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Archives, Truth and Reconciliation

1ST NATIONAL ARCHIVES LECTURE | SENATE HOUSE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON | 24 OCTOBER 2005

I woke up this morning feeling extremely queasy and everything around me seemed a bit unreal. I would reach for something and just as I was about to seize it, it seemed to disappear.

Naturally I was quite alarmed and I went to the doctor and the doctor looked at me and said:

‘You’re from South Africa, aren’t you?’

And I said, ‘Yes’.

He said, ‘I can tell from your accent, and I can tell from just the way you’re relating these symptoms to me; immediately I know what your ailment is, it’s endemic in South Africa, I’m sad to say it’s incurable, but it can be managed’.

And I said, ‘Well what is it?’

And he said, ‘It’s archive fever’.

‘I’ve had many patients from South Africa with that ailment’, he continued, ‘and I’m not surprised, because people entering the realm of archives feel they’re entering a realm of security where facts are facts, where things are collected and classified in a completely neutral way, where there’s no hierarchy of importance, and chunks – nuggets – of social reality from one period are stored forever, for examination, certainly for as long as the materials last. And instead of feeling more secure as a result of entering this realm, they find themselves totally displaced. To begin with, the documents are as partial as you can get. They were documents that were collected by a ruling minority, confident and assured in relation to its right to rule, and not only to rule but to the right to record their own history, the story of the world in which they functioned, from their own point of view, which they saw as the natural point of view’.

‘As for the majority of the population, they weren’t agents of history; they were subjects of anthropology. They didn’t live in time, but existed as units of unchanging social structures. And if any information at all was collected from what were called the native people, it was assembled not with the view to understanding their society as it understood itself, but with a view to more effective administration through control and subordination. And so this apparently neutral collection of documents called the archive immediately appears to be as partial as you can get. The silences become far more dramatic than the speech, the absences from the record more resonant than anything you read. You want to know what has been left out, but how do we find out what’s not there? How can we interpret what is there without knowing about the silences and the gaps? And to make it worse, huge quantities of these documents that would seem to be particularly revealing were destroyed – deliberately, intentionally destroyed, to ensure that the picture that came through was a partial picture of a partial picture. Can you be surprised that your head seems split and your vision blurred?’

‘If that’s not enough’, he continued relentlessly, ‘Jacques Derrida came to Johannesburg at the height of the ferment and left behind him a blazing trail of contestation and irreverence. It was he who introduced the very words “archive fever”. The very act of taking a document, a piece of information, and placing it in a file is, in its own way, betraying that document as a source of information. You’re detaching it from its context, you’re placing it in a different context, you’re giving it an eternal real life of its own, when in fact it had a transitory, integrated, consequential relationship with the context in which it was generated. A severed limb has all the physical features of an arm or a leg, but its formaldehyde immortality is its functional mortality. It no longer moves, feels pain, touches the ground or the arm or the leg of another.’

The doctor looked sadly and sympathetically at me. I felt disturbed. As anybody here would know, archive fever is very, very contagious. And if that wasn’t enough, archivists found themselves confronted by people from the Liberation Movement, saying:

The only reference to us, fighting for the rights of the majority of the people, in the documents that you claim to be neutral, are to us as a group of gangsters, terrorists. We are seen through the optic of police investigations aimed at destroying us. Everything we say and did is collected, not with a view to honouring what we stood for, but with a view to prosecuting us, maybe sending us to the gallows. The information is all distorted.

On the other hand, our own story of ourselves is not there at all: it was forbidden even to quote the whole list of banned people, it was a criminal offence to distribute their materials. One needed permission as a librarian to have a copy of Justice in South Africa by Albie Sachs, PhD, University of Sussex, my thesis, and it wasn’t easily granted.

If that’s not enough, other voices are coming forward: ‘What about the oral tradition? That is how memory is transmitted amongst our people: stories, parables, through oratory, praise singers, multiple different ways of interpreting legends, family narratives and stories from the Bible, tales passed from grandparents to parents to grandchildren, from generation to generation. A rich store of information and knowledge, it’s not in the archives at all’.

And then people say, ‘Well let’s go out and collect that information’.

You don’t know where to start, it’s millions of people with millions of stories and even if you concentrate, then the ultras will come along and say, ‘But you’re simply seeing these memory systems as potential evidence to be recorded in an archive, and you’re destroying the orality, you’re destroying their connection, you’re detaching them from their own context’.

No wonder you feel in a state of crisis; even when you’re trying to do good, people say you’re not doing it well enough. And then there’s a very strong women’s movement, saying,

‘We’re looking through these archives, going back to written records, from the Portuguese sailors, the Dutch sailors, the first Dutch settlers, the governors, the colonists, the missionaries; there’s no voice of women at all. Women weren’t there, one doesn’t know how children came unto the earth, how things were done; it’s a voice that’s completely absent, even from the records of the rulers, of those in charge of society. The so-called subaltern voices just aren’t there at all.’

And so you’re left with what looks like a rather pitiful collection of documents that formerly you were so proud of because you were guarding them for posterity and you feel in a state of crisis and you wonder, what can we do now? So much of the past has been lost. We have millions of people with their memories and their stories – how do we make sense of them? How do we integrate them? How do we give genuine dignity and equality to this precious function that we’re undertaking?

And so the doctor said to me, ‘You can see: it’s endemic and it’s incurable, but there is hope. It can be managed and I happen to have a very good medicine which I’m going to give to you … and I want you to open it at the right time, not straight away’.