TRATAMIENTO PARA LA ENFERMEDAD DEL ALZHEIMER

The materials selected for preservation by the Radio and Sound Archive includes all major events of national importance. This includes festivals, opening ceremonies of parliament, state funerals, the speeches of State Presidents, Prime Ministers, and other prominent people in the economy, arts, religion, sports and sciences. It also includes a selection of programmes from all of the SABC radio services, such as dramas, features, actuality or entertainment programmes, interviews, discussions, music programmes, sport

commentaries, talks, recitals and excerpts read from literary works by the authors

themselves (TM, 1998:5, 10). In appraising their documents, the Radio and Sound Archive recognises the two Schellenbergian categories for determining archival value, namely evidential (or functional) and informational (or research) value.26 In other words, material is preserved that will be of value to broadcasters in compiling their programmes, as well as for

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This project forms part of the SABC’s turnaround strategy to make the company more financially viable and bring the SABC in line with the digital media environment. The push to move the archives from analogue to digital formats is a “critical funded component of the recapitalisation programme” (SABC Annual Report, 2006:53).

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futurescholars and journalists. However, determining archival value raises many challenges, amongst which is predicting what material will have value in the future. Bennie Jacobs, manager of the Radio Archive, explains (BJ 25/07/2011):

It is a big issue *…+ you get certain programmes that don’t really have archival value. Your problem *is+ who decides what has got archival value, because for you it won’t have archival value but for someone else it could have archival value. For instance, we don’t really archive Metro-fm because it is a commercial radio station. But Metro-fm came back and said we are now ten years old, so we want clips of all our DJ’s that we had, so now we sit with a

problem. You don’t have even one item of a DJ you know!

This uncertainty around “future value” is reflected in the contradictory language used in the

Training manual of the SABC Sound Archive faced in appraisal: “The importance of the

person, the event, or the information confirm archival value”; but, “a degree of crystal ball gazing is necessary to define whether the person commenting will become important in the field” (TM, 1998:69). A few pages earlier the Manual (TM, 1998:17) states that “the archival standards were determined scientifically, and they are always implemented when new material is selected. The basic principle is the irreplaceability or unrepeatable nature of the material, and the degree of importance of each recording”. The archivist should

furthermore “be up to date with political, financial and social trends in order to be able to objectively assess the future values of current events. *…+ It is vital that the archivist is capable of objectively assessing actuality. The News and Actuality archives have NO political, financial, or social agenda.” (TM, 1998:57) In using both “crystal ball gazing” and

“scientifically determined” as notions to explain the processes and method involved in selecting material to be preserved, one of the fundamental challenges of appraisal comes to the fore: no matter how selection criteria are set up, the archivist will always have to use his or her own judgement and their perspective will therefore be central to the selections made. Since archivists are individuals with political and social views, their worldviews, personal interaction with the record creators and social and cultural environments will inevitably influence the archival record. Within the process of selection and appraisal the power inherent in archives is made plain and unavoidable (Harris, 2002:85). In appraising documents during the rule of the National Party, for instance, the politics of the time

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became part of archival processes and collection through what was left out of the archive. Since the collection of the Radio and Sound Archive depends largely on broadcasted material, prohibited material was not archived. Jacobs (BJ 25/07/2011) notes:

Selection, especially before 1990, was determined by the state, when it came to the SABC. There were certain things that you couldn’t touch. *…+ there was a department that had a section where they would sit and select what would go out on air. So, for example, any song that had the word freedom in it, it wasn’t right. With the archives, anything that dealt with black aspiration with black people and all that, it was never broadcasted.

Due to this, important events that reflected badly on the government, such as the

Sharpeville Shooting (1960), the Women’s March (1956), the Soweto Uprising (1976) and speeches by anti-Apartheid activists such as Steve Biko, do not form part of the archival collection (Jacobs, BJ 25/07/2011). In some cases, even when material was broadcasted, archival copies were sometimes sabotaged. Assmann (IA 27/07/2011) notes:

In the years when I started, you physically had to walk to the archive to collect the tapes and if there was a controversial tape, the journalist or programme director would have removed it before you got there. So in the process we lost a lot of material.

The archive thus became a reflection of, and complicit in, the political systems of the time through its omissions. The partial record that subsequently stemmed from the

government’s strategy of tightly monitoring broadcasts and removing records that did not match its ideology could be viewed as an example of the State’s control (albeit indirectly) over the archival record. As Harris has pointed out “a key element in this exercise of hegemony was the state’s control over social memory, a control which involved both remembering and forgetting” (Harris, 2002:69).

In order to broaden this partial catalogue, archivists at the SABC Radio and Sound Archive have a mandate to identify and collect material not in their catalogues (TM, 1998:4-5). This project has its origins in the Living Archive Action project that was instigated by the SABC Archives committee in the early 1980s. Initially its priority was to capture the background of

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the SABC on record, and veteran broadcasters were identified for interviews (Minutes Nr. 5, 1982:2). By the late 1980s, archivists were less restricted in what they could record and used this system to fill in the gaps within the existing collection. Assmann recalls, for instance, that she took great effort in her capacity as light music archivist to record interviews with people who were in exile. She went to the Voëlvry concerts and music festivals “to record the things that were not broadcasted on the SABC during that time” (Assmann, IA

27/07/2011).27 This project continued successfully until the early 2000s, but due to the financial crisis the SABC has been facing since then, this project can no longer be carried out effectively (Jacobs, BJ 25/07/2011). In addition to the oral history project, the Radio and Sound Archive is also actively involved in creating networks with other archives, whereby archivists are encouraged to make sure that they know about the existence of material that could supplement the SABC’s holdings (Assmann, IA 27/07/2011).

In the SABC’s current selection practices, everything that has been broadcasted from 2003 is kept on DVDs for legal purposes and for use by researchers or broadcasters. However ,not everything is catalogued (Jele, RJ 25/07/2011; Jacobs, BJ 25/07/2011). During regular meetings, the “archival material is selected by the archivist in close collaboration with the heads and programme staff on the various services” (TM, 1998:3;15). These selections, called air checks, are then recorded by the main office (or tower) and collected by the archivist for cataloguing and preservation. Thus, apart from the Schellenbergian principles to determine archival value, some basic principles of macro-appraisal are also employed in the sense that the selection process takes place before the material reaches the archive.28 Even though this pro-active approach to selection allows more effective archiving, it is restricted by the man-power and hours needed to catalogue these materials and

contributes daily to the immense un-catalogued backlog of the Sound Archive. Retha Buys, (RB 26/07/2011) the archivist for the Afrikaans and English lifestyle programmes as well as Springbok Radio, states that:

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The Voëlvry movement was driven by a group of mostly Afrikaans rock musicians including Johannes Kerkorrel, Koos Kombuis, Bernoldus Niemand and Dagga-Dirk Uys, who rebelled against the Afrikaner Apartheid establishment through their music. A large amount of their music was censored by the SABC (for more information, see Hopkins (2006)).

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The problem is, the amount of material that comes in per day is more than the hours we have to work – for half an hour’s material it can easily take you one to two hours to catalogue. You know, you have to listen and play it back to make sure you catalogue it correctly. So it is just too much. We are too few people. *…+ The programmes that come in are just too much, you are working with 24 hour broadcasts. So it is huge! And the

disadvantage is that there is material in the backlog that is just as important and as valuable but we don’t know about it. We don’t know that it is there. I recently came across some old Springbok Radio recordings that were lying there and I didn’t know about it. And we don’t find the time to go there and to work through the material that is there. It is bad.29

Appraisal is one of the most important and most difficult tasks of an archivist. The Training

manual for the SABC archivists (1998:7) notes: “The resources available for future research

are, to a large extent, dependent on the judgement employed during appraisal”. The archivist, who has to rely on his/her intuition and knowledge to choose which material to preserve, is central to these decisions. Ilse Assmann (IA 27/07/2011) pointed out to the current writer that no matter how objective one aspires to be as an archivist, how strictly one’s criteria are designed for selection and appraisal or how experienced one is, “you inevitably leave your imprint”.

Although macro-appraisal eliminates some of the problems of determining archival value through documenting the processes of the present rather than predicting the future, Harris (2008:102-103) points out that appraisal and archival value will “always be, specific to place, time, culture and individual subjectivity. It does not dangle somewhere outside of humanity, immutable, pristine, transcendent. The appraiser creates, or re-creates, archival value with every appraisal exercise”. In our interview, Bennie Jacobs (BJ 25/07/2011) further illustrated this point:

BJ I always say to my people, even the decisions that you make, you must make sure that you make the right decisions because your decisions influence the cause of history.

LL What kinds of decisions?

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BJ Like decisions on what is it that you are keeping, and what is it that you are not keeping. Your decision in saying, this is not important, ok, let me give an example. One of the archivists – before [President Jacob] Zuma speaks at rallies, he will sing this song.30 Now the archivist decides that the song is not important, I will only take the speech. Now ten years down the line, you want to give a speech in a context of that song, because that song, before he speaks, is a message. And that song shaped our history for the time that Zuma was president. Now you have decided that that song is not important. So history on that part, it’s gone. So it means you have created history, in which way, in your way. And that is your problem. As an archivist you would have to realise that you actually have the most important job.

Even though archivists at the SABC Radio and Sound Archive are aware that they are

complicit in the processes of power through their decisions on selection and appraisal, they cannot operate outside these parameters because of the archival system and the way it allows archiving to take place. Through selecting and appraising documents to be preserved, archivists bestow archival value on some records and deny it to others. Archiving as a

process of judgement is intrinsically connected to certain modes of power.