In May 2015 Prof Lize Kriel, current Acting Head of the Visual Arts Department, delivered a keynote address at the Colloquium on ‘Print Culture and Colonisation in Africa’. Jointly hosted by the University of Pretoria and the University of Cape Town, in collaboration with Oxford Brookes University and the British Academy, the colloquium focused on the interplay between colonial interventions and local textual cultures.

In her keynote address, Prof Kriel argued that digital technology as a means to preserve data has foregrounded the hermeneutic possibility to perceive of all the material in colonial archives – not only photographs, but also ‘cultural’ objects, and all forms of inscription and print (illustrations, maps, even handwritten correspondence and typewriter generated texts) – as visual images. When digitising a colonial archive, all the above forms of ‘historical evidence’ are being photographed with a view to presentation, interpretation and dissemination. The new materiality of the digital image (framed by a computer device; data stored in a big building) seems to have rendered the material form of the content of the archive more ‘visible’ than before.  Whereas its tangibility had been taken for granted, or accepted as natural (neutral) in the analogue era, digitisation, ironically, challenges us to rethink the significance of images as artefacts with a cultural meaning and a traceable commodity value in space and time. What is required is a historicising of the knowledge manufacturing process itself. Inherent in the digitisation of archival content, is the question of why and to what effect that content had been archived in the first place. 

With specific reference to the Hoffmann Collection of Cultural Knowledge, which brings together archival material from three different archival repositories, two libraries and private collections, all related to the Berlin Missionary, Carl Hoffmann’s attempts to record oral performances by northern Sotho speaking communities during the first half of the twentieth century, in her keynote address Prof Kriel explored the many complexities one needs to grapple with in order to contextualise digitised archives.