Archiving the Grassroots: An Exploration of the African Activist Archive Project

Daniel Abelow

MA, History, New York University

MSLIS, Palmer School of Library & Information Science, Long Island University

Introduction

The 1994 collapse of apartheid in South Africa marked the close of a deeply shameful chapter in history. For the archival community, this transition raised urgent concerns regarding the documentary record of this period. In the final years of apartheid, South African authorities frantically destroyed records, covering up state crimes and suppressing documentation of domestic resistance.^[1] Conversely, the post-apartheid governments in South Africa and Namibia engaged in massive archival undertakings, extensively documenting their countries’ liberation movements.^[2] At the same time, traces of the international solidarity work that helped make apartheid untenable remain scattered and ephemeral, at constant risk of disappearance. This is especially true in the U.S., where mostly decentralized, grassroots solidarity efforts achieved major victories, including effective divestment campaigns and the passage of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986. Since its founding, the African Activist Archive Project (AAAP) represents the most significant effort to document this movement in the U.S. Operating at the intersection of digital humanities, transnational social movement history, and archival theory, the AAAP demonstrates how grassroots digitization projects reshape historiography and collective memory.

Above Image: Screenshot of the African Activist Archive homepage. Source: African Activist Archive, accessed March 5, 2026.  

Context

Founded in 2004 by Richard Knight and Jennifer Davis, both prominent anti-apartheid activists, the AAAP focuses on documenting local and student groups concerned with Southern Africa.^[3] This focus is justified by the role of local organizing in building a base of support for the national movement, as well as practical concerns around the materials of groups that no longer exist and relied on volunteer staff. It is significant that the AAAP groups the struggles against colonialism and apartheid throughout Southern Africa together. In doing so, it challenges notions that the anti-apartheid organizing of the 1980s emerged spontaneously, or that the 1970s, a decade when grassroots organizing centered around the independence struggles in Portuguese Africa, were a fallow period for African solidarity movements in the U.S. In 2006, the African Studies Center at Michigan State University (MSU) became the sponsor of the AAAP. Despite this affiliation, the project is not a physical archive or repository. Instead, its primary objective is to digitize materials from former activists, prioritizing ephemera like posters, t-shirts, flyers, and newsletters.^[4]

Scholarly and Historiographic Implications

As it asserts the importance of grassroots organizing in the historical record, the AAAP has deeply impacted scholarship on African solidarity in the U.S. My own work, which focuses on the circulation of documentary films about Southern African liberation struggles amongst U.S. activists, would be almost impossible without the grassroots collection focus and digitization efforts of the AAAP. While some activist documentaries have survived and remain readily available online, many films have become lost to time. For instance, Massacre at Nyazonia, depicting the aftermath of a massacre perpetrated by the racist Rhodesian government, was screened to activists in the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s, yet it is not readily available through any archive, digital or otherwise. Though the film itself may be unavailable, the AAAP enables researchers to reconstruct the life and circulation of Nyazonia and similar films through newsletters, advertisements, flyers, film catalogs, discussion guides, and other ephemera typically neglected in the archive.^[5] 

Above Figure: An example of some of the ephemera related to activist documentary films which has been preserved and digitized by the project.  Source: Private Collection of Richard Knight, African Activist Archive, accessed March 1.

Beyond my specific research, the project has profoundly shifted scholarship around African solidarity activism in the U.S. at large, with documents from the AAAP liberally cited in the bibliographies of almost all major publications on the topic released since its inception. The access provided by the project allows scholars to excavate the lives of activists like Robert Van Lierop, a lawyer who abandoned his practice in order to make films about the national liberation struggle in Mozambique. The AAAP has made flyers and calendars advertising Van Lierop’s films digitally available, allowing for the publication of secondary literature based on sources ignored by more institutionally focused archival projects.^[6] Increased scholarly interest in American solidarity with the Portuguese African liberation struggles is also greatly indebted to the AAAP.^[7] In turn, this has allowed scholars to more substantively explore the 1970s, a period long marginalized in Black internationalist literature.^[8] 

Perhaps the most direct scholarly impact of the project came in the form of No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half Century, 1950–2000. Started in 2003 and published in 2007, No Easy Victories was conceived in a manner directly complementing the work of the AAAP. Featuring a number of oral histories, many from figures involved with the project, it provides a comprehensive history of African solidarity in the U.S., one that is still being expanded through a website featured on the AAAP’s “Related Sites” page.^[9] One of the most important scholarly interventions of No Easy Victories is its emphasis on local actors, as well as on the existence of a long-standing activist infrastructure which made the anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1980s possible. This impact further indicates that the AAAP is not an institution based on some impossible notion of archival objectivity, but itself an activist effort that allows veterans of African solidarity movements to shape their own histories and social memory.

Archival Theory and the AAAP

Among the project’s many achievements, some specific successes stand out, differentiating the AAAP from otherwise similar efforts. The AAAP’s most remarkable accomplishments come in the form of its collaborative and counterhegemonic relationships with a wide range of archival institutions, its focus on digitization and access, and its comprehensive approach to covering the entire universe of documentation related to African solidarity activism in the U.S. These achievements reflect the project’s deep engagement with ideas from archival theory, particularly documentation strategy and the social theory of appraisal.

Originally articulated by Larry Hackman and Joan Warnow-Blewett, documentation strategy is an archival concept that seeks to establish adequate documentation of a specific topic or event, within a multi-institutional context.^[10] The influence of documentation strategy is visible in the AAAP’s embrace of Warnow-Blewett’s notion that archivists should pursue an activist approach towards records creators.^[11] Staffed and advised by activists who were themselves creators of relevant records, the project began by reaching out to activists personally known by staff and encouraging them to locate and save, or even create, new collections of papers and multimedia materials.^[12] Outreach then expanded to include people suggested by activist friends of the project and names that appeared in documentation.^[13] Efforts to produce new oral histories and interviews with former activists similarly reflect documentation strategy’s emphasis on encouraging records creators to generate new documentation where necessary.^[14]

Predicated on the belief that archival work is inherently ideological, the social theory of appraisal, as proposed by Terry Eastwood, emphasizes the evidentiary value of the archive, as well as the importance of use as a criteria for appraisal.^[15] Since Eastwood, the social theory has been expanded upon by archivists like Verne Harris, who incorporates critical theory, postmodernism, and an emphasis on social justice into his analysis of the archive. Harris and like-minded theorists question the extent to which archives can ever reflect objective truth, arguing that rather than serving as passive repositories of information, archives are active agents in the construction of collective memory.^[16] In this perspective, archival objectivity is itself a quixotic goal, with the archivist playing an inherently political role. This view of the archive is foundational to the AAAP. Harris also interrogates how the silence of marginalized voices in the archive has been used to maintain oppressive power dynamics.^[17] In its self-identity as a “people’s archive,” primarily focused on local organizations otherwise missing from major collections, the AAAP commits itself to filling such archival gaps.^[18] 

Related to its employment of documentation strategy, the AAAP avoids competition in its work, instead recognizing the importance of a decentralized archival world. Despite its affiliation with MSU, the project does not promote any particular institution; instead, it assists records creators with depositing materials wherever is most appropriate.^[19] This eschewal of centralized archival practices in favor of building collaborative networks is deeply rooted in social theory of appraisal as well, aligning with Eastwood’s opposition to archival centralization, on the basis that such practices limit the ability of the public to participate in memory formation.^[20] Simultaneously, the AAAP speaks to Verne Harris’ concerns regarding archival gaps and silences created by the eschewal of grassroots experience and oral documentation.^[21] The grassroots-focused collection policy of the AAAP, its inclusion of community archives, and the project’s deep engagement with oral history all address these concerns.^[22]

Perhaps the greatest success of the AAAP has been its ability to make materials accessible to researchers and the public through digitization. Given its association with the AAAP, many of the digitized materials on the website come from MSU, although another forty activists have loaned their personal materials for digitization, without permanently depositing them. At the request of the Africa Fund and the American Committee on Africa, the AAAP hosts over 1400 digital files with metadata about these organizations.^[23] Although the comprehensive archives list provided by the AAAP does not have digitized records for all of the repositories or collections listed, it still enables researchers to see if any digitized items are freely available from a repository.^[24] Digitization also expands access for scholars and the public in the Global South, although this aspect of the project admittedly raises thorny questions about archival control and neocolonialism within the archival community.^[25]

Conclusion

In confronting the silences created by decentralized grassroots organizing, the AAAP demonstrates that archives are active sites of memory formation. By prioritizing grassroots materials, embracing documentation strategy, and foregrounding the socially constructed nature of archival memory, the AAAP has established itself as a participant in the historiography of African solidarity movements in the U.S. Its work has reshaped modern scholarship on African solidarity activism, making the infrastructures of local organizing which sustained the movement across multiple decades visible. In doing so, the project challenges both archival centralization and historiographic narratives that privilege national leadership and the movements of certain decades over the grassroots organizing that sustained these campaigns. Although questions remain about the long-term sustainability of the project, its broader intervention into the politics of historical memory is already evident and impactful. The AAAP provides an outstanding example as to how activist-led archival initiatives can alter both what is preserved, and how history itself is written.

Author Bio:

Daniel Abelow was raised and has lived most of his life in New York City. He is currently a student in the NYU-LIU Dual Degree Program, pursuing an M.A. in History and an MSLIS. He holds a B.A. in Film and Revolutionary Movements from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Prior to entering the dual degree program, Daniel worked in a number of positions related to the marketing and distribution of arthouse and international cinema. His research focuses on the relationship between film, decolonization, and transnational solidarity in the Global Cold War.

Bibliography:

“About.” African Activist Archive. Accessed November 12, 2025. https://africanactivist.msu.edu/about/.        

“Archives List.” African Activist Archive. Accessed November 12, 2025. https://africanactivist.msu.edu/archives-list/.        

California Newsreel (Southern Africa Media Center). African Media Program Collection. African Activist Archive. https://africanactivist.msu.edu/browse/results/?collection=African+Media+Program+Collection.        

“Collection Policy.” African Activist Archive. Accessed November 12, 2025. https://africanactivist.msu.edu/about/#collections-policy.        

“Related Sites.” African Activist Archive. Accessed November 12, 2025. https://africanactivist.msu.edu/related-sites/.         

Movie Review: Massacre at Nyazonia in  Zimbabwe Bulletin Newsletter by ZANU Support Committee (New York). February 1977. Alan Zaslavsky Africa Collection, Michigan State University Libraries Special Collections. African Activist Archive. https://africanactivist.msu.edu/record/210-849-20186/.        

Private collection of Richard Knight. African Activist Archive. https://africanactivist.msu.edu/record/210-849-31703/.        

Biondi, Martha. We Are Internationalists : Prexy Nesbitt and the Fight for African Liberation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2025.

Eastwood, Terry. “How Goes It with Appraisal?” Archivaria 36, no. 36 (1993): 111-121.

Greene, Mark A., and Todd J. Daniels-Howell. “Documentation with an Attitude: A Pragmatist’s Guide to the Selection and Acquisition of Modern Business Records.” In The Records of American Business, edited by James O’Toole, 161-229. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1997.

Hackman, Larry J., and Joan Warnow-Blewett. “The Documentation Strategy process: A Model and a Case Study.” The American Archivist 50, no. 1 (1987): 12-47.

Harris, Verne. “‘They should have destroyed more’: the destruction of public records by the South African state in the final years of apartheid, 1990-94.” Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa, No. 42 (2000): 29-56.

Harris, Verne. “The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa.” Archival Science 2, no.1-2 (2002): 63-86.

Limb, Peter, Richard Knight, and Christine Root. “The Global Antiapartheid Movement: A Critical Analysis of Archives and Collections.” Radical History Review 2014, no. 119 (2014): 161-177. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2402018.

Luque, Alba Martín. “International Shaping of a Nationalist Imagery? Robert van Lierop, Eduardo Mondlane and A Luta Continua.” afriche e oriente XIX, no. 3 (2017): 115-138.

Minter, William, Gail Hovey, and Charles Cobb Jr., eds. No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half Century, 1950–2000. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007.

Parrott, R. Joseph. “A Luta Continua: Radical Filmmaking, Pan-African Liberation and Communal Empowerment.” Race & class 57, no. 1 (2015): 20–38.

Parrott, R. Joseph. Dream the Size of Freedom : How African Liberation Mobilized New Left Internationalism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025.

Root, Christine. “Archiving the US Campus Anti-Apartheid Movement.” Safundi 23, no. 1–2 (2022): 113–21. doi:10.1080/17533171.2023.2165014.

Santos, Aurora Almada e. “Action Needed: The American Committee on Africa and Solidarity with Angola.” In Transnational Solidarity: Anticolonialism in the global sixties, edited by Zeina Maasri, Cathy Bergin and Fracesca Burke, 154-179. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022.

Schwartz, Joan M., and Terry Cook. “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory.” Archival Science 2, no. 1-2 (2002): 1-19.

Stapleton, T.J., and M. Maamoe. “An Overview of the African National Congress Archives at the University of Fort Hare.” History in Africa 25, (1998): 413-22.

Van der Hoog, Tycho. “A New Chapter in Namibian History: Reflections on Archival Research.” History in Africa 49, (2022): 389-414.

Von Eschen, Penny. Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Williams, Brian, and William K. Wallach. “Documenting South Africa’s Liberation Movements: Engaging the Archives at the University of Fort Hare.” In Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, edited by Francis X. Blouin and William G Rosenberg, 321-32. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006.