The Westbury Community Archive: Claiming the Past, Defining the Present towards a Better Future

This article looks at the process of compiling a community archive in Westbury, Johannesburg. The township is located alongside the better known Sophiatown. Its history provides an insight into the experiences of the working class in the city since the establishment of Johannesburg more than a 100 years ago. The motivation for this archive comes from the experiences of activists in dealing with social and economic challenges that this community continues to face, and the connection with past activism through the work of community activists like Florrie Daniels. Daniels kept meticulous records of community organisations she helped to establish around early childhood development, preventative healthcare, poverty alleviation, housing, sport, youth and women’s organisations, as well as political and civic movements from the 1960s onwards. Much of what is contained in the Florrie Daniels collection is associated with cooperative grassroots activity. Her collection offers a perspective that includes records of working-class solidarity around regional and national social and political struggles. It forms the basis of further accumulation of materials to incorporate into a community archive. The idea of the archive has encouraged dialogue between veteran activists, organisations that operate in the area and education institutions that resulted in collaborative approaches in its construction.


Introduction
The history of Westbury cannot be separated from the development of the City of Johannesburg after the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886. The increasing urban population attracted by the mining and growing service, support and manufacturing industries required that housing be provided in proportion to the expanding urban population. As a result of overcrowding in the initially demarcated "locations" in the inner city, Sophiatown, Martindale and Newclare were laid out in 1905 as areas for "Natives, Coloured and Asiatics" residing in peri-urban areas (Pirie and Hart 1985, 388). A section to the south of Sophiatown became a municipal shelter location known as Western Native Township to restrict African settlement in Johannesburg after 1924 when the Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 was applied (Parnell and Pirie 1991). The area was named Western Coloured Township after the Group Areas Act of 1950 was promulgated, and then renamed Westbury in the 1960s.
There are many occurrences resulting from the spatial landscape that shaped the community of Westbury. Chapman (2013) describes five distinct morphological stages of the area as: • the origins of Johannesburg; • the 1904-1919 period characterised by the creation of a transport grid for the town; • the period of high apartheid from 1948-1985; • the dismantling of apartheid spatial policies in the post-1985 period; • the most recent spatial policy and development in the Western Areas, branded in 2012 as the "Corridors of Freedom." 1 The rearrangement of the demographics during the "high apartheid" era culminated in Westbury becoming a working-class "coloured" group area in the 1960s. Racial classification ripped families apart and created a community identity of being more privileged than those who were removed. However, the challenges of the working class remained, and activism around them continued. Behind the much-publicised and recorded history of the removal are stories of resilience, endurance and activism that continued among those who were left behind.
Each period brought its own challenges and legacies for its inhabitants. There are different perspectives on the history of the area. Participatory interactions with people and organisations that function/ed in the community can capture accounts of lived experiences. They can unearth interesting material to compile a profile of how communities responded to conditions created by changing policy and how they experienced the resulting impact. This knowledge can change popular perceptions, misrepresentations and glaring omissions of the collective history. It can offer a fresh perspective on historical events and their bearing on local communities like 1 The City of Johannesburg in the past few years embarked on new spatial plans based on transport-orientated development. The "Corridors of Freedom" consists of transport arteries linked to interchanges where the focus will be on mixed-use development. It is aimed at transforming apartheid settlement patterns, which have shunted the majority of residents to the city's outskirts, away from economic opportunities and access to jobs.
Westbury. There are also lessons to be learned from efforts to organise for a better quality of life.
Activists from Westbury have started building a community archive where experiences of past and present generations will be made available in the form of publications, recorded oral histories, artifacts, music and art forms. The archive will challenge the dominant chronicles and perceptions of the area and its people by the mainstream media and biased historical documentation that portrays it only as a violent community riddled with crime, illicit drug trading and substance abuse. The lived experiences of people from this community need to find expression in historical record so that it can provide a better understanding of the context of socio-economic challenges and how to deal with them communally. The value of such archives is summed up in the following (Motala 2015, 4) way: Useful and systematic knowledge can be produced by engaging with and recognising the direct experience of individuals and their communities. There are many ways of ensuring that the knowledge that has been developed by communities over many generations can be understood and used. This knowledge can hugely enhance our understanding of the kinds of issues that affect communities.
Gathering histories and setting up community archives are "the grassroots activities of documenting, recording and exploring communal heritage in which public participation, control and ownership of the project is essential" (Flinn 2007, 153 (2007,152) puts it, In reality the mainstream or formal archive sector does not contain or represent the voices of the ordinary people, the grassroots and the marginalised. Or at least if it does, the archive rarely allows them to speak with their voice and through their own records.
In the post-apartheid era, the National Archives of South Africa Act No 43 of 1996 came into effect on 1 January 1997, marking the start of a new phase of public archive management and administration under a new political dispensation (The Archival Platform 2015, 37-8): The Act mandated the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa (NARSSA) to play a proactive role in shaping public memory by filling gaps resulting from past imbalances in the acquisition of non-public records and actively documenting the experiences of those either excluded from or marginalised in the colonial and apartheid archives.
The Act opens the possibility of the state committing resources to bring sidelined collections by anti-colonial and anti-apartheid organisations into focus. The Act does not explicitly refer to or mention community archives, but clearly suggests participatory grassroots activity with communities to influence democratic participation in rectifying the disparities caused by selective archiving of South Africa's colonial and apartheid past. It is therefore expected that innovative local community history and heritage programmes will be encouraged, supported and funded by state agencies.
By implication, the Act acknowledges that archives must serve a different purpose to that served in the past. It creates space for heritage activists to contest, create and build public memory in a constructive manner to help bring about fundamental social change. There is also opportunity for national archiving to be influenced by local initiatives to be more representative and useful in addressing the consequences of discriminatory and oppressive policy formulations.
Opposing forces in society will remember, record and refer to events in line with the values they want to preserve and outcomes they desire. Community Projects (BCP), which made the connection between the struggles in education to those of structural inequality and oppression. The uprising motivated activists to intensify efforts to organise workers on the factory floor and in communities where they live, thus extending the need and role of education beyond formal institutions. As Heffernan (2016) notes: They [the students] were inspired and encouraged to connect these issues to the broader political system by a range of influences in their homes, communities, and classrooms. Among these were university students who had been conscientised through the Black Consciousness Movement and expelled from rural "bush" universities during waves of protest in 1972 and 1974.
One On the one hand, the framing of the 1976 uprising by the state tried to justify repressive action in order to maintain control, while the most vocal liberation movement, the ANC, appropriated the uprising to further its mission of liberating the country from white minority rule. The contributions of other liberation organisations and movements such as the PAC, AZAPO, the National Forum (NF) and a number of independent left groups continue to be sidelined.
Many of the struggles within communities were not very prominently, if at all, covered by the mainstream media, while the popular "liberation" narrative followed the actions of and against prominent individuals who went into exile or were killed as a result, and selectively promoted organisations that were active at the time. The contributions of many activists on the ground are also largely ignored. As a result, much of the grassroots activities inspired by the uprising, of mobilising and organising communities, has not been adequately preserved, recorded and shared. Just like many townships around the country, the community of Westbury too was impacted by the uprising. Formally documenting those experiences will complement existing initiatives to present our collective history as lessons for building organisation towards a society free of racism, sexism, exploitation and inequality.

Recollections and Collections for Building a Community Archive
Events that followed the 1976 uprising encouraged many people to become politically active.
Exiled organisations had their military wing swelled by those who chose to leave the country to join movements in exile, such as the Azanian People's Liberation Army (APLA), Azanian National Liberation Army (AZANLA) and Umkhonto We Sizwe (MK). After 1976 many students who attended the so-called "bush universities" returned to Johannesburg townships.
The bush universities were the extension of the apartheid strategy of providing separate tertiary education for those defined "African," "Coloured" and "Indian." In Westbury and surrounding areas, they were mainly from the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and the University of Durban Westville (UDW). These "bush" students were politicised by the unfolding events and activity on university campuses and brought a new energy to communities they returned to.
The "bush" scholars brought with them an assortment of political ideas and ideologies. Student debates were influenced by the writings of Steve Biko, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, and the practical activities of SASO that encouraged students to join or initiate community programmes under the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). There were articles by famous academics in exile such as Harold Wolpe, Baruch Hirson, and Martin Legassick, as well as those embedded in the mass democratic movement, such as Richard Turner, Neil Aggett and Eddie Webster (Reddy 2004). They were also exposed to Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, to literature produced by the Unity Movement and Neville Alexander who wrote under the pseudonym "No Sizwe." Those who returned to Westbury and its surrounds were adherents of the BCM, the New Unity After 1976, the ANC intensified its information campaign through a radio station, Radio Freedom, which broadcast from Lusaka, Zambia. The trademark AK47 gunfire introduced the fiery speeches and messages from leaders in exile about waging warfare against the oppressive apartheid government. It was during one of these broadcasts that Florrie Daniels, an activist from Westbury, commented to a bunch of young impressionable teenagers huddled around a transistor radio in her dining room, absorbing the emancipation rhetoric with intermittent shouts of "Amandla, Awhethu" ("power to the people" It was while living in Moguerane Street in the 1950s that Daniels first became involved with community work, driven by her deep concern for families that did not have the means to combat the cold winters or access to nutritious food. Her activism progressed to organising youth into the Girls' Brigade, starting two crèches for preschool children, bringing an eye clinic to Westbury and starting an anti-substance abuse support group, and in the late 1970s her work was influenced by political events. She helped build the civic movement in the (then) Transvaal province, mobilised around housing and healthcare and became a member of the ANC.
One of the first projects she started in 1958 was Operation Winter Warm. She arranged donations of wool and knitting needles for unemployed women to knit caps and scarves. There were also donations of blankets and clothing that she organised women members of her church to distribute. Her youngest daughter, Sharon, remembers that this project was still in operation when she, as a little girl in the early 1970s, was tasked to assist with surveys in Western to establish needs and numbers of people who required help with clothes, blankets, fuel and food in the cold winter season. At this stage already, Ma Florrie started documenting, cataloguing and reporting methodically on how many items were received and the families in need.
Ma Florrie's eldest son, Andy, joined the Boys' Brigade in the early 1960s. The Boys' Brigade has its origins in Glasgow, Scotland. It was formed by a Sunday school teacher, William Alexander Smith, as a means of instilling "discipline" into adolescent boys and to try to develop their character in an orderly, Christian manner. The discovery of gold in Johannesburg resulted in flows of immigrants to South Africa (also) from the British Isles who first brought the idea of the Brigade to the Reef, for European youth (Adonis 1975, 78-9). The concept was the new clinic to be named the Florrie Daniels Clinic, but this has yet to happen.
Other achievements of the campaign included the mass action that led to WRAC challenging the construction of new houses in Westbury, as Lupton (1992) recalls: The militant struggle of Westbury residents in 1985 over the redevelopment of the township was centred on [issues of size health and design] Action against the construction was swift, foundations dug during the day by the LTA construction workers were filled in at night by residents. When it became apparent that that construction would continue, building sites were entered during the day, walls knocked down, and building material damaged, WRAC mobilised tenants through public meetings which culminated in a march to the Department of Housing in the [Johannesburg] city centre. Police suppressed the march with force and leading WRAC activists were detained. After a bitter confrontation the city council finally agreed that WRAC would be allowed to present alternative plans. In cooperation with a progressive architects' consultancy [Planact], WRAC made new proposals which incorporated many of the demands of tenants.
Planact is an organisation established in 1985 as a voluntary association of professionals who came together to assist community organisations to propose and advocate for alternative development plans to those of the apartheid regime, and then to facilitate a civic voice in policy development processes during the transition to democracy.
In Westbury, Florrie Daniels kept records of the activity she was involved with. Her activism covered community organisations she helped to establish around poverty alleviation, housing, sport, early childhood development, preventative healthcare, youth and women's organisations, as well as political and civic movements. Part of the collection survived security police raids when she protected them in an underground chamber in her backyard (Interviews: Daniels 2001;F. Daniels 2013;Sithole 2013). Her actions ensured that the memory of community action embodied in her collection is preserved. Among her records are the following: • Handwritten accounts of how community projects were started and some detail of organisational housekeeping since the 1950s.
• Meeting minutes, notes and reports compiled by the members of the organisations she started or was part of, including: Operation Winter Warm, Operation Self Help, Advice Office, and the Co-ordinated Residents' Action Committee.
• As noted earlier, she was a founding member of WRAC, an organisation that mobilised around inadequate housing, health and general civic matters. WRAC produced numerous pamphlets around specific issues and struggles as well as a monthly newsletter from 1979 to 1985 that was used as an organising tool. Her collection includes all pamphlets and copies of WRAC News.
• Advice office records. WRAC ran an advice office staffed by law students from Wits together with volunteers from the community and supported by lawyers from the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), an organisation that played a crucial role in providing legal services to the poor. These records include documents and details about the Westbury struggle for decent housing, giving an insight into the strategy of community action and legal processes that led to community input in infrastructure development.
• Details of the community consultation process and action that led to the Planact plans submitted to the Johannesburg Department of Housing.
• Details of processes associated with the health screening that WRAC undertook in

1984, including reports and a documentary film titled More Health Less Rent.
Her collection captures other voices in a range of publications that were used to help build organisation and create awareness through the interaction of WRAC with other civic groups, NGOs and political groups. Among them are the following: • All of the issues of Speak Community News produced by the Co-ordinating Residents' Action Committee (CRAC). CRAC was a federal structure for community organisations in the (then) Transvaal formed in 1983. Speak Community News was conceived when community organisations met at Wilgespruit Fellowship Centre, a sanctuary run by progressive theologians and educationists, and resolved to start a newspaper that would speak directly to the challenges facing poor communities with a view that collective strategies could be formulated to deal with common challenges.
The South African Council of Churches (SACC), and particularly Dr Byers Naude, provided the initial funding. WRAC members were key in the production of Speak Community News. Florrie Daniels kept records of the newspaper, including editorial and production meeting minutes, and unpublished material from townships across the province.
• Learn and Teach magazines that addressed issues faced by workers on the factory floor and in communities. Westbury activists contributed to and featured in some issues.
• Upbeat magazines aimed at youth, and other education material produced by the South African Committee for Higher Education (SACHED). Staff from the Labour and Community Project (LACOM), a project of the SACHED Trust, occasionally held workshops in Westbury.
• Arise! Vukani, produced by a left youth organisation, Action Youth. The collection consists of different media. Envelopes, containers and photographs are well marked and in relatively good condition. There are videos, a documentary film, visual and sound recordings that will need digitisation. There are also some objects like a typewriter, a Roneo duplicating machine used for producing pamphlets and newsletters, and the plaque of the WRAC advice centre with the wording: "For housing, job creation and many other projects.
Open Mon-Thurs. 10am-1pm." These objects typically belong in a community archive.
It is the collection kept by Florrie Daniels that inspired discussion about establishing a community archive. Her collection is the perfect basis for establishing a platform to expand and include information held by others in the form of artifacts, documents and oral histories that will uncover valuable lessons from lived experiences. Community memory embodied in an archive has the potential to turn those experiences and knowledge from below into useful structured educational and socio-economic interventions to break down the hegemony of official classification.
The collection has since been lifted by the UJ Library Special Collections, where the professional services of archivists are engaged to preserve, sort, and index it for optimal retrieval of information and for usage by researchers and activists. To establish and sustain the community archive, a number of concerns must be addressed. It is not sufficient to have a space and to gather community resources. On this issue, Flinn (2007, 168) contends that "[t]here are questions of custody and care for collections, experienced archivists must support the creators and custodians in the stewardship and preservation of the collections." Flinn calls it a post-custodial model where custody and care do not occur in a formal archive itself but happen in a distributed manner within the creating organisation where the records remain. In this case, UJ Library Services has agreed to assist with preserving the integrity of the collection together with activists from the community, and to a "joint custodial" model, with dual archives at UJ and in Westbury. The advantage of this model is that Library Services at UJ are breaking with tradition by helping to curate a collection within a community for broader benefit, beyond only academic research, as a site for community learning and organising. Activists are also acquiring invaluable skills in the process, and finding new ways of making local history accessible and relevant.

Building the Archive: Participatory and Collaborative Practice
The Westbury Community Archive created opportunity for participatory approaches with former and present activists and collaborative practice between activists, organisations and education institutions. It has inspired activists in other areas like Kliptown and Alexander Township to consider establishing community archives.
Building the archive is in itself a learning process. Staff members from the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) at UJ are helping to set up the archive with community organisations based at the Westbury Youth Centre. CERT evokes a range of participatory educational approaches, including popular education (Amsler et al. 2010;Torres 1992), action research and integrated people-centred development (Davids, Theron, and Maphunye 2009), and is using them to assist in the construction of the archive.
In establishing the Westbury Archive, many conversations about how it should be done gave rise to three focused discussion groups: one with former WRAC members who still reside in Westbury, and a second with veteran activists who were part of WRAC who have relocated and former members of CRAC. The third group is with members of organisations and projects that are currently active in the area. At first, a community history project was envisaged to be housed at the old Westbury library premises, with the collection made by Florrie Daniels as the foundation.
Former WRAC members who constituted the first group were concerned that the contribution they have made to organise the Westbury community would only be a vague memory in the minds of a few older people. They wanted a project to help younger people understand that many battles were fought with authorities to change the conditions in Westbury to be more conducive to promoting values that will build a strong community. They were also adamant that the community should take stock of the root causes of the challenges endured to encourage more people to be involved in building organisations.
The second group of veteran activists thought it important to revisit some of the techniques and methods of organising. There was a strong motivation for the reintroduction of Speak Community News to serve as an information source, a tool for networking and organising.
Based on its strong reputation of covering working-class issues in township communities in the 1980s, the group felt that present-day struggles of service delivery, substance abuse and other challenges faced by communities could be shared across geographic areas while also creating awareness of past activism as lessons. Four members from this group volunteered to serve on an editorial committee which has produced two issues of the revived Speak thus far.
Discussions about the community archive prompted the above two groups to start a secondary project. The Legacy Project was established to recognise many who have made valuable contributions to the people of Westbury and broader society. They felt it important to showcase the history of Westbury through the activism of a range of people from differing political persuasions. The Legacy Project (The Legacy Project 2015) preamble reads: The Legacy Project will honour our elders who have sacrificed so that we may be free. They interpreted the conditions of inequality, racism, exploitation and oppression; and devised responses in defiance of unjust laws and state repression. They persevere against all odds and give us courage to remain committed to total liberation of ourselves and our communities. Their words and their collective actions continue to inspire us to take forward the initiatives that are changing our lives and restoring our dignity.
There were also people from this community who chose to collaborate with the then authorities in the Tricameral Parliament and local councils, established by the apartheid government to allow for parliamentary and regional representation for "Coloureds" and "Indians." It was felt that an objective description of their involvement should be included to form part of a holistic historical account. Until now, the Legacy Project has honoured the contributions of Florrie Daniels, Gerald Braam (former rector of the Rand College of Education) and Mike Fetani (social rights and anti-substance abuse activist). All material generated by the activities of the Legacy Project will be incorporated into the Westbury Community Archive.
The third group, representing organisations that are active in Westbury, expressed concerns that despite efforts in the past by very committed people, the situation in Westbury continues to be challenging. One of the reasons cited is the lack of interest or active participation by more people. The projects they run offer vital services, but they are seen as a reliable presence for when they are needed. They felt that their work will have much more of an impact if the root causes of the issues that they deal with on a daily basis such as drug and substance abuse, teenage pregnancy, basic healthcare, trauma counselling, and even services like eye health, and mental health, could be located in the holistic picture of historical influences. Activists who staff these organisations were astonished to learn from more experienced members that so much has happened in the past that they were not aware of. Most of them make the connection as a means to better understand their role and the mission of their respective projects. They are keen to continue to promote the idea of community documentation of history from intergenerational dialogues. A master's student who lives in Westbury and who was part of this initiative is following up with the idea of intergenerational dialogues. This student has since taken up a teaching post at a primary school in the area, and has introduced her learners to local history as an auxiliary activity, using material from the archive.
Another group active in the area, "Readers are Leaders," that has a presence at all primary schools, has been inspired by the dialogues to consult the works of local authors like Don Mattera and Chris van Wyk, as well as others who have not been published. It has also started a programme of regular interactions between parents, knowledge holders and children. The process has unearthed some very good storytellers among retired community members, including an ex-teacher who has been inspired to make written submissions to the archive.
The archive will also benefit from research initiated by the Faculty of Arts Design and FADA students have exhibited their work, which includes laminated illustrations of possible design interventions to improve the quality of life in Westbury and the efficiency of organisations. Currently an honours student is doing her dissertation on the design for a community archive, and an illustrated history of Florrie Daniels is the subject of a master's thesis.

Conclusion
The people of Westbury were, and still are, involved in political battles, social challenges and survival struggles. Campaigns that emerge around basic issues faced by working-class people as a result of deprivation and inequality are often the platforms for refining strategies to build organisation. There is great value in including people in projects that create awareness, and in making the links within the wider historical context through the basic issue being addressed.
The Westbury Community Archive has created the space to revisit the past to inform current practice, and to document experiences in such a way that they provide lessons, ideas and guidance for future solidarity actions.
Over the past few years, Westbury has experienced intermittent violence, killings, rape and teenage suicides. According to most residents, recent levels of violence and killings in the area are fuelled by nefarious activities linked to destructive illegal drug trading, substance abuse, theft and related economies that have their roots in the spatial, political and economic legacy of oppression, deprivation and inequality. Presently, many organisations are actively pursuing solutions to these challenges. Among them are an organisation of former gangsters, Together Action Group (TAG), local radio station Kofifi FM, the Westbury Local Drug Action Committee (WLDAC), and a consortium of religious groups. They, together with organisations with a long-standing record of dealing with specific challenges, have been included in activity around establishing the archive. The co-creation of the archive with activists from Westbury and UJ, who are committed to participatory approaches, is leading to critical discussion, reflection and examination of current strategies to strengthen action to build emancipatory organisation.
The Westbury Community Archive has inspired veteran activists to revisit past struggles. It has developed a sense of collective ownership of the history as expressed through the Florrie Daniels Collection. It has stimulated initiatives like the Legacy Project to extract memories embodied in individuals and organisations. Community dialogues between older knowledge holders and younger people are augmenting an understanding and appreciation of historical factors that impact on current circumstances. Some of those who are active in community projects have a renewed appreciation for past activism and its impact on the work that they do.
It has inspired young activists to take a deeper interest in social issues in Westbury. Existing organisations that were consulted find value in talking about their own expertise and areas of activity in the broader historical context of Westbury and surrounding communities to make the work that they do more significant.