There are between 195 and 200 countries in the world (depending upon whether or not certain controversial cases are included), of which 54 are in Africa. All of these countries have some sort of archives service in one or more institutions, and there are usually around 195 countries represented in the membership of the International Council on Archives (ICA). The archival collections which are universally held are governmental archives. Every country with membership of ICA has an archives service which collects and preserves records of national government, in part or in whole. A great majority of ICA member countries (but not all) also hold archives of local, municipal or regional government, as well as collections of parliamentary papers (which are generally regarded as distinct from papers of government).

Last year the University of Texas at Austin celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of what was to become the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, an archive named after a former English professor who had risen rapidly up the university's administrative ranks, using his considerable budgetary authority as Dean, Vice President, Provost, President, and finally Chancellor of the entire fifteen-campus University of Texas system to fulfill his vision of establishing in Austin “a center of cultural compass, a research center to be the Bibliotheque Nationale of the only state that started out as an independent nation”. To get things started, on September 11,1957, in his position as Director of the university's Rare Book Collection, he wrote a formal letter to himself authorising the expenditure of $25,000 from Special Research Collections in Humanities “to purchase books and materials for the use of the humanities faculty in furthering their research”.

This cyclical passage described by Christopher Okigbo in Elegy for Alto constitutes the core of the process of transmission that characterises the cycle of life, death and rebirth. After the poet's disappearance in 1967, the flame of his art and life still burns in our memories and outlives him through our committment to his legacy. Christopher Okigbo was born in 1932 in Ojoto, East Nigeria. The colonial context in which he was immersed at Government College, Umuahia shaped his work as much as the traditions of Igbo culture that were passed on to him by his maternal lineage.

This article seeks to investigate the largest collection of literary artefacts in South Africa, housed at the National English Literary Museum, and particularly the relationship between the founder of the museum and archive, Guy Butler, and how NELM has come to operate in the South African literary landscape in a post-colonial and post-apartheid moment. It is necessary to invoke the post-colonial moment from the outset in order to explore the question of post-colonial archives from a critical perspective.

This research is informed by what has come to be known as the ‘archival turn,’ which considers the ‘meta-text’ of archival formation. The work investigates the locations of power and regularities of logic that have informed the collection of certain items and histories, and the neglect of others.