Oral History - National Archives of South Africa

6OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF THE ALUMNI: THE UNIVERSITY OFPRETORIA AS A CASE STUDYDefiningBy Bronwyn Strydom, Ria Groenewald and Louis ChanguionUP ArchivesThe History Matters website of George Mason University refers to oral history as“a maddeningly imprecise term” 1 and certainly, an exploration of the definition oforal history reveals a variety of both broad and narrow understandings of the term.On the one hand, oral history or oral reminiscence can be broadly defined as “thefirst-hand recollections of people interviewed by a historian” 2 or simply, “therecording of people’s memories.” 3 Bill Schneider explains that, personal narrativesare stories which individuals tell about their experiences or observations, such aseye witness accounts of disasters or the role which they may have played in someevent deemed worthy of recall. Oral history consists of those parts of the oraltradition and personal narratives, which get recorded, and which become arecord. 4On the other hand certain definitions insist on “the spoken word” 5 , for example,D.K. Dunaway and W.K. Baum refer to oral history as primary source materialobtained by recording the spoken words – generally by means of plannedinterviews – of persons deemed to harbor hitherto unavailable information worthpreserving. 6Historian Carolyn Hamilton, however, has pointed out the “blurred” divisionbetween oral and written texts 7 , indicating that both categories are subject to thesame types of problems. It is therefore not that simple to distinguish between oraland written first-hand accounts and reminiscences. For the purposes of this paper,the broadest definition of oral history will be taken into consideration, namely,that “[o]ral history embraces all types of interviewing for first-person testimonyabout directly lived experience.” 8______________1. L Shope, “What is oral history?” http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/oral/what.html, (n.d.),access: 15 September 2004.2. J Tosh, The pursuit of history, (Harlow, 2000)), p. 206.3. Oral History Society, Essex University, http://www.oralhistory.org.uk, (n.d.), access 15September 2004.4. Quoted in MB Gilder, “Preservation of oral history: the case of South Africa”, in ArchivesNews 41(2), December 1999, p. 17.