The Apartheid Archive

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):

So, to mock a fellow student you repeated his words more slowly, in an affected ‘African’ kind of voice, to make him sound like he didn’t know what he was talking about, as if he were stupid.  That was enough – the mere evocation of a caricatured black voice speaking in English was sufficient to imply someone was unintelligent. Name calling – by using the prefix ‘i’, or using ‘ngi-ngu’ before someone’s name, was enough to associate them with the racist values of blackness (incompetence, stupidity, inability, and so on)……. There were also facial improvisations, flattening one’s nose, spreading one’s lips as wide as possible, making them as thick as possible, sufficed to mimic blackness. By doing this at the same time as mocking a fellow student – sometimes, oddly enough, affectionately (?), one would again set up the association of them as somehow black. In short, a series of racist stereotypes and bodily evocations became part and parcel of the repetitive play of white adolescent boys, vital instruments in the ongoing in-group/out-group identity practices of who was cool and who wasn’t. (N53, Male, White).

In the same article, we find the humiliating experience of a senior black academic and researcher, visiting a district office of health with colleagues in order to set up some interviews there, rendered invisible by a patronising (though apparently well-meaning) white woman health worker:

The first thing I realized was that Mrs W never looked at me. She never addressed me except to ask me whether I spoke isiZulu. What she said was, “Do you speak English, ag, I mean Xhosa….er, Zulu?” …. The next time I became part of the discussion was when Mrs W addressed me in the third person, asking my white colleague, “Is he going to do most of the interviews?” My colleague would later say it made her uncomfortable but at the time she answered, “Yes, but I will do some of the work” ….. But the one moment that stands out that morning is when Mrs W asked my colleagues whether I wanted to go to the toilet. My colleague had asked her to point her to the ladies. When Mrs W asked her about my bladder, she said she didn’t know what to say. She mouthed some incoherency, possibly in an attempt to balance Mrs W’s foolish infantilizing question. But me, it floored. By then I was already close to ground anyway…. (N8, Male, Black, 30s)

This particular account is also cited by Gillian Straker in her courageous and personally revealing paper in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Vol. 21 (6) 2011. p643.