March 1, 1999
University to Be Home for Anti-Apartheid Group's Archives

by Mike Allen
Source: The New York Times on the Web | National New York Region


STORRS, Conn. -- The archives of the African National Congress, which were buried in backyards and otherwise hidden in three dozen countries during the party's underground struggle against apartheid, will be collected and opened to the public here and in South Africa under an agreement to be signed Monday.

The University of Connecticut will help catalog 5,000 boxes of previously secret letters and other documents in South Africa. Copies will then be deposited at the campus in Storrs, 30 miles east of Hartford. The Connecticut collection will also include videotapes of rallies and some original artifacts: beaded mats used to send coded messages of resistance, and decades' worth of buttons, stickers and posters that were used to build support around the world.

The A.N.C., led by Nelson Mandela, now the president of South Africa, was an officially banned organization for 30 years but won control of the government in 1994 in the country's first free elections. "There was a time when documents meant death or imprisonment or torture," Narissa Ramdhani, the head of archives for the A.N.C., said in a telephone interview from Cape Town. "The history of South Africa needs to be rewritten, but until now, we've never had the materials to rewrite it. This has been a lost history."

Most tantalizing for scholars, the party has agreed to open records about such touchy subjects as accusations of human rights violations within its own ranks. "We've been denied access to this history for so long that it would be hypocritical of us to close off part of it now," Ms. Ramdhani said. "It is not our intention to portray the party only in a positive way. But we believe people will see this was a liberation struggle fought under difficult conditions."

The agreement, which will make the University of Connecticut the only official A.N.C. repository outside South Africa, is to be signed at the Parliament building in Cape Town in a ceremony with Government officials and a delegation from the university. The collection will be housed at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, which specializes in human rights materials and is named for the father of Senator Christopher J. Dodd. The elder Dodd, who also served as Senator from Connecticut, was a senior prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

Ms. Ramdhani said a dozen universities in the United States and Europe had vied for the collection. She said the University of Connecticut was chosen because the Dodd Center is "a unique human rights repository."

Ms. Ramdhani also has a personal connection, having studied at the University of Connecticut for three years beginning in 1986.
The diaries and other documents cover everything from mining strikes to the A.N.C.'s diplomatic maneuvering abroad to its smuggling of machine guns into the country. As part of the project, scholars at the University of Connecticut will collect oral histories from 200 A.N.C. leaders and members, beginning with Mandela.

Amii Omara-Otunnu, an associate professor of history who will head the archives project in Connecticut, said scholars were eager to evaluate the motives of those abroad who helped the A.N.C., and to better understand such practices as the execution of suspected informers within the Congress.

"We will be in a position to see whether these actions were the policy of the A.N.C. hierarchy, or whether these were extremist members," Dr. Omara-Otunnu said.

The material is to be catalogued in Johannesburg, a project that is expected to take about eight years, then preserved at the University of Fort Hare, Mandela's alma mater.

The first A.N.C. documents should arrive in Storrs this summer. Some of the archive is already available through the A.N.C.'s World Wide Web site, including all 11,000 words of Mandela's famous defense from the dock in Pretoria Supreme Court in 1964, in which he declared, "I am prepared to die."

Also available is "What Women Demand," a 1955 manifesto calling for street lights, public swimming pools and the right to home ownership "for all people of all races."