Academics call to declassify apartheid-era archives

A group of academics and activists are calling for apartheid-era documents to be declassified for the sake of scholars and “transitional justice for victims of oppression”, writes Tanya Farber for Times Live.

This came to light at a recent colloquium at the University of the Witwatersrand at an event on “promoting open and transparent public record-keeping for a democratic South Africa”. Participants discussed how state-generated public records should be declassified. In that way‚ the documents of government departments that kept their own records could become public.

Co-organiser Gabriele Mohale‚ archivist of the university’s Historical Papers Research Archive‚ said that unlike in many other countries‚ South Africa’s National Archives has “no systematic process of declassifying records – you even have records from the Anglo-Boer War that are still not declassified”.
Full report on the Times Live site