Privatisation and displacement of armed struggle archives in Zimbabwe.

Access to the armed struggle archives in Zimbabwe has always been a challenge. The armed struggle heritage risks being a history without archives. Archives of the armed struggle are rarely found at the National Archives of Zimbabwe. The exceptions are only the oral archive of the armed struggle, collected by the National Archives of Zimbabwe, to address the paucity of archival documents about the liberation struggle. The political parties involved in the armed struggle keep their war of liberation archives in their party-political structures, as with the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA). Some archives were migrated before independence in 1980, as in the case of the Rhodesian Army Archive, while others were confiscated by the ruling government, as exemplified by the Zimbabwe People's Revolutionary Army (ZPRA) archive. Using the lens of the critical archival praxis as the theoretical framework, this conceptual paper critically analyses the privatisation of the armed struggle archives through a literature review. The persistent theme that runs through this phenomenon is the deliberate controlled access to no access. The study was guided by the research objectives, which sought to assess the archive of the liberation struggle and politics of memory; examine the expropriation of the Rhodesian Army Archive and the custody question; analyse archival repatriation of the Rhodesian Army (RAA) amidst provenance issues, and assess the privatisation of the archives of Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) amidst patriotic history in Zimbabwe. Further to that is the confiscation, privatisation, sanitisation, and propagandisation of the armed struggle archives by those in power. This paper recommends collaborative partnerships between the National Archives of Zimbabwe and stakeholders in custody of the privatised armed struggle heritage to safeguard and promote enhanced access to liberation struggle archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]