Much of what Lwando Xaso told us during our tour of the Constitutional Court remains with me and continues to color how I see and experience subsequent class lessons, interpersonal interactions, and new locations. Today, I remembered Lwando’s assertion that “the destruction of an archive is a human rights violation.” She said it in reference to the Afrikaaner government’s systematic destruction of records at the Constitution Hill Prison during the transition of power in the early 1990s, but her words echoed for me when we visited several sites in Soweto.
In Regina Mundi, I had a palpable sense of the church in its different scenes and seasons. I could vividly imagine the heat of bodies pressed together in community worship during a Youth Day service, the electrifying effect of hearing Mandela or the Obamas speak, or the terror of hiding from the Afrikaaner police during raids. Physical remnants of the attacks, like the bullet holes in the ceiling, helped this mental image materialize. Other traces of history felt less tangible, like imagining the exact spot where Mandela or Michelle Obama placed their feet. However, we weren’t left alone in bringing the history of Regina Mundi alive. Our guide, Danny, delivered visceral descriptions of the past that helped animate history for a group of western college students from thousands of miles away. Danny was in his early twenties when the Soweto uprisings began in 1976. Now he is 71. Danny is himself an archive of sorts, overflowing with memories from coming of age admist the turmoil and tragedy of apartheid.
When we walked upstairs to the photo exhibit on the Soweto uprisings, the first thing I noticed was the layers of scrawled messages covering the gallery walls. Stretching back over twenty years, visitors to the church had written messages ranging from “I was here” to philosophical meditations on peace, liberty, and hope. At first, I found the hundreds of notes distracting from my efforts to focus on the black and white photos. However, the handwritten messages provided a key dimension to my comprehensive experience of the gallery. The notes were a way to show the process of history accreting, not simply through the passage of time but also through the continuity of emotion shared by every visitor. The notes scrawled on the walls constitute another archive, one that is constantly growing and unlikely to be stifled or erased so long as the story of Soweto continues to be told.
Loosely quoting the Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the process of semanticization, of making meaning, is nothing but a process of “localizing the dead.” Writing any history is a mourning process, and we summon ghosts with the stories we tell. The archive is a gravesite, but it can also be a site of regeneration. Outside the Hector Pieterson museum, we listened to another guide chart the physical landmarks and use them to tell us the story of June 16th. Nearby, a group of South African schoolchildren listened to their teacher explain the same history. Later on while inside the museum, I watched another student group raise their fists in solidarity and chant “Amandla.” Even when the older generation passes away, the one that still remembers the uprisings and the lived reality of apartheid, this new generation will absorb and carry their stories and messages with them. The archive will never truly be lost so long as the stories survive, but will rather accrete and gain new meaning over time.
I am still mulling over what our role is in this archive of stories. We are here to collect stories and amplify them, using both epidemiology and emotion. During this process, we are creating an archive ourselves, which is this blog. Although the larger significance of us being here and documenting what we see and experience remains opaque for me now, I’m looking forward to looking back on these reflections in months or years and seeing how the archive metamorphoses.
