International

Why South Africa’s Freedom Month calls for recognising Cuito Cuanavale as shared African and Global South heritage under the NHRA and UNESCO frameworks.

April in South Africa (SA) carries a particular weight. Freedom Month is the annual moment of collective remembrance that anchors our democratic identity around 1994: the unbanning of liberation organisations, the release of political prisoners and the long walk to the ballot box. As a heritage practitioner, I am compelled each year by what our official commemorative narrative omits: the external geographies where apartheid’s military power was confronted, contained and ultimately defeated. Chief among these is a small town in the south-eastern interior of Angola, whose name every South African should know, but does not.

It is called Cuito Cuanavale.

What happened at Cuito Cuanavale

From 14 August 1987 to 23 March 1988, the largest conventional military engagement on the African continent since World War II was fought in this Angolan town. Angolan and Namibian forces, supported by Cubans and the Soviet Union faced the apartheid SADF and its ally UNITA within a wider Angolan Civil War. It shaped the fate of an entire subcontinent.

The strategic consequences of the battle precipitated the New York Accords of December 1988, requiring the full withdrawal of South African forces from Angola and Namibia and setting in motion Namibian independence on 21 March 1990. The ultimate defeat of apartheid’s military machine in Angola fundamentally altered the regional balance of power. The path to the negotiating table and to the democratic...

Others tried and sorely failed to be the first to be able to travel by vehicle from Cape Town to Cairo. 

Major Chaplin Court Treatt and his South African born wife, Stella, succeeded in doing so in 1926 for the first time ever, taking a humongous 16 months to do so.

Imagine the blood, sweat, tears and mosquitos that cover every exposed area on your body like a grey crust. There were mud swamps as wide as 20km that had to be crossed and they got lost in the desert. Christmas was spent in pouring rain under a leaking tent with one member who had a broken arm and another one with an almost deadly insect bite. Sometimes they were only able to cross rivers by dragging the vehicles under water over the bottom of the river.

Maybe they would have thought twice if they knew all this before they departed!

By the early twentieth century the British Empire was at its biggest ever. The route the Court Treatts chose was to stretch only over colonial territory, described as “all red” since maps of the time indicated British colonies coloured in red. Stella Court Treatt wrote in her book, Cape to Cairo, that was published in 1927: “The desirability of blazing a trail through British Africa was superior to every other consideration.” They later acknowledged that another route would have been shorter and easier.

As the crow flies, Cape Town is 7,241 km from Cairo. A current electronic route...

In constructing this article, I had to ask myself the question: 'Is this article still in line with my primary research topic, namely South African photographic history, or have I become a full-blown genealogist?'.

This article stems from a photograph found in a South African West Coast pawn shop. Without it, this heritage story might never have been told.

The photograph in question is a photograph of seven Afrikaans-speaking Oxford students, captured by an Oxford-based photographer. Photographs by foreign photographers are not included in my ongoing research framework. The fact that all the sitters are South African was however the attraction.

To answer my own question above... a photo historian cannot ignore genealogical aspects presented by any image. The two aspects, namely photographic history and genealogy, therefore clearly overlap. In my ongoing research work, the photograph remains the primary source with the supporting text becoming secondary.

This is the second article where I rely on the photograph to partly reconstruct the narratives of students abroad. The first article related to medical students in Edinburgh (1878), some 50 years before the photograph under discussion in this article (click here to view).

Initially, I was stuck on how to go about researching each of the sitters as only the initials and surnames were presented in the photograph. I was going around in circles and was getting nowhere, until a heritage mentor, Prof. Kathy Munro, suggested: “Think Rhodes Scholarships”. Well, that opened the door. Immediately, I could link all seven sitters to Rhodes Scholarships awarded to...

I loved athletics in school and my favourite race was the 800m. I still follow the big races closely each year. I remember watching a runner a year ahead of me at school 'jog' twice around the track and finish with times in the mid 1:50s. He went on to race at the Olympics and the fact that I got to train alongside him was inspiring. What I witnessed on the weekend, however, just blows my mind. I still can't believe it happened. A young sixteen-year-old, Cooper Lutkenhaus, just ran an incredible 1:42.27.

Lutkenhaus Flying (Wikipedia)

Lutkenhaus, a high school student (year 10) from Justin, Texas, who attends Northwest High School, wasn't even expected to make the final. He went on to place second in the men's final, beating some of the best athletes in the world. The field included World Indoor Champion Josh Hoey and American record holder Bryce Hoppel - he beat them both. To put it in perspective for South African readers, his time of 1:42.27 is faster than Hezekiél Sepeng's South African record of 1:42.69 set in 1999.

Hezekiél Sepeng (World Athletics)

I'd recommend to anyone interested athletics watch the last stretch of the race. I've seen it dozens of times and get goosebumps every time...

As a 93-year-old retired archaeologist with enough time on my hands to continue some family history research, I have restarted looking into my part-Dutch ancestry in Cape Town, especially during the VOC era. It is a work in progress, mainly for our family's interest, and it is simply aimed at building on our family's collection of memorabilia and hearsay, tempered with the valuable and scholarly assistance from my two very experienced researchers, Richard Ball and Maureen Rall. Membership of "Ancestry" with its linked DNA "Throughlines" facility has also been extremely valuable.

Overview

I have chosen to focus on the surnames Danielsz and Pool because they have traditionally been recognised as belonging to the ancestral line from which our Brine/Edwards families here in Australia have developed. Both Dutch surnames can be seen in the VOC mid-17th century shipping records of sailors and passengers, as well as among the surnames of the early part-Dutch Cape Town residents. If slaves, they had been brought mainly from ports along the sea route which was used by the Dutch ships travelling from the Netherlands to their major VOC trading settlement at Batavia in the "Indies." It is acknowledged, however, that some slaves who were resident in Cape Town in the very early days had come from West Africa.

In our family line, the Danielsz surname itself appears to go back among the very early settlement records of 1654, whereas the surname Pool first appears in 1808 when J.J. Pool is recorded as the acknowledged father...

High Speed 2 (HS2) is a Mega railway engineering project currently being built in the United Kingdom, the cost of which is being covered by the British Government (read the Taxpayer). To say that the project is a controversial one is no overstatement as its construction has been beset with cost and time overruns, ever since its inception (in 2009). The original Scope of Work was to lay a double track high speed (passenger only) railway from London Euston to the provincial cities of Birmingham (Phase 1), Crewe (Phase 2a), Manchester and Leeds (Phase 2b), however because of spiralling costs the scope now has been reduced with only the London to Birmingham section going ahead, with the Old Oak Common Interchange station now becoming the initial London terminus, which is situated 5 miles (8km) due west of Euston.

HS2 plan (Wikipedia)

The original London and Birmingham Railway (L&BR), as engineered by Robert Stephenson, was opened in 1838 between Euston and Birmingham and had existing onward connections from Birmingham to Liverpool and Manchester via the Grand Junction Railway (of 1837) and the Liverpool & Manchester (of 1830). The three railway companies had a close working relationship which led to their merger, in 1846, to become the “London & North Western Railway” (LNWR), considered by many as the “Premier Line”.

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Searching for abandoned South African photographs is a passion of mine in that many photographs contain valuable historical provenance which then becomes useful in reconstructing historical narratives.

The provenance can relate to the individuals posing for the photographs, the photographers or a broad spectrum of themes. These themes may include war-related imagery, trains, planes, cars, toys, clothing, hats or animals. One of my personal abstract favourites is black and white photographs showing up the photographer’s lack of skill in the use of the camera.

Social media activity confirms that both the concepts of “abandoned” and “found” photographs have become accepted words amongst photographic historians and enthusiasts alike.

Photographs become abandoned when a family can no longer relate to the people or subject matter, resulting in the photograph albums containing these images being discarded.

I appreciate family members who donate family photograph albums to charity organisations, selling them online or at car boot sales.

On a negative note, unbeknown to the donators of photographs to charity organisations in South Africa is that the photographs end up being destroyed because many of these organisations believe that by selling the images they may be transgressing the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). They are sadly ill-guided and in doing so actively destroying possible historical-significant objects. This sensitive issue will be addressed in a future article.

I cringe at the thought of how much valuable imagery has been destroyed or is still being destroyed by simply tossing it in the rubbish/recycling bin or burning...

A recent road trip to Zambia, to assist my friends in transporting the zooarchaeology artefacts of their son’s girlfriend (a PhD candidate) from the Livingstone Museum to South Africa for further scientific analyses, gave Lorraine and I the opportunity to see something of the countries to our north.

Our route to Livingstone and back to Johannesburg

On our first night we stayed over at Big Fig Oasis Camp, a few kilometres before Grobler Bridge and the Martin’s Drift Border Post to Botswana. While the other couple and we were comfortably ensconced in airconditioned chalets, their son (Christian), braved the tent atop the camping trailer. He certainly drew the short straw as he also had to prove his excellent braaiing talents on several occasions.

Like all overland trips, ours had some moments of vexation. Firstly, my friend’s SUV suffered a break down near Modimolle, causing delay, while Christian’s Pajero was brought up from Johannesburg as replacement vehicle. The following morning at the Martin’s Drift Border Post, a burst water pipe water caused a temporary closure of said post. Hobson’s choice: wait for the water to be restored or detour to the Stockpoort Border Post (‘Parr’s Halt’ in Botswana) some 80 kilometres to the south-west. Unsure of the duration of the...

A Victorian photograph album can be described as an artefact, but so can the content. Each photograph included in these albums of old is therefore also an artefact in its own right. Where provenance, such as details of the photographer and/or sitter, is provided on a photograph, the value of the photographic artefact becomes even more significant.

A recent Victorian album acquired by the Hardijzer Photographic Research Collection (HPRC) contained a single cabinet card format photograph which immediately grabbed my attention. It is a rather playful image showing nine men, eight of which are medical students who underwent their training in Edinburgh between 1875 and 1883. The photograph, with a hand written inscription: “Cape Medical Students/Edinburgh”, was captured on 23 August 1878 by the Scottish photographer Jas. Howie Junior.

Also included in the album were some smaller Carte-de-Visite format photographs of the same individuals that appear on the Cabinet Card. In addition, the album also contained another two medical students who do not appear on the Cabinet Card image.

What makes the Cabinet Card unique is that each sitter’s name has been recorded on the back of the card. Without this provenance, this card would just have become another image of interest, but of little value as an artefact.

This creatively posed image is further of interest in that the medical students are seemingly studying a human skeleton (bones and skeleton). Two of the sitters are holding long pipes. These pipes are known as churchwardens or reading pipes (in German)...

Shortly before his death in 1984, Italo Calvino assembled thirty-eight essays in his Collections of Sand (Collezione di Sabbia). One section of essays was labelled ‘The Traveller in the Map’ (Il viandante nella mappa). Calvino described his notion of a cartographic odyssey:

The simplest form of a map isn’t the one we consider the most natural today: that is the map which represents the surface of the Earth as seen by an extra-terrestrial eye. The first need, to put places on a map, is connected with travel: a map is the reminder of ... the tracing of a route.

Understanding an image through time and space is essential in cartography. Time assumes a past story.

While a map’s borders neatly constrain the geography of the map, they can also constrain one’s interpretation of the map. To get to Calvino’s notion of a cartographic odyssey, the gaze of the beholder of the map must wander beyond the restrictions imposed by the map border and page margins.

For some time, I had been mulling over the destiny of a distressed, incomplete Atlas that was published in 1825, in London. The author of the maps was James Wyld the Younger, geographer to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. I was perplexed by the small label inside the atlas: ‘J Pownceby, Book Binder, Lonsdale St East, Melbourne’. A London publication bound in Australia?

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