Decolonial Framework

Supplied by June Bam-Hutchison (Click on image to learn more)

This digital archive arose out of a process of intense dialogues, collaboration and co-design between the Centre for African Studies and San and Khoi leaders, community members and civic organizations (the A/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum) since 2018. This contestation process was catalysed by the renaming of the colonially named graduation building ‘Jameson Hall’ to ‘Sarah Baartman Hall’ at the historically white University of Cape Town.      

The community demanded the decolonisation of knowledge at the university as one of its conditions for this renaming.

The archive consequently aims to be decolonial in its approach and design, as the represented knowledge and information is contextualised in a manner that acknowledges its indigenous origins, with the aim of making its content (and even rarely viewed archival colonial texts) accessible to the public. One of the demands in the community dialogues was in fact to access all texts produced on the San and Khoi as the communities wanted to critically engage with their colonial representation.

The archive therefore aims to contribute to language revival as well as language preservation, through creating a central repository for San and Khoi languages, literature, history, rituals and art that will enable generations to keep indigenous knowledge alive.

Central to this archival process are the knowledges of San and Khoi communities passed on to future generations. These knowledges have survived both colonialism and apartheid and it is essential to ensure an ongoing engagement with these indigenous knowledge practices existing outside of Western knowledge systems. Although there are well established San and Khoi archives embedded in western academic research processes (in the disciplines of Anthropology, History, Archaeology etc.) these archives often place the knowledge of the indigenous communities themselves outside of the mainstream knowledge production process. 

The San & Khoi Digital Archive takes a decolonial approach in working with community researchers deeply invested in answering important questions relevant to endangered San and Khoi languages and knowledge of the landscape facing erasure. The aim is to acknowledge the history of San and Khoi in Southern Africa, in particular, in order to use the archive as a tool to assist with asserting indigenous people’s rights.