The Manuscript Collection

The items in the manuscript collection are diverse in content, medium and extent. Besides written accounts, the collection includes scrapbooks, press cuttings, telegrams, maps, sketches and photographs. And, in extent, the collection ranges from a single fragment on one page to boxes of material.

There are letters from royalty, statesmen, missionaries, explorers, officers and soldiers; diaries and journals; personal accounts and military dispatches. There are title deeds, manuscripts of books, company records, minutes of organizations and charitable associations, and reports made by governors at the Cape.

The collection includes the manuscripts of Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, Denys Reitz’s three autobiographical books and several of Sarah Gertrude Millin’s books. The papers of the Rand Pioneers Association and of Fred Struben – who, together with his brother Harry, was a pioneer of the Witwatersrand gold rush – are important to the history and development of Johannesburg. Letters by David Livingstone, the travel journals and notebooks of the artist and explorer Thomas Baines, William Paterson and Robert Jacob Gordon in the 1770s, all relate to the exploration of southern Africa. Politicians are well represented, including papers relating to Jan Christiaan Smuts, a manuscript by Winston Churchill from the South African War and a letter written by Leo Tolstoy to Mahondas Gandhi on the nature of passive resistance. There are important letters and papers on the Frontier, Zulu and South African Wars, including the sieges of Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking.