Documenting Continuity

The aim of my dissertation, as many of you area aware, is to understand how and why health and agriculture (in particular in relationship to each other) have changed from the 1930s to the present. Now, in order to understand changes over those eighty years, I have to actually know what changed and what did not. As a result, I spent a full two months working on gathering oral histories about health and agriculture with eight households, gathering point data for the mid 1950s, late 1960s, early 1980s, 1992-1994, and today.

Why not just look back at the health center and Department of Agriculture records you might ask. Well, when the government decided to stop funding the Pholela Community Health Centre and its medical director finally left in 1962, so too did its extensive records. So while the documentation for the 1940s and 50s is incredibly rich, information for time thereafter is virtually non-existent (in written form, that is until democracy in the mid 1990s.) According to the written record at least, nothing much happened. As a scholar there is a certain burden of proof that I must meet, and this includes finding some sort of evidence for this middle period. As a result, I embarked upon these oral histories to find out what had happened between 1960 and 1990.

I did, of course, have some hints – the form and extent of agriculture in the early 1990s was similar to the form and extent in the 1960s. Further, the biomedical infrastructure had changed little during that same period, though the quality of care had deteriorated markedly. As a result, I surmised that I was setting out to document continuity. Of course, there might be some minor changes, but overall, I was betting that this would be a period of relative stability.

Getting at this information, however, was more of a challenge than I had anticipated. First, I underestimated how boring documenting continuity can be. By this time, the (mainly) old ladies that we were continuously visiting were very comfortable with us and so they would point out, each and every week, that we were asking them the same questions, and further that they had already answered them once, twice, three, or even four times. In an effort to stave off boredom, we would attempt to conduct interviews in fields or kitchens; to try to help the old ladies to complete whatever chores they had. I also tried tactics like bringing baked goods so we could do an interview over tea and cake. While these distractions did, in fact distract, they didn’t really solve the boredom issue.

As I conducted this research I, of course, learned that my assumptions were both correct and incorrect. For one, I learned that one community had been entirely moved in 1975 in a government effort to stem soil erosion, and another had been partially moved in 1968. However, despite those moves, I learned that in general, households were cultivating fields and gardens, and herding livestock just as they had been in the 1950s.

Trying to maintain focus and interest was also difficult for me and Thokozile (my research assistant), as we had forty interviews to complete and eight narratives to keep in mind. However, while documenting continuity might be boring for both researcher and research participant, for a scholar thinking and writing about a place, it can be just as interesting as change. The time period which I am looking at (1930s to the present) is bookended with periods of immense change. In the 1930s it was the introduction of basic public health measures like pit latrines and sanitation that would lead to better health and in the late 1990s and 2000s it was the transition to majority rule and the onset of full blown AIDS. But in the middle is this period of continuity. Yes, communities move, but agricultural practices, yields, and labor changed little. Why? As a scholar, it strikes me that this is just as interesting as the change, even if it was far more boring to prove.