A letter predominantly begins as a private act: one person writing to another. But once it leaves the writer's hands, it begins a journey of its own, one that the writer can no longer control. Its materiality lies in scratching out, rewriting, and adding in tiny, almost illegible scrawls onto portions of the paper - whether in handwritten letters or when a typewriter is used - and small typing errors are made and remade for the reader to make meaning of in their own interpretation. That meaning-making is one of the first times that the letter is encountered, and both the perception and the mood of the reader determine how it is read. Writing letters taught both discipline and the anticipation of waiting, while writing letters today, in a digital age that processes immense amounts of information so quickly, can be seen almost as an act of resistance to a culture of erasure and editing. Prof. Dhupelia-Mesthrie laments the loss of thought-provoking composition and penmanship, and in her assessment, "gone is the time of time-consuming act of thoughtful expressive writing", and in its place she decries is the "havoc wreaked by auto correct", which disrupts the opportunity for expansion or exploration of what could have been or was meant to be.
These few pages written to another - friend, family member and/or loved one, often with no expectation that anyone else (outside of the inner circles) will ever read it and also with the hope that there will be a reciprocal letter - remain within the realm of sentimental value, often survive long after their writers and recipients are gone. They appear as time travellers, containing fragments of memory, evidentiary moments of lived experience, becoming unexpected records of history for contemporary readers and audiences. So what happens when these private musings and shared intimacies are made public? What happens if they are lost and never made public? Bongani Kona, PhD candidate and lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at UWC, and Prof Dhupelia-Mesthrie’s interlocutor at the Distinguished Lecture, describes Prof. Dhupelia-Mesthrie's work on her book Gandhi’s African Legacy: Phoenix Settlement, 1904 to 2024, a History Through Letters, as well as the epistolaries that she comments on in her lecture as being recorded and documented with a remarkable sense of devotion.
Kona's description of devotion is quite apt, in this lecture and her published work, Prof. Dhupelia-Mesthrie strives to draw attention to women's letters in a world where men and their his-story dominate by far. She notes of the female workers, the domestic servants, the immigration encounters that these women confront and in these experiences, with tales that are not widely disseminated across various subjects, these correspondences that she works with and brings visibility to can offer access to junctures that are not always visible through conventional historical records because of the standard and male-centred, but also male-dominated, historical narratives. Regina Gelana Twala's epistolary collection, for example, remained hidden and unknown for fifty years and, by association, so did her husband, Dan Twala, with whom she corresponded.
"Since the beginning of the democratic era, South African non-fiction has been dominated by biography. Joel Cabrita estimated that out of 225 biographies since 1990, just ten were about women. Cabrita has written one of the most outstanding biographies of recent years, on Regina Gelana Twala. Written Out: The Silencing of Regina Gelana Twala (Joel Cabrita 2023) is interestingly published by the same press that published Black Intimacies, a year earlier. Gelana’s life in the first six decades of the twentieth century straddled several places in Natal, Johannesburg and Eswatini. She was a path breaker." (Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, “The Epistolary in Narrative Non-Fiction in South Africa,” UWC Dean’s Annual Distinguished Lecture, University of the Western Cape, 2026, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6VsVbmzHQ4.)
Gelana and her husband, Dan, wrote while apart, communicating over distance as most correspondents do, but also, unusually, while together. Prof. Dhupelia-Mesthrie describes their writing as an experiment in identity, imagining different versions of themselves and recording the ambitions, frustrations, and intimacies of their lives. Gelana even imagined that, "one day our letters may be collected as a memoir." In their epistolary, they exchanged more than one thousand letters over the course of their lives, an incredible collection that was found laying in boxes in the study of “Tim Couzens a young lecturer in his thirties in the English Department at the University of the Witwatersrand.” Couzens interviewed Dan around his own academic interest and where they most likely discussed the collection: “One may assume that Dan was happy to hand over the letters …” (Dhupelia-Mesthrie, 2026). Yet for decades, that collection remained hidden in boxes, collecting dust, before it was eventually found and entered into the historical record. Prof. Dhupelia-Mesthrie poses this as a way for us to consider who decides which correspondences are important enough to preserve. What happens to those letters after they are written? And how does this choice determine which histories ultimately survive, and does a letter's historical value change over time depending on the owner, historian/archivist, or witness who perceives its value to society?
In published works, A reader rarely encounters a historical letter exactly as its original recipient did. By the time it reaches publication, editors have considered and decided which letters to include, how to arrange them, and what or how much context to provide for the reader, when considering their audience and their reading experience. The process changes how we, the readers, experience the passage of time contained in the correspondence once it enters public record or even in the epistolary collection, as it no longer transits the postal system. The reproduced text is no longer a letter; it no longer functions as a letter and instead becomes an object used as evidence of authenticity for the reader.
Translation introduces a further layer of complexity when working with historical texts and considering the authenticity and the original vs the translated copy. What happens when you’re working with a collection written in a language you’re not fluent in or only have a basic understanding of? Translation is an interpretive process where meaning is conveyed, negotiated, and when necessary, adapted for contemporary understanding. The letters of Manilal and Sushila Gandhi contained within Dhupelia-Mesthrie’s published book are an example of this (and a further demonstration of her devotion). “For all my wishes for Sushila’s letters to be the voice of her life, the very act of translation has already limited that possibility. Furthermore, readers will encounter her almost 100 years after her first available letter.” (Dhupelia-Mesthrie, 2026).
Prof. Dhupelia-Mesthrie’s lecture was particularly informative of my own doctoral research, which examines letters to and from ex-political prisoners on Robben Island written between 1960 and 1990. Although our archival collections differ, the underlying aspect of the everyday was captivating, and I was excited to leave with more questions than I arrived with, which I believe is always a good sign of a deeply educational lecture that stimulated curiosity and interest. The collections discussed in the lecture reveal people negotiating relationships, sharing their vulnerabilities, coping with hardships, and imagining their futures, all very difficult circumstances made material in the folded, ink-stained pages that endured long after the moment(s) they were written and intended to be read. This has encouraged me to reflect more deeply on the personal and relational dimensions of the correspondence surrounding Robben Island, and on the responsibilities of historians entrusted with personal and private correspondence. The responsibility is not simply to recover voices from dusty shoeboxes, forgotten collections in attics, or the offices of apathetic lecturers who make empty promises, such as Tim Couzens, that might otherwise be neglected, but to do so with an awareness of the power dynamics involved in making another person's life legible to the public.
Letter writing is rarely tidy or fixed in meaning - mostly because of the way that meaning is made and negotiated between the correspondents and later the reader who may not be involved in the conversation at all. It is also because the writer negotiates meaning and conversation in real time as they pen their letter. Letters are re-written, edited ‘post-production’; and they are considered. Considered in a way that words, thoughts and musings are when they are important and weighted with the moment of the occasion. Writing has intrinsic integrity when perfectionism is set aside, and materiality means too much to crumple paper up, throw it away, and try again. Instead, the imperfections that make the letter are included and noted almost inconsequentially. In this way, letter writing aligns more closely with lived experience, which is rarely tidy or fixed. And at every stage of its life, we change how we understand and interpret letters; incidentally, so do the writers and how they relate to who they were and the words they wrote at that stage in their life.
Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of the Western Cape. Her research focus has included forced removals, land restitution, immigration histories, bureaucratic paper systems and especially India-South Africa connected histories. She is the author of From Cane Fields to Freedom: a Chronicle of Indian South African Life (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2000). Her book Gandhi's Prisoner? The Life of Gandhi's Son, Manilal (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2004) won the Via Africa Award for best non-fiction and the Faculty of Arts (UWC) best monograph award in 2005. Her recent book Gandhi’s African Legacy: Phoenix Settlement 1904-2024, A History Through Letters (Belville: UWC Press, 2024) received the Humanities and Social Sciences Award in 2025 for best edited non-fiction book. She is an elected member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.
Rosalia Mendes is a PhD candidate in the Department of Historical Studies at the UWC. Her research focuses on letters exchanged between ex-political prisoners incarcerated on Robben Island and their correspondents from 1960 to 1993. She examines these letters through the lenses of biography, identity, materiality and the everyday and how their materiality may expand or complicate the published biographies of these political figures.
