The UKZN Griot. Of Scholarly and Not Scholarly

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Recently, I had to clear out 40 years of accumulated documents, books, journals, dissertations and correspondence, from a UKZN office to make room for new occupants.

My UKZN graduate assistant helped me to digitise hard copies, and we contributed tons of paper to the recycling mill.  She was astonished at the sheer volume of paper that we had amassed since starting my Kalahari project in 1995.  Amongst those documents were thousands of pages of open-ended transcribed interviews that I and my students had conducted with our research participants, especially in the Kalahari.  These interviews were done before the new ethical requirements came along in 2013 that require the destruction of data after five years, a monumentally stupid legalist requirement that flushes useful data through the shredder.  As if information, like baked beans, has a sell-by date!  How would the world look had Aristotle’s writings been trashed? Along with this indigenous knowledge cleansing goes history, memory and the personalities that populated these forms of tracing.

In rereading some of the interviews conducted, in many cases, tears came to my eyes, as I scanned transcripts with characters with whom we had worked for nearly 20 years, many of whom have passed away, in communities where the death rate is way higher than the birth rate.  The causes are many: old age, HIV, substance abuse, malnutrition, domestic violence, the winter cold, and homicide.

Whatever the cause, I experienced a sense of real loss as we trashed these transcripts.  Here were the stories and thoughts of individuals who wanted to be on the academic record, to whom we had retuned hard copies of interviews, but who had nowhere to archive them.  These same individuals played international roles in movies, human rights movements and in research.

Here were individuals whom we came to know well, who always welcomed us into their communities, whose sense of self-significance was captured in our published work.  But much of that work is discounted by our peers who dismiss it as ‘not scholarly’.

To this our Kalahari hosts would counter-argue that they are transdisciplinary:  they work with geneticists, zoologists, botanists, archaeologists, astronomers, linguists, anthropologists, pharmacists, historians, literary scholars, development researchers, etc.  They redefined the nature of the research encounter:  they claim to be the professors and position all these visiting professors as their students – why else would they be consulting them?  How many academic careers did they make for visitors like us?  And yet, what they told us has to be trashed, now for ethical reasons we are told.  Who benefits from this documentary vandalism I keep asking myself.  Certainly not the folks who gave us permission to talk to them.  Nor the organisations that represent them.  Nor their children who want to remember them.

Science is not just survey work, then abstracted, sanitised, and discussed in terms of statistical significances.  In these forms of encoding personalities are eliminated, feelings discounted, and hopes lost as the academic factory processes the human experience into explanations often unrecognisable to those who provide the data, the stories and the information. That’s the nature of the academic enterprise, however.  But it is often an alienating one for our hosts.  They think that we academics have lost the plot somewhere.

Remember the ballyhoo in the mid-1980s when a group of American museumologists questioned a life-size diorama of “Bushmen” displayed in the Cape Town SA Museum which exhibits mainly natural history.

The diorama was “archived” in 2001 to allow reinterpretation but ethical considerations insisted that the life-casts should be treated as human remains and therefore not exhibited.  The diorama will be dismantled in September 2017 after a cleansing ceremony with traditional healers has been held to dispel any negative forces.  The leaders of various Khoisan groups want their history and culture to be shown in the Iziko SA Museum which they regard as the most appropriate place for the story of the “first people” to be told.

Kruiper, the traditional leader of a re-constituted group that came in the 1990s to be known as the #Khomani, whose land and heritage was, in July this year, declared by UNESCO as a natural heritage site, told my team that when he died that he wanted to be part of that diorama.    Political correctness would not allow his wish.  But his death in 2013 was attended by 2 000 people, amongst whom were non-community members and opportunistic dignitaries who used his international prominence to polish their own marbles [1].  They bulldozed a section of the communal land claim farm for a huge tent and two car parks, graded the road, installed portable toilets, served themselves a hot meal, made frothy speeches and gave take-aways in polystyrene containers to the community, many including the Kruiper clan. The rest were told to sit in the sand and sun outside the marquee.  Now, you tell me what’s ethical and what is not.  I won’t paraphrase the Kantian categorical imperative here.

The printed transcripts, now shredded, had outlasted many software programmes:  Wordstar, Xywrite, ASCII, Wordperfect, all lost in translation, often faded in dot matrix print format, vanishing before our eyes.  Dawid and his clan have outlasted the opportunists who sought to abuse his memory for their own ends. Many academics have worked in partnerships with such communities to help restore dignity and trust, to enable mutual benefit, and the establishment of archives.  But this work is not easily recognised by the academic enterprise. University Press’s continue working within archaic assumptions about what is “scholarly” and what is not.  Higher Degree Committees impose their own positivist prescriptions.  SAQA roots syllabi in fixed moments.  Classroom auditors demand banking education rather than critical pedagogy.

And, don’t get me started on performance management except to wonder why it is the managers who assess academics while the academics are not permitted to assess their managers.  Now, that would be a game-changer.

We can learn from the First People about reversing observer-observed relationships.

Reference

1. See Grant, J. 2012. A Hollow Sound of Lamentation.  http://ccms.ukzn.ac.za/files/articles/Subtext/subtext%20winter%202012%20web.pdf

- Keyan G Tomaselli is a UKZN Professor Emeritus and Fellow, known as “Die Prof”, amongst the #Khomani, and currently Distinguished Professor at the University of Johannesburg.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are the author’s own.