A Literary Guide to KwaZulu-Natal

A Literary Guide to KwaZulu-Natal, Niall’s first book, co-authored with Professor Lindy Stiebel, has just been published by UKZN Press. Read a few pages HERE and read more on the authors HERE.

KwaZulu-Natal is culturally rich, offering a wide range of writers – writing mainly in English and Zulu – who are linked through their lives and their writing to this province of South Africa. The writers include, to name just a few, Alan Paton, Roy Campbell, Lewis Nkosi, Ronnie Govender, Wilbur Smith, Daphne Rooke, Credo Mutwa and Gcina Mhlophe.

And how better to understand a writer than to know about the places they are linked to? For example, who, after reading the lyrical opening sentences of Paton’s famous book, Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) has not wanted to see this scene in reality?

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it.

A Literary Guide to KwaZulu-Natal introduces you to the regions and writers through word and image, leading you imaginatively through this beautiful province. This could include following the route a fictional character charts in a novel, visiting particular settings from a story or tracking down the places linked to a writer, whether a birthplace, home, burial site or significant setting. Literary tourists are interested in how places have influenced writing and at the same time how writing has created place. This is also a way of reflecting upon and understanding historic and contemporary identities in a changing cultural and political South African landscape.

The Five Hundred Year Archive

The Five Hundred Year Archive (FHYA) project is the focus of Grant’s post-doctoral research fellowship at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative. The FHYA aims to develop and promote understandings of the archival possibilities of materials located both within and outside of institutions and to facilitate their engagement.

Project Focus

The project team has selected a limited number of bodies of material pertinent to a small region (the southern Swaziland-KwaZulu-Natal region) in a limited time period (the late independent period, from about 1750 to various points in the late nineteenth century), drawn from diverse collection settings, covering a large range of disciplines (archaeology, botany, ethnology, history). In short, a small focus drawing on a vast array of “sources”. In so doing the project is attempting to deal with the maximum complexity involved in creating an archive in relation to a tightly circumscribed focus. The aim is to use this as an opportunity to think through the problems involved and, in the form of a sample project, to attempt to address them.

FHYA in Swaziland
Three generations of passionate archivists and historians, popular and professional, local and foreign, pose for an historic photograph on the occasion of the FHYA stakeholder meeting in Swaziland.

Digital Exemplar

An important output of the project is creation of an online digital archival exemplar, which is capable of bringing together, through the use of digital technologies, visual, textual and sonic materials relevant to these periods. As an exemplar it is not an archive that will exist in perpetuity in its own right, but rather a sample or prototype designed to show what is possible. The exemplar aims to be a conceptually innovative intervention geared to work across geographic and disciplinary boundaries, across multiple institutions (both in South Africa and internationally), and to incorporate a variety of media formats such as digital images, text and audio.

Project Partners

The FHYA project has a number of external partner institutions from a variety of disciplines so as to make the exemplar responsive to a wide range of institutional concerns. The project team has worked closely with many of the partner institutions to ensure mutually beneficial relationships, including the Swaziland National Archives and the KwaZulu-Natal Archives, amongst others. The institutions are Wits University Historical Papers, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the KwaZulu-Natal Museum, the Swaziland National Archives, the Killie Campbell Africana Library, the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Bews Herbarium at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the Cambridge University Library, with relations with AMAFA KwaZulu-Natal and the Voortrekker / Msunduzi Museum in process.

Theory of Change: Local Knowledge in Local Languages

McNulty Consulting has developed an exciting new theory of change that focuses on local content in local languages. It is aligned to the South African government’s National Development Plan, the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the United Nations’ developments goals, defined in its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The theory of change advances the idea that the creation of a mobile digital platform of local knowledge in local languages has the potential to support certain of the South African, African Union and UN development goals. The objectives of such a platform are to empower everyday Africans by providing opportunities to:

  • Create and access relevant information (about places, history, people, customs etc.) in their own languages, through iAfrika.
  • Access mobile training modules in their own languages, through Diji.

This type of platform has the potential to bring about long-term societal impacts in Africa such as developing digital skills and improving digital, information and reading literacy, promoting local languages and knowledge, supporting social inclusion and cohesion, as well as contributing to the development of a knowledge society and economy in Africa.

Click on the images below for an overview of the Theory of Change.

Digital Memory Toolkit Wins at IFLA 2015!

With funding from the Goethe Institut, we were able to develop a practical resource for those wishing to set up digital memory projects. The Digital Memory Toolkit (available for free HERE) aims to address a lack of digital literacy in community memory projects by giving project teams the insight and tools necessary to develop these types of projects. Projects of this nature commonly focus on preserving and sharing local knowledge and empowering community members through skills training and engagement.

Alongside Brigitte Doellgast of the Goethe Institut, Niall presented a poster of the Digital Memory Toolkit at the IFLA World Library and Information Congress. Illustrations by the talented Janine Petzer, who can be found here: www.janinepetzer.com.

The poster won the best poster of the conference!