Academics push South Africa to open apartheid-era archives | THE News
lterrat's bookmarks 2017-09-03
Summary:
"The campaign to open up the state archives of apartheid-era South Africa could help researchers explore some fundamental historical questions.
On 24 August, the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg held a colloquium on 'promoting open and transparent public record-keeping for a democratic South Africa'.
Discussion centred around primarily 'state-generated public records and government departments that keep their own records', explained co-organiser Gabriele Mohale, archivist of the university’s Historical Papers Research Archive. Unlike in many other countries, South Africa’s National Archives has 'no systematic process of declassifying records – you even have records from the Anglo-Boer War that are still not declassified'."