African Renaissance – A Call to Reality: Southern African Archives – How Should We Collect?

When President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa announced his dream for Africa and called it the African Renaissance, he did not envisage a rebirth, but rather a rediscovery of what Africa once was: a people free in mind and soul, capable of original thought, confident to live and to embrace life holistically, united with itself, nature and God: “The beginning of our rebirth as a Continent must be our own rediscovery of our soul”. Mbeki also refers to the African Renaissance as a “journey of self-discovery and the restoration of our self-esteem.” Mbeki’s own definition of the African Renaissance embraces “marriage of memory and dream, of past and future”. His objective is to free the African mind from the enslavement that colonialism brought, which almost crushed the African soul and distorted, banished, and almost destroyed this memory. It is in this context that I would like to explore the archives of Southern Africa: archives as places of memory and archives that need preservation desperatelyAfrican archives are at a crossroads. There are no easy answers to the questions that come to mind: Does being an African archivist require a new body of knowledge, a new methodology regarding the treatment of archives and new practices? How do African archivists appraise oral records? Do they have to? How do they arrange and describe oral testimony for researchers?23 This is for the African archivists to decide. However, these archival functionalities that exist in every archive should not distract archivists from their real task: to preserve and maintain the oral and visual memory of Southern Africa that is changing forever, in a way it deems fit. ESARBICA Journal Vol.21 2002: 24-3