The desire to overcome the bias of written sources and access the authentic, orig-inal voices of Africa was particularly prominent in the oral tradition school led by Jan Vansina. InOral Tradition as History, he developed a methodology that aimed to recover the tradition of precolonial Africa through the precise analysis of collected oral narratives.¹³ His techniques, taken up by many scholars, as-sumed the possibility of overriding the impact of the colonial and postcolonial periods on“African voices.”Vansina’s school can be appreciated for its consid-eration of multiple oral ways to convey memory, in particular gossip, tales, prov-erbs and poems. However, its attempts to reach the“true”oral tradition through interviews paradoxically tended to reinforce the myth of “discovering” Africa and the illusionary objectivity of the historian’s sources, whether written or oral.¹⁴
Oral tradition exemplifies how the mere fact of contesting the supremacy of written primary material may not challenge dominant historiographical trends per se. As recent studies have observed, one of the most important drawbacks of oral history can be the quest for genuine African, or women, or subaltern voi-ces.¹⁵This quest can be explained by the necessity to break with the idea of oral sources as“a spontaneous uncontrollable mass of fluid, amorphous material,”
and to reassert the authority of the historical knowledge produced in the aca-demic realm.¹⁶The tendency to romanticise these “original” voices has led to two trends, one establishing a new essentialism denying the influence of any he-gemonic mechanisms on the emergence of these voices, the other reinforcing the
Jan Vansina,Oral Tradition as History(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
David W. Cohen, Stephan F. Miescher, and Luise White,“Introduction: Voices, Words, and African History,”African Words, African Voices, Critical Practices in Oral History(Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2001), 14; Abdullahi A. Ibrahim,“The Birth of the Interview: The Thin and the Fat of It,”in Cohen, Miescher and White,African Words, African Voices, 103–124.
For an extensive critical review of the limitations of oral history projects, see Cohen, Miesch-er and White,African Words, African Voices.
Alessandro Portelli,“What Makes Oral History Different?”in Perks and Thomson,The Oral History Reader,33.
illusion according to which power dynamics can be overcome by the methods of oral history.¹⁷
While feminist historians played a crucial role in the emergence of oral his-tory as a new field of research, they also contributed to its constitution as a “priv-ileged”way to retrieve African voices. The myth of universal sisterhood was used as a tool to legitimise the erasure of any notion of difference between the female narrator and the female researcher.¹⁸Confronted by the reality of leading inter-views and by a range of harsh criticisms originating in different disciplines and opinions, this argument was, however, rapidly discarded. Many feminist re-searchers decided to abandon easy dichotomies and shift the attention to con-tested“grey areas.”¹⁹By focusing on the fine balance between the necessity to challenge binarisms and the tendency to reify the “Other,”they moved on to other controversies, including the power relationships inherent to oral history.
Despite these cautions, oral history can provide a bridge between different spaces, temporalities, and realities. According to Alessandro Portelli,“oral his-tory is a work of relationships; in the first place, a relationship between the past and the present; then, a relationship between the interviewer and the inter-viewee, and between the oral form of the narrative and the written or audiovisu-al form of the historian’s product.”Even more interesting is how he describes the emergence of memory in oral history methodology:“In oral history, in fact, we do not simply reconstruct the history of an event but also the history of its mem-ory, the ways in which it grows, changes, and operated in the time between then and now.”²⁰
It is exactly in the ways that memory is constructed and constantly redefined that oral history projects in prisons prove to be useful. Prisoners’ voices only emerge at occasional moments in the written archives of a prison. If archives can be considered as“a set of discursive rules,”the power relations inscribed in Pollsmoor Prison did not act in favour of the representation of prisoners’
sub- Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins,“Social Memory Studies: From‘Collective Memory’to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,”Annual Review of Sociology24 (1998): 105–140;
Megan Vaughan,“Reported Speech and Other Kinds of Testimony,”in Cohen, Miescher and White,African Words, African Voices, 65; Alison Baker,Voices of Resistance, an Oral History of Moroccan Women(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
Sylvie Vandecasteele-Schweitzer and Danièle Voldman,“The Oral Sources for Women’s His-tory,”in Writing Women’s History, ed. Michelle Perrot (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992), 41–50.
Michelle Perrot,“Introduction,”Writing Women’s History, 7.
Alessandro Portelli,“What Makes Oral History Different,”inOral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans, ed. Luisa Giudice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 21–30.
jectivity.²¹ The only instances when their voices do appear is under the form of a written complaint against the administration or a fellow inmate addressed to se-nior officers or to the commissioner, or under the form of an affidavit related to an offence committed on the prison grounds. While working on these archives, it soon became evident that prisoners who did not know how to write asked the help of a fellow prisoner or a social worker in order to put his/her requests on paper. This implied two translations: a first rephrasing of one’s thoughts forced by the necessary adaptation to the rules set forth by the prison administration, and a second translation by the person actually writing the letter. In the Polls-moor archives, the invisibility of female prisoners was even more striking, and could not merely be explained by the small percentage of women in the prison population. In 1989, just before the beginning of the democratic transition, fe-male prisoners represented a mere 3.5 percent of the prison population, though the rate had reached 6.55 percent in 1977.²² Most archive files related to Pollsmoor Women’s Prison were practically empty.
Non-censored prisoners’letters can be found in the records of organisations of support such as the Black Sash, the South African Prisoners’Organisation for Human Rights, the Detention Resource Centre Archive or the Cape Town Legal Resources Centre. These letters, smuggled out throughout the apartheid period, are now scattered throughout different South African archives and represent a rich addition to the letters conserved in the Pollsmoor archives. Interviews inside and outside prison during late apartheid and the democratic transition produced a narrative that came to fill a great number of gaps left by the written sources.
If the interviews I conducted outside the prison with former prisoners, psychiatrists, psychologists, lawyers and judges related to the general ethical problem of leading interviews in a post-colonial country, conducting them on prison grounds raised different issues. At Pollsmoor, language was definitely an issue, as the interviews were conducted in English, which was not the mother tongue of most black and coloured inmates. Gaining their consent to interview raised other concerns. A small number of studies, mostly from a criminology per-spective, have tackled the specific problem of consent in oral history projects tak-ing place in closed setttak-ings.²³ Despite the information they provide on the legal
Stoler,“Colonial Archives.”
Government Publications, University of Cape Town (GP, UCT), Annual Reports of the Com-missioner of Prisons, 1976–1977 & 1989–1990.
See, for instance, Jennifer A. Schlosser,“Issues in Interviewing Inmates. Navigating the Methodological Landmines of Prison Research,” Qualitative Inquiry14, no. 8 (2008): 1500– 1525; James B. Waldram,“Anthropology in Prison: Negotiating Consent and Accountability with a‘Captured Population,’”Human Organization57, no. 2 (1998): 238–244.
framework of these interviews and the difficulties encountered in closed settings across the world, these studies often fail to provide a meaningful explanation of the dynamics between consent, silence, the damage left by the experience of vio-lence–as either victim or perpetrator–and the definition of historical subjec-tivity.
This specific configuration would have been ever more striking in the con-text of Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital. One of the shortcomings of the research I undertook in South Africa was my inability to interview current and former psychiatric patients. In the first case, Valkenberg psychiatrists dismissed the very idea of such a possibility. In the second case, the memory of this experience of confinement seems to have been too painful and stigmatising to permit con-versation about it. Even if I had been allowed to conduct interviews within Val-kenberg, the impossibility of agreement on what constituted“official consent”in this medicalised context would have constrained the research. Indeed, the few archived letters by Valkenberg patients highlight the annihilation of subjectivity that took place on the hospital grounds. Once individuals entered the hospital and became patients, whether voluntarily or not, the on-going medical diagnosis deprived their voice of legitimacy. Their status as a Valkenberg convalescent re-duced each phrase, each request, and each complaint to a mere symptom of mental illness. The letters that patients sent to police commissioners or judges and that passed through the authorities’ censorship often bore comments in the margins from the head psychiatrist.²⁴The only legitimate voice in the highly hierarchical Valkenberg was, indeed, that of the psychiatrist.²⁵ Not even the nurses or the psychologists who worked there were entitled to elaborate a dis-course based on“truth”and“reason.”The collective memory that perpetuated itself within the psychiatric hospital’s walls was characterised by overwhelming acts of silencing: silencing of patients’subjectivity, of the violence and mistreat-ment to which they were subjected, of the margins of manoeuvre and small acts of resistance or collaboration they manage to create, and of the possible collec-tive mobilisations that took place in the hospital.²⁶
Returning to the issue of consent in prison settings, the general idea of a
“contract”tying together the interviewer and the interviewee, including clauses on anonymity and confidentiality, raises several problems. Students and
re- Cape Town Archive Repository (CTAR), HVG, 2/1/1. Secretary for the Interior to Valkenberg, 7 November 1932.
Michel Foucault,Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique(Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 616 & 623.
While newspaper clippings attest the existence of such mobilisations in rare occasions, there is no trace of these events in the archives.Cape Times, 18 February 1992; Interview, Mr. Colman, forensic psychiatrist at Valkenberg, Cape Town, 10 December 2010.
searchers who engage in oral history projects are often provided with or con-struct for themselves an interview consent form. Once signed, this document is intended to prove the interviewee’s willingness to participate in the project.
Consent forms are variable, depending on the nature of the information collected and on its future use. The idea of a contract at the core of the definition of con-sent in oral history assumes that the two parties are“competent,”i.e. able to act autonomously.²⁷ Although the problematic of informed consent and the power relationships it covers underly most oral history projects, in closed institutions this problematic becomes exacerbated. Prisons, reformatories or asylums all cre-ate circumstances where the oral historian will struggle to analyse how genuine her interlocutors’consent can be. This is reinforced when one considers the dif-ficulty of speaking about“consent”when non-reciprocity characterises the rela-tionship between the two parties.²⁸
Hence, in addition to potentially sensitive, stigmatising and dangerous ele-ments communicated to the researcher, often causing uneasiness, the confined interviewee is in a position where both the researcher and his/her custodians may summon the individual to speak.²⁹Although the interviewee might find in the oral history project a freer space to speak and an opportunity to break with the silence that otherwise encloses his/her situation, a fine line divides the will to speak from the obligation, imposed by his/her social surroundings, to engage the researcher.
Within Pollsmoor Prison, I undertook interviews at different moments dur-ing my doctoral fieldwork, speakdur-ing with long-term prisoners and repeat offend-ers who had been incarcerated during the late apartheid period or the democrat-ic transition. I began research in the Medium B Prison, then moved to the Maximum Security Section, and finally worked in the Women’s Prison. Indeed Pollsmoor, like many other South African prisons, includes a female wing in its buildings. In none of these prisons did I have the chance to speak directly to a collective of prisoners first in order to explain my research project and ask who would be willing to join. I could only describe my project to the head of the particular prison. That person would then assign to a warder the specific task of recruiting inmates for the interviews. I waited in a small room in the area of the senior staff’s offices while the warder surveyed the section. The room was
Joseph Rommey,“Legal Considerations in Oral History,”The Oral History Review1 (1973): 69.
Patai,“U.S. Academics,”141.
Boschma, Yonge and Mychajlunow have extensively described the strain endured by nurses recalling their experiences in mental hospitals. See Geertje Boschma, Olive Yonge and Lorraine Mychajlunow,“Consent in Oral History Interviews: Unique Challenges,”Qualitative Health Re-search13, no. 1 (2003): 129–135.
furnished with a table and two chairs. Each time the warder arrived with an in-mate, I explained to the latter the goal of the interview and asked if he/she would indeed consent to speak about his/her past experiences in the prison.
Congruent with the idea that interviews within prisons represent at least a small break, a digression in the monotony of everyday life, at that point the in-mate invariably agreed to participate. In only one instance, the interview lasted a mere 15 minutes, as the female prisoner who remained standing in front of me had obviously no desire to answer my questions.Warders in general seemed little interested in being interviewed, though some did speak expressively. While con-ducting oral history in Pollsmoor, I was therefore unable to appraise the degree of consent given by the warders and prisoners I interviewed or whether any po-tential participants were denied the right to speak. Each interview revealed the difficulty of determining where exactly agency lay in a prison environment, while reinforcing John Lonsdale’s argument of the close links between agency, oral history, and memory, particularly in the context of African history projects.³⁰ Establishing trust in this environment was an arduous, if not impossible, task. I attempted to make the most of every small margin for manoeuvre. One of the most effective actions was to close the door before beginning the inter-view. Prison administrators advised against this but it was essential to converse meaningfully in a closed environment otherwise filled with the sounds of gates, keys, metallic noises and shouts. What ethical position should the historian adopt in such circumstances? Most researchers are confronted with a dilemma as soon as they enter a prison, between complying with the prevailing rules– once they have understood their implicit and changing character–and conduct-ing research regulated by the prison authorities, or attemptconduct-ing to skirt the rules, with the danger of disrupting the social setting and having to end the project pre-maturely. In her work on collaborative oral history in the context of Brown Creek Correctional Institution in the United States, Alicia Rouverol explains how she managed to find an intermediate solution by respecting certain directives while altering others according to what she gauged would best facilitate her re-search.³¹
Reciprocity in such contexts presents another intricate issue. The oral histor-ian, attempting to“recover”the voices of the marginalised, might raise narra-tors’expectations in the form of recognition of their personal historical
signifi- John Lonsdale,“Agency in Tight Corners: Narrative and Initiative in African History,”Journal of African Cultural Studies, 13, no. 1 (2000): 5–16.
Alicia J. Rouverol, “Collaborative Oral History in a Correctional Setting: Promise and Pit-falls,”Oral History Review30, no. 1 (2003): 61–85.
cance or improvement in their conditions of prison life.³² The illusion of reci-procity thus created might increase narrators’motivation to participate in the project and will most likely end in deception. These difficulties should not, how-ever, be interpreted as an incitement to silence these marginalised voices. The interpretation of sources, from written documents and oral testimonies to in-scriptions on prison architecture and the body, enables the interviewer to retrace narratives where violence, silence, resistance and subjectivity are intertwined.
These narratives are the basis of a collective memory that is conveyed, genera-tion after generagenera-tion, in Pollsmoor Prison.