Enter the Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa Collection ...
Information about the Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa Collection is organised into the following topics:
- Overview
- Partners and Advisors
- Content Selection in Southern Africa
- Collections Outside of Southern Africa
Download the Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa handout (PDF)
For more information, see:
Overview
The struggles for freedom in Southern Africa were both a regional and global phenomenon. As such, documentation of the struggles is scattered around the world, reflecting the history itself: colonial rule, dispersion of exiles, international intervention, and worldwide networks that supported successive generations of resistance within the region. The Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa Collection brings together materials from various sites throughout the world and makes them available online to students, teachers, and researchers, both in Africa and outside the continent. By providing sample materials, the Collection also publicises the rich collections of partner institutions, helping make them more widely known to researchers.
At present, the Collection consists of more than 180 000 pages of documents and images, including periodicals, nationalist publications, records of colonial government commissions, local newspaper reports, personal papers, correspondence, UN documents, out-of-print and other particularly relevant books, oral testimonies, life histories, and speeches.
The idea for Aluka was inspired by Digital Imaging South Africa (DISA), a pilot project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which, by 2006, had digitised approximately 60 000 pages of relevant South African periodicals. Aluka’s goal has been to add regional, transnational, and comparative dimensions, bringing in other Southern African countries as well as documentation from outside the region. In March 2004, the first Regional Advisory Committee meeting was held in South Africa, attended by representatives from Aluka, DISA, and committees then in formation in South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. An Angolan national committee, currently in formation, joined this group at the March 2007 regional meeting in Gaborone, Botswana. The Regional Advisory Committee, which meets annually in Southern Africa, provides the strategic direction on selection and organisation of the content area and has appointed an international subcommittee to focus on collections outside Southern Africa.
The project’s goals are defined in inclusive geographic terms. The region is defined politically as well as geographically, and includes the neighbouring countries of Tanzania, Zambia, and the two Congos. However, the complexity of the project and practical considerations mean that it is inevitably a work in progress. Existing imbalances need to be corrected by involving additional partners. The timing of the formation of committees, the initial resource base available to each committee, and the unique challenges of each national and international context have all affected the balance of documentation available in the first phase of this project. To overcome some of these challenges, Aluka is assisting its Southern African partners to expand their capacity for digitisation by providing equipment and training. It is also exploring contacts with other countries and regions now underrepresented in the content area. For a summary of collections currently available and others in process, see Current and Forthcoming Collections. Suggestions for additional collections are always welcome.
Educational and research institutions in Africa can facilitate access to the Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa Collection and all other available collections free of any participation fee. Institutions outside Africa pay an annual sliding-scale participation fee.
For additional background on the project, as of 2005, see 'Digitization, History, and the Making of a Postcolonial Archive of Southern African Liberation Struggles: The Aluka Project,' inAfrica Today.
Committees, Partners, and Advisors
Aluka is collaborating with archives, libraries, universities, and other educational and research institutions in the selection and digitisation of materials, and is engaged with more than 100 prominent scholars, senior archivists, museum specialists, and engaged public intellectuals throughout the region. This process is guided by the Regional Advisory Committee, consisting of representatives from each national committee, as well as selected senior scholars from the United States and Europe. Each annual meeting is also attended by additional members of the host national committee.
Aluka also establishes formal partnerships with institutions. In Mozambique and Namibia, the national archives are Aluka’s leading partner institutions, and Aluka has assisted each with setting up a small on-site digitisation lab. Training is being provided by Digital Imaging South Africa (DISA). In South Africa, DISA and Aluka are working with a wide range of institutions and archives, including the National Library, the University of the Witwatersrand’s Historical Papers, the Campbell Collections of the University of KwaZulu Natal, and the University of Cape Town. Overseas partner institutions include, for example, the Herskovits Library at Northwestern University, Rhodes House at Oxford, the Netherlands iInstitute for Southern Africa in Amsterdam, and the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala.
Aluka’s senior advisor for the Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa Collection is Allen Isaacman, Regents Professor of History at the University of Minnesota and Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. Content selection is overseen by the Regional Advisory Committee and by national advisory committees in each of the five countries. An Angolan committee is in formation. The chairs of the national committees and the members of the international subcommittee of the Regional Advisory Committee are listed below.
- Botswana: Part Mgadla (University of Botswana), Thomas Tlou (University of Botswana)
- Mozambique: Arlindo Chilundo (University of Eduardo Mondlane), Joel das Neves Tembe (National Archives of Mozambique)
- Namibia: Ellen Namhila (University of Namibia), Jeremy Silvester (Museums Association of Namibia)
- South Africa: Michele Pickover 2004-2007 (University of the Witwatersrand), Christopher Saunders (University of Cape Town), Premesh Lalu 2004-March 2007(University of Western Cape)
- Zimbabwe: Ngwabi Bhebe (Midlands State University), Gerald Mazarire (University of Zimbabwe), Ivan Murambiwa (National Archives of Zimbabwe)
- International subcommittee: William Minter, chair (AfricaFocus Bulletin), Ellen Namhila (University of Namibia), Terence Ranger (University of Oxford), Thomas Tlou (University of Botswana); the international subcommittee also relies on the assistance of special advisors, notably former UN Assistant Secretary General E. S. Reddy, as well as others familiar with the involvement of particular countries or international sectors
For more information about the national advisory committees and Aluka’s other partner institutions, see the More about Committees, Partners, and Advisors page.
Content Selection in Southern Africa
In each country, responsibility for selecting materials lies with the national advisory committee, which is composed of scholars, archivists, librarians, and other experts. The Regional Advisory Committee provides a forum for co-ordinating the content-selection process so that it will include regional, international, and comparative perspectives. This is essential to reflect the historical reality that the freedom struggles across the region were intertwined ideologically, strategically, and tactically and cannot be fully understood in isolation from one another, or from the wider global context.
To aid in content selection and in presentation of the material selected, the Regional Advisory Committee has established five broad thematic categories, or topics, that provide the overall intellectual architecture for the project. The five topics are:
- the colonial system and its consequences;
- popular resistance;
- anti-colonial organisations;
- regional and international contexts; and
- wars of liberation, destabilisation, and internal conflicts.
Within each category, the national committees are responsible for identifying subtopics and themes relevant to their respective countries. Emphasis is placed on providing material reflecting a range of material for research and debate, rather than simply retelling conventional narratives or one dominant perspective. The goal is to include the lived experiences, historical agency, and voices of the people of the region. Users should be able to explore the systems of oppression and the multiple ways peasants and workers, old and young, women and men coped, creatively adapted, and struggled to make a better world and, ultimately, gain their freedom. For more information about the content-selection process, see About Our Data.
Collections Outside Southern Africa
Many important collections are located outside the region, reflecting the regional and global dimensions of the conflict, as well as the fact
that exiles and liberation movements found asylum and support elsewhere in Africa and on other continents. One of Aluka’s primary objectives is
to complement other efforts to make these materials accessible in Africa. Some of these collections are the result of decades of research in
Africa by well-known scholars. Other collections are in the archives of former colonial powers. Still other materials document the history of
opposing colonialism and apartheid by organisations based in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, documentation that is, almost by definition,
widely scattered. Additional important materials are lodged at the United Nations. Aluka and its advisors are working with archives, libraries,
scholars, and veterans of activist groups to digitise as wide a selection of such documentation as feasible.
At present, the digital library includes selected publications and other documents from the United Nations, the World Council of Churches
Programme to Combat Racism, the American Committee on Africa/Africa Fund, the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Great Britain, the Netherlands institute
for Southern Africa, and the Nordic Africa Institute, among others. A collection on India and South Africa contributed by Mr. E. S. Reddy is in
process. Efforts are being made to include additional materials from other world regions as quickly as possible.
At present, the Collection includes selected publications and other documents from the United Nations, the World Council of Churches Programme to Combat Racism, the American Committee on Africa/Africa Fund, the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Great Britain, the Netherlands institute for Southern Africa, and the Nordic Africa Institute, among others. A collection on India and South Africa contributed by Mr. E. S. Reddy is in process. Efforts are being made to include additional materials from other world regions as quickly as possible.
To partially compensate for the gaps in documentation, the Aluka advisory committees have proposed a set of approximately 150 essential books covering national, regional, and international contexts. More than 60 of these are now digitised and available on the site.
The Aluka Digital Library is a work in progress. We are aware of many gaps that we are working actively on filling. We look forward to your assistance in making it an even more useful resource for students, teachers, and researchers in Southern Africa and around the world. We welcome your comments and suggestions for improvement, and are particularly interested in learning of additional important material that we might include.
Last updated: 7 November 2008
