Abstract
The ‘migrant letter’ has been proposed as a separate genre of letter-writing around features concerning absence, identity and relationships and location. However, questions arise about this claim, made using largely North American material. Explored in a different context, important complexities and differences come into view. This is discussed regarding the settler colonial context of South Africa using data from the Forbes family collection, containing around 15,000 documents written between 1850 and 1922. The Forbes were Byrne migrants to Natal, then Transvaal. The majority of letters in the collection were written and exchanged within South Africa, with significant numbers from family members remaining in Scotland or who removed elsewhere, and many drafts and copies of letters written by the South African end exist too. The size and composition of contents enable migrant letters to be explored within the greater entirety of the family’s letter-writing, conceived as a scriptural economy with characteristic writing practices. This is examined by looking in detail at the writing practices of a range of letter-writers and their correspondences. Important differences concerning how absences, identities and relationships and locations are inscribed in the context of South Africa are explored and traced to features of its settler colonial mode of production.
Highlights
It is on one level self-evident what a migrant letter is: a letter from someone who has removed ‘abroad’ to a person remaining ‘at home’, written in a context of permanent absence, with contents characterized by looking back to shared bonds while valorizing the new circumstances, through this creating a‘third space’of structures supporting letter-exchanges, such letters being more often written by men than women because of literacy differentials
The majority of letters in the collection were written and exchanged within South Africa, with significant numbers from family members remaining in Scotland or who removed elsewhere, and many drafts and copies of letters written by the South African end exist too
The Forbes collection contains around 15,000 documents written between 1850 and 1922.1 Letters are a major component, with diaries, accounts, tallies, inventories, ledgers and other papers present, written by the Forbes family, their kin, friends, neighbors, business associates and officials. The majority of those extant were written and exchanged within South Africa, significant numbers are from family members who remained in Scotland or removed elsewhere, and there are many drafts and copies of letters written by the South African end as well
Summary
It is on one level self-evident what a migrant letter is: a letter from someone who has removed ‘abroad’ to a person remaining ‘at home’, written in a context of permanent absence, with contents characterized by looking back to shared bonds while valorizing the new circumstances, through this creating a‘third space’of structures supporting letter-exchanges, such letters being more often written by men than women because of literacy differentials. Questions arise about the general applicability of these ideas, based largely on North American/ northern European data, for there are different migratory origins and points of arrival and settlement and most migrants will have produced many different letters, some to people ‘at home’, others to connections in the new context These matters are explored here from the perspective of settler colonial letter-writing in South Africa. While the economic unit underpinning this centered on the Forbes household and Athole Estate, it had generous and permeable boundaries, involving flows of activity, goods, services, money and many movements of people.30 Because of their shared business ventures, the Forbes and correspondents were necessarily involved in writing and receiving large numbers of letters which rehearsed, expedited and communicated these activities while keeping in touch and facilitating ongoing relationships. As the discussion following shows, levering apart what was a business/economic letter and what was a private/personal one, and what was a migrant letter and what was not, would miss the point, for the letters concerned made no such distinctions
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