Digby Reflects on being an oral historian

by AnneS · Published 14/11/2025 · Updated 10/11/2025

Oral Historian is an Ancient Calling, the Essential Craft, my Dream Job: and here is my most memorable
Winter 1975. It was poor country, low knobby trees, scrub. Wispy grass on stone-strewn sand. Barbed wire fences and sagging power lines that clung to the road. Lonely grey Stewarts & Lloyds windmills with their cross-braced towers and their uncertain vanes. I slowed up to for the turnoff: a few whitewashed boulders, a rusty mailbox and a cattle grid marked the entrance to the old farm. I drove cautiously along the rutted track, no sign of cattle, and until I was nearly upon it a row of distressed pine trees hid the homestead. But then it was just as I might have imagined it, though smaller, a bungalow on piles, hemmed in by a wide verandah and topped with a faded red corrugated iron roof. This is where my interviewee, whom I shall call Mrs Fourie, ninety-odd years old, lived on alone.
She met me on the verandah. The front door led into a corridor that ran straight through the house. She motioned me into the parlour. The first thing I saw in a heavily curtained and crowded room was the mantelpiece, which was laden with yellowing photographs in silver frames. And in pride of place amongst the photos was a studio portrait of a hard-bitten young man, presumably her late husband; ranged alongside were individual and group snapshots, some taken in the veld, some against the farmhouse itself.
I picked up one of the larger assemblages.
“My children.”
“What? All of them?” I thought I was joking.
Mrs Fourie smiled. “Yes, I had fourteen children. Six are still alive, and I have 29 grandchildren.”
I tried to think of a way to say: “That’s some achievement, in this barren corner of the world.” Or: “Where are they now?”
“In those days you needed more people to work the land.”
I had heard that some of the poorer Afrikaans farmers couldn’t afford labourers. There were eleven men and boys, three girls, in the photo.
“Remember, where there were ten children, the Education Department gave you a teacher.”
“So four to spare.” What she was saying was true; teacher might manage a class with an age range of half a generation.
“My son Hendrik is at the University.” Of course, the Professor of Biochemistry; I hadn’t put two and two together.
We stood companionably in the dark room. I was immediately at ease. I admired her furniture, hardwood dresser, skin-strewn sofa.
Mrs Fourie made tea, moving laboriously out of the room and, after a long interregnum, laboriously back. I am not fond of rooibos – or anything but English Breakfast, actually – but somehow hers was good, and the koeksisters, of course.
And so we settled down to tales from the early days, some commonplace, like the one about buying milk from the “natives” only to discover it had been expressed from the breasts of nursing mothers, and some new to me, like the false alarm that sent all Whites in the neighbourhood scampering into laager as late as in 1922.
And the further back she went in time the brighter her eyes and the firmer her speech. She spoke of the trek up from the Transvaal and over the Limpopo, through Providential Pass and onto the highveld in a strung out line of ox wagons. The beasts used to travel, she told me, for three hours at a time. They planned their journey around water sources. “We knew where the ‘pans’ were,” she said, “but sometimes when we reached them they were liquid manure.”
She told of accidents and misfortunes, such as the time a disselboom broke; to replace it a branch was hewn from a tree and shaped by axe and bound together with rawhide. Human beings, however, when malaria or dysentery struck, were harder to patch up. In her mind’s eye she saw a solitary grave in the bush marked by a name carved crudely into the trunk of a cream-of-tartar tree. “I lost my eldest brother,” she said. “Piet. Blackwater fever.” She gazed out of the window.
On the other hand, food had been plentiful that summer. The men hunted regularly for game, occasionally dynamited a river for barbel. On reaching the highveld they dined on ostrich omelette, roast guinea fowl, eland and preserved peaches. The Shona tribesmen would barter cereals and vegetables for beads and calico. I asked: “Back then, what were the vegetables?” and she answered: red or grey millet, maphundi (a type of corn), velvet beans, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, gourds, small tomatoes.
I was transported back into her yesterday. The dark room grew darker.
At six o’clock, after another cup of rooibos, another round of koeksisters, it was time for me to depart.
I stood part way down the steps to the verandah and Mrs Fourie clasped my hand and looked directly into my eyes. She said: “I can see you are troubled, my boy. You are very troubled.” This was startlingly near the truth. “But you must not worry.”
And I drove away carrying with me the image of a gentle old lady, warm, selfless, compassionate: “Put your trust in the Lord.”
From a strictly statistical point of view, I suppose it isn’t as surprising as it may seem to be that several days later, after a morning writing up my notes, I should take up the newspaper in my lunch break and find a four-line mention of the death of a respected pioneer, Magdalena Geertruyda Fourie. For it happened more often than I liked, made me feel like a priest taking deathbed confessions.