History being deleted
The Rivonia Trial reincarnated in VR is a triumph. At the same time, it highlights the crisis facing hundreds of other dictabelt tapes and archival footage that have not been digitised and are deteriorating every minute.
Heritage consultant Jo-anne Duggan is a former director of the Archival Platform, a nongovernmental initiative to deepen democracy through the use of memory and archives as public resources.
She says the state of our national archives should be a national crisis.
“We don’t have the capacity or resources right now to keep digital records properly. Think of all the emails, Whatsapp messages, letters and photographs on phones that are not making it into record-keeping,” she says.
Duggan says non-paper based communications such as emails from Mandela’s early days in office are lost. The same for #Feesmustfall mobilisations that took place via Whatsapp group messages.
“We can’t recover information that is in a format we can’t read. We lose that history utterly,” she says, pointing out how information on stiffy disks and even DVDS already stands to be lost.
Duggan says the value of records is not just for history, it’s also a way to hold politicians and authorities to account. “Records provide evidence to challenge impunity.”
Material record and memory are also linked: “Material record stimulates memory and memory evokes other memories to make another source of record,” says Duggan.
Records, ephemera and artefacts of our pasts are also deeply humanising, she says.
“Just think about hearing the voices from the Rivonia Trial. You hear the accents, you hear where maybe someone stumbled or how they pronounced a word. You hear that they are humans, just like us.
“If we want to understand the fuller story of the past, not just the narrative of big events, we need to understand the humanness of humans and this comes from proper record-keeping of our human story,” says Duggan.