of the speech by the UNIN Media Department. The audio quality is poor so I will quote as best I can and edit heavily where it is not possible to distinguish his words.
Perhaps let me have the humility of saying that, in my younger days, I, myself, was a destroyer. I was once sent to go and break a meeting of the Communist Party.... It was a classic speech of a wise man, of a hero who analyzed the position of our people with an outline [of] how we can mobilize one another ... or mobilize the entire country and how to overcome oppression ... on us. That address was punctuated by prolonged ovation because it was a good speaker and he was making sense.
And the question was, what was I going to do? How was I going to carry out the task when people have you so filled with what they want to say? And I decided on a simple strategy and I said, "South Africa is like a big kraal. There are two bulls, one white coming from overseas, from a foreign country. There is a black bull produced by our soil. [Some] say the white bull must move in the kraal. I say the black bull from our own soil, the bull of [mentions three regions or chiefs]. I say that bull should lose [the white one]. What do you say?"
The same people that were cheering for [the speaker] were now cheering for me and I was able to break up the meeting. I had said nothing. [At this point the UNIN audience like the earlier audience was cheering for the black bull. Mandela quickly corrected them.] ... No vision but that slogan. Now, when there are tensions, it is ... your duty as people who do not fear opposition, who do not fear, ... to identify good men and women in all communities amongst Africans, Colored, Indians, Whites, among the various political organizations. It doesn't matter which political organization they come [from]; there are good men and women. Your duty, especially young people, is to say, why are we fighting? ... Why should we, when we have the opportunity of arming ourselves, why must we speak different voices? You should be able to say why should the so-called leaders of political organizations destroy your own future ...
Be positive, be constructive, and make sure that in every crisis the people of South Africa should emerge more united, more solid, and speaking with one voice. That is the homework I give you.
President Mandela's speech includes what may be an old story (the two bulls) retold within the larger story of how he broke up the Communist Party meeting. Most people there, and those who listen to the videotape, would say that he was imploring the audience to work together for South Africa, for the common good. He was telling us not to discriminate based on racial, ethnic, or political lines, that the greater good could be reached by everyone speaking with one voice.
That's probably all that I am qualified to report on, but I am quite sure that is not all that he was saying. Let me try to peel back some layers with your full understanding that I am raising questions more than speaking with authority. First there is the setting, UNIN, a university that has experienced year after year of unrest and disruption. This is a place that has a proud history of helping to cultivate the revolution that led to the new South Africa, but a place that is also struggling in the post-apartheid era to make the transition from revolutionary to democratic means to enact change. Nelson Mandela represents that change and is a living example of how to make the transition. This is further corroborated by his admittance that he didn't always make the right decision: "Perhaps let me have the humility of saying that, in my younger days, I, myself, was a destroyer."
I think Mandela was speaking directly to members of the UNIN community and calling for them to rely on reason and to work together. I suspect he knew that there had been long periods during the past year when the university was closed down to avoid violence, times when students closed the library and scared fellow students to keep them from attending classes.
You might know what he meant in his speech without knowing the history of UNIN, but would you know why he chose to say what he did on that occasion? I don't think he ever referred specifically to the university by name, but it sure felt like he was specifically speaking to us.
Then there is the story within the story-the two bulls in the kraal. He refers to it as a slogan, which would indicate that this story has a history of general use, that it is commonly understood. I am searching for that understanding and, like Joseph Sheppherd's research with the Ntumu people in the Cameroon (1988), I am reminded just how difficult it is to interpret sayings, adages, and riddles without an adequate knowledge of the oral traditions that inform them. In Mandela's story we might think that the two bulls should learn to get along, to use their joint might to plow the field, instead of fighting in the kraal. But to a farmer, this is ridiculous. My colleague at UNIN, Segothe Mokgoats'ana, in his manuscript, "It is herstory too," references the adage Ga go na poo pedi ka sakeng, which he interprets to mean, "There are no two bulls in the kraal." This reference is imbedded in his discussion of a "folk custom" that says a community has only one authority. The adage has also been used in the academic arena. Carolyn Hamilton, in her commentary on my use of the Mandela speech, noted that the expression was used recently at the University of Witwatersrand to describe a power struggle between two Western-educated African academics, one Black and one White.
So, how are we to understand Mandela's use of the story? Is he saying we should not be like two bulls in a kraal, that we should follow one leader? Or is he simply saying that he needed something to break up the meeting, thought of the (old) saying, recognized its potential impact, and used it with no concern about whether it was applicable? Or, was he saying that he used it, believed it at the time, but now thinks the saying is wrong and divisive? In order to answer these questions, we have to know a great deal more: how he has used it before and how others have used it.
Nhlanhla Maake also commented on my use of the speech and pointed out there are many layers to this speech, and Mandela has artfully manipulated them to convey meaning. For instance, I can see how he goes from personal narrative to adage to manipulation of adage to application of story to the present, and then to a prescription for the audience in the form of "homework." But how pale my rendering is, and how exhilarating it was to experience a masterful storyteller who speaks to the very issues that are foremost on our minds.
I chose to start this book with President Mandela's speech not because I am an expert on Africa. That is not the case. I would be on safer ground talking about the Arctic and subarctic. I start with the speech because it illustrates to me, and I hope to you, how profound an impact story can have on us, even when our understanding is minimal. I chose an area that I did not know well to illustrate how important it is to know and have experiences with the particular group of people who tell the stories. As my African colleagues point out, there are depths of understanding in this story that I have not begun to know.
In this work, I want to suggest we think about the young children of the people gathered at that graduation. In some respects, they are like me. They will grow up in a world that will be different from their parents. How can we preserve a record that they will understand? What can we preserve of this experience? Tape recorders and video cameras can help, but they won't preserve meaning. What do future generations need to know to understand the record? That's what this work is all about.
The predicament we face with oral history is that recordings produce a fixed record of words that were spoken by one or more people to others at a particular time and place. Unfortunately, this record often tells us little or nothing about the original context of the storytelling, performance of the speakers, and reception/response of the audience.
Once recorded, we tend to treat stories as fixed commodities, as if they were containerized or freeze-dried. We forget that they were told at a particular time and place to particular people, and each telling represents a creative tension between a speaker who selectively recalls the past in order to speak to the present. The oral record that we have on tape represents one such telling. The tape may be played and replayed for many years. It may reside in a public archive along with many others. How can we be sure that future users have the best opportunities to move beyond the words on the tape to understand the meaning of what was shared?
Sometimes I hear people say how pleased they are that we have an extensive collection of recordings in our archive at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and that they preserve history and culture. As I realize more about the differences between stories told and stories recorded, I question just how good a job we are doing to preserve history and culture. I cringe a bit and ask myself what is missing from the archival record that was present in the recording session. Then I ask how does that session differ from what might occur when an elder decides to tell a story to a son or granddaughter? This book explores these questions, first through stories that naturally occur beyond reach of the recorder. We look at how people use story to convey meaning to each other and the implications for those of us who document, interpret, represent, and preserve these accounts. Then, we propose a new direction for curators of the oral record, a direction that can give the old tapes new life. But for the new approach to work we will need to break down some old distinctions and create a greater degree of understanding across academic lines.
We often create artificial distinctions between those who collect, those who research and report on, and those who preserve the record. When these are not the same person, their interests become compartmentalized, and there are too few opportunities to transfer understanding from recording session to future listeners and viewers of the record. This study brings together the work of several disciplines and celebrates the growing folklore and anthropology literature that speaks to how understanding of oral narrative is based on performance, setting, and context (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Finnegan 1992; 100-111; Toelken 1996; 117-56). This work is also firmly grounded in the realities of the curator of collections, who must serve the multiple and diverse interests of narrators, donors, and users. The goal is to incorporate each of the perspectives, interests, and approaches so that we can find ways to preserve more of what is going on when people decide to share their stories on tape for future generations.
The book begins with a quote by Chief Peter John, the traditional chief of the Tanana Chiefs region in central Alaska. Peter John knows how difficult it is to understand what is meant when people tell stories, and his teachings have stretched many of us to see multiple layers of meaning (Krupa 1996, 1999; Schneider 1998b). It is fitting that his words should lead us into this discussion. The full quote is discussed more fully in chapter three, "What's in a Story."
The subtitle is meant to highlight that there are cultural considerations in documentation, representation, and preservation of oral sources. The cultural issues are in some cases cross-cultural, which is to say we recognize distinct groups of people whose traditions and lifeways are different. At an individual level, this influences how we understand what they say, how they see themselves as members of a particular group, and how they recognize and define others.
In other cases, and at other times and places, it is more appropriate to speak of transcultural and cross-cultural patterning. I take the term transcultural patterning from Carolyn Hamilton, who used it in her critique of my discussion of the Nelson Mandela speech. There she used the term to describe to me the movement in South Africa to forge a common culture (personal communication, 1998). This lens has several advantages. It permits a more fluid view of peoples' lives; reflects the sharing of traditions that has occurred between groups; and in South Africa, it avoids the painful legacy of apartheid. During apartheid, cultures were viewed as separate and distinct static entities that could be identified and labeled. The labels were then used to justify the government's policies of segregation and discrimination. In a more recent exchange on the term "transcultural," Carolyn emphasized the ways people move beyond historical labels of culture to new identities that they actively create and from which they derive meaning. Considered in this way, transcultural patterning reflects the active role of individuals as both inheritors of identity and conscious shapers of new identities.
I hadn't thought much about transcultural patterning in Alaska until I attended a memorial service for a prominent Native leader and his wife and daughter. They died in the tragic crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 in February, 2000. As I listened to the eulogies for the three, I was struck by the fact that each of them not only walked in many worlds but also built lives that creatively and graciously introduced others to their heritage and experiences. While I know they saw themselves as Athabascan Indians first, one senses that is a quality and a range of experiences they brought to their fuller lives as civic leader, homemaker, and young woman who, among other things, guided the development of the World Extreme Skiing competition. The eulogies paid tribute to their Native heritage but presented them in this fuller light, as Alaskans, an umbrella that encompasses many influences.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ... so they understand ... by William Schneider Copyright © 2002 by William Schneider. Excerpted by permission.
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