Chris Saunders

I began using archives in the late 1960s when researching my doctoral dissertation for Oxford on the Transkei in the late 19th century. This was before there were photocopiers in any of the archives I visited, let alone digital cameras... In the 1970s, after beginning to teach at UCT, I turned my attention to Africans in Cape Town, then to questions of historiography, which required relatively little archival research but began to lead me to a broader understanding of the sources of historical enquiry.

More recently, I have been mainly working on the transition from apartheid to democracy in Namibia and South Africa, and was for many years involved in two digital projects (DISA and Aluka) related to that work.

Recent publications include Southern African Liberation Struggles: New Local, Regional and Global Perspectives, ed. Hilary Sapire and Chris Saunders (UCT Press, 2013), a chapter on Albert Luthuli in A. Adebajo, ed., Africa's Peacemakers (Zed Press, 2014) and a chapter with Sean Morrow in Andrew and Leslie Bank, eds., Inside African Anthropology. Monica Wilson and Her Interpreters (Cambridge University Press, 2013).