[Source – Steven Kotze for FHYA, 2025: 13 June 2025 would have been Jeff Guy’s 85th birthday. To mark this anniversary the FHYA presents the completed curation of ‘The Jeff Guy Research Papers’ on EMANDULO, comprising material created by historian Jefferson John [Jeff] Guy (13 June 1940 – 15 December 2014) during the 1970s and 1980s and used throughout his 45-year career as a distinguished historian of the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) region. While the main work of curating Guy’s papers is complete, the FHYA remains open to the acquisition of further relevant materials, and welcomes contributions here.
Jeff Guy was born in Pietermaritzburg, attended school in the KZN Midlands and later graduated from the University of Natal at Pietermaritzburg with an Honours degree in History. His PhD on the Zulu Civil War was supervised by Shula Marks at SOAS, University of London, and became his first book. Guy taught at the Roma campus of what was called the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland for 15 years before moving to the University of Trondheim in Norway. In 1992 he was appointed Professor and head of department at the University of Natal, Durban, where he remained after he retired from teaching.
Guy published a number of seminal articles as well as six books on topics that encompassed environmental factors in the rise of the Zulu kingdom, the Zulu civil war of 1883-1884, the careers of Anglican Bishop John William Colenso and his daughter Harriet Colenso, gender relations in pre-colonial African societies, African responses to British imperialism, the 1906 Poll Tax uprising and the career of Theophilus Shepstone (to name only the most important of these).
Guy’s publications were based on decades of meticulous archival research in South Africa and Britain, which he documented and preserved in a variety of ways. Initially his research notes were transcribed by hand or typewriter onto 126mm x 203mm index cards, which in turn were arranged alphabetically according to the topic he was working on. Subsequently, as he developed his ideas further and began preparations to write a dissertation, book or article, he also kept neatly handwritten notebooks that served as rough drafts. Guy was fastidious in the way he archived his own research, and there is evidence within the notes of his frequent return to these over the decades where they were amended or new information was added. Furthermore, his daily diaries served variously as notepad, aide memoire and record of meetings or research in specific archives. As a result, he has left a substantial body of evidence that serves as an index of the sources he used, a selection of derivative sources, and an extensive map of how his thinking developed and changed over most of his career. In addition, when technology later made photocopies affordable, Guy supplemented his earlier notes and summaries with personal copies of important British parliamentary papers and other records.
Arguably the value of the collection lies in the way it brings together in one place a wide range of material gleaned from diverse sources that is pertinent to the history of the KwaZulu-Natal region in the nineteenth century.
After his death in December 2014 these materials and his personal library initially remained in place at his former home in Durban, where they were kept by his family. After an approach made by the FHYA in 2023, the Guy family agreed to make his research available for digitisation, while the physical archive would be donated to the UCT library. This allows researchers ready access to this valuable repository of Jeff Guy’s work.
Thanks to the African Digital Humanities Programme at Wiser, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, for making this project possible.]
