Van Riebeeck Society

ปป ACTIVITIES ซซ

Paton Launch in Pietermaritzburg

The Alan Paton Centre (APC) celebrated its 20th anniversary with a conference on UKZN’s Pietermaritzburg campus which attracted a group of scholars, researchers and academics who presented a variety of interesting papers. The conference was opened by Professor Nelson Ijumba, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research, and by Mrs Anne Paton, Alan Paton’s widow who travelled from England in order to attend. The keynote speaker was Professor Peter Alexander of the University of New South Wales in Australia who is the author of Alan Paton: A Biography. His new publication, Alan Paton: Selected Letters, in which he has edited a large number of previously unpublished letters for the Van Riebeeck Society, was launched at the conference. Speakers at this launch were Professor Peter Alexander and the VRS’s chair, Professor Howard Phillips, who presented one copy of the volume to Alan Paton’s widow, Mrs Anne Paton, and one to his son, Dr David Paton (who will also attend the launch in Cape Town on 29th October, we hope). The VRS also took advantage of the presence at the conference of Professor Phillips and vice-chair Dr Elizabeth van Heyningen, to publicize its activities and sell copies of its volumes. The immediate results – six new members enrolled and 19 volumes sold – were a fair reward. In addition, the contacts that they made at the conference yielded an agreement that the Alan Paton Centre would stock copies of volume 40 to sell to the public and an invitation to the VRS to display its books at the Msunduzi Heritage Forum Bookfest in Pietermaritzburg in September.

Here are Howard Phillips, Peter Alexander and Elizabeth van Heyningen

And here Howard Phillips and Peter Alexander share the limelight with Mrs Anne Paton and Dr David Paton

Cape Town Paton Launch

The audience of some 75 members and guests (a record attendance!) was welcomed by chairman Prof Howard Phillips who introduced guest speaker Dr David Paton, surviving son of Alan Paton. Dr Paton was here to visit his daughter Carol and agreed to speak a few words at the Launch. His daughter was presented with a copy of her grandfather's letters. The main speaker, however, was Tony Morphet, an old Liberal Party colleague of Alan Paton, and his late son, Jonathan's, great friend. After the speeches, we had a wonderful party, eating delicious snacks with a glass of wine and catching up with old friends and new members - about which the good news is that the VRS membership now stands at 1200! See AGM Minutes for the various speeches.

David Paton and daughter Carol Paton with a copy of volume 40, Alan Paton Selected Letters, which was presented to her by Prof Howard Phillips

Members and guests awaiting the Launch speeches

Tony Morphet and David Paton at the speakers' table

Book Fair

We shall be there - as usual. More details later.

Summer School 2009

To mark our 90th birthday in 2008, we held a course at the UCT Summer School in January 2009. The title was:

'Lost voices'. South Africa's history through the words of its people'
Here are the the texts of some of the lectures:

1 Slave voices - Gerald Groenewald
2 Isaac Williams Wauchope, Xhosa linguist and poet - Abner Nyamende
3 Jane Elizabeth Waterston, missionary, teacher and pioneering doctor - Elizabeth van Heyningen
4 A Canadian horseman in the South African War - Alan Morris

Forthcoming attractions

In the pipeline for publication in future years are works in a variety of genres, from 18^th century travellers’ accounts to diaries of long-time residents of the Cape and collected letters by prominent South Africans. In the last category, for instance, are the letters of politicians like M. T. Steyn (president of the Orange Free State from 1896 to 1902), Sir Patrick Duncan (Governor-General of South Africa from 1936 to 1943) and Dr A.B. Xuma (president of the A.N.C from 1940 to 1949), of novelists like Olive Schreiner (author of The Story of an African Farm) and Alan Paton (author of Cry the Beloved Country), of journalists like Thomas Pringle (1789-1834) and of doctors like James Barry (about whose sexual identity far more has been written than about his important medico-political work at the Cape between 1816 and 1828).

In the category of travellers’ accounts two forthcoming works stand out, Peter Kolb’s Caput Bonae Spei hodiernum (‘The Cape of Good Hope Today’), originally published in German in 1719, and Ensign August Frederik Beutler’s account of his pioneering expedition to the Eastern Cape in 1752, while in the category of diaries, those of Lady Anne Barnard’s sometime manservant, Samuel Eusebius Hudson, and of the Eastern Cape missionary, the Reverend James Laing (1803-1872), will add richly to our knowledge of emerging Cape society.

Despite their diversity, what all of the above have in common are the fresh perspectives they will offer on South African history from an array of contemporaries, fulfilling the VRS’s goal of enabling its members to listen to the past in its own words.