The publication is freely available from MILE and the eThekwini Municipality.

• Play the games …

As the African workforce expanded, so also did football in the African locations, as well as among Africans at their leading (mostly mission) schools.

Among the first African clubs were Wild Zebras at the Ohlange Institute, Shooting Stars at Adams College and Natal Cannons at the Inanda Seminary.

• Read the full article on Ulwazi Community Memory …

• Click here to read an extract from the article …

Guy Redman (Deputy Head Libraries & Heritage  at the eThekwini Municipality), Jacquie Subban (Head of the Geographic Information and Policy at the eThekwini Municipality) and Logie Naidoo (Deputy Mayor of the eThekwini Municipality) all spoke about the eThekwini Municipality’s SmartCity programme and how Ulwazi now forms a key component of this.  Representatives from local, provincial and national government were in attendance, along with with journalists, library staff and pupils from KwaMashu schools.

More photographs up on our Flickr group.

ABSTRACT
In post-apartheid South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) government’s efforts to create a new national identity, a more inclusive heritage and to address past imbalances have contributed significantly to the reshaping of the South African heritage landscape, entailing the revision and restructuring of old museums, heritage sites and memory institutions. These political and institutional changes have also generated new sites. The focus of my research is one such site, the Ulwazi Programme (UP), an online archival initiative that has been set up by the Ethekwini (Durban) Municipal Library to provide opportunities for communities actively to record and share their contemporary history and culture.

The programme model uses the existing library infrastructure and Web 2.0 technologies to create a collaborative online indigenous knowledge resource in the form of a Wiki. Fieldworkers, selected from the immediate communities, are trained by the library to collect digital audio and visual material (such as recorded oral histories, intangible heritage, material culture etc.) in their areas and to add it to the Wiki with the libraries serving as Internet access points.

My interest in the UP lies in its uniqueness as a digital initiative that offers a new approach to archiving and heritage in South Africa. More specifically, the research focuses on the Mbumbulu branch of the UP. Mbumbulu is a peri-urban area located approximately 45km southwest of Durban that has deep historical disassociations from a centralised Zulu identity, traditionally focused on the Zulu monarchy and more recently as mobilised by the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), as well as a long history of in-migration of people opposed to centralised Zulu power. In Shakan times, chiefdoms in these regions were required to maintain identities clearly separate from those of the Zulu royal house and as part of the IFP-run KwaZulu Bantustan during apartheid, Mbumbulu was subject to IFP propaganda and the promotion of a politicised notion of Zuluness. In the 1980s and 1990s the area was wracked with political violence stemming from disputes between members of the ANC and IFP.

Therefore, Mbumbulu has a long history of complex relations with central Zulu authority and has been the on-going site of contestations around Zulu identity and political power. This suggests that contemporary archival efforts in the area will yield rich material about the relevance of new approaches to heritage and how they might relate to ideas about identity.

By focusing on the UP as a post-apartheid initiative born of changed political and institutional settings, the study considers the articulations of a project of this nature and how these engage the local contexts of Mbumbulu and the wider heritage fields of KwaZulu-Natal and South Africa. The study explores the UP – a site that employs new technologies and new approaches, which in turn generate new content and perspectives – as an aspect of continued transition in South Africa.

• ANC Youth League founding president, 1914-1947
• Early Days
• Education
• Lembede the Teacher
• Lembede the Writer
• Lembede the Lawyer
• Lembede the Catholic
• Lembede the Man
• Political Life
• His Philosophy of African Nationalism
• Lembede’s Opinions on the Liberation Struggle
• A Message to the Youth of South Africa
• His Death

We currently have a category Soccer in Durban but could do with a lot more information on what made soccer so vibrant in Durban, from the 50s and 60s up until the present day.

Here are a couple of guidelines on what could be improved in articles.

1. The article has no English summary.
2. The article has no Zulu summary.
3. The article has numerous spelling / grammatical errors.
4. The article needs more information.
5. The article needs one or more images.
6. The article needs captions to the images.
7. The article is not correctly categorized.
8. The article is incorrectly formatted.
9. The article needs a new title.

The Archival Platform is a networking, advocacy and research initiative. They use the word “archive” to refer not only to records or books in archives and libraries, but also to memory, cultural practice and places that tell the stories of the past. The Archival Platform’s aim is to facilitate dialogue and information sharing between professionals, academics and government employees in the heritage and archive sector.

• Click here to read the post Archiving the East Coast …