Chairman’s Annual Report, 2011

If the VRS used the Chinese calendar, I would be tempted to describe the last 12 months as a ‘snakes and ladders year’, for it has been a year of ups and downs for us, quite literally.

On the one hand, we lost 93 members to death, downscaling, immigration and tightened purse-strings; yet, on the other, we signed up 61 new members. The result is that today our membership stands at 1212, 32 down from the figure a year ago, but 12 up on our membership figure in 2009. We clearly need to find a few ladders to regain and indeed exceed our former heights, while at the same time avoiding serpents, something which the new Council has sought to do with both energy and imagination. But we also need you, our members and thus our best ambassadors, to help us in this task, by encouraging your friends and family to join the VRS, either via our website or by completing one of our application forms. As you will see hear when I introduce Randolph Vigne at the book launch later tonight, enrolling a child or grandchild can be gift which lasts and lasts.

One of the reasons that we have not been able to bounce back from the loss of members as swiftly as in the past is that no Cape Town International Book Fair was held this year. For the last 5 years it was a prime site for enrolling new members. Between 2006 and 2010 we signed up 110 new members on the spot, while several more people joined after the Fair, using application forms that they had taken away with them. This year, the cancellation of the Fair denied us such opportunities.

To offset this, the Council re-doubled its efforts to publicize the VRS, at conferences, public lectures, interschool workshops, a family history fair, a ‘meet-and-greet’ evening, on Facebook and even – somewhat ambitiously – at the forthcoming performances of Lost in the Stars at the Artscape Theatre. For those of you who are puzzled by the latter, I refer you to page 212 of our 2009 volume, Alan Paton: Selected Letters, for Lost in the Stars is a musical based on Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, with music by Kurt Weill. On top of this, thanks to Randolph Vigne’s zeal and his willingness to cover his own travel and accommodation costs, we will have four launches of this year’s volume, The South African Letters of Thomas Pringle. Tonight’s launch will be followed by three more, a public one at the Book Lounge next week, then one at the National English Language Museum in Grahamstown on 11 November and finally one at Boekehuis in Johannesburg on 16 November. Randolph, maybe we should also consider a musical version of Pringle’s Narrative of a Residence in South Africa, with a score by Andrew Lloyd Webber!

A major reason for organizing these activities outside of the Western Cape is the fact that our membership ‘out there’ is well below what we think it ought to be. In KZN, for instance, we have only 90 members, in the Eastern Cape 145, in Gauteng and its environs 300, while in the Western Cape we have 600 members. To try and increase our membership beyond the Western Cape, Council decided to co-opt two non-Capetonians onto the Council, Professor Johan Wassermann from Durban and Nicholas Southey from Pretoria. Both of these have been active in raising the Society’s profile in their home provinces: Johan ran VRS stalls at the South African Historical Society’s biennial conference in Durban in June and at Durban’s Family History Fair on Heritage Day in September, gave a lecture on the VRS to the South African National Society in KZN and organized a ‘meet-our-members’ evening in Pinetown in June, while Nicholas gave a radio interview about the Society on the programme ‘Jozi Today’ on Johannesburg’s Radio Today station and is organizing next week’s launch at Boekehuis in Johannesburg.

To both Johan and Nick (who is present tonight) I say thank you for embracing our ‘outreach policy’ with such drive and imagination. May your initiatives help the VRS to – forgive the mix of metaphors – drive away the snakes, erect many ladders and bear lots of fruit not of the Cape.

While I am in ‘thank you’ mode, may I also express – though this time without mixing metaphors – my gratitude to my fellow Councillors (whose names are listed on pp. 396–7 of this year’s volume) for their ready input into the work of the Society over this past year, whether in the realm of words, ideas or action. These have ranged from the likely to the unlikely, from contributing bright ideas to our deliberations, assessing manuscripts and compiling and translating newsletters to giving public lectures, running books stalls and even hand-delivering 170 copies of this year’s volume to members’ homes, which saved us over R3200 in postage. No-one who has served a term on the Council will come away from this experience without their life skills having been considerably expanded.

Nowhere is this more so than in the case of my vice-chair, Elizabeth van Heyningen, and our secretary and series editor, Cora Ovens. Their huge contributions have not been in words, ideas or actions, but in words, ideas and actions. Both have been veritable towers of strength, all-rounders who have readily pitched in when asked – and often even before being asked. The Society is very fortunate in having such reliable and able enthusiasts on its executive.

All these efforts, as our astute and financially insightful treasurer, Piet Westra, always reminds me, are directed to one end, the publication of one new volume p.a. and the less regular reprinting of an earlier, out-of-print VRS volume. The reprint that we will be doing early next year is Schapera and Farrington’s seminal The Early Cape Hottentots, first published as a 334-page volume 78 years ago in 1933.

Our mainstream volumes for the immediate future span several genres, from letters and journals to travellers’ published accounts. Thus, in 2012, the centenary year of the ANC, we will be publishing the letters and papers of Dr A B Xuma, who was president of that organization from 1940–49. This will be followed by the letters of another president, M T Steyn of the old Orange Free State Republic, probably in 2013. Also in the pipeline are the political letters of Olive Schreiner, the journal of Ensign Beutler’s pioneering expedition to the Eastern Cape in 1752, the Eastern Cape journal of the Rev\James Laing, volume 2 of François Le Vaillant’s Travels into the Interior of Africa and Peter Kolb’s Cape of Good Hope Today, originally published in German in 1719. A pristine copy of this recently fetched $6250 at an auction.

There is thus every reason to be filled with anticipation as we approach the 100 at the top of our snakes and ladders board, in other words our centenary in 2018, not least because of the prospect of future AGMs and book launches being held in some unusual places. If the venues we have used for AGMs and launches over the last few years are anything to go by – the Ship Society HQ in Duncan Dock, Rust-en-Vreugd, the Mendi Memorial at UCT, the Moravian Church in District Six and the Zendinggestig Museum in Long Street – the VRS certainly gets around.

That we are indeed a society on the move, still steadily pursuing our founders’ mission ‘to print or reprint for distribution among the members, and for sale to the public, rare and valuable books, pamphlets and documents relating to the history of southern Africa’, is borne out by recent reviews of our 2010 volume, Friendship and Union: The South African Letters of Patrick Duncan and Maud Selborne, 1907-1943, edited by Deborah Lavin. A reviewer in the latest edition of Historia believes that ‘Few publications convey the zeitgeist of this complicated era as effectively [as this book]’, and remarks that ‘South African political history unfolds itself through his [Duncan’s] pen… Deborah Lavin’s introduction and contextualization…are excellent and provide a well-written and concise background…The selections of correspondence are superb, as the conversation between these two spirits flows freely.’ (Koorts in Historia, November 2011). Bolstering this positive opinion, the Cape Times’ reviewer concluded that the volume is ‘a fine work of scholarship which is at the same time accessible to all South Africans who believe that a knowledge of this country’s past is a useful guide to its future.’ (Cape Times, 17 June 2011).

This is the sort of reception of our volumes which the Council finds very heartening and uplifting. Which brings me back to my ‘snakes and ladders’ metaphor with the wish that, in 2012 (and beyond), we land on more such ladders rather than on snakes.

Thank you.

Howard Phillips

3 November 2011