Material Remains: Artifice versus Artefact(s) in the Archive of Bantustan Rule

If Bantustans were artifices of the apartheid state – ‘puppet’ regimes ruling through the despotism of ‘tradition’, rather than through modern bureaucratic techniques – what are we to make of their archives, the remains of their government? This paper – a chronicle of the reclamation of the KaNgwane archive – considers this question in relation to scholarly critiques of the archive as well as that of the Bantustans. As a pile of rotting, random (almost pulped and recycled) documents, the KaNgwane archive lacks most of the taxonomic classification, ordered selection, and epistemic authority of colonial state archives, against and along which critical scholarship urges us to read them. Yet the remains of what was in fact the KaNgwane archive is richly instructive. First, what remains as (and in) the Bantustan's archive suggests not only investments in the conventions of statehood, but the way in which the Bantustan state was materialised through bureaucratic paperwork. Second, the literal recycling of history lays bare the possible meanings of the histories of Bantustan rule to those once subject to its authority, and who now subject its history to theirs.