Archival Work at the Killie Campbell Africana Library

With the reopening of public institutions after the Covid-19 lockdown, Angela Ferreira of the Archives & Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town and Dr Geoff Blundell, Head of the Human Sciences Department at the KwaZulu-Natal Museum, conducted work at the archive housed at the renowned Killie Campbell Library at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban Campus. Ferreira is conducting research for her Masters degree on the formation of communities in nineteenth-century KwaZulu-Natal while Blundell is researching KhoiSan resistance to colonialism in the Eastern Cape. Ferreira and Blundell are also collaborating on various projects where there is overlap in their research interests.

Together with Troy Meyers, they are researching the history of the Lochenberg Family. The Lochenbergs were important intermediaries between Colonial authorities, missionaries, and indigenous communities; their influence stretched from the Fish River in the west to the Mzimkulu River in the east and from the south-eastern escarpment to the Indian Ocean—an area of some 178,000 square kilometres. While the focus of the study is the nineteenth century, the Lochenberg family played a major leadership role in ongoing resistance to colonialism and Apartheid in the Eastern Cape during the twentieth century. The histories of communities, such as those of the Lochenbergs, have largely been glossed over or have been treated simplistically and one of the aims of this research is to bring the subtleties and complexities of the histories of these communities to the fore.