The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

Hoover Institution since 1962, preparing a guide to the 25‐reel microfilm record of the
Treason Trial. 18 This time, he asked Gwendolen Carter to work with him. During field
trips to Southern Africa in 1963 and 1964, both Karis and Carter collected and copied
further primary political materials and began to interview veteran political activists. 19
After Sheridan Johns and Gail Gerhart had joined the project, the hunt for political
materials was broadened to include further collections in South Africa as well as
archives, libraries and private collections in the United States and Britain. Further work
was done in other countries such as Zambia at the end of the 1960s when Thomas Karis
and Sheridan Johns spent spells at the university enabling them to discuss resistance
history with South African émigrés. The project was expanded from an initial plan of
one volume to four volumes. The publication in hardback of the four volumes under the
title From Protest To Challenge took place between 1972 and 1977. While publication in
this form involved a selection from the corpus of documents, all the assembled political
materials were copied on to 71 reels of microfilm in order to make the documents
available to scholars to the greatest possible degree. 20
18 Thomas Karis, The Treason Trial in South Africa: A Guide to the Microfilm Record of the Trial, Stanford:
Hoover Institution Press, 1965.
19 Thomas Karis and Gwendolen M Carter, From Protest To Challenge, Volume 2, Preface. One of the
early documentary publications that emerged from this line of work was a biographical one,
consisting of a selection of speeches of Reverend Zaccheus R Mahabane and biographical information.
See Gwendolen M Carter and Sheridan W Johns (eds), The Good Fight: Selected Speeches of Rev. Zaccheus
R Mahabane, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965.
20 Thomas Karis and Gwendolen M Carter, From Protest To Challenge, Volume 2, Preface; Peter Duignan,
‘Preface to the 1990 Printing’, in Thomas Karis and Gwendolen M Carter (eds), From Protest To
Challenge, Volume 4. Original hard copies of the documents (1882‐1964) were stored in boxes at Africa
House at Northwestern University where Gwendolen Carter was Director of the Program on African
Studies. Later these documents were moved to a research room at Northwesternʹs Melville J
Herskovits Africana Library where they were placed under the care of then curator, Hans Panofsky. I
had the good fortune to share a study space with these documents while at Northwestern in 1986‐7.
While the originals had been “deeded” to Northwestern, where they form part of the Africana
Library’s collection of rare material, “virtually all the material” was also made available on microfilm
in the care of and under the copyright of the Comparative Africana Microform Project (CAMP). See
Gwendolen Carter and Thomas Karis, ‘Preface’ in Susan G Wynne (Compiler), South African Political
Materials: A Catalogue of the Carter‐Karis Collection, Bloomington, Indiana: Southern African Research
Archives Project, 1977, pp i‐iii. In January 1999, the ‘“Karis‐Gerhart” Collection of South African
Political Materials 1964‐1990’ was filmed for CAMP onto 101 microform reels as a “continuation of the
Carter‐Karis collection”. The collection itself was lodged in the Cullen Library at Wits. See catalogue at
.
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