Snapshots that ask: who are we?

For every SA family, there is a photograph that fixes a detail that has something important to say about who we are, writes Michael Morris.

Cape Town - In the photograph, the boy and girl seem to marvel at the artisan craftsman, settled on his blanket-cushioned stool – though he, the old man who knows, is less successful at obscuring the creases of a grin, his self-consciousness at the pretence of posing, of holding his hammer, just so, for the camera.

The girl, Elizabeth, seems to appreciate best the purpose of the tableau; her poise in the print is lasting.

The boy, Roger, who will later become an engineer, and adept to his dying day at crafting any conceivable thing with his hands, cannot betray the intensity of his interest in the old man’s doings at the last. Even so, his considered appraisal is bound up with a would-be practitioner’s seeming scepticism – hands boyishly thrust in his pockets – as if he already imagines a better way to do the job.

But the old man, Johnnie, is not really repairing a shoe; he is pausing in mid-chore – whatever the chore really was, perhaps even repairing that shoe – to leave an impression for posterity, of him and the family’s children out in the yard, his workaday domain that unmistakably sets him apart.

That much seems obvious. Yet, it could be that it is only our ways of seeing that set him apart. There is always more to seeing than believing.

To ask, “Who are these people?” might be to ask, instead, “Who are we?”

In Heritage Month, South Africans are, naturally enough, asked to focus their attention on signal events and prominent personalities, and, implicitly, to celebrate a past chiefly to the extent that it has delivered a present which always claims to be an improvement, a historical or moral coming-to-our-senses, a correction, a “good story”.

Too often the commemorative procedure risks overlooking the detail of our common, insignificant lives, the small unflattering or heroic choices, the errors of judgement or the secret marvels of courage. There can be no monuments to this muddle; history is not, after all, a fairytale. Yet I am certain that for every South African family, there is a photograph – or a photographic moment, if no print exists – that fixes a detail that has something important to say about who we are and what we might celebrate this, or any, September.

Regarding this grainy 1930s snapshot, quite a bit of detail is known about the threesome at the last.

Not many years after it was taken, Roger enlisted in the Royal Navy, serving until the end of World War II on the destroyer HMS Rapid. (A curious sequel was that, in 1956, he used his wartime nautical know-how to send a morse-code greeting by flashlight from a hotel window at Morgan Bay to the Royal Yacht, Britannia, then passing on its way to Mombasa). He became an electronic engineer of legendary ingenuity and exactitude. He was a closet historian, an inveterate chronicler of events and a precise, unabashed genealogist. He was an adventurer at heart who loved wild places, reserving a sometimes reckless scorn for barbed-wire fencing or signs that warned against trespassing. He was an exceptional father, a lover of animals and trees, and a man who, to the end, faced the world with, and brought to it, a boy’s wonder and enthusiasm and likeable sense of mischief.

Elizabeth, his sister, became a university graduate at a time when women were not universally encouraged to fulfil an intellectual calling, and remained a discerning reader and thinker all her life. She followed a path of deepening, yet unostentatious spiritual reflection, and, as the philosophers might say, died well. She was a fine example to her children, loving and modest to a fault, a practical, generous woman who, with her husband Brian, ran a soup kitchen in a township into their 80s with a signally unadvertised commitment to helping those in want.

As for the old man in the picture, we know much about him, too.

His name was Johnnie Peter, born in the Caledon district in 1849. His father was a Scotsman, Edward “Ned” Peter. His mother’s name we don’t know. Johnnie travelled to the diamond fields of Kimberley with his father in 1870 or 1871, and, when his father died soon after, in 1872, he “entered the service” of Mr and Mrs George Hull and remained with their family for the rest of his life.

When he died of a stroke in January 1937, he was remembered in an obituary in the Diamond Fields Advertiser, sister newspaper of the Weekend Argus, that appeared under the headline: “Served one family for 68 years: Coloured pioneer of Diamond Fields. Helped to build the first brick house of Kimberley.”

The obituarist noted that Johnnie Peter “was proud of the fact that at one time he could number Cecil Rhodes … among the people he knew”. We learn that “to Johnnie fell the distinction of helping to build the first brick house in Kimberley”, which was called “Gladstone” and was situated in Hull Street, named after his employer. He was a lover of books, chiefly biographies and South African travelogues, and of music – though “not jazz” – and “during the Kimberley Exhibition of 1892, he did not miss one concert”.

Near the end of his own life, the boy – Roger – recalled how, when the news of Johnnie’s death reached the family while they were holidaying at the family farm, Tyger Hoek, near Caledon, they were “plunged into the depths of gloom”.

Johnnie, he remembered, “taught me many skills which I never forgot”. Among them, he mentions shoe-making.

In their time, then, all three figures in the photograph were, in their own distinctive way, notable people.

But what is unexpected – today no less than in their yesteryear – is that the children and the old artisan were cousins, first cousins, thrice removed.

And, as Roger Morris and Elizabeth Shier are my father and aunt, so Johnnie Peter, much storied in my childhood, is kin, too. All these eons later, in a different world, this knowledge still lends a tugging poignancy to the phrase in that late 1930s headline: “Served one family for 68 years.”

As a footnote, it is worth mentioning that “Peter” is a name – rather like “Morris” – that appears in that great anthropological repository, the telephone book, in places as diverse as Kalksteenfontein, Heideveld, Khayelitsha, Sea Point and Constantia. Here, in unanticipated ways, our collective heritage lives and breathes. And remembering that really is something to celebrate.

Weekend Argus

* Do you have a photograph that captures something about your family’s heritage? Send it to [email protected] with a short explanation and we may include it in our Heritage Day family snapshot gallery.