Archive history in Zambia as a history of loss

Abstract

This article is about how both the accidental and intentional loss of archives in Zambia has shaped what kind of history can be written about the region and who can write this history. The loss of archives is often viewed as the result of intentional destruction but he loss of archives can also be accidental. Moreover, loss is not only related to destruction, intentional or otherwise. It can also be about the loss of an archive to a specific place or group of people through the removal or disappearance of that archive. Many archives have disappeared or been removed from Zambia, and the same is the case in many other African countries. There is a longstanding assumption that archives can be best preserved outside Zambia and this shapes who can write about the region’s history.

KEYWORDS:

• Archives
• archive history
• Zambia
• colonialism
• archive preservation
• African history
• national archives

The loss of archives is often viewed as the result of intentional destruction. This is particularly the case in colonial contexts. Departing colonial powers often destroyed or concealed state archives and South Africa’s security services engaged in archive destruction on such a mass scale at the end of apartheid that it required the use of a blast furnace at a steel plant (Harris 2000, 39). Anti-colonial forces, too, have targeted archives as symbols of state power to be destroyed. Perhaps the best example of this is the burning of Custom House in Dublin, which housed the records of Britain’s administration in Ireland, in 1921, during Ireland’s War of Independence.

The loss of archives can also be entirely accidental though, as with the fire at the Jagger Library in 2021. Nor is loss only related to destruction, intentional or otherwise. Often, loss is the loss of an archive to a specific place or group of people through the removal or disappearance of that archive.

This is the case in Zambia where archival history can be seen as a history of loss, both intentional and accidental. Our joint presentation on this topic at the symposium prompted the thoughtful question from Alírio Karina: How does loss organise African Studies?

We take up this question in this article and look at loss in two senses: destruction and disappearance. These losses have shaped which topics are written about on the region’s past and who can write this history.

This history of loss in Zambia is a long one. Destruction was embedded into archiving policy in the colonial period almost as soon as bodies of documents were first accumulated. The British South Africa Company (BSAC), a private company that seized and first administered the territory on behalf of Britain, had no policies for preserving documents, apart from sending documents deemed important to the Company’s offices in London (Baxter 1969, 28). All of these documents were subsequently destroyed when the building was flattened in an air raid during the Second World War.

This event encapsulates both the wider theme of accidental destruction and the persistent belief that archives could only be preserved outside the country.

Control of the territory passed from the BSAC to the British Government in 1924, and more of an effort was made to manage records, though with the same assumptions about what should be preserved and where it should be preserved. Colonial archiving policy was first articulated in a circular on records management and preservation sent by the Colonial Office in 1929. This concluded that Zambia’s own natural environmental prevented historical documents from being preserved:

colonial official records of historical value are in some instances in a bad state of preservation and that, owing to climatic causes and other causes, their disintegration would appear to be simply a matter of time and preventable only by removal to a temperate climate…[To prevent such a loss] they should be transferred to Britain with a view to their preservation. (cited in Simabwachi 2019, 86–87)

Records that could not be preserved and were deemed to have no value were destroyed; an action which, in the view of the colonial authorities, simply accelerated what was an inevitable outcome. In 1936, a Records Destruction Committee was established and archives management “was framed in terms of the destruction imperative, rather than the preservation imperative” (Simabwachi 2019, 97).

The 1929 circular embodied an assumption about archives that has dominated thinking about archival preservation in the century since then: archives are best preserved outside the country as preservation within Zambia is impossible. This same guiding assumption is apparent in many other parts of the African continent, leading to a phenomenon Peter Limb (2002) termed “document drain” from Africa to Europe and North America.

Documents do not always flow off the continent, however. One of the important collections housed in the University of Cape Town Library’s Special Collections owes its presence at the library to this same assumption. The 200 boxes containing the papers of Jack and Ray Simons, anti-apartheid activists who spent many years in exile in Lusaka, were sent out of Zambia in 1987 in order “to save their vast collection from destruction” (Belling 2014, 111–12). These papers were sent first to Sweden for sorting and microfilming, then to UCT after the end of apartheid and were subsequently almost destroyed in the 2021 fire. There is some similarity here to the earlier loss of the BSAC archival material: their removal from Zambia for preservation almost resulted in their accidental destruction.

Not all archival material moved great geographical distances. Some material moved relatively close by as a result of the peculiar arrangements of colonial government after the Second World War. For a short period, from 1953 to 1963, Zambia was grouped with Zimbabwe and Malawi to form the Central African Federation, with its capital in Harare (then Salisbury). Government documents were relocated there and private companies followed suit. Among them were the two mining companies that dominated Zambia’s economy, Rhodesian Anglo American and the Rhodesian Selection Trust, both of which moved their administrative offices to Harare. After the Federation disintegrated, many of these files remained in Harare as political tensions, following the Unilateral Declaration for Independence by white settlers in Rhodesia in 1965, led to the border being closed. The movement of people and goods between the countries ceased (Mwanakatwe 1994, 72), which made it impossible for the mining companies, which had relocated to Zambia, to retrieve their records.

Although the idea that archives can only be preserved outside Zambia is a colonial one, we do not suggest that preservation within Zambia is straightforward or guaranteed. Many archives within the country have been lost. After independence, in 1964, the new government sought to establish a state archive, which soon became the National Archives of Zambia. The National Archives is today equipped with good storage facilities and air conditioning systems that safeguard the archival resources from environmental damage, but it has faced a severe shortage of space in its repository for many years. Government documents have been housed in warehouses in Lusaka or in rural offices without air-conditioning or metal shelving. While all government records are required to be transferred to the central repositories for safe custody, not all make it there due to challenges of distance and limited storage space (Haamoya 2009, 71). Instead, records from recent decades steadily deteriorate in repositories never designed to house them.

This situation is not peculiar to Zambia but has been common across Southern Africa for decades. Not long after independence, M. J. Simons and Pambi Mukula (1974) noted that archives in the newly independent countries of East and Central Africa were lost due to insufficient staffing levels to monitor the safety of documents in archiving institutions and lack of storage space.

The loss of archives has shaped our understanding of the past. The historical records that remain best preserved are those of the institutions with sufficient resources and self-interest to accumulate and preserve documents, which in Zambia is the mining industry. The mining industry archives are by far the largest repository in the country, and this has strongly influenced the historiography (Money 2021). There are many examples of this. There is, for instance, relatively little historical research about domestic workers, even though this has been one of the largest sources of urban employment for many decades. In her doctoral research on the topic in the early 2010s, Sacha Hepburn (2016) used the archives of the two trade unions for domestic workers. A decade later, the archives of both of these organisations had disappeared.

Another major challenge is the country’s political history, which is often centred on the narrative of the former ruling party the United National Independence Party (UNIP), which governed Zambia from 1964 to 1991. The creation of the UNIP Research Bureau for its members resulted in a selective approach to what was included as valuable political records and what was ignored if it did not fit into national narrative according to UNIP. As Marja Hinfelaar and Giacomo Macola (2004, 12) note, Zambia’s collection of political party archives largely consists of UNIP records, while significant private papers of other political figures were not acquired. The declaration of a one-party state by UNIP in 1971 further hindered the preservation of other political party records. Mukula (1992) notes that documents that belonged to banned opposition political parties such as the United Progressive Party (UPP), which represented a faction that split away from UNIP, were destroyed. Other records of earlier political organisations involved in the struggle for independence were not retained.

UNIP records were made available to researchers. Mwelwa Musambachime (1991) produced a useful guide to the UNIP archives, explaining that, at the time of his writing, the archives were accessible at the party’s headquarters in central Lusaka and were overseen by a Research Bureau staffed by respected scholars, with clear policies regarding access. These records have subsequently been digitised and are available online through the British Library. In contrast, none of the three parties that have ruled Zambia since – the Movement for Multiparty Democracy, the Patriotic Front and the United Party for National Development – have produced accessible archives.

The loss of archives, either through destruction or removal, has strongly shaped the kinds of histories that are written. It has also shaped who can write such histories. The locations of archives of Zambian history outside the region mean that Zambian scholars often cannot access them. Alfred Tembo’s recent history of Zambia during the Second World War is based primarily on material at the National Archives of Zambia, and with polite understatement he notes that he could not utilise relevant material from archives located in Britain “owing to logistical challenges I encountered in trying to access these” (2021, 19).

Loss has organised how historians study the recent past of Zambia and who can study particular topics. Archives located within and outside the country have been lost, narrowing the kind of topics people write on and privileging certain subjects. Moreover, the longstanding assumption, too, that archives can only be preserved outside the country – an assumption that has survived the destruction or near-destruction of relocated archival material – continues to shape who can write histories and limits the access of Zambians to their own past.

The same is true of other parts of the African continent. The accumulation of archives off the continent, whether justified on preservation grounds or not, diminishes the kind of histories that can be written and accessed by people from the places the archives pertain to. So, too, do the indifference or inability of contemporary organisations to preserve their own archives, a phenomenon by no means confined to Africa.

Debates on archives in Africa have often focused on silences in archives and the difficulties of recovering African voices and perspectives from archives created by colonial governments, white settlers or missionaries. There is, in our view, a more practical consideration, namely how the loss of archives shapes and limits the kinds of histories we can produce, whether they are lost completely or lost only to some people and available to others.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Duncan Money

Duncan Money is an independent historian and a research associate at the University of the Free State. His research focuses on the mining industry, and he is the author of White Mineworkers on Zambia’s Copperbelt as well as co-editor of Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa and Born with a Copper Spoon: A Global History of Copper.

Miyanda Simabwachi

Miyanda Simabwachi is Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation at Chalimbana University in Lusaka. She was awarded her PhD from the University of the Free State in 2019 for her history of Zambia’s archives, and her research interests include political and institutional histories of African archival institutions, especially those in Zambia.