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About the Project
Saving South Africa’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission’s Video Collection
Planning Grant
The testimonies heard at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) at the time of South Africa’s transition from apartheid in the 1990s were captured and preserved on Betamax tapes by the state broadcaster, the South African Broadcast Corporation (SABC). The archive, consisting of at least 6335 hour-long tapes, is currently held by the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa (NARSSA), but faces obsolecense and decay without intervention. The video archive is the most comprehensive account of the state-sponsored violence and structural racial oppression under apartheid as well as the events that led to a fairly peaceful political transition. This planning project will survey the TRC video materials at NARSSA and plan for the urgent next step of digitization. Our goal is to provide open access to all video content so that the world is able to know what happened under apartheid.
Host Institution
Foundation for Human Rights, South Africa
More Information
Read the Collection Report
The MEAP-sponsored audit of the TRC Video Collection held at the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa (NARSSA) in Pretoria was successfully completed between August and December 2022. A total of 4,195 tapes were physically checked.
The TRC Video Collection consists of VHS and Betacam video recordings made by the SABC of the TRC Hearings conducted between 1996 and 2000. A copy of these recordings were delivered to NARSSA. There are concerns that some of the tapes may have been illegally destroyed. This survey project catalogued available tapes to account for any gaps in the collection.
Read the NARSSA TRC Video Collection Audit Survey Report for the full findings