Conference signals crisis of neglect in the preservation of South Africa's audiovisual archives

Verne Harris, Head of the Centre for Memory, introduces the Nelson Mandela digital archive

By Emma Sandon

Representatives from a wide range of state institutions, and commercial film and audio-visual archives and libraries in South Africa, as well as delegates from other southern African countries, gathered in mid-November at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town to explore Perspectives on the preservaton and promotion of audiovisual heritage in France and South Africa.

Organised by Craig Matthew from DOXA Productions and the Visual History Archive in Cape Town, and the French National Audio Visual Institute (INA), both organisations which provide training and promote the preservation and digitisation of audio-visual materials, it formed part of the two year season of events related to France and South Africa, currently running through 2012 and 2013. The event also screened poignant archival film held at INA, of Miriam Makeba produced when she was in exile, as well as a film created by DOXA, about the four South African Nobel peace prize winners, Nelson Mandela, FW de Klerk, Desmond Tutu and Nadine Gordimer. These were showcase examples of the importance of visual images as cultural and national heritage.

Crucial interventions in the debate were made by representatives of the the Archive and Public Culture research initiative and the Archival Platform at this important and well-timed forum. NRF Chair in Archive and Public Culture Professor Carolyn Hamilton, Head and Deputy Head of the Archival Platform Jo-Anne Duggan and Mbongiseni Buthelezi, and Senior Curator of Visual Archives in the Manuscripts and Archives Library at UCT Paul Weinberg all contributed to panels. Other APC members, curators and librarians from Special Collections at UCT also attended.

The Department of Arts and Culture, the National Library, the Western Cape Provincial Library, the National Archives, the National Film Video and Sound Archives (NFVSA), SABC, Swazi TV, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibian, Seychelles, Zambian broadcasting, eTV, Jasco Broadcasting Solutions, Soweto Experiential Media and other audio-visual service providers all participated.

The seminar kicked off on the first day with an upbeat series of panels on policies of preservation and issues of access. This immediately highlighted the major differences between France and South Africa. Whilst South African speakers raised the politics of archive, the French contributors kept to a technical agenda, describing impressive nationally-funded digitisation programmes achieved in recent years in France.

INA employs a thousand people, and has a budget of twenty-two million Euros per year for preservation. Whilst South African speakers bemoaned the lack of political will to preserve important archive collections in the country, let alone set about large digitisation programmes, the French were able to demonstrate inventive and collaborative trans-national digitisation projects such as the European Union-funded Mediterranean project, Med Mem, http://www.medmem.eu.

The collections being archived in France, and in Europe more broadly, in these publicly-funded digitised programmes, do not just cover traditional audio-visual media of film, video and radio, but are also, importantly, pioneering internet archives, and public access to these collections online are crucial to the delivery of these resources.

As Verne Harris, Head of the Centre for Memory, Nelson Mandela Foundation, said: in South Africa it is one thing to discuss the digitisation of existing records, it is another to address the archiving of digitally-born records and online resources. There has been no collection of electronic memory since its beginnings in the 1970s, nor is it being generated today.

Jo-Anne Duggan described the Archival Platform's recent visits to audio-visual collections across South Africa. She used the term 'lament' to describe the way in which archives are perceived in South Africa. South Africa's archives are 'treasure houses' to which access is obstructed or the door is often locked. Archives have no independent status as such, and until these structural problems are addressed, they will not be able to function, she stressed. There is a need for a co-ordinating mandate for South African archives across the different sectors managing them.

Carolyn Hamilton reminded participants of the power of archival regimes in the processes of creating knowledge. Archival systems need to be made transparent. Apart from the audio-visual archives themselves, accompanying material that forms a record of the archivist's work on the process of archive is often stored in separate places. This needs to be made available and unpacked in order to interpret the archival object.

Harris discussed the Centre for Memory archive, which is one of the first South African digitisation projects. He highlighted the politics of digitisation and gave examples of some of the editorial difficulties involved in keeping a curatorial openness, in avoiding pressures to censor particular information, and in dealing with copyright issues, when digitising materials. The Centre for Memory archive which has made material on Nelson Mandela available online through a partnership with the Google Cultural Institute, a not-for-profit part of Google, has raised these issues prominently.

Catherine Kennedy from South African History Archive (SAHA) described the difficulties SAHA encounters in making public information available when records cannot be accessed. Police and government departments have not responded to SAHA's requests for video material, yet SAHA knows that records exist. This has also been the case with the national broadcaster, SABC.

In the example of videos made by SABC on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the full collection does not exist nationally, as copies have gone missing. When SAHA did eventually locate a full set of copies of the TRC proceedings at Yale Law department, the SABC's attitude towards the commodification of film archive, meant that it obstructed the copyright clearance to put these online for eighteen months.

Jihan El Tahri, an award winning Franco-Egyptian documentary film-maker, raised the politics of using archive and the importance of bringing a southern perspective to interpreting colonial archives. The history of Africa needs to be told from the perspective of Africans, she argues, so how can we use archives to tell our stories? Her stories of accessing such archive for her films, The Tragedy of the Great Lakes (2001), The House of Saud (2004), and Behind the Rainbow (2008) on South Africa demonstrated the difficulties for African film-makers, who are up against the commercial value of film archive, to access material to tell their histories. SABC charged an extortionate eight thousand Euros for her use of footage of Mandela.

Yet those working for South African state archives did not engage in any of the political debates that had been raised. In spite of Jo-Anne Duggan's sympathetic publicising of the reasons behind NFVSA's inability to deliver its mandate of preservation and acquisition, Brenda Kotze, representing NFVSA, did not address any of the critical resource issues that continue to plague the NFVSA in spite of its recent refurbishment. Instead she delivered an overview of how to use the archive, drawn from the NFVSA website, and did not discuss the difficulties the archive encountered in its mammoth task of preserving of film, video and sound.

She did enlarge on the oral history projects that the archive has supported in schools. This really was a missed chance to engage with an interested public and concerned users on possible ways in which digitisation could be supported for the collections held at this important national and state-funded audio-visual archive.

SABC Media Libraries manager, Ilse Assmann, gave an impressive presentation about her work on the UNESCO-funded Southern African Development Community (SADC) project to preserve African broadcasting archive in southern Africa. Yet SABC representatives present at the seminar did not respond to the point made by members of the panel and audience, including the film-maker, Jihan El Tahri, that the SABC was charging unjustifiably prohibitive prices for its important historical film archive, which is a publicly-owned resource.

Members of the audience had responded early in the first day to INA's apparent idealistic promotion of digitisation as a solution to South Africa's archival problems, and its proposals that the partnership between France and South Africa would benefit both countries, by requesting that the organisers were alerted to the seminar's format and programme which suggested a 'talking shop'. 

Various people argued that the seminar needed to address the serious problems that South Africa faced in preserving its audio-visual archive. By the afternoon of the second day, in spite of assurances by INA, it was clear that these concerns had grounds.

The programme was dedicated to profiling examples of successful digitisation projects in Europe and discussion of the reverse issue of the problems innate to digital preservation, such as the permanent transformation of the original to another format, or the life of digital objects compared to older formats. While the case studies presented in the last session were each of interest, such as the Ulwazi Programme for the eThekwini Municipality in Durban, run by a Digital Media consultancy company, and the Balkans' Memory project, which INA has supported, these presentations might have been matched with workshops to deal with South African archives. 

While digitisation plans are key to the preservation of archives in South Africa, what was not practically addressed was how to prioritise this. There is a huge discrepancy between the digitisation projects funded by the European Union presented at the seminar and the difficulty of finding the resources and the political will for digitisation projects in South Africa. The answer, voiced by Daniel Terrugi, head of  Research at INA, was to think small and start by digitising specific collections or sections of archives. Start with a scanner, he suggested.

Jean-Luc Vernhet, Deputy Manager of the Media Content Division at INA, also responded to the urgency raised by participants that important collections in South Africa could be saved through digitisation, by encouraging participants to start now, however small. Jo-Anne Duggan supported this approach, citing the case of an archivist in Eritrea who raised five hundred Euros to buy a scanner and two bicycles and who went around libraries copying materials. Other advice from INA, which surprised participants, was that it was cheaper to digitise everything, than to start trying to select materials to conserve.

A wide range of examples of successful digitisation programmes and expert technical advice and experience was shared. Yet whether INA has taken on board the depth of the problems and issues facing archives in South Africa, raised by South African members of the panels and the audience, is yet to be seen. The point was made that to create the necessary political will, different groups of stakeholders need to work together, rather than blame or point fingers at specific individuals and institutions.

The seminar ended with an impromptu and unscheduled proposal from Craig Matthew, on the part of the South African participants, that a network of South African practitioners is established and a task team is set up. This could have easily have been prioritised as an item to be discussed fully at the last session of the seminar. A draft mission statement inviting the comments of participants has just been announced through the Archival Platform.

This was the first of two seminars, the next is to be held in two years time. There is clearly a need for practical support to help with the digitisation of South African archives, an agenda which could be factored into the follow-up seminar, possibly through a series of practical workshops held at specific archives.

Antoine Michon, the Consul of France in Cape Town, standing in for the Cultural Counsellor of France in South Africa, proposed in his opening address that the project between France and South Africa for the preservation of images was a long-term partnership. It is important, therefore, that researchers build on their participation in this seminar to ensure that the partnership does endure and, more crucially, that it delivers a sustained engagement with the important task of the preservation of audio-visual archives in South Africa and facilitating affordable access to them.

• Emma Sandon is an APC Honorary Research Fellow based at Birkbeck College, University of London.