On the trail of the affective and everyday in the digital archive
A key element of our project research into how diplomats of African states were trained in the decolonisation period is the investigation of everyday politics - gendered, racialised, spatialised - as experienced and performed by trainers and trainees. As we begin to consult archival sources, we face a central methodological challenge: how to recognise, interpret and analyse the affective qualities of diplomatic training within the mundane, partial, often bureaucratic detail? Added to this is a second challenge, that of going beyond the empowered voices of trainers contained within the archival sources available to us, to consider the more marginal voices and perspectives of trainees.
Recent work by historical geographers offers some helpful examples to build on. Stephen Legg’s piece on ‘Political Atmospherics’ at the India Round Table Conference ably demonstrates not only the value of paying attention to affect in the archive, but also shows how it can be done. In this research, personal memoirs, letters and photography are used to great effect, but it is the analysis of the press commentary surrounding the conferences that completes the picture of their atmospheres. Another inspiration is the current online exhibition of the Royal Geographical Society by Kate Simpson, The lost voices in the archive, which reappraises the records of Victorian British expeditions to Africa to find traces of African people who were central to these expeditions but silenced and marginalised in their histories. The research uses images powerfully, as well as drawing attention to short written accounts of African lives and voices, particularly those of women.
We are only at the start of our archival research, and taking advantage of digitised records prior to embarking on in-person archival fieldwork. A particularly valuable source for much of the training carried out in Geneva and across Africa during the 1960s and 70s are the Swiss Federal Archives. These archives are freely accessible for research and offer digitisation of records on request free of charge. Files are digitised one batch at a time, with a few weeks’ wait between batches – however for the avid researcher each new download of files is like the next instalment in their favourite series. Thanks to this accessibility, we have begun to be able to explore the voices contained there, relating to the delivery of a Carnegie Endowment training programme in Cameroon in the 1960s.
These contain descriptive lists, formal letters between embassies, and meeting minutes describing several groups of diplomatic trainees, where they were from, where they were trained, and by which Swiss trainers. In one file, a newspaper clipping from La Presse du Cameroun offers hope of identifying something more of the qualitative, affective experience of training. There’s a picture (below) – two rows of almost all young male black Africans dressed in Western suits, turned towards the camera and smiling. They are physically close, and appear relaxed and friendly with one another although the article tells us they have come from across the continent from Morocco to Burundi, Ivory Coast to the Congo, and have been training together for only a month.
It is difficult to read much more into such an image about the everyday politics of the training, without falling into ventriloquism. Unfortunately the text beyond is short and barely engages with the people in the image, largely serving to underline the prestigious nature of the course, its association with the local official hosting them for an evening, and the value of the CEIP’s work across Africa. No one, not even the host M. Sabal Lecco, is quoted in the piece. What appears to be underlined is the passivity of the trainees, who are ‘stagiaires’ rather than étudiants, and ‘receive training’ by ‘listening to presentations from a certain number of technicians’ as they tour the country.
Cutting from La Presse du Cameroun 23.12.1966 (Source: Swiss Federal Archives)
That the clipping was kept by the Swiss Foreign Ministry does however offer a clue as to the function it might have performed within contemporary systems of funding. Such training was funded by Western states and parastatal organisations like the Carnegie Endowment not only as ‘technical cooperation’ but as a means of building influence and soft power. For the Swiss Foreign Ministry, this newspaper clipping might have represented evidence of the value of its investment, with the very publicity of the event and the inclusion of such an image serving to indicate the course trainees’ implied alignment and friendliness towards Switzerland and the West more broadly.
As we press further into our archival fieldwork we will encounter more of these sources, seeking to further elucidate the affective geopolitics of diplomatic training during this period of decolonisation.