Family Narratives
When I was a child we had a large tatty cardboard coat box filled to the brim with old family photographs going back generations. I loved pouring though those piles of images, peeling through the brittle brown sheets of paper and wondering about the lives they led, the clothes they wore, what life must have been like for them, and weaving together the long winding strands that entwined their lives to mine.
Copies of those images are now sitting on shelves in my kitchen and help me feel grounded in a country where I am an immigrant. Each branch of family tree has a different adventure to tell; The Cornish miners who fled grinding poverty in the late 1800’s, the London Missionaries who traveled to China in the 1860’s and later Bechuanaland, the Scottish engineers who travelled to Durban to build the first telephone exchange, the English farmers who lost everything when their ship was wrecked on their voyage to South Africa in the mid 1800’s.
My husband’s family tree is just as fascinating; his great grandmother as a child survived the British Concentration Camps during the Boer War (Yes, the British set up death camps long before Hitler), and his grandfather fought fearlessly with the South African troops in North Africa during WW2. Each story is fascinating, and every single one of us have similar narratives to share.
With so many strands I’ll start with this one here taken in about 1915, of my paternal grandmother Alice Ethne Lewis. Her father, a London Missionary, travelled to Bechuanaland (now Botswana), and literally built a church which still stands today. The thing I love about this first photo is, well, can you see where the blond curls come from? It ties me directly to my father, and to my middle born son, who share indentical blond locks. I might add that these curls are matched with a fiery temper too. Ethne used to tell us with great pride how she went to school on an ox wagon, and was expelled from at least 7 boarding schools. Some feat for the daughter of a London Missionary. In this photo she is sharing a cup of milk with one of Chief Khama’s children who lived nearby. Seretse Khama is a sibling of the small child in the photo, and he would go on to become Botswana’s first elected president after independence in 1966. Seretse also married an English woman, Ruth Williams, and their controversial interracial love story unfolds in the movie A United Kingdom. It is wonderful to see these amazing people that my grandmother’s family knew well, portrayed on screen, and to feel that we are connected to a small window in history somehow.
Ethne’s father, Hayden Lewis, helped arrange for the sons of Chief Khama to be educated at Oxford and Cambridge along with his own sons, my great uncles. This is where Seretse Khama met Ruth. My grandmother Ethne, despite her intelligence and razor sharp wit, was not sent to university owing to her sex (or perhaps due to her less than stellar school career?) This is something I think disappointed her, as she had an adventurous, rebellious spirit and never conformed to what was expected of her. I’ve no doubt she would have thrived in an academic environment.
So what do all these stories and images mean? Narratives of where we come from are important to tell. Print the photos you have, don’t leave them on your phones. Memory sticks get lost, hard drives fail. If you can’t find the images in five, ten years, neither will your children or their children.
Print the images large, put them between the covers of a book, frame them on the wall, and tell all the stories while you can remember them. For if we know a little about our past, perhaps it can show us a way forward with uncertain roads ahead. xx