Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive

I

Why explore the life of an archive, and what might it mean to study its “life” as opposed to writing its history? The proposition of an archive having a life is, on the face of it, counter-intuitive. Once safely cloistered in the archive, we imagine that a record, an object or a collection is preserved relatively unchanged for posterity. Under those conditions does it even have an ongoing history worth investigating, let alone a life?

The efficacy of archives in affording researchers a view of a past, our awareness of the incompleteness of the glimpse offered, our gratitude for the historical accident or deliberate act that preserved the fragments on which we depend, and our understanding that particular records reflect the biases and interests of their writers, all of these recognitions concentrate our attention on the status, possibilities and limitations of records as sources. The historical disciplines have a range of sophisticated methods for mining these sources, of attending to their biases, reading them against the grain, and filling in the gaps. As historians, we acknowledge our debts to the archives, or archival configurations which house these sources, thanking fulsomely the skilled professionals who facilitate our enquiries. We rue failing institutional contexts when the conditions of preservation and care deteriorate, and where we can, we organize interventions to support archives.² Much of the disciplinary practice of history depends on ideas about archives as neutral, professional storehouses, committed to holding deposited records as far as is possible unchanged over time. Indeed, this is the understanding of archives that underpins the professional practice of the archivists. Thankfully, professional archivists mostly do an outstanding job in ensuring conditions of preservation.

But archives, are of course, themselves historical artifacts, with often complex conditions of production. Readings and interpretations of a “source” can shift in significant ways when considered in the light of the conditions of production of the particular record, a methodological step seldom taken by historians until the interpretation of the record becomes a matter of debate. When the South African historian Julian Cobbing made his “case against the mfecane,” he claimed that the notion of the Zulu king Shaka as the devastator of regions around the Zulu kingdom was part of an elaborate alibi constructed by white writers in an effort to obscure the disruptive effects of their participation in a local slave trade.³ This intervention sparked off a host of studies that scrutinized closely the circumstances of the making of the written records of early visitors to the Zulu kingdom as well as a debate about the status of the relevant recorded oral evidence.⁴

Even when undertaken, all too often enquiry into the making of an archive finds a seemingly natural endpoint in the moment when the record enters the archive. This essay considers the methodological imperatives and potentials that underlie investigation of the conditions of production of a record, and of the archive set-up in which it comes to be lodged, where conditions of production are understood to be ongoing over time. The essay puts forward the argument that the conditions of production of the archival housing and what happens to the record once in an archive, allows us to understand much about how the archival housing changes and frames a record.

My use in this essay of the terms “archival configuration,” “archival setup,” and “archival housing” seeks to alert the reader to the variety of, and changing, forms of archive, including, but not confined to: formal archival institutions, such as the provincial Pietermaritzburg Archive Repository, formerly known as the Natal Archives Depot; institutions with an archival aspect, such as the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Killie Campbell Africana Library (books and manuscripts collected by the incunabulist, Killie Campbell); institutions termed “museums” (such as the Mashu Museum of Ethnology, the collection of material culture and material culture images collected by Killie Campbell and housed in the old Campbell home, the same building as the books and manuscripts of the Africana Library); and published archives, like the published volumes (1976-ongoing) of the papers of James...