Stumbling upon heritage remnants in dusty storerooms

Laura Phillips does not fit the picture of a historian who comes dressed in long skirts and cardigans, balancing tortoise shell frames on the tip of her nose and tightly clutching files that symbolise access to antiquity. On the contrary the trendy young academic, who traded the Big Apple for Johannesburg in the beginning of the year, might very well frequent her time glued to documents in secluded archive buildings, but is busy uncovering a Limpopo story of modern times that begs to be verbalised.
With a future PhD degree in History with New York University in mind she is conducting research into the economic history of Limpopo from the Seventies, a topic for study formulated after stumbling upon documents of the erstwhile Lebowa Development Corporation that were kept in dusty store rooms at basement level of the Legislature buildings in Lebowakgomo around 2010. The discovery was made while involved in a project of the National Research Foundation conducted by Wits University.
During an interview with Polo­kwane Observer she professed to having been in the right place at the right time when they came across the documents, as the then work on the project resulted in a suggestion for her to conduct her future degree studies which she registered for in 2014. For that purpose New York became her home for the next three years. She started with full-time research in the beginning of this year and envisaged that her dissertation could be finished late 2019 if all went well, she indicated.
Phillips found some of the archives to have been catalogued in a very rough manner, in rooms and rooms filled with material relevant to the time under scrutiny. For purposes of research she then stayed in Lebowa­kgomo in the first two weeks of every month. Upon the documents having been moved to the Limpopo Archives in Polokwane, she had been travelling to the city on and off the past year to visit the facility but also conduct interviews with some of Limpopo’s more lustrous political players including the older guard, Phillips indicated. As part of her stepping back into time she also called on Polokwane Observer’s archives.
A stirring about the legacy of the homelands of South Africa was currently being experienced, but still there was not much focus on Limpopo, she remarked as she alluded to the fact that no such research had been conducted on the history of the province before.
Dwindling between the past and the present, Phillips takes one back when sketching the playing field of the early Nineties and a move towards one identity, a perceived bloated government service, the non-existence of a formula for transition, huge bureaucracy to deal with, monetary impact of a take-over by a new dispensation, concern about the possibility of civil war in South Africa and uncertainty about its future.
Her research had thus far afforded her the opportunity to travel to parts of the prior Lebowa, Sekhukhune, Venda and Giyani and the more she learnt the more she endeavoured to know, Phillips remarked. She found it quite interesting that Limpopo was being tied to what was broadly happening in the rest of the country and that one couldn’t understand what was happening in Limpopo without grasping the international scenario, she mentioned.
As the country prepares for introduction to another chapter in its rich history this weekend, an outsider is retracing the bold steps of news makers and ordinary people to capture a part of Limpopo’s past for future reference.

Story & photo: YOLANDE NEL
>>observer.yolande@gmail.com