‘Covering Our Tracks’

Archival research in post-colonial contexts poses challenges to researchers, with archives often telling us more about their creators than their subjects. In the modern South African context, a thirty-year period of censorship led to further silencings in the media and greatly affected the ways in which the liberation movement communicated. In order to avoid capture, activists rejected the practice of collating their communicative processes, covering their tracks, as it were, and leaving distinctly thin, sometimes coded, paper trails. This paper addresses the domino effect of censorship on liberation movement communication practices between 1963 and 1980, examining the ways in which state suppression forced resistance underground, posing various challenges (and opportunities) for historians. The paper argues that decolonial approaches to research—foregrounding resistance, orality and moving beyond conventional understandings of the archive—are best suited to researching dissident communication.