Shane Moran - Alternation Journal

lived modernity, and as complex and changeable. Her work also shows how 'the
traditions of ~nodernity' are equally present as variously violent, exclusive and
contlict~~al, but also intelwoven and interdependent in settler and chiefly ivorlds. At the
same time, the nuanced interweaving of concepts makes problelnatic any easy or siinple
dichotolnous conceptions of nationalism and political reconciliation.
It is to these concerns of 'orality' and 'literacy' as the central organising
concepts of the book that we wish to draw attention. Hofmeyr demonstrates that any
interaction between orality and literacy (rather than using notions of explanatio~l
between tradition and inodernity) needs to be sought in the details of each particular
context and that the impact of literacy has no automatic consequence and callnot be
predicted. As the case studies illuminate, the relationship between the spoken and the
written was si~nultaneously co~nplexly interwoven in practice. and symbolically
oppositional ir, tlie idea of orality (supposedly for tradition) and that of literacy
(supposedly for tlie modern). She argues, though, that by the 1960s, historical tales had
been tr-ansfor~ned under social and political pressures, but also by the combiiiation of
oral and written historical accounts. in this context, and within the substantive changes
between inale and female, and between historical and fictional stolytelling, the 'radical
attrition oflneinory3 has currently taken place, alongside the alnplitude ofa previously
marginalised and pail-onised craft ofstorytelling.
Hofineyr thus provides a rich and nuanced account of the ways in ivhich
words-spoken and written-have eloquence and power, but also of the ways they are
socially co~istructed nod u~idelgo ti~resholds of change. decline, attrition and amplitude.
She highlights the social conditions that control texts and audiences, but also sliows that
attention to narrative structure is necessarily central to revealir~g the substance of ideas,
diflring intellectual tiaditions (chiefly and settler) and the different and changing
meanings ofthe past entailed in different dominant and subaltern, and modernist and
nationalist accounts. Thus, for exan~ple, she is able to combine text and context in an
erploiation in tlie production of local or 'indigenous' fonns of knowledge in the
Mokopane or Valtyn chicftancy through looking at the oral historical narration dealing
with the story of the cave of Gwala' (the siege of Makapansgat in i 554) She argues
lliat lhese historici~l tales are draivn froni 'tile intellectui~l traditions undel-pinning
cl~icilnncy' and are 'complex investigations into tlie meaning ofchiefsliip as a system
of political authority and as a synibol of the entire social order' but also that the
interaction bet\veeir oral and written accounts of the siege, and bctween chiefly anti
settler accounts were by 110 means separate entities. They influenced each other in
signiilcant ways so that the 'neat distinction between chiei1yJoral and settler/writteti is
not possible' (F-iof'n~eyr- 1993: 14).
l~ic~lcc. son?c\\~i~e~-c along the iilic. most \\;i.iltc~.r (settler) documciits lvcre
bascd on oi.nl tcslimon)~ ... Equally. chielly vcl-sio1.r~ oftlic story apllropriatcd
into thci~~selves fi-agrne~~ls ii.0111 flic ~v~-illeil accounts. In terms ol' thriiinlplicil
fbl-nls of.intcrpretatioil. the two fsaililioiis also ir~lrrsecl in intrrcsting
ivayx .. .
Rut they hdve also changed 111 ~elatron to the changing 1-01 tunes of the chlefdorn, and In
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relation to the change$111 the production, form and content ofthe storytelling. The stoty
of the South African past, then, which draws on Hofineyr's approach to social h~stoly
and subaltemity, is also much more mutual and lnterconnected than previously
imagined, and the possibilities of a radical nationalist break in academic hlstoly
productio~i is equally rendered as problematic if her work is held up as a model.
Focused through the concepts of orality and literacy, then, Hofineyr's study
has significant other implications. Not only does she suggest the need to attend to the
orality of all written source^'^, and thus the entire documentary has that still ranks the
written over the spoken in histoly, but also that to explore subaltern memory, identity
and agency requires new cultural contexts and forms of analysis where language,
translation and the 'evidence of experience' are engaged as material, social and
narrative constructs. Thus, she says,
while therc has been a lot of work that is based on oral hislorical inf'orination.
this scholarship has tended to mine testimony ibr its 'facts' without paying
~iiucli atlention to the forins of interpretation and intellectual traditions that
inform these '[acts' (Hofnleyr 1993:9).
A third very different work that examines the tensio~is of rule is that of Tirn
Keegan's Colonial South Afiica u~zd fhc: Origins of the Racial Ordev (1 996). While
Hofmeyr's work is situated in the meeting ground between text and context and
between that of orality and literacy-and between social histoty and literary
studies-and Van Onselen's between the structures and agency of 'histo~y frorn
below', Keegan's study sets out explicitly to synthesise revisionist writing on
nineteenth century South Africa in opposition to liberal historiography. Keegan's book
Ilas a number of strengths and as the best syntheses are, is strikingly original: he traces
the origins of modern SA racism and the racial state into the early period of integration
of the Cape into the British Empire, re-assesses the relationships between Dutch slavery
and British colonialism, tracks regional and i~nperial dimensiolls that have not been
previously explored and compared, and reviews collventio~~al interpretatiol~s of such
key lno~nertts as the Great Trek. Here, for example, Ile presents a strong argument,
backed with evidence, to show the deep involvement of leading English-speaking
settlers in produciilg what are conveiltio~~ally regarded as Afrikaner apologia for the
Trek. This is breathtakingly daring! Moreover, the liberal tradition is revealed as not
only being Janus-faced, but as deeply embedded within the violent construction of
racialised and subaltern subjects.
At the same titne, however, Keegan's work reflects some ofthe tensions oftliis
kind of synthesis. It is largely a 'histoly from above'. It is about how the structures of
dominalzce: of accumulation, thc colonial state and settler society were developed and
how these structures of dominance necessarily and increasingly shaped the racialised
'' F-lofn~eyr (1994; 1995) has engaged thcse issues in relation to oral liistory in Soutl~ Afi-ica in
two important papers.
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