New Online Archive for The History of Anticolonial Liberation Struggles in Africa
From the 14th of July, the website of the Tchiweka Documentation Association (ATD) is open to the public, putting online a large part of the archive that, since 2006, its Documentation Center has been managing, organizing and expanding.
Starting with the thousands of documents collected by Lúcio Lara “Tchiweka” (1929-2016), a well-known combatant of the Angolan liberation struggle and a prominent leader of the MPLA, the archive has increased its collection with other personal contributions and with the Project “Angola – Paths to Independence” (2010-2015).
The importance of this first Angolan online archive dedicated to the history of the struggles against colonial rule in Angola and in other former Portuguese colonies is undeniable. The advance towards the digitization of documents and the option for internet access, a logical option for current archives, has become even more urgent due to the restrictions that COVID- 19 has imposed on everyone.
This is a work in progress, which will continue to be developed, but thousands of documents are already available (including texts, press, photographs, videos and others), with the possibility of searching and with information on each document (see www.tchiweka.org).
Due to the complexity of this type of archive and given the limited resources available to ATD, the opening to the public will be phased, not only for the archival work still necessary, but also to overcome the inevitable failures, identifying the necessary improvements according to the users’ demands.
The Tchiweka Documentation Association (ATD) is an Angolan non-governmental, non-profit association, and its Tchiweka Documentation Center manages a private archive which complies with Angolan legislation and the principles defended by the Association. When ATD is celebrating 15 years of existence, this website and the archive available on it fulfill the main goals of its creation, namely to organize and make accessible documentation that contributes to “preserve the memory and deepen the knowledge about the struggle of the Angolan people for independence and national sovereignty”.
