Reconstructing an archive of Pan Africanist exile: (re)locating a decolonial vision for Azania

Keywords: archives, archival methods, Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania, South Africa, anti-apartheid, exile
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 4

Abstract

The Pan Africanist Congress of Azania (PAC) played a significant role in the South African anti-apartheid struggle. However, by the end of apartheid, they had been eclipsed and actively side-lined by the African National Congress (more so since they formed the government). When exiled members of the PAC returned to South Africa in the 1990s, they did not have the resources or foresight to take a substantial archive of their political work with them. This paper reflects on a recent project which contributes to reconstructing a PAC archive, by digitizing and interpreting papers relating to the political work of their members exiled in the UK and making this archive publicly available to members of South Africa’s ‘born free’ generation interested in Pan-Africanism’s history and potential. Although the archive documents the political work of Pan Africanists in the UK and the PAC’s exiled headquarters in Tanzania, the papers we have access to were collated at the time by British solidarity activists. We reflect on the multiple dislocations and distances, in time, space, and subjectivity, that have shaped this archive and the processes of its (re)composition. Taken together, the archive presents a Pan Africanist vision for a post-apartheid Azanian nation in which the undoing of settler colonial property relations, to redress the question of land ownership, was central to the decolonial project. While our collaboration with the contemporary PAC seeks to recentre this vision, we recognise that the archive itself and the process of reassembling it cannot escape ongoing coloniality.