African Labour and Social History

Sylvia Pankhurst and Haile Selassie

The International Institute of Social History presents an online guide of its collections on African labour and social history (pdf, 507 Kb). The Institute's recent acquisitions in this area have significantly added to its African collections, and therefore we have developed a special guide to be used in the fast growing field of African social historiography.
The recent acquisitions are:

• archival and library material of the Werkgroep Kairos (one of the most important Dutch anti-apartheids organizations)
• the archive of the South Africa/Namibia Association (SANAM), a Brussels based organization of European NGOs active in Southern Africa at the end of Apartheid
• the archive of the ICCO, a Dutch organization involved in aid and development projects in South Africa

Foundation conference SACTU

Up to now the most important holdings on African history in our archival department were the archives of international trade union secretariats and international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International. The second area of relevant information comes from large national, predominantly Dutch, political and trade union organizations involved in development and support of aid to Africa. The third source comes from organizations in Europe opposing racism and apartheid.

Patrice Lumumba

Now the guide lists both recent and older material in our Archival Department and in the Department of Image and Sound Documents. The main focus has been on African topics. The aim of this guide is to provide information on primary sources available at the International Institute of Social History for research on African social history. Because much of this material is to be found in the archives of European organizations sympathetic to the African cause, data on the activities of those organizations in Europe were also listed. This information provides a context for African studies.

The area's best covered in this guide are Southern Africa, especially South Africa. This is a consequence of the importance of the anti-apartheid stuggle and the presence of mining and industry and hence, labour organizations in the area. The other important country in this guide is Nigeria - because of its large oil industry and the related social issues.

PAIGC delegate

Africa had not been an important focus in the acquisitions politics of the IISH. The Institute is well known for its European collections on the labour movement of the 19th and 20th century. Non-European material of similar importance included an extensive collection of documents on Latin America that had been collected by Max Nettlau. Since 1964, however, Fritjof Tichelman has been involved with non-European topics, in particular Asia and Indonesia. While developments in Africa were followed from 1964 on, they were never given priority. Nevertheless, in the course of time acquisitions and collections on Africa have now become so extensive that they deserve special attention.