The apartheid archive was conceptualized and initiated in August 2008 by 22 core researchers located at universities spanning South Africa, Australia, the United States and United Kingdom. In June 2009, about 50 academics and researchers met at Wits University to set up the
Apartheid Archive Project. The idea was to record details of everyday experiences of apartheid in the lives of ordinary South Africans in order to document, interrogate and acknowledge how racism impacted on everyone, and thereby fuel the transformation agenda in diverse ways. It would show how traumatizing racism is for the victim and how complicity affects the perpetrator/beneficiary/bystander(to use
Gillian Straker's all-encompassing term for us whites). By so doing it is hoped that these experiences can be psychologically integrated instead of being disavowed.
Initially the accounts were written by the participants, their colleagues and friends. Everyone was asked to write about their earliest and/or significant experiences of racism under apartheid and how these affected their lives. They now want to broaden the accounts to include many different kinds of South Africans and you can
submit your own story online. A number of research articles have already been written based on the archive.
Take a look at this extraordinary account of probably fairly ordinary behaviour of white adolescent boys (cited by
Tamara Shefer in
South African Journal of Psychology, Vol. 40(4), 2010. p390):
