Liberating the archive (Nelson Mandela Foundation)

Three books have been published in recent months which address themes of fundamental importance to the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Each of them, in very different ways, explores the nexuses of archive-discourse, public-private and violence-peacemaking. All three of the books have benefitted from engagement with the Foundation and its archival resources.

Jacob Dlamini’s The Terrorist Album uses a particular apartheid-era security police record as a prism for reading apartheid security archives and explores the importance of memory and narrative in reckoning with South Africa’s pasts. Carolyn Hamilton and Lesley Cowling’s Babel Unbound is a collection of essays on public deliberation in South Africa, with one of its central themes being the ways in which public discourse is always already in a relation of dynamic and ever-shifting interdependence with archive. Imraan Coovadia’s study of Mandela, Gandhi and Tolstoy, Revolution and Non-violence, explores intersecting traditions of resistance to oppression, including a counterpointing of the strategies of Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

Read more here.