MICHAEL MORRIS | History, hope and reform echo in Rudd House memories

Some years ago I read an intriguing story about a worn patch of linoleum in an otherwise forgettable room in an old mansion of another time entirely.

The mansion started out as a modest four-roomed bungalow in Kimberley’s 1880s, but underwent elaborate transformation from 1896, when it was bought by mining magnate and business partner to Cecil Rhodes, Charles Dunnell Rudd. Succeeding generations lived in Rudd House until well into the second half of the 20 th century. (Olympic sprinter and 1920 gold medallist Bevil Rudd grew up in the house.)

This much emerges from a 2021 essay in the journal, Critical Arts, headlined “Diamond Town Toil and Trauma: Weaving Material Counter-Narratives of Kimberley’s Pasts”. It was written, as it happens, by my archaeologist brother, David.

“Built in a colonial Indian style,” David writes of the house, “it was expanded through a succession of eccentric additions … extra bedrooms, nursery, staff quarters, pantries, billiard room, in addition to the well-appointed core – dining room, drawing room, and so on, and a kitchen separated by a hatch and a passage… A sun deck completed the sprawling house, while the yard and garden, along with stables and sheds, sported a conservatory for the cultivation of the more exotic types of foliage and flowers, and a croquet court.”

It’s when we get to the worn linoleum that the old mansion gives away something of the humdrum routines of its yesteryears and the telling traces of choices made or not made.

After a restored Rudd House opened as a house museum in 1986, David recalls, one of the elderly family members, out from England, visited the home of her childhood. It all came back to her … the nursery and a small adjacent room where, she remembered with an exclamation of delight, the ironing was done.

Here, the linoleum floor, fortuitously left unrestored, “bears a distinctly worn-out patch, a veritable archaeological trace of the labour expended there in the routine pressing of shirts and sheets and table linen”.

In this way, “an outwardly colonial heritage site” reveals “material signatures” of a larger world “beyond the inner walls and garden fence”.

The washerwomen of late 19th century Kimberley may seem as peripheral to us today as they would likely have been to those who largely determined their fate.

Yet, even if we can’t name them, these faceless figures are not wholly absent either, being traceable not only in those tell-tale patches of worn linoleum, but in the reach of history itself, and the hopes and calculations of those who live and breathe today, and not as helpless subjects.

In a speech last week, my senior colleague, Institute of Race Relations CEO John Endres , challenged his audience to imagine a seeming implausibility: a child entering grade 1 today and finishing school a decade hence “in a country twice as rich”.

This was not far-fetched; by implementing practical, inexpensive reforms, he said “we think South Africa can grow at 7%, reached step by step over five to seven years.