Do stories of people with disabilities matter? Exploratoion of a method to acknowledge the stories of people with disabilities as valuabole oral sources in the writing of social history

Abstract

Oral history has been used as a valuable tool for the recording of the neglected history of the ordinary people. Since the 1980’s, oral historians in South Africa have engaged recording the histories of the black people, the poor, the women, the children, migrant labourers and of the immigrants. What is glaringly absent from the recorded histories in the last thirty years are the voices of the people living with disabilities. This article attempts to propose a methodology on how oral history practitioners can go about recording the histories of people with disabilities. The article acknowledges the long history of cultural and religious discrimination, the lack of vocabulary and the education on how to understand the various disabilities and how best to record stories of people with disabilities in a non-prejudiced manner.