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Archiver > SOUTH-AFRICA > 1999-10 > 0939205662


From: "Mansell Upham" <>
Subject: SELF-PRESERVATION
Date: Wed, 06 Oct 1999 10:27:42 +0000


The Master's Office is there to serve the interests of the State. The State
taxes people to death - even post mortem. Necrophilia is alive and well.
The aboriginal Khoekhoe understood the real function of vultures (aasvoëls)
by telling the Dutch "seadogs" that their name for such carrion-gluttons was
"strontvogels"....The State dupes its underdogs into believing that
'citizens'
have the 'right' to access these records. The State cannot function without
index registers. Lawyers and bureaucrats are happy that these registers are
inaccessible. The public must remain on the ouside looking
in...Genealogical researchers are a minor nuisance.

The GSSA's membership is negligible. Why copy existing indices which the
State must and will maintain for its own purposes? Kick in the door, turn
over the table and demand your right to inspect what you are told to be
"public documents". Let the State further lay waste your monies to make
these registers more widely available and accessible.

Would that researches rather channelled their energies and competency into
making available/accessible the contents of more valuable and less legible
archivalia. Why waste time preserving indices which the State maintains
anyhow? Why reduce Genealogy to a
data-collating-multiplicating-multiplacating frenzy? Or are genealogical
researchers (hobbyists?) cicuitous like social workers? Social workers have
a vested interested in poverty. Solving poverty, they would be out of work.
Why not worry instead about the identification and preservation of our
really old documents 'lost' in our 'State Archives' (an ugly SA
contrivance...at least the British Crown is more 'honest' in its duplicity -
'Public Record Office' is so much more 'inclusive'...). These older
documents are now so well preserved that even researchers are being
discouraged from accessing them too regularly...unless, of course, you're an
'academic' and know the right people...

Let's teach our offspring to preserve their own past/present/future without
relying on the State and bureacrats to do it for us. How sad that we have
to remember and view our antecedents in terms only of how their rulers and
oppressors viewed and screwed them...

Mansell Upham

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