Welcome to the Fingo Village Blog

For our History 3 project this term we were commissioned to set up a blog documenting the history of one of the oldest and most significant townships in South Africa. What follows is our manifesto for the Fingo Village Blog.

Public History in General:

Baines argues that “public memory is a body of beliefs and ideas about the past that help a public or society understand both its past, present, and by implication, its future[1]”. This is what we hope to achieve with the Fingo Village Blog project. We want to record the history of Fingo Village and its people. In documenting this rich and diverse history of a culture we hope to make their history more accessible, as it is a crucial part of their identity.

Vision:

The Fingo Village Blog’s vision is to be an outstanding public history project that promotes an understanding of the history of Fingo Village and its people. In pursuit of this we are committed to being fair, honest and producing and documenting balanced material. We want to promote historical consciousness without endangering Fingo Village’s historical and cultural resources.

Mission:

In pursuit of the vision we will aim to adhere to the ‘big four’ criterion of public history. The skills balance between ethics, appeal, research and relevance. We want to strive towards theorising memory about Fingo Village and create a project that contributes to an ongoing debate about memory and how it is presented and understood. In this quest we will accordingly:

Facilitate an understanding of history as an inescapable part of the broader political and socio-economic processes of our time[2].

Work with groups and individuals to affirm their identity within Fingo Village because “historians should take care not to simplify and underestimate the need for a history which reinserts black people into the heart of the national narrative[3]”.

Odendaal writes about the nature of history in an article titled ‘Heritage and the arrival of post-colonial history in South Africa[4]’. Included in the Fingo Village Blog project’s mission is some of the concerns which Odendaal highlights that good public history projects should focus on. Therefore our vision will be achieved by representing the past through a clear narrative, explanation and analysis. A focus on the importance of the power of economic interests over time, how it contributes to change, as well as continuity. The blog will also emphasise the importance of cultivating empathy with various experiences and perspectives of the past.

We will seek to go beyond the conventional perspectives. We will not limit ourselves in terms of the resources used to document the history of Fingo Village and its people. We hope to highlight how ordinary people feel about the history of Fingo Village. We hope to include photographs of Fingo Village and the people interviewed for the project on the blog. This will make the blog visually more appealing and give readers a better idea of what Fingo Village looks like. The blog will look at the history of Fingo Village but it will also include information about what is happening there today. We will look at how its history has contributed to bringing it to where it is today. We will examine the plans that Makana Municipality and the Heritage Council has for the future development of Fingo Village.

The project will be done in way that ensures that it is sustainable. We want to do it in such a way that member of the Fingo community, or anyone else who has an interest in the village and its people, can contribute to the blog or make comments about the content. This is a public history project that aims to meet the needs of the community, to give a voice, to the previously marginalized. Throughout the project will adhere to the requirements and desires of the client. We will try to meet these needs to the best of our ability but we intend bringing some of our own creativity, originality and initiative to the project as well.

[1] Baines, G. ‘The Politics of Public History in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, p. 2.
[2] Odendaal, A. ‘”Heritage” and the arrival of post-colonial history in South Africa’, p. 20.
[3] Ibid., p. 24.
[4] Ibid., p. 12.

- Posted by Delia de Villiers

Learn more about Steve Biko

Visitors to the blog are encouraged to research Steve Biko on their own. Links to useful pages have been inserted and can simply be clicked on and it will open the relevant page.

The reason for this self-exploration is that no first-hand information could be found in Fingo Village about Steve Biko. Any information found on this blog would therefore be taken from foreign sources. This is not the ideal or the objective of a public history project. There is an abundance of information available on the life and work of Steve Biko. There is also the great 1987 film, Cry Freedom, about the life of Steve Biko.

Readers, or rather public history explorers, will find that doing their own investigation about Steve Biko will allow for a broader and deeper understanding about the driving forces behind his political aspirations and how he came to be the symbol of the Black Consciousness Movement. Steve Biko's legacy lives on today. His legacy is most noticeable on the Rhodes University campus throught the SASCO (South African Students Congress) society. Steve Biko was one of the founders of SASCO.

We want to encourage explorers to share any interesting things that they have learnt about Steve Biko on the blog. This can be done by posting comments or by contacting the producers of the blog (an email address can be found on the blog) and we will upload any information that readers of this blog want to share about the life and work of Steve Biko, or how they were personally influenced or inspired by him.

It is perhaps important to mention at this point that the purpose of a blog is for it to function as a journal, where regular postings can be made about events or thoughts or ideas. A blog is something that can be updated as frequently as any one group or individual chooses to update it.

As previously mentioned, this year (2007) marks the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Biko and special events will be held to commemorate his life. This will probably take place in Fingo Village and on the Rhodes campus. The event will hopefully be covered in this blog.

Project Design Report

It is important to view the making of a public history project as a process. It is not something that can be done without planning and regular evaluation. We, the producers of this blog, therefore thought that it might be interesting to include the report submitted to our supervisor on 18 May 2007 on the intended project design. The full report can be found below.

The Fingo Village Blog will be hosted on a free internet blogging site. The URL is http://www.blogger.com. The blog was very easy to set because it has various user-friendly tools to assist one in setting up a diary of this nature. A diary is essentially what a blog is but we are using it in a slightly different way. A blog allows for visitors to the site to make comments that will then appear on the blog. This feature of a blog assist us in our mission to make the blog something that is interactive and something that ordinary members of the community can participate in.

The design of the blog was chosen from a number of template options that are given to the user. We opted for a more elegant looking design. The reason for this is that is that way we hope that people will take the blog and the content, and other material found on it, quite seriously. By serious we do not mean academic, but rather that they will find honest, fair, balanced and well-researched historical discourse on the blog. The great thing about a blog is that there is no limit to the amount of space that can be used. While there is a limit to the amount of information that one can see on the computer screen, the blog automatically stores older information as new content is uploaded. The blog also allows for the inclusion of photographs or other graphics. Another resourceful feature is that one can insert links to other interesting or useful webpages. We intend making use of this as we see it as a way to entice and motivate people into learning more about this specific aspect of South African public history.

Every member of the group is able to upload content onto the blog on their own time. This is made possible by sharing the username and password that secures the blog. This is another useful feature because it means that the group is not forced to meet every time somebody wants to add something to the blog. The initial setting up required full group participation but now we will probably meet once or twice more to ensure that the overall tone and style of the blog is what we set out to do.

The blog allows for the users to include a profile about themselves. We filled in the profile part, describing how we are young historians at Rhodes University that are doing a public history project, that above everything else, will give something back to the community.

The general plan for implementation is easy because the groundwork has been done. Everybody had a part of the history of Fingo Village to investigate and write about and this will all be posted on the blog under various headings. The, very ambitious, plan is to have it all done and good to go by Saturday 19 May 2007 which is three days before the presentation of the project to our peers and lecturer. The presentation that will be done for the class will most likely be rehearsed the night before the presentation.

A ‘hook’ is always necessary to draw people into a project and to encourage them to participate in the experience. We are going to hand out little flyers that say very little apart from, ‘have you checked out this blog?’ and the web address. We think this is the most effective way of encouraging people to log onto the internet and view the blog because it makes them curious. If too much information is supplied about what is on the blog people might decide that they are not interested before even viewing it. Other hooks to be used will be striking and interesting headlines that draw people into the content. Photographs will also serve as a ‘hook’ as the visual medium serves to entice people in a different way than mere text does.

The costs involved in this project are minimal. The only costs that we have are the printing costs of the flyers and the petrol that was used to drive to Fingo Village to speak to members of the community.

As previously mentioned, a whole variety of sources will be employed. They range from peer-reviewed academic articles to interviews with people. Since it is a public history project, rather than a piece of academic work we thought to necessary to draw from a wide variety of knowledge to ensure that the content of the blog does not become stale or too theoretical. The other reason is to ensure that the blog becomes ‘the voice of the community’ in a sense. This is an all-inclusive history project, as in line with the democratic ideals of our country, and so no possible source will be discriminated against.

Steve Biko

This year, 2007, marks the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Stephen Bantu Biko in police custody. In recognition of this and in celebration of his life, a biography of his life will be included in the Fingo Village Blog. Biko visited Rhodes and Grahamstown in 1967 for a NUSAS (National Union of South African Students) conference. Rhodes was at that stage a white campus. In terms of a ministerial decree the university authorities did not allow black delegates to stay in the residences or to eat in the dining halls. Biko was outraged by this and made his dissatisfaction known. It is said that it was at this point that Biko realised the exact nature of what he was fighting for and the enormity of the challenge he faced in fighting and campaigning for a non-racial South Africa.

Member of the Fingo Village community remember seeing Biko. Steve Biko was one of the key figures in the anti-apartheid struggle, someone whose legacy still lives today and whose life and ideas continue to inspire many young people.