Greetings, Gentle Reader

Thank you for visiting my website. I am a South African historian and archivist who has worked in museums, archives and cultural bureaucracy since the late 1970s. I began as a junior archivist in Pietermaritzburg in 1977 and moved into museums in 1984. I worked for five years in the provincial museum service researching and planning exhibitions in small country museums and on historic sites, such as the famous Anglo-Zulu and Anglo-Boer War battlefields. In 1989 I joined the old Natal Museum in Pietermaritzburg as its first historian. I did the splits in my research, balancing between Fort Napier and the imperial garrison of the Victorian era and the anti-apartheid struggle raging around the city in the years leading up to 1994. I was part of a small team of activists pushing for transformation in the South African heritage sector. Now, more than twenty years after democracy we wonder how successful we were.

Between 1996 and 2001, I worked as Director of Arts and Culture in the new province of Mpumalanga. It was exciting work ranging from ceremonies graced by President Nelson Mandela in the most remote part of the country, to traditional dance competitions, to trying to entice the World Gold Panning Championships to Pilgrims Rest: Mpumalanga had it all!

In 2001 I was appointed as National Archivist of South Africa in Pretoria. I worked with old apartheid records and with the records of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I was also given policy responsibility and oversight for the national and community library system, together with a large parliamentary grant to revitalise and transform local libraries.

I served on the International Council for Archives (ICA) and hosted the 2003 conference on ‘Archives and Human Rights’ in Cape Town with Archbishop Desmond Tutu as keynote speaker. I am still a member of the Human Rights Working Group of the ICA.

My professional and archival travels have taken me from Iceland to Korea and Australia, from Britain, Ireland and mainland Europe to the Middle East and North America. I have also visited some sixteen African countries. My biggest and most challenging project was the Timbuktu Manuscripts Project, a presidential project to conserve the ancient manuscripts in the desert city of Timbuktu.

The last years of my career were conflicted: Between 2010 and my retirement in 2014, I was embroiled in a protracted labour dispute with the Minister of Arts and Culture which I eventually won in the Labour Court and I was able to retire on a full pension with all my backpay and accumulated leave intact.

Currently I am a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa (Unisa); an Associate of the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) and a Research Fellow of the Helen Suzman Foundation. Going into the research world has been very therapeutic and I now write as an historian and as a commentator on archives, access to information and governance issues.  This site has a link to the Helen Suzman Foundation’s journal Focus, which contains a recent article of mine on the abuse of the disciplinary system in the South African public service.

I have a PhD degree from the University of London, an MA degree from University College Cork (National University of Ireland) and a BA (Honours) degree from the University of Natal. I also obtained post-graduate diplomas in education, archives and museums (the latter from the University of Pretoria).

I am married to Anne, who provides my Irish connection. She studied law in Ireland and South Africa, had a successful career in local government and organised the first democratic local government elections in Pietermaritzburg in 1996. We have a son, James, who is pursuing a stellar career in the computer world. He is married to Amanda, who designed this wonderful website.

Anne and I are cat people and on this website you will see a picture of the moment I finished the index of my book  Last Outpost on the Zulu Frontiers (published by the University of Illinois Press this April, 2016), closely supervised by two of our ginger cats.   

You can also check out some of my recent articles – they cover African, Irish and Jewish historical topics. They is also the fascinating story of the fake Ghanaian “Golden” Stool in the old Natal Museum. I hope you will enjoy them all.