The Line and the Pegs

By Simbarashe Namusi

Mr Mavhunga is sixty-three and a composite, the kind of man every Masvingo village knows. He is claiming the headmanship his grandfather held. A rival family disputes it. Oral history will not settle the matter, because both families have one.

What he is banking on is a line in a district record from the colonial years. In it, a native commissioner wrote down his grandfather's name and the kraal he governed. Mr Mavhunga has never seen the page. He has been told it is in the National Archives in Masvingo, and he is counting on it being there.

On 5 October, a hailstorm struck the city. According to All Zim News, it caused extensive damage to infrastructure, and the Archives were affected. Staff are now drying the damaged documents on lines, page by page, held with wooden pegs. Photographs published by the outlet show rows of paper hanging across a hall like Monday washing.

The people doing this work are doing it carefully. A wet page handled roughly tears. A wet page left alone grows mould within days. Whoever chose the pegs chose well.

But look at what the pegs say. This is the memory of a country: land records, court files, administrative papers, the documents that settle who held what and who decided what. Disputes like Mr Mavhunga's are argued from them. They are drying the way a family dries school uniforms.

The rival family has no page. Its case rests on what the elders say, and the elders are old. Mr Mavhunga's case rests on paper that is currently pegged to a string.

A hailstorm is weather, and weather cannot be scheduled. The roof, the drainage, the shelving and the conservation budget can be. Whether any of that failed here is a question for those who run the building, and I do not know the answer. I know only that a well-protected archive does not need a clothesline.

We are a country that argues loudly about the past. We recognise chiefs and headmen, unveil statues and hold commemorations. All of it assumes the record underneath is intact. Spending on the ceremony is easy to see. Spending on the box, the shelf and the dry room is not, and nobody cuts a ribbon for a dehumidifier.

One day Mr Mavhunga will carry his grandfather's name to the Archives and ask for the file. Someone will go to look.

Some pages will have dried flat. Some will not have survived.

Simbarashe Namusi is a media expert writing in his personal capacity

Masvingo National Archives