Oral History and Digital Stories from Cape Town

People in South Africa have a dynamic, but largely unrecorded heritage. The Centre for Popular Memory (CPM) creates spaces for these stories to be heard, seen and remembered. The CPM presents various oral history and memory courses for on and off campus students such as a 1st semester post-graduate course: ‘Oral History: Method and Practice and Theory’ (HST4034Z) which provides skills training in oral history interviewing and interpretation, an under-graduate course ‘Memory, Identity and History’ (HST3037S) explores trauma and memory across case studies of the Holocaust, Apartheid and Rwanda, and the representation of trauma through oral history, films, photographs, cartoons and performances.

The video clips are snippets from the following projects:

Street Stories - a film documentary project tracking socio political issues and perceptions around race, gender and belonging, through the individual recollections of over 400 people who live or work on three arterial roads in Cape Town.

Bridging the Digital Divide - The program concentrates on the generational and cultural divisions between apartheid survivors and their descendants, and the IT skills divide between what is perceived to be a 'developing' country and first world technology. This project seeks to build strategic partnerships that will result in strengthening scholarly dissemination.

Performing Stories - The CPM project, Performing stories, trained young people in 4 provinces, between the ages of 18-35 to use oral history recordings to create performative outcomes.