Raising Money for Archival Project

Who am I: I'm Wilton Schereka, a South African writer and scholar invested in and working on a history of my family through colonization and apartheid. I am conducting a large archival and genealogical search to uncover the stories of my family, one of whom was a person taken into servitude when she was just a child.

One of stories inspiring this fundraising drive: My family always spoke, in hushed tones, about an ancestor of ours, my mother’s great grandmother. She was a young black girl, taken by a white family to be a house servant and maid. The story goes that she was taken from her community and brought to a different province to serve in the house of a wealthy and powerful white settler colonial family. The hushed part was about how my great grandfather was conceived, a painful story that was not revealed to me until I was in my 20s, and it was not until this year, 2024, that I learned her name, or saw any other evidence of her existence outside of the stories.

Why this matters: In a world where we are atomized further and further away from each other, and a world in which the archives and stories of our people are hidden and destroyed, the work of retrieval, of uncovering, of telling, becomes essential. This is my attempt to begin that work. While the world is largely familiar with the term "apartheid", there are countless lived experiences and histories that are lost, buried or unexamined. It's important to cover these histories, to honor these ancestors and in the hopes that we prevent these atrocities from occurring in our present and future.