Archives, scarcity and austerity

Archives, by definition, exist under conditions of scarcity. The productive capacities of humanity and the environment are greater than our resources for preserving, ordering and recalling. As a result, government archival policies and vernacular archival practices usually diverge from historians’ ideal of unlimited preservation and access. All archives come into existence through limits and culling, whether through forgetting, decay, exclusion or destruction. An archives, however broadly conceived, is a product of calibrated reductions of material and conceptual resources for preserving the debris of the past.

However, neither ‘the archive’ (an operation of power) nor ‘an archives’ (a repository of documents) is an inert and haphazard collection of stuff. Carolyn Steedman differentiates between ‘the Archive’ and ‘memory’, writing, ‘The Archive is not potentially made up of everything, as is human memory; and it is not the fathomless and timeless place in which nothing goes away, as is the unconscious.’ Rather, she contends, it is a collection of ‘consciously chosen documentation’ and ‘mad fragmentations’ from the past (Reference Steedman1998: 67). Following Foucault, Achille Mbembe suggests that the intersection of archives as ‘a collection of documents’ and archives as ‘a building, a symbol of a public institution’ is critical to producing an ‘instituting imaginary’ that distinguishes an archives from textual rubble. In an ideal state, a ‘community of time’ imagines the resulting carefully chosen debris as relics that establish authority over the past, making ‘the archive … not a piece of data, but a status’ (Mbembe Reference Mbembe and Hamilton2002; Foucault Reference Foucault1980). The archivist Terry Cook summarized a long-held consensus in archival studies, writing that ‘archives are not unproblematic storehouses of records awaiting the historian, but active sites of agency and power’ (Reference Cook2011: 601). He argued that historians’ analyses of ‘the Archive’ as a conceptual formation were diminished because of their blindness towards material practices and intellectual innovations in archival institutions (Cook Reference Cook2011: 615; Caswell Reference Caswell2016).

Following these scholars, the archetype of an archives remains a government repository of paper documents, usually housed in a quiet, austere building where material and social conditions are governed by air conditioners, thermostats, trained staff, and a lengthy list of obscure in-house rules. In this ideal form, an archives’ regulations reflect professional archival norms as well as legal regimes through which states exercise conceptual power over public imagination and rawer forms of censorship and historical editing (Stoler Reference Stoler2009; Badger Reference Badger2012; Anderson Reference Anderson2015).

Despite the conceptual and political power that ‘the archive’ can embody, few government archival institutions are prioritized in the allocation of resources. Formal austerity policies have accentuated this tendency, even among prosperous states in the global North. The British National Archives’ government budget has flatlined in recent years, forcing it to rely on contingent grants, donations and revenue from private services.Footnote ² The United States’ National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has experienced consistent staffing shortfalls for decades while its core budget has failed to keep pace with inflation, despite increased challenges absorbing digital records and reviewing classified material.Footnote ³ In 2014, NARA acknowledged ‘low employee satisfaction for many years’. Its administrators concluded that the agency needed to do more in order to ‘provide a workplace that fosters trust, accepts risk, and rewards collaboration’ (NARA 2014).Footnote ⁴

Archivists harness limited labour and resources to defend, and redefine, professional standards under conditions of austerity. In two controversial articles, Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner exhort their fellow archivists to find ways around the laborious work of ‘arrangement, description, and cataloging’ that cannot keep pace with acquisitions under limited budgets (Greene and Meissner Reference Greene and Meissner2005: 208). They conclude that many standard processing practices, like removing metal paperclips that damage paper over time, are ‘useless tasks’ that reflect an institutional view of low-level labourers as ‘useless workers’ (Meissner and Greene Reference Meissner and Greene2010: 215). Technological change has become integrated with the logic of austerity, enabling the redirection of resources away from archival workers in order to generate value from visible digital collections that are perceived to be distant from human labour and an archives’ material properties. This ‘reductionist view’ of preservation and archival labour compounds archivists’ precarious position, as governments seek to free up space and resources for costly but publicly visible virtual collections (Phillips Reference Phillips2015: 472). As Michael Moss argues, the resulting neglect of original documents and reduced staff budgets have led to ‘a marked deterioration in record keeping practices’ (Moss Reference Moss2012: 860). The corrosion of institutional memory, the greater responsibility placed on fewer individuals, and the devaluing of unseen maintenance all weaken archives’ status as public resources.

Bureaucracies’ infinite capacity for production would require infinite investments in preservation without decisions to redirect resources. As David Anderson cautions, ‘Destruction is thus necessarily constitutive of the archival process’ (Reference Anderson2015: 144). Non-archivists are often jarred to read on NARA's website that ‘only 1%–3% [of US federal government records] are so important for legal or historical reasons that they are kept by us forever’.Footnote ⁵ Actual rates of preservation in accessible archives fall short of these targets. The UK National Archives aspires to keep 5 per cent of all records, noting, ‘We may need to consider the affordability of collections of marginal historical or research value.’Footnote ⁶ If budgets manifest official imaginations of the future, archival budgets express official anxieties over the future's relationship with the state's past.

In much of the world, state archives were founded not as repositories of national heritage but as stores for the paper debris of unaccountable colonial regimes as they anticipated a transition to self-government. In such contexts where expectations are continuously unsettled by histories of colonial violence and underdevelopment, archiving is a particularly precarious profession that distributes responsibility and risk unevenly towards the margins of postcolonial bureaucracy.

Uganda's archival pasts

Archival management is often characterized by broad mandates but with constrained resources. Uganda's 2001 National Records and Archives Act empowers ‘[t]he Director [to] do all such things as appear to him or her necessary or expedient for maintaining the utility of the National Archives and any other archival repository under his or her control’. In recent years, officials have placed rhetorical weight on the country's archives as ‘treasure[d] heritage’. On opening a new World Bank-funded archives building in Kampala in 2016, the State Minister of Public Service (the ministry that oversees government archives), David Karubanga, heralded the end of official disregard for records management. ‘In the 1970s, confidential government records could be found in markets used for wrapping merchandize. I am happy to inform you that government now attaches great importance to information and that has stopped’ (Rwothungeyo Reference Rwothungeyo2016).

Officials’ pronouncements situated archives within the ministry's mission to modernize public service delivery. However, they have not been matched by material and institutional support. The position of Director of National Archives has been vacant since 2016. A national land commission appropriated the new archives building, with the archives confined to the basement. After the commission's departure, ministry officials retained the archives’ reading room, which was fitted for closed-circuit cameras. The archives’ offices and improvised reading room remain in the basement. Just five staff oversee a dozen original collections and thousands of uncatalogued boxes from government ministries. Records officers, who manage government archives in upcountry districts, face greater limitations. Their collections often sit in leaky attics or flood-prone basements, while the demands of maintaining current records outweigh the attention these officers can give to archives.

These material conditions of austerity – limited staff, space and resources – reflect governments’ budgetary constraints and political priorities, but their particularities also provide a lens onto archivists’ work to remake archival practice and manage risk while overseeing contentious relics of the past. East Africa's colonial history of archival management demonstrates the pernicious relationship between the operation of colonial budgets and the exercise of state power in the archive's instituting imaginary.

The British Protectorate did not centralize the administration of archival records until the 1950s as part of a broader expansion of colonial bureaucracy. Upon arriving in Entebbe in 1951, the first Government Archivist, Patrick English, found materials ‘heaped at random’ and ‘termites [making] heavy inroads in the paper’. Extolling his contribution to bureaucratic efficiency, he noted that, before his arrival, ‘if anything specific had to be procured, clerks [had to] burrow in the pile in the hope that by chance they would come across the required document’. English, and his successor J. P. M. Fowle, produced a modest organizational framework for future archival administration, including a handwritten catalogue of secretariat files up to the 1920s and new procedures for accessing them (English Reference English1955: 226; Fowle Reference Fowle and Ellis1958).

The professionalization of records management created an order that protected documents from insects but also reinforced administrators’ power to manage access and edit collections. Governor Andrew Cohen and his administrative secretary John Wild granted the historian Kenneth Ingham access to confidential documents in exchange for providing editorial instructions for Ingham's manuscript The Making of Modern Uganda (Reference Ingham1958). Wild asked Ingham to remove references to certain files because ‘I do not want to encourage a whole lot of public delving into the official archives’.Footnote ⁷ When less acquiescent academics, such as the sociologist Peter Gutkind, inquired about confidential files, high officials intervened to deny the existence of relevant documents in order to avert the ‘danger that [they] might be tempted to make use of “C” [confidential] material’.Footnote ⁸

Self-interested editing was constitutive of archival professionalization. Recently, historians have detailed secretive British programmes to conceal and destroy files in the late 1950s and early 1960s, codenamed Operation Legacy in Uganda and with different appellations across the British Empire from Kenya to Borneo to Fiji (Sato Reference Sato2017; Banton Reference Banton2012; Peterson Reference Peterson2014; Anderson Reference Anderson2015; Elkins Reference Elkins2015; Badger Reference Badger2012). These operations proceeded concurrently with archival professionalization as officials introduced formal archival institutions in the territories they were soon departing. The energy and systemization of recent record-keeping initiatives helped to facilitate and conceal purges of material in the name of efficiency. At the height of its efforts to destroy sensitive documents, the British administration in Kenya appointed a former district officer, Dick Cashmore, ‘to survey and preserve … records … up to 1945’.Footnote ⁹ Officials then wove a new language of archival professionalism into their justifications for destroying files. Tom Neil of the Chief Secretary's Office refuted ‘rumour’ in the press ‘that we are destroying records … of historical or intrinsic value’. He argued that ‘this very routine exercise in tidying up the confidential papers of the Government’ was part of ‘a normal, continuing procedure in all Governments, whether Colonial or Metropolitan, and is in fact concerned with ensuring … safeguards’ to ‘preserve what will be of value to posterity’.Footnote ¹⁰ He implied that destruction was evidence of professionalization in a colonial archives that could afford to preserve only the most essential documents.

In British colonies and protectorates, archival futures were shaped as much by administrators’ efforts to manage perceptions of austerity as they were by hasty efforts to purge sensitive files. Institutionalized impoverishment shaped how late colonial and early postcolonial record keepers economized in their preservation work. Neither Uganda nor Kenya had a permanent archivist at independence. The last archivist in the Uganda Protectorate had decried the ‘ramshackle softwood shelving and poor electric circuit’ in the archives where he worked ‘single-handed’ (Fowle Reference Fowle and Ellis1958: 51–2). After surveying Uganda's archives just six months before independence, Zanzibar's government archivist C. H. Thompson was impressed by English's and Fowle's work but concerned by the ‘congested accommodation’ of files.Footnote ¹¹ To render the archive usable, he recommended ‘a most ruthless weeding out’ of ‘useless, ephemeral or duplicate material’ in order to ensure the long-term accessibility of valuable ‘scientific, statistical, legal, [and] administrative’ papers. He warned, ‘Unless the accumulations of paper are kept under control it will soon be impossible to retrieve any information without protracted searches, however urgently it may be needed by those responsible for the future government of the country.’ Historians such as Margery Perham were troubled by such proclivities to destroy, but Thompson advocated thorough culling as a preservation practice in response to expected limitations on space, staff and resources. He lamented, ‘The point is often overlooked that everything stored in an archives repository or a library costs something merely to store.’Footnote ¹²

Austerity in colonial archives was part of a broader practice of colonial governance. Like other services in British colonies, archives were shaped by official fears that government investments, despite their developmental value, were a drain on resources and minefields of political claim-making. Paper records were important administrative props, but they rarely reflected colonial bureaucracy's effort to know its subjects and micromanage colonial governance, which was outsourced through indirect rule (cf. Breckenridge Reference Breckenridge, Breckenridge and Szreter2012). When Government Archivist Dick Charman filed his report on Kenya's archives in October 1963, he found it necessary to remind soon-to-be-departing colonial officials that archives were ‘not merely a dumping ground for unwanted files, but an agency whose job it is to take in and hold records which have been selected for permanent preservation, both for their administrative and their historical importance’. He proposed measures that would require ‘the minimum expenditure consistent with an efficient Archives Service’, observing that the budget would not surpass that of his own archive in Sussex, which served a population 5 per cent the size of Kenya's.Footnote ¹³

Postcolonial East African governments inherited the impoverishment of colonial underdevelopment and the colonial state's suspicion of reading publics. The flight of foreign capital, the collapse of industrial productivity, and the decline of the state's capacity to tax the flow of primary commodities into global markets all limited the Ugandan state's resources for promoting developmental nationalism (Peterson Reference Peterson2021). The governments of Milton Obote and Idi Amin, like their colonial predecessor, were nervous regimes made up of unstable coalitions, insecure of their power and suspicious of groups under their rule, particularly Baganda royalists and Uganda Asians (Taylor Reference Taylor2019). Obote's government routinely denied permission to researchers to consult archives and was suspicious of all academic fieldwork out of apprehension that ‘we do not know what goes on at all when the actual researches are being carried out … In a developing country, this is highly risky.’Footnote ¹⁴ The violent anti-intellectualism of Amin's government, including the murder of journalists and academics, effectively curtailed professional archival research, even as documents became central to officials’ efforts to record their achievements and for bureaucrats to paper over the shortcomings of local administration (Taylor et al. forthcoming Reference Taylor, Abiti, Peterson and Vokes2021; Peterson and Taylor Reference Peterson and Taylor2013).

Despite their structural limitations, Obote's and Amin's governments held grand ambitions for public institutions driven by sincere nationalist conviction. Amin appointed Uganda's longest-serving archivist Eugene Wani, sent records officers for archival training in Ghana and Sudan, ‘train[ed] junior staff in repairing, binding and micro-filming’, and commissioned UNESCO to plan an overhaul of the National Archives. Legislation was also drafted to govern ‘all aspects of records administration’ (Nangodi-Gubi Reference Nangodi-Gubi1973: 28; Akita Reference Akita1979).Footnote ¹⁵ Both governments relied on colonial documents when formulating policy, such as anti-Asian citizenship and licensing laws.Footnote ¹⁶ Meanwhile, Amin's government archived visual records of its achievements, which it guarded from public view lest they be framed in an unflattering manner (Peterson et al. Reference Peterson, Vokes, Abiti and Taylor2021; Vokes et al. Reference Vokes, Peterson and Taylor2020). Archiving was a crucial function of postcolonial governance, even as archives remained underfunded and physically closed off to Ugandan publics (Taylor et al. forthcoming Reference Taylor, Abiti, Peterson and Vokes2021).

Independent Ugandan governments’ aspirations to control and order archival institutions collapsed in the 1980s with the introduction of structural adjustment programmes. Amin's government fell just two months after UNESCO published its report on the National Archives’ proposed expansion. Over the subsequent days, journalists combed through secret government files in Amin's residence and in the notorious State Research Bureau (SRB).Footnote ¹⁷ There followed a long period of structural adjustment and pro-market policies that continue to shape geographies of economic inequality and institutional crisis in Uganda's public life. After returning to power in 1980, Milton Obote renounced the nominal socialism of his previous government. Under conditions set by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, his government devalued the Uganda shilling and scaled back public services in an effort to promote macro-economic growth (Edmonds Reference Edmonds, Hansen and Twaddle1988). These programmes subjected Uganda's public institutions – including archives – to severe cutbacks and internal collapse. Amin's plans for a new national archives and records centre were shelved, the value of public servants’ salaries crumbled, and existing archives fell into disrepair. After Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Movement (NRM) took power in 1986, Obote alleged that the NRM ‘plagiarise[d] the economic policy and programmes [of] my government’, including privatization and disinvestment from public institutions (Obote Reference Obote2002: 20; Wiegratz et al. Reference Wiegratz, Martiniello and Greco2018).

Government paper detritus underwent an ontological transformation in the 1980s and 1990s, from contentious stores of information to wasted garbage. Neither the Obote II nor the Museveni governments were interested in reviving nationalist histories through the authority of archival documents. Although Obote could claim to have twice liberated Uganda, he could hardly project a unifying national myth. Buganda Kingdom loyalists, expelled Asians and ousted opponents might seek documentation with which to pursue claims to political power and economic resources. Neglecting archives and intimidating people who were tempted to delve into government institutions helped to further sever Uganda's state archives from public life. The NRM offered rigid developmentalism that associated the past with sectarianism and promised Ugandans future peace and prosperity that would transcend divisive histories (Reid Reference Reid2014: 352; Hundle Reference Hundle2017; Taylor Reference Taylor2016: 318–24). Archives, with records of violent and contentious histories, had no place in this future except as neglected rubble (Taylor et al. Reference Taylor, Rockenbach, Bond, Barringer and Wallace2014).

Uganda's archives, however, did not disappear during the 1980s and 1990s, either as institutions or as collections of documents. This period of seeming archival neglect paradoxically corresponded with a resurgence of primary historical research by Ugandan and foreign scholars, many of whom sought out government archives for records of contentious living histories. At the National Archives and in the districts, historians found archivists or other caretakers guarding keys to rooms, sheds, attics or basements full of decaying files (Morddel Reference Morddel1987). The records that once provoked anxiety among officials from the Protectorate, Obote I and Amin governments now seemed to be endangered by abandonment.

The conditions of austerity and institutional neglect faced by Ugandan archivists meant that archives could not function as a panopticon with claims to total knowledge and the capacity for total surveillance (Burton Reference Burton and Burton2005: 9). Most collections lacked catalogues. Moreover, files often sat beneath other debris or in conditions that inhibited prolonged human presence, guarded by mould, bats, bees and dust (cf. Steedman Reference Steedman2002). Kabarole's district records were encased in wasps’ nests. Mbale's records resided in a basement cell with a massive bat population. Kabale's court archive sat in a leaky shed underneath broken bicycles and maintenance tools. Jinja's district archive was kept in a basement room that periodically flooded with several feet of water. In these cases, neither archivist nor researcher could see the entire archive, either as a physical assemblage of paper or as a map of official knowledge. Likewise, few archives had reading rooms for monitoring visitors.

The convergence of economic austerity in the 1980s and official disparaging of the past over subsequent years contributed to a familiar understanding of Ugandan postcolonial archives as sites of static neglect and decay rather than terrains of active contestation. However, Kirsten Weld warns that historians tend to evade the power relations that shape their work by failing to see archives ‘as more than the sum of their parts’, and in particular as enduring ‘sites of social struggle’ (Weld Reference Weld2014: 13; Hamilton Reference Hamilton2013). Even as otherwise unfetishized garbage in a particular historical moment, archives’ material forms remain ‘nodes of rubble’ that are ‘part of the affective and social configurations of the present’. Gaston Gordillo reminds us that rubble is not ‘dead matter’ because it is interwoven with the multiple, overlapping histories and constellations that constitute it (Reference Gordillo2014: 19–21). In archives, whose status brands them as tools for recovering a version of historical truth, these histories continually threaten to erupt and reanimate archives’ unpredictable power. Despite their seeming neglect, government archives remained contentious sites of potential symbolic power overseen by individuals who were responsible for managing risk with minimal resources.

Archival labour under conditions of austerity

In 1955, Government Archivist J. P. M. Fowle observed, ‘So far as can be judged after the lapse of some sixty-five years, the climate of Entebbe is kind to paper, as it is to European humans’ (Reference Fowle and Ellis1958: 52). His association between the health of colonial documents and that of white bodies points to the twin colonial priorities of protecting British interests and European prestige. Fowle's predecessor, Patrick English, had regarded archiving as evidence of ‘the modern Englishman['s] instinct for pioneering’ (Reference English1955: 230). Ugandan archivists would be responsible for the less glamorous and more dangerous work of maintenance and risk management. Colonial archival infrastructures proved less benign to the former colonial subjects embedded in the margins of state institutions who succeeded English and Fowle in the continuous work of constituting postcolonial archives out of the Ugandan state's paper debris.

Under conditions of austerity, archivists face myriad potential material, interpersonal and historical dangers. Simply accessing documents can lead to direct personal harm, which archivists mitigate by limiting their contact. For some, dust and mould have contributed to respiratory problems, bees have inflicted painful stings, discarded equipment has caused bruises, and paper has cut through skin. Archivists also risk bodily harm from techniques of preservation. In order to combat paper-consuming insects, some collections are sprayed with chemicals such as DDT. Toxic fumigants are common in archives globally, but archivists’ locations often determine their ability to mitigate the effects of pests and chemicals alike.Footnote ¹⁸ In the absence of protective equipment, many develop strategies to limit their exposure to spaces that they deem dangerous. In Kabarole, for example, officials regarded the district archive as a ‘dumping ground’ too hazardous to examine due to the wasps’ nests that covered many of the files. A few inquisitive researchers were allowed into the archive in the attic of the decaying district building at their own peril (Barrett-Gaines and Khadiagala Reference Barrett-Gaines and Khadiagala2000: 459; Peterson Reference Peterson2013: s24).

The physical dangers that archivists navigate under conditions of austerity are mediated through professional and interpersonal relationships that present another field of risk. Many Ugandan records management students believe that archives offer little opportunity for career advancement. Current records are constantly needed by powerful administrators. By contrast, archives’ constituencies – historians, students and curious private citizens – exert little influence within government bureaucracy. Professional and bureaucratic incentives produce ‘dead archives’ as sites of disposal away from public engagement, which reinforces hierarchies of risk exposure (Machava and Gonçalves Reference Machava and Gonçalves2021). Archivists may assign more junior or vulnerable employees to activities with known hazards or heightened uncertainties, such as cleaning archival spaces, handling files with preservative chemicals, and monitoring visitors with unknown intentions.

Trust is necessary in all bureaucratic interactions, and, in modernist imagination, it is often re-embedded in personal connections when the reliability of expert knowledge or bureaucratic rationality is uncertain (Giddens Reference Giddens1990). Archivists rely on interactions with visitors in order to facilitate archival access and to calculate and limit the uncertainty that such access creates. Many researchers take note of these interactions merely as feats of endurance to overcome in pursuit of documentary sources. Some, however, have taken them as opportunities for reflection on the practice of archival historians’ fieldwork (Burton Reference Burton and Burton2005). When Kathryn Barrett-Gaines and Lynn Khadiagala described their work in the National Archives in the late 1990s, they emphasized their interactions with archival staff. ‘Investing time is important,’ they wrote, as was ‘being patient, cheerful, personable, polite, calm, and persistent’ (Reference Barrett-Gaines and Khadiagala2000: 457–8). Nakanyike Musisi, who conducted research in the National Archives in the late 1980s, described how she began to see files only after spending multiple days of conversation with archivist Eugene Wani about her background and research interests.Footnote ¹⁹ For Caroline Howell, the combination of bureaucratic and interpersonal complexities involved in accessing archives at Makerere University in the early 2000s ‘called on reserves of patience and negotiating skills that I did not realize I had!’ (Howell Reference Howell2001: 412).

For many Ugandan archivists, such extended interactions substituted for the bureaucratic procedures and maps that mediate archival access in the ideal forms described in training manuals and records management textbooks. Under conditions of austerity, there are scarce resources for promoting the archive as a symbol of a government institution or as a publicly navigable collection of documents (Mbembe Reference Mbembe and Hamilton2002). Simply finding a government archives building required its own research itinerary, as there were no public means of knowing which districts or government departments maintained archives, or even where the National Archives was located (in the basement of the National Agricultural Research Organisation offices until 2016) (Sebbowa Reference Sebbowa2003; Emokot Reference Emokot2003). Upon reaching the archives building, researchers could not read a catalogue of the collections and direct archivists to provide them with specific files. In Entebbe, as in the districts, incomplete catalogues compiled decades earlier offered clues about the extent of the collections but did not correspond to the location of specific files for archivists to retrieve. Archivists at the National Archives had only the list compiled by Patrick English of ‘A Series Secretariat’ files prior to the 1930s and another handwritten list of certain files from the 1950s (Barrett-Gaines and Khadiagala Reference Barrett-Gaines and Khadiagala2000; Howell Reference Howell2001; Taylor et al. Reference Taylor, Rockenbach, Bond, Barringer and Wallace2014). District archives usually had no such lists. In both cases, individual archivists were the only people with the knowledge necessary to navigate their collections and to find relevant material.

Archivists’ understandings of trust and risk are shaped by the unpredictable agency of documents. As Matthew Hull argues, documents are not merely ‘the instruments of already existing social organizations’. Rather, ‘their specific discourses and material forms precipitate the formation of shifting networks and groups’ (Hull Reference Hull2012: 21). Such processes continue even after documents are transferred to an archives, rendered administratively obsolete, or even physically destroyed. The material form of paper documents generates contests over professional hierarchies in archival labour – whether to remove paper clips, how to manage paper-consuming insects, who should be exposed to dust or preservative chemicals. Archivists also attempt to determine the risks that documents pose beyond their physical presence. Katherine Verdery observes that files, or even the possibility of the existence of a file, have effects in the world that transcend the context of their production or the evidentiary value of their contents. The content of documentation produced by the Ugandan colonial and early postcolonial state reflects the norms of the bureaucracy that created it and not the reality of life it purports to describe (Peterson and Taylor Reference Peterson and Taylor2013). Recontextualized in an archives, however, files are open to new readings and to a new status as relics and repositories of evidence (Verdery Reference Verdery2014). For archivists and records officers, as a Pakistani bureaucrat told Hull, ‘Files are time bombs’ (Reference Hull2012: 129).

In their interactions with strangers, Ugandan archivists attempt to identify and manage risk while limiting the uncertainties generated through paper ‘time bombs’. For many, this involves the delicate work of anticipating how a visitor will read and use archival documents. Barrett-Gaines and Khadiagala observed, ‘For whatever reason, government officials will tend to define your needs very narrowly, thereby circumscribing the range of materials that they will make known to you’ (Barrett-Gaines and Khadiagala Reference Barrett-Gaines and Khadiagala2000: 458). This approach saved archivists from the under-compensated and potentially hazardous work of handling many files. Some have also expressed a fear that if powerful interests were to perceive that their collections contained material with evidentiary value on particular contested events, those interests might attempt to appropriate or destroy files. An archives' disorder provided archivists with a means of limiting access and denying the existence of what others might speculate is contained within. One archivist read entire files before lending them to Ugandan researchers who requested material on topics or regions deemed to be politically sensitive. Such practices were archivists’ efforts to render uncertainty into controlled risk. As one archivist told me after abruptly turning away an inquisitive visitor, ‘You can't tell his intention.’

The centrality of personal relationships in mediating archival research does not fit with ‘the fictions of access and transparency that modern bureaucracies perform’ (Burton Reference Burton and Burton2005: 11). Some archivists and historians have acknowledged the often highly gendered and racialized power of social capital in shaping research itineraries and archival access even in well-resourced and bureaucratized institutions (Johnson and Duff Reference Johnson and Duff2004; Burton Reference Burton and Burton2005). The significance of these relations is amplified in archives that lack some of the artifice of bureaucratic rules and institutional support. By forcing the work of risk management onto vulnerable civil servants, austerity incentivized archivists to reproduce historical exclusions and hierarchies that facilitate apolitical research, exclude ordinary citizens, and privilege well-resourced scholars primarily from the global North. This was despite many archivists’ deep desire to facilitate access and transparency as an expression of their vocation. Before the widespread availability of digital cameras, trusted visitors from institutions in the global North were able to sign out files overnight from the National Archives and the Jinja District Archive while others were met with suspicion and struggled to gain access (McConnell Reference McConnell2005: 475).

The risk inherent in the agency of documents presents dangers and opportunities. Working with meagre resources and small salaries, Ugandan archivists from the 1980s to the early 2000s were gatekeepers to collections that were treated as waste but still held potential value. Austerity required them to generate financial value from their work even as it devalued the material they protected. A visiting records management consultant in the mid-1980s observed that records staff were ‘polite, cheerful, and helpful’ but also ‘humorous about their situation [and] somewhat cynical’ (Morddel Reference Morddel1987: 46). Some perceived that historians, collectors and government officials could regard archival files as valuable sources of data, as marketable artefacts, or as means of editing evidence of contentious pasts. Stories from this period suggest that some caretakers leveraged personal interactions with researchers in order to extract monetary compensation. One elder archivist has surmised that some colleagues in those times may have been tempted by money to ignore risk and allow the removal of files. If someone showed a willingness to forge a financial relationship in the expectation of taking documents away, ‘I think someone could have said, “Ah, these old papers. Get them out of here.”’ Even here, the framing gestures to a logic of efficiency, clearing inconsequential trash from government bureaucracy. Details of such stories are difficult to confirm. Some retired civil servants have collections of official documents from their service. A few academic and journalistic writings cite files that are conspicuously absent from the archives. However, the actual market for files appears to have been limited. Perception of a file's authority partly resides in its location within a particular constellation of files – that is, within an archives. This status makes an archives’ dissolution risky for those who seek validation from its content. Particularly sensitive files – such as land titles and judiciary records – were held by their controlling ministries, not the National Archives. Moreover, as another archivist observed, if a government asset such as an archives were to become profitable to sell off, bigger officials would likely swoop in to punish the culprit and/or appropriate their covert business. Archives remained a marginal, financially unprofitable field of government service.

The erosion of archival integrity, far from being a product of postcolonial failure, was reflected in how colonial archives compelled ordinary people and archivists to engage with their inherent danger and instability. Shireen Ally considers that ordinary citizens’ recycling of government archives in the former South African Bantustan of KaNgwane could be read less as popular revenge against an oppressive bureaucracy than as ordinary people's efforts ‘to purge the evidence of their complicity with a shameful past’ (Ally Reference Ally2015: 986). Similar discomfiting historical intimacy is pervasive in Uganda as well (Taylor Reference Taylor2016: 313–24). However, practices that degrade Uganda's government archives under austerity are less easily read as revenge of the commons or as erasure of historical responsibility. Rather, they are constitutive of the ongoing labour that impoverished colonial institutions require. In the courthouse of Mengo, the court archive literally bulged out of a locked storeroom adjacent to defendants’ holding cells.Footnote ²⁰ The building and the institutions it housed were built to confine the archive and prisoners alike with inadequate care for both. Lacking bathroom facilities, prisoners in nearby cells reached for papers bursting out of the archive room's vents in order to obtain materials as substitutes for toilet paper. Such acts of desperation – conditioned by the material and legal architecture of colonial institutions – helped to curate state archives.

The caution with which archivists approached potential readers, the personal connections that governed access and the uncertainty of archives’ value all helped to insulate collections from publics who might seek to dredge up contentious histories. Housed in inhospitable conditions, archives were often physically difficult to access. Even archive buildings were out of public view – none has had a permanent signpost. Files could become time bombs or sources of revenue in the future, but the conditions of their storage generally resembled dumping grounds for the detritus of state bureaucracy. From the violence of the 1960s into the 1980s, and through recent decades of structural adjustment, it is tempting to regard postcolonial archives as reflections of institutional failure and the collapse of once-robust colonial institutions. However, the history of Uganda's archives suggests that impoverishment and destruction were founding conditions, not postcolonial deviations. Repair work and risk management preserve the archive's status and protect archives from targeted editing, even as archivists are forced to generate value from the rubble left behind by structural adjustment. With few exceptions, Uganda's archival collections are remarkably unspoiled by government purges or intrusive editorial practices.Footnote ²¹ Their disorder made systematic editing prohibitively difficult. The preservation of Uganda's state archives was partly a product of their deliberate inaccessibility, protected beneath other debris, chemicals and animals’ nests by individual gatekeepers away from the vagaries of public life.

The risks of archival futures

Three developments have begun to bring archives into public view and to change the context of archival labour in Uganda: the advocacy of historians, the resurgence of historical narrative in public discourse, and the Ministry of Public Service's effort to fold archives into public service modernization. As more historians sought out Ugandan state archives in the 1990s and 2000s, they frequently looked for ways around the gatekeeping practices of individual archivists. ‘Archival reports’ published in History in Africa provided field guides for researchers who previously relied on word of mouth. However, researchers still could not search systematically through an archives. Archivists, too, were frustrated by their limited capacity to assist growing numbers of visitors. Some worked with historians to catalogue specific collections. Grace Carswell separated agricultural files in the Kabale District Archive, which she subsequently used for a book on the history of farming in the region (Carswell Reference Carswell2007). Derek Peterson arranged for the Kabarole District Archive to be separated from a casing of wasps’ nests and transferred to nearby Mountains of the Moon University, where – along with the records of Hoima District – they were catalogued and digitized. He subsequently worked with former National Archivist Okello Ajum to catalogue eight collections at the National Archives with graduate students from the University of Michigan and the Makerere Institute of Social Research (Taylor et al. Reference Taylor, Rockenbach, Bond, Barringer and Wallace2014). National Archives staff catalogued ‘Confidential’ and ‘Chief Secretary's Office’ collections. Administrators in Kabale and Jinja have enthusiastically opened their collections to cataloguing teams, and similar projects are ongoing at the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation and Uganda's High Court. In each case, archivists have repeatedly described their sense of professional fulfilment by being able to efficiently assist visitors.Footnote ²²

The proliferation of archiving projects has taken place amidst a resurgence of historical narrative in elite public debate. During the 1990s and 2000s, popular critiques of the NRM often used past governments as benchmarks for levels of extreme repression or dysfunction that the ruling party risked repeating (Hansen Reference Hansen2013). By the 2010s, however, it was more common to hear young Ugandans express nostalgia for the racial nationalism of Idi Amin and contrast the perceived shortcomings of the present with the accomplishments of previous governments (Peterson and Taylor Reference Peterson and Taylor2013: 63). This shift coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of independence, which occasioned daily discussions of historical subjects in newspapers and on radio. Official attitudes to the past are also changing. In 2010, the government began issuing medals to tens of thousands of individuals for their historical contributions to the nation.Footnote ²³ In each case, truth claims about the past held growing importance.

Renewed scholarly and public interest in the evidentiary potential of official documents has nudged government archives into contentious, if still limited, public view. This change has opened archivists’ work to public scrutiny, which has prompted restrictive instructions from wary administrators. One Ugandan journalist incorrectly surmised that Uganda's national broadcaster had lost or destroyed its audio-visual archives and cited its alleged mismanagement as evidence for the failure of Uganda's postcolonial institutions. ‘[O]ne of the best kinds of “theft” ever undertaken in Uganda,’ he wrote, was the alleged pilfering of these materials by private media (Kalyegira Reference Kalyegira2013). Sensitive to allegations of malpractice, some administrators have promoted a public image of archival modernization and professionalism, while working to curtail archivists’ independent initiative, fearing that any internal effort to catalogue or digitize material could expose collections to private profiteering. Several archivists have also been approached by individuals whom they suspected of wanting to remove or destroy archival materials for their potentially incriminating or propagandistic content. An archives’ disorder may limit access, but, with greater visibility, it can also take on a dangerous agency in public life. With renewed public focus on their work, the balance that Uganda's archivists must strike in the old archival studies debate between access and preservation is often informed by immediate personal and professional hazards as well as stark institutional risk.

Catalogues that map an entire archives at a particular moment in time enable new editorial and curatorial possibilities, prompting archivists to fashion new techniques for calculating and managing risk. In many cases, catalogues have empowered administrators – who are removed from day-to-day archiving work – to exert greater control over archival collections and to promote standardized guidelines for culling files. Records officers conducted surveys of district archives in the 2000s and produced cover lists for boxes or bundles of files in some collections. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ministry of Public Service had begun transferring district archives to the National Archives in Kampala. Administrators have also issued instructions to destroy so-called flimsy or duplicate files and other material deemed of minimal administrative significance. These guidelines remove discretionary powers from individual archivists in an effort to free up space and resources. Archivists’ responses have varied widely. Many have enthusiastically complied in order to make limited space available for the rest of their collections. Others have relied on their own knowledge of their collections – for example, saving flimsy files when their originals are missing. Some have attempted to remove entries from catalogues in order to regulate public knowledge of particular files’ existence and thus limit the potential for targeted theft, while mitigating risk to precarious archival systems. All make decisions in contexts of uneven professional vulnerability.

As constitutive elements of postcolonial public life characterized by suspicion of the divisive power of the state's past, state archives are subject to reworkings by diverse editorial interests (Hamilton Reference Hamilton, Cowling and Hamilton2020). Their increased accessibility and public visibility in recent years have enhanced public historical debate. The National Archives’ reading room now sees a steady flow of Ugandan graduate students and professors, government officials, private citizens and journalists who cite archival files in their writings, sometimes reinscribing and occasionally challenging their evidentiary power. However, this trend has also escalated fears of political intervention and appropriation. Some scholars condemn efforts to preserve colonial archives funded by proprietorial institutions from the global North, which, they argue, can uphold colonial sovereignty. The anthropologist Liam Buckley has argued that ‘decay – as well as the right to allow for decay – is central to the cultural practice of archiving’ (Reference Buckley2005: 250). Buckley's analysis echoes an approach to archives as heritage objects that has found particular momentum in a context of friction from donor-driven digitization projects and archival theft accompanying American imperial interventions (Bet-Shlimon Reference Bet-Shlimon2018; Caswell Reference Caswell2011). This literature concludes that salvage operations not only perpetuate colonial power when driven by foreign donors preoccupied with recovering colonial histories, but they also override locally meaningful practices of forgetting premised on the decay of the material debris of the colonial past. South African historians have led the response by promoting community archives that decentre the authority of apartheid government documents and compensate for the deterioration of government archival maintenance.Footnote ²⁴

By focusing on archivists' labour, the history sketched in this article unsettles the distinction between the imperatives of professionalization and the poetics of decay in postcolonial state archives. It shows that institutional neglect, although it preserves documents from some forms of human editing, is the result of colonial bureaucratization premised on restricted access and austerity. The deterioration of paper alone does not displace the authorizing power of the colonial archive's instituting imaginary. Rather, it reflects the perpetuation of colonial governance and the systemic transfer of risk onto the vulnerable margins of state bureaucracy. Even as Uganda's archives underwent an ontological shift into waste sites, archivists have continued to contend with documents’ ‘time bomb agency’, which is inherent in their potential to be marshalled as evidence and sources for particular versions of historical truth (Verdery Reference Verdery2014: 72).

The changing context of archivists’ work generates new uncertainties. As Keith Breckenridge has argued, changing digital archival infrastructures have challenged ‘the fetishization of the document in the dusty archive as the uncomplicated source of truth’, as ‘historians must now work in a sea of millions of widely available digital records’ that are open to new forms of manipulation, curation and suspicion (Breckenridge Reference Breckenridge2014: 501). Meanwhile, paper documents in neglected archives are available only to those with the privileged knowledge and social or economic capital necessary to work through individual gatekeepers. Since the 1950s, Uganda's government archivists have worked to mitigate risk in institutions that are pregnant with symbolic power but defined by legacies of colonial austerity and exclusion.

Archival imaginations in Uganda are changing – and with them, so too is archival labour. At significant personal and professional peril, individual archivists have kept government archives largely intact and have helped mediate their insertion into combative public struggles over the past. However, the relative safety of archival collections depended on shielding them from public view. Far from being an act of passive resistance, the decay of government records beyond public reach is constitutive of colonial archival institutions that redirect resources away from vulnerable civil servants and divert the hazards of repair work and risk management onto them. As state archives become subjects of greater scholarly, popular and government scrutiny in Uganda's public life, archivists bear the risks of their unrealized futures.