“Working with the Archive: Second Apartheid Archive Conference”

The Apartheid Archives project

The Apartheid Archive project was conceptualized and initiated in August 2008 by 22 core researchers located at universities in South Africa, Australia, the United States and United Kingdom.
As described on its website, “the Apartheid Archives project is an international research initiative that aims to examine the nature of the experiences of racism of (particularly ‘ordinary’) South Africans under the old apartheid order and their continuing effects on individual and group functioning in contemporary South Africa. The project is fundamentally premised on the understanding that traumatic experiences from the past will constantly attempt to re-inscribe themselves (often in masked form) in the present, if they are not acknowledged, interrogated and addressed. Specifically, we believe that it is important for South African society to review, so as to acknowledge and deal with its past, in order to better manage its present and future.“

Noting that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has made a contribution to this process, the Apartheid Archive Project has chosen to focus on “the everyday experiences of ‘ordinary’ South Africans during the apartheid era, rather than simply focusing on the ‘grand’ narratives of the past or the privileged narratives of academic, political and social elites.” In effect, this study will attempt to fill the gaps interspersed between the ‘grand’ narratives recorded by the TRC.

To this end, the project is collecting, documenting, analysing and providing access to over 5000 personal or narrative accounts to examine the nature of the experiences of racism of South Africans under the old apartheid order and interrogate their continuing effects on individual and group functioning in contemporary South Africa.

The narratives

The Apartheid Archives project website invites South Africans older than 20 years of age visitors to submit narratives or short stories of their earliest and/or most significance experiences of race and racism in apartheid South Africa.

Participants are advised that their stories are important for society and informed that stories will be archived and made available to researchers, and eventually disseminated more broadly to the public via the project’s website

Guidelines for the submission of stories note the need for specific information such as year, place and key people involved and ask that the writer consider the impact of the incident on his or her views about him or herself and their relationships with others. Participants are assured that their names and other personal details which may identify them will be removed from the story before it is made public. Participants are also told explicitly that stories will be examined by researchers and that these examinations may be published in journal articles, books and on various websites.

Working with the Archive: 2nd Apartheid Archive Conference

In the introduction to the call for papers for ‘Working with the Archive: 2nd Apartheid Archive Conference’ the organisers state that, “Sixteen years ago the curtain was finally drawn on the system of institutionalised racism that the world knew as apartheid, and the memorial signifiers (such as monuments, museums, statues and street names) of its demise are writ large on South Africa’s public landscape. Yet, its pernicious effects on our inner-worlds; on memory, identity and subjectivity, continue to constrain the promises of a truly post-apartheid South Africa. Trapped by a national desire to look forward rather than to the past, the everyday personal accounts of the scourge of apartheid are rapidly fading into a forgotten past.”

At the conference, researchers involved in the Apartheid Archives project and in a variety of disciplinary, trans-disciplinary, interpretive and methodological interventions presented brief short papers focussing on key motifs, research problems, methodological issues and insights into the Apartheid Archives body of narratives. In addition to these papers, keynote speakers including Saul Dubow, Sussex University, UK, Philomena Essed, Antioch University, USA and Pumla Gqola, University of the Witwatersrand presented keynote lectures.

While most of the papers were absorbing, albeit difficult to listen to because they evidenced the deep and fundamental damage of apartheid, it was of particular interest to see the way in which narratives were examined through the lens of psychology, rather than history. A number of the presentations were particularly memorable. Gabeba Baderoon’s reflections on ‘the ordinary’; Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s rather harsh dissection of the narrative of a young white girls dilemma about what teacups to use to serve construction workers, made me wonder if it is possible for people with vastly differing life experiences to understand the actions and insecurities of those deemed as ‘other’; Antjie Krog and Nosisi Mpolweni’s moving account of the testimonies delivered to the TRC by three women brought home the stark tragedy of apartheid, and the potentially devastating impact on the lives of ‘ordinary’ women; Leswin Laubsher’s evocative contribution in which he made mentioned the haunting of the archive added a poetic note to the proceedings; and Lieza Louw’s film showing student protests at Wits, reminded us shockingly of the raw brutality with which the police dealt with dissent. 

For me, as an outsider, one of the few people at the conference not directly involved in the project, I wondered about the complex relationship between trauma, memory, history and archive. The Archival Platform’s engagement with memory activists is usually focussed on ways in which to record and preserve memory, on memory as a treasure or a resource, not as a burden. The Apartheid Archives Conference made me wonder if forgetting may sometimes be an easier and happier route to travel.

For more details about the Apartheid Archives project and its conferences see the website

Jo-Anne Duggan

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