HISTORICAL PAPERS: A PLATFORM FOR RESEARCH AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
The Historical Papers research archive, situated in the William Cullen Library, was established in 1966. We are a friendly, vastly used, valued and popular service as well as unique and accessible hub for human rights research serving civil society, scholars and researchers. Historical Papers is one of the largest and most comprehensive independent archives in Southern Africa. We house over 3300 collections of historical, political and cultural importance, encompassing the mid 17th Century to the Present.
Our primary aim is to serve the broader community as well as the university and to transform archives into accessible centres for research. Included are the records of many human rights NGOs, trade unions, labour federations, political parties, women's organisations, churches and church bodies, and the papers of human rights activists. We are also home to a huge volume of political trials, photographs, press clippings, oral interviews, and material collected by several research institutions and individual researchers.
With generous funding from the Atlantic Philanthropies Foundation we are continually building up our web-based delivery of digitized resources. More
On the 17 February 2011 Historical Papers and Museum Africa jointly held the opening of the FOSATU exhibition and the book launch of 'The future is in the Hands of the Workers' A History of FOSATU'. You can now download the book for FREE.
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Ronald Ngilima Photographs
This collection contains the photographic archive of Ronald Ngilima, dating from the late 1940s to March 1960, continued by his son Torrance until around 1965. The approximately 5600 negatives were deposited at Historical Papers by Ronald Ngilima's grandson Farrell Ngilima and Sophie Feyder from the Leiden University in the Netherlands, who facilitated the digitisation of these negatives.
The new collection AG3365 contains the papers of FASA, which was formed in 1892 as an all-white South African Football Association, documenting the long road of racialised soccer in South Africa. FASA would see its expulsion from African soccer by the CAF in 1960 and be banned by FIFA from international soccer in 1976. But in 1991 FASA unified with other national football bodies in South Africa, to become the South African Football Association (SAFA), allowing all South African teams to join international soccer again.
This collection contains the photographs of Fraser MacLean, originating from Nova Scotia in the USA. He, together with his wife Barbara Hutmacher MacLean, worked in South Africa at the Daily Dispatch newspaper in East London in the later half of the 1970s.
The Historical Papers Research Archive has published more online collections, some of which have been used extensively by researchers in the past.
One such collection are the papers of Colin Goodman, who was the Chief Housing Engineer in the Johannesburg City Council. The collection contains photographs and building plans relating to the large construction activities overseen by the City Council in Soweto in the 1970s.
Digitised collections of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa
We have recently embarked on digitising collections from the archive of the Anglican Church in Southern Africa, of which Historical Papers is the official repository.
Picture above: Bishops Court, Cape Town, Painting by Tinus de Jongh. Bishops Court is the official residence of the Archbishop of the Anglican Church in Southern Africa.
