Jobless people have been temporarily employed by the South African Heritage Resources Agency to collect the names of those who died in the liberation struggle, according to the agency’s annual report ending March 2002.
In terms of the National Heritage Resources Act of 1999, the agency must conserve and generally take care of graves protected under the legislation.
The legislation provides that the agency must by 2004 submit to the Arts and Culture Minister for his approval the list of graves and burial grounds of ”persons connected with the liberation
struggle and who died in exile or as a result of actions of the state security forces or agents provocateurs”.
The minister must, after public consultation, publish the names of those graves he believes should be protected.
The agency’s burial sites unit had embarked on an ambitious project of temporarily employing jobless people to collect the names of those who died in the struggle, the report says.
The pilot project was undertaken in Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage and Grahamstown. Other projects were established in Kroonstad, Welkom, Bloemfontein, the KTC camp in Cape Town, Graaff-Reinet, Somerset East, Oudsthoorn, George, Mossel Bay, Jansenville and Aliwal North.
A total of 6320 names had been included on the database.
However, few photographs had been added, the report says.
The unit was liaising with state departments and political groups.
The unit has also travelled to Tanzania to identify graves of activists and links had also been established with Mozambique, Botswana and Lesotho. – Sapa