The dead archive: governance and institutional memory in independent Mozambique

Abstract

Translated from the Portuguese expression arquivo morto, the dead archive is a site where files that have lost their procedural validity are stored for a determined number of years before they are destroyed or are sent to permanent archives. In Mozambique, where awareness and institutional capacity for proper archival procedures are still being developed, a common feature of the dead archive is the way in which files are untidily piled up with old typewriters, furniture, spare parts and other material debris of bureaucratic work and administration. In these archives, more than forty years of institutional and public memory lie ignored in leaky, damp basements across the country and in serious danger of irreparable damage. Drawing from various stints of historical and anthropological field research conducted between 2009 and 2016 in Maputo, Niassa and Inhambane provinces, this article examines the dead archive in order to explore the relationship between institutional memory and governance during the long period of austerity in Mozambique. Based on our investigation of the multiple layers of the dead archive, we argue that the Mozambican post-socialist government has sought to control institutional memory as a way to keep the ruling party in power in the context of multiparty politics. While the public sector has experienced conditions of austerity since independence, we show how, during the socialist period (1975–90) of single-party rule, the state's relationship with institutional memory was more progressive, with transparent and communicative archival practices. In contrast, despite the combination of public sector reforms and progressive legislation regarding the right to information, the multiparty democratic period (1990 to the present) has seen an exacerbation of administrative secrecy leading to less transparent and communicative archival practices.

Researching post-independence Africa in regional archives: possibilities and limits in Benin, Cabo Verde, Ghana and Congo-Brazzaville

“…However, in terms of access, reference to the national archives is essential in all cases: for the international and national researcher to enter the ‘dead archive’, they need to be known at the level of the national archives and be recommended and supported by these archives. At the provincial level, this recommendation is more powerful than any other credentials, as held by Machava and Gonçalves (2021: 566–7) with regard to their Mozambican case study.…”

“…A third issue concerns the role of the national archives in postcolonial African countries in relation to administrative archives at the provincial level; this also links to questions of access. In our four case studies, the national archives are either responsible for or involved in the conservation of provincial archives, in ways comparable to the case of the 1992 legislation in Mozambique commented on by Machava and Gonçalves (2021: 556, 558). Archivists from the central structure might be involved in preserving local archives; however, normally, there is no resource base for such engagement.…”

“…In that vision, the archivist carries out ‘the delicate work of anticipating how a visitor will read and use archival documents’ (Taylor 2021: 542–3). Therefore, access to archives could be constrained by the archivist’s perception of risk; or, as Benedito Machava and Euclides Gonçalves have pointed out for Mozambique, it could be conditioned by regimes of uncertainty, in which archivists have an incentive to classify most files as secret and to withhold them as much as possible from visitors, in a quest to avoid committing mistakes (Machava and Gonçalves 2021: 564–5).…”

“…In our case studies, the treatment of the ‘dead archive’ remained conditioned by it being an inconvenient but necessary product of bureaucratic culture; while that bureaucratic culture might have been rooted in colonial practices (Awenengo Dalberto and Banégas 2021; Awenengo Dalberto 2020), it proved to be powerful enough to preclude the destruction of the holdings of provincial archives. This explains why reports about the destruction of such archives by officials wishing to clean up their place of activity (Machava and Gonçalves 2021: 557) and circulating stories about files from the archives being sold to street vendors for wrapping up merchandise are not the general experience. In many cases, records in the ‘dead archive’ might be inconvenient as they occupy storage space; often, they are not consulted for a long time or they are never consulted; but while they are certainly not intentionally well kept, there is an underlying notion that they cannot be removed either, as, even in their ‘dead’ nature, they remain part of bureaucratic modernity.…”

“…41In this sense, we are more sceptical about existing international research in provincial archives than seems to be the case in Machava and Gonçalves (2021: 568).…”