The Memory of Belonging: Creating Community in the Sudan Archive

'Accession' is both a term for acquisition of materials by an archive and also for formal acceptance or initiation into a group or an association. This paper analyzes the Sudan Archive at the University of Durham, founded the year of Sudanese independence in 1956, as a location of retro-active community formation for former British administrators in the Sudan and members of their families. The methodology of acquisition established by the Archive's founders in its initial years is, however unself-consciously, an interesting prefiguration of contemporary curatorial attitudes towards archives and their role as creative collaborators in community identity formation. From its inception, in a deliberate effort to grow the Archive, all Britons and Sudanese with any biographical connection to the Sudan under British rule were invited to contribute materials. The resulting accessions act as proxies for donors, and the Archive, rather than preserving the community of the British administration as it stood, has evolved into a far more egalitarian one because previously silenced or marginalized voices now have equal shelf space - equal community presence. We find the fearless declarative statements of a young and callow official being confronted by the more nuanced analysis of his older self. Multiple perspectives of a single event now permanently challenge the official word. An individual's private letters offer a running commentary on his public actions. The masculinity of the colonial endeavor is challenged by wives' contributions, and by husbands' self-declared dependence on wives' memories in order to write their own monographs and memoirs. And so it is argued in this paper that creating an archive intended to and assert the narrative of a lost community - the British in the Sudan - has instead created a new community. Through the continuing process of accession, the collective memory alters British-Sudanese identity through the act of preserving it.