The Upington Trial digital curation on re-source

In November 1985, at the height of the demise of apartheid, 26 people were arrested in a black township on the outskirts of the Northern Cape town of Upington, for the murder of Lucas Sethwala, a local policeman. The murder took place after almost 3,000 township residents met on a soccer field to peacefully protest their daily living conditions and the brutal police conduct against the community. Police arrived in armoured trucks, declared the meeting unlawful,and fired tear gas cannisters to disperse the crowd. As the crowd fled with police in pursuit, a small group gathered in front of Lucas Sethwala’s home.Sethwala fired two shots from inside his house, seriously wounding a young boy playing nearby. Fleeing his home, Sethwala was chased onto an open field,felled to the ground, beaten over the head with his own rifle, and set alight with petrol. Two and a half years later, the Honourable Justice Jan Basson of the Upington Supreme Court convicted 25 of the 26 accused of Sethwala’s murder on the basis of the ‘common purpose’ doctrine. Most of the 25 convicted werefound neither to have physically participated in the killing of Sethwala, nor to have demonstrated the individual intention to execute the murder. In May1989, 14 of the 25 were sentenced to death. Facing the imposition of the death penalty, the 25 accused engaged Cape Town solicitor, Andrea Durbach, andNamibian barrister, Anton Lubowski, to represent them in the trial on extenuation and mitigation of sentence. A year and a half later, after mounting what was to become one of the most extensive trials on extenuation in African legal history—with evidence from clinical and behavioral psychologists, social anthropologists, forensic medical scientists, and criminologists—14 of the 25, including an elderly couple (a railway employee and domestic worker), a former mayor, a male nurse, and a young artist, were sentenced to death. Eleven of the 25 were sentenced to prison terms or to undertake community service. A few months later, Anton Lubowski, the first white member of SWAPO, the Namibian liberation movement, was assassinated. In May 1991, the South African Appellate Division overturned 21 of the 25 murder convictions and set aside all 14 death sentences. In June 1995, just over a year after the inauguration of President Nelson Mandela and almost four years after the release of the Upington 14 from death row, the new South African Constitutional Court declared capital punishment inconsistent with the new Constitution and abolished the death penalty in the case of S v. Makwanyane.

The value in archiving the records and associated material of the Upington Trial lies in the preservation of key aspects of a particular historical period, both locally and nationally. Importantly, it offers an opportunity for the development of an archive pertinent to the history of a particular community in the relatively sparsely archived Northern Cape. It makes a significant contribution to the archive of South African legal history and the application(and distortion) of the ‘common purpose doctrine’ in political trials. In addition, the records feature smaller collections of various ‘off-shoots’ from the Upington trial, for example the research and evidence provided by the experts (which included a highly respected anthropologist,criminologist, and behavioural psychologist), the history of the Defence and Aid Fund which was the primary funder of the trial, other death penalty and common purpose cases in South Africa legal history, the Constitutional Court’s abolition of the death penalty, the artistic innovations created by the accused during the extended time in jail e.g. the matchstick boats, the role of the media and international anti-apartheid organisations, the TRC hearings of some of the accused, the life and contribution of Anton Lubowski.

Scope of the materials

In the first instance, the project deals with the material in the possession of one of the trial lawyers, Andrea Durbach, including court transcripts, photographs, letters from death row, folders of media clippings, art works, matchstick boats, the book Upington (by Andrea Durbach) and the documentary, A Common Purpose, directed by Mitzi Goldman. FHYA experience indicates that as a core digital collection like this take shape, and once it is available online, it, by virtue of its existence, elicits further components from a wide variety of sources. People who hold further elements become motivated to contribute them to the archive. In this way the initial digitisation push facilitates ongoing accretion to an archive.

Re-source

The project will be an output of the APC’s new re-source initiative. A key feature of deposit via re-source is that instead of the donation process seeing the donor deposit the physical material, followed by archival arrangement, and ultimately by digitisation in due course, the process begins with digitisation. Digitisation-led archiving caters for the acquisition of digital resources, often in cases where physical acquisition may not be possible or may be delayed. It pays close attention to what innovative digital assemblages can achieve. It offers new affordances, epistemologically and methodologically, at a time when physical consultation of archives is limited and limiting. It is an opportunity for expanding the university’s archival base. It offers much-needed decolonial opportunities, leading to new kinds of collections assembled experimentally by researchers, typically filling gaps in the colonial archive; introducing completely new material; or rearranging older materials in such a way that there arrangement enables the asking of different and new questions. In these respects re-source is pioneering, innovative way of building archives in the twenty-first century. In 2022 re-source will be used on a trial basis by a group of post-graduate student researchers and by the Upington trial project team.

Deposit via re-source, with its facilities for user and public contributions and engagement, further lends itself to stakeholder involvement. The Upington Trial record involves many stakeholders with whom the project is designed to engage and support.

The APC has been successful in securing donor funding for the Upington project from the Claude Leon Foundation which funded the original trial defence in the late 1980s, with further grant applications for the community engagement side of the work in the pipeline.