IntroductionFootnote 1
A digital future for African archives – it sometimes appears as if that were already a clearly defined path.Footnote 2 While the debate is still in its beginnings amongst both archivists and historians, we are currently witnessing a general initiative for the creation of digital resources, which includes the African continent.Footnote 3 In the case of French initiatives especially, the idea of digitization is also partly combined with a notion of “bringing colonial heritage home” or making a shared heritage accessible to both sides.Footnote 4 However, digitization is also mentioned as a solution for difficult storage conditions, perhaps caused by difficulties of climate, for example, or lack of investment in archives.Footnote 5
Initial plans to create digital archives in African contexts were more systematic and must be seen from the point of view of making available the primary resources on the liberation struggle, especially so for Southern Africa.Footnote 6 Only over the last ten years has the matter of the potential loss of the existing archives on the African continent become a more frequently discussed problem. Many archival holdings in sub-Saharan African countries must nowadays be considered to be endangered and eventually they will fall into the group of documents the future accessibility of which might be secured by digitization. That is of course the point of a number of conservation programmes, of which perhaps the most renowned is the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme.Footnote 7
As we shall discuss later, such programmes, while being of vital importance to the preservation of archival data, can sometimes have an impact on the definition of researchers’ priorities. There are less incentives for researchers to focus on postcolonial archives, which explains why they are even more strongly at risk.Footnote 8 For example, if heaps of administrative paperwork are just shoved into cellars until they are forgotten and perhaps in due course destroyed, whole periods of the more recent past could ultimately be lost to researchers. It might well be therefore that regional histories based on what important archival documentation is currently still available, will then be “cancelled out by increased superficiality and new blind spots.”Footnote 9
Historical debate on the research prospects within archives has been rather unhelpful as far as postcolonial African histories are concerned. The reputation for authenticity of oral information is greater than that of archival records, but there is agreement that archives are obviously still important for the colonial period, especially when carefully interpreted.Footnote 10 However, any attempts to work with postcolonial archival holdings means leaving the comfort zone of relatively well-organized series within African national archives. It is also easy to agree with Stephen Ellis’s claim that archival documents from the colonial period are much more readily available for research than are postcolonial ones.Footnote 11 However, the notion underlying recent debates is clearly wrong, which is that archival research on postcolonial African themes is – at least in any systematic way – close to impossible.Footnote 12 Moreover, with important exceptions, notably John Straussberger’s most useful reflections on the Guinean Labé District Archives, the debate rarely touches on the question of the differences between regional/provincial and municipal archives on the one hand and national archives on the other.Footnote 13 That is, again, a dramatic choice to ignore: many such archives are at risk, and in a way upon their preservation depends an important element of writing African post-independence histories, certainly for the years between 1957 and the early 1990s. It is yet to be seen how administrations will deal with files from the last two and a half decades, as for the most part that information is still relevant to current administrative services.
The various problems can become entangled in a single combined research and preservation mission, as was the case of Endangered Archives Project (EAP) 844, carried out by the National Archives of the Republic of Congo and an international team of researchers operating from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. The changes and reverses in such experience are important in themselves, for they illustrate the essential questions for research orientation towards preservation measures, and the need for flexibility and quick adaptation of choices in the complicated context of regional archives. The concrete initial goals of an Endangered Archives mission gave results which were much more ambivalent although, we would argue, highly interesting. Based on those results we intend to show how such activities need to be adapted to findings. Ultimately, the results do indeed allow us to offer the perspectives needed to provide new paths for research at least in the Congolese case, and in doing so are able to suggest what that could mean for digitization plans and for priorities with regard to the whole of (postcolonial) Africa’s archives.
The initial design of the research mission was straightforward enough, even if it was focused on an anomaly of the archival infrastructure inherited from the colonial period. As far as we know the Republic of Congo differs from all other former French colonial territories in that it has no colonial territorial archives currently available as a coherent set of holdings. The colonial records of the National Archives in Brazzaville are based mostly on documentation from the Government-General of French Equatorial Africa (AEF) – which is important, but very different from what territorial Middle-Congo archives would contain.Footnote 14 It is plausible that the latter documentation was not moved when Pointe-Noire, the former capital of the colonial territory from 1949, lost that status in 1958. Brazzaville then went through an administrative transformation from being the capital of the Government-General to becoming the capital first of an autonomous, then of a completely independent Republic of Congo. Therefore, it seemed crucial to find those territorial archives. They might have been in the possession of the current archival services in the city of Pointe-Noire, which means that we should have to search in regional and municipal archives. Our optimism to find a roughly organized territorial archive as integrated in another archival collection was reasonable, for after all, Pointe-Noire had mainly escaped the turbulences of conflict in the Republic of Congo, especially those between 1997 and 1999.Footnote 15 We hoped to be able to make scans of sample boxes after such a discovery, to prepare a future large digitization project.
So much for the theory! In practice, the mission discovered only fragments of the territorial colonial archives. However, there emerged instead a real treasure-trove of dispersed, complex holdings from both the late colonial and postcolonial periods. From the point of view of research perspectives, a certain amount of these documents could be digitized through EAP 844; but it became clear that questions of reorganization and inventories would prove to be equally or even more important. In material terms, the changing focus within the mission called for attention to the needs of postcolonial regional archives, as the greater part of the material found in Pointe-Noire turned out to be from the postcolonial Kouilou District Administration, with valuable excursions into national questions, or those of neighboring administrative regions within the Republic of Congo. All the relevant files remain in danger of being lost; to ensure their continued existence changes in preservation strategies might be necessary, returning from the lofty heights of digitization to “old-fashioned” preservation through the groundwork of saving documents and re-categorizing them within local archival depositories.
Lost Colonial Archives in the Republic of Congo – And No Postcolonial Files at All?
Why focus on safeguarding archives in the Republic of Congo? In some respects the Congolese case may be seen as exceptional, although the more common problems of access to archives for historical interpretation equally apply. From the historian’s point of view existing research on the Congo’s historical trajectory is unsatisfying; for the archivist, in the current situation, the National Archives hope to play a more active role in making regional holdings accessible.Footnote 16
We should like first to give an overview of historical research on the colonial and postcolonial Congo. The colonial territory of the Middle Congo was the subject of one of the pioneer studies in African history published in French by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, on concession companies and their social and socioeconomic effects.Footnote 17 Apart from that, however, the Republic of Congo has rarely been a favorite subject for historical research. In a very rough categorization, we might speak of four themes that have dominated the small amount of studies related to the history of the country. Those are labor extraction and labor abuses; Brazzaville’s particular urban social history; the Middle-Congo/Republic of Congo’s experience as a country of political mobilization and network-building in the late colonial and early postcolonial period; and the evolution of the Marxist-Leninist state and particularly the impact of the Civil War and of violence.
The latter experience has been interpreted exclusively by sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists, without any reference to archival sources at all. That might at first glance seem unsurprising, but is not a necessary situation, given that archival records for that period were available even before EAP 844.Footnote 18 Of the other three subjects, the first coincides with research on the early decades of colonial rule between the 1880s and the 1930s, while the other two have to do with developments after the Second World War. Concession company rule was one subject, forced labor after the decline of the concessions a second; but other than for comparable processes in Gabon research progress was limited in that regard.Footnote 19 The Congo-Océan railway project, infamous for devouring and killing laborers between 1921 and 1934, was recently discussed as a humanitarian disaster and international matter.Footnote 20 Other recent research approaches have prolonged the debate on coercive labor practices in the Congo into the war period, when Brazzaville briefly became the centre of the “Free French” struggle, or into a wider framework which has discussed them from the end of the concession company phase up to the time of the Marxist-Leninist state.Footnote 21
Thanks to Phyllis Martin we also have an impressive study on urban culture in Brazzaville, including habits of dress and use of leisure time, which is still practically unequalled for any similar urban conditions in African territories under colonial rule.Footnote 22 Although she later moved away from the Congo to specialize fully in Gabonese history, Florence Bernault created a ground-breaking analysis on ambiguous democracies by comparing the changing political context of the Congo to that of Gabon. Hers was a broad study of network-building and the creation of party support and cultural and regional platforms.Footnote 23 Jean-Pierre Bat’s discussion of Congo-Brazzaville as a base for early French experiments with neo-colonial domination in Central Africa is more strongly centred on the French political-informal than on the Congolese social experience, although it shows the wider networks among African leaders, the actors of the Cold War, and the French.Footnote 24 Analysis of Congo’s turbulent political evolution in the 1960s has recently been the subject of two ambitious comparative approaches, by Françoise Blum and by Matt Swagler. Both historians have debated the effects of trade union mobilization and urban protest in Brazzaville in contrast to other former French territories, especially Senegal.Footnote 25 Finally, although outside all those categories, Phyllis Martin has offered another volume, spanning a longer period and discussing the experience of Catholic nuns in a context of modifying gender roles in colonial Congo.Footnote 26
This overview is useful to point out that historical analysis of Congo-Brazzaville has been insufficient in many ways. That has been because of the generally complicated research conditions on the ground, but also because of the lack of available archival resources in the Congo. The National Archives in Brazzaville have attracted the interest of certain researchers, and we will discuss their series below, but we see a lacuna in current debates and reflections in the fact that no one has ever discussed either the need or the possibility of rediscovering the colonial territorial archives of the Middle-Congo.
Another problem for research is the apparent absence of postcolonial archives. Even so, at some point after independence the National Archives began to integrate files from the later period thereby creating out of that material a series called “Presidential Records” (PR). Interestingly, because it offers detailed reports on specific regions the series is quite useful for a very short period from roughly 1966 to 1968, therefore covering the decline and fall of Alphonse Massamba-Débat’s regime.Footnote 27 Explanations for the existence of that particular archival series are hard to come by. Up to now we cannot speak of any concrete plan for practical steps to integrate other postcolonial records and series from the various services into the National Archives, although the director of the archives is aware of the necessity for them. For a long time, storage space has been a huge obstacle: the interim solution for an archives building was inadequate, and then part of its structure was damaged during a landslide. The hiatus continued for four years, but in 2018 a recent visit by a French mission and newly available funding have finally allowed the National Archives to be relocated.
Other places in the Republic of Congo where postcolonial records are currently stored and relatively accessible, include the municipal archives of Brazzaville and, as it turned out, of Pointe-Noire. Naturally, the material in those archives concerns mainly urban questions, but it includes among wider themes considerable, extremely valuable information on the urban police services up to the 1980s.Footnote 28 A huge challenge for archival organization in the Republic of Congo is the matter of securing access in the near future via the National Archives to regional holdings under the control of the central state (within the Préfectures). Obviously, digitization could be a useful solution, for if documents cannot be moved, they might at least be made accessible through mass digitization, although that would of course necessitate the acquisition of suitable equipment.
The hope of finding a compact archive corresponding to the old territorial archives was essential to the original design of the planned mission. No scholar working on the history of the territory has ever used the colonial Middle-Congo archives for research. Florence Bernault mentioned the existence of archival records from certain territorial services within the National Archives, but those records are no longer there.Footnote 29 The important former “Fonds Brazzaville” in the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes (CADN) boasts quite important holdings from the territory, now integrated within the archives’ records series of the French Embassy in Brazzaville, but they seem rather to have been inherited from the inspectorate services of AEF than from the territorial services of the Middle-Congo.Footnote 30 For all those reasons, EAP 844 calculated that there was a reasonable chance of finding a relatively intact territorial archive left behind in Pointe-Noire.Footnote 31 Compared to other EAPs on colonial African files, that would in any case have been a large series, and therefore physically difficult to deal with.Footnote 32 Derek Peterson’s preservation and digitization measures in Uganda, carried out in part by students working under Peterson’s supervision, formed the principal model; in our view it is in fact the only wider initiative intended to engage with regional archival holdings.Footnote 33 In the end, however, the reality we encountered on the ground was far different from the predictions and initial research goals, and forced us to rethink priorities.
Opening Up the Local Repositories: A Search through Postcolonial Treasure Chests
The principal focus of research during this EAP mission was the archives of the Préfecture in Pointe-Noire, as they were most likely to contain substantial parts of the former colonial Middle-Congo archives. Those archives had been reformed in 1950 after the territorial government services were installed in the Hôtel Ottino, which became the seat of government and later the Préfecture building.Footnote 34 With the support of the Departmental Directorate of Archives in Pointe-Noire, it was possible to start work in the historical storeroom of the main administrative building. The place was crammed to the ceiling with hundreds of packages, countless files almost entirely disordered and myriad loose sheets of paper.
Even after the first steps of reordering material, it is complicated to make anything like an accurate estimate of the archive’s size, but a realistic guess might be that the material would extend to a length of at least 150 metres. Accessing and classifying material had to be done under difficult circumstances, on an upper floor balustrade of the Hôtel Ottino. The sheer physical vastness of the records forced researchers to select samples for analysis in the most practicable way they could, instead of their being able systematically to sort through the entire holding.
The practicalities of the research and classification exercise, including the periodization of the material encountered, is described in the survey published on the British Library webpage for the Endangered Archives Programme.Footnote 35 It is sufficient here to underline that the project members established 99 new boxes of historical material.
The inventory of that newly established historical series is available online and is an important, if essentially rudimentary research instrument.Footnote 36 We completely share Vincent Hiribarren’s opinion of the importance of inventories published online – and that it is even more essential that the opening of regional archives should be accompanied by publication of inventories.Footnote 37 In principle, this series is now open for research during regular access hours (at the Préfecture from 9 am to 3 pm) after authorization by the director of the National Archives; a visa for research in the Republic of Congo may be requested. Currently, the historical series may be consulted only in the office of the current archives in the Préfecture building.
As in Salau’s EAP, or Isidore Horugavye’s, which is a survey of the holdings of the National Archives of Burundi, the project team considered for immediate sample digitization the most significant complete dossiers they found during the first enquiry.Footnote 38 The team indeed found a number of collections of colonial material belonging to the territorial administration. They then scanned one complete relevant dossier as an example for such documentation – that is the one currently classified as 96.1 in the new inventory. The dossier illustrates the social history of local populations under the multiple pressures of recruitment and coercive forms of labor during the war years. It therefore contains a number of voices witnessing forced labor, including those of locals describing the experience of the Second World War in the Kouilou, the wider region of Pointe-Noire, as “new slavery.”Footnote 39 Their experience was somewhat complementary to later discussions of un-free labor that can be found in the National Archives at Brazzaville, as those later records focus on the period after the formal abolition of such exploitative practices through the Houphouët-Boigny Law voted by the French National Assembly on 11 April 1946.Footnote 40
However, while – completing and deepening Jennings’s analysis – that sample dossier is certainly a valuable source to deepen our knowledge on the local effects of the war years, it is by no means representative of the nature of the entire archive. Project work in the Préfecture opened a number of colonial processes probably related to the territorial services but, against our expectations, those were only a small part even of the colonial files. The post-independence records meanwhile clearly constitute more than half the “historical archives” stored and available for historical analysis in Pointe-Noire’s Préfecture. From the point of view of the original project plan therefore, that was a disappointing outcome to have to realize during the project’s first days in action.
Other archives in Pointe-Noire were unlikely to contain territorial series from the Middle Congo, because after the transfer of its capital to Brazzaville, the logic step for the administrators would have been to keep those territorial colonial files within the Kouilou Préfecture archives covering Pointe-Noire. We therefore considered it improbable that such files had been placed in the municipal archives of Pointe-Noire’s town hall, and were quickly proved right as those archives proved to be in an impressive, orderly state with a useful hand-written inventory. We found certain unclassified colonial records, but research into the holdings, which amounted to only a dozen or so boxes, confirmed them to be mainly from the services of the colonial town administration (the commune mixte) of Pointe-Noire.
As with the municipal archives of Brazzaville, the most interesting historical files in Pointe-Noire’s municipal archives contain information on police services. The series bridges the last years of the already autonomous Congo; it gives impressions of conflict between groups in the city after independence, especially if such conflict led to violence registered by police officers. Attacks against Angolan merchants and other “foreign” residents are one recurrent theme on which research could be deepened.Footnote 41 Conflict with leading Mbochi residents, members of an ethnic group mainly living in the Congo’s north, who had clashed with other groups during the famous Brazzaville riots of 1959, are another matter that was being discussed by Pointe-Noire’s police by 1961.Footnote 42 But while all of that is essential material for any scholar wishing to work on late and postcolonial urban society in Pointe-Noire, the files do not describe the colonial past from a territorial perspective. The same is true for the railway archives of the Chemin de Fer Congo-Océan (CFCO), although there the mission found an impressive archive on pension and other social rights of former employees, all presented in well-organized files. The CFCO archive contains an important postcolonial section too, which is valuable for research on tensions within a principal state enterprise and to shed light on a deteriorating climate of widespread distrust in the 1980s.Footnote 43 For the rest, the CFCO archives contain literally a mountain of unclassified archival material, although it seems none of it is from the colonial period.
Therefore, as a result of enquiries and the sifting of available records, it rapidly became clear that we should not expect to find any coherent colonial Middle-Congo archives. Moreover, the colonial material located in Pointe-Noire was very mixed and certainly represents a minority of the files that were immediately relevant for social processes. But does all that mean that EAP 844 was a failure? If the rationale had been to stick rigidly to the plan, then certainly it would have been. However, the research activity opened a number of treasure chests of formerly unknown content and suggested new directions for social historical analysis of the Congo and especially the postcolonial Congo. It represented an opportunity that would not be wasted.
Adapting the Goals: Findings and Potentials of Research in Pointe-Noire
As we have pointed out, the Archives of the Préfecture of Pointe-Noire are home not only to scattered colonial files of which only a proportion are likely to have originated in the former territorial archives of the Middle-Congo. For their part, the records stored in the Hôtel Ottino also function as a regional archive that offers material on the city of Pointe-Noire and the Kouilou region from 1960 onwards. Such abundant material is obviously invaluable for any researcher interested in Congolese history and its different phases and, as we described above, it could easily be supplemented with other important late or postcolonial documents from the municipal and the CFCO archives. Only certain of the files are organized in larger dossiers, which could be addressed directly – perhaps put into folders or boxes and eventually scanned. The rest of the records are of more limited processes or even miscellaneous compositions of documents.
The need for archives not only to be stored sustainably but properly interpreted, means that observations must be accumulated on social life, political engagement, and administrative realities for the various phases of postcolonial Congolese society. Cumulative approaches to history remain quite normal, although they have had something of a “bad press” since they seem to be less sophisticated than theory-driven screening and selection from series of records that have been well established either thematically or at least chronologically.Footnote 44 But in our view, a good proportion of the postcolonial files of the archives of the Préfecture are important precisely because they lend themselves to such a “cumulative” approach of diligent analysis, reordering, and bringing together to solve a puzzle. Decisions on how to reorganize the archive must come only after taking that particular quality of the documentation into account.
Rather than offering anecdotal evidence of the usefulness of such cumulative approaches, we wish to point to a number of themes that the Préfecture archives help to address in spite of the scattered nature of the records. One such category is the number of reports on individuals migrating within the wider region of the Congo Basin, and their experiences during the changes of the late 1950s and 1960s. A particularly impressive case is that of a number of residents of 1960s Pointe-Noire who had formerly lived in Léopoldville and lost some their possessions there during the 1959 riots and mutinies. The archives document their struggles over years to retrieve their property.Footnote 45 Information on room for economic manoeuvre for women in the 1960s and their trajectories is another subject that can profit from deeper delving into various of the newly established dossiers.Footnote 46
Complementing the daily police reports from the Municipal Archives we found further police records from the early 1960s in the form of depositions. It is clear from those papers that by 1961 fraudsters in Pointe-Noire were attempting, by presenting themselves as officials of Congolese ministries, to extract money from European company staff in the city.Footnote 47 The available records also shed light on social life especially under the Fulbert Youlou regime, which now is perhaps – and thanks especially to Bernault’s book – no longer as opaque and unmentionable as in Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga’s reflections from 1990. However, much more historical research is still needed.Footnote 48
A second category of material is reports of regional tours by administrative officials, which can be highly informative in discussing local moods. While a relatively biased source, such reports are useful for research on the colonial period and onwards through the Youlou and Massamba-Débat years and indeed well into the Marxist-Leninist state. We found that type of record in isolated documents within the Préfecture Archives of Pointe-Noire; indeed, somewhat frustratingly, we sometimes saw a number of copies of the same tour report! For example, the report of a 1981 tour of the Nkola region shows the dynamics of local refusals and anger at the lack of adequate education possibilities. The report reveals too the rhetoric used by the agents of the regime referring to “Machiavellian” attempts by some “bad citizens” to hamper the revolution. It is a source of great interest, because it offers evidence for the behavior of local residents, even if it is relayed in rather complicated “Marxist-Leninist” terminology.Footnote 49
The available files include debates that at first glance seem to be rather dryly technical, discussing the limits of resources and lack of personnel. But they too are important and interesting, and available even for the years when multi-party democracy was just beginning. For 1994, after the country’s democratic turn, we learn of various regional problems that essentially involve a huge lack of personnel, during the attempted change of public sector staff.Footnote 50
We were able to identify a fourth type of documentation in the form of personal statements by secondary school students in Pointe-Noire, such as that of the orphan boy F. Kono-Bouity who was a pupil at the Lycée Augagneur. The boy’s prose must have particularly impressed the educational services of Kouilou District, as it combined the argument for “proletarian identity” in the terminology of the Parti Congolais du Travail (PCT) regime of the 1970s, with a frustrated description of the lack of social support for poor students, for example through scholarships.Footnote 51 Kono-Bouity gives some insight into the living conditions of students from less privileged families, not least since it appears that he himself worked at the port most mornings until 7 am, before going to school. The text is especially interesting because it illustrates the reception of state propaganda by adolescents like Kono-Bouity, showing that they could reshape the propaganda into concrete complaints. We ought however to enquire more closely into the comments members of the educational services might make on such prose.Footnote 52
Archival records from the 1970s and 1980s are more randomly scattered, mainly into smaller processes, but for the 1960s and particularly for the early years after independence there are large and coherent dossiers. Within EAP 844 we therefore decided to scan one complete dossier containing some hundreds of reports and annexes on local security conditions. We found that approach especially suitable as it allows researchers interested in the early Youlou period of the Republic of Congo to contrast the interpretations made in Bat’s studies on the French neo-colonial Foccart networks in Central Africa with other, much more local types of security sources, which are more immediately focused on social history of the Pointe-Noire region.Footnote 53 That documentation apparently came from a French security officer in Pointe-Noire reporting to the Ministry of the Interior in Brazzaville. However, it should be read with caution for like many of the sources from the Foccart network it is probable that it overstates and over-interprets certain regional political questions.Footnote 54 However, the regional perspective is deeply impressive.
To give an idea of the importance of the themes discussed, sometimes with detailed annexes of correspondence – for example from trade union members – it is sufficient here to mention a number of relevant matters. The fragmentation of the trade unions soon after independence is very important in correspondence looking for local opposition against the Youlou regime.Footnote 55 That correspondence includes intercepted letters between Confédération Générale Africaine du Travail (CGAT) activists travelling or living in Eastern Bloc countries and their trade union section.Footnote 56
Another such matter of interest is the role of local religion, especially regarding the important Lassyism religious movement in south-west Congo, and trans-border movement from the Congo into Portuguese Cabinda.Footnote 57 Equally remarkable is that a kind of “public opinion” in Pointe-Noire interpreted processions and public invitations to the Prophet Zéphérin Lassy as attempts of the Youlou government to play both a religious and an ethnic (Vili) card to reinforce its support base in the country’s second city. Moreover, it was not only the Catholic and Protestant clergy and followers who protested against such preferential treatment, for the Kimbanguist community of Pointe-Noire did so too. They represented a principal church in neighbouring Congo-Léopoldville/Kinshasa but had a presence in the Republic of Congo as well. They accused the administration of courting specific “native churches” in the Kouilou district and actively opposing others.Footnote 58 In this instance then, the importance of the series becomes clear from the fact that the information analyzed is much less top-down in its orientation than it was in Bat’s discussion of Matsuanism, a principal religious movement in the region of Brazzaville and the Pool. Bat’s work was rightly criticized for this bias by Meike de Goede.Footnote 59
The records give insights as well into local politics, sometimes as more concrete examples of managing to win over local opposition forces throughout the year of 1961. Some of the reports are very detailed and extremely useful. An example of that is one on the subdivision of Mindouli, where the observers discussed local criticism against the ruling UDDIA but reported on an overall “improved” political atmosphere.Footnote 60 By contrast, in Pointe-Noire the city’s population’s anger at rumours of sumptuous spending by ministers in Brazzaville led to outrage during a presidential visit.Footnote 61 Equally, for the Kouilou and again on ethnic forms of mobilization the security reports scrutinize “Vili propaganda” against the Brazzaville elites as a political project, and comment on the worries of Vili spokesmen that artificial opposition provoked by agents of the Youlou regime would cause a rift between Vilis of Madingo-Kayes and the Pointe-Noire area.Footnote 62 The social history of the region in 1961 cannot of course be written exclusively on the basis of security reports, but as the examples given here illustrate, we may see them as another essential source.
Taking Stock: How to Work with “Endangered Archives” in a Mid-Term Perspective
At first glance, the observations made here regarding the maintenance of “African archives” and the process of making their contents more widely available including through creation of digital holdings might seem trivial. Faced with widespread optimism for a splendid future of rather quick digitization, they might also appear as unduly alarmist or old-fashioned. However, in our view they are a contribution to a debate which has indeed perhaps become overheated and needs to proceed somewhat more calmly if it is to meet the needs both of research and of saving for posterity as much as possible of the currently available resources.
The original design of EAP 844 considered the possibility of retrieving an original and temporarily lost colonial archive, and to find that archive in spaces with a historical connection to the original colonial administration in Pointe-Noire, the former capital of the French Congo. But events did not quite follow that course. As in the example of the scanned sample dossier, a number of files from territorial archives offered interesting insights into social life under the hardships and coercive realities of the Second World War; others are relevant to a study of urban and district life in Pointe-Noire and the District of Kouilou during the colonial period. However, the real success of research and classification was in the constitution of postcolonial dossiers, some of which will be of great importance to future research on the transition around independence in the widely ignored western coastal area of the Republic of Congo. For later periods, the material is more scattered, but further work to reorder the records might help uncover larger clusters.
Discussed elsewhere by the team of Derek Peterson for Uganda and the Geneva project group of Alexander Keese for certain West African cases, the research mission added also to existing impressions of “the regional archive” as a research entity.Footnote 63 Regional archives are difficult to work with as their holdings are disorganized and any research activity will always include considerable time spent in reordering them. It is worth pointing out here, incidentally, that once we had abandoned hope of finding a larger colonial territorial archive in the Archive of the Préfecture of Pointe-Noire, it was obvious to us that we should have to consider that archive principally as another “regional archive.” At the same time, regional archives are entirely underrated, and we must reaffirm their indispensable nature for any future research on African societies between independence and the 1990s. Therefore, like many archives of the regional level, the Pointe-Noire archives do continue to exist; they are accessible and offer vast records that certainly must be interpreted in future research. They also confirm that any negative expectations about archives as principal sources for research on postcolonial Africa are unfounded. Archives need researchers, who by their activity will show the importance of them to international research, thus helping push archives higher up the priority ladder in places where limited resources need to be distributed for social and cultural projects.Footnote 64
However, within the current tendency towards large digitization projects, regional archives may be expected to occupy a difficult position. The creation of digital series depends on the existence of relatively well-ordered archival holdings. Such well-ordered series can certainly sometimes be found in the less-known colonial archives on the regional level. For example, in spite of all the difficulties of the material found there, Salau’s project in the Kaduna archives and Kwabena Adu-Boahen’s regarding the regional archives of Cape Coast in Ghana are instances where digitization is certainly more feasible within an Endangered Archives mission. That might be said too for the EAP on the Bolama series within the Arquivos Históricos Nacionais of Guinea-BissauFootnote 65 although their success must not obscure the fact that many as yet unpreserved archival holdings will require intense preliminary work of categorization and historical description, in the form of the creation of metadata, if they are to be useful in digitized form to researchers.
Given the sheer amount of records stored in regional archives or files from central offices and other institutions of the postcolonial states, it might be an attractive thought to shift the work of making sense of material to the historians, and to set them to work on unorganized digitized material. Given improved technical possibilities large-scale digitization might be the obvious answer to the precarious state of many regional holdings. It might be imagined that with top-class scanners an entire endangered regional archive could be digitized without needing to order and categorize the records first. Then, if in theory it were possible to convert at least the typed documents into text-searchable digital files, future historians could try to screen them using keywords.Footnote 66 But then again, that would mean local services like national archives would need to be equipped with powerful technology with attendant investment in extra staff and organization to achieve these goals. As things are now, the whole idea is difficult to imagine and as long as that remains the case it might be more useful to remain attentive to the more urgent special needs of both postcolonial and late colonial regional archives in places like Pointe-Noire. While digitization is more spectacular, the principal task remains the much harder groundwork of saving and ordering.
Conclusion
In Congo-Brazzaville’s context of limited storage space and resources for transporting a vast amount of records from their current repositories to the capital, the directorate of the National Archives is fully conscious of the advantages of digitization. In the case of Pointe-Noire and other regional archives, if sufficient technological resources can be obtained and put to use the creation of digital series could for the first time allow researchers permanent access to the documentation. However, while in a future panorama such possibilities might exist, the activity in Pointe-Noire under EAP 844 rather serves as a salutary lesson on the problems and priorities of dealing with endangered regional archives.
First of all, such archives are highly important, as they offer not only precious information on the social history of the first postcolonial decades, but also records of the late colonial period. Storage conditions are not remotely adequate and the material itself is widely scattered. Although again that might seem exceedingly trivial, the indispensable first step must be simply to place the files into new folders and boxes. Much of such initial work will have to be improvised but is of enormous importance.
Second, the success of such a mission cannot be measured by the number of digital sample files created, although where possible it is certainly a useful step to scan relatively complete dossiers and make them available immediately. However, as the documentation is so diffuse the groundwork of the historian is even more essential. To begin with, material must be tentatively ordered; we must contextualize what the documents reveal and that is certainly easier for the late colonial period for which many files are complementary to those already accessible in the National Archives in Brazzaville, the Municipal Archives in Pointe-Noire, the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer in Aix-en-Provence, or the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques in Nantes. For the early postcolonial decades, it is much more difficult; for those years the classification and interpretation process depends on a literature that – with the exceptions of Bernault’s, Jennings’s, Blum’s, Swagler’s and Kiriakou’s work – has ignored (or had no choice but to ignore) the archival repositories in the Congo. The creation of a first inventory is also essential. Therefore, while it might seem that the result of the mission in Pointe-Noire produced a somewhat limited outcome, the 99 boxes of files along with their detailed inventory are proof that we may rightly claim that those files are now truly available for local research and interpretation.
The third point we wish to make here is about flexibility in projects of archival preservation and creating access to formerly unused archival holdings. The emphasis on digitization is connected to an idea of planned and relatively straightforward transformation of physical to digital records, but it is often forgotten that when we speak of regional archives, those archives must be understood as treasure chests, the precise nature of the contents of which cannot be guessed. In this article we have strongly emphasized the twists and turns of an EAP that was initially planned to locate a particular colonial archive. In the end, only traces of that archive were found, but in its place appeared rich postcolonial records. Historical research in regional archives is – or should be – very much contingent on one of the fundamental skills of the historian’s profession, which is to react properly to the unexpected and to make rapid sense of new documentation that might not correspond to the initial research plan. From a mid-term perspective if not in the long-term, that is perhaps more important than possibly vast digitization projects that might follow. As with EAP 844, such challenges also call for close cooperation between the archivist and the historian, which allows new pathways to be made. We hope that will be the case for the interpretation of Congolese history.
