Forged and Continually Refashioned in the Crucible of Ongoing Social and Political Life: Archives and Custodial Practices as Subjects of Enquiry

Abstract

Shaped as much by fractures, uncertainties and changes in contemporary social and political life, the current dilapidation of the South African national archival system is a more complex problem than simply a matter of inefficiency and bias. The paper argues that any attempts to analyse its current situation with a view to changing it, or indeed to understand in any situation why some things are preserved in certain forms, others in other forms, and some things not at all, requires us to recognise that archives, and other preservatory forms, are artefacts, with linked practices and processes, forged and continually refashioned in the crucible of ongoing social and political life. In mapping out something of the range and form of contemporary engagements with inherited and newly collected materials about the past, looking at how they were, and are, entered into the record, and how those records change over time, the essay raises questions about the roles of archives and archive-like activities in contemporary, and past, social life. Making and maintaining archives, and the host of practices with similar features, are things that people do, for complex reasons, and in a variety of ways. In refiguring archive-as-source as archive-as-subject, the essay recognises archives as simultaneously sites of storage and as practices in social life. The paper goes on to examine the range of methods which researchers from a variety of disciplines mobilise – historical, ethnographic, literary and biographical – in order to examine records as historical and contemporary subjects of investigation in their own right rather than simply as the storehouses of sources used by historians.

Keywords:

• memory
• production of history
• South Africa
• biography
• ethnography

Acknowledgements

I am especially grateful to my fellow researchers in the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative (UCT) as well as to participants in the South African Contemporary History and Humanities Seminar (UWC), especially Leslie Witz, for helpful discussions on many of the points developed in this essay. Patrick Harries and his students made useful comments on an earlier version while Megan Greenwood and Natasha Page assisted in the preparation of the paper for publication. The Archival Platform staff were especially helpful and their website proved to be an invaluable resource.

Notes

¹The promulgation of the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa Act (No 43 of 1996 as amended) led to the transfer of authority in archival matters other than those at national level to provincial governments. The system thus comprises the National Archives and Records Service and the various provincial archives. The National Archives and Records Service is responsible for the preservation of ‘national archival heritage for use by the government and people of South Africa’; and the promotion of ‘efficient, accountable and transparent government through the proper management and care of government records’ (Manual of the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa, first edition, 2003, available http://www.national.archives.gov.za/nars_dmlib_3476.pdf; these quotes p. 8, accessed 3 December 2012).

²Inter alia, letter and fax Professors William Beinart (Oxford University), Carolyn Hamilton (University of Cape Town) and Shula Marks (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) to Minister Paul Mashatile, March 2011; letter, Professor J.S. Bergh, Chairperson of the Historical Association of South Africa to Arts and Culture Minister, Dr. Pallo Jordan, 25 August, 2006. See also the minutes of the South African Historical Association (HASA) General Meetings 2006–9, which document various efforts of the Association, and the South African Historical Society, to raise their concerns about the state of the archives with the National Archivist and the National Archives Advisory Council and their concern about the lack of responsive action. I am grateful to Professor Karen Harris and Karina Sevenhuysen from the University of Pretoria Archives for making copies of the 2006 letter and these minutes available to me.

³ Archives at the Crossroads 2007: Open Report to the Minister of Arts and Culture (Johannesburg: Nelson Mandela Foundation, 2007). The Report emanated from the ‘National System, Public Interest’ conference (April 2007), co-convened by the National Archives, the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Witwatersrand University's Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Research Project. See also S. Morrow and L. Wotshela, ‘The State of the Archives and Access to Information’, in J. Daniel, R. Southall, and J. Lutchman, eds, State of the Nation: South Africa 2004–2005 (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2004), 313–335. While observing that the National Archives remained one of the most efficient official archives in South Africa, this assessment noted that by 2004 it was under strain. The article further highlighted the by then already evident vulnerability of provincial archives.

⁴See http://www.gcfund.co.za, accessed 12 May 2012, for these developments from the point of view of the officials who were suspended.

⁵On the poor state of the system see the ongoing reports, inter alia on the national Film, Video and Sound Archive, the National Oral History Programme, the archives of the Northern Cape and the ‘sorry state’ of the Mthatha Archive that are being posted on the Archival Platform website (www.archivalplatform.org.za) in preparation for a 2013 State of the Archive Report by the Archival Platform.

⁶Director of the Archival Platform, pers. comm.

⁷See S. Jeppie, ‘Re/discovering Timbuktu’, in S. Jeppie and S.B. Diagne, eds, The Meanings of Timbuktu (Cape Town: HSRC Press in association with CODESRIA, Dakar, 2008), 1–17; B. Maaba, ‘The Liberation Archives in South Africa’, in C. Saunders, ed., Documenting Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa (Uppsala: The Nordic Africa Institute, 2010), 66–71.

⁸‘Mzansi's Golden Economy: Contribution of the Arts, Culture and Heritage Sector to the New Growth Path’ (http://www.info.gov.za/view/DownloadFileAction?id=146493, accessed 10 November 2012).

⁹L. Smith, ‘The Power of Politics: The Performance of the South African Revenue Service and Some of its Implications’, Policy: Issues and Actors, 16, 2, Centre for Policy Studies, Johannesburg, April 2003, available at www.cps.org.za, accessed 10 November 2012; W. Punt, ‘South Africa Revenue Service (SARS): The Creation of a SARS Ethics and Governance Office’, United Nations Global Compact Case Study, August 2006, Pretoria, Ethics Institute of South Africa, available at www.ccps-africa.org, accessed 10 November 2012.

¹⁰The papers offered at the recent CODESRIA conference, ‘Archives of Post-Independence Africa and Its Diaspora’, Goree Island, Dakar, Senegal, 20–23 June 2012, offer insight into the current situation across Africa. See, inter alia, J. Allman, ‘Shadow Archives and the Contingencies of Postcolonial History Writing: Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana, 1957–1966’; M. Larmer and M. Hinfelaar, ‘Historians as Archivists in Post-colonial Zambia’; O.C. Adesin, ‘Archival Documents and the Gatekeepers in the Twenty-first Century: Reconfiguring Nigeria's National Archive’.

¹¹See the recent series of articles in the New York Times by Dinyar Patel, ‘In India, History Literally Rots Away’ (20 March 2012); ‘Repairing the Damage at India's National Archives’ (21 March 2012); ‘India's Archives: How Did Things Get This Bad?’ (22 March, 2012); ‘The Parsis: Once India's Ccurators Now Shrug as History Rots’ (23 March, 2012); see www.NYTimes.com, accessed online on 29 October 2012. Comparison of the situation of the archives in, for example, Goa, reveals similarly ‘shameful’ features. (Interview by F. Noronha: Ines G. Zapanov on Catholic Orientalism and the State of the Archives in Goa, Archive and Access, http://publicarchives.wordpress.com/ accessed 10 November 2012.) I am grateful to Bodhisattva Kar for directing me to the latter site.

¹²For a similar situation elsewhere in Africa see, for example, D. Kweya, ‘We Shall Be Back: Self-Archiving, Subjectivity and Contestation of Postcolonial Marginality’, paper presented to the Archive and Public Culture seminar, University of Cape Town, 15 November 2012.

¹⁹ Sunday Times, 17 June 2012, ‘Raise those voices and discover your society’.

¹³See www.archivalplatform.org.za.

¹⁴See www.saha.org.za.

¹⁵ http://www.gala.co.za, accessed 10 May 2012.

¹⁶ http://www.nelsonmandela.org, accessed 11 May 2012.

¹⁷X. Mangcu, ed., Becoming Worthy Ancestors: Archive, Public Deliberation and Identity in South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2011).

¹⁸See www.activateleadership.co.za.

²⁰See www.sahistory.org.za.

²¹Draft registry of archival entities prepared by the Archival Platform indicates that the universities account for just under one quarter of all the archival entities in South Africa. (Registry, in prep.).

²²See ‘KZN Premier, Sibusiso Ndebele, to officially launch the family tree project, 27 May, 2008’, www.info.gov.za/2008/08052771415/004.htn, accessed 29 May 2012.

²³These include a study of the American Board Mission Stations in southern KwaZulu-Natal commissioned by the National Heritage Council in 2005, as well as the KZN Mission Legacy Project dealing with 11 mission societies funded by the Office of the Premier in KZN (www.nhc.org.za/page.php?page=395, accessed 20 May 2012). Also see ‘History and Heritage: A Special Issue on Former American Board Mission Stations in Southern KwaZulu-Natal’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 28 (2010).

²⁴A. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); A. Wanless, ‘The Fourie Collection of Khoisan Ethnographica: Forming an Archive’, Social Dynamics, 36, 1 (2010), 24–37.

²⁵P. Lalu, The Deaths of Hintsa (HSRC Press: Cape Town, 2009).

²⁶For another insightful intervention by an historian concerned to develop an ethnographic approach to archives, see Antoinette Burton's edited collection, Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005); see also K. Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010).

²⁷The mfecane debate of the late 1980s saw Julian Cobbing's indictment of a variety of sources on the Zulu kingdom under Shaka as hopelessly tainted, and responses to his intervention that offered detailed, historicised accounts of the making of specific bodies of source material for particular reasons at particular times, as well as the effects on these materials of later developments. (J. Cobbing, ‘The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo’, Journal of African History, 29 (1988), 487–219; J. Cobbing, ‘A Tainted Well: The Objectives, Historical Fantasies and Working Methods of James Stuart, with Counter Argument’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 11 (1988), 115–54; and, inter alia, C. Hamilton, ‘‘The Character and Objects of Chaka’: A Reconsideration of the Making of Shaka as Mfecane Motor’, Journal of African History, 33 (1992), 37–63; and C. Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: the Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention, (Boston: Harvard University Press, and Cape Town: David Philip, 1998)). On disciplinary knowledge see P. Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Ohio, Ohio University Press, 2007); S. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge. Science, Sensibility and White South Africa 1820–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); J. Weintroub, ‘A Working Life: The Rock Art and Linguistic Researches of Dorothea Frances Bleek, 1873 to 1948’ (PhD thesis, University of the Western Cape, Bellville, 2010); also see F. Blouin and W. Rosenberg, eds, Archives, Documentation and the Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, Anne Arbor, 2007); see N. Shepherd and A. Haber, ‘The Hand of the Archaeologist: Historical Catastrophe, Regimes of Care, Excision, Relationality and Undisciplinarity’ in C. Hamilton and P. Skotnes, eds, Uncertain Curature: In and Out the Archive (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, forthcoming). The history of art collections is well served in this regard. See J. Carman, Uplifting the Colonial Philistine: Florence Phillips and the Making of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2007) and also B. Schmahmann, Picturing Change: Art and Visual Culture at Universities in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, forthcoming).

²⁸See, inter alia, A. Bank, Bushmen in a Victorian World: The Remarkable Story of the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore (Cape Town: Double Storey, 2006) and the earlier contribution by R. Thornton, ‘“This Dying Out Race”: W.H.I Bleek's Approach to the Languages of Southern Africa’, Social Dynamics, 9, 2 (1983), 1–10.

²⁹For another recent innovative approach to the engagement of the Bleek and Lloyd archive see M. Winberg, ‘Annotations of Loss and Abundance: An Examination of the !kun Children's Material in the Bleek and Lloyd Collection (1879–1881)’ (MA thesis, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, 2011).

³⁰See also A. Wanless, ‘The Silence of Colonial Melancholy: The Louis Fourie Archive of Bushman Ethnologica’ (PhD thesis, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2007) and M. Nixon, ‘Percival Kirby and “the Musics of the Native Races of South Africa”: Interpreting the Percival Kirby Archive’ (PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, in prep.). For published work by these two authors which alludes less directly to this approach of dealing simultaneously with subject and source, see A. Wanless, ‘The Fourie Collection’, and M. Nixon, ‘Depths of Field: Photographs and Early Southern African Music Studies’, in C. Hamilton and P. Skotnes, eds, Uncertain Curation: In and Out the Archive (Jacana Media, forthcoming).

³¹For analyses of the effects of changing forms of record keeping, cataloguing, labeling and so on, see C. Hamilton and N. Leibhammer, ‘Salutes, Labels and other Archival Artefacts’, in Hamilton and Skotnes, Uncertain Curation; V. Viestad, ‘The Dress of Some Gordonia Bushmen – as Collected and Photographed by Dorothea Bleek in the Northern Cape, 1911’, paper presented to the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative Workshop, University of Cape Town, April 2012; M. Nixon, ‘Percival Kirby’; J. Brown, ‘Ethics of the Dust’ (MA thesis, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, in prep.); also see the radical interventions by Chimurenga magazine which, in launching its own online archive of pan-African periodicals, staged a take-over the Cape Town Central Library with artists and others staging interventions that re-catalogued its holdings (http://www.chimurenga.co.za/chimurenga-magazine, accessed 10 May 2012). This exciting intervention is one of the case studies in Hedley Twidle's ongoing project ‘Unpacking whose Library? Borrowing History in the Postcolony’.

³²See C. Hamilton, ‘Backstory, Biography and the Life of the James Stuart Archive’, History in Africa, 38 (2011), 319–41.

³³See also the essay by John Randolph on the biography of the Bakunin family archive. Randolph is similarly interested in archives as subjects of history, and also ascribes to the view current in recent anthropological literature on material culture that things have social lives. His essay is primarily concerned with the Bakunin archive's transition from a domestic collection in the hands of the Bakunin family to its preservation as a public resource in the Institute of Russian Literature in St Petersburg. To my mind his most valuable insight is that the story of an archive is not merely the account of its ‘physical preservation, but ‘of a capillary interplay between conceptual continuity and objective change’ (213). Like the anthropologists discussed above, Randolph recognises that the labour of assembling, maintaining and altering the Bakunin archive had meaning for the people who handled it and for the ‘societies’ through which the archive passed (J. Randolph, ‘On the Biography of the Bakunin Family Archive’, in A. Burton, ed., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 209–31).

³⁴See U. Dhupelia-Mesthrie, ‘The Form, the Permit and the Photograph: An Archive of Mobility between South Africa and India’, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 46, 6, (2011), 650–62. A number of the studies being undertaken within the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, University of Cape Town, reconstruct the biographies of the archives that are their subjects of study, tracking the processes of mutual constitution of archives and disciplines. See viz, in addition to Molins-Literas (this issue), the work of Michael Nixon on the Kirby music collection, (‘Percival Kirby’); Xolelwa Kashe Katiye on the Mapungubwe Archive (‘“Biography of a Disavowed Archive”: The Dead of Mapungubwe and Their Possessions’ [MA thesis, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, in prep.]), and C. Hamilton and A. Wanless, ‘Archival Biography, Sources and Methods: The Case of the Louis Fourie Archive’, paper presented at The Courage of //Kabbo and a Century of Specimens Conference and Exhibition (Michaelis School of Fine Arts, University of Cape Town, 17–20 August 2011), as well as Hamilton, ‘Backstory’.

³⁵Of course, the division is never absolute, as museum collection sometimes have accompanying documentation of an archival nature, while documents collections sometimes include objects, albeit uncomfortably. (On the latter see J. Bloch, ‘Making Things Speak: A Case Study in the Reconfiguring of a South African Institutional Object Collection’, Phd thesis, University of Cape Town, in prep.).

³⁶See S. Jeppie, ‘History for Timbuktu: Ahmad Bularaf, Archives and the Place of the Past’, History in Africa, 38 (2011), 401–16. See also the work of Saarah Jappie on the changing historical and social contexts of the Cape Town kietaabs, family-owned manuscripts in Arabic-Afrikaans and jawi, mostly from the nineteenth century, which have shifted from being practical objects to becoming heirlooms, and more latterly, research objects and heritage (S. Jappie, ‘From the Madrasah to the Museum: The Social Life of the ‘Kietaabs’ of Cape Town’, History in Africa, 38 (2011), 369–99).

³⁷A. Haidara, ‘The State of Manuscripts in Mali and Efforts to Preserve Them’, in Jeppie and Diagne, The Meanings of Timbuktu, 265–9; pers. comm., Haidara to the author, Timbuctu, January 2011. At the time of writing many of these families have fled Timbuctu in the face of a Tuareg uprising in the region, and the fate of these manuscripts is uncertain. It is not the first time in their long history that these archives have been under threat and have had to be buried, bricked up or otherwise secreted.

³⁸M. Buthelezi, ‘“Sifuna Umlando Wethu” (We are Looking for our History): Oral Poetry and the Meanings of the Past in Post-apartheid South Africa’ (PhD thesis, Columbia University, New York, 2012).

³⁹See Ancestral Stories focus on the Archival Platform, www.archivalplatform.org/ancestral_stories/, accessed 4 May 2012.

⁴⁰A. Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in the Form’, in C. Hamilton, V. Harris, J. Taylor, M. Pickover, G. Reid, and R. Saleh, eds, Refiguring the Archive (Amsterdam & Cape Town: Kluwer & David Philip, 2002), 87.

⁴¹A. Mbembe, ‘The Power of the Archive and its Limits’, in Hamilton et al., Refiguring the Archive, 19–26.

⁴²V. Harris, ‘Genres of the Trace: Memory, Archive and Trouble’, Archives and Manuscripts, 40 (2012), 147–157, doi:10.1080/01576895.2012.735825.

⁴³In making these points I am mindful of the distinction which Diane Taylor makes between ‘archive’ and ‘repertoire’, which draws our attention to the important ways in which the past can be worked up in ephemeral practices and in embodied knowledges that resist the deadening effects of archival preservation (The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas [Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003]). Finding much inspiration in Taylor's work, I also consider especially productive the focus that Anne Cvetkovich opens up in relation to unconventional practices of archive that reside between formal archives and ephemeral practices (An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures [Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003]), as well as the focus on conservationary and curatorial activity that shows up in much of the work on ancestors and archives pursued within the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, University of Cape Town.

⁴⁴M. Foucault, ‘The Statement and the Archive’, in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 79.

⁴⁵See also the work of Carine Zaayman which focuses on absence in its own right and which both renders visually and theorises the presence of archival absence. (C. Zaayman, ‘Anarchive: Picturing Absence’, in Hamilton and Skotnes, Uncertain Curature.

⁴⁶F. Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, trans. by C.L. Markham (New York: Grove Press, 1967 [1952]).

⁴⁷See A. Cvetkovich, ‘Depression is Ordinary: Public Feelings and Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother’, in Feminist Theory, special issue on ‘Affecting Feminism’ 13 (2012), 131–146.

⁴⁸G. Mahashe, ‘Dithugula tša Malefokane: Framing the Ethnographic Photographic Archive Made by E.J. and J.D. Krige in Bolobedu in the 1930s’ (MA thesis, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, 2013).

⁴⁹A. Putter, ‘Native Work’ (MA, University of Cape Town, in prep.).

⁵⁰J. Vansina, Oral Tradition: a study in historical methodology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965).

⁵¹Archaeologists introduce into the record of the remote past the material remains which they locate, even though their practices of long-term storage sometimes make a weak claim to the status of archive for this material. Rock art, by way of contrast, has benefited from considerable archival commitment, care and conservation.

⁵²L. Keene, ‘Embodied Others: Conflict, Reconciliation and the Possession of Thokoza Sangomas in the Present’ (Honours essay, University of Cape Town, 2012).

⁵³I have in mind here the kinds of creative interventions by the artists Nicholas Hlobo, Kathryn Smith and Mary Sibande, the photographer Santu Mofokeng, and the playwright, Mwenya Kabwe, as studied by Alex Dodd (in ‘Secular Séance: Uncovering the Victorian Postmodern in Contemporary South African Art and Literature’ [Phd, University of Cape Town, in prep.]).

⁵⁴See X. Mangcu, ‘Evidentiary Genocide’, and C. Hamilton, ‘Why Archive Matters’, in X. Mangcu, ed., Worthy Ancestors (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2011), 1–16; 119–44.

⁵⁵L. Keene, ‘Thokoza Sangomas’. As Anne Cvetkovich shows, an archive of feelings, including that of trauma, challenges conventional understandings of what constitutes an archive and demands a recognition for archive of unpredictable aspects of popular and everyday culture: see Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings.

⁵⁶See for example P. Landau, Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which mounts an argument that reaches back in time to the fifteenth century that historically the people of South Africa embraced and absorbed strangers. The study contends that hybridity lay at the core of a sub-continental political tradition of heterogeneous mobilisation that survived into the twentieth century. To make this argument Landau circumnavigates established archives instantiating tribalism and ethnicity, finding materials attesting to this form of politics in alternative archives centred on practices of local Christianity and of ancestrally motivated movements.