 Okay, welcome everyone. And I think we can start the session. I introduced Wayne Dooling, a source lecturer in African history who is going to chair this session. Wayne, I leave it to you to introduce the keynote and the following panel. Many thanks. Thank you very much, Angelica. And welcome everybody. And as Angelica said, I am my name is Wayne Dooling. And I'm a member of the department, or rather the School of History, Religions and Philosophies here at SOS. My work, I'm an historian of South Africa. My work is primarily on colonial South Africa. But today I'm here to serve as the chair on this panel. Our very exciting afternoon panel, and which is on archives, museums, and heritage as contested spaces. So first up we'll have the next keynote session, our second keynote session for today, keynote conversation, and then we'll have a panel of speakers. So the members of our keynote panel, our keynote conversation. At first we have Paul Basu, Paul is Professor of Anthropology here at SOS. Paul's earliest work was on genealogical heritage tourism and historical imagination in the Scottish Highlands or the Scottish Highland diaspora. The distance moved his attention to West Africa, specifically Sierra Leone and Nigeria and continues to work on issues of heritage, and on issues of landscape memory cultural heritage. He has also worked as a filmmaker, trained as a filmmaker and worked as a filmmaker, and continues to explore the use of different media in ethnographic research and exhibition curation. So we are currently leading an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project entitled Museum Affordances. The second member of our keynote conversation panel is Elsie Usu, but I think Paul will speak more directly to Elsie's professional expertise and experience. Thank you very much Paul and Elsie, so to start with our keynote conversation and then I will introduce the members of our panel afterwards. Over to you Paul, thank you. Thanks very much, thanks very much Wayne and thanks to all of the organisers of this great event. Elsie I don't know if you're there, I don't know if you want to turn on your camera too and then we'll be... Oh my camera is turned on. Ah okay, great, sorry. You should be able to see me. Yes, great. Well, as Wayne suggested, archives and museums are some of the most significant public institutional spaces that bring together the themes of the conference, epistemologies, mobilities and identities and there are certainly spaces of contestation. These sites of knowledge production and representation are of course also entangled in and often responsible for perpetuating ongoing conditions of coloniality. In their modern guise, these institutions are inseparable from the histories of empire and colonialism and with Eurocentric epistemologies that have ordered the world according to particular logics and hierarchies. These are the structures of collecting, documenting, cataloging, classifying and displaying that are associated with museums and archives are also fundamental projects of colonial modernity and are bound up in its different violences. And the principles of ordering impressed upon them in which alternative world views are often relegated to the status of heritage. Dominant knowledges were and are produced and reproduced. We can't undo history but we can recognize and address the legacies of history and we can acknowledge the need to repair what has been damaged. And so this brings us to the main theme of this keynote conversation with Elsie Owusu, the issue of kind of repair or reparation and restitution with particular reference to archives, museums and heritage. So, so let me introduce Elsie then Elsie Owusu OBE is an architect and urban designer. She's principal of Elsie Owusu architects, member of Council of Reba the Royal Institute of British architects, and the founding chair of the Society of Black Architects. She's been a board member of various arts and heritage organizations, including the Arts Council England and the National Trust for England. And she's also director of the company just Ghana, which promotes investment sustainable development and constructive social engagement in Ghana. So welcome, Elsie. So, I know, I know you've been a long standing proponent of and and been long engaged with the African reparations movement. So perhaps we could start if you could tell us a little bit about your involvement with this over the years. Well, my involvement with this conversation dialogue started in 1993, just about the time when the Society of Black Architects was formed. It started with a meeting with the one of the first black MPs in UK, in the UK Parliament, Bernie Grant, who was part of a movement, which in those days seemed, you know, completely utopian, called the Africa reparations movement, and lots of people sort of titted and smirked at the idea that these up to 90% of African historical material, according to the New York Court afford report was held outside the continent. And as a result of colonial conquest, plunder and outright theft, as well as legitimate trade and exchange. So, but since then, the calls for the return of these treasures has gained momentum and has ended in the ground recently in the groundbreaking Sarsavar report commissioned by President Macron. It was actually published two years ago and calls for full restitution of of works in French museums, which were plundered from former African colonies. So the idea which so many years ago seemed completely outlandish is gradually gaining traction. So, in 1996 as a young architect, I launched a competition called the Gallery for Returning Treasures, and this was co-sponsored by Royal Institute of British Architects and the Africa reparations movement and Bernie Grant. 25 years later, I'm working on the concept of a real gallery for returning treasures in Ghana. In fact, the concept has become so popular that there are several proposals for returns of African treasures. And it just reminds me of a conversation, a meeting we had with one of the dignitaries from Benin, from the Ober of Benin's court with the British Museum, which was set up by Bernie. He sort of said, well, you go along, I'll see you know about these things. Well, I thought it and we had this meeting with one of the keepers who was, you know, nice in the sort of Monty Python sort of way, nice, nice gentleman. And he said, well, actually, I'm very sympathetic to this, but I have a better idea. We are prepared to make facsimiles of the doors, the archways and the various treasures that you see on the, in various parts of the British Museum, and we'll let you have those. But unfortunately, we can't return the, by acts of parliament, we can't return the originals. And quick as a flash, the oboes relative said, well, I've got a better idea. Why don't we have the originals and you can keep facsimiles and needless to say that didn't go down very well. But I mean, it is pretty wonderful that treasures that were taken by British forces in 1874 and auctioned at Garards and went into the British Museum and V&A and various places. By no means, not just the National Collections. But you know, there are a huge number of these treasures. And they were never intended for museums. I mean, these are not museum pieces. These are artifacts and religious icons, which belong to the custodians who are still alive. And you know, because of the way that memories transmitted and and history is shared, are still part of oral culture in Ghana, the former Gold Coast, and the custodians are saying, you know, Mr, can we have our ball back please? And to which the answer is, well, give us another 50 years and we'll think about it. And I think most people would agree that's certainly not good news. Thanks. And perhaps we can hear a bit more later about the particular museum project that you're leading there. And that would be very interesting to hear about. But maybe just to pick up on a couple of the points. I mean, and I see my role here really is playing devil's advocate to try and open up some of the kind of the space of contestation as it were around these these kinds of issues, because one would think it would be a very straightforward matter as you're kind of suggesting. And yet somehow it is bound up with contestation just not just of the kind of kind of legal framework that say the British Museum might respond with but perhaps more complex things. Indeed, that issue of complexity is something that I found myself returning to quite a lot with some of the recent debates. The SARS of wire report that you mentioned, for instance, really tries to simplify the story this the notion of complexity or ambiguity is kind of seen as something that is almost giving permission to institutions to actually pause to hesitate deliberate seemingly endlessly and therefore not actually take any action. But I suppose the question is about, you know, what about what happens if we actually open up some of that complexity. It's interesting that the the project that you mentioned there there refers to the notion of treasures. And in some senses, I wonder whether using treasures as the kind of model as it were to base a principle is is part of the problem, because as you say there are certain categories of objects in in our museums, which are kind of unequivocally looted in the context of military colonial expeditions and the like. You mentioned the kind of shanty context and Ben in and so on. These are the kind of kind of poster board kind of cases in a way. And in some senses that a simplest because it's quite uncontestable in a way than the circumstances in which they led to be collected. Science of what a less. Well, they broaden this category into it's very clear where it ends in a way. So for instance, the kinds of material that I've been working with resulted from colonial, for instance, anthropological expeditions where material was commissioned or purchased. But this is still framed within the same type of logic in terms of restitution. So I'm just wondering whether the focus on these treasures, the, you know, these icons, as as they're framed in the kind of afford report complicates things a little bit because it focuses on these exceptional objects, whereas actually if we're broadening that to use Macron's kind of framing to be African cultural heritage, they represent actually a very narrow and very elite form of cultural heritage. So what about the fish traps and the baskets and the all of the other everyday kinds of things, for instance, which actually make up the bulk of material in museums in the West. Well, and that reminds me of a phrase that my lawyer brother often uses, which is we mustn't make the best the enemy of the good. No, I mean, there are huge numbers of icons, treasures, artifacts, call them what you will. The important thing is the process that the VNA is going through at the moment, which is leading data collection and cataloging. You know, where are these things, what are they, when were they taken. We have that information in great detail, but it isn't assembled onto one database and in a coherent way. And I think if that scholarly work was to be done. Then we could say, let's have a hierarchy, you know, and you know who is putting up their hands and saying, all right, well you can have Kofi Carrie Carrie still back. We've got it here in Pitt Rivers and actually we'd be delighted to return it let's start there. You know so you don't have to agree to send everything back in order to start the process and I think it needs a pilot. It needs the willing, if you like collaboration of the willing both in terms of the governments and in terms of the keepers. There are keepers in Africa in Ghana museums and monuments board for instance has a wonderful team of keepers who could very easily and happily collaborate with the British Museum and with the VNA to say, you know let's sit around the table and say, you know let's have some photos. And we're going to send back is it going to be this beautiful item that's going to be the first one, you know, and we go through whether it's an active parliament or an agreement or a call that whatever you like to call it and hurrah we've got one back. But the fact of the matter is that we've been talking about this for such a long time on the basis that you know if we can't send them all back we can't send one back. And I think that some, some great work has been done I know Chris Smith has been doing work at Cambridge University about return, return of ancestral remains for instance. And there is really good work being done and I think we should piggyback on that work, you know we should have a database of the items obviously but we should also be aware, each other of, you know, of the people who are working in that space of who is doing what and how we can help each other. So I think it must, to me it must be much more collaborative at the moment it's quite binary, you know, it's a binary position, either you send them back or you don't send them back, but to me it's much more of a process. And what we should do is to be working together to define and design that process, and say that we reach a successful conclusion. And I suppose I've been involved to some degree with the debates in the Benin context and there's the kind of Benin dialogue group, which Prince Gregory who you mentioned earlier has been a member of also for many, many years and that seems to have gone around in circles. There, there's been quite a breakthrough there as I'm sure you know and David Ajay is involved in the design and building of a new museum in Benin City for instance. And, you know, the kind of provenance research that you're talking about is going on, not least in a project that's being led from Hamburg, this kind of digital Benin which is about trying to map all of those objects from the 1897 punitive expedition and the looting. Again, I'm putting my devil's advocate hat on just to kind of open up some of the questions here so you mentioned for instance the Ghana Monuments and Museums Board. And again in the Macron report, or the Sars-Efoir report, the kind of a relationship, there's a lot placed on this notion of restitution as something that's unequivocal. And the notion of the legitimate owner of this heritage. And I'm slightly troubled by some of this because in the in the proposals in France for instance this is very seen very much as a kind of bilateral national project, where objects in national museums in France are to be restored to or repatriated to national institutions on the African continent so from a national museum in Paris let's say to a national museum in Accra. Does that necessarily though get make these these collections more accessible to the actual people whose heritage they represent or embody, again in the case of, you know, royal regalia and so on it might be relatively straightforward. But again I'm thinking of the more general kind of context. My experience of many museums in African countries is that they don't necessarily really engage with communities outside of the capitals for instance. So I'm just wondering this notion of well they're two things really one is this idea and it's mentioned in in in Sars-Efoir's report is this kind of incarceration of objects so that objects are incarcerated in institutions say in Europe. And some of these strategies merely incarcerate them in institutions in African cities, for instance, would broader publics the publics who are actually closest to this heritage necessarily have greater access to them. And then there's a question of what does a legit what is the legitimate owner mean. And where are those legitimate owners in an age as it were of migration and diaspora. Can we assume that the legitimate owners are necessarily sitting in the villages or towns where the material was taken 100 150 years ago. So you can ask the same question of items which are in the British Museum, which come from the UK. I mean, you know something from the Yorkneys, or the Isle of Skye is just as alienated from its original context as something from 3000 miles away so I think that's, that's, that's a conversation at a very important conversation important dialogue about the role and functions of museums and those institutions that incarcerate items out of their everyday use. And I think that, to me, this is a dialogue about access and democratization of knowledge. Now, I think there's another conversation about empire and how these items were were collected, not just by the British by, by, say the Ashanti in the first place, you know, I mean the Ashanti had a huge empire. And, and, you know, they were just, you know, to use a colloquialism, just as much in the habit of fetching up around somebody's house and biffing them on the head and taking their stuff away. As the bricks were, you know, and, and a lot of these items were taken by the British Empire as a result of a collision with another empire. And then it is arguable that there was a big, there was a big fight and the Ashantis lost. And as a result of that, they had the regalia and their treasures taken in a punitive way, and those expeditions were called punitive expeditions they were sent out there to teach us, and to say, you know, it might be right, and we've got guns and you haven't say we're going to kill your lot and take your stuff away. Now, we don't do that anymore. So I think part of the process of reparation is recognizing that we do not do, we do not do things like this and it was a bad way to behave. And, you know, the, the, the, the Santa Hini has offered an apology for slavery. And, and other people have offered an apology for slavery now, you know, an apology is one thing. But what, what are the consequences of that apology. And there are people in Ghana who would say, you know, Ghana didn't exist when this piece, this lovely piece was made, you know, that piece belongs to my family. It doesn't even belong to my family we are custodians of this item. And there is that concept in, in, certainly in Ghana, that whether it's land or treasure. The, the person, the individual person is a custodian, not an owner. So the idea of custodianship versus ownership, I think needs to be interrogated as well. So who is the proper custodian now for these treasures, because Ghana didn't exist in those days it isn't a bilateral to me it isn't a bilateral conversation. It's about a conversation about proper custody and stewardship and care for whether it's land or intellectual property. So how we deal with that in a way which is recognises that we no longer have the days when, you know, blokes got up in their best of and Tucker and went off to war and some came back and some didn't we don't do that anymore, or we shouldn't do that anymore. So how, how do we manage that dialogue in a world where, you know, women and children and people of diverse backgrounds and orientations are part of that conversation. It's very much set in the context of an old fashioned conversation in which, you know, we are the government, we are, we are the guys, you know, one bunch of guys is talking to another bunch of guys, and I just think that it just needs to be so much more diverse and so much more interesting. It's very important, I suppose, again, this is where the question of hesitancy comes into play because I mean that the point you made there about, you know, again this goes back to this question of legitimate ownership, let's say, and as you say, problematising both the notion that there's a singular legitimation as it were, and such a thing as property in that sense or ownership. Given that some of the nation states, indeed most of the nation states didn't exist at the time when these things were acquired through whatever means the placing the responsibility on the, the, you know, the National Museums, for instance, in those countries is, you know, I could, I could see that that becomes a complicating factor now. Are they necessarily invested in the same process of negotiating that, you know, the different claims, as it were, other kinds of localities. I mean, actually, actually, and Benby was talking earlier and one of the points he made which I think is a very important one is relating to the local he made the point that there's no local that is not contested. There's no indigenous knowledge that is not the object of contestation. And I think this is very important, many museums do not speak from a position of expertise or deep understanding of the local contexts, in terms of the people who have a claim on some of the cultural heritage that we're talking about. And so again, this notion of how to work through that as a problem. If one's saying that the, the nation state isn't necessarily the legitimate owner or custodian. But then when one's got actually competition at increasingly local levels. Again, it becomes challenging. And then suddenly the museum, for instance, in, in a European country is, is in a position where it must make a decision about these competing legitimizes about which it's ill equipped to do because it simply doesn't have the knowledge. No, it doesn't that doesn't have the knowledge but you know if I can talk about Ghana Ghana does Ghana has the knowledge and Ghana has a superb infrastructure of national and local jurisprudence. So, you know, and discussion like this could be referred very easily to the House of Chiefs, where all the chiefs from the, you know, from the paramount chiefs to the sub chiefs are are represented. And that would be a really fascinating conversation to have, you know, to be a third is 14th, who is currently the chair of the House of Chiefs. And, you know, if you say someone is the 14th in line, you can see how far back that, you know, that that is his chief structures, you know, that centuries of history embodied in that individual. And there will be many, many others in the House of Chiefs, who will have those stories at their fingertips. You know, and those names like Yaya Santua and Kofi Carrie Carrie are daily names, everyday names, and children will be continuously named after those, those ancestors. And I think all it really needs is for somebody to ask the question. But you know, I mean, I'm afraid what's going on is people are sitting in their institutions and scratching that in the West and scratching their heads, and saying what are we going to do what they just need to get out there get on a plane. Go out there and ask some questions just go go to the villages and say, you know, here's a photograph. We think it comes from here. You know, do you remember this or do you, you know, do any of the grandpas and grandmas remember hearing stories about this and you will find you will find that there will be answer. I mean, just recently we've been doing a project on Michael Cardew, who was a great potter and pupil of Bernard Leitch, who spent maybe five, six, seven years in Ghana, and lived in a village in the Volta region. And we went there and said, you know, does anyone remember Michael Cardew? Oh, yes, what happened to that white man? He said he was going to see his folks and he'd be back. And that was in 1948, you know, and, and we found, you know, a lovely old lady of 92 who had been his assistant when she was 16. You know, so, so, and, and, you know, she was talking about Michael Cardew and how they did, how they were finding clays because the clay, you know, was it the right clay was it. And, and so these, and if she had died, she would have passed that on to her children and grandchildren. So these stories are there. But you're not going to find them by, I don't mean you, but one doesn't find them by sitting in a, you know, in an institution in Oxford or Birmingham, or, or Scotland and saying what should we do about this, you know, you just have to get out there. And if you can't get out there, just have one of these conversations like a Zoom conversation, you know, and, you know, people in Ghana are incredibly IT savvy. And you can just do a huge amount of research just by thinking creatively. Absolutely. And as an anthropologist, the notion of just going to talk to be it seems a very simple thing to do doesn't it just to talk to people. I'm also having witnessed many, you know, quite violent contestations for instance over chieftaincy and so on. I also recognize, you know, what, and then they were saying earlier about local contestation where it's perhaps not quite so harmonious and consensual. But actually, heritages are fought over for, for, for, for many reasons. It's very rare. I mean, in Ghana, it's very rare. I can't speak across 54 countries, obviously, but the contestations that make the news are make the news because they're rare. But generally speaking, you know, it passes relatively smoothly with a bit of pushing and shoving from one generation to the next. And I think those, those are the areas that we can focus on where things do happen smoothly. And we can deal, you know, we can sort of ring fence the hugely contested ones because they actually do need a lot of care and expertise. But by and large, those that, as I say, certainly in Ghana, very rare. One of the problems, say in southern Nigeria, where I've done some of my work has been really contestation over the value of old things, particularly from strongly Christianized communities, for instance, who have, you know, who often demonize anything like old, really, not a, not even, you know, ritual objects or things like this. So it's a, there are complexities there, but let me just pick on upon something else you said and just just to kind of shout out to any audience members do put your questions into the questions field and where we'll come on to those soon. And this, as it were the fetishization of things of material things seems to me something that museums do and this, this quote of 90% of African cultural heritage is in European museums that's been used quite a lot recently, referring to a very particular category of cultural heritage, you know, things objects. And again in many of, and I'm not talking here about that, those chiefly regalia and things like that that you were referring to earlier but the more ordinary things or even shrine objects and so on is the fact that actually the objects aren't necessarily the most important thing it's the intangible aspects of cultural heritage and you mentioned storytelling and, and photographs actually I mean things like photographs and sound recordings and so on make up a large part of museum collections. And yet, none of the contention as it were around the fetishized artifacts really is applies here because they're actually very easily digitized and distributed and redistributed. And yet, the value as it were, in a way reflects a colonial hierarchy of saying actually, cultural heritage is much more about these tangible things, rather than the intangible aspects of, you know, whether that's a song or a dance or whatever it might be. Again, I just wonder whether the debate has been skewed in a certain way, which, you know, isn't necessarily helpful. Well, I mean that that sort of puts me in mind of the way we used to behave before COVID, which is that we all used to turn up to meetings, which is a sort of bizarre way to behave you know we we all thought that the physical embodiment of our person had to be in the same room in order to show the fact or care or I don't know why we did it actually now I think about it it seems quite bizarre. But anyway, there was always the physical presence of something has always had a magic to it. So you can see a photograph of something, but to actually see the thing itself, the physicality of the thing itself, even if you can't touch it has a magic to it. So, and I, you know, absolutely agree that photographs are absolutely wonderful. And, you know, and particularly for educational purposes, that is a great thing. But if we agree that the thing the real thing has a magic to it. And why should that magic be in the VNA or the British Museum, you know, as the over of the names relative said, Well, you can have a facsimile. You know, if it really doesn't matter that much. It matters to us. So we will have the thing itself, and you can see the picture. So, you know, there has to be equity in this in this dialogue. And, and it seems to me that the dialogue always tends to towards, and for that reason we will keep the thing itself and you can have the facsimile. So if there's equity in that, in that conversation, then, of course, yes, you know, photographs are great. So the VNA can have the photographs, and the Santahini can have his important regalia back. So, you know, there seems to me that some of this conversation is kind of disingenuous, because it always leads back to status quo is best. Sure. And I wasn't really referring to photographs of objects so much as historical photographs, but you know, yeah, absolutely. So I mean in the broader kind of framework of this conference. You know, which is about kind of decolonization of knowledge and so on. And one thing that strikes me is the museum is a desperately colonial institution. And indeed many museums on the African continent were established during the colonial era, not necessarily as part of a colonial kind of an overtly kind of colonial project of kind of representation on, often the pet projects of people who, you know, managed to get them off the ground and certainly the case in Nigeria is like that. So I'm just thinking of your project that you mentioned earlier. So what would you say a decolonial museum in on the African continent might look like now I mean we tend to think of museums in this mode of a very impressive building with things in them. Is there a different way of imagining the museum of what was it of repatriated treasures in returning returning. Well, I think, I think that, you know, to talk about colonialism, as if it is, it's a historical anomaly is peculiar. I mean, you know, it's been, goodness knows how many years since African independence, and that culture of museums and curatorship is firmly embedded in the African culture that is as African. You know, museum curatorship is as African a speciality, as it is a European speciality. So I think that binary approach is probably outdated, but I see, I mean, we've been thinking about this a lot I've been thinking about this a lot. Particularly in relation to the village room where Michael cardio lived, and where people are still using the kiln that was built by him and and his his group of potters. And people using techniques in those days that they collectively arrived at. And so, and in the same with the abouja pottery where Ladi Kuali worked very closely with Michael cardio and Clement Kofi affa those three great great potters had such an influence on 20th century culture. And their techniques are still being used. So I think there is a sort of a transition in the African cup, the African museum I see, of, you know, whether it's photographs or the thing itself, the magic of the thing itself, saying, you know, these are we people we potters who may are in this tradition, you know, we're not a museum we are making stuff, you know, and you can buy it, you know, we will make you stuff in that tradition, so that you can have a piece of that history, it is not, you don't lock it up, we don't lock it up. We treasure it, we take care of it, but we will make you a piece, you know, whether it's a sculpture of you and your, you know, your partner for your wedding, or, and, you know, a huge planter in the shape of a of an eagle, you know, this is what we do. So there is an integrated an integration of cultural artifacts which to me are part of everyday African life, and always have been, and also the the discipline, important discipline of collection and curatorship and I think, you know, giving African curators and collectors every bit as expert, and as interested and as talented as curators that, you know, that you find in the Tate or, you know, the Museum of the Modern Art in New York, so they're part of a world, a world conversation and international, and a lot of the time absolutely in the forefront of how we integrate art and daily life. Wonderful. I know, yes, I know Wayne's wanting to, we've got quite a lot of questions so I think Wayne's now going to kind of pick out some of the questions that have gathered. Thanks very much, Elsie. Thank you. Thank you very much to both of our panelists, but I'll say most of the questions are addressed to you. I mean we've got a couple of comments. The first comment was from Carolyn Hamilton about the importance of digital, of collecting these materials in digital format and it wasn't so much a question as a comment and perhaps you wanted to respond to that or emphasize that point in some way or other. And then we've got a couple of questions, I'm around a common theme and I think you've addressed them in your most recent comments, so there's a couple of questions that address the common theme as to whether African museums are capable of looking after artifacts that might be returned and I think the very last thing you made speaks to that. But then there's a, there was a very specific question, I think, I mean you obviously feel free to respond to any of these, but there was a very specific question from Malika Karama about whether you could comment on the contestations of that are currently proposed in the National Museum of Ghana, I'm not quite sure. Which you'd have to be more specific, which contestation still is. The person didn't actually specify. But what actually let me say since 1993, pictures of Kent in museums all over the world and colonial photos of Ghana with many people throughout the Baltic region and the Ashanti region have much to say and know much about the treasures often in very detailed ways. And if you could comment on those. Yeah, but that's the general question as to because we've had a two or three questions around the theme about the capability or capacity of African museums to to preserve these artifacts. Well, I think there is absolutely no doubt about the talent and capacity of African curators to. Well, I mean, you know, simply world class, I see no reason. Well, in fact, I've seen lots of reasons to say that there are so many talented curators and systems of curatorship and the potential to set up the infrastructure. What really saddens me is the lack of resource. You know, and actually how little resource people need in Africa to just do such fantastic things. And, you know, whether it's curatorship or design or making art. You know, it really saddens me that with the tiniest amount of resource people can produce such fantastic work. And yet, you know, the usual response is, Oh, well we have to make a $50 million application to the Rockefeller in order to even be able to move on this stuff. But you don't have to do that. You know, what you have to do is to get your phone and send somebody $100, you know, or send somebody $500, you know, so that they can stop running around trying to decide where their next meal is going to come from and just have some space to think. So, you know, I think small amounts of resource, whether it's financial or physical could just make a huge difference. And with that, you know, those, those hugely talented people who are unable to show their talent to display their worth and to display the worth of the work that they do will just come to life. You know, and I think it's a, I mean, I know I keep using this word but I think it's a really potentially a really magical process. And that just requires not huge amounts of money, but just thought and love and care and attention. Thank you. We've got a couple more questions but I wondered if you wanted to come in poem or should we continue? I was looking at some of the other questions actually and I think what there were there were a couple of related one thing David Walter Sonya spammer raise a couple of interesting points. Yeah, one touches on the issue of kind of the unit, it's a UNESCO kind of framing of kind of you kind of universal kind of heritage. And the other really is about also recognizing that cultural heritage is also potentially divisive, and it's not just benign thing and I think that's an important thing we were speaking about cultural heritage almost as if it's exclusively in its kind of way of, you know, being but it can be used for all kinds of projects. So the one question that David Walter asks I saw part of that question is about and he's referring to the destruction of ancient manuscripts in Mali is when national contexts are, you know, are actually sometimes anti what say from a UN point of view might be regarded as the heritage of humanity, rather than a particular nation state let's say or, you know, there's a question there which is often used. And I think there's a very interesting point that Sonya raises about in a way the uncommoning if you like of of cultural heritage, such that it's not something that's linked to a kind of cosmopolitan world view, but but becomes actually part of a very deeply colonial world view which sees the world as divided up into a kind of mosaic of, of discreet, you know, bounded entities and it becomes only that bounded entity, whatever whether that's the nation, the ethnicity, the tribe or whatever one might say becomes the exclusive right to access and control. So I just wanted to highlight those things which I think again kind of complicate a narrative. Just add one further question which should not question it's in the, it's in the chats and could please ask members of the audience to please post their questions in the chat but I think it's an important one so one comment is that to repay creation is one thing and simply the first step. And the question is, what do we do with items once they've been created, whether the interpretation of these items differs in any epistemological way or whether they're simply interpreted in the same way in a new site. And the short answer is that we don't know, and we should find out. I mean that's part of the exploration isn't it. So we, we, we actually, we know there will be a different narrative, but we don't necessarily know what that narrative will be, nor should we, you know, and second guess it. You know the narrative will differ from country to country and age to age. I mean if you look at how, for instance, women's work. Women's art is interpreted from oh it doesn't exist, which was the old way, you know, where were the women to the sort of delicate understanding that has happened. Over the last generation of the last 30 or 40 years, that has changed hugely. And I think, I think it's a really exciting prospect to see how narratives change from, you know, the interpretation of, you know, who was Francis Bacon. You know, who was he as an artist. And in those days, you know this sort of swagger and swank and the what we would consider was certainly I would consider to be a sort of glorification of a toxic masculinity. And to the problem I problem my station of that kind of masculinity which has allowed work by women and artists of different cultures to come to the fall and to be understood and treasured. So I think, I think, and I hope that the narratives will change over a period of time over the next, you know, certainly I wouldn't be around to see it but I mean I think it would be a really fantastic thing to, to make space for that change and the prospect of change. And, and, and to, and to appreciate it that appreciate the prospect. Thank you. Please feel free to post more questions in the, in the chat we have a few more minutes. So there's another, another one from Catherine Vine. I think that's how you pronounce it. I was wondering whether you could say something about material limitations of the returned objects. That is the state of contamination. How does this influence the possibilities of returned objects to play different roles, other than being museumized once again. Perhaps materiality poses a challenge towards decolonizing the logic of preservation linked to the objects as notably European. It was that just to me. Either one of the cameras. Okay, yeah. Paul, do you want to say something about that? Only to say that I totally agree. I mean, it's I mean museums and archives that are very peculiar institutions and ocean that we put things away in these special places in an attempt to kind of arrest time to stop the process of decay or slow them down in this kind of a way. So, you know, it goes to a kind of more profound question around, you know, to the kind of epistemological kind of context of all of this, and why necessarily this is why I was referring to in this fetishization of the object that one finds in the museum context things are not allowed to whereas, you know, had had these objects I mean there's the paradox of course that when these materials were kind of collected and frozen in their status it were and then shipped to these museums they survived in contexts where had they been left on the the shrine or whatever, then the termites would have done their work and they would have been replaced and so on. So that different idea about what the object is, and that whether this notion of preservation or conservation these regimes which seek to kind of stop decay, you know, and necessarily, you know, they're certainly not the only way one can conceive of these objects. There is that paradox though having, you know, taken them out of their, you know, normal natural kind of context as it were where they would have decayed, taking them into this very unnatural artificial environment where they're protected from decay, they then survive, and that link that magic perhaps the Elsie was referring to the fact that one could they this is kind of idea of them almost like as a time machine by being in the presence of objects that probably wouldn't have survived and certainly they have a power to transport us to to another time. So I think that, as with most of these things for me at least it's about ambiguity and complexity rather than trying to say well this is right this is wrong. We have these different regimes they coexist. And then our challenges had we negotiate them what does it you know where do they belong, and what regimes to they belong in as it were. Well up to a point but I mean I would point out that gold is one of the longest lasting materials that you could possibly, you could possibly have. And you know if I refer to the Ashanti treasures. Most of the ones that I've seen are made of gold at which is which which is why, which is why they were taken. And West Africa certainly has a very long tradition of, you know, from Mansa Musa onwards of gold, gold artifacts and gold being worked. And certainly one of the justifications given by the V&A for buying the treasures of the garage sale was that they wanted to demonstrate how skilled, how skilled gold working should be, and that these are exemplary items. So I do understand that there was sort of day to day items, which don't belong in museums, but there are also items which were in very very careful custodianship. And the war of the golden stool was about how precious an item it was the golden stool, and how it should not be touched by people, it should only be touched by sacred hands. I think there is, there is the tradition of keeping, keeping treasures very, very carefully, whether it's in the Abyssinian treasures the Magdala Horde which was taken. The Obunas crown and chalice for instance wouldn't have wouldn't have been accessed by termites I doubt. Would Kofi carry carry stool so I what I'm saying is that there is a hierarchy to these, these items, and we mustn't lump them all together, we must be careful to, to understand the context, and the provenance, and also the magnitude of, you know, 90% of those, those items which belong in on the present being here I mean that is a huge amount of work. Both originally and now to understand and understand the breadth of it and I don't think we do. I certainly don't feel I have a grasp of the full breadth of the scale of the, the, the items that we're talking about. There's an important point comment made by Catalan Hamilton, which was that items continue to have a life once they make their ways into museums that they don't become fossilized in museums and that museums themselves, and that they continue to, they continue to change. And after having been placed in the museum I think that's an interesting point but there's an interesting question I think that probably one that was posed more at historians and this is a question by Shia and the silver, which is about the ownership of manuscripts and the question is who owns a manuscript for example, when the material has been recorded by a colonial officer and what ownership does the community have of the search manuscripts. Well, I mean I think there are different levels, there are different levels of ownership up there that there is the ownership of the story, and the ownership of the narrative which I think is, you know, pretty much universal. And should be shared as widely as possible whether it's in digital form or book form or whatever. And then there's, then we get back to the thing itself. And I think that when you talk about recorded material, particularly, I'm less concerned about the thing itself, because I think there was a trend, there is a transition from, you know, the stuff, the hard material to the story and the narrative. And so I think we should be should kind of differentiate. And I suppose that's the point I'm making is that the scale of the treasure, if I use that in general terms, is so vast that we must be careful to sort of understand and recognise what we're talking about. Because if we conflate everything and say that these are about things that somebody owned, then I don't think we are doing justice to the scale of the conversation and the potential for dialogue and the potential for cultural understanding that comes with it. Well, thank you very much. I think I should draw this part of the session to a close, and to thank both our panelists, our speakers, both Paul and Elsie, thank you very much, it was incredibly interesting and stimulating. And I think we move straight on to our next session. Actually, sorry, apologies, Wayne. If we don't mind giving 10 minutes break. Yes, actually I wanted to talk about that. Yes, thanks Angelica. Yeah, just because on the program we have the panel at 315, so we allow you for a little break. Okay, yeah, thank you. Perfectly perfect because I did have that in mind, I got confused for a second. So, so thank you very much. Yeah, so let's have a little bit. Thank you very much, Elsie. Thanks, Wayne. We will see you back at 315 when we'll have three different speakers. Thank you. Thank you, Elsie. Thank you, Paul. Thank you very much. Okay, Wayne, you can start. Thank you. We'll be back on air. Yes, we are back on air. Okay. Okay, well welcome back everybody, and we will continue with the rest of our panel today, which to remind you is on archives, museums and heritage as contested spaces. We have three speakers. Our first speaker, perhaps I'm not sure if I'll introduce each person in turn, but our first speaker is my very long time colleague, Kai Easton. Kai and I have been colleagues for a very, very long time. And Kai is a leading scholar on the work of South African novelist Jane Kutziere, and more recently has shifted her attention to the work of Zoe Wicken. And of course, very much a transnational author and Kai several years ago organized a conference here in London and as well as another one in Cape Town, and I think there was one in Australia too, wasn't there Kai, on Zoe Wicken. And she's a professor of transnational scholar for a transnational author, and she's also led a number of exciting projects and the project that she will be speaking to us today is the work that she did as calculator for an exhibition entitled scenes from the south, which is about the work of Jane Kutziere and I, I think Kai if I'm not mistaken that I just thinking about the title of your presentation, that some title scenes from the south that comes from scenes of a provincial life doesn't it. But she'll be speaking to us about issues of the archive as relating to the work of South African authors, the title of the talk is about curating North South itineraries. So, I think perhaps, Kai, I'll just introduce you for now and if you could speak and then we'll, we'll go to the other speakers in turn. Okay, thank you so much Wayne. As you said we've been longtime colleagues so I actually just wanted to spend a minute thanking Wayne for his facilitating of this to my fellow panelists so I'm looking forward to the conversation with you, and to the keynotes. In this conversation we just had with Paul and LC and earlier today as well so thank you all. Also, because we're launching and Wayne and I are both involved in this whole symposium and designing it with Angelica and Mahesh at UK ZN and her colleagues there. I'll keep looking at this talk as a way of thinking of the interaction between the work that I've been doing recently, but also how that inspires some of the questions that we've asked of the symposium, which I'll get to in just a bit I also want to just do an anecdotal thing for UK ZN. I'm delighted with the link because I was a postdoctoral fellow there in back in 2004. And it was actually the first year of the merger. So I want to think about that because we're going to be thinking about renaming also very briefly. The first year of the merger so it had just become UK ZN. And also, I'm hoping that at some point David at will might be able to get into the Q&A or something because he also has a connection to UK ZN he was there when it was natal he was in English department there. And during that time, the topic of my talk is also an honorary graduate of both so as an UK ZN. James Kutzia was awarded an honorary doctorate by Natal back in the day, and also vice so as in 2015 so those are the nice things. And a really rigorous session on contested spaces which really is of course what this symposium is about but I realize in my slightly cheerful way that what I really want to talk about it is, is how contested spaces can lead to unexpectedly productive collaborations and reciprocity. So those are the two key words I want to highlight now from my title as Wayne said, curating South North South itineraries, and then sort of on the side scenes from the south which is the name of our exhibition. And then an international exhibition on the archives of jam could see you can see these different strands, I'll probably be focusing a tiny bit more on the first few words. In general what I'm talking about are the terms relating to the symposium. I'm thinking about directions of travel. I'm thinking about rethinking the roots in which we work to reflect in particular the production and traffic of archives in the south and the north. Rethinking what these geographical imaginaries of south and north might mean in terms of actual networks and how this knowledge is documented and disseminated and consumed as a material and creative practice and as a digital practice to In some ways I've just got time to kind of tell you the story about the exhibition we launched which was fortuitously in early February last year so it's exactly a year ago from the ninth to the 11th of February 2020. And the ninth was the signal date because that was the actual date we were marking for jam could see as 80th birthday celebrations. About 150 invited guests so it was a full house which you could have back then there were writers and musicians and scholars who all descended on the condor in the eastern Cape from South Africa but also from all over the world. And again as I said this is when most of us could still travel just our guests from China of course regrettably could not. Could see of himself was there celebrating with us now we had gathered him back in South Africa where he was born and raised, where he was educated and taught. He was at ECT for over 30 years. We were joined in spirit and in our thinking and I really also want to signal to our friends in Australia and colleagues in Argentina. Here the jam could see a center of creative practice has been a major inspiration for a variety of reasons, and in Argentina, where could see has been so busy with a literature of the South program from 2014 to 2018. This together with as Wayne rightly guests scenes from provincial life, which is his trilogy of fictionalized autobiography. These are the guiding influences on scenes from the south. Here is an exhibition of his archives from the major collection at the Harry ransom center in Austin, Texas, and a Marsway in McConda in the eastern Cape speak to the multiple pathways and geographies of could see and how might we map retrospectively and his life and work in ways that might expand and diversify our readings of him is one of the most globally recognized writers writing today. But we also want to acknowledge, and this was crucial we want to acknowledge his formative beginnings, in particular his home ground of the Western Cape. What does it mean to put travel at the heart of the exhibition in its conception and its execution as a critical practice as a collaboration. What we need to say is that we're talking about a current exhibition that involves travel that is situated as it were as a dynamic and collaborative work on going mobile. And that is, as I said, cartographical in concept from the outside it embeds ideas of mobility. It's concerned with mapping and remapping visually critically creatively and trans locally. We're talking around a global writer across Southern spaces now I'm excited to use this term which I use all the time now because it's from a seminal conference some of you back in the day in 1993, even Wayne might remember this. If you were in London at that time, Kate, Jerry and Smith there's gonna answer and not all organized a conference called Southern spaces about Australia and South Africa shared histories. It's very prescient in a way for the kind of shaping of could see his own work as well as my own. Now, this became a book that you may also know called text theory space. And as I say this has been a formative influence for me but we've added some geographies to this in terms of the work we've doing. Now crucially our exhibition journeys along with could see a biographically intellectually well beyond South Africa, especially as it happens, along with 34 degrees south parallel where he seems to have it, and that would be Cape Town, Adelaide, South Australia, and then going west to Buenos Aires, where he's been working on the project with the University of San Marta, as I said but also publishing beautiful new editions of his work and introductions to other classic works in Spanish. Now quick aside, but it's crucial to kind of talk about this tension and it might be more interesting to do that a little bit later but his project on literature of the south was very literary project that had a particular agenda around language and publishing roots. It's a critical intervention that is quite extraordinary. And he was bringing Australian Southern African and Argent writers from Argentina, all together at least symposia throughout all of these years it resulted in actual new works being translated in all sorts of networks and associations. Now he wrote. He's given a couple of addresses on this and one of the phrases I just want to put to stand out there, which might be at odds with the project that I'm doing is he talks about ignoring the gaze of the north. He talks about South South literary arrangements that don't have to go through the Metropolitan they don't have to go via London. Now of course there are a few contradictions here because he writes in English and he is very much a Metropolitan cosmopolitan writer. But I think what we're trying to get to in this exhibition and to the work we're doing more generally is to disrupt this idea of hierarchies and to disrupt this idea that you can't kind of be both or do both at the same time by which I mean, his particular intervention is, I would say aware of the position that he's in, but he's making a tangible breakthrough in a sense by in some cases publishing his work in Spanish before it's published in English as a very deliberate measure. Our itinerary plays with the three sides of his own interests, but it also plays with the south and the north so I was delighted that a shield helpfully affirmed this in his keynote conversation earlier today when he said, there are many souths in the north. And again what I'm mostly interested in is thinking about the traffic between north and south and thinking exactly about that the different south in the north so for him. And one of the ones in which we highlighted was the south of France. It's been quite a significant site for him both intellectually creatively and even athletically. I think Barney and I have been working with john on an essay film we like to call it on the politics of cycling since 2016 and there was an installation at the exhibition to also highlight that site. Well one of the key questions the exhibition raises is how we might problematize the idea of the south in light of three other regions that have been significant sites for him as I've said, the south of England where he lived in the 1960s in 1962 and 65 before going to Texas in the Southwest, which is where he received his doctorate, and where the majority of his archives coincidentally now reside. Okay. In addition to France these two sites. The exhibition seeks to illustrate the kind of crisscrossing that happens when we begin to read the south and the archives in this way. When we look to the migrations of the archives themselves, their after lives and the different ways in which their materiality is also mediated by different southern spaces. I want to take it doing an experiment as if I actually had you all in a room the kind of thing I like to do is a show and tell just to take a break from virtual lives were all leading I mean I think I will show you this on the screen in just a minute to. But this is an actual poster from the exhibition. And you can just about see the dates and the locations for where the exhibition was going to be held. Hundreds of these posters. They're stacked in our host museum and Mars we state of the art building, all advertising the physicality of our exhibition scenes from the south it's very clear from this poster that the exhibition was to have had two main sojourns in the city, first in the south at a Mars we, and then traveling traveling back to the Harry ransom center in Texas. Now, our conference was inspired actually again coming back to our friends at Adelaide by their groundbreaking and highly imaginative conference and exhibition traverses, which was to celebrate could see a 75th birthday so we were five years later on as a birthday bringing him back to South Africa for another archival and the true venture. The scenes from the south is the first major exhibition on James could see a to bring together both archives from the collections in Texas, which is the major acquisition in 2011. It has led to a flurry of scholarly activity with researchers traveling all over the globe to see could see as first drafts and his notebooks, his computer programs his family albums his school day notebooks which feature quite highly and our exhibition and correspondence. And then we have a Mars we which had in a sense. It hasn't been fully recognized that this local museum in the Eastern Cape, which has long existed in a different form as the National English Literary Museum in what used to be called grants town and is now Mekanda have their own collection of could see archives. It's a very different curatorial situation for these were donated over the years. First editions correspondence with other South African writers telegrams manuscripts typescripts typewriters matchboxes of handmade vocabulary cards in English and coisson English and French, and even his boyhood air rifle and cricket bat. Now think of the timing, coming back to what we were trying to do by having a traveling exhibition move between south and north. It was conceived as you can see from the poster that I showed you as something concrete material but also multimedia. This is what we imagine when we gather together last year for the launch. And it was to stay open to the public in. In fact it was going to be featured and showcased at the actual annual National Arts Festival in June and July 2020, which also happens to take place down the road in Mekanda. In April of course it was pretty obvious that the pandemic would intervene. So the festival reinvented itself in a remarkably short time reprogramming the whole event as a virtual festival. So scenes from the south was then reinstalled they had had to pack it up and conserve these very original documents and items. It was the amazing stuff of a Mars we had to do that without its curators David and I were now back in the UK. Oh it was photographed and then designed on Matterport software and you can still view this just by going to the National Arts Festival website of 2020. So the symposium questions that serve as prompts for the idea of contested spaces were actually written once scenes from the south was on the ground and running and so I keep trying to bring these two projects together in a certain way because I see this as a productive form of interaction. In a significant way some of the sentence we've offered as prompts for speakers intended to engage dialogue with other colleagues like we're having here, working in archives and museums again very different collections and very different issues that are being discussed. But it's this dialogue that I hope we continue to have not just in this symposium but also, as we all develop new ways of looking at the much higher impact of global sculling the exchange and reciprocity. I want to go back just briefly to the origins of the event. David at well and I happen to be working on different similar projects at the same time and we joined up and forge this collaboration which was extraordinary meant that I have been working with Texas. David with a Mars we, and what we managed to do is have a four way partnership between these four institutions in North and South. So we want to thank the directors of the Harry Ransom Center and a Mars we Beverly Thomas and Steven and us, and all of their extraordinary stuff. Now Mars we coming back, we're in two strikingly different venues. One is in South Africa's Eastern Cape, just down the road from Rhodes University. One at the University of Texas at Austin and Merck Southwest. They have entirely different histories and audiences. They are actually though entangled histories in a number of ways, even before our collaboration. Wayne is going to tell me I don't have much time to talk about that so I'm simply going to say that David at well if he's here might write a beautiful sentence for us about the fact that the Harry Ransom Center was actually acquiring the African archives back in the day. And it's this idea of having archives that actually leave the country to live in broad in Texas. Our vision for the exhibition was to think of a kind of corrective. It's aim was to rethink the contested spaces of archives origins and archival dwellings, and to imagine more creative and energetic archival mobility. I think, Wayne, do you want me to stop. Yeah, thank you very much. Thanks to show you but I think you must see them after this symposium. I think we'll have time, I think we'll have time in the Q&A for you to elaborate. So thank you very much, Kai. That was very interesting. Our next speaker is Etory Morelli. And Etory is at SOAS. At the present time I'm very happy to see Etory back at SOAS. He completed his PhD thesis year at the end of 2019 or the course of 2019. And the thesis was a major study of political authority on the high felt of Southern Africa. The pre-colonial high felt, I should say, it's very, very important to emphasize that it was a study on the pre-colonial period, the first of its kind for a very long time. And I was especially delighted to see the space that Etory gave to the study of slavery on the high felt. And the thesis is the story of a major slavery rebellion on the pre-colonial high felt. And I will persuade Etory to write that at some point. But he'll be speaking to us today on work that he, I think is carrying on from work that he did in Cape Town after finishing his degree at SOAS. And he joined the Archive and Public Cultural Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town. And the work that he's speaking about today is specifically about the creation of an archival for uncovering an archive by an important figure. So thank you very much, Etory. And we look forward to hearing your paper. Thank you, Wayne, for the introduction. And thank you. I mean, all the organizers for organizing this wonderful symposium. If it's okay, I will share my screen. I prepared a presentation. So let me just know if it works, should work. I suppose you are looking at the first page now. So as you, as Wayne said, this is an ongoing project for me. Today, the first, I mean, the very beginning of this project might be found actually in the research they do in the PhD, as it always says. I mean, it's sometimes the case. I'll try to go, you know, straight to the point on, you know, our time constraints. So what I'm going to do is to read my presentation and to read it to my argument. Today, I'll briefly outline an archive or an archival collection that does not exist yet, and discuss some of the issues surrounding its possible creation. At first glance, this archive appears as the product of a lifetime of research of a single man. It contains an unsorted mass of research notes, notebooks, correspondence, unmade maps, copies of books with marginality, books and booklets and pictures. To give an idea of what I mean by unsorted. This is the only research tool I found the last time I visited the main part of the collection of the Royal Geographical Society in London, a roughing index that was made when the collection was accessed in 1994. For brevity, I begin here by referring to the subject as the scattered archive of Ronald's written web, but as I will I like this is quite far from being the correct definition. Before getting into the presentation there are three preliminary key points that I would like to consolidate. One goes with space, another with persons, and a third with time. To start with, the archive is not a single unit and is not physically hosted in a single place. Its parts are in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Lesotho and the United States. This geographical extension is surpassed by the variety of the host actors that include an established research institution in the old imperial capital, the Royal Geographical Society in London, the private papers of retired archaeologists, including Mags in Cape Town, the Archives of Protestant Missionary Society, the Mooridge Archives in Lesotho, and the personal collection of the late historian William Lee now housed at the Utah State University. Secondly, the archive is not only about by all the property of Ronald's written web alone. As we are starting to see multiple actors are involved in its preservation. Some of them were also involved in the creation of some of the contents. Reverend Arnold Brusch, Archbishop Mooridge for most of the second half of the 20th century, and already mentioned Tim Mags and William Lee. Then there is at least another scholar Peter Sanders, historian of Lesotho. I presume that some of these names have already been heard at least by those of you working on South African history. Basically, I will refer to them as academic correspondence. However, the archive comprises a much more important group of persons was named I presume you have never heard of. They are Abraham Aaron mollezane of the battle. The third point is about time. Have you ever had the feeling reading something that was written long time ago, that those words were written for you. Maybe not for you personally but for somebody like you, or at least for somebody in the future, like you, I had the feeling twice while working on this project. So let me introduce you to my ongoing research on Ronald's written web, a prolific writer who published very little disseminated his work among selected interlocutors and seemingly renounced to transform the efforts of a lifetime into final product. This literally remains remained inert and bypassed on purpose the time in which they were produced. They reemerged today and quite literally speak to us. They asked several things, including implicitly to be treated with care. So what about the man. When a certain web was born in 1892. There is no agreement on the place of his birth, quite possibly he was English. Webster during the First World War in the Royal Field artillery and survived the gas bombings in the Belgian trenches. He spent most of his life in South Africa became a lens of failure was a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and died in part in 1976. He wrote about their meetings in the last in the late 1960s, describing as a man who dressed I'm quoting, like an Edwardian gentleman, and of course, was obsessed with war was clearly still traumatizing physically debilitated from his own experience. He didn't just treat of a large part of his land by the government, or the municipality in part of web's historiographical legacy is just slightly more defined. In 1950, he published the monumental gazetteer for bazooka land, an erudite compilation of place names in Lesotho and the free state that set in motion much of the peculiar personal relations that made the rest of his research as possible. From a scholarly or academic perspective, however, he played a very minor role between the 1950s and the 1970s, remaining in the background and eventually disappearing from the view was called us. Webber had a strong connection with the Morigia archives in Lesotho and send several of his works there. Morigia, however, was a marginal institution in the Southern African system of knowledge production. For academic correspondence only team max really employed web's researches and unpublished notes, putting them to great profit in 1976 books, I and age communities of the southern iPhone. On web's correspondence, however, further research is required. Before web knew another group of person that is considerably more interesting for our discussion today, those who I simply refer to as African intellectuals. Chronologically, the first ones to appear were Andrew Lesodian, Felix Machete-Cate Seconiella in 1947, when web was working on the gazetteer. We need here to start thinking of the intricacies of these relations. I show you an example from the notes that they took at the archives in London, attempting to copy the button. They're a descendant of the 19th century African King, Seconiella of the Batlokwa, writing about 60 pages of the history of his people and sending the manuscript to web. The language was set to look what slightly different from modern standards. Then the manuscript was transcribed and translated with the key help of Andrew Lesodian, but much more research is needed here. After the gazetteer was published, web met Abraham Aaron Moleczane in 1951, starting a research fellowship that lasted until the early 1970s. The products of this relation include the further manuscript written in vernacular languages by African elders, then transcribed and translated by web Moleczane and other African researchers. In August 1952, web sponsored a journey made by Abraham Aaron Moleczane and Kata Moukezi, who were British subjects of the British Baselian, across the free state on the tracks of the surviving members of the Bataum and the Bakugum, two peoples who had lived there until mid-19th century. Indeed, Moleczane was the grandson of the last ruler and Boris's own name. The result was a diary written by Abraham Aaron Moleczane, then edited multiple times by him and web, a copy of which is currently in Lesotho. I'm writing a paper on the diary, but now I can only briefly point out two aspects pertaining to it. As with the previous case, the intricate relation between the authors, including the different phases of work, is quite explicit in the text, which is right with marginalia and later additions, often with date and name. As you can see from the frontispiece, handwritten in 1952, two lines were added in 1958 after Moleczane had requested correction. The second aspect is connected to my preliminary thought on time. It is unclear what Webb attempted to do with the manuscript that he and Moleczane were producing. It is possible that he wanted to publish them as books and did not succeed. For sure, these works were an unrepentant claim to most of the land of the free state province, not from a legal but from a historical perspective. Webb grew convinced that the time was not right for such publication or simply gave up his hopes and noted this on the back cover of the manuscript. So you can see it was written on the 30th of January 1959. This diary with the accompanying notes could with advantage be put away for 2550 years. Later on in the 21st century, they may be found interesting, they may be read by Motang and Mosutu in a time of leisure, in a time of freedom from the disabilities of the present day. This is the first easy talking to me moment that I had while working on this subject. Webb removed his work from his present and connects directly with us. The second came from a draft preface of source that Webb wrote in 1958, seemingly from a book that for a book that he never published a book so he wrote that out to be strongly anti colonial and could be read by persons far removed from South Africa and its current affairs. That book he went on had not been written. Once more, he was not up to the task, or the time was not right. The prospect of what would happen was hardly reassuring a further warning of the type of mandate that Webb is trying to impose on us today as researchers. There wasn't these extracts from individual sources within the archive, because they work very well, but to show their complexity as sources. And to question my initial idea of treating all these as the Ronald's threatened web papers or the archive of Ronald's threatened web. The question resonating here are, who's the author of each single document was the author of the entire collection. How can we show the network of personal connections without dissolving the current archival structure, still very meaningful from a historical perspective. And finally, why most of the collection is in London and what can we do about it. As we move towards the conclusion. Let me jump to jump ahead to my present situation. As when was saying at the beginning of 2020 I joined the 500 year archive project at the University of Cape Town, where I was doing a postdoc. The project that had been running for some years and it is now finalizing the latest product that we have called a Mandulo a website hosting the digital collections of several archives museum and libraries across South Africa and Europe. This is a project with the history of Southern Africa before colonialism and up to the early 20th century. The website is still in draft and it's not public at the moment, so we're still working on it. A digital research tool such as a Mandulo has the potential of answering to some of the queries posed by the Ronald's threatened web collection and similar ones. It solves the practical difficulty of traveling across three continents to work on the sources, and it avoids the political conundrum, at least you know temporarily or physically conveying all the papers in one place. More importantly, however, it can allow to foreground all the hands that touch and shake the papers of the collection. Specifically those of African researchers rebalancing but not the raising the role of web as collector and relevant actor and retaining the role of the various archival institution involved in its preservation. You get a glimpse of our going discussion around this matters by looking at the titles we have currently adopted for the archival creations that we have already on the system. This is an innovation by my colleague Lloyd Rachevich to conclude what I've spoken about would not be the Ronald's threatened web archive, but something like the Free State and Lesotho materials collected by Ronald's threatened web and associated items and FHYA creation. And in our view, this difference matters. So, thank you. Thank you very much. I thought that that is very interesting and speaks actually very directly to the earlier session we had on artifacts to the locket. So, I love to say about that. Yes. So I think we could have a very interesting conversation. Can I please encourage members of the audience to post their questions in the Q&A window on our screen. The speaker today is Gulam Wahed and Gulam and I have actually never met but I am certainly very familiar with Gulam's work having sort of seen a little stream of articles and other items appear over the years. And I'm certainly very familiar with Gulam's scholarship. Gulam is a professor of history in the Department of History at the University of Kuzhulu Natal. His research interests include migration, identity, identity formation, citizenship, transnationalism among South Africans of Indian descent. And he's more recently worked on issues of sport and culture in South African society. He's the author amongst other things of a book called Schooling Muslims in Natal. So thank you very much Gulam. We look forward to hearing your talk today and over to you. Thanks, Wayne. I actually spent four and a half months at Sora's in 2000. I was at Shula Marks in the history department. I think often I am a fellowship or something but I think you are away on leave or something so we may have just met briefly but I was there. I guess it wasn't very pleasant but I hope I can come some other time. Thank you for that and thank you to the organizers as well. So I'm going to look very briefly at the struggle over a monument to commemorate the indentured experience in Natal. And as background the indentured migrants, you know, 152,000 of them came to Natal between 1860 and 1911 and they were part of the 1.3 million migrants who went to different parts of the British Empire as a new source of cheap labor following the end of indenture. So although they were meant to work for five years, and after 10 years they could get a free passage home, most chose to remain in Natal. Now they were both, you know, this, so it's quite interesting that although it's only in 2010, that's 150 years after the arrival of the first indentured, that this impulse for the monument emerges quite strongly. And so they are both local and global impulses for this. The one as I mentioned is, you know, it's a post-apartheid period. There's, you know, a sort of public wanting to, you know, rewriting to history, black people's struggles as well. So there's that aspect of it. But I think the roads must fall movement. So initially there was this idea that you could incorporate, you know, black people and leave the existing monuments, but I think roads must fall as put paid to that aspect. So the local pressure comes with the 2010, 150 year commemoration which I'll look at that. But there's also a global dimension and this is that people increasingly find that Indians in South Africa and Diana Trinidad, Tobago, there's a feeling that they have, you know, all have troubled racial histories. And so with the emergence of India as a global power, you had organizations such as Gopio, the global organization of people of Indian origin being formed. And so there's been a pressure and this is formed by mainly Indians based in New York and other Western countries. And so there's this pressure to give some recognition to the indentured experience, similar to what's been given for the acknowledgement given to slavery. Mauritius which has a majority Indian population has been at the forefront of this quest for a global recognition of indenture. And then they built the, what's called the apravasic art, which is the immigration depot, which in 2006 was made declared a world heritage site. At the UNESCO session in Paris in 2014 Mauritius actually presented a proposal for an indentured labor root project, and an international what's called an international scientific committee was established in Mauritius in 2017 to investigate ways to create an international labor root project. So that's the global aspect where there's this pressure for this Indian diaspora to be given more recognition. So locally 2010 marks an important, you know, moment, 150 years, it was also the year of the workup. But for Indians, you know, there was a lot of awakening to say that slavery was very much as you think I would have it sort of indenture was very much a new form of slavery. So that the 1860 legacy foundation was created a three person monuments committee was formed under a person by the name of Celan Archery, who is a descendant of indentured migrants and trade unionists as well as an ASC member. The Israeli Nkezi then a premiere of KZN set aside 10 million grand for the erection of a monument and for commemorating the 150th anniversary. So government at this time, you know, there were many factors behind that one of them was to Indian voters in KZN but it was also the historical relationship between the ANC and the NIC. So the first thing that this committee did is they had this huge, you know, lunch luncheon commemoration, and then they put a place 10 plus at different towns in KwaZulu Natal. And so, by the time the public awakened to this, you know, this, where is the monument that cry began already 5.2 million off the 10 million have been spent. So they were just left with 4.8 million. But anyway, at the time the, you know, they wanted a suitable site. It wasn't just a site anywhere. So eventually, at the time you have Mike Sutcliffe who was very opposed. He was one of the grand plans for the beachfront area, and did not want to allocate a site for a monument, but eventually after his departure they were able to convince the mayor James Kumano, and he identified a site right next to what's called a Ushaka Marine And it's an area that draws a very large number of visitors casual as well as overseas visitors and so they thought that that would be an appropriate site. Eventually, you know, there were more delays and in 2015. I'm just going through very quickly in 2015 a plan was presented and the money, the remaining 5 million was made available to the municipality to implement this project. This is now where you had the political tensions emerging because you had the, you know, a few people mentioned that together with the roads must fall movement and the removal of the statue on off roads. And so, a statue of candy that was defaced in Johannesburg. And so see them was working with a person by the name of Dr. Shlantzla to see was a renowned jazz musician but was also a director in the premiums office. And then a close relationship and in Ceylon's word, Dr. Tuzi told him who passed on in 2018 but Dr. Tuzi told him, it's too hot. Let's delay this thing now. In other words, there was a great anti Indian sentiment so it was not seen as an appropriate time to be building a monument for indenture. So, you had an organization called the Masibuya African Forum which was formed in 2012. And they issued a statement at the time that it would be a monumental insult to African leaders who uncompromisingly defended the length and breadth of Vazuru Natal to commemorate the arrival of indentured laborers. So they argued that actually the arrival of indentured workers reduced the bargaining power of Africans with the white colonists. And so they, you know, there was sort of no need to recognize that and so they looked at it as a as an insult to them so you had the, you know, history of racial tensions 1949 1985. So that's because witnessing xenophobic attacks since 2008 you had the defacing of the Gandhi statue in Johannesburg so all of those reasons Ceylon and Dr. Tuzi decided to hold on this project. So there were clear differences amongst, you know, Indian and African stakeholders, you know, as Daniel Wolkowitz and Lisa Noverite had divided societies often marked by divergent and often competing interests and different states in how histories are represented. So you also had at this very time the EFF which is emerging at the political force, also making lots of anti Indian utterances. So that was one factor that led to the delay of this. But the second factor was, what should the actual design of this be. And so the municipality, you know appointed architects, and they had in mind something very grand, like what's at the Mandela site in Harwick. It's a world class tourist attraction and that's what they had in mind. But so they put out the boots and they got 10 designs and when this was shown. I mean Ceylon and his committee was aghast at what they saw you know as Ceylon told me in an interview, these artists didn't have a clue as to what we want. During all our deliberations we have been saying, we want to commemorate the 16th of November, the first people who put foot on the soil. The other history of Indians is captured in the museum. He said that the designs are so far fetched you would have to walk twice thrice or four times to make out what the hell is in there. What is the word for that like modern art is abstract goes away is the exact word. So he found it to abstract and if I, you know he had, he was very clear about what he and he actually provided us sketch and I can just show that for a minute. I don't know. Are you able to see that. Yes. So that's a sketch of what he had in mind, you know, something very simple, and I wouldn't say simple but something that's very, you know, clear and sort of. Whereas the architects had in mind something more abstract that would attract a world class or in a world of people from all over the world may want to come see this particular museum. So, so there was on the one hand there was the, the political tension and then you had the differences over the design. And so in the meanwhile, just tell me when I got a minute or so I'll stop. The community getting frustration so every year. And what's really ironic is that there was a lot of political pressure being put every year in November, a Syrian be accused of stealing the money, whereas the delays were caused by the design and yet knowing full well that there was, you know, no monument in sight. There was no design even approved in 2016, all of the political, you know, players. You had a sort of turning ceremony to say, you know that everything's approved now in three months time this monument is going to be put up it's going to be ready, but they didn't ever have a design in place but it was just that they were trying to give the political pressure that they were facing. So, to this date in 2020, again, it marked 160 year anniversary so 10 years have gone by, and they still know monument, the money has actually been taken back by the, by the industrial government, because, you know, they have a policy if you don't use up the money within two years then they take it back. So, as things stand this to round up since 2010 this demand has been getting louder, both due to local and global influences the memory of indenture is of a painful one to most descendants of indenture, but also people like Seelan and the late Satish Dupilya was a great grandson of Gandhi and who unfortunately died during the COVID. He said that it should also be a sort of a symbol for for social cohesion people are drifting apart as South Africans, we come together what we need to but we definitely need to come together again. But many Indians also want to use what Christina Luke refers to the monument as a cultural diplomacy, and to show the sacrifices made by Indians at a time when they feel that they are being marginalized in terms of affirmative action and be policies. And I think also that you know, as many have written that the political climate determines what can be done and what cannot be done. So 2010 was right there was a euphoria over the World Cup, Zuma had a very close relationship with Indian businessman and so on. But I think we are living in a very different time in 2020 there's massive unemployment, you know racial tensions across different in various avenues are on the increase so I think that to try to get the even though there is a lot of pressure locally from Indians for this monument. The international scale is a lot of pressure now to be for the United Nations for UNESCO to have a global indenture route. I think that you know Indians who do feel excluded from the post apartheid nation state. I think it's going to be a while before this monument sees the light of day, and the anthropologist Thomas Blom Hansen, you know he spoke of that this will likely enhance what he saw refers to as Indians feeling a sense of loss. I'll stop. Thank you very much for that was incredibly interesting too. We don't have very many questions in the Q&A section. But we have one which is a question to Ettore about your comment Ettore about having a feeling that the archive that you're collecting spoke to you directly and perhaps if you could elaborate on that. If we don't have more questions from members of the audience. I have a question perhaps come question to both Kai and to Gula, which is about audience. In the sense we both talk about exhibitions and Gula you speak about monument and I wondered if you could say whether or the people who are behind trying to make the monument happen. If you could say something more about who they imagine the audience to be and what it is that the monument is, you know, who's the monument, who's the monument to speak to and what is it to say I mean I know you showed us that you showed us the image of people with very clear images to, you know, suffering and production, there's a very clear image to sugarcane reference to sugarcane in the image. So I just wondered if you could tell us who if indeed there is a single audience in mind, but if you perhaps people have thought about that and then for Kai to kind of question about audience and I wondered, Kai you know the exhibition that you curated who is arraigned that specifically. Okay, would you like me to go first. Anybody yes but you should. Okay, yeah, so as I say one of the reasons that that there is a delay was over the design because the, the, the architects, you know, wanted something that would sort of be of an international attraction. And the tourists from different parts, when when they're visiting South Africa, they would say, oh let's go to the waterfront, let's go see this monument is something. So I don't know if any of you have seen but you know the Mandela site in Harwick has something that people actually go out of the way to go and see. And that's who they had in mind that it was not a specifically Indian audience but it would just be something that you know they didn't give a proposal of what they wanted on paper but they wanted something that would captivate tours, no matter where they came from, they wanted to see it for itself, whereas the organizers on the other hand, they have a very specific agenda, which is, you know, two things on the one hand they want to, they want other, the younger Indians to come and see this and appreciate the suffering that they, you know, the migrants went through in, in building this, the economy of Quazulu-Natal, but they also want a message to be sent to non-Indians in the province, especially at a time when this heightened race tensions to say that we played our sort of forefathers, you know, we played a very pivotal role in building the economy of this region and we should be given equal stake in the present time and not be marginalized. So I think they have a very special, I mean they have a specific purpose in that. But I should also add, there's also pressure, I'm not pressure but suggestions from people like Ashwin Desai and Professor Brij Maharaj, for example, who have, you know, suggested alternatives to just a monument. So Professor Maharaj says that, you know, the warring market area in Durban was originally an Indian market and now it's primarily an African, you know, clientele but also many Indian stall holders there as well. And he says let's have a living monument to honor the arrival of Indians because this area is ideal, it reflects a vibrant race, a mix of race and ethnicity, which is solely lacking in this multicultural city of ours and this is one site where there is a degree of of, you know, mixing and so let's make that into a living monument to the indenture and that would be a far better, you know, means of remembering. Thank you. I mean, it's of course it's a, you know, the, I guess the position of Indian indentured laborers in, or at least descendants of Indian indentured laborers in South Africa is rather different to say Mauritius where descendants of indentured laborers they are not marginalized or certainly don't feel marginalized in the way that you describe for people of Indian descent in South Africa. So I think that's, I think, you know, I guess the point is that you're the, the quest for the monuments speaks so very directly to presently politics rather than a so historical agenda, I suppose. But I'll leave it at that. Thank you. I mean, in a way it's an interesting question to have to answer for an exhibition that was live for only about six of the weeks or less that it was meant to be visited. And one of the things we expected to see in the National Arts Festival that we expected to go to and engage with the public that voluntarily came wasn't invited and just came a public viewing, as well as the education. You know, engagement is things we were going to do would have given me a more tangible sense of who that audience ended up being who it was for. I think really we were trying to one for the concierge scholars which are, you know, it's a, I realize that in this particular audience that that would be too restricted so we really were trying to both speak to a clear audience which he has such a huge readership and he really is the most global right in South Africa has ever had. But we were also trying to make that story more localized very much more specifically and beyond the actual manuscripts of his drafts of, of, of novels, there were just so many. And here I'm sort of appealing to you Wayne is that when I haven't really shown you any pictures yet, but you can imagine that since the archive included many other artifacts many other school day materials now this means we're talking about seeing in the 1950s rather than in the 2000s. This means we're not just seeing his first writing as an adult but we're also seeing how he was educated. We're also seeing the collection of photographs and albums that his mother, more or less I sort of argue that she curated it. So, all of these actually disrupt a uniform literary picture of could see it as a writer by, by making you think, and I'm hoping in new ways, biographically, by which I'm still putting, you know, certain reservations there. When I said it was inspired by scenes from provincial life that's a fictionalized autobiography. So I don't want to say that we're trying to, in the exhibition simply write an autobiographical or biographical story to provide any kind of, you know, historical evidence. But we are trying to flesh out a social history that is behind a lot of the writing and also to engage other publics and the geography notebooks from when he was about 10 or 12. So for him, this is how it would have been back then you would have had notebooks that you had to write in in class, you would have had to actually write history exams with the names of these colonial towns that we now know, you know, and so you get a real sense of the shifting political geography, as well as the shifting, shifting ideas of history in the work too so we're hoping it's also interesting for other academic disciplines but also for the wider public who may have lived through these lives and times. Thank you very much. I've got a follow up question but I've put up the reserve for later, but actually I wondered if you wanted to come back to the question that was asked of you. Thanks, thanks Wayne. And yeah, first of all, I see from the way that the question was posed that there's also a mention of moments of particular moments of frustration in my research, I mean in the research process, I mean, in contrast to that moment of, you know, talking to me, and I must say frustration, I don't know, you know, for my colleagues I cannot speak for them but frustration is definitely a lot more frequent than you know that feeling of wow, this is great. In this case I was actually looking for those documents so it was also a moment of real I mean what I can consider a sort of discovery. You know the process and I'm trying to you know put that forward during my presentation because I think it's it's pertinent with the way we, we maybe not think about time in those, in those institutions. Well I was first very happy that I discovered those documents then I felt compelled to do something with them. They were clearly asking to, you know, to be put out, it was almost exactly 50 years later I mean I discovered them in 2016. You know, you would say okay, this is just by chance or not but anyway, it's about time to do something. And then of course you start to think you should start to think it's, that's too easy you know that there are different I mean those are not natural. The agency that a document has is important must be taken into account the way the author has, you know, has conceived them and wanted them to be to become needs to be taken into account so these all this is also, you know, the process that went on from the moment I started to read them until until today. And I must say that process has then enveloped the entire collection more broadly so just to elaborate a bit more. When I, when I first presented this, I mean the first papers on the project last year and was almost exactly a year ago in UCT in Cape Town. And by the way, I think that, you know, traveling is also another important part of our, you know, of our job. In my case it was just because just because I traveled there that they started to receive incredible feedback on this project including being, you know, starting to be in contact with any I know it's been mentioned in the chat from level mollezane a descendant from Abraham Aron mollezane who teaches at the University of Quazzaluna town. Something was completely out of my reach, if I had remained in Europe. Just to say, you know, just to say in passing. And then I was meant to go to London and do this research and I literally could not because of COVID the week before I was about to travel. But you know, back then a year ago I was still thinking about this as the really the papers of Ronald Stretton web and yes he was in contact with those interesting figures. And it was because of the feedback that I received in in South Africa, because of the criticism they received from my colleagues in South Africa and then I realized that the frame was slightly off and it was a frame. Possibly now I that I look at that also dictated by the way the, you know, the archive was built when I briefly managed to look at the documents in in Lesotho, and it was the Ronald Stretton web papers and then you could find yet those other names, you know, mentioned marginally. And so now that I could not do that research for an entire year, and I had a lot of time to think about it. And there might be the possibility of building a digital, you know, tool on this. I think it's just important to highlight that those, you know, those structures that are such integral in the way we learn we read documents can be remade in a different way. And that was one of the points I wanted to to make in the in the presentation. But also I'd like just to briefly comment on. I don't think he's here anymore. You know, Paul mentioned this idea of the archive as a sort of. I think he said a time machine. And he's also I mean something interesting I think to think about. Or a place where documents and items are preserved unnaturally or are frozen and I know that Karen Hamilton has already commented on that particular notion. But, you know, I must just say documents age in archives. They are, you know, they are consumed by time. I mean, they actually they are the time machines. I mean, they travel to us. And they is not the archive that, you know, that do the tricks. And then, and just to add another brief, you know, piece of thinking on this project of digitization. I think it's easy to see them as a sort of incredible and powerful tools that we know will preserve those documents forever have been allowed to, you know, to give access to them to an incredible amount of people and that's very part of the game. I mean it's very much part of the game but at the same time digitizing an archive is a very dangerous procedure for the documents themselves. I mean, that means unpacking unboxing scanning, you know, each page one by one, very fragile documents. And in some occasions I, I encounter damage documents because of projects of digitization, which is something that's also it's part of this new, you know, type of project that are becoming very, very common nowadays. So I don't know if that's more or less, you know, an answer to at least some of the points you wanted to elaborate and me to elaborate upon. And so, well, if I can share an anecdote in the response to your point, that documents age in archives, they're also actively destroying an archive by people who are called archivists. So, in the case of the South African archives several years ago I went to visit the Blomfontein National Archives South African National Archives and Blomfontein, the old Free State Archives because I had in mind that I wanted to do a project on the 19th century Free State. And so there were several kind of, you know, I made two trips and one occasion I was a kind of trip just to identify what was there. And so, you know, several, literally, hundreds of volumes of magisterial records, records of different magisterial districts that is. And I identified these records and thought, well, that's, you know, it would be the basis of a great project. I went back two or three years later. And these records that I had identified were destroyed by official order by the head of the Blomfontein Archives. And, of course, you can imagine I was a pretty aghast at this and so I'm asked, you know, what the reason for this was, and the reason was that nobody was using them. And hence the head of the archives thought that these records should be destroyed. So, effectively what that means is that the Blomfontein archives, you know, these are national state archives have been identified as as archives for the South African War, the World War, because that is what people come to look at. So, people, the people who come to the Blomfontein archives are coming to look at concentration camp records. And so, the head of the archive decided that these were the only records worth preserving and then, of course, records of the 20th century, the liberation struggle. The great bulk of the Free State Republic records have all been destroyed. So, that's, I wish I could write it up, but I feel that I should have, when I, when we put this panel together, I thought of trying to write a paper on this, but I felt that I didn't have enough to write a paper other than to say that the records were destroyed. Can I just say something there? Yes, please. Yeah, no, I had the same. I mean, I had a similar experience because I was doing some research on a particular individual. And I came across this court case that took place in 1906. It was really very interesting because, you know, the judge said that this person shouldn't do it. So, I got to the archives and that the whole file is missing. So, you know, probably his family members, somebody just took it away. But coming back to, you know, the point is, if you go to say one of the archives in London, a lot of key, they used to be, I don't know now, a lot of care about wearing gloves and how you can work. And in the South African archives, they just give you the files, what you do with it, you take it away, you scan it, how you use it. And by the end of it, you'll find all little bits of, you know, mess there. So I think if it's done under control procedure, it's a one-off where you're scanning it, it is better than lots of different people coming with no oversight as to how you're using it. And then, and definitely, there's far more damage being done there. Thanks. But, you know, the point is that the archives, that these, you know, this was clearly a kind of political act, you know, it was a certain kind of areas of the South African past were decided as kind of worthy of preservation, and others not. And so it really, talking about contested spaces, you couldn't, couldn't think of a more kind of an example. When can I just ask you exactly about the gatekeeping for that decision? Do you have a sense of, was it just one person or was it a? I couldn't, I think it was probably a committee, I suspect, but it certainly was a ratified and signed off that I spoke to the person who was head of the, you know, the main person head in charge of the Brunnery archive. Yeah. So, you know, and this is meant that also a key kind of canon of, of, of, you know, what historians regard as, you know, absolutely kind of critical, which is kind of footnotes. And the point of the point of historical footnotes is that such as with the researchers can go and look at those footnotes and, you know, check them out, follow them out, verify their accuracy, etc, etc. So, you know, the big book, of course, on the field of two big books on the free state, the one is by Colin Murray, and, you know, so you can't follow up Tim Keegan's footnotes, because the records have been destroyed. And then I just also wanted to hit on the captions that Tori was talking about too, because that's just so important for what you decide to keep and and how you're going to look for it and how you're going to find it. So, in a sense, you know, that archive that was destroyed could have been filtered out in a very different way and could have been called other things, couldn't it? Yes. And of course the same thing happened in, I mean, in the Cape archives, except in that Cape archives are sort of recorded as the archives were weeded, that's the word of the archive. So, you know, lots and lots of records on the Cape colony for the 1920s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, they've all been, they've all been not completely shredded, but a lot of them have been shredded and some records have been kept. Some of the records, some of them have been kept. The most frustrating aspect of that is that one doesn't know what the basis of the decision was for what was kept and what was destroyed. As far as I could work things out, as far as I could work things out, the basis of the decision was whether they, actually I was thinking of criminal records specifically and the basis of the decision was whether things were interesting from a legal point of view, rather than an historical point of view. And of course, you know, the end of the archive was the person who decided that. And I don't think there was any consultation with historians at all. But when if I may, I see that there was a question for, I mean, for Kay, for me, the Q&A box on the, well, in my case, just come in, yes, yes. I suppose in my case it was about the unifying role of web for these different geographic program in this disperse archive, if I got it right. I think it's, I mean, I'm quite inclined to retain this figure, this personality as a sort of unifying trend, because first of all, he was the collector of most of those things and he was the person who sent them away. You know, when when they are not in his private collection in the Royal Geographical Society, because he chose to send them away. So, the point is not about removing the person entirely, but, you know, not to consider him as the, in a way, the only honor. And we spoke in the previous keynote about, you know, different levels of ownership and custodianship and creativity, possibly. So, you know, that's a different way, finding a different place for the man who is still, you know, the identifying figure at least in my, I mean, in my present understanding. Yeah, thanks, we have we the webinar will turn off automatically at 430 I was just told, so we have to end so we're but we have time I think for Kai. Just quickly. You have eight minutes guys. Well, I mean, Rick, my dear friend Rick has given me a tough question but it's, it's a really interesting question about about, again, coming back to what is a cartographic cartographic or approach to somebody's life and times across these different sounds but also how does that maybe disrupt what are the differences that remain and what I haven't dealt with in terms of audience yet Rick, I mean it Rick and and Wayne from your question is precisely the second leg of the exhibition which is Texas. And so, what we would also sing I didn't think I'm going to answer Rick's question properly but I did want to address the fact that the audience that I see researching at Texas, and the audience that I see going to an exhibition there where they're very used to hosting exhibitions that went on all the time it's, it's a big venue when you walk in so it's a culture of exhibitions of archives and paintings from the ransom center but this is a very global at the ransom center it is Texas, but at the same time it's one of the most global and and you know quite affluent collections. So when you see could see it at Texas, we could we are going to do this particular theme, but I think it is going to be seen regionally in a very different way in in the north. Because his readership is so global, and by bringing him scenes from the south to the south what we were trying to do was to disrupt this idea that despite the fact that he's lived in Australia for nearly 20 years. There's hardly a person who doesn't go back to the beginning of time and talk about him as if he's still absolutely in the same space that he was when he began writing in the 70s, and that he's, you know, they call them a South African writer well we wanted to see that that formation is so important to understanding him now to, but we also wanted to look to see what the South, if we think about it differently, like with France and we think about his own excursions to Argentina, how his readership and his writing can be read in a very different way and expand and diversify both in terms of your understanding about his interest in languages which are evident in the archives. And in terms of just to come back to what I really wanted to say is that displaying archives means that you are a different kind of gatekeeper visualizing deciding how you want to thematize this and what you want to show and where you want to show it and in what order. And in what space partly depends on the venue and what they have for display cabinets, but it also depends on what you as a curator trying to tell what story that is. So that's, that's my answer. Thank you very much. Hi. We have tools in one minute so anybody wanted to come in we can send their comedy to you. Otherwise we'll draw things. I'll just, I'll just make a last point. The point about Mauritius I think it's very important because 70% of India of, you know, in this make up 70% of the population Mauritius and control country basically. And so a lot of what you see globally is from Mauritius and increasingly from people in India as well. And as you know prior to this 20, 30 years ago, so the people of India disown those who are from the indentured and the dissent. And so now there is an embracing of that for the last 20 years. So that's the first point but also increasingly the kinds of issues say for example, Indians facing South Africa. And you'll find that the people of Fiji of Guyana of, you know, turning that they're all writing about the same issue so they have now, once among these zoom conferences that people from different diasporic settings. It's called give me cha cha. Like it is giving me is a is a corruption of the word agreement that people sign. So it's giving me. And so there are people that you know there's increasing sort of awareness of being an Indian in as a minority in various settings and so that identity is becoming quite strong. And a couple would of course the rise of India as well. So that's something I thought I'll just draw up. Yeah. Yes, thank you. That's very interesting. An interesting thing about Mauritius of course is that these records have been danger players are shot. They're not accessible to the public. So, yeah, you can't, you can't, you can't really walk into those records and look at your ancestry. Well, thank you very much for our session today out and thank you very much to our panelists again and thank you to Angelica for holding it all together. I think we had an exceptionally successful day on our first day. This brings us to the end of our first day, and we will continue tomorrow. I forget what time we start Angelica. We start in tomorrow at 9am UK time 11am South African time. Please check our website. I put the link in there for the program. And if you haven't registered on the zoom link please do so tonight to be ready for tomorrow. Thank you everybody. Thank you. We'll say goodbye to you. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye.