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Abstract
The Sinomlando Centre for Oral History and Memory Work in Africa runs a variety of research and community development projects which aim to assist orphans and vulnerable children to take ownership of their history. Sinomlando is an isiZulu word meaning “we have a history.” Adapting the skills and methods of oral history, one of the programmes run by Sinomlando is the memory box project which helps families affected by HIV&AIDS and, to a lesser extent, other fatal diseases or crime, to record their family history by way of life stories, family trees and bereavement narratives. The aim is to enhance resilience in the children and assist caregivers. The facilitators must manage competing ethical demands: respect for the child as an individual and respect for cultural norms and values which assign subordinate roles to children and deny them the right to be informed about adult matters; conformity to ontologies, epistemologies and ethical principles which arise from Western research practices while honouring indigenous African knowledge systems. In this paper I focus on the ethical implications of the memory box project.
Notes on Contributor
Judith Lütge Coullie is Senior Research Associate at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a Learning Advisor at the University of Canterbury (Christchurch). Publications reflect her abiding interest in self-representational writing: a collection of South African women’s life writing (The Closest of Strangers, 2004), a co-edited volume on Breyten Breytenbach (2004), a CD on Roy Campbell (2004), and the memoirs of Campbell’s daughters (2011). She co-edited a collection of interviews on southern African auto/biography (2006) and a collection of essays on Antjie Krog (2014). “The Ethics of Nostalgia in Post-Apartheid South Africa” appeared in Historical Justice (2016).
ORCID
Judith Lütge Coullie http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5275-140X
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to acknowledge the founder of Sinomlando, Philippe Denis, and the Director, Gracia Makiwane, for their generous sharing of knowledge.
Notes
1. The Sinomlando Annual Reports provide an overview of their impressive achievements. In addition to training workers in NGOs, the Sinomlando Centre has also assisted a few schools with a high proportion of orphans to engage in memory work and provide psychosocial support for vulnerable children. Memory work is also undertaken with HIV positive children undergoing ARV treatment, with refugee children, and with deaf children and their caregivers (Annual Report Citation2014: 11–2).
2. Instead of the usual “HIV/AIDS,” I use “HIV&AIDS,” following Musa W Dube (Citation2009: 213). He notes that people who are HIV positive or who have AIDS have complained that the generic HIV/AIDS conflates two very different conditions.
3. Later in the essay, I have more to say about the concept of tradition, and the fact that it denotes a shifting and mixed set of norms, values and beliefs.
4. Hence the title of Steinberg’s study of the responses to AIDS in a rural community: Three Letter Plague (Citation2008).
5. (Margalit Citation2002: 38) The past is an integral part of present identities. That explains the identity crises we often experience as a result of dramatic changes that quite literally tear us from our past, as when we emigrate or lose a spouse.
6. Bénézet Bujo notes that the typical “African ‘ethical community’ […] includes the invisible world of the living dead. The ancestors play an important role in shaping morality [and …] set up moral directives for the welfare of the children” (Citation2009: 115).
7. Murove’s condemnation of conceptions of African ethics as unchanging is apposite: “it is doubtful that any ethic could consist only of past teachings [and] any that did would soon become extinct” (Citation2009: 25).
8. One does not need to resort to melodrama to observe that death lurks close to the heart of life in South Africa. The World Health Organization “Global Status Report” (Citation2015) states that there are 25.1 deaths on South African roads per 100 000 people. Although not the highest for fatalities in the world, this can be contrasted with the USA’s 10.6 and the UK’s 2.9 deaths per 100 000 people. According to the United Nations Survey of Crime trends for 1998–2000, South Africa’s per capita intentional homicide rate (at 51.39 per 1,000 people) is second only to Columbia’s.
9. A street survey with 487 men and women living in a township in Cape Town showed that 11% believed that AIDS is caused by spirits and supernatural forces and 21% were unsure if AIDS is caused by spirits and the supernatural (Kalichman and Simbayi Citation2004).
10. The memory work involves both new memory practices as well as “observing, analysing and reflecting upon existing memory practices” (Denis Citation2005a: 67). “Revered elders perform a similar act as caregivers of an AIDS orphan, when they recount family stories in the presence of memory facilitators. Thus the concept of creating memory boxes is not wholly alien to broadly conceived Zulu cultural views” (Denis Citation2008: 588).
11. Similarly, the suitcases of the refugee children, “became significant, not only as metaphors for their identities, but also as powerful representations of ownership – ownership of identity, ownership of physical space, ownership of something special and treasured […] a concrete place where they could leave a sign or trace of themselves […]” (Clacherty Citation2008: 158).