6 Working with non-official serials in the BLDS Legacy Collection

The British Library of Development Studies (BLDS) archive is in many ways a work in progress, and there is one part of the collection still in the process of being properly catalogued and organised (see chapter by Alice Corble in this volume). This collection, the so-called Non-Official Serials (NOS) is no less valuable than the rest of BLDS holdings, despite its (until recently) unorganised state. For the last two years I have been working on the NOS collection to integrate it into the rest of BLDS, a process that has uncovered some hidden gems in the collection and exemplified the process of inheriting and creating a special collection. In this section I’d like to cover the formation of the NOS collection and examine the importance of this collection in relation to BLDS.

First, we must discuss what we mean by ‘Non-Official Serials’. Similarly to the rest of the BLDS collection, the Non-Official Serials originate predominantly from the Global South, with over 100 countries represented. However, while the main collection consists of items published by a governing body, the Non-Officials feature material from a more diverse range of publishers; newspapers and magazines, trade unions, universities, businesses, religious organisations, activist groups, and community publishing collectives among many others. The range of material is also broad, including magazines and newspapers, newsletters, academic and research journals, posters, information packages, and more. Some are part of long runs of dozens of items, others are one-offs or part of an incomplete group, and the collection as a whole comprises of roughly 1400 titles. These titles round out the BLDS collection by providing these alternate accounts and championing often lesser-heard voices within a collection generally dominated by government publications.

For example, Walikè, a magazine funded by a trade union in Guinea with the aim of educating working class people on local and national/international news, workers rights, and class solidarity through simple language, photography, and cartoons would not belong in the main BLDS collection with its lack of government involvement, but is typical of the kinds of titles found in the Non-Officials. This is what truly sets the Non-Officials apart and makes them an important part of this collection: by offering a window into the past that centres the lived experiences of ordinary people, the BLDS collection is transformed into something truly representative and diverse, and aspects of the past that may have otherwise been overlooked are pushed to the forefront. The accessible nature of Walikè, for instance, highlights aspects of popular culture and daily life that are not present in government publications from the same country and era, as well as reframing topics which are written about in the rest of the collection (in the case of Walikè, this could be articles on work and unemployment) from a new perspective. In short, the NOS are largely a way of balancing the collection and telling the history of development from below rather than above.

When we inherited the NOS collection, like a lot of the BLDS collection as a whole, it was in a state of disorder, with no real record of the collection existing. As such, decisions had to be made over how to shape the NOS into a cohesive collection that complemented the story of BLDS. As the example mentioned above suggests, the main criteria for deciding which items to prioritise for the collection revolved largely around the perspectives they were told from; the government publications have many instances of reports discussing issues such as poverty, gender equality, and work/class, for example, but due to their very nature of being written by a governing body are not told by those marginalised groups. Even items in the NOS written from more privileged backgrounds, such as university publications, are valuable and will often present a more counter-cultural stance on current affairs in the Global South not supported by government documents. For example, one title that immediately stood out when curating this collection was Jeune Afrique, a Tunisian magazine written by predominantly middle class and educated contributors from across French-occupied North Africa and the Middle East (see chapter by Tobey Ahamed-Barke in this volume).

The striking graphic design, unique photographs, and long form essays on national liberation movements, post-colonial politics, and international solidarity make it a valuable resource for studying politics and protest from an educated, left wing stance. Jeune Afrique is set apart by featuring many interviews with or articles penned by influential political and revolutionary figures, notably for example Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella, who may have felt freer to express their opinions in a magazine that is explicitly critical of the elites. This is evident in the fact that Jeune Afrique was forced into and had to relocate its publishing base to Paris after facing significant government backlash and harsh censorship in Tunisia, demonstrating how the attitudes expressed in the NOS are barred from appearing in the main collection and how different the government and non-government sub-collections on Tunisia are in the collection. Jeune Afrique also prominently features advertisements between its articles, often for cigarettes, cars and travel companies, which may at a glance appear a trivial detail, but can also offer new insights into ordinary life in the Global South from a consumer perspective, something which will also be notably absent from government publications.

As well as focusing on marginalised voices, another key criteria for selecting items to include in the NOS was availability and accessibility. While there certainly are titles among the non-officials which have an online footprint, digital access to articles, or other library holdings elsewhere in the world, there is also plenty of material which is comparatively harder to find or is inaccessible to researchers. There are many reasons for this; perhaps a title had a limited print run and there are few physical copies in existence, or few people in the target audience for a publication at the time thought to preserve copies for future, or simply the lack of an official archive space existing compared to government archives at the time. An example of this from the collection is an eclectic collection of FRELIMO publications from Mozambique spanning the 1960s and 1970s, which chart the fight for independence and national revolution.

Though FRELIMO do go on to become the governing political group in the country, this material, which covers the time period before this, represents a revolutionary group on the forefront of the national liberation movement and offers a snapshot of their history without the benefit of hindsight or more neutered government official overtones. The collection of speeches, combat diaries, manifestos, and written instructions on guerrilla warfare are delicate and rough around the edges both in physical terms and with regards to their contents; the anonymous writers could not have known at the time how the FRELIMO movement would work out and obviously did not have access to government archival practices to preserve what appears to be clandestine, inflammatory material. As such, this specific example exists in very few places and is unique for the collection.

Another example we chose to keep in the collection despite a greater digital and physical presence existing was the Sechaba magazine, published by the African National Congress of South Africa from 1967.

The magazine documents the anti-apartheid struggle and the fight for human rights and justice in South Africa from the perspective of a revolutionary organisation that was banned in the country between the 1960s-1990s; Sechaba itself was published from the UK while the ANC was in exile for much of its run. The provocative articles written by members of the ANC on such topics as the arrest and execution of protestors, Nelson Mandela, justice and the state (one particular issue is titled ‘A South African policeman, judge, and executioner – No dialogue with murderers’, and is a special on the human rights violations against anti-apartheid protestors carried out by the police force in the 1970s) are evidence of why the South African government banned the publication and why copies only became more readily documented in recent decades. Given the University of Sussex’s connection with the anti-apartheid struggle through student protest in the 1960s and 1970s, the presence of many ANC exiles as students here, and the inauguration of the Mandela scholarship (which still exists to this day) which forged close relationships between Sussex and the first post-Apartheid government, Sechaba felt like an important addition to the NOS that further cemented its connection to the University itself.

While relocating the NOS to its new place with the rest of the BLDS collection, the issue of working with damaged, incomplete, or material with unknown origins was a recurring one and required a significant amount of research and care. This process did reveal a great deal about the collection and many hidden gems were discovered that had previously been overlooked in surveys of the BLDS collection in the past. One title that stands out is Battlefront, a trade union newsletter from Trinidad and Tobago that ran through the 1970s-1990s.

While the contents of Battlefront are, of course, fascinating, with eclectic recipes and letters from subscribers, news items on local news relating to work and class issues such as elections, workers strikes, and strides made through pressure groups for worker’s rights, the ephemeral details surrounding it also offer unique insights into the NOS collection and BLDS as a whole. In particular, many of the copies feature handwritten or typewritten addresses pasted onto the back to former staff in IDS (or the institution generally), and postage stamps depicting native flora and fauna and politicians, which tell the story of how this collection came to be and the amount of effort that went into compiling these items in the first place. Battlefront is not alone in bearing these hallmarks of transportation halfway across the world and the collection’s curation, and such aspects are just as worthy of study and attention as the contents of the items themselves.

While researching the collection further when organising and cataloguing it in recent months, titles that initially appeared typical for the collection came to stand out as unique. Namely Transition, a journal published in Uganda in the 1960s, is fascinating and has drawn particular attention from student groups.

Like many titles in the NOS collection, the graphic design in Transition is strong, with many full page illustrations, colourful covers in a psychedelic 60s style, and glossy pages that suggest a high production value. Compared to other items from Uganda in the collection, we could immediately tell Transition was different due to this difference in physical quality. Through research, we discovered that although the journal discusses political events and focuses, like many titles, on international solidarity, Transition had actually been covertly funded by the CIA (which explained the financial investment clearly made in the publication) and was pushing radical ideas with a subtle slant to them. Evidently Transition had a community of readers as each issue contains many letters from readers discussing Ugandan politics and trans-African solidarity, but whether this aspect of the magazine was widely known among readers or even contributors remains to be seen and provides an interesting angle for studying the role of the media and the establishment in global development. Like other examples we have discussed, the case of Transition suggests that often the stories behind this material is just as fascinating as the ideas they discuss.

As mentioned above, graphic design and art direction are particularly strong among many of the NOS. Unlike official government publications, there is less need to project a standardised, ‘professional’ face and more ability to demonstrate creativity and individuality, capturing local and international culture through design choices. In a more practical sense, the strength of the art, photography, bold colours and designs featured on many of the NOS publications are beneficial from a teaching and research perspective: the eye-catching covers are appealing and make the NOS comparatively more accessible to those unfamiliar to using primary sources for research. Some of the titles were originally written for audiences perhaps less formally educated and so a greater focus was placed at the time on the visual element: graphic covers, illustrations, and cartoons (both instructional and humorous) make frequent appearances in the NOS and provide insight into how certain themes and events were depicted in art and communicated to ordinary people. One example that has become a favourite among the NOS is Mujeres, a Cuban women’s magazine that was viewed in similar terms as something like Elle magazine today; namely, a publication for ordinary women, often wives and mothers.

Mujeres features iconic illustrations for covers, full page spreads with photography, sewing patterns, and uniquely each back cover features a paper dress up doll which can be cut out and played with by young girls. Mujeres also offers an interesting female-centric counterpart to Tricontinental. Alongside embroidery patterns, simple culinary recipes, and instructional tutorials on how to protect your family from parasites, each article of Mujeres features stories on politics, international solidarity, women’s liberation, and profiles on Cuban and international revolutionaries such as Fidel Castro. Mujeres could be treated as a piece of propaganda given the political angle of these articles, presenting Cuban politics and international events in a format believed to be accessible and desirable to Cuban women. It offers an interesting comparison not only to Tricontinental (many of the current events reported on in Tricontinental, for example the Vietnam war, are also present in Mujeres at the same time), but to other women’s magazines in the Global South and Western Europe at the time. Mujeres, for example, appears both radical in its politics and activist approach and simultaneously traditional in pushing its female readers towards housework, beauty, and childcare, a far cry from the intensity of Tricontinental but something that highlights how ordinary people would see and interact with politics in their daily lives.

As the final few hurdles are crossed to putting the NOS in order and catalogue them, we have uncovered countless more examples of unique and interesting titles that offer excellent companion material to Tricontinental, the rest of BLDS, and general research as a whole. There are far too many to list here, but when putting together the collection we have noticed that it is strong not only on the themes of politics, solidarity, and protest, but more niche topics too.

Our understanding of the NOS collection is still growing and evolving, and we hope to see interest in the collection grow too as it takes a more prominent place alongside the rest of the BLDS collection. The discoveries we have made about the Non-Officials have made a case for its value not only to the collection, but to researchers too, acting as a preserved record of voices and perspectives that have typically been sidelined from the historical record. It is these voices which set the collection apart and give it an extra depth and insight into how global development, politics, and history have shaped the lives and lived experiences of ordinary people. The Non-Officials are essentially an untapped treasure trove of information that cannot be found in one place anywhere else, and through further research and engagement these marginalised voices in the collection will find their place to be heard.