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Abstract
In this article, I explore the flows of official paperwork in the troubled Mogalakwena Local Municipality in the Waterberg District of Limpopo Province from 2009 to 2015. The documentary environment of this municipality exhibits many of the challenges identified in existing scholarship on contemporary records management in the state. In this paper, I raise another aspect which has not been interrogated sufficiently by South African archival scholars: the role that divisive political conflicts play in shaping records practices. This study takes cues from the work of scholars of paperwork elsewhere, who have called attention to the social and political climates in which state functionaries write. What lies beneath the gridwork of generic terminology that letters the documentary productions of the state is a world of competing human designs, of antagonistic strategies, and, in particularly contested settings, of emotional distress and bitter fights for political survival. In Mogalakwena, an intensifying political conflict came to directly influence documentary practices in the institution, resulting in a ‘war of documents’. This study offers another reminder to both archival practitioners and historians to consider the document in context, and understand it as an instrument of power through which broader social struggles are refracted.
Notes
1 This paper was originally presented at the South African Historical Society Conference, 21–24 June 2017.
2 T. Twiss, Trotsky and the Problem of Soviet Bureaucracy (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), 10.
3 The National Archives and Records Services of South Africa, Nelson Mandela Foundation and Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Research Project, Archives at the Crossroads 2007, Open Report to the Minister of Arts and Culture from the 2007 Archival Conference entitled ‘National System, Public Interest’; M. Ngoepe and S.M. Keakopa, ‘An Assessment of the State of National Archival and Records Systems in the ESARBICA Region: A South Africa–Botswana Comparison’, Records Management Journal, 21, 2 (2011), 145–160; South African Human Rights Commission, ‘The Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) and Records Management’ Consolidated Audit Report (2012); I. Schellnack-Kelly, ‘The Role of Records Management in Governance-Based Evidence, Service Delivery and Development in South African Communities’ (PhD diss., University of South Africa, 2013); M. Yuba, ‘The Role of the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa in the Young Democracy’ (Hons research report, University of the Witwatersrand, 2013); Archival Platform, State of the Archives: An Analysis of South Africa's National Archival System, 2014 (Rondebosch: University of Cape Town, 2015), http://www.archivalplatform.org/images/resources/State_of_the_Archive_FOR_WEB.pdf, accessed 29 April 2019.
4 The result of an archival conference held between the National Archives, the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Research Project at the University of the Witwatersrand.
5 South African Human Rights Commission, ‘The Promotion of Access to Information Act’, 26.
6 The Archival Platform, State of the Archives, 36.
7 According to the Archival Platform: ‘Municipal records are in a chaotic state, as is municipal government, yet they are records that ordinary people need – building plans; road plans; transport schedules; public health policies […] the most under-resourced and under-capacitated components have responsibility for one of the most challenging tasks’: Archival Platform, State of the Archives, 89
8 T. Ledger, I. Makukule, G. Tshimomola, R. Brunette and F. Duca, ‘2013/14: Red Zone Municipalities Municipal Audit Outcomes Unpacked’ (Public Affairs Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, for the South African Local Government Association, 2015), 6.
9 Archival Platform, State of the Archives, 85.
10 Schellnack-Kelly, ‘The Role of Records Management’, 203.
11 M. Phadi, J. Pearson and T. Lesaffre, ‘The Seeds of Perpetual Instability: The Case of Mogalakwena Local Municipality’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 44, 4 (2018), 593–691.
12 A.L. Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance’, Archival Science, 2 (2002), 97.
13 J. Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4.
14 M. Weber, Economy and Society Volume III (Oakland: University of California Press, 1978 [1922]), 197.
15 Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives’, 96.
16 Ibid., 91.
17 Ibid.
18 M. Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 23.
19 K. Breckenridge, Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 6.
20 Ibid., 8.
21 Archival Platform, ‘State of the Archives’, 20.
22 Ibid., 20.
23 JH Davies quoted in Schellnack-Kelly, ‘The Role of Records Management’, 45.
24 Ibid.
25 Archival Platform, ‘State of the Archives’, 20.
26 V. Harris, ‘The Archival Sliver : Power , Memory, and Archives in South Africa’, American Archivist, 2 (2002), 71.
27 V. Harris, ‘They Should Have Destroyed More: The Destruction of Public Records by the South African State in the Final Years of Apartheid, 1990–1994’, paper delivered at the History Workshop conference The TRC – Commissioning the Past, (University of the Witwatersrand, 11–14 June 1999), 2.
28 Quoted in Ibid.
29 Ibid., 3.
30 Ibid., 2.
31 Ibid., 7.
32 Harris, ‘The Archival Sliver’, 44.
33 The Archival Platform, State of the Archives, 32.
34 K. Allan, ‘Applying PAIA: Legal, Political and Contextual Issues’, in K. Allan, Paper Wars (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009).
35 S. Booysen, The African National Congress and the Regeneration of Power (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2011), 359, 371; see also S. Booysen, Dominance and Decline: The ANC in the time of Zuma (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2015), 95.
36 Booysen, Dominance and Decline, 29.
37 See Phadi, Pearson and Lesaffre, ‘The Seeds of Perpetual Instability’.
38 Archival Platform, State of the Archives, 149.
39 The Archival Platform report notes significant shortcomings in the electronic records management practices across the state: ‘while 21st century record-keeping is primarily electronic, records managers and public archives remain geared to paper-based realities’: ibid., 101.
40 Interview with Records Clerk at Mogalakwena Local Municipality, 14 April 2015.
41 In terms of the 1996 Archives Act, they are tasked ‘to preserve public and non-public records with enduring value for use by the public and the state, to make such records accessible and promote their use by the public and ensure the proper management and care of all public records’ (NARSSA Act of 1996).
42 Interview with Records Manager at Mogalakwena Local Municipality, 19 April 2015.
43 Discussions at a gathering of the Provincial Archive Heads at the Ford Foundation, September 2015.
44 See Ledger et al., ‘2013/14: Red Zone Municipalities’.
45 J.-F. Bayart, S. Ellis and B. Hibou, The Criminalization of the State in Africa (Melton: James Currey, 1999).
46 R. Brunette, ‘How Will South Africa Tackle Corruption?’, Mail and Guardian, 5 April 2017, https://mg.co.za/article/2017-04-04-how-will-south-africa-tackle-corruption, accessed 10 October 2018.
47 Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives’, 97. She continues: ‘colonial archives ordered (in both the imperative and taxonomic sense) the criteria of evidence, proof, testimony, and witnessing to construct moral narrations’.
48 Here, I draw on Matthew S. Hull’s explanation for the role of documents in the English East India Company: ‘The most fundamental function of documentation, evident in the earliest practices of the English East India Company as in all bureaucratic organizations, is to constitute the organization by distinguishing actions done for the organization from all others’: Hull, Government of Paper, 35.
49 So much so that consecutive organisational reports have repeatedly raised the issue of members of the ANC taking the party to court. In 2012, the Secretary General Mantashe was moved to state publically that ‘members who take the ANC to court are expelling themselves’: ‘Members who take ANC to court expel themselves’, TimesLive, 14 December 2012, http://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2012/12/14/Members-who-take-ANC-to-court-expel-themselves-Mantashe, accessed 15 August 2018.
50 J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, eds, Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
51 Hull, Government of Paper, 129.
52 M. Power, The Audit Explosion (Demos Open Access, 1994), 3.
53 ‘CoGTA Assessing Forensic Reports’, The Times, 2 December 2014, http://www.rnews.co.za/article/1966/cogta-assessing-municipal-forensic-reports, accessed 14 April 2018.
54 Interview with the Chief Operations Officer, Mogalakwena Local Municipality, in Mokopane on 19 April 2015.
55 Mogalakwena Local Municipality Records [Hereafter MLMR], ‘Forensic Investigation into Allegations of Irregularities at Mogalakwena Municipality: Report on Factual Findings’ (5 February 2014), Preface.
56 See, for instance, Chipkin and Meny-Gibert’s discussion on the influences of the NPM paradigm in informing key pieces of public finance legislation, such as the Public Finance Management Act of 2000 (PFMA) and the Municipal Finance Management Act of 2003 (MFMA): I. Chipkin and S. Meny-Gibert, ‘Why Studying the Past Matters: Studying Public Administration in South Africa’, Journal of Public Administration, 47, 1 (2012), 102–112.
57 Power, The Audit Explosion, 1.
58 Ledger et al., ‘2013/14: Red Zone Municipalities’, 36.
59 Ibid., 36–37.
60 Meeting of the Limpopo Research Platform, February 2017.
61 Inability to comply with the documentary requirements imposed by the National Treasury, for instance, can prove costly. Penalties can include the withholding of revenue shares and municipal grants by the Treasury.
62 Ledger et al., ‘2013/14: Red Zone Municipalities’, 36–37.
63 See I. Chipkin, R. Brunette and G. Tshimomola, ‘The Contract State: Outsourcing and Decentralisation in Contemporary South Africa’ (Public Affairs Research Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, 2014).
64 As Keith Breckenridge and others have noted, the South African government has long operated on an ‘informational void’, lacking detailed information of its populations, a trend stretching back to ‘colonialism on the cheap’: Breckenridge, Biometric State, 5.
65 Allan, ‘Applying PAIA’, 148.
66 MLMR, ‘Forensic Investigation into Allegations of Irregularities at Mogalakwena Municipality: Report on Factual Findings’, 5 February 2014; Interview with Council Secretariat at Mogalakwena Local Municipality, 18 August 2015.
67 The MM appealed the judgment and the case dragged on without resolution.
68 MLMR, ‘CoGHSTA Limpopo: Forensic Investigation into Allegations of Irregularities at Mogalakwena Municipality’, 15 March 2012.
69 See, for example, MLMR, Minutes of the Special Council Meeting held on 26 November 2013.
70 MLMR, Minutes of Council Meeting held on 26 November 2013.
71 MLMR, ‘Item 2: Application for Members Leave of Absence’ in Minutes of Council Meeting held on 26 November 2013.
72 Interview with Records Clerk at Mogalakwena Local Municipality, 14 April 2015.
73 D. Posel, The Making Of Apartheid, 1948–1961: Conflict And Compromise, Oxford Studies in African Affairs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), Preface, 19.
74 Ibid., 271.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Joel Pearson
JOEL PEARSON received a joint Honours in Politics and History at the University Currently Known as Rhodes in 2012, and a Masters in History from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2014. From 2015 to 2018, he worked as part of a team of researchers at the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) which studies the recent histories and political dynamics of local municipalities in areas of growing mineral extraction. He is now a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Wits, pursuing a study of greater depth into the history of Mogalakwena Local Municipality, with a particular focus on processes of the transition and the sociopolitical landscape in which they unfolded at the local level.