Using Primary Source Material to Teach Africa's History . . . the Logbook of the Northern Light Gold Mining Company

This semester I plan to do something new in the South African History course.

I do not want to compete with the world of visuals as put forth in available media. But I want to ride it forward a little.

My initial thought: people's sense of time in the past differed from today's, especially in rural places and before the railroads.

I have a "logbook" from the cook and account keeper with a party headed by Danial Francis transporting head gear to the previously defunct "Blue Jacket" mine between the Tati and Shashe Rivers, in the middle of nowhere, by "ox wagon": up from Barkly to Kanye and into the hinterlands of Khama's and Lobengula's dominions. The "logbook" is a daily update, at times laconic, at times hilarious, at times offensive, ultimately revealing of a particular time and place the way few other sources I have encountered are. It is still unpublished: I found it in the Zim Archives -- try going there now!

But it works only if each entry is read slowly, and clearly, over a long time — in fact, ideally, when each entry is read only in series, one per day, every day, over the same amount of time that the entries cover.

It goes from July 7th, 1881, to October 9th, covering 94 days or about thirteen weeks, mostly in laconic prose, but sometimes in verbatim and colorful quotations exposing the class and racial tensions in the outfit.

Three months. That's how long it took to haul a piece of machinery from the Cape docks to Tati District, a little piece of South Africa stuck in the corner of Botswana.

The effect, if the kids do it, listening to each installment, is to force the listener to slow down, to stop their expectations, and to relive, in something approaching real time, the entire journey, which is repetitive and dull . . . but then sometimes suddenly hilarious or awful.

The narration is then racist and casually uses Kaffir and once even N——, which we are told is absolutely verboten. It also pits "white men" against one another and rehearses their colorful language toward one another. It is laconic and stark and the reader has to think about what is going on in order to piece together the relationships between the principles and the people around them. I'll help with the larger context, of course.

I am going to edit myself on IMovie to bleep both the N and K words. I do not want to offend anyone in a stupid way, when the facts of history manifest in the narrative of the "log book" are legitimately offensive, because of what they WERE.

Otherwise, therefore, my plan is to read, in a straightforward manner, each entry, labelling each one by the day, and linking them in series to the syllabus, posted on line.

Students will sometimes hear a few concise words, "Inspanned at the river, paid the boys," and that kind of thing; but over time, something very different will emerge, a glimpse of the past in realtime.

Anyone interested in trying it will ultimately also find the links posted here, on my obscure website. As they will also be linked to my syllabus, I'll be identifiable by name for anyone who can type, I suppose.