THE INTERDISCIPLINARY CENTER for the STUDY OF GLOBAL CHANGE is hosting a talk by Ph.D. candidate Geraldine Frieslaar titled "(Re)Collections in the Archive: Making and Remaking the International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF) Archival Collection" on Friday, October 17 at 12:00pm in 537 Heller Hall.
The study primarily aims to write an archival biography of the International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF) collection. The work of IDAF conducted between 1956 and 1991 gave rise to a collection of records that traverse 35 years of support work. As a solidarity organisation IDAF provided support to liberation movements in Southern Africa through their legal and welfare assistance programmes. Equally significant, IDAF also sought to highlight the oppressive machinery of the apartheid government through the deployment of their research, information and publications programmes as a way of creating awareness and 'keeping the conscience of the world alive.' When the administrative records of IDAF were relocated to South Africa with the Mayibuye Centre for History and Culture at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) as chosen location, they were turned into an archival collection which also became a memorial to IDAF's resistance work now located in the foremost anti-apartheid university and politically in a new project that intended to create a museum about apartheid. Later the collection was incorporated into the Robben Island Museum through an agreement between the UWC and the Museum. The dissertation seeks to examine the history of the making of the IDAF archive and how it continues to be remade as well as the archival meanings that have been and is being produced. More than this the dissertation attempts to provide an alternative approach of thinking about the history of resistance in more complex and nuanced ways.
