Madiba, Dundee, and cranky old archivists

Madiba visiting Oliver Tambo in London, 1962

An article appeared on the Nelson Mandela Foundation website this week under the caption,"Foundation Receives 1962 Mandela photos." Updated regularly, this is a website I generally check a couple of times a week. Because of the time I spent there, I am curious as to the ongoing activities of the NMF. I am also especially interested in the archival documents and photographs of Madiba that have turned up in the past few months.

The latest photographs, including the one above, were taken of Madiba when he visited Oliver Tambo and his family in London in 1962. At the conclusion of the article, I was surprised to see that the photographs are part of the Michael Peto Photographic Collection at the Dundee University Archives. In the early 1990s, I spent an exchange year at The University of Dundee in Dundee, Scotland. It was a fantastic year in every way (well, perhaps not academically), it was my first time away from home and I have friends from that year that I still keep in touch with. This was my pre-archival days and only now I realize it would not have occurred to me to even remotely having considered looking for the University archives. The irony is, however, one of my first introductions to archives actually did happen that year - just not in Dundee.

My Aunt Hilda sent me money that year with the request that I to go to Dumfries to see what information I could find concerning my paternal grandmother’s Lewis/Douglas ancestors. More excited about seeing this unfamiliar corner of Scotland, I accepted the challenge – and the money, and recall thinking, “How difficult could it possibly be?”
I took the bus to Dumfries. I toured the seemingly endless sites that claimed a connection to Bobbie Burns. I took a bus to neighbouring Castle Douglas and walked through famer’s fields (yes it was in the middle of nowhere) to visit the ruins of Threave Caste, one time home to the Douglas Clan. Yah, you guessed it – I put off the visit to the archives for as long as I could.

Threave Castle, Castle Douglas, Scotland

With family history notes from my aunt tucked under my arm, I made my way to the Dumfries and Galloway Archives I was met by a stereotypical, stern-looking archivist who peered over her glasses at me and asked me what I wanted. Thinking my Canadian accent would result in her wanting to help me, as I had come such a long distance to visit her small archives, I simply said, like many others before me and probably like many after me, “I am here for the next two days and I want to research my family tree.” With little sympathy and less direction, she set me loose in her reading room. Within five minutes she was screaming at me because unknowingly, I had inserted the microfilm into the reader the wrong way.

Looking back, it is amusing to see where I ended up.