Arms’ length, hands on, blinkers off

Launching our “Letters for Lulu” campaign this week prompts us to reflect on the mandate of the state in the management of the South African archive, our heritage.

How we manage our archive affects our identity, our account of ourselves and how we can respond to the opportunities of the future. The archive is particularly important in a country like ours with a highly contested and conflictual past, in a old continent accused so long by the West of being ‘without a history’.

Our archive and heritage sector is in crisis. What will you do about it?  Read More

Post-colonial revival: Bow, Women & Song

A women’s day event, ‘Bow, Women & Song’, poses questions about new representations of indigenous music.

Bow songs document significant moments in our history, including early encounters with Europeans, migrations to urban areas and the brutalities of our past laws. But bow songs also convey something more intimate, they sing of lost love by young women, children’s sleeping songs and travel-tunes of working men.  Read More

Treatment Literacy: The Siyayinqoba Beat It! AIDS archive

AIDS and the struggle for access to treatment has defined the notion of a progressive politics based on the constitutional promise to realise a whole range of social and economic rights – not least being the right to health, which is fundamental to the rights to life and dignity.

An AIDS archive is essential to chart the history of changing perceptions of and reactions to the pandemic in South Africa, and to inform treatment literacy programs. Such an archive, with full online access, is in the making, comprising over 3000 hours of tape produced by the Community Media Trust for the Siyayinqoba Beat It! Television programme. In this archive, generations of researchers and video makers will find an invaluable resource which indexes the real meaning of the changes induced by the epidemic and its response.

“Letters for Lulu”: taking the pulse of the sector

Heritage Month is a time of reflection on the past and planning for the future. We believe in the desire of the newly elected government to listen to the people and improve service delivery. In addressing problems and grasping new opportunities in Arts and Culture, what needs to be done, and by whom? In the spirit of “Tips for Trevor”, write your “Letter for Lulu”, the Honourable Minister Lulu Xingwana, and tell her what you think about the state of the heritage and archive sector. Email all scanned letters to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and contact us to post us the originals. At the end of heritage month we will deliver them all to the Minister and follow up on the issues raised.

Platform provides new opportunities for participatory democracy in arts and culture

Political analyst Richard Calland (Mail & Guardian, July 24) described the current political environment in South Africa as providing opportunities for participatory democracy that had been increasingly lacking under former president Thabo Mbeki. He pointed to a high level glasnost in politics, a new conviviality and openness under President Jacob Zuma, in spite of accountability and implementation problems in the nether regions of government. At the same time, after the 2007 ANC national conference in Polokwane, there has been a new effort, spearheaded by party secretary-general Gwede Mantashe, to bring ANC policy closer to government.  Read More

The Archives Advisory Council: a chequered past, with hope for the future?

Verne Harris reviews the history of the Archives Advisory Council, outlines weaknesses in the past and underlines the importance of making strong nominations to the Council before 28 August.

The National Archives Advisory Council is the successor structure to the National Archives Commission, which was established in terms of the 1996 National Archives of South Africa Act. The architects of this legislation were mindful of the need to create new management and oversight structures for the National Archives which took into account the fact that at that point it was little more than the old apartheid-era State Archives Service with a new name. One of the key mechanisms for providing the post-1994 ANC-led government with watchdog and public accountability capacities in relation to the transformation of the National Archives was the National Archives Commission.  Read More

Who are we training? And for what purpose?

Deirdre Prins-Solani of CHDA shares a few thoughts on ecological thinking and heritage training on the African continent.

The ability of the baobab tree to grow, thrive and survive is surely a combination of a number of environmental, social, cultural and unknown factors. The rains, the sun, the nutrition in the soil, the quality of air, the protection of them because of their cultural purpose, the uses of the tree from food to bowl…When one imagines the ecosystem which creates and sustains such life through centuries of change which has been mediated either by humankind and natural phenomena, the value of these lessons can certainly be applied to the nature and notion of “training” within the heritage sector on the African continent.  Read More

A workshop on Digital Resource Management

DISA (Digital Innovation South Africa) recently hosted a 2.5 day workshop in Durban with the aim of providing a comprehensive overview of the nuts and bolts required for the successful management of digital resources.  The opening address was delivered by Professor Nelson Ijumba, Vice-Chancellor of Research at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Patricia Liebetrau reports.  Read More

Investing in arts and culture

Jared Diamond’s fabulous book Collapse, looks at why some societies collapsed in the past because of injudicious use of their resources. He talks about the Nordic Greenlanders who spent most of their export income on fancy imported European materials for their churches, and much of their local resources on raising beef, rather than learning to eat local foods like the Inuit. This is what finally did it for them, when their connections by boat with Europe were disrupted, although in the meantime it probably kept them going as a community for about 500 years.  Read More

Encyclopaedia of South African Arts and Culture

I found this link today - looks like a most interesting initiative in KZN

The Encyclopaedia of South African Arts and Culture is a major multi-year project of national significance that aims to produce multi-volume, multi-media work of encyclopaedic scope that will encompass the verbal, performing and visual arts as well as many expressions of South African cultural heritage. Cultural literacy in our plural society, cultural industry and cultural diplomacy will benefit from the availability of user-friendly information the Encyclopaedia will supply, in its electronic and print forms.  Read More