After the fire: loss, archive and African studies

ABSTRACT

A devastating fire destroyed the University of Cape Town (UCT) Jagger Library in April 2021, housing UCT Libraries Special Collections and its African Studies print collections. It triggered an outpouring of grief and concern about irrecoverable archival loss of material that carried the designation “African Studies.” This article challenges this perception of the disaster and its significance for African Studies. Moving away from a negative emphasis on loss, it takes a sensitised position that recognises the possibilities for a reconceptualisation of archives, loss and African Studies presented by the fire. It critically reconsiders the relationships between archives, loss and African Studies by taking seriously how archives are permanently marked by the absence of losses that precede and coincide with their production and remain in a state of decay. Building upon a symposium raising these issues, the questions that guide this article and the eponymously titled Special Issue are: What happens when we take the notion of loss seriously as a path for thinking through archives and their relationship to African Studies as a field? How might we read points of connection and disjuncture between the management of archival loss on the continent and the historical losses that structure African Studies?

KEYWORDS:

• Archive
• loss
• African studies
• Africa
• Jagger library
• University of Cape Town

Even as loss is inescapable, the catastrophic still takes us by surprise. On the afternoon of April 18 2021, a raging wildfire swept down from the slopes of Devil’s Peak into the grounds of the Upper Campus of the University of Cape Town (UCT). Hot ash and burning embers gusted over buildings igniting foliage and buildings on site and in surrounding areas. The fire department arrived on the scene, and students and staff were evacuated. The roof of the J.W. Jagger Library building caught fire, and eventually collapsed, setting the reading room and its books ablaze. UCT’s Plant Conservation Unit offices and collections were also destroyed (Kirkwood 2021). The scene of the iconic building and its irreplaceable holdings going up in flames left the UCT intellectual community, city residents and the country in shock. Media coverage in the following days quickly underscored the wide social significance of the Jagger Library, throwing into public light its importance as a repository of material of importance for the South African national story, the African continent and the study of Africa. In the weeks that followed, UCT Libraries organised a mammoth salvage operation to recover material from the site. It coordinated volunteers and experts to assist in the evacuation of the Jagger Library basement stores through careful painstaking removal of materials “one crate at a time” and the emergency conservation and storage of wet materials (Singer and Noble 2022).

The event, and the salvage that followed, attracted sustained national and international media attention. As archival matter was recovered from amidst the ash (Jethro 2021), stretched parallels were drawn with other historic library and heritage disasters, such as the loss of the Library of Alexandria or the fire at the Notre Dame in Paris. This was not the only instance of fiery destruction of property at UCT in the last five years, nor was it the only university library to catch fire in South Africa in recent times (Makhubu 2020; Mbhele and Sibanyoni 2022). Yet it was the scale of the destruction and the significance of the building and its collections that contributed to its heightened media profile. That is not to say that public commentary about the disaster was homogeneously melancholic: there were voices that indeed celebrated the Jagger Library disaster as timely for an institution with a deep colonial history. Nevertheless, the dominant public response of grief and loss signalled a public grasp not merely of the importance of the Jagger Library, but also of archives as spaces for the safekeeping of precious and vulnerable knowledge resources for the use and enjoyment of future generations.

As much as the disaster destroyed the Jagger Library and its collections, we see it opening up space for a critical reconsideration of its history as a library and archive that helped give shape to African Studies. Moreover, the disaster enables a broader, continental consideration of archives and African Studies and the material and conceptual place of loss in shaping that relationship. As such this article and the Special Issue are not solely about the Jagger Library disaster. Instead, they take the event as a point of departure for asking a wider set of questions, addressed from multiple perspectives in the articles collected in this Special Issue, about archive, loss and African Studies.

Archival losses, silences and lacunae are not new subjects of sustained research. For example, the question of the incompleteness of archival collections and the relationship between archives, justice and power, and how archival users and archivists have negotiated the gaps and omissions in collections, has been addressed by archivists and scholars in the past (see Carter 2006; Cook 2011; Schwartz and Cook 2002). Scholars have long worked to expand the frame of knowledge production in ways that supplement archives, or that replace them altogether with other modes of attending to memory, knowledge and present life (see the oral history debates prompted by Vansina 1965 and usefully reframed in Hamilton et al. 2002; also Apter 1992; Falola 2020; Hamilton and Leibhammer 2016). Others have worked to engage the problem of the gaps of the archive, either by working to fill them or by thinking with and around them, creatively and theoretically speculating about what might fit into the spaces between what can be known and about what can be made of archival impossibilities (see Hartman 2008; Lalu 2009; Philip 2009; Zaayman 2019). This article and issue alike both build upon such research to consider the consequences of these problematics, and the stakes of the archive itself, for knowledge production focused on the African continent.

Thinking archives through loss also draws attention to the rich materialities that accompany disasters, fast and slow, intentional or through neglect, and the potency of ruins as entry points into the knowledge ecologies, and politics, that inhere in them. The notion of the ruin, decay and deterioration has extensively been explored in literatures in heritage studies, English literature and anthropology. It departs from a consideration of the aesthetic potency of the ruin, and from criticism of conservation discourses that reinforce institutionalised expertise and power. It accommodates readings of decay, deterioration and ruin as either a product of relational radical material ontologies or material transformation that unfold over vast expanses of time (DeSilvey 2017; Harrison et al. 2020; Stoler 2008). This Special Issue does not take a strongly materialist reading, although the loss of archival material sits at the centre of the issue. It embraces the resistances and alternative temporal readings offered by such literature for reframing archives and unsettling their colonial epistemic foundations.

These readings offer avenues through which to respond to broad concerns about the status, legitimacy and constitution of the field of African Studies, concerns which have prominently featured in the pages of this journal. Most recently, Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe’s (2014) special section retraced the debates that had come, and continue, to animate the field, insisting upon considering the ambition of an African Studies to come. It is not necessary here to repeat this effort. But Ksenia Robbe’s (2014) article, in the same section, offers a useful diagrammatic of the problem space. The crucial concern is with the formulation of a field in the wake of (and in excess of) the lineages of Native Administration and Area Studies in whose shadow the field often remains. At stake is the possibility of a terrain of scholarship that might offer Africans a pathway to what V.Y. Mudimbe (1988) characterises as absolute discourse, or Mahmood Mamdani’s (1996) provocation as self knowledge. This route requires the examination of those intellectual formations that have come to define the study of the continent and its peoples. For Harry Garuba (2012), its actuality is revealed by the set of interrogatory questions regarding Africa as an origin and terrain for knowledge, questions to which scholars return in the hopes of inaugurating a new project of African Studies. In reflecting upon these interventions, Robbe proposes the necessity of theoretical, interdisciplinary work, a challenge to which this issue represents a partial response.

In responding, we pick up upon the beginnings of a conversation in this journal regarding the complexity of loss as a historical and political terrain, and the constitution of archives by loss. Many works could be raised here. To list but a few: Anne K. Bang (2012), in an examination of ritual and textual practices of commemoration in the wake of the deaths of members of an Islamic scholarly community in Zanzibar, underscores the importance of these commemorative practices as means of making history, of relaying knowledge across generations, in ways much akin to Toyin Falola’s (2020) ritual archives. Later essays, by Constance Smith (2018) and Khwezi Mkhize (2019), reflect upon ruination. Smith’s work invites us to read urban decay in Nairobi as the accumulation of history. Critically rethinking how the elimination of decay serves as archival priority, Smith invites us to understand the archival quality of the evidence of ruination, a matter which under another lens may appear as the threat of loss itself (of history, among other matters). Similarly, Mkhize provokes us to consider how the architecture, aesthetics and planning of cities, neighbourhoods in “ruin” and the promise of their “regeneration” serve as multiple fragments of an ordinary archive of empire that is at once what structures everyday life in South Africa. Positioning ourselves in the tension between these “ruins that surface undying histories” (Mkhize 2019, 196) and the cataclysmic events of ruination, this Special Issue works to problematise what loss means for archives and African Studies.

The “African Studies” materials held on the shelves of the Jagger Reading Room – that is to say, the portion of its collections that was written into the particular post-war field formation taking the name – were collected from a diversity of publishing houses from across the African continent and beyond, reflecting at once a staggering diversity of African opinion and a common terrain of concern. Colonialism, apartheid, neo-colonialism; the material conditions of life, the land question and agrarian life, urban proletarianisation; memory, ideology and politics – topics of profound urgency to generations of African thinkers coalesced upon the library’s shelves. So too the problems of constituting a body of discourse in the wake of colonial rupture, a political body in the wake of enslavement; of accessing the histories that are, wilfully and incidentally, undocumented; of finding alternative ways of knowing; and their slippages. These problems are compounded by the loss of the resources that sought to begin answering them, in ways revealing of the aspirational quality even a partial archive offers the field. Where the mandate of African Studies is to seek knowledge despite losses that disable that pursuit, archives work to be the repositories of experience that might pre-empt the problem of this same mandate. An archive of African Studies promises something of a tabula rasa – a point from which we might have access if not to everything then to everything we have known. By holding such materials in archive, and thus working to stall the threat of knowledge loss, such a collection would work, however tentatively, to insulate the field from its founding epistemic crisis: the abundance of silences, absences and impossibilities that organise scholarship about the parts of the African past we are most invested in transparently accessing. What is at stake here is thus a space of particular political-epistemic attachment and vulnerability, whose predicament ties questions of archive and African Studies in revealing ways.

This article attends to this predicament by drawing on the Jagger Library disaster as a point of entry into a set of questions about African Studies as a field, its links to archive and archival practice and loss as a concept and idea across the continent. For us, then, the Jagger Library disaster is a point of departure, an event from which we begin but do not centre. It is a prompt, a spark, so to say, for considering loss, archive and African Studies across the continent. In doing so, we insist upon attending to the non-catastrophic, to the ordinary structures of loss. By reckoning with the violence that accumulates when such ordinary losses are invisible, we might reorient our theoretical attention, and thus also allow the UCT disaster to be situated in continental context, raising the problems and questions that both offer the continent’s archives common ground and demonstrate their diversity. In focusing on loss, we want to attend to the diverse ways in which various kinds of loss have been reckoned with and responded to in archives across the African continent, and to seriously engage the consequence of these efforts for how we consider archives in African studies. No less so, we want to spark a reorientation to loss in African archives. Rather than thinking of loss as an event or an exteriority, a grievous harm to an archive imagined as a fixed and complete site of accumulation, classification and retrieval, we propose the provocation that the organisation of archives by loss is an ordinary, ambivalent feature of the archive. We argue that loss is at once a negative and generative force informing the formation of archives and African Studies, and that its open reconsideration as generative and formative lends new insights into the politics and ambition of archival practice, and into the afterlives of African Studies’ colonial history. The article departs from the positions that archives are permanently marked by the absence of losses that precede and coincide with their production and remain in a state of decay, or that African Studies is informed by impulses to salvage knowledge on the brink of loss to modernity. By taking this position we do not wish to imply an endorsement of deterioration and loss but, rather, hope to unsettle a persistent normative set of assumptions about archives as impervious to decay, only operant as repositories when fully intact and complete. Put in context with other examples of loss collated in this Special Issue, we also aim to unsettle the Jagger Library’s authority as an exceptional archive. That process of unsettling is launched by a distinct set of questions. What happens when we take the notion of loss seriously as a path for thinking through archives and their relationship to African Studies as a field? How might we read points of connection and disjuncture between the management of archival loss on the continent, and the historical losses that structure African Studies? We explore contours of these in the pages that follow.

Archive and African studies

The Jagger Library disaster draws our attention to the relationship between African Studies as a field and discipline, and its relationship with the archive. At UCT, as across the continent, this relationship had an unmistakable colonial slant, as the Jagger Library construction tied into the colonial knowledge project at UCT and the emergence of African Studies as a distinct field of study at this institution. The foundation stone for the building was laid down in the 1930s, as the first main library on the Upper Campus of the University of Cape Town (Phillips 1993). Named after J.W. Jagger, a businessman and former cabinet minister, the Jagger Library’s function as a repository and reading room would change over the course of the twentieth century according to shifts in the educational and archival needs of UCT Library and the university educational policy (Kirkwood 2021). At the time of the fire, the Jagger Library held collections managed by the Special Collections division of UCT Libraries. Under the Manuscripts and Archives subdivision, rare and antiquarian books, manuscripts and archives, oversized collections, such as maps and architectural drawings, photographic materials and pamphlet collections were collected and stored. The published collections subdivision managed collections such as the African Film and Visual archive, and 65 000 volumes of printed books, published monographs, pamphlets and papers, rare books and niche collections related to South and southern Africa. Consisting of texts in multiple languages, and covering the geographic scope of sub-Saharan Africa, the collections were especially rich in materials covering southern African languages, the HIV/AIDS crisis, African Studies as a field, media studies and gender studies.

The strong southern African profile of the collections reflects a long-standing archival impulse to stake a claim over knowledge in and about the region and its people. A Special Collections division was founded by the then director of UCT Library, R.F.M. Immelman, in 1953 (Phillips 2019). Immelman had steadily built up a collection in Africana material, including books, manuscripts and papers that constituted the germ of the African Studies collections and library. It was a collecting principle that was implicitly tied into, and actively supported, the research, teaching and learning enterprise of African Studies at the UCT. The first appointments in the School of African Life and Languages were made in 1920, with W.A. Norton appointed Professor of Philology and British anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown appointed Professor of Social Anthropology the following year. The first degrees offered by the school were advertised in the first issue of Bantu Studies (“African Life and Languages” 1921), a journal run out of the University of Witwatersrand that would, from 1942, come to rebrand as African Studies. The post-war and early post-Union context were especially significant in framing the motivations for the School as an institution that would facilitate greater, in-depth knowledge of native life, for better political administration. Between 1933 and 1974, it operated as the School of African Studies. Harry Oppenheimer donated the funds for the establishment of a Centre for African Studies, along with an African Studies Library in the late 1970s (Ntsebeza 2020; Phillips 2019; Van der Merwe 1979). It remains an active research and teaching unit, incorporated as the Department of African Studies and Linguistics since 2019. The Jagger Library was a primary scholarly support for its research and teaching project, as the African Studies Library. Following a major renovation in 2011–12, the various subdivisions of Special Collections, including the African Studies collections, were consolidated under one roof, which contributed to the Jagger Library’s colloquial reference as the African Studies Library (Kirkwood 2021). As former A.C. Jordan Chair, Lungisile Ntsebeza puts it, UCT was therefore not only “the first university on the African continent, if not in the world, to form a school that focused on African Studies,” “the genealogy of the concept of African Studies at UCT” was linked to “the colonial strategy of ruling over the indigenous people” (Ntsebeza 2020, 358; see also Fendler and Löhr 2022). Such archival impulses informed state archival policy in South and across southern Africa during the twentieth century and, despite concerted efforts towards transformation, have continued to exert an influence after colonialism (Netshakhuma 2019). In broad strokes, this Special Issue draws out similar genealogies of African Studies as linked to and flowing from archives from other parts of the African continent.

Ironically, inasmuch as an African Studies archive offers resolution, it also recalls a strategy from its maligned predecessor, Native Studies, in organising African intellectual, political and cultural production through the frame of salvage. Indeed, with the fire as with the founding losses of the field of African Studies, loss brings us to the limits of knowledge and provokes the impulse to salvage, collect, restore, digitise. In working for the expansion and protection of existing archives, the mitigation of future losses and research accessibility, these strategies (and the dissident voices celebrating the library fire) underscore the complicated relationship between the futurity of an archive and its present as a part of political life. This complexity is reflected by the critical engagement with the limits of archival and historical memory discussed above. But the value of a collection like the one UCT held – one that sought to archive African social, political and intellectual production – is significant for the field of African Studies in particular ways. If the threat of loss organises every facet of archival life, its actuality – its inescapable fact – has defined African Studies. The problem of what is known, what could have been but is no longer knowable, and what could never have been accessible recurs, often as political, ethical and material crises.

Debates about African language, culture, religion, politics, economics and epistemic possibility are all marked by various losses, reflecting dense and complex histories of local and imperial imposition and subjugation, and colonial and post-independence histories of the various kinds of work various actors have mobilised discourses to do. These threads are deeply knotted, and as a field African Studies is forced to deal with how it is possible to produce knowledge that claims to be African in the wake of loss, and in the wake of myriad obstacles to accessing what remains. When loss echoes in African Studies, it offers a reminder both of the violence of its origin and of present constraints to politics and knowledge, and at the same time both a call to grieve and to rethink the shape of our intellectual and political organisation. This call is one which reverberates across the many fields born on the threshold of decolonisation and is reflected in much critical African-produced work in African Studies as a set of intellectual commitments: to honouring the victims of injustices, to pushing against the constraints to knowledge, and to working towards (however varied visions of) liberation.

The history of the ties between African Studies and the Jagger Library is just one of a number of examples profiled in this Special Issue. Not only do they reflect how historical and political conditions shaped the profile of African Studies but also how the development and management of libraries and archives were crucial to this process. The process of collecting and the provision of access to knowledge resources for the development of a field speak to the generative negativity of loss as an impulse inspiring both the accumulation of archival materials for libraries and repositories and African Studies as a field. We explore this in more detail in the following section.

Loss of/and archive

We have already noted the substantive losses of books and archival collections held in the Jagger Library. Yet despite the spectacular suddeness suddenness of this disaster, we want to affirm that loss is everywhere in this library and prevalent in all archives. Its threat organises archival fears, attentions and labors. Loss is visible in the most minute and most extensive strategies of archival care and property management, in every grant proposal and reaction to new budgets. It is the impetus for costly and complex conservation, restoration and digitisation efforts. It is there in the everyday rules of use – no ink, no liquids, no backpacks, no flash – and in the restrictions to access and circulation. It is, ultimately, the most ordinary fact of any archive that the matters held within it are vulnerable to myriad destructions. Through their vulnerability, loss is both part of what elevates the status of precious holdings in archival collections and what threatens to altogether erase the archives’ authority. We may, following Anjali Arondekar (2014), counter that radical abundance can also define the archive, and that strategies of archival destruction might reflect that abundance rather than its absence. But even so, loss remains centrally in frame.

The historian Jacob Dlamini explores a fascinating tension about archive, destruction, loss and remains in the opening pages of his book, the Terrorist Album (2020). He relates the story of conferring with two interlocutors, former officers in the apartheid police structures, about details arising in files and notes for his book project. The oral corroboration was necessary as, during the early 1990s, the Security Police burned 44 tons of files and documents related to their operations during apartheid (Harris 2000). The paucity of corroborating documentary evidence not only hindered his book project, but had caused confusion about insiders, freedom fighters and collaborators that continued to trouble the post-apartheid state. The documentary purge was undoubtedly an attempt to conceal the apartheid state’s illegal activities, and it went on to generate a mythology of its own, one where it was assumed all evidence had indeed been destroyed and the past effectively obliterated. His interlocutors and historians had come to “believe that, because [the apartheid Security Police] had set out to destroy every record, they must have done exactly that” (Dlamini 2020, xiv). Yet this myth was disavowed by the very documents and records that had prompted Dlamini’s research: “There I was, after all, not just working with physical objects (an album, confidential police correspondence, informer reports, photographs, secret memoranda), that had survived the memory purge but asking these men to decipher for me the bureaucratic hieroglyphics that marked these relics” (xiv). The apartheid state, like so many other authoritarian regimes, believed in the purging power of fire, to cleanse the record, yet so much incriminating data still remains. As David L. Eng and David Kazanjian point out in their introduction to the volume Loss, “loss is inseparable from what remains, for what is lost is known only by what remains of it, by how these remains are produced, read and sustained” (2003, 2).

Mobilised in defiance against the mythologies that continue to sustain history making and reading in the post-apartheid era, Dlamini’s account also turns against positivist assumptions about archives as stores of ultimate and final truth and argues instead for the power of fragments and slivers and traces as equally valuable evidentiary sources for developing narratives about history. Carine Zaayman’s work takes the work of the fragment a step further through the notion of the anarchive, or “that which is not contained by archive, which is without archive, particularly those things that cannot be captured by documents, fragments and texts” (Zaayman 2014, 319; see also Zaayman 2019). She develops her concept through a close examination of the archival traces through which we come to know the Khoi woman, Krotoa, a figure of historic loss, astute navigator of colonial conditions, but with no distinct voice in the historic written record. Krotoa embodies “the absence of presence,” and exists in the anarchive. Lying just beyond the archival frame, the anarchive is a space of absence, in this case of indigenous voices such as Krotoa’s. Rendering interlocutors like Krotoa voiceless is a product of the colonial project, as record-keeping was aimed at privileging the narratives of colonisers. This accumulation of written knowledge excludes the voiceless from being agents of history and obstructs the possibility of recognising alternate ways of knowing the world. Colonialism was therefore a project of the deliberate erasure of systems of knowledge on the continent; and in the anarchive, their recovery is partially possible.

While we do not dispute the value of collections, we do not see their absence or loss as absolute closure. Further, in stepping away from the position where loss is always negative and archives are always valuable, we hope to open to critical conversation the structure of the archive as institution, and whether its priorities of preservation disallow more dynamic, fluid and perhaps disruptive modes of attending to memory and knowledge. In remaining “neutral” towards loss, attending to its manifestations and to the questions it provokes, we are working to raise critical conversations about how loss mediates the relationship between African Studies and archives, and what critical archive studies and African Studies alike might learn from their mutual implication in the fire. Habitually, African Studies is always after loss, and archives are always under threat of loss. Allowing each to help us think about the other, we might pay attention to how archives might reckon with the status of being after-loss, after catastrophes, ruination, decay. We might explore too how African Studies might proceed not only in light of originary losses but in view of others that are yet to come.

For both domains, the questions that might follow are at once theoretical and practical – what do we do to retain knowledge, what do we prioritise retaining, what do we rush to conserve or study (and how do we hold ourselves to account for what might be lost because we didn’t)? How do we incorporate the losses that have taken place into the archive, and think archive in terms of what is already lost? How do we incorporate an attention to the vulnerability, fragility of human knowledge into fields that, like African Studies, hope for the invulnerability of truth as a balm to soften the impact of past injustice? How do we think the project of understanding Africa as an intrinsically vulnerable one – vulnerable to quotidian disruptions and to distinct efforts to disable it, to the violences of nature and of politics? How do we restore both to the politics of the present, without surrendering their intellectual autonomy to that same politics? These questions invite both reflection and interrogation; in raising them, we might come to see new directions for scholarly engagement, new ways of taking stock of the present and imagining scholarly and archival precedents for the future.

We start from the Jagger Library fire because its disaster took place. But if the fire’s fact insists we attend to particular questions, it is because they were already organising the crises, conflicts, functions and possibilities of the archive. The fire invites us to consider how we might imagine archives and African Studies alike as not only inversely, anxiously constituted by loss, but also as sites in which loss comes to be generative of interpretation, knowledge, theoretical possibilities and practical movements in political life. These are questions that resonate far beyond the walls of UCT – that, in fact, may resonate more deeply in contexts where archives are less resourced, or under institutional attack. This issue reflects a considered effort to stage a conversation amongst the tensions held by archives across the continent. Further, while the collections and the disaster are significant, to solely concentrate on this disaster would accord further attention to an institution that has, in the past, arrogated to itself an outlier position among higher learning institutions on the African continent.

In the process, it would also leave unquestioned the privileged status of the collection as a centralised repository. It is true also that some of the non-unique materials lost in the fire are not lost altogether – copies may be held in other central repositories further afield, or in varied university libraries, private collections and funder repositories, on and off the continent. But part of the value of UCT’s collection was the promise that by building a large collection – and doing so on the African continent – knowledge might be more accessible, and UCT the ideal location from which to develop it. Of course, no central repository can ever be perfectly accessible, and African travellers face bureaucratic hostility in visiting even South Africa, a fact we were forced to reckon with during the organisation of our symposium. The partiality of its accessibility is only one reason such archives might be removed from their pedestal. Another is that even the most immense collections in the wealthiest libraries with the largest acquisition budgets cannot be complete. There will always be kinds of texts left out of frame, regional materials left underattended. As a result, we are glad to be able to foreground many engagements with regional and local archives, institutions that are positioned to register and mark subtle local change and contribute to attending to and recording matters of regional priority.

Some of the leading questions framing the Special Issue therefore cover queries about when acts are framed as destructive of the archive, and when might they themselves be archival acts? After grieving the transformations in archival conditions brought about by ruination, by wilful destruction, by various different agents with various motives, how might we think with them, as not mere threats that demand the reification and defence of the archive, but as matters critical to archival definition?

In the articles that follow, a more pointed set of questions arises around archive and African Studies specifically. What happens when we take the notion of loss seriously as a path for thinking through archives and their relationship to African Studies as a field? How might we read points of connection and disjuncture between the management of archival loss on the continent and the historical losses that structure African Studies? What does it mean to think about an archive deemed African Studies as a space always already marked, and made possible, by loss? What new genealogies of, and for, African Studies does loss enable us to think? What is to be learned between “Africa” and its archives? And what directions might we take to understanding these resources and problem spaces anew?

Overview of this Special Issue

This Special Issue arises out of the editors’ efforts to reckon with the broader significance of the Jagger Library disaster. Out of those discussions a symposium was conceived, whose name this issue borrows. Organised to run between April 18 and 19, 2022, over the anniversary of the fire, the symposium gathered together scholars from UCT, UCT Librarians and scholars and artists from Africa and beyond to consider the loss of the Jagger Library from their various vantage points. The articles gathered in this Special Issue reflect the output of those two days of lively, engaging discussion around loss, archive and African Studies. As a publication it presents, we hope, a textured, polyphonic engagement with what we believe is a set of timely set of questions.

The destruction of books, archives and collections have played an important role in political development in post-colonial Africa. We have already flagged the destruction of state police records as accompanying South Africa’s transition to democracy. In his article, the archivist and historian William Musamba examines the concealments, control and destruction of archives in colonial and post-colonial Uganda.

The first national record-keeping systems were instituted for the organisation of government records and the efficient administration of the British Protectorate of Uganda. It seeded what is today known as the Uganda National Archives. With the transition to independence, in the 1960s, British authorities systematically purged and destroyed records that cast the administration in a negative light. Musamba illustrates how systematic a practice this was across Africa and the empire. Collections pertaining to local government formation, economic policy and development were either shipped to Britain or cast into the Indian Ocean or Lake Victoria. Following independence, changing Ugandan political regimes perpetuated many British traditions of access and control to the National Archive, by, among other things, instituting extended embargoes on records that could cast the ruling regime in a negative light. This management of historical narratives, Musamba shows, posed significant challenges and frustrations for researchers of Ugandan history who found themselves obstructed by record collections that were either destroyed or embargoed for decades. His article sheds light on a period of archival activism within this context. He shows how local communities such as the Abataka Abasoga resorted to forms of archival activism in the late colonial period, mobilising record-keeping in spite of colonial suppression of knowledge accumulation, to fend off their local rivals and the colonial state through the mobilisation of their own archives.

As one step in a set of bold theoretical moves, Edwina Ashie-Nikoi inverts the question of archival evidence in Africa in her article on community archives in Ghana. She argues that the colonial histories informing the formation of Ghana’s universities and national archives mean that the information they contain is only a partial representation of the local knowledge they assume to profile and represent. She explores a different set of archival practices incubated and developed through the J.H. Kwabena Nketia Archives of the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies and the Likpe Traditional Area Community Archives, profiling these as sites of resistance that challenge inherited archival orders and meaning making. The Nketia Archives for example, continue to collect audio-visual recordings of traditional Ghanaian performances, music and dance, building on their founding collection, and invite community members back to the archive, to work in their oral history room. Activating the archive in these ways, the Nketia Archives are a space of African creativity in the knowledge production process. While the Nketia Archives are centrally located in the capital Accra, the Likpe Traditional Area Community Archives pivoted off an archival strategy aimed at countering the loss of the memory of a minority in its context. They comprise mainly of a digitisation project that evolved out of and with the trust of the community who offered to have their records and materials digitally documented for electronic archiving. This includes the organisation of the chief’s records. It serves to consolidate their history in the broader narrative of the Ghanaian nation. These projects represent what she refers to as the Africa archive, repositories of knowledge informed and ordered by local African epistemologies and languages, and which stand as an important point of reference for the field of African Studies by democratising voices in the archive, and accommodating for the diversity of knowledge sources as valid and evidentiary for the continent.

As a distinct contribution to the Africa archive, the Timbuktu manuscripts have gained worldwide attention as a record collection of great historic and cultural value, that is in a perpetual state of risk of loss due to the prevailing economic and political conditions. It necessitates the question, what preservation methods are appropriate for conserving these records, how are they made accessible and who could they be made to serve? In her article for this Special Issue, Susana Molins Lliteras turns our attention to the mysteries that lie behind contemporary digital conservation methods, and the problematic tropes that they perpetuate about literacy, texts and heritage. She profiles Google Arts and Culture’s Mali Magic digitisation project, which aimed to digitise manuscripts from the Timbuktu region. The digitisation project claims that it contributed to the saving of these precious, endangered Arabic manuscripts and records. She deconstructs this self-congratulatory premise by profiling a longer history of manuscript-keeping that accommodated for what may be referred to as loss and destruction. Turning attention to the culture of manuscript handling, moreover, she draws attention to the generative potential of the loss of records, through an exploration of the art of manuscript copying by hand, which served not only as a mode of knowledge preservation and distribution but also as a mode of knowledge production. The article alerts us to the problems associated with digitisation as a method of preservation, what it is meant to do and for whom, and has an implicit immediate relationship with the Jagger Library where digitisation efforts are increasingly being applied as a conservation method.

Jennifer Blaylock’s article explores the politics of the loss of audio-visual archives. She compares the history of the loss of the Ghana Film Industry archive with the films by Onyeka Igwe – a so-called archive (2020) and No Archive Can Restore You (2020) – that feature a similar collection in Nigeria. Drawing attention to the generative losses that arise in these archives, Blaylock further pushes us to consider the media of film as a knowledge product with its own archival heritage and baggage, but also a media that holds the potential to reveal aspects of the nature of archive present and absent, that remain elusive otherwise. She presents us with the notion of artefacts of decay – that which “mark[s] the elimination of information from the image that restoration seeks to renew” (60). She invites us to consider that the parallels in “the politics of carelessness that characterised archival neglect at ISD and the losses that it produced, can also be seen as an act of archival labour” (67).

These fuller length articles are followed by a selection of short, impactful intellectual sketches, points and counterpoints. We have included an edited transcript of a recorded interview that took place between UCT-based media studies scholar Litheko Modisane and the filmmaker Onyeka Igwe. They discuss the provocations raised by Igwe’s haunting short film, a so-called archive, and its affordances for grasping archive through loss. In the roundtable section that follows, scholars (re)consider the significance of the loss of the Jagger Library, the loss of archive and African Studies from their respective fields.

We have also identified a selection of recent books that invite us to extend attention to thinking archive and loss in Africa either through broadening our regional attentions or through raising theoretical questions about how loss comes to inform and reshape archives: Ghosts of Archive: Deconstructive Intersectionality and Praxis (Verne Harris); “Little Research Value:” African Estate Records and Colonial Gaps in a Post-Colonial National Archive (Ellen Ndeshi Namhila); and (W)archives: Archival Imaginaries, War, and Contemporary Art (Daniela Agostinho, Solveig Gade, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Kristin Veel, eds). We have invited reviewers to consider the texts within a comparative framework paying particular attention to the theoretical provocation of loss and its consequences that this Special Issue is concerned with.

The contributions dwell on a set of generative questions compounded by the Jagger Library setting with a broad reach to the African continent as a whole. Our hope is that this Special Issue will illuminate new insights about loss, the archive and African Studies, through the comparative lens of examples gleaned from diverse perspectives and literatures from across the continent. Considering the unequal politics of knowledge production, keeping and dissemination in the academy, it was crucial for us to publish the Special Issue Open Access. We are delighted to have had the institutional and editorial support to make these contributions freely available.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the generous and helpful comments on this article. We would also like to thank the Centre for Curating the Archive, at the Michaelis School of Fine Art and the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative for their support of this publication. Early work towards the symposium, this issue and this introduction was workshopped at Archive and Public Culture Research Development Workshops in October 2021 and March 2022, and we are grateful to Emma Sandon and Nina Liebenberg for their comments, and workshop participants for their feedback. We would also like to thank Himal Ramji for his editorial assistance in realising this Special Issue. This Special Issue and the symposium that it flows out of were funded by the University of Cape Town Fire Fund (discretionary donations) which we duly acknowledge.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Duane Jethro

Duane Jethro is a Lecturer in the Department of African Studies and Linguistics at the University of Cape Town. His work focuses on the cultural construction of heritage and contested public cultures in South Africa and Germany. He serves as an editor of Material Religion and serves on the editorial board of the journal Museums and Social Issues. His book Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Aesthetics of Power is published by Bloomsbury Academic.

Alírio Karina

Alírio Karina’s research examines the historical and political transformations and consequences of anthropological thought, and its relationship to sedimenting conceptions of blackness, indigeneity and Africanity. They hold a postdoctoral fellowship at the Princeton African Humanities Colloquium, are Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and Organizer of Mimbres School for the Humanities.