There is a tacit belief in a number of archival disciplines that making documents related to the history of liberation struggles in Southern Africa more widely accessible via the Internet and stockpiling new resources on the web will result in new and better histories.
However, a survey of a range of digitisation projects currently underway in Africa suggests that this may be a naïve expectation. Many initiatives, especially those related to the history of the liberation struggles in Southern Africa, still rely on well-worn categories and conceptual frameworks that once provided the politically constraining paradigmatic choices of the Cold War.
Most liberation movements, like the states against which they struggled, were indelibly marked by such Cold War paradigms. Today, digitisation initiatives of archival collections based on this adversarial inheritance continues unabated. African states, political movements, university administrations and archivists are increasingly teaming up with international donor agencies to create access to the documentary traces of the very contentious history of the liberation movements in Southern Africa and cultural heritage more generally.
Nowhere, it seems, is the question of debating what can be critically said about the history of liberation struggles in a more fundamental sense being posited as grounds for forming digital archives. Neither is the issue of the relation between technology and knowledge being given adequate attention. More troubling has been the extent to which digitisation projects have bypassed the debate about the reconfiguring of the archive in parts of Africa in the aftermath of colonialism. In the process, discussions about the skewed relations of academic exchange and information-gathering through which Africa’s marginality is being reinscribed under globalisation have unfortunately been circumvented.
The creation of digital archives of the liberation struggle should perhaps be broached as a question of technology and knowledge. Care should be taken not to make a fetish of technology. Echoing the critic Theodore Adorno, we should remain aware of the threshold between a rational relationship to technology and the overvaluation that can finally lead to the point where one who cleverly devises a train system that brings the victims to Auschwitz as quickly and smoothly as possible forgets about what happens to them there. One can only hope that someday the same standards of memory would apply to the violence that engulfed Southern Africa during the Cold War in the name of apartheid.
For now, suffice to say that in the work of the Frankfurt School we may detect a tendency to avoid viewing technology as mere neutral mediation. Technology has a much more proximate relation to violence, not least, as French philosopher Michel Foucault was later to show, because of its formation in the knowledge/power nexus that facilitated modern systems of governmentality.
What is needed is a critical model from which to approach the production of knowledge and the digitisation of the archive of liberation struggles that simultaneously exceeds the limits of Cold War paradigms that such a history often recalls. In other words, the formation of digital archives should be rendered equally responsive to the politics of contemporary South Africa and the need to investigate the foundational concepts on which modern African states have been forged.
It is not surprising that many digitisation initiatives are so intensely contested given their focus on documents related to the history of liberation struggles. The reasons, while often couched in terms of intellectual property, national heritage, and the political economy of digitisation, have not sufficiently acknowledged that the sources of contestation are also embedded in the Cold War paradigms which the documentary traces of the liberation struggles bring to the fore. Concerns about the legitimacy of these digital initiatives should be coupled with an understanding of the potential consequences of the technologisation of knowledge.
Beyond the arguments about access, digitisation raises fears that unequal relations between the global north and south will be perpetuated. Good intentions notwithstanding, we will perhaps see the rise of vast technopolies with powerful resource concentrations that will continue to make Africans consumers of knowledge about themselves rather than producers of that knowledge.
Digitisation may also have very specific consequences for the formation of public and civic spheres such as higher education. Coupled with the creeping effects of globalisation, the technologisation of knowledge may be speeding up the depoliticisation of society. None of the digital initiatives as far as I can tell have as their guiding impulse the pressing need to assess the effects of liberation struggles, their relations to global processes of the Cold War and newer arrangements of global hegemony, their complex conceptual points of departure in the racial premises of modern states and the strategies deployed in overcoming colonialism.
It is equally interesting that digitisation initiatives should be undertaken without considering how the end of the Cold War entrenched views about capitalism that, in its more recent manifestations, uncritically elevated the idea of exchange to the status of universality. This idea surfaced despite a world of extremes of inequality. Elided in the ascending orders of hegemonic discourse, and we might say, the totalising narrative of Empire, are the unequal relations that define late capitalism.
The often ambivalent responses of African states to digitisation projects suggests that the incessant demand for technological development as a basis for the reconstitution of society leaves little room for critiquing the introduction of new technologies into the society. Moreover, the technological advantage gained by the archive in its function of normalising the exercise of power raises fears that digitisation initiatives would lend themselves to the further instrumentalisation of states. Bound to the legacies of the Cold War and committed to technology as a means for Africa’s development, the question of the imagined form of the postcolonial African subject remains to be addressed. The focus on the history of liberation struggles, as is already known, recasts some well-traversed binaries of domination and resistance that elide the production of subaltern subjectivity in postcolonial Africa. Digital technologies may be fostering precisely such an elision.
The process of digitising archives of the liberation struggle seems to be haunted by an earlier politics of collecting by which the colonial archive was once distinguished. Tackling the formation of the colonial archive might highlight the ways in which its entrenched categories and modes of evidence persisted in the highly technologised environment of the Cold War, with, as we know, dire consequences for many. Digitisation initiatives might be where the toxic legacies of the two predicaments of colonialism and the Cold War appear to be converging.
In the face of the virtual stampede for Africa, we should perhaps strive to return the technological to a subordinate position to the epistemological. It is here that it may activate debate about the ways in which Africa’s marginality is reinscribed, sometimes by using the very same resources of knowledge and technology through which it hoped to escape its predicament.
This requires rendering the colonial and Cold War imprints on the archive as the facilitating point for imagining different relations of knowledge production. Digitisation initiatives that serve as a critical model for making technology the very object of scrutiny may help to clear the space for an investigation of our modernity which has left in its wake a trail of mangled bodies and devastation.
Premesh Lalu is associate professor in history and heads the Programme on the Study of the Humanities in Africa in the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape