Working with the Apartheid Archive: Or, of Witness, Testimony and Ghosts

Abstract

An organising and motivational pivot for the Apartheid Archive Project is to solicit ‘experiences of racism of (particularly “ordinary”) South Africans under the old apartheid order’ because ‘traumatic experiences from the past will constantly attempt to re-inscribe themselves (often in masked form) in the present, if they are not acknowledged, interrogated and addressed’ (Apartheid Archive Project, 2010). To that end, my role as a researcher participating on this project seems fairly circumscribed, in the words of the invitation, to ‘collect’, ‘document’, ‘analyse’ and ‘provide access’ to such apartheid narratives. But how am I to do so? Is there not a demand on the researcher of the post-traumatic and postgenocidal archive, he or she who fingers welts and traces scars in order to thematize it, even to understand it, that exceeds the academics of the law, the universal and the empirical presence of the text as data? Indeed, I will argue precisely that — that this researcher’s’ response, which is also his or her responsibility, cannot proceed from an ontological calculation of being, but from an ethical and hauntological call to witness and testimony.