As I make my way methodically through the documentary record of British governmental thinking about the transition between empire and national sovereignty in Africa, I am thinking once again about why—or whether—it should be important for a government to preserve most of its documents and make those available to its citizens, to researchers, and to global publics. Sometimes immediately, in the name of transparency; sometimes in the fullness of time, in the name of truth.
I am thinking on this question not merely as part of my work, but because I am the citizen of a state whose chief executive between 2016-2020 is reliably said to have routinely destroyed documents relating to his decisions and work either by ripping them up or stuffing them down toilets, and who also seems to have taken a number of classified documents that he was not entitled to possess as a private citizen on exiting the White House.
What difference does it make if documents get ripped up or flushed, or end up in the custody of someone who was quite recently entitled to look at any document he chose to examine? Do we know whether someone else in government needs to see those documents now? It seems unlikely that the former President is holding the only copy in existence. Is there a danger that he will share secret documents with people who should not see them at the moment? In the case of this particular former President, it’s not as if he observes the discipline of classification in any case—he’s as likely to blurt out in public what he’s seen as he is to give someone a document they shouldn’t have.
What if we had a government where no records were preserved, or where they never were given to an archive or other depository? In the last few weeks, I’ve been reminded that what we think of as a comprehensive record of the work of a democratic or republican government in the modern era is anything but comprehensive. The telephone has been used to have conversations that don’t go on record, as have personal face-to-face conversations. Nixon’s desire to record conversations—and he wasn’t the only one in government in the last seventy years to have the desire—was a result of wanting to escape the way that conversations off-the-record could be denied, misremembered, or distorted, but for his benefit alone, not the benefit of the public. Which is how we the public ended up with a glimpse of what gets said in deliberations that normally never become part of the archival transcript. Documents get destroyed, too. Sometimes en masse, as in the case of the apartheid state destroying much of its own archival record during the transition to majority rule. Sometimes piecemeal: I just viewed a file on discussions in the UK Cabinet of a gift to Ghana at independence where there’s a note of one document being removed and destroyed at the behest of the Prime Minister’s office in 1990, more than thirty years later, presumably because it contained a sentiment that was seen as embarrassing.
What historians and the wider public find in archives is either a record of the routine administrative and deliberative work of government through correspondence, reports, and data where all the parties concerned are at least half-consciously performing for each other in formal and official ways. It’s not hard much of the time to read around the edges to see alliances and enmities, things half-said, real feelings and thinking seeping in. But it’s not like being a fly on the wall in the room where it happened. Or we find in more unusual circumstances a momentously important revelation of government action that has been left for us to see because nobody at the time it was recorded thought it was important. Seeing that often involves a kind of alchemical transformation wrought by historians—we pull up what seemed routine and undisturbing to the creators of documents and show how much else is now visible with hindsight.
The really transformative deposits into archives and public record, transformative in their own moment, are usually accidents of another kind—documents taken by whistleblowers, documents intercepted by adversaries, documents admitted into public knowledge as the result of judicial proceedings or legislative inquiries. What we know of what government does is as much a result of a kind of constant testimonial buzz relayed by journalists, some of which turns out to be verifiably true in later inquiries and against what the archives reveal, some of which turns out to be half-truths offered in order to create or manage particular controversies.
So again, I ask, what if we didn’t deposit anything? What if it all got flushed?
The most immediate answer I have to that as a historian and citizen is to think about the modern times and places that I can’t research, where there was little depository of anything despite those times and places being within what seems like a nation-state in the 20th or 21st Century, or where there is zero expectation than any member of any public or any researcher will be permitted to examine whatever records might have been kept within government.
The places where it all got flushed, or where it might as well have been flushed because nobody looks at it, maybe even within those governments, are mostly places where military juntas, authoritarians, or governments in complete internal disarray, have held authority.
There are and will be ways to know something of the history of a country or place that does not have “archive fever” in Derrida’s sense of that concept. As Benita Sampedro Vizcaya notes in her 2008 article “Rethinking the Archive and the Colonial Library: Equatorial Guinea” (Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 9:3, 341-363, DOI: 10.1080/14636200802563600), the lack of a conventional archive full of documents excreted from the business of governmental work or the private writings of powerful people doesn’t mean there isn’t another kind of archive available. Africanists know this very well. Not only do we have strategies for knowing about history—and futures—that compose or look to other kinds of repositories of memory, information, evidence—but we hope in many cases to align with or provide assistance to communities and people who have knowledge of a place and time by having lived it or been produced by it.
That said, the kinds of states that flush it all down, that don’t keep archives, or that keep in their archives the documentary records of past colonizers and perhaps some work by postcolonial archivists who have sought to generate new forms of knowledge, are flawed states. Perhaps even bad states, if that’s not too crude. I accept Sampedro Vizcaya’s urgings that we not simply treat Equatorial Guinea as unknowable or excluded from knowledge, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the government of Equatorial Guinea is a government no human being should have to live under.
Flushing it all down is a diagnostic sign of a state that doesn’t even care to pretend that the composition of its administrative business matters very much to the governmentality that it actually practices within its territory.
Trump’s habit of flushing and ripping doesn’t seem quite there yet, but that’s where it is plainly heading, and where all the Trumpist administrations now spreading in conservative-dominated states within the U.S. are heading even more programmatically. For now, flushing and ripping are at least partly the long habit of a haphazardly criminal businessman and huckster who long ago learned that documents pose two sources of peril to him: first, as potential evidence in civil and criminal proceedings, and second, as providing documentation of his habitual and insistent lying about virtually everything.
That’s a transitional kind of motivation, though. When states simply halt the accumulation of documents or the provision of information that in some sense comes from the inside of their working operation, they’re often long past caring about the use of information against them in legal proceedings—one does not sue a dictator or military junta within the nation they control, and one only calls such governments to account internationally after they are no longer in power. There’s no need to keep documents from public view once you do not have a public that uses documents to discover the truth. The public in Sri Lanka learned some of what they know from journalists, but they’ve also lived and witnessed the catastrophic ineptitude of their government and their political class, and that was sufficient as a truth for pushing them into a confrontation with their rulers.
It is not that we must have archives full of deposited documents to have freedom or democracy. But it is, perhaps, that ripping and flushing and erasing and forbidding are announcement that we are moving from a state that still has things to hide and deny to an arbitrary dominion that not only could care less about its public but that has no desire to know even for itself, of itself, what it is that it does or has been, where the impulses that its rulers feel on each day are sufficient to resolve what the government should do. If the whole of the law is “do as thou wilt”, what need for any memory of what has been done?
Image credit: Photo by David Maier on Unsplash
This one needs a wide circulation, Tim.
Very thoughtful, informed clearly by an understanding of the complicated question of historical evidence on the African past. Thank you!!