History Uploaded: Digital Archives After Thirty Years of Democracy

ABSTRACT

This article provides an overview of digital archival projects and online databases developed by scholars and archival practitioners in South Africa since the early 1990s. It sketches key shifts in theory and practice over this period, including the economic and practical perils of digital conservation as heritage and of increasing civic archival activism. It shows that the outlook, aims, and successes of these projects have changed in tune with shifts in the state’s archival legislation, changing publishing economics, decreasing cost of digitisation and equipment, and widening access to the internet. Recent archival projects, such as the Five Hundred Year Archive and EMANDULO Project, illustrate a pioneering trend in South African digital archival practice and are suggestive of the formation of a distinct digital epistemic culture. The article argues that South African scholars and archival practitioners have often been at the forefront of key turns in debates taking place in digital archival practice globally and in Africa.

KEYWORDS:

• digital archives
• digitisation
• democracy
• South Africa
• southern Africa

The devastating fire that destroyed the Jagger Library at the University of Cape Town in April 2021 turned attention to its history and the significance of its primary special collections.¹ As the salvage and recovery of books and primary materials proceeded apace,² questions arose about the digital conservation of the holdings. Not only were these inquiries about preservation but also about the idea that digitisation would bring primary materials into the twenty-first century. Digital archives and cataloguing systems also have histories. The National Archival Service was one of the first agencies to purchase the digital STAIR programme from IBM, the then leading international computer software company, in the 1970s, and the South African Security police implemented a digital database from the late 1980s.³ These digital systems were filled with records and employed classification systems that harked back to colonial times. They were organised around the management of labour, the movement of people, and the documentation of property ownership including land and slaves.⁴ The Department of the Interior established and implemented the first unified, national archival system following the Union of South Africa in 1910. During the apartheid era, starting in 1948, the National Archival System became a more sophisticated, centralised apparatus that supported the political agenda of the white minority government.⁵ State archival systems were employed as apparatuses for extending the political project of black subjugation, the assertion of a white minority view of the past and capitalist extraction. The turn to democracy necessitated a reckoning with these legacies so as to facilitate conditions for archives to support a constitutional rights culture. Archive, therefore, sits at the hyphenated juncture post-apartheid, keeping in tension the past in the present, through the demands for access to information and a diverse and inclusive representation of the past that leads to an empowered citizenship and belonging.⁶ As this article shows, various archival projects contributed to, but also at times constrained, the project of archival freedom in the post-apartheid era.

This article tracks changes in digital archival practices in post-apartheid South Africa, noting and categorising the practical and theoretical contributions and innovations of their makers, and reflects on the prevalence and social role of digital archives today. It considers, broadly, the role of digital archival practices during the post-apartheid period, reflecting on how political, policy, and economic conditions have influenced digital archival practice. While taking the reproduction of knowledge resources seriously, the article is not about the discipline of history, evidence, or sources. Instead, it is a profile of changing practices of archiving subject matter, of reproduction and classification systems, and of the organisation of knowledge about the past in electronic form and online since 1994. Moreover, it mentions but does not dwell on the important matter of the deteriorating state of official public record keeping and its digital apparatus⁷ or digital archival use patterns amongst researchers.⁸ It considers the influence of economics and legislation on digital archiving but is not a systematic evaluation of factors affecting digital archiving. The article also does not pay attention to the proliferation of independent digital archival projects of communities, such as memory walls on social media platforms. Finally, the article does not reflect on the ‘aura’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘truths’ of physical documents over their digital reproductions.⁹ Instead, it is a synthesis of existing research – much of it available in digital form – about digital archives, digitisation methods, and technologies initiated in post-apartheid South Africa or by South African scholars and archivists on the continent and changes in practices in this domain over time.

The article profiles three types of digital archival projects: first, those concerned with the conservation of primary archival deposits through digitisation; secondly, projects focused on advancing freedom of access to information and the keeping of collections relevant to social justice; and, thirdly, contemporary projects concerned with the representation of knowledge as archive in digital space online. Drawing on the self-descriptions of these projects, this scheme does not imply hard, closed categories nor ideal types. Organised accordingly, the article surfaces a broad picture of changes in the field and their significance for South Africa and the continent. It demonstrates a shift in emphasis from digital conservation to concerns about metadata and representation; from a concern with the apartheid past to the increasing importance of digital archives for social justice and an empowered citizenry; and from a concern with digital preservation to the mobilisation of digital tools for exploring deep time and the precolonial past. Overall, it demonstrates South Africa’s importance as region for digital archival theory and practice, as indicated by the development of increasingly sophisticated home-grown software systems and the integration of theory and digital technological infrastructure in newer projects. This places the work of South African scholars and archival practitioners at the forefront of innovations in archive and digitisation practice, despite many material and logistical challenges. Indeed, at times practitioners and researchers have been ahead of key debates about the digital knowledge economy and archival theory and practice. In the following section, I discuss the matrix in which these archival projects have been formed, their relation to projects on the continent, and the key concepts framing the article.

Digital archival context

This review article considers the development of digital archival projects as produced and negotiated in a context informed by the forces of the constitutional imperative of the right to freedom of information, the capitalist knowledge economy, the falling cost of digital archival technology, and the increasing speed and wider penetration of internet connectivity. South Africa’s Bill of Rights makes provision for the freedom of access to information for all South Africans through Section 32, which along with the constitution has informed the network of legislative instruments relevant for digital archival practice since the 1990s.¹⁰ The free distribution of information requires funding, labour, and resources to digitise and store archival deposits and to make them available for access over the long term. These costs make archives vulnerable to the whims of funders and, in extreme cases, the complete transfer of ownership of local repositories and collections through the provision of conservation services. Archivist Michele Pickover flagged concerns about the problems associated with the possible prohibited transfer of deposits of public records to private owners in the 1990s, emphasising how it could lead to the private control and exploitation of knowledge assets of public value.¹¹ Commercial value, therefore, stood in tension with the cultural, historic, and social significance of collections, despite the benefits of increased circulation and access to knowledge resources that could result from digitisation. Many of the digital knowledge resources available for research today are accessible on commercial knowledge databases, such as JSTOR. Access is costly, and questions have been raised not only about ownership of collections of digital primary materials but also about the publishing economies around secondary sources that flow therefrom.

Notably, digital archival projects were also influenced by shifts in archival theory, with works like Refiguring the Archive¹² and Derridean theory more generally strongly influencing archival scholarship – and to some extent digital archival practice – in the late 1990s and early 2000s.¹³ There has since been a shift to postcolonial and decolonial theoretical orientations towards archive since the Rhodes Must Fall movement in 2015. This turn was driven by a concern with race and the deep colonial structures of knowledge production, classification keeping and representation, especially as it translated online.¹⁴ At the highest level of abstraction, this article demonstrates how digital archival practice is itself a space of applied southern African theory making around archives.

Yet the cost of digitising technologies and database infrastructures has continued to decrease and, coupled with the expanded roll-out of the internet in South and southern Africa, especially through mobile phones, has contributed to the proliferation of digital archival projects that were less dependent on foreign funding. Increasing concerns about data ownership and copyright law in the online space and the right to privacy, and the ownership of personal, private data, have added to the tensions around knowledge access and security in South Africa. The projects discussed in this article are situated within this matrix of tensions and, set in context, demonstrate changing responses by scholars, archivists, and the South African state to shifting social, cultural, financial, and technological conditions.

South African archival practice is not unique on the continent, with similar pressures coming to bear on down on projects across Africa. A persistent observation in the literature on archives and Africa concerns frustration over the way historic asymmetric material conditions between Africa and the global North hampers the roll-out of digital knowledge conservation projects. This digital divide ‘has shaped not only the form and content of digital libraries, but also access on the continent to material about the continent’.¹⁵ Marion Wallace argues that the success of digital archival projects as easily accessible, rich knowledge resources is further obstructed by copyright law, cost, and a lack of online discoverability.¹⁶ Significant strides have however been made in digital archival processes, systems, and access in the area of libraries and library sciences.¹⁷ Yet there remain material challenges in local African contexts such as Nigeria where ‘unstable internet connectivity, lack of funding, irregular power supply, […] lack of IT personnel and the absence of digitization policies’ all affect the roll-out of projects.¹⁸ The emergence of a distinct digital archival infrastructure and culture in South Africa was made possible by a few factors. In contrast to other African nations’, South Africa’s shift to democracy coincided with the global digital revolution and the promises of technology and the World Wide Web for making knowledge accessible. Existing infrastructure, such as a well-mapped telecommunications network, institutions of research and higher learning, and a skills base of professionals working in information technology, all helped support digitisation drives during the 1990's. This was further supported by the social and political impulses to document and publicise previously marginalised histories and to put these to use for democratic and civic work linked to nation building. This makes it distinct though not necessarily exceptional from other digital archival turns on the continent.

The terms archive, digitisation, and digital archive are crucial to this article. Archive, the historian Carolyn Hamilton argues, entwines inscription, designation, and preservation of an assemblage of legible traces considered of such value that it is worth preserving for the future.¹⁹ It requires a preservatory apparatus for conservation and, I would add, contains a classificatory apparatus that organises the deposition and retrieval of knowledge objects in the future. Digitisation is the act of recording physical collections of artefacts, objects, texts, and records by the means of electronic devices such as cameras, scanners, and other audio-visual equipment to produce an electronic replica stored in a digital database. This includes the generation and capturing of metadata – the detailed descriptive terms for each digital object – on a digital classification system that organises the storage and ordering of digital knowledge objects. A digital archive can be more than an organised assemblage of digitised materials. It can encompass a collection of digital-first writings or images, refer to a digital system that organises and displays aggregated digital resources such as a curated website, or guide access to resources available for offline digital databases of physical collections of images and texts in the form of bibliographies, catalogues, and indexes. In what follows, I discuss archival projects that fall into categories concerned with knowledge conservation, social justice, and knowledge representation.

Conservation

The transition to democracy ushered in a period of urgency around the gathering and preservation of the documentary record of the struggle past.²⁰ Some of the earliest major digital archival projects were concerned with digitisation as the conservation of collections at risk, especially collections related to the struggle for liberation, through data gathering and scanning drives and, later, electronic publishing.²¹ Digital Innovation South Africa (DISA), funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation in 1998, remains an early landmark case study. It was a pioneering large-scale digitisation project that concentrated on the digital conservation of fragile publications and later primary archival materials. It also aimed to play a role in the online learning space by using ‘digital technologies to promote the efficient and economical delivery of information resources’ to students and scholars in South Africa.²² Spawned from a digital imaging workshop in 1997, DISA’s first phase was titled ‘Struggles for Liberation in South Africa 1960–1994’ and focussed on digitising serials lodged at universities and institutions across South Africa that were related to the liberation movements, such as the Black Consciousness Movement, the African National Congress, and the Pan Africanist Congress.²³ The second phase of the project, initiated in 2003, expanded to include primary archival materials related to the struggle for liberation from across or pertaining to the southern African region. ‘Southern African Freedom Struggles 1950–1994’, as it was called, covered the digitisation of collections at institutions across southern Africa and incorporated new media such as audio recordings, videos, and interview transcripts. The digitisation drive would bring scattered collections together through the organising logic of a linked southern African history of the struggle for liberation. Once collected, this information would be made available through the central DISA hosting platform, based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.²⁴

DISA was the Mellon Foundation’s latest foray into the digital space, as in 1995 it initiated the online journal subscription platform JSTOR. The DISA platform thus suggested that the South African digitisation drive formed a core part of the early history of the global knowledge ecommerce enterprise we engage with today. The Mellon Foundation would later found Ithaka Harbors to coordinate its digital scholarship ventures and, through its oversight, structured the second phase of the DISA project as a collaboration with another of its projects, Aluka. This entity was meant to develop digital content about Africa according to the themes of ‘struggles for freedom’ and ‘African cultural heritage sites and landscapes’.²⁵ Moreover, it sought out unusual, distinct collections of primary materials related to southern African history and employed historians and experts to identify these. The second funding phase was therefore a collaboration, led by Aluka, to which DISA was a partner. Notably, by the early 2000s, DISA had already accumulated a significant digital database of its own,²⁶ which would, through a modification of the partnership agreement, then be transferred to Aluka.

The collaboration was perceived to be based on an unequal economy of exchange – of funding, knowledge, resources, skills – that remained tenuous and, in this, was informative of the dynamics of digital archive building at this time. Institutions of higher learning in South Africa, where collections were mostly kept, were struggling with the cost of physical conservation, let alone possessing the technologies required for large-scale digital conservation. DISA and Aluka, therefore, presented a hard-to-resist opportunity for the conservation of socially significant collections. Indeed, these projects explicitly profiled their digitisation work as facilitating the preservation and wider circulation of data about liberation struggles that would benefit Africans and be of interest to the international scholarly community.²⁷ Moreover, there was significant interest in the South African liberation story internationally but also growing concern about the fragile and deteriorating state of important primary collections in South and southern Africa. These projects marked a significant, forward-thinking investment in southern African knowledge conservation, anticipating a future learning landscape in which electronic resources would be more accessible.

But the second phase of the project became marred in struggles over the pace of digitisation and the ownership and long-term preservation of its digital assets. Scholars within Aluka had raised concerns over the funding model and the ultimate ownership of the data and the possible transfer of sensitive collections of national importance from public to private hands, as flagged in the 1990s.²⁸ While recognising the need for digital conservation, researchers and institutions were also keenly aware of the politics of knowledge and unequal relations of exchange. There was deep and, with hindsight, not unfounded suspicion that it was a foreign-funded digitisation drive of local material that would be made available for global consumption online. Digitisation was seen as eliminating the need for researchers from the global North to physically access local archives. Ultimately, this threw the aims and benefits of these projects into question.²⁹ Participants were wary, for example, that, amongst other things, the project would be merely appropriative and that it would ‘subvert intellectual property rights and national heritage’.³⁰ These concerns played into broader concerns about the digital divide, unequal access to funding, and histories of knowledge production and exchange between the global North and South, reflecting a kind of neo-imperialism. This was further amplified by the ‘technopolitical’ question of ‘sustaining disk storage space for high resolution masters in perpetuity’ and where and how these would be stored and maintained.³¹ These concerns came to a head when it was discovered that, owing to a revised collaboration agreement that backdated the transfer of DISA’s data to Aluka, scanned materials were transferred into the possession of Ithaka, and subsequently to JSTOR. It was an unfortunate vindication of the deep suspicion that a key promise of the information age, that knowledge could be liberated for greater empowerment, could be subverted in ways that reproduced existing asymmetrical relations of exchange. Despite participants’ best intentions, digital projects could therefore ‘solidify rather than challenge the established Western narratives when colonised archives merely supplement and thus confirm their primacy’.³² The data remains available and accessible to many researchers under the custodianship of JSTOR, which manages its distribution and long-term care.³³

The fallout of the collaboration led to critical reflection amongst scholars, historians, and archivists, who would view future digitization projects with greater suspicion. State agencies like the National Heritage Council were alerted and directed to take more firm action on the protection of digital assets as national heritage, hence influencing policy development. DISA was, therefore, an important theatre in which the formulas for heritage protection, knowledge production, digitisation, copyright, and online distribution were actively negotiated.

Yet digitsation projects of all kinds flourished after this.³⁴ Many went beyond the preservation of records pertaining to the struggle for liberation and extending to the conservation of collections of wider historic significance. One such collection was the Bleek and Lloyd Collection, comprising notebooks, drawings, index cards, and philological notes and records documenting the life, culture, and history of the !Xam of southern Africa.³⁵ Jointly owned by Iziko Museums of South Africa, the National Library of South Africa and the University of Cape Town (UCT), the collection was originally compiled by the German ethnologist Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. The physical collection was inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World register, greatly amplifying its significance as a knowledge resource of relevance for global scholarship. It is significant that, as with the DISA project, the language of heritage and memory appears as a value-adding discourse accounting for the need for digital conservation as a value-free, noble practice. In 2003, the Lucy Lloyd Archive, Resource and Exhibition Centre, now grown into the Centre for Curating the Archive, at UCT’s Michaelis School of Fine Art, initiated and led a digital conservation project in collaboration with its institutional partners. The digitisation comprised scanning of the physical objects, the generation and classification of metadata for each of the scanned objects, and their publication in a highly accessible format. Through the centre, various exciting, non-digital publications would be pursued; whether through the publication of image-rich books or the curation of exhibitions, they all surfaced new and different features of this important collection.

The Digital Bleek and Lloyd project brought with it a distinct set of challenges around digital access, the distribution of archival deposits, and the speed of retrieval, to meet the project requirement that the data be available and accessible online, offline, and on DVD, and across different hardware and software platforms.³⁶ The technological innovations developed to make this happen are what is of significance here. To make the material highly accessible, the scans needed to be organised as a digital library without a database,³⁷ with metadata for each individual digital object captured using Excel and then transferred to an XML system for ease of organisation and retrieval across platforms. System development provided a model test case for the development of an innovative classification process and system of organisation for digital data in the South African context. Presenting the material online and making it searchable in a context with low bandwidth, where high-quality scanned images were the primary digital data objects, presented a problem on its own.³⁸ This necessitated further digital innovation that ‘involved building a prototype lightweight, distributable, generic repository management and access system’ that ‘centred on simplicity’ and accessibility ‘in areas with limited resources and/or expensive Internet bandwidth’.³⁹ Through these digital innovations, high-quality image scans were made available for research in a variety of formats, across online and offline platforms. It demonstrated the application of tailored technological innovations that made the best fit for the South African and African context.⁴⁰ The data was published on a CD-ROM but was also made available online on the Digital Bleek and Lloyd webpage and on JSTOR. Nevertheless, the case demonstrated how digital conservation doubled as a proving ground for digital innovation and research in the 2000s. Similar adaptations would be made by more contemporary archival projects I discuss later in the article.

South African scholars and archivists also contributed to digitisation projects concerned with material from other parts of the African continent. The Tombouctou Manuscripts Project is one of them: it was to facilitate research and document manuscript traditions in Africa and, specifically, the Arabic manuscript collections held in the city of Timbuktu in Mali.⁴¹ Led by historian Shamil Jeppie from UCT, it focused on the translation, digitisation, and historical study of book and library traditions in this area, which was considered an important symbol of African literary heritage.⁴² South African researchers travelled to collaborate with local archive keepers in Timbuktu to research the manuscripts and digitise parts of. The project arose out of a diplomatic collaboration between the states of Mali and South Africa, originating in President Thabo Mbeki’s 2001 trip to the city of Timbuktu and his visit to a manuscript centre where he learnt about Mali texts. Recognising that they were ‘without any doubt among the most important cultural treasures in Africa’, Mbeki committed South Africa’s financial assistance for the conservation, cataloguing, and research of the manuscripts.⁴³

The project was enfolded into Mbeki’s Pan-African political vision for an African Renaissance. Indeed, he observed that ‘the Renaissance of Africa has to begin with an understanding of our past’.⁴⁴ In this frame, Timbuktu would ‘for ever remain a place of pride and affirmation of our African identity’.⁴⁵ The collaborative agreement to fund the conservation and research of the manuscripts was about ‘securing our own patrimony for the benefit of our children and all of Africa’s future generations’.⁴⁶ These archives were, therefore drawn into a Pan-African vision of a thriving Africa of the future, based on the recognition of its scholarly and intellectual heritage in the past. The project lost funding and attention following Thabo Mbeki's recall as president. The Tombouctou Manuscripts Project still remains online, with some of its digitised holdings accessible to registered researchers. The official state project did lead to the construction of a manuscript centre, pioneering research into the histories of Arabic texts and manuscript traditions, with research continuing to call attention to the perils of digitisation as conservation of heritage amidst complex Malian manipulation of this discourse as part of local efforts to control authority over their history.

Freedom of information and social justice

In the late 2000s, alternative digitisation and archival models emerged that stand somewhat as exemplifying outliers in the scheme that I have proposed. The South African Bibliographic Information Network (Sabinet) is one such example. Founded in 1983 as a not-for-profit company, Sabinet was designed to promote the networking of library and information resources in South and southern Africa.⁴⁷ It became the biggest provider of bibliographic information in southern Africa and functioned as an important broker of information amongst local libraries and between local libraries and international library and information networks and consortia. Its strength in the early 1990s was ‘achieved by assuring seamless connectivity to data communication networks in Southern Africa, including the Internet’.⁴⁸ It managed the compilation and exchange of the SACat Database, a catalogue of books, journals, and materials from South African libraries, which eventually ran to 2.5 million bibliographic references.⁴⁹ It would expand its footprint as a network to become an important repository of content from African academic journals when, in 2008, the Carnegie Foundation awarded Sabinet a US$1.8 million grant for its African Online Journal Archive Project. The project hoped to collect and digitise 200 journals from African English-speaking countries such as Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Uganda, Zambia, and South Africa and make them available for research online.⁵⁰ With its motto ‘Facilitating Access to Information’, Sabinet has grown to be a dominant, if not the leading provider of digitisation services for librarians, legal practitioners, and researchers in South Africa. It further emphasised its African profile through its digital journal contents and its self-ascribed profile as a ‘knowledge portfolio that integrates content knowledge and service to provide easy access to credible online information from and about Africa’.⁵¹ Through publishing its digital holdings of African academic resources, but also providing private digitisation and content solutions for librarians and legal practitioners, Sabinet straddles the space between public and private enterprise, negotiating the tension of cost, access to information, and sustainable knowledge conservation practice as a private South African enterprise.

Many domestically launched digital archival projects explicitly profiled themselves as civic enterprises concerned with the deepening of democracy and the empowerment of citizens through the provision of information.⁵² These spanned projects concerned with the independent documentation of history and hard social issues, such as access to government information around public spending, the provisioning of social services and heritage and public history. For example, one aspect of the Sunday Times Heritage Project was an educational website that used archival material from the records of the eponymous newspaper to supplement the stories it commemorated with physical monuments at site-specific locations across South Africa.⁵³ The project celebrated the newspaper’s centenary and was branded a self-funded give-back project in the form of artistic monuments dedicated to public figures and events that had made news since 1906.⁵⁴ Amongst the information made available online were historical records, interviews, audio-visual clips, photographic records, and other material related to the story of each of the memorials put up as part of the project. Purposefully designed to be interactive, visually rich, and engaging, the website was conceived as a resource for South African high school learners. An online archive of the Sunday Times Heritage Project, the website was developed through a collaboration with another, independent archival research project, the South African History Archive (SAHA) and was funded by the Atlantic Philanthropies. It remains active online as an engaging, if somewhat dated learning resource.⁵⁵

South African History Online (SAHO) presents a different model of an online resource and historical archive that evolved into a crucial knowledge resource and learning platform. Founded by documentary photographer Omar Badsha in 2000, SAHO claims to be ‘the largest and most comprehensive online website on South African and African history and culture’.⁵⁶ A Section 21 non-profit organisation, SAHO initially concentrated on profiling South African history related to the struggle for freedom and democracy. It has, however, since expanded to include historical resources related to the African continent. As of 2024, the website presented resources related to the history of society and politics, arts and culture, a vast trove of biographies, histories of Africa, but also online learning materials for school learners.⁵⁷ The website was an expression of its partnerships with community-based history groups, schools, and universities, and the sharing of knowledge resources and skills.⁵⁸ Doing so, it aimed at ‘break[ing] the silence on our past and to address the biased way in which the historical and cultural heritage of South Africa and the continent has been represented in our educational and cultural institutions’.⁵⁹ Committed to wide accessibility, the project also took pride in academic rigour with many articles written by scholars and history graduates. These were also supplemented by primary sources from its own archives. Its biographies, for example, were often studded with links to relevant primary documents, journal articles, images, and videos in its database.

Through its historical rigour, accessibility, and ongoing documentation of South African and African history, SAHO aimed to interrupt mainstream portrayals of historical knowledge and to make it inclusive and engaging. Moreover, since its founding in 2000, it has grown from being an online database into an important online learning platform. It operationalised its archive to produce educational materials that were freely available for school learners and university students through its online classroom facility and resources. In this way it activated public history for education and civic life. SAHO represents a successful evolution of a civic, non-profit digital history project that started out as a platform profiling critical, rigorous, but accessible historical knowledge about the struggle for freedom and democracy in South Africa to being an important, active public educational resource for audiences within and beyond South Africa.

Increasingly, archival initiatives staked themselves as champions of citizens’ rights to freedom of access to information. These archives or archival projects did not merely seek to provide information but also conducted research or litigated against the state, using legislation linked to further access to information around social justice issues. Two examples are the Nelson Mandela Foundation, which has positioned itself as a champion of archival research and the promotion of access to knowledge in South Africa, especially about Nelson Mandela’s life; and the GALA Queer Archive, which was founded in 1997 as a centre for the ‘production, preservation and dissemination of information about the history, culture and contemporary experiences of LGBTIQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer) people in South Africa’.⁶⁰ Previously known as the Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action Archive, it is founded on the principles of social justice and human rights. The archive profiles the experiences of the communities it represents and implements its resources in a South African educational programme.⁶¹

SAHA, one of the supporting partners of the Sunday Times Heritage Project, was especially active. It had a distinct history as an archive of and for social justice. Founded in 1988, it profiled itself as ‘an independent human rights archive dedicated to documenting, supporting and promoting greater awareness of past and contemporary struggles for justice through archival practices and outreach’.⁶² Based at the Constitution Hill precinct, which houses the Constitutional Court, SAHA mobilised its archives for social justice by collecting information about democracy in the making, by extending the boundaries of freedom of information through official appeals for information from the state on relevant social justice issues that it then made public, and by raising awareness about the importance of archives for human rights. With its small but growing digital archive it champions access to information and citizenship rights, effectively highlighting the important civic value of archives for contemporary South African society. SAHA has been at the forefront of several legal disputes with the state over access to crucial information around labour rights and health care among other issues of social significance.

State institutions have, however, also engaged in regional archival empowerment projects that have expanded the linguistic scope of archival practice and promoted active citizenship around engagements with history online. For example, the Ulwazi Programme, a web-based project launched in Umbumbulu in KwaZulu-Natal in 2008, served as a platform for empowering the citizens of eThekwini to record and share their history. Building on their public library infrastructure, the municipality hoped to establish ‘a collaborative, online, indigenous knowledge resource in the form of a Wiki’.⁶³ Actively promoting the use of Zulu for online record keeping and archival engagement, the project was pioneering creating space for the generation and sharing of non-institutional knowledge.⁶⁴ Contributing to the diversification of representative archival languages online and the public, digital negotiation of the past, it created space for mother-tongue digital archival engagements that, as I show later, is crucial in South and southern Africa.

Considering the importance of archives for documenting history and how it informs the South African constitutional order, the Archival Platform, a project affiliated with the Archive and Public Culture (APC) research initiative, was established as an important space for collating and disseminating information about the condition of public and private archives. Established in partnership with the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and funded by Atlantic Philanthropies, the Archival Platform was an online portal that served as ‘a civil society initiative committed to deepening democracy through the use of memory and archives as dynamic public resources’.⁶⁵ The Archival Platform gathered and published information about the state of the National Archival System and the status, condition, and significance of archives and archival holdings in civil society and highlighted their importance for social justice. Through its website it was also a hub for commentary and debate about the archive in South Africa. Its 2014 open access publication entitled ‘State of the Archives: An Analysis of South Africa’s National Archival System’, for example, gave an overview of the failing state of the post-apartheid state’s national record keeping and management system;⁶⁶ while its 2018 publication, A Ground for Struggle: Four Decades of Archival Activism, surveyed four decades of non-state-managed, private civic archives.⁶⁷ The periodic assessment of the national archival system and the tracking of independent archival projects and their role in civic society was important work. But it was time- and funding-driven. It suggests that provision should be made for continued, independent, periodic assessment of state and independent archives as part of a broader overview of the vitality of civic rights and engagement in South Africa.

Representation

Since 2015 digital archival scholarship has increasingly been concerned with with colonial logics, terms and classificatory orders that appear in primary sources and their potential transfer to digital archives. For example, with their deep roots in colonial practices of surveillance,⁶⁸ data from registries of criminal databases (which are conventionally strongly biased towards black and minority groups) could be fed into algorithms aimed at profiling potential future criminals or the administration of justice,⁶⁹ leading to a perpetuation of historic injustice. Similar biases crop up in the transference of colonial classificatory orders when collections of primary data are transposed into the metadata of new digital archives. This has prompted scholars to rethink the practice of digitisation as more than a mere conservation practise and rather as a site of epistemic change. ‘Digitization can become a true decolonial tool.’⁷⁰ This is collaborative work: ‘while progressive code writers will undoubtedly continue to play an indispensable role in making the archives more accessible and democratic, most of the decolonisation is, however, to be done on the epistemological level’.⁷¹ Energising this process means digital archival projects need to invent alternate strategies of assembling archival collections and to rethink how data is classified, ranked, ordered, and presented so as to short-circuit inherited terms that stabilise the availability of materials as archival. Two related projects in the South African context have been experimenting with precisely these disruptive approaches to knowledge capturing, coding, and representation in the digital space.

The Five Hundred Year Archive (FHYA) was a project initiated by the APC in the second decade of the twenty-first. The APC, the FHYA’s incubation space that was initiated in 2009, critically engaged with questions about history, memory, identity, and the public sphere, enjoining interdisciplinary research to explore ‘the workings of the archive in contemporary culture’.⁷² The FHYA was also positioned to be informed by scholarly research into the precolonial era. Research driven by APC scholars and others analysed how, for one, ‘disciplinary conventions and colonial and apartheid knowledge practices’ moulded accumulated knowledge about ‘the pre-colonial past’.⁷³ The name FHYA was, for example, inspired by the publication Five Hundred Years Rediscovered: Southern African Precedents and Prospects, co-edited by the South African archaeologists and historians Amanda Esterhuysen, Natalie Swanepoel, and Philip Bonner. Deepening the time depth of South African historiography and experimenting with interdisciplinary methods, the book was an attempt at unsettling the colonial and apartheid record about the precolonial past especially as it regarded the ‘ethnological fixing’ of indigenous peoples and the colonial texts and records that were assumed to be the only testament to them and their past. As one major critique of this ‘ethnologising of the past’, the APC followed later with the publication of the double edited volume Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal.⁷⁴ Departing from research into the precolonial past, the FHYA was conceived as a digital frame that would recognise ‘the archival potential of “ethnologised” materials that were historically exiled in institutions and spaces other than archives [and] the liberation of certain of the materials from inappropriate or politically-charged forms of categorisation’.⁷⁵ It would induce ‘the archival possibilities of materials located both within and outside of formal archives’, gathering and organising this disconnected assemblage as digital objects that carried the traces of the precolonial past.⁷⁶ Convening a recovery of the precolonial through the reassembly of digital objects, the FHYA therefore prompted a ‘rethinking of the status of the concept of archive itself’.⁷⁷

Funded by the National Research Foundation of South Africa, the FHYA online exemplar is distinct in at least five ways from the digital archival projects that preceded it.⁷⁸ First, rather than accumulate and classify material relevant to liberation, apartheid, or colonial histories, the FHYA was designed to convene and present data related to the precolonial era. Secondly, the FHYA platform was set up to accommodate a range of materials including texts, images, and sound recordings that came from museums and institutions of higher learning, while at the same time resisting being an archive itself. Thirdly, the FHYA was built using open-source digital software, which was flexible and also less costly and restrictive than privately owned operating systems. Fourthly, the FHYA software infrastructure was coded to track and render apparent the existing and ongoing genealogy of curatorial classification that is attached to each knowledge object in the FHYA database, revealing as far as possible the curatorial authorship behind every (re)classification along the chain of an object’s biography.⁷⁹ Finally, the FHYA included a facility for incorporating comments, opinions, and supplementary material about existing digital objects issued by registered users of the platform that could be ‘virtually attached’ as supplementary interpretation.

Developed through 2015, the FHYA was also a product of its time, referencing the radical epistemic energies that swirled in the wake of the Rhodes Must Fall Movement, triggered at UCT. Yet the project never explicitly linked itself to or referenced any of the official student movements. It turned attention to the possibilities of apprehending the precolonial past and pushed the ways in which the archive could be radically rethought in online space; and its conception was influenced, sometimes literally disrupted, by the strident, timely, uproarious agitation for change on UCT’s upper campus. The FHYA, therefore, spoke to and about the times of its conception, offering a model for archival exploration that foreshadowed a future founded on a more acute suspicion about the constitution of the past through archival systems in online space. As a different kind of model of a digital archive, the FHYA was, therefore, set up as both ‘a conceptual and a technical intervention’.⁸⁰

EMANDULO is branded a successor to the FHYA and as an ‘experimental digital platform, in ongoing development, for engaging with sources pertinent to southern African history before colonialism, across what is today eSwatini, KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape’.⁸¹ It comprises archival curation and is a general repository of digitised objects and presentations – creative, multimedia interpretations of digital knowledge objects and collections. The project was designed by the FHYA team. While also incorporating aggregation and digitisation features, EMANDULO was designed to extend the FHYA by facilitating wider creative engagement with the digitised primary records through the use of podcasts, images, and supplementary writing. For example, a search of the Zulu author and social historian Magema Fuze reveals a multilingual description of his life and work, a bibliogram of his texts and secondary literatures, and a link to a podcast.⁸² But it is also directed to the digital repository of materials held in the EMANDULO network, including entries and objects with rich custodial annotations. The search does not merely bring together several existing innovations in digital information presentation – making it attractive for high school learners and undergraduate students, for example; it goes further through its use of multiple southern African languages and extended creative engagement with audio-visual media and archival annotations of primary sources to amplify the multilayered affordances of individual knowledge objects held in its repository. These innovations are an expression of decades-long theorising in archive and technological development. It is a distinct South African digital expression of primary archival sources and repositories that are sensitive and responsive to histories of knowledge and representation.

The infrastructural adaptations employed in the construction of the FHYA and EMANDULO distinguish it from other digital archival projects that seek, for example, to publicise material related to slavery and colonialism. The Transatlantic Slave Trade Data Base, for instance, uses maps, statistics, and primary sources for presenting the history of the slave trade. Yet it does not place systemic emphasis on custodial histories of the data and flexibility to changing meanings of terms and categories of classification that is apparent with the FHYA and EMANDULO for example. Its producers have acknowledged this flaw, recently noting, for example, that ‘[u]nfortunately, some of the language used to label fields of information in our databases is embedded in the programming of our website. Changing the terms we use requires reprogramming the website, which takes technical skill’.⁸³ Instead, the FHYA ‘foregrounds the processes of production and preservation that shape items over their lifespans. This is crucial for conveying that these items are complex and layered testimonies of the past’.⁸⁴

Rather than focusing on conservation, the FHYA and EMANDULO, I argue, are concerned with questions of the representation of knowledge and the affordances of archive and evidence online. They bring together existing and new innovations in digital practice in southern Africa in ways that contribute to a new, South African digital epistemic culture. By that I mean, they have developed a set of practices in digital archiving that appropriates and interprets existing established digital infrastructure, software, and knowledge systems and adapts them to local knowledge repositories with a keen awareness of prevailing local histories and epistemologies. It is epistemic in so far as it entwines consideration of the politics of primary classification of local knowledge objects, cultures, and histories with technological innovation that seeks to transform future ways of interpreting and understanding these knowledge objects as evidentiary traces. And it sets in place new categories, terms, and networks of classification that are self-reflective, informed by local histories of the digital archive, and are to an extent self-replicating, all the while remaining open to adaptation over time. These projects are not the sole constituents of this digital epistemic culture, as change is taking place across the digital space in South Africa, and indeed Africa. Certainly other digital archival interventions can be found in other parts of the continent that serve as similar expressions of a local epistemic culture. Both EMANDULO and FHYA do, however, mark a notable shift in the history of digital archives, moving away from a concern with conservation of physical collections, seen in the early post-apartheid period, to concerns with knowledge ordering, classification, and representation that accommodate diverse local languages and cultural inflections.

Conclusion

In 2024, it is largely taken for granted that primary and secondary archival resources are readily accessible online. Moreover, digital archival projects are not only more stridently positioned as research platforms, such as through the Programme in African Digital Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand; it is also being more strongly integrated into educational programmes at high schools and in undergraduate university programmes, as well as in scholarly practice, as both the Programme in African Digital Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand and UCT’s Ibali online system show.⁸⁵

Despite many record collections that remain undigitised and at risk, great strides have been made over the course of the last 30 years in digital archiving and online resourcing. The projects that have been discussed in this article, I argue, have been developed within the tensions that exist between the need for the preservation and publication of historical knowledge, their economic sustainability and the profitability of the commercial knowledge economy, legislated freedoms for access to information, and technological challenges and access. Three types of digital archival projects were mapped: those concerned with the conservation of primary archival deposits through digitisation; projects focused on advancing freedom of access to information and the keeping of collections relevant to social justice; and more recent projects concerned with the representation of knowledge as archive in digital space. Negotiating these tensions, these digital archival and knowledge resource projects have also expanded the scope of civic freedoms, transformed the scope and depths of digital archival practice, and contributed to the expansion of archival engagement in the online space in South Africa. They have also widened access to knowledge about the deep, precolonial past in South and southern Africa.

Three distinct shifts can be observed. The first is a greater sensitivity to digitisation as more than a conservation method and its relationship to copyright regimes and commercial and cultural knowledge economies. The earliest digitisation projects, such as DISA, were launched out of a concern for the conservation of knowledge resources. Yet, in the process, new digital knowledge objects were created and, packaged as collections, could be of commercial value in the global education knowledge economies. Some of these collections, such as the Bleek and Lloyd collections, were of national heritage value and could not easily circulate in the commercial knowledge economy. South African legislation developed along with and sometimes behind the outcomes of these projects to create a legislative framework that better classified the criteria for defining digital knowledge objects, their ownership, and their use rights. These legislative changes, and the practices that informed them, demonstrate a shift from a singular emphasis on digitisation as a conservation method to a broader appreciation of the products and ownership regimes such practices create and the custodial responsibilities that the generated data trigger.

The second is the increasing importance of independent, non-state funded archival projects for civic empowerment. Independent and activist archives have created spaces for the gathering, preservation, and presentation of knowledge resources that offer an alternative perspective on the past than presented by the South African state. More importantly, these digital archives have actively engaged in the shaping of civic society, through digital curation and legislative action that has held the state to account for and contributed to the advancement of constitutional freedoms of access to information. This observation is not new. The Archival Platform has provided an excellent overview of increasing archival activism over the last 15 years. Yet placed in historical context and viewed against other digital archival projects, we get a stronger picture of how significant such activism is for empowering a civic culture and citizenry through the provision of information.

Finally, the proliferation of digital archives has contributed to the emergence of what I would like to refer to as a digital epistemic culture. I have argued that the FHYA and EMANDULO projects were but two expressions of this. One way of understanding this is through the transformations in infrastructure, theory, and digital access. The cost of digital archival technologies has decreased, and access to the internet has widened, especially through the use of mobile phones. The widespread implementation of digital archival platforms and systems at institutions of higher learning and non-profit organisations with an archival orientation and state recognition and promotion of digital archives have contributed to the widening of the skills base in digital archival practice. Combined with advances in archival scholarly theory, there is an ever greater sophistication in the adaptation and manipulation of universal software platforms to accommodate for local knowledge forms and infrastructural conditions, as first pioneered in the early 2000s. Connected to local knowledge ecologies and histories of archive, archival projects that have especially interrogated questions of knowledge representation are therefore an expression of the emergence of a South African digital epistemic culture – a distinct, repeatable set of archival practices informed by histories of knowledge, infrastructural needs, and scholarly and public need.

Put differently, the history of infrastructural change, turns in scholarly theory in history and archives, and the long experience of digital archival resourcing and archiving have contributed to an embrace of local ways of gathering, storing, and representing knowledge in digital form and online. Similar in appearance to leading international projects, local digitisation ventures are employing historically and culturally informed practices of bringing knowledge into digital and online space and, in the process, making it possible to engage with existing resources, whether primary or secondary, in distinctly new ways. The transparency around custodial chains employed by the FHYA, for example, throws into relief evidentiary legitimacy and authority, while the pooling of knowledge resources amongst different partners by SAHO makes it possible to see rigorous knowledge production as a collective, rather than individual enterprise. These are just two examples of such locally informed digital knowledge interventions.

The article makes a point about digital archival practice and digital resourcing in a general sense. Reflecting on the distinct South and southern African power dynamics that have borne down on such archives, the article demonstrates a break with an approach that assumes electronic reproduction and classification systems are universal and transferable. Instead, it shows the many ways that local conditions have shaped home-grown archival practices, hinting at a distinct South and southern African digital archival epistemology. In this way, the article brings a southern African history of archival practice into a global conversation about digital archival practice and makes the case for digital epistemic diversity, or digital archival practices that reflect situated knowledge cultures and practices.

Finally, the article brings into focus the challenges of historical research and on digital space and the demands it places on historical method. Websites and online databases are not only resources; they also have histories that are worthy of study – in this case, for the provisioning of historical knowledge for society and for the promotion of democratic values of freedom and citizenship. Yet these resources have changed over time, and this is reflected in constantly updated website profiles and descriptions. This article has provided some insight into this change. Yet it has been hampered by a kind of electronic amnesia where websites disappear or go unarchived and where, as project descriptions get updated, web projects are expanded or go defunct. Interrupting traceability and with sources subject to unpredictable change or even disappearance, digital practices and the digital life of online archives pose new evidentiary and methodological challenges for history and digital humanities research. As much as history has been uploaded and the research of history is increasingly dependent on online repositories and archives, research is also subject to the cultural and economic demands of the internet that implicitly prioritises immediacy over history itself. New methods and tools are required to make sense of these changes, to best track the continued role of digital databases, online resources, and archives in an evolving democracy in the decades to come.

Acknowledgements

The original research for this article was conducted as part of a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative in 2016. Many thanks to Carolyn Hamilton and Grant McNulty for comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Duane Jethro

Duane Jethro is a lecturer in the Department of African Studies and Linguistics at the University of Cape Town. He works on the cultural construction of heritage and contested public cultures in South Africa and Berlin, Germany.

Notes

1 C. Kirkwood, M. Noble, and M. Singer, ‘What We Lost in the Jagger Library Fire’, Africa Bibliography, Research and Documentation, 2 (2023), 12–29; D. Jethro, ‘Ash: Memorializing the 2021 University of Cape Town Library Fire’, Material Religion, 17, 5 (2021), 671–677.

2 M. Singer and M. Noble, ‘One Crate at a Time: Recovering the University of Cape Town Libraries’ Special Collections’, Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa, 76 (2022), 3–18; N. Crowster, ‘Volunteer Assistance with the Jagger Library Fire’, Semantics, 1 (2021), 28–31;

3 K. Breckenridge, ‘The Politics of the Parallel Archive: Digital Imperialism and the Future of Record-Keeping in the Age of Digital Reproduction’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40, 3 (2014): 504; J. Dlamini, The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators and the Security Police (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020, 73), D. Waters and J. Garret, Preserving Digital Information: Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information Commissioned by the Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group (1996).

4 G.C. Botha, The Public Archives of South Africa 1652–1910 (Cape Town: Cape Times, 1928).

5 J. Gerber, ‘The South African Government Archive Service: Past, Present and Future’ (Master’s thesis, University College, London, 1987); V. Harris, Exploring Archives: An Introduction to Archival Ideas and Practice in South Africa (Pretoria: National Archives of South Africa, 1991).

6 For more on the early history of the debates that took place between 1990, when liberation movements were unbanned, and the ratification of the National Archives Act No. 43 of 1996, see Archival Platform, A Ground of Struggle: Four Decades of Archival Activism in South Africa (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 2018), 27–33; L. Callinicos and A. Odendaal, ‘Report on Archives in South Africa by Luli Callinicos and Andre Odendaal, Convenors of the Archives Sub-Committee of the Arts and Culture Task Group (ACTAG)’, South African Archives Journal 38 (1996): 33–49; South African Society for Archivists, ‘Submission on the Arts and Culture Task Group’s (ACTAG) Heritage Report’, South African Archives Journal 38 (1996), 108; V. Harris, ‘Editorial, Getting Our ACTAG Together: Musings on the Challenges Facing South African Archivists, with Special Reference to the Arts and Culture Task Group’s (ACTAG) Report on Heritage’, South African Archives Journal, 37 (1995); C. Kirkwood, ‘Submission on Draft White Paper on Arts, Culture, Heritage and Archives’, SA Archivists Journal, 38 (1996).

7 See M. Ngoepe, ‘Archival Orthodoxy of Post-Custodial Realities for Digital Records in South Africa’, Archives and Manuscripts, 45, 1 (2017), 31–44; Archival Platform, A Ground of Struggle; M.E. Matlala, T.R. Ncube, and S. Parbanath, ‘The State of Digital Records Preservation in South Africa’s Public Sector in the 21st Century: A Literature Review’, Records Management Journal, 32, 2 (2022), 198–212.

8 See K. Mtombeni, ‘Investigating How South African Humanities Researchers Engage with Digital Archives’ (PhD diss., University of Cape Town, Cape Town, 2021).

9 See Breckenridge, ‘The Politics of the Parallel Archive’.

10 Official archival practice is informed by the South African Constitution of 1996, especially provisions for freedom of access to information through Section 32 of the Bill of Rights. Other key legal instruments further lattice this legal infrastructure, such as the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa Act 43 of 1996, which reflected long-standing discussion amongst archivists, politicians, and scholars. The act established the National Archives agency and referred to ‘electronic record systems’, as a ‘record system in which information is generated electronically and stored by means of computer technology’. The National Policy on Digitisation was passed in 2010 and drew impetus from international best practice and policy but also referred to ongoing digitisation activity in South Africa. It set out a broad legal framework and provided recommendations that could be tailored by individual agencies such as the National Heritage Resources Agency and the National Archival Service as suited to their specific documentary needs. The National Archive Service published its digitisation strategy in 2013 and referenced both the constitution and the National Policy on Digitisation as guiding legal instruments for best practice relating to capturing, storage, and long-term preservation of digital data. These key legal instruments are linked to other key pieces of legislation, such as the Copyright Act, the Protection of Information Bill, the Promotion of Access to Information Act, and the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act.

11 M. Pickover, ‘Negotiations, Contestations and Fabrications: The Politics of Archives in South Africa Ten Years after Democracy’, Innovation, 40 (2005), 1–11; M. Pickover, ‘The DISA Project: Packaging South African Heritage as a Continuing Resource: Content, Access, Ownership and Ideology’, IFLA Journal, 34, 2 (2008), 192–197; M. Pickover and D. Peters, ‘DISA: An African Perspective on Digital Technology’, Innovation, 24 (2002), 14–20.

12 C. Hamilton, V. Harris, M. Pickover, G. Reid, R. Saleh, and J. Taylor, eds, Refiguring the Archive (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002).

13 See V. Harris, ‘The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa’, Archival Science, 2, 1 (2002), 63–86; V. Harris, Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2007); V. Harris, ‘Jacques Derrida Meets Nelson Mandela: Archival Ethics at the Endgame’, Archival Science, 11, 1 (2011), 113–124; V. Harris, ‘Hauntology, Archivy and Banditry: An Engagement with Derrida and Zapiro’, Critical Arts, 29, 1 (2015), 13–27.

14 See A. Mbembe, ‘Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive’ (unpublished paper, 2015); S.J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, ‘Decolonizing the University and the Problematic Grammars of Change in South Africa’, Keynote address delivered at the 5th Annual Students Conference on Decolonizing the Humanities and Social Sciences in South Africa/Africa, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 6–7 October 2016.

15 Barringer, T., M. Wallace, and J. Damen, eds, African Studies in the Digital Age: DisConnects? (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 2.

16 M. Wallace. ‘Digital Sources in Europe for African History’, in T. Spear, ed., Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.338.

17 See E. N. Namhila and J. Ndinoshiho, ‘Visioning and Strategising for the University of Namibia Library: Planning the Library’s Facilities, Services and Resources for the Aspired Library Vision’, Innovation, 43 (2011), 3–19; B. Mbambo-Thata, ed., Building a Digital Library at the University of Zimbabwe: A Celebration of Team Work and Collaboration (Oxford: International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications, 2007); P. Mapulanga, ‘Digitising Library Resources and Building Digital Repositories in the University of Malawi Libraries’, Electronic Library, 31, 5 (2013), 635–647.

18 E.E. Baro, K.G. Oyeniran, and B. Ateboh, ‘Digitization Projects in University Libraries in Nigeria: The Journey so Far’, Library Hi Tech News, 9 (2013), 25.

19 C. Hamilton, ‘Forged and Continually Refashioned in the Crucible of Ongoing Social and Political Life: Archives and Custodial Practices as Subjects of Enquiry’, South African Historical Journal, 65, 1 (2013), 1–22; C. Hamilton, ‘The Long Southern African Past: Enfolded Time and the Challenges of Archive’, Social Dynamics, 43, 3 (2017), 338–357; C. Hamilton, ‘Archive and Public Life’, in L. Cowling and C. Hamilton, eds, Babel Unbound: Rage, Reason and Rethinking Public Life (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2020), 125–143.

20 It is worth mentioning the UWC-Robben Island Mayibuye Archives, which are located at the library of the University of the Western Cape. Opened in 2001, it is a physical collection of documents, personal papers, publications, photographs, and audio-visual material related to the struggle for liberation and Robben Island. The nucleus of the collection came out of a collection of papers first gathered by the Defence Aid Fund in London during apartheid; it was subsequently relocated to South Africa. In October 2022 it secured French funding for the digitisation of its collections. See G.H. Fredericks and C.J. van Wyk, ‘Using Memory as a Tool to Build Museum Collections with Special Reference to the UWC–Robben Island Mayibuye Archives: The Robben Island Memories Project’, Mousaion, 24, 2 (2006), 269–282; M.C. Webb, ‘Research Note: Mayibuye Archives and the Cold War in Southern Africa’, Cold War History, 22, 3 (2022), 369–373.

21 Harris, Verne. “Redefining archives in South Africa: Public archives and society in transition, 1990–1996.” Archivaria (1996): 6–27.

22 ‘Digital Innovation South Africa (DISA)’, https://web.archive.org/web/20180407163400/http://www.archivalplatform.org/registry/entry/digital_innovation_south_africa_disa/, accessed 25 March 2024.

23 Pickover, ‘The DISA Project’.

24 Digital Innovation South Africa, ‘Welcome to DISA’, https://disa.ukzn.ac.za/, accessed 25 March 2024; C. Saunders, ‘Digital Imaging South Africa (DISA): A Case Study’, Program: Electronic Library and Information Systems, 39 (4): (2005), 345–352.

25 See JSTOR, ‘Struggles for Freedom: Southern African Partnerships’, https://about.jstor.org/librarians/primary-sources/struggles-freedom-southern-africa/partnerships/, accessed 25 March 2024.

26 Saunders, ‘Digital Imaging South Africa’, 349.

27 A. Isaacman, P. Lalu, and T. Nygren, ‘Digitization, History, and the Making of a Postcolonial Archive of Southern African Liberation Struggles: The Aluka Project’, Africa Today, 52, 2 (2005), 55–77; P. Lalu, ‘The Virtual Stampede for Africa: Digitisation, Postcoloniality and Archives of the Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa’, Innovation, 34, 1 (2007), 28–44.

28 Pickover, ‘Negotiations, Contestations and Fabrications’.

29 K. Breckenridge, Biometric State: The Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 507.

30 Isaacman, Lalu, and Nygren, ‘Digitization, History, and the Making’.

31 Breckenridge, Biometric State, 507.

32 R. Ištok, ‘Introduction’, in L'Internationale Online and R. Ištok, eds, Decolonising Archives (L’Internationale Online, 2016), 6, https://internationaleonline.org/publications/decolonising-archives/, accessed 25 March 2024.

33 Aluka remains an important South African case study in sometimes flawed terms of international collaboration around digitisation and digital archive building. Nevertheless, South and southern Africa remain highly attractive regions for American and European institutions of higher learning who have undertaken similar collaborative archival and digitisation projects, employing different, more equitable funding and data exchange models. See, for example, Howard University’s South Africa Research and Archives Project, the University of Connecticut’s African National Congress Partnership, the African Archivist Project at Michigan State University, and the Nordic Documentation on the Liberation Struggle in Southern Africa.

34 R. Page-Shipp, ‘An Audit of Digitization Initiatives, Ongoing and Planned’, in South Africa Report for Stakeholders Workshop (2 March 2009).

35 H. Suleman, ‘Digital Libraries Without Databases: The Bleek and Lloyd Collection’, in L. Kovacs, N. Fuhr, and C. Meghini, eds, Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, 11th European Conference, ECDL 2007, Budapest, Hungary, September 16–21 (Berlin: Springer, 2007), 392–403.

36 H. Suleman, ‘In-Browser Digital Library Services’, in L. Kovacs, N. Fuhr, and C. Meghini, eds, Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, 11th European Conference, ECDL 2007, Budapest, Hungary, September 16–21 (Berlin: Springer, 2007), 462–465.

37 Suleman, ‘Digital Libraries Without Databases’.

38 Suleman, ‘In-Browser Digital Library Services’.

39 L. Phiri and H. Suleman, ‘In Search of Simplicity: Redesigning the Digital Bleek and Lloyd’, DESIDOC Journal of Library and Information Technology, 32 (2012), 307.

40 H. Suleman, ‘An African Perspective on Digital Preservation’, in Post-Proceedings of International Workshop on Digital Preservation of Heritage and Research Issues in Archiving and Retrieval, Kolkata, India, 29–31 October 2007, http://www.husseinsspace.com/research/publications/iwdph_2007_african.pdf.

41 Tombouctou Manuscripts Project, ‘Welcome’, https://tombouctoumanuscripts.uct.ac.za/, accessed 25 March 2024.

42 S. Jeppie and S.B. Diagne, The Meaning of Timbuktu (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008); S. Mollins-Lliteras, ‘From Toledo to Timbuktu: The Case for a Biography of the Ka’ti Archive and its Sources’, South African Historical Journal, 65, 1 (2013), 105–124.

43 T. Mbeki, ‘Message from the President of the Republic of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki’, in The South Africa-Mali Project, Timbuktu Manuscripts: A South African Presidential Initiative, A Nepad Cultural Project (Pretoria: The Presidency, Republic of South Africa, 2014), 2.

44 T. Mbeki, ‘Address by the President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, at the SA-Mali Timbuktu Project Fundraising Dinner, City of Tshwane, 1 October 2005’, Dirco, https://dirco1.azurewebsites.net/docs/speeches/2005/mbek1001.htm, 24 March 2024.

45 Ibid.

46 Mbeki, ‘Message from the President of the Republic of South Africa’, 3.

47 M. Boshoff and A. Bergesen, ‘A Tentative Tariff Structure for the South African Bibliographic and Information Network (Sabinet)’, South African Journal for Librarianship and Information Science, 49, 4 (1982), 200–209.

48 V. du Plessis and P. Malan, ‘Sabinet’, New Review of Information Networking, 1, 1 (1995), 171; see also V. du Plessis, ‘What Sabinet Can Do for You’, Cape Librarian, 40, 8 (1996), 15–17.

49 A.A. Alemna and I.K. Antwi, ‘A Review of Consortia Building among University Libraries in Africa’, Library Management, 23, 4/5 (2002), 234–238.

50 Candid, ‘Carnegie Corporation Awards $1.8 Million for African Online Journal Archive’, Philanthropy News Digest, 9 July 2008, https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/carnegie-corporation-awards-1.8-million-for-african-online-journal-archive, accessed 25 March 2024.

51 Sabinet, ‘Home’, https://sabinet.co.za/, accessed 1 December 2022.

52 Page-Shipp, ‘An Audit of Digitization Initiatives’.

53 Sunday Times Heritage Project, ‘A New Home for History’, http://sthp.saha.org.za/, accessed 25 March 2024.

54 S. Marschall, ‘The Sunday Times Heritage Project: Heritage, the Media and the Formation of National Consciousness’, Social Dynamics, 37, 3 (2011), 409–423; C. Kros, ‘Prompting Reflections: An Account of the Sunday Times Heritage Project from the Perspective of an Insider Historian’, Kronos, 34, 1 (2008), 159–180.

55 Marschall, ‘The Sunday Times Heritage Project’.

56 South African Historical Archive, ‘About-Us’, https://www.sahistory.org.za/about-us, accessed 1 May 2018; see also J. Kelly and O. Badsha, ‘Teaching South African History in the Digital Age: Collaboration, Pedagogy, and Popularizing History’, History in Africa, 47, 1 (2020): 297–325.

57 Ibid.

58 See S. Netshakhuma, ‘Capacity Building through Digitisation: Case of the ANC Archives’, IQ: The RIMPA Quarterly Magazine, 34, 2 (2018), 38–43, https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.706555028146406

59 Ibid.

60 GALA, ‘What Is GALA’, https://gala.co.za/, accessed 1 May 2018.

61 A. Sizemore-Barber, ‘Archival Movements: South Africa’s Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action’, Safundi, 18, 2 (2017), 117–130.

62 SAHA, ‘South African History Archive Internship Opportunity’, 15 March 2018, http://www.saha.org.za/news/2018/March/saha_internship_sfjp_archival_intern.htm.

63 G. McNulty, ‘Archival Aspirations and Anxieties: Contemporary Preservation and Production of the Past in Umbumbulu, KwaZulu-Natal’, South African Historical Journal, 65, 1 (2013), 45.

64 Ibid.

65 Centre for Curating the Archive, ‘Archival Platform’, https://humanities.uct.ac.za/cca/reading/archival-platform, accessed 25 March 2024.

66 Archival Platform, State of the Archives: An Analysis of South Africa’s National Archival System, 2014 (Cape Town: Archival Platform, University of Cape Town, 2015).

67 Archival Platform, A Ground of Struggle.

68 Breckenridge, Biometric State.

69 C. O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Crown, 2017); see S. Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (New York: New York University Press, 2018).

70 Ištok, ‘Introduction’, 6.

71 Ibid.

72 Archive and Public Culture, ‘About’, http://www.apc.uct.ac.za/apc/about, accessed 1 May 2018.

73 Archive and Public Culture, ‘The Five Hundred-Year Archive Online Project: A Preliminary Summary’, https://web.archive.org/web/20190722195738/http://www.apc.uct.ac.za/apc/research/projects/five-hundred-year-archive, accessed 1 April 2019.

74 C. Hamilton and N. Liebhammer, eds, Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2016).

75 Archive and Public Culture, ‘The Five Hundred-Year Archive Online Project: A Preliminary Summary’.

76 Ibid.; see also C. Hamilton and G. McNulty, ‘Refiguring the Archive for Eras before Writing: Digital Interventions, Affordances and Research Futures’, History in Africa, 49 (2022): 131–157.

77 Archive and Public Culture, ‘The Five Hundred-Year Archive Online Project: A Preliminary Summary’.

78 Five Hundred Year Archive, ‘Welcome’, https://fhya.org/, accessed 1 March 2024.

79 Archive and Public Culture, ‘The Five Hundred-Year Archive Online Project: A Preliminary Summary’.

80 Archive and Public Culture, ‘The Five Hundred-Year Archive Online Project: A Preliminary Summary’. An updated, adapted statement is located at Five Hundred Year Archive, ‘About’, https://fhya.org/about, accessed 26 March 2024.

81 EMANDULO, ‘About EMANDULO’, http://emandulo.apc.uct.ac.za/, accessed 2 January 2022. The updated version is located at http://emandulo.apc.uct.ac.za/about-emandulo.html, accessed 1 February 2024.

82 EMANDULO, ‘Magema Fuze: In His Own Words’, EMANDULO, last updated 27 November 2023, http://emandulo.apc.uct.ac.za/cgi-bin/view/Presentations/magema-fuze-in-his-own-words.zip/studio-emandulo.uct.ac.za/magema-fuze-in-his-own-words/index.html, accessed 1 February 2024.

83 Slave Voyages, ‘Note on Terminology’, September 2020, https://www.slavevoyages.org/blog/note-on-terminology, accessed 1 March 2024.

84 Five Hundred Year Archive, ‘Welcome’.

85 See Wiser, ‘Programme in African Digital Humanities, 2018–2023’, https://wiser.wits.ac.za/page/programme-african-digital-humanities-2018-2023-13069, accessed 26 March 2024; and Ibali Digital Collections UCT, ‘Showcasing Connections through Collections’, https://ibali.uct.ac.za/s/ibali/page/welcome, accessed 26 March 2024.