Southern African Historical Society gathers in Gaborone

The Southern African Historical Society (SAHS) - the name was changed from South African Historical Society at the conference held at UCT in 2005 - met for the first time outside South Africa from 26 to 30 June at the University of Botswana, Gaborone.

I was especially glad to attend this conference, having been president of the Society when it decided, on my prompting, to change its name. I had also attended the first-ever regional historical conference to be held in Botswana in 1973. Phil Bonner, Neil Parsons and John Aldridge, who had also been there in the Seventies, returned to Gaborone 40 years later for this SAHS conference.

Over one hundred papers were delivered on a very wide range of topics, along with outstanding keynote addresses by Neil Parsons and Jane Carruthers. One of the highlights of the conference was the roundtable on 'The State of the Archives in South Africa'. At this event, Mbongiseni Buthelezi of the Archival Platform told of the report soon to be completed on the various archives the Archival Platform has visited. He presented a mixed picture, but one that was mostly extremely gloomy, given the lack of concern for archives by those in authority.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the person from the National Archives who was scheduled to speak did not turn up. A member of the audience, who had recently been appointed to the new National Archives Advisory Council, seemed to think there was hope that things would get better, and an academic who has recently used the Free State provincial archives described them to me as 'a dream', because he had been able to call up an unlimited number of files, delivered to him within minutes, but most people painted a dire picture of the state of the archives in South Africa. The panel did not address other countries in the region, but a speaker from Swaziland on another panel described the archives in that country as 'a nightmare'.

At the conference's wrap-up session the outgoing president of the SAHS, Ackson Kanduza of Zambia's Open University, suggested to his successor, Sandra Swart of the University of Stellenbosch, that at the next conference, to be held at Stellenbosch in 2014, a session on archives should be a plenary event. Few, if any, could have left the roundtable on archives with any expectation that the situation would have improved by then.