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

A crumbling national archival system

In 2012 the extent of the collapse of the various tiers of the South African national archival system is alarming. Over the past five years the relevant local professional bodies, concerned historians and civil society organisations have approached the government ministers and officials involved, without effect and sometimes without even formal response.2The 2007 Open Report to the Minister of Arts and Culture, Archives at the Crossroads, was a concerted attempt, in which the National Archives participated, to draw attention to the growing crisis.3 It was acknowledged by the Minister and then ignored.

The National Archives Advisory Council (which, in 2005, replaced the body then responsible for the system, the National Archives Commission, but with vastly reduced powers) had become moribund by the time its term of office ended in 2008 with the then-incumbents having been rendered ineffective by a limited remit and a lack of infrastructure and administrative support. The government department responsible for the National Archives, viz. Arts and Culture, called for nominations for new council members in August 2009, but at the time of writing (December 2012) no appointments have been announced. The National Archivist and a senior colleague were suspended over two years ago and dismissed in July 2011. Despite the fact that an independent arbitration found that their dismissal was substantively unfair and ordered their re-instatement in mid 2012, the DAC has not yet reached a settlement with them.4 In all this time the National Archives have been effectively leaderless. A lack of oversight, a crisis of leadership and an absence of vision thus compromise the proper functioning of the national archival system.5

The Department of Arts and Culture (DAC) is clearly derelict in meeting its obligations in relation to the National Archival System and in giving guidance and support to the provincial and municipal archival bodies. In some respects, the collapse of these services mirrors bureaucratic failures, bad management, absence of leadership, lack of adequate performance evaluation, and poor staffing practices that prevail in other sectors of government. Where archives do work, it is usually because of the presence of passionate professionals who have invested in the acquisition of specialist capacities. These dedicated professionals are yet to be found in isolated pockets in the national archival system, working under increasingly striated conditions. Many of them are distressed by the collapse of their institutions but are muted in their public comments and criticism for fear of reprisals, as are a number of concerned officials in the Department of Arts and Culture. Indeed, few government-employed custodians or bureaucrats are brave enough to participate openly in the animated debates and discussions about archives that go on in the public domain and in the academies, although Google Analytics reveals that many follow these issues online through the Archival Platform.6

However, the state of the archives is never merely a matter of administrative and professional competence, even though such competence is utterly vital. The failure that is evident across the national archival system is also the result of a lack of political vision and will.

DAC's precursor, the Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology, invested heavily in high-profile heritage-orientated Legacy Projects such as the Nelson Mandela Museum and Robben Island, while the archival investment of the Mbeki era was focused on the Timbuctu archives in Mali, a prestigious African Renaissance initiative, as well as on the installation of the archives of the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC) at the University of Fort Hare.7 These efforts were the energetic undertakings of a new power seeking new forms of national memory.

While the DAC under Minister Paul Mashatile (2010–present) talks about issues of social cohesion and national reconciliation, its energies go into addressing two of the ANC's most pressing political priorities, economic development and the shoring up of the party's ideological hegemony. This translates into support for initiatives in the arts, culture and heritage sector which offer employment and enterprise opportunities in what DAC terms Mzanzi's Golden Economy and into commemorative invocation of the liberation struggle, through projects such as the launch of the National Liberation Heritage Route and the construction of a museum to remember the 1981 apartheid-regime raid on ANC cadres at Matolo in Mozambique.8 While employment is, of course, a pressing national priority, the political appeal and potential of these kinds of projects and investments is obvious. Indeed, 2012, the ANC's centenary year, has seen a worrying blurring of the line between the ruling party's mobilisation of the past and government's responsibilities in relation to heritage. The National Heritage Council's 2012 conference, initially – and inspiringly – titled ‘Archives Deepening Democracy’ morphed into an ‘International Conference on Liberation Archives’, jettisoning its focus on accountability and the record in the weeks just prior to the event, much to the surprise of the paper givers and the Archival Platform, which had been asked to develop the original focus. Tellingly, in his 2012 Budget Vote Speech the Minister did not make mention of archives, or any of the DAC's other institutions and agencies, and it is not immediately clear what role he envisages for these.

Politicians resist accountability if they possibly can, and it is incumbent on citizens to insist on it. In a young democracy however, the role of the record in securing accountability may not be adequately appreciated by citizens. Seemingly, the Department of Arts and Culture has failed to grasp the great responsibilities it carries in relation to safeguarding the record of the past and the enormity of the consequences of failure. The inability of the National Archives to monitor the storage of, and process, the records of government departments sent into commercial storage, to monitor the maintenance of the electronic records, and to implement and drive national digitisation policy is alarming. Government, and more specifically, the Department of Arts and Culture, shows no inclination to develop the sensibilities and capacities of the citizenry in relation to the importance of the record.

In the face of the politically threatening capacity of the record to hold individuals and political groupings to account, and in the context of the current power struggles within the ANC, it is hardly surprising that ambitious politicians make the dangerous short-term calculation that the archives are more of a liability than an asset.

Comparison with the South African Revenue Services (SARS) highlights the lack of political will in relation to the National Archival System. Similarly concerned with, and dependent on, records, SARS is a beacon of administrative and professional competence. It has managed to move across to a digital and electronic environment, enjoys a reputation for efficiency and attends actively to its compact with the country's citizens.9 The key difference is that the efficient collection of revenue enjoys active support from the politicians even as it is tacitly resisted by some of the country's wealthiest and most empowered citizens!

The dilapidation of and apathy within the South African national archival system characterises official repositories in many other sub-Saharan African countries.10 The African situation, in turn, shares many features with other postcolonies like India, where, as Dinyar Patel notes, the archives ‘rot’ and institutional malaise prevails, this despite India's strong documentary culture and tradition of pre-colonial archives and libraries.11 Many archival holdings in former colonies suffer from a taint as being the records of the time of colonial domination, and in South Africa, also of the apartheid system. Yet, even as they are viewed with antipathy because of the way in which certain records were used historically to effect dispossession, and others to buttress the racial sciences, so too are those same archives now actively reconnoitred for a variety of contemporary purposes, as McNulty's essay in this issue shows so clearly.12 The current state of these archives is thus a more complex problem than simply a matter of inefficiency and bias, seemingly shaped as much by fractures, uncertainties and changes in contemporary social and political life, some of these particular to their contexts.

State archives are not neutral storehouses of source material nor monuments to past ideologies and any attempts to analyse their current situation with a view to changing in it, or indeed to understand why some things are preserved in certain forms, others in other forms, and some things not at all, require 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.

Indeed, even as the national archival system disintegrates, a handful of activist organisations seek to develop and deepen public understanding of the role and importance of records in a democracy. Through interventions like its ‘Letters for Lulu [Lulu Xingwana, then Minister of Arts and Culture]’ campaign and its State of the Archives Report, currently in preparation, the Archival Platform lobbies government on matters of policy and practice and attempts to get the relevant authorities to meet their archival responsibilities. The Platform also supports of a variety of counter-archival endeavours, draws attention to disavowed pasts and their neglected archives, fosters critical discussion about archives and explores and develops new archival possibilities.13 The South African History Archive (SAHA) has done sterling work using the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) to mine state archives in an effort to throw light on covert activities such as South Africa's apartheid-era nuclear weapons programme. SAHA also works at securing records from both public and private archives in order to support contemporary struggles for justice in South Africa, ranging from the treatment of asylum seekers by the Department of Home Affairs, to the flawed Presidential Pardons process. The placing of records like these in the public domain is an uphill battle that depends on the expertise and vigilance of the SAHA staff and involves expensive and lengthy court battles.14 Likewise, GALA: Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action, works actively to record gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) experiences, and curates the LGBTI archive in the public domain in order to develop senses of self-worth and political purpose in LGBTI communities.15 The Nelson Mandela Foundation has just officially changed its name, and identity, to the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory. Its vision is for ‘a society which remembers its pasts, listens to all its voices, and pursues social justice’.16 A close reading of its various projects reveals how it uses the record related to its illustrious founder to leverage larger and wider discussions about the power and politics of archive and memory, to raise difficult matters for discussion, and to support vulnerable causes in the face of overweening political pressure. The Constitution of Public Intellectual Life Project convened, and subsequently published, a series of public lectures on how the archive informs public deliberation about identity and citizenship, stressing contemporary responsibilities in relation to archive in order for the citizens of the present to become ‘worthy ancestors’ to the future.17 Fazeka Gxwayibeni is one citizen who has publicly insisted on her rights to gain access to the records of government and to hold elected representatives accountable. In an article published in the Sunday Times in 2012, Gxwayibeni described how she and group of fellow activists from Activate (a leadership incubation initiative)18 went in pursuit of the records pertinent to the development, or more accurately, lack thereof, of the communities in which they lived:

The dominant experience of Activators across the country is that information is difficult to obtain. When we set out, we didn't know how hard it would prove to be ‘active citizens’, and how much resistance we would encounter from our political representatives and officials, NGOs and even private citizens. The problem wasn't only restricted access, but public malaise as well: many officials stated that this was the first time a member of the public had approached them for such information … … If dedicated individuals constantly operate in environments where power is exercised by withholding information that affects people's day-to-day lives, they will either eventually be co-opted by the system or leave to find more stimulating work. The success of the public sector depends on its willingness to be open to debate and scrutiny as it exercises its public mandate.

If we don't start raising our voices and asking informed questions, how can we ever hold our leaders – in government, business and civil society – accountable?19

In addition, there are projects all over the country that preserve and make available materials pertinent to the history of the region. These include activist initiatives like the South African History Online (SAHO) which provides materials, many of them of an archival nature, designed to address the biases in South African history;20 the large institutional commitments made by the universities which accept diverse holdings;21 a wide range of small, often community-based, projects many of which do not necessarily name themselves as archives, and countless small-scale endeavours by committed family historians. While official failure in relation to the record is substantial, the extent of response within civil society is thus significant. It is also highly diverse. Some of these projects, like GALA, are tied to particular community interests. Others, like SAHA, make targeted political interventions while the Archival Platform's primary interventions take the form of fostering critical discussions and facilitating information sharing. These projects, too, are artefacts forged and continually refashioned in the crucible of social and political life, and the circumstances of their creation, continued existence and ongoing viability merit attention.

Primarily, but not exclusively, through a discussion of the papers that follow, the next section of this essay draws attention to the range of archival, or archival-like practices, that go on in the face of the disintegration of the official archival system. This enables us to begin to nuance our understanding of the role of government in relation to record creation and maintenance, allowing us to discern distinctive provincial energies, involving divisions and departments other than those labelled archives, as well as the record-making role of governmental commissions dealing with contested rights. It brings into view a range of challenges to official record-keeping efforts quite unlike the overt activist initiatives thus far discussed. It highlights the role of major institutions like the church in laying down records. It points us to the extraordinary resilience of family archives, the role of what Weintroub (this issue) summarises as the personal, contingent and affective in the making of records, and alerts us to what is at stake in treating collections of objects as archives.

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 activity in contemporary, and past, social life. Archives are one of the things that societies produce, along with a host of other similar forms that are not designated archives. 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 practices in social life. Researchers from a variety of disciplines mobilise a range of methods – 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. Methods then are also a focus of the next section.

Archives as the subjects of ethnographies, histories and biographies

Anthropologist Megan Greenwood (this issue) deploys an ethnographic approach in analysing the research, recording and exhibition activities undertaken by St George's Cathedral in Cape Town in its Crypt Memory and Witness Centre, established in 2008. The Crypt Centre is activist around matters of memory and the record in ways that are similar to the civil society initiatives discussed above. Indeed, a social justice agenda shapes its approach and purpose. But, as Greenwood's ethnography makes clear, the role of the remembrance in which the Centre engages does not seek only to recuperate memory as a form of healing following trauma. Prominent civil society activist and congregant, Mamphele Ramphele, articulated its purpose as constituting opportunities for being ‘watchful witnesses in our young democracy’. Unlike the Department of Arts and Culture, the Crypt Centre undertakes the work of developing an understanding of the responsibilities of citizenship, and of civic engagement and its relation to records of the past.

This work in relation to the record also serves actively to build the profile of the Anglican Bishopric of South Africa and to create networks of interaction for the Cathedral that extend beyond its own congregation and which it deploys in its efforts to break out of the bounds of inherited urban segregation. Greenwood's analysis shows how the Anglican Church astutely asserts its role in the anti-apartheid struggle alongside that of the hunger strikers whose struggle the Crypt Centre documents, and how the Church exhibits that role, in an ongoing curation of its historical position in relation to the South African state. The contemporary politics of the record, and the way in which powerful institutions support, but also use, community memory emerges clearly in this ethnography.

Grant McNulty (also in this issue) looks at the variety of ways in which custody over historical materials is exerted in one locale, Umbumbulu outside Durban, a hot spot in the conflict between the IFP and the UDF/ANC in the late 1980s and early 1990s. McNulty reveals some of the ways in which the ANC-led Ethekwini municipality currently navigates the area's complicated inheritances of what it regards as tradition and custom. McNulty's study offers insights into the ways in which the ANC government in the province seeks to establish custody over the resources of tradition and custom that were so long the preserve of the Inkatha Freedom Party, and predecessor Zulu nationalist political formations. It does this through the creation of the Library Service's Ulwazi intervention for the online archive of tradition and culture and through the KwaZulu-Natal Family Tree Project, run out of the provincial Premier's office.22 The dynamism in the KwaZulu-Natal initiatives, albeit outside of the provincial archives service, stands in marked contrast to the torpor that is the hallmark of the national archival system.

McNulty's ethnography also reveals how certain local chiefs attempt to retain control over tradition and custom as custodial rights vested in chiefship. Commissions are classically sites for the creation of documentary records and none more so than the Commission on Traditional Leadership Disputes and Claims, also known as the Nhlapo Commission, which drew submissions from a number of KwaZulu-Natal chiefs entering into the record their claims to pre-Shakan sovereignty. While some chiefs, under certain conditions, seek to enter their claims into the documentary record, others, or even those same chiefs in different circumstances resist archivisation, or are inhibited by political pressure in claiming recognition for their evidence. Family history material is the subject matter of another Umbumbulu intervention investigated by McNulty, a book published and then withdrawn from circulation by a local clan historian because of local political sensitivities.

But activity around the record in Umbumbulu is by no means confined to the materials of what is termed tradition and custom. McNulty also draws attention to the work of another custodial activist who has developed a manuscript on Umbumbulu's famous mission school, Adams College. More an inventory than a narrative, this assemblage too resonates with government initiatives, in this case, efforts to enter into the record an account of the mission-educated founding fathers of the ANC from KwaZulu Natal.23 The energies devoted to these many forms of concern with the record stand in contrast to the neglect that historians encounter in the official provincial archives. These investigations of the various sites of custodial activity in Umbumbulu show how alert Umbumbulu producers of the past are to the power of the written record, and to the possible gains and dangers involved therein. Materials about the past are valuable resources and the stewardship of these resources is actively contested, not only in Umbumbulu.

Anthropologists like Greenwood and McNulty utilise ethnographies in order to investigate the work of the record in the present and to understand why record-making in many and various forms take place. Their work reveals a range of archive-like activities taking place both within and beyond the ambit of official archives, and even self-declared counter archives, and in the face of the failure of the national archival system to nurture national archival patrimonies. Probing the understandings of, and ideas about, archives, custody and so on, that underpin the practices that they study, these anthropologists explore how they relate to various forms of power. They examine how such practices shape knowledge in particular ways24 and how they are brought into play in imaginings of self and of identity. Another feature of the ethnographic work is the way in which the various custodial events and activities that they investigate emerge as occasions and sites of social contradictions and uncertainties about the nature of contemporary relations of power. Ethnographic enquiry has similar results when undertaken in the archives of the colonial powers.

Premesh Lalu's The Deaths of Hintsa (2009)25 challenged the capacity of ‘against the grain’ readings, long used by historians, to overcome the limitations of colonial and apartheid archives. Lalu deployed postcolonial theory in his assertion that it is impossible to use tainted colonial archives to write a history of the Xhosa chief, Hintsa, which in any way evades reproducing the violence of the past. While Lalu is surely right in insisting that colonial archives are in no sense neutral records, and that it is often impossible to recover an understanding of the subjectivity of the colonised from the colonial record, it is far from clear that recognition of their limitations and often dubious nature shows colonial archives either to be fully certain of themselves or that it renders them historiographically impotent. Rather, the recognition throws into sharp relief the extent of the epistemological and methodological challenges involved in working with colonial archives in particular, and indeed, by extension, all archives, which are always a product of the conditions of their making and reproduction over time.

The work of the anthropologist, Anne Stoler, on the archives of the nineteenth-century Netherlands Indies offers an ‘along the grain’ reading of the kinds of archives that are the object of Lalu's critique. She focuses on the archiving process itself – the practices, culture, conventions and forms involved – and shows how the archives are at once technologies of rule and epistemological experiments. Indeed, Stoler's study attests to the ability of an ethnographic approach to reactivate use of the colonial archive in a manner that is both cognizant of, and that reaches beyond the kind of post-colonial critique put forward by Lalu, foregrounding epistemological uncertainty. It focuses attention squarely on archival practices as sites of social, political and cultural activity.26

Historical studies, mostly emanating from within the field of intellectual history, have made a rich and valuable contribution to understanding the processes by which archives and collections were produced, and how they have shaped disciplinary knowledges.27 For the most part these approaches focus on processes of collection and how these were informed and shaped by the demands of the time – often disciplinary, political and religious, in various combinations – and the specific objectives of the collector. The Bleek-Lloyd Archive has been particularly well served in this regard,28 most recently by the work of Jill Weintroub. Her essay in this issue focuses on the contribution of Bleek's daughter and Lloyd's niece, Dorothea Bleek, to the making of the Bleek-Lloyd collection. Weintroub follows Stoler in reading along the archival grain, attending to ‘the provenance and placement of materials in the archive’, and in so doing goes beyond the frame of intellectual history to explore the affective and personal aspects of Dorothea Bleek's contribution to the formation of this archive. Weintroub's study, ‘[d]riven by an interest in archive as process rather than repository’ details ongoing additions to the collection over time, and shows how certain elements of the collection, notably the Bleek-Lloyd Notebooks which remained in Dorothea Bleek's possession, lent shape to the additions to the archive which the latter was responsible for.29 A methodologically interesting feature of this work is the way in which it uses the archive that is its subject of study also as a source for the study.30

Once safely interred in an institution, a collection is typically regarded as ‘preserved’ and thereafter as relatively inert, except for instances – mostly exceptional – of transfer to alternative housing, or being subject to accident. Indeed, it is the declared aim of archive or museum preservation to halt processes of change, except perhaps for the kind of additions discussed by Weintroub. However, changes in forms of archival housing, and changes in cultures of record keeping, are often linked to changing public, political and academic environments.31 Sometimes these changes in the environment precipitate changes to the record. Sometimes, the record precipitates changes in the environment. When we start to consider change in relation to the preserved record, much more activity comes into view than we might initially suppose. Archival collections are reframed and refashioned over time, subject to the ebb and flow of reinterpretation, and in turn affecting interpretation. Thus it is that the archival object, perhaps more accurately, archival subject, charts a course over time, lived in a continuous relationship with an ongoing, changing context, sometimes exerting a form of agency. This allows us to recognise that archives, and indeed other kinds of collections, do not merely have histories, but lives, and sometimes very active ones. Again, counter intuitively, those lives, seemingly cloistered, are often profoundly public.32

Recognition of the life of an archive, and its often public aspect, leads to a further recognition that a history of the archive might not be methodologically sufficient for research purposes. Histories of archives generally confine themselves to an understanding of archives as things. The real meat in a history of an archive lies in the story of the collection of the composite items and how they ended up in a repository. An historical account often ends once the collection is safely installed in a formal archival setting. If dealt with at all, subsequent developments are invariably postscripts of one sort or another, not least of all because changes, the heartbeat of any history, are by definition, the antithesis of the archival endeavour.

A subject with a public life benefits in very particular ways from biographical treatment. The concept of a biography recognises that the subject of the study – in this case archive – influences and is influenced by, the world in which it moves.33 When we begin to give biographical attention to an archive we see that if any one collection was shaped by the public, political and academic developments and discourses of the time, so too equally did it, in turn, contribute to the moulding of those developments and discourses, providing them with forms of evidence that shaped their directions. What is at first perhaps just a collection mutates into something deemed to be an archive, giving shape to disciplines and institutional practices which in turn, reshape the archive, often causing it to move location, to be reclassified and catalogued, to be augmented or diminished, disavowed and neglected in storage, or celebrated and digitised. Archival biography allows us to discern motion, process and change in and around archives and records at the same time as archival processes and procedures work to preserve the record for posterity.34 The essay by Weintroub lends itself to a reading in precisely these terms.

Sara Byala's account (this issue) of the assembly of the Gubbins collection of Africana that constitutes the core of what is today MuseumAfrica, and the changes to which it was subjected over the following century, offers a case study of a collection as an ongoing process as well as of its public life. It also provides insight into its current neglected state. But is this properly regarded as an account of the public life of a collection, or is it an account of the public life of an archive, and what is at stake in relation to the designation? The question is of considerable significance to any discussion of the politics of archive in South Africa.

It is no accident that the Gubbins collection is held in an institution termed a museum, rather than in one called an archive. On the one hand this is a function of the longstanding idea that archives are appropriately repositories of documents, and museums of objects.35 Papers and pots clearly require different kinds of conservatory environments. Papers, it would seem obvious, are for consultation mainly by serious researchers, pots for viewing by a curious public. Reading rooms with tables and chairs are needed in archives, vitrines, dioramas and information panels in museums. The classical division is an invidious one in a context like South Africa, ensuring that literate recorders dominate the shape of serious historical research, while the producers of pots are confined to contributing to ‘culture’. Whereas archives pay meticulous attention to provenance, museums typically prioritise classification according to cultural groups. The result is that much of what is in museums is undatable, its archival potential fundamentally compromised by its location. For much, if not all of its public life, the Gubbins collection was not treated as archive, except perhaps by the occasional art historian. The result, as Byala shows, is that the Gubbins collection is today disavowed as the anachronistic, even offensive, artefact attesting to a view of timeless tribes that it became under apartheid. Byala's study begins the work of redeeming, through careful historicisation, the Gubbins collection, as an archive capable of enriching our understanding of the past.

The essay by Susana Molins-Literas (also this issue) is an initial foray in reconstructing the life-story of the Fondo Ka'ti archive in Timbuctu, and assesses the sources that can be utilised to write a biography of this archive. The paper shows vividly the mutual constitution over time of scholarship of the region and its archive, and charts the increasing publicness of a family archive. While on the one hand the Fondo Ka'ti archive sits at the heart of a contemporary scholarly project driven by a family custodian, Ismael Diadié Haïdara, it has shown itself to be a powerful resource, capable of attracting further resources and contributing to the status – and it would seem – the material well-being, of its custodian. It further attests to the historical origins and standing of the family. Indeed, many such manuscript collections have been preserved for centuries by Timbuctu families not so much as items to be read – a number of them are never consulted by the families that own them, some of whom are unaware of their content – but as objects, the possession of which attests to the family's origins and historical identity and which differentiates them from surrounding communities.36

For these kinds of reasons, and indeed a host of other reasons, family archives prove to be resilient over time and often retain materials about the past in face of robust attempts by official and institutional archives to suppress those very materials, to absorb them so as to consign them away, out of sight, or to harness them to projects with very different aspirations. In Timbuctu, determined attempts, including the construction by South Africa of a state-of-the-art depot, to collect the family manuscripts into a single official repository, have been tacitly resisted, even by the families who no longer consult their manuscripts, or who can barely afford to attend to their upkeep. A more successful conservation intervention has been that of the Savama-DCI consortium of private libraries that has arranged for improved conditions within homes and conservation training for family stewards.37

Family archives in various forms are increasingly attracting the attention of ethnographers and historians who are interested in exploring the dynamics of family custodial activity. Weintroub's essay highlights the contribution of some four generations of family activity in the making and shaping of the Bleek and Lloyd Archive, as well as the many ways in which, over time, family and institutional preservatory activities intersected. The essay by McNulty highlights the family custodial work of Siyabonga Mkhize, as does the recently complete doctoral thesis by literary scholar, Mbongiseni Buthelezi, on the contemporary activities of the Ndwandwe families of KwaZulu-Natal who track their history back to the pre-Shakan kingdom of Ndwandwe.38 Indeed, there are many initiatives across South Africa for the preservation of clan praises, the care of ancestral graves and other forms of family archives, many of which have been quietly conserved within family settings, outside of the public eye with its focus on larger-scale political identities and assiduously curated official memories.39

Partly as a consequence of the ways, often metaphorical, in which the term archive has been taken up and used in the field of cultural theory to refer to selective remembering and forgetting,40 it has loosened the moorings it has to notions of formal repositories. Indeed, as scholars and activists have come to recognise the relationship between archives and the operations of power, they – we – have increasingly sought out archival alternatives to the records (usually documents held in grandly pedimented public institutions) of those in power.41 Aspects of this quest have been contentious. While few, if any, historians would question the merit of using oral accounts in circulation in society as historical sources, many would resist the application of the term ‘oral archives’ to circulating materials, arguing that these materials need to be archived – removed from circulation – so as to save them from loss, degeneration and mutation. I raise this point to draw our attention to core ideas that distinguish the term ‘archive’ from cognate concepts like memory. Both of these terms operate within wide fields of meaning, fields that overlap in certain respects. But even as we use them and read them, we are aware of when we reach the limits of each one's application, a boundary which, once we have gone beyond, we feel that the term we are using is no longer apposite, or perhaps even applicable.

One notion that sets a limit on applications of the concept of archive is the idea that items that are archival are items deemed worthy of preservation, by some-one, somewhere, and not necessarily in an institutionalised form.42 Another is the idea of the archive as a place that immobilises its contents for posterity. But, as we increasingly understand how changeable, sometimes even volatile, the materials lodged in formal archives are, we are bound to acknowledge the second limit as something of a fiction, even as we may hold on tenaciously to conservation as a core value of the archival profession. This recognition frees us to reconsider critically the idea of an absolute distinction between materials in circulation in which people invest significant preservatory energies, and the formal archives with their elaborate preservatory apparatuses that seemingly remove their holding from circulation. In making this point I am not arguing that, for example, elaborated practices directed at the maintenance of ancestor well-being, constitute ‘indigenous’ archives that are the equivalent of colonial records. I am suggesting that both institutionalised archival practices and such ancestor practices are contemporary cultural forms, with long histories of their own, that curate the past in attentive and careful ways, and that the ways in which they do this, and the ways each inherits materials from the past, is worthy of attention.43Neither brings those materials into the present without change and innocent of the concerns of power both in the past and in the present.

Contemporary engagements, custodial practices and archival inheritances

Benefiting from over two decades of critical scrutiny of colonial archives driven by Edward Said's powerful insights into colonial processes of othering, exoticisation, and denigration, and Foucauldian perspectives on archives as technologies of rule and archive as, in that often quoted formulation from the Archaeology of Knowledge, ‘the system that establishes statements as events and things’,44 contemporary explorers in, and of, the archives are able to see not just what these theorists have enabled them to grasp, but quite a lot more still, some of it putting pressure on these influential modes of approach. As many of the essays in this issue show, new modes of engaging archives, including but far from confined to, ethnographies, histories and biographies, reveal not only forms of manipulation and control, but also uncertainty, anxiety, hesitancy, contradictions, faultlines, experimentation, debate and conflict, in the making of the records and indeed, even in the creation of imperial and colonial taxonomies and categories of knowledge.

While historians and ethnographers are active in exploring new modes of archival engagement, they are not the only ones thinking critically about archival inheritances. Literary contributions abound which use fiction and cultural imagination to fill in absences in the archive, notably in the archive of slavery and of the Khoisan past, and a review essay in its own right is warranted here.45 In his contribution to this issue, literary scholar Hedley Twidle looks closely at the ways in which histories and fiction engage problematic colonial archives, suggesting that their conceptualisation as an antagonistic binary seems inadequate. ‘It seems that, rather than being rivals, many instances of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction from South Africa have for a long time been in an unusually intense, intimate and even constitutive dialogue with each other’. While his paper is primarily about histories and fictional works and their interrelation, there is another more electric underlying argument in the paper: that not only do novels reach into archives for core materials and for shape, or imagine things to fill archival lacunae, but that writerly activity can stretch and change the shape of archives. Twidle shows how Dan Sleigh's epic literary work, Eilande, forgoes fantasy in favour of the recovery and collation of slight archival traces from places other than the central record. The focus on processes of correspondence – trans-oceanic between Heeren XVII (Lords Seventeen) in Amsterdam, the Council of India in Batavia, and amongst the VOC outposts at the Cape – evades the logic of any the central repositories – Amsterdam, Batavia and the Cape. Twidle's intervention is all the more significant for its recognition that for all the palliative potential of archival fantasies, the pain caused by absence in the archive only finds relief in accounts rooted in real traces.

While contributions both of the imagination and those involving intensive archival activity within literary works have been active in filling up the spaces of absence in the archive of slavery, vast temporal territories of the past before colonialism remain achingly vacant, dispossessed of history. It was Frantz Fanon who first most fully named and probed the deep complexes of racial negation and psycho-social alienation rooted in colonialism's casting of the history of that period as testament to cultural backwardness.46 Sometimes approached as a psychic wound, or as trauma, and most recently in relation to the somewhat different contemporary condition of African-American consciousness of the past as a form of political depression, this damage confronts archive with what is perhaps its greatest challenge.47 First off it creates the demand for the wound itself to be examined, for the processes of the historical denial of archive to materials pertinent to the past before colonialism, to be investigated. It requires critical consideration of the various gestures in public life that seek to treat the wound, often with palliative ideas of a romanticised and utopian past. It creates a demand for materials that can be critically engaged as possible sources. Some of these lie in the colonial archives, requiring sensitive and critical forms of engagement in order to realise their potential in this regard. Where research into living human subjects is now the subject of close ethical scrutiny, ethical responsibilities in relation to archival material are not well-developed in research protocols. One place where they have emerged forcefully is in relation to photographic archives, and in particular in relation to anthropometric photographs, and to a lesser extent, ethnographic photographs, which were used to attest to indigeneous primitivity.

For at least two decades photographic records in colonial and apartheid archives, have not only been the subject of sophisticated analysis by visual historians but also the objects of intensive ethical scrutiny with an eye both to the circumstances under which they were taken and the uses to which they have been, and are yet, put. They are also increasingly the objects of practice-based ways of reading archives undertaken by a new generation of South African photographic artists who grapple not only with how photographers framed their subjects, or how officials collected evidence, but also with the signs of self-curation by subjects of the photographs and with the significance of, in Stoler's terms, the archival grain. Photographer and Masters student, George Mahashe, reconnoiters the J.D and E. Krige archive of photographs of Lobedu, taken by the anthropologists in the 1930s, not only probing the tactics of self-presentation employed by the photographic subjects, but also the ideas of archiving and curation involved in the making of photographs, and in the doing of the ethnographic research. He further explores forms of curation and archiving in Lobedu, such as those at work in relation to the category of motshwara morapo. As discussed by Mahashe, this is a conductor figure, who, through ‘knowledge of the bones’, facilitates and mediates occasions, such as funerals, whose subjects are bound into more than one form of custody. Harnessing Lobedu structures of thinking about pasts, Mahashe treats the ethnographic photographs as troubled, but valuable, inherited objects, and sets out to settle the disturbed and disturbing ancestors to which they are connected. This he achieves through a range of interventions encompassing research, curation and engagement. Mahashe's approach convenes in a shared frame the multiple and intersecting archival and curatorial activities of the ethnographers who took the photographs, local cultural and ritual conductors, the Lobedu Rain Queen, contemporary academics and the Lobedu-raised photographer scholar, Mahashe.48

Artist Andrew Putter also tackles the tainted archive of ethnographic photos. His latest work references the photographic practice of A.M. Duggan-Cronin, arguably the most influential photographer of ‘the Bantu tribes’ who was renowned both for the extent of his corpus, and for the costume boxes with which he reputedly travelled in order to achieve the effects that he sought. Putter goes to enormous lengths to mimic Duggan-Cronin's photographic style, and casts contemporary people in ethnographic roles from Duggan-Cronin's script. He dresses the models from another prop box, a private collection of so-called traditional material culture. Putter foregrounds the beauty and affective dimensions of Duggan-Cronin's photographs, and the extent of Duggan-Cronin's engagement and investment in his photographic project, by doing the intensive work necessary to achieve a like effect in his own latter-day, echo, photographic project. In this way Putter raises questions about the nature of Duggan-Cronin's ‘racism’, and as the artist makes clear, his echo project constitutes an occasion for Putter to confront the extent of his own racial ghetto-isation. Putter draws our attention to the way in which Duggan-Cronin's photographs exceed their purpose as illustrations of ‘tribal life’. In probing, through his own artistic practice, the extent of Duggan-Cronin's aesthetic efforts, and the affective qualities of his photographs, Putter invites us to recognise in Duggan-Cronin's productions more than an interest in his subjects. He alerts us to the visual signals and affective signs of Duggan-Cronin's appreciation of, enchantment with and admiration for his subjects, what he terms ‘an impulse of tenderness’. Taking a calculated risk in rehearsing Duggan-Cronin's mode of work, Putter challenges viewers to recognise a larger range of ways of engaging alterity than those identified by Said.49

In addition to the demand for imaginative and critically alert ways of engaging colonial and apartheid archives, the historical negation of the past before the advent of colonialism makes imperative methodological innovations that expand archival possibilities and which look for them in new places. An early move in this area was the turn to oral materials in the 1960s. In the period since the publication of Jan Vansina's Oral Traditions: a Methodology,50 the discussion about oral materials, relations between the oral and the written, the oral and the performed, and the status of all productions of history, in whatever medium and by all sorts of different producers, has become increasingly complex. Scholars no longer take for granted the once apparently self-evident division between oral materials as ‘sources’ (needing to archived before they are lost!) and written accounts as ‘histories’, a point reconfirmed in McNulty's ethnography in this issue.

Increasingly, researchers interested in the past before colonialism use an archive of material evidence and are alert to possibilities of landscape, and of sites in landscapes, as historical materials.51 Likewise, inherited cultural repertoires have archival potentials that are slowly being explored. Local, and often subaltern, forms of the curation of the past are gaining recognition as having much that is relevant to the understanding of the past before colonialism. When anthropology student, Liam Keene, explores the way in which contemporary Thokoza sangomas negotiate the legacies of the violent conflicts of the mfecane period, he taps into a body of ideas and thinking about the past associated with unsettled ancestors who demand attention and care. For the practitioners and patients concerned there are high stakes involved in getting the processes right. The sangomas’ curatorial – in all sense of that word – responsibilities are demanding in something of the same way as those of the archivists.52 Under pressure, the inventory of custodial activity is undergoing expansion. But even as it expands the sites of archive, this work raises in its wake complex questions of epistemological, methodological, conceptual and political complexity, demanding sustained critical attention.

What does it mean in each case to identify materials and then to confer on them the status of archive? What do these moves enable and what do they close down? Indeed, they raise the question of what it is to engage in the practice of archiving, and what might counter-archival practices signify and enable? In all of these contexts the problem of another alienation looms large, archival alienation which often literally removes the material from a private holding into a formal repository, a form of alienation that is resisted in Timbuctu where families hold on to the manuscripts even as the new state-of-the-archive building offers professional custody, or in Umbumbulu where chiefs guard the resources of what is termed tradition and culture that are the source of their authority. To place material in a recognised archive is almost always to enter it into, and to position it in a particular way in, public life, as is any attempt to challenge its disavowal, as do Byala, Mahashe and Putter. All of these questions populate the field of archival engagement. As much as they pertain to the remote past, so too are they relevant to the contemporary status of the Bleek and Lloyd archive, the Gubbins collection, Siyabonga Mkhize's book, the Timbuctu manuscripts and the novel, Eilande.

The essays that follow, and much of the wider new generation scholarship on archive (some of it only now beginning to be published out of a range of disciplines, including but not confined to history, and much of it by scholars in the very early stages of their research careers, which I have used this essay to bring into view) consider the potencies of archives and other custodial forms. They explore both their limits and possibilities as forms of evidence in the production of knowledge, as well as interventions in public and political life. Where once archives might have been thought of as the neutral, conservatory repositories of unpublished documents, and histories as synthesised, usually published, circulating accounts of the past, this scholarship, and the papers by Molins-Literas and McNulty in particular, draw our attention to custodial and productive activity in a mixed range of formats: we have synthesised manuscripts, many of them copies of older manuscripts, that are used as archives; oral traditions – clearly complex productions of the past – both in circulation is society and housed in archives where they are treated as primary sources, themselves then undergoing publication and moving into new forms of circulation. We also have such material entering the Ulwazi on-line archive under very particular conditions of production as archive, dictated by the framework of the South African government's policies on Indigenous Knowledge Systems. We have tradition and custom in action in chiefly forums that refer little to records and which themselves resist archivisation. The hand-written manuscript produced by Mahmud Ka'ti in the fifteenth century, the manuscript collection reassembled by his descendant, the scholar Diadié Haïdara, 500 years later and installed in a specially-built family archive in Timbuctu, resonates with the texts transmitted orally to Siyabonga Mkhize and the Mkhize chief, Kusakusa, as well as in the texts compiled by Siyabonga Mkhize and Desmond Makhanya, in Umbumbulu. Part archives, part syntheses, part family histories, part resources in the work of judges, chiefs, teachers, intellectuals and scholars, all of these emerge as critical interventions in the political life of their times. In a variety of forms, the record comes into being and persists as a result of specific socio-political and economic impulses, both changing and shaping the public discourses around it, and in turn being shaped and changed by them. As much as the recent research challenges the idea of the archives as neutral repositories, so too does it attenuate notions of colonial, or indeed other official archives, as consistent and coherent regulatory apparatuses.

In various ways, all of the studies discussed in this essay take archive as their subject of study rather than, or in addition to, archive as the location of their sources. It is an approach characterised by the asking of exciting and provocative questions about who holds historical materials – and what might that very notion, historical materials, mean – under what conditions, for what reasons and who turns those materials into other things, among them formal archives, historical narratives, land claims, exhibitions, performances of various kinds, ancestor considerations, and so on.

Conclusion

The current neglect of the formal archival institutions in South Africa is illuminated when it too is placed in this framework. One reason for the neglect is the widespread perception of the inherited colonial and apartheid state archives as racially obnoxious and irredeemably biased. Failure to grasp the full complexity of the colonial and apartheid state archives misses the riches they hold in illuminating the past, whether the operations of, a despotic bureaucracy or the creation of parliamentary accountability. The burden of my argument in this paper is that every archive, and indeed every body of material preserved over time that lends itself to use as an archive, is an artefact (or cluster of artefacts), initially of the time of its creation, and subsequently refashioned over time. So too are the activist projects concerned with the contemporary state of the archive themselves products of particular conditions and circumstances that merit attention. The more we understand of these conditions of production the more we will understand the limits and possibilities of archives in giving us an understanding of what happened in the past, as well as what it means to have them as inheritances in the present.

It is clear from the range of work published in this issue and indeed, work presented elsewhere, some of it discussed in this and the other papers, that colonial and apartheid-era archival inheritances of the state and from other sources, as well as cultural inheritances and practices with archive-like aspects or archival potential of a wide variety, are attracting both imaginative and creative engagements of all kinds, as well as careful critical investigations of many different kinds. Where once the written documents preserved in the formal repositories were trusted, and materials circulating in social life were suspected of bias, all custodial formations now require consideration of their conditions of production and transmission, of what they preserve and what they exclude, what kinds of investigation they facilitate and what they close off, and how they might have changed over time. Whereas previously written documents enjoyed an unquestionable archival authority over memory, ritual practices, fiction, art, artefacts, landscape and a myriad other forms, now these other forms are explored for their abilities to both to complement and to offer critical perspectives on, or in relation to, the written records, to attest to what the written occludes, and to unsettle and rethink the notion of archive itself.

Many contemporary projects that engage archives are interested primarily in what it means to have, or to be deemed to have, an archival inheritance in the present.53 Others, probably the majority of the readers of this journal, are interested in what archives offer the attempt to understand events and processes in the past. The methodological demands on those concerned with the challenge of verification are enormous.

Best practice by historians has always exerted a demand on researchers to understand fully the production of the sources on which they rely, and especially where the sources are questioned, to offer an account of how the historian views the sources, and how s/he is using them. Recent histories, ethnographies and biographies of archives all contribute to an understanding of their production and their subsequent trajectories and there is much new material germane to the discussion about sources. These scholarly engagements need to percolate into public debate. It may not be in the narrow political interests of the ruling party for this to happen, but it is surely vital for ongoing political health and public debate. The intellectual and political stakes around archives and other custodial formations are high54 and the failure of the national archival system either to protect the documents that constitute the bulk of its holdings, or to rethink itself in the light of wider custodial challenges and opportunities, is cause for grave concern.

The neglect of the official archival institutions also speaks to contemporary epistemic and political uncertainties, ambiguities and contradictions surrounding the formal archival inheritance and the many forms of material held in other custodial formations. Even as a post-colonial sensibility involves an understanding that all evidence is a product of particular conditions, and all arguments based on evidence are shaped by the conditions of asking and answering questions, there is simultaneously a deep-seated demand for verification. It is a demand as much for South Africans who were excluded by racialised discrimination under colonialism and apartheid from being the subjects of History, as much as it is for those South Africans, like the Deputy Minister of Agriculture, who in 2012 challenged the claim that 40% of the land in South Africa was occupied before the arrival of the first Europeans.

It is a demand for verification that exists alongside ideas about the past that are intertwined with matters of faith, belief, spirituality, health and well-being, how these are tied into understandings of what it is to be human and what that entails for how we cope in the present with traumatic pasts. This is evident in the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where alongside the Christian framework of confession, repentance and forgiveness, laborious forensic work in the location and identification of human remains is needed to conclude the business of ensuring that the spirits of the dead are brought home correctly. The thriving contemporary Thokoza sangoma tradition, among many other indicators, shows that the address of ancestors is central to the management not only of the apartheid past, but also to forms of reconciliation relating to devastating conflicts of a much deeper past.55 These kinds of practices offer glimpses of ideas about a radical hospitality to others that the dominant accounts of South Africa's history of racial violence obscures.56 Our greatest challenge is, perhaps, the excavation from archival sources – sometimes of an unexpected nature and sometimes from the most apparently tainted of sources – of evidence of a past that can persuade us of this human possibility.

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.