The Centre for Innovation and Technology (CITE) has launched a regional archive to record the memories of people who lived through Southern Africa’s liberation wars. The Frontline States Liberation Archiveswill document the struggle through the testimony of those who fought in it, supported it and survived it. Many of the people it hopes to interview are now in their seventies and eighties.
“Every month, some of these witnesses die,” CITE director Zenzele Ndebele said. “When they die, parts of our history disappear with them – because their experiences were never recorded and their stories never entered the official archives.” The project will be officially launched later this month. The archive combines the existing ZPRA Liberation Archives with the histories of liberation movements and frontline communities across the region.
Its reach extends into Zambia, Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania and Angola, as well as Namibia and South Africa – countries that became transit routes, training grounds, refugee camps and battlefields. CITE says the record will go well past political leaders and military commanders. It intends to gather accounts from combatants and women guerrillas, but also from refugees, political detainees, couriers, villagers and families split apart by the war.
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“This is not only the history of generals and politicians,” Ndebele said. “It is the history of the woman who hid fighters in her kitchen, the driver who carried weapons across a border, the nurse who treated the wounded, and the village that buried young men whose families never knew where they died.” Much of the region’s liberation history has been told through official speeches, state institutions and political biographies, the organisation argues. Those accounts are important, it says, but incomplete.
Thousands of people took part in the struggle without ever appearing in a history book. Others still hold photographs, letters and diaries in boxes and suitcases at home.
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