An archive of identity: the Central African Archives and Southern Rhodesian history

Abstract

Between 1943 and 1956, government archivists in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) collaborated with the publisher Chatto & Windus to produce a series of nine books. The collection was known as the 'Oppenheimer Series'. The volumes were published by the Central African Archives and offered in print, for the first time, the primary sources-diaries, correspondence, notes and maps-that chronicled the first English-speaking Europeans to visit south-central Africa. This paper explores the role of this publication event in building a settled identity for Europeans in Southern Rhodesia. The publication of the Series coincided with efforts by the Rhodesian archivists to bring manuscripts from the UK to their collection in Salisbury (Harare). These activities reveal a strategy not only to publish the history of European exploration and settlement in central Africa but to reify it through the physical presence of these books and the archival institution itself.

Information Representation in Displaced Archives: A Meta-Synthesis

“…The main characteristic that corroborates this reunification strategy consists in the interest of the claimants in wanting to represent dispersed documentary sets under Latinised ethnonymic names, such as Rossica/Sovietica (Grimsted 1993a), Ucrainica (Grimsted 1993a;1987;1991a), Baltica (Grimsted 1993a), Polonica (Grimsted 1993a), Rhodesiana (Dritsas and Haig 2014), Judaica (Schenkolewski-Kroll 2016) and Hungarica (Niessen 2018), among other forms. This strategy has also been adopted for the archives of liberation fronts constituted in exile during…”

Czasopismo „Archival Science” w latach 2011–2020 – analiza treści artykułów naukowych

“…Tak częste występowanie kodu jest do pewnego stopnia efektem opatrywania tekstów na inny temat szerokim tłem historycznym (jeśli jednak było ono zarysowane tylko częściowo i nie wpływało istotnie na treść publikacji, kod ten nie był nadawany). Przykładowe tematy artykułów: historia i struktura brytyjskiej administracji kolonialnej 31 , historia Centralnego Archiwum Afrykańskiego, jego działalność publikacyjna i związek z budowaniem europejskiej tożsamości w Południowej Rodezji 32 , rozproszenie archiwaliów jako zjawisko historyczne 33 .…”

‘Pilgrimage to Chipundu’: Livingstone's Legacy among Scottish Missionaries in Northern Rhodesia/Zambia, 1950s–1970s

“…In the late colonial period African nationalists, colonial civil servants and white settlers could, and did, look to Livingstone and other explorers and missionaries for inspiration as his life story could mark the beginning of a process with which they were involved (Mufuzi 2012;Dritsas & Haig 2013). European missionaries, who often felt peripheral to the colonial authority and did not identify themselves as 'settlers', looked to him for religious example.…”