Menings | Opinion > SeminaarKamer | Seminar Room > English > Mini-seminars > NALN is not only a national resource NALN is not only a national resource

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Peter D McDonald - 2007-04-19

I am very grateful to Rudi Venter for alerting me to this discussion about the future of NALN. As I understand it, the current situation raises a number of large and difficult questions about the institutional location of the archive, the funding arrangements that sustain it, its status as a "national" resource, and its significance in relation to the constitutional guarantees regarding South Africa’s many languages.

As I am not familiar enough with the state of the debate at the administrative level, I do not feel I am in a position to comment on these pressing and important matters. All I can do is express a hope that others who are better qualified than I am, and who have more detailed knowledge at their disposal, will have the opportunity to do so and perhaps to address questions like the following:

1. Is it desirable, given the demands of the past and the prospects for the future, to continue to have separate archives or museums for each of South Africa’s languages?
2. Is it desirable to have disparate funding arrangements for these various institutions, some sustained from the centre, others from the regions?
3. Is it right, given the constitutional guarantees, for any such institution to be privatised?
4. Is it possible intellectually, practically and financially to conceive of a future in which a single, centrally funded literary archive covering all South Africa’s languages and perhaps linked in some way to the National Library, might be created?
5. And finally, what, if any, are the connections between these discussions and those currently being held under the auspices of the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s "Centre for Memory" forums?

As a past and, I hope, future user and beneficiary of NALN, I feel I am on more secure ground and I hope the following brief reflections will be of some use for this virtual seminar.

The first point I would like to make is that, like all archives around the world, NALN is not only a national resource. Following Kwame Appiah (see the chapter "Whose Culture Is It, Anyway?" in his most recent book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, 2006), I would argue that an archive like NALN also forms part of a larger, cosmopolitan world culture and that, as such, its guardians have responsibilities that extend beyond regional or national borders. They need, in a sense, to address the fact that the "ons" in the question "Wat word van ons argief?" need not necessarily be narrowly or even clearly defined. Like any "ons", its meaning depends on the context of its use.

I realise this sounds like an easy, perhaps even utopian claim, but if I can use my own research as example, it also has a concrete, practical dimension. For my own work, which is in part about the long history of the link between the literature and nationalism, NALN represents a major resource not only for understanding Afrikaans literature but also for tracing the movement of ideas around the world. It is, to this extent, a repository not of a culture but of cultural connectedness.

My second point is that while NALN inevitably has a history, perhaps even a questionable history based on a very limited definition of "ons", it is not wholly contained or defined by it. Again, like any archive, it is a locus of both planned and unplanned consequences.

It could, of course, be argued that it is worth preserving simply as a record of a particular period, a specific interest group, and a certain kind of thinking. Yet its value today surely lies as much in the fact that it is now not a monument to that past but, for many younger scholars, an essential tool for opening up a new and different future, a future which may be made possible only by a radical reinterpretation of the past. This is in part because the evidence accumulated over the years may have significance beyond anything NALN’s founders might have been able to imagine. It is also because historiographical priorities and practices change.

Speaking from my own experience as a fellow traveller in the field of what is now generally called "book history", I know only to well how many gaps there are in the record, particularly in the field of publishing history, where the loss of publishers’ archives, through neglect or deliberate, commercially motivated suppression, leaves huge holes in our understanding of the past.

France is, I believe, one of the few countries in which it is illegal to destroy business records because they are regarded as a part of the cultural life and memory of the nation.

As scholars become more and more aware of the social, economic, political and cultural value of such sources, NALN’s extraordinary holdings will, I am sure, acquire an ever greater significance in ways we cannot yet conceive of.

To this extent it is worth preserving and, indeed, building on within the context of a new, democratic South Africa, not just because it is a record of the past, but because it creates space for an as yet unknown future in which the meaning of "ons" might be wholly unpredictable.

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