Posted on August 5, 2012
President Jacob Zuma, Kwa-Zulu Natal (KZN) Premier Zweli Mkhize, King Goodwill Zwelithini and Ndlunkulu Zola Mafu at the Unveiling of Inkosi Zihlandlo "ka Gcwabe" Mkhize in Emfume South Coast, KZN. Image and caption source: http://www.gcis.gov.za/content/president-zuma-attends-unveiling-inkosi-sihlandlo-mkhizes-monument-5
The histories written from records held in colonial archives are distortions in favour of those who ruled during colonial eras. The most common fate of archives in postcolonial countries is that postcolonial ruling elites disinvest from national archival systems and distance themselves from archives created under colonial rule. This is the story of archives in many postcolonial countries.
While many African countries gained independence in the 1960s and hence have had time to go through the collapse of archives and emerge from the morass, South Africa is only now on its precipitous slide towards what seems to be going to be the collapse of the national archival system, unless something radical is done urgently. Is this imminent collapse of archives a result of neglect because the archives hold records of colonial and apartheid rule? Perhaps. However, in the making of policy for the postcolonial era in the 1990s a role for the archives in addressing the colonial and one-sided nature of the archive was imagined and written into law. How has the future that was imagined turned out? Let us take a step back and look at how the future was imagined.
Policy
Section 3(d) of the National Archives Act no 43 of 1996 (as amended) states: "The objects and functions of the National Archives shall be to collect non-public records with enduring value of national significance which cannot be more appropriately preserved by another institution, with due regard to the need to document aspects of the nation's experience neglected by archives repositories in the past"Â (emphasis added). In 2000 cabinet mandated the then Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology to establish a National Oral History Programme. The foundational document of this programme adopted in September 2001 states that the programme would be deemed successful if, among other things,
a) at least fifteen oral history workshops per year [are held] in the nine South African provinces,
b) at least 20 projects per year are screened, monitored and funded, and
c) a national oral history association is established.
But beyond being central to the founding of the Oral History Association of South Africa and random recordings by the Film, Video and Sound Archives, the National Archives have done little else because of a dire shortage of capacity. In provinces work that has been done includes academics doing local history projects (Peter Delius in Mpumalanga, Noor Nieftagodien and Phil Bonner in Alexandra, etc.), an odd researcher in history, literary studies or another disciplines pursuing something of interest to her or him (and this kind of research is by no means the mainstream in our universities), a museum here and there doing some random collecting, or the odd budding imbongi learning the craft from predecessors.
If this is the situation, are we systematically dealing with the legacies of the colonial archival inheritance? What needs to be done?
People all over the country are continuing to engage with the deep past. An example of this engagement is the commemoration of Zihlandlo KaGcwabe of the Mkhize at an event attended by, among others, President Jacob Zuma, King Goodwill Zwelithini and premier of KwaZulu-Natal, Zweli Mkhize . Another example is contained in the story in the Star Africa Edition of 10 July 2012 which reported that the Khoi-San are unhappy about the state"™s neglect of their attempts to re-establish the institution of chieftainship that was destroyed by displacement under colonialism and apartheid in their communities in the Northern Cape (Star Africa Edition, p. 7).
In thinking about how to work towards a national archival system that's up to the task of addressing the problematic of a colonial inheritance we must answer some hard questions that could lead us to filling the gaps that policy makers imagined would be filled in the 1990s. Here are some of the questions: What information or records or archives do the uses of the past I have named above and many others rely on? I ask this because surely to make a claim that one's particular ancestors were forcibly removed from a particular place or were dethroned as traditional leaders of a particular place at a certain time, one must rely on evidence which one believes in the veracity or verifiability or at least the usability of.
Secondly, where does this information or these records or archives reside? Are they being systematically kept somewhere where they are preserved for posterity so that when in 100 years' time the state, certain private citizens or academics want to revisit how arguments were being made about the past now there'll be evidence of what the contestations in this particular moment were about? Or are we so focused on creating singular national narratives that can be packaged as heritage that questioning and dissenting voices do not even enter the ambit of what is officially permissible for systematic capture and preservation?
Let me begin some tentative answers to the questions I have posed so far in order to move towards pointing out how the future imagined in the formulation of policy a little over a decade ago has turned out. On the question of what information or knowledge or records popular claims about the past rely on, many rely on stories about what happened in that. Most of us have or had a slightly strange auntie or uncle who is or was an encyclopedia of information s/he gleaned from her/ his elders in the family. Many of our families have an elder to whom we turn when we perform ceremonies in which we address our ancestors. They can call up our lineages and call out the praises of each ancestor in the lineage as well as the address names of the clan as a whole in the appropriate manner. Yet these elders are almost everywhere lamenting that what they know will die with them because the younger ones are not interested in learning these things.
Ancestral Stories
However, some of the initiatives we have profiled are indeed intervening to halt this loss of memory. (See Bradley van Sitters and Musa Hlatshwayo's stories.) More broadly, in Ancestral Stories we have profiled stories of, for example, clan groups meeting all over KZN to reconstruct their histories before they were colonised by the Zulu kingdom, Khoi-San groups calling for recognition and speaking their pasts into the public record, how people are using Facebook to discuss the histories of their clans and share praises, as well as books, exhibitions and theatre productions engaging the longer past. Most of these initiatives call into question the overwhelming focus on struggle history of state-driven heritage initiatives. They point to a deep-seated need in many of us to know who our ancestors have been over time and how we have historically become who we are. For social cohesion an appropriately constructed sense of historical self seems to me a necessity for each individual citizen. Such a sense of self requires that a mother living in the village down the road from here be able to point to this building and say to her child, 'In there you can listen to a discussion with your grandmother about how she lived. You can get a copy of her birth certificate in that place, learn how our clan is related to these other clans in that book, and get a version of our iziduko, or clan praises in that other place.' Unless more of the many of us who are interested in these things raise our voices, in 50 years' time we'll still be complaining about how the colonial archive does not represent us. Making it possible for people to hear and speak their pasts is as important as constructing dignity by building them houses. Such work is slow and methodical and long-term, with no immediate pay offs. We must urgently attend to expanding what the archive is.
Mbongiseni Buthelezi is the Archival Platform's Ancestral Stories Coordinator