The Centre for Innovation and Technology (CITE) has launched a regional archive to record the memories of people who lived through Southern Africa’s liberation wars.
The Frontline States Liberation Archives will document the struggle through the testimony of those who fought in it, supported it and survived it.
Many of the people it hopes to interview are now in their seventies and eighties.
“Every month, some of these witnesses die,” CITE director Zenzele Ndebele said. “When they die, parts of our history disappear with them – because their experiences were never recorded and their stories never entered the official archives.”
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The project will be officially launched later this month.
The archive combines the existing ZPRA Liberation Archives with the histories of liberation movements and frontline communities across the region.
Its reach extends into Zambia, Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania and Angola, as well as Namibia and South Africa – countries that became transit routes, training grounds, refugee camps and battlefields.
CITE says the record will go well past political leaders and military commanders.
It intends to gather accounts from combatants and women guerrillas, but also from refugees, political detainees, couriers, villagers and families split apart by the war.
“This is not only the history of generals and politicians,” Ndebele said. “It is the history of the woman who hid fighters in her kitchen, the driver who carried weapons across a border, the nurse who treated the wounded, and the village that buried young men whose families never knew where they died.”
Much of the region’s liberation history has been told through official speeches, state institutions and political biographies, the organisation argues. Those accounts are important, it says, but incomplete.
Thousands of people took part in the struggle without ever appearing in a history book. Others still hold photographs, letters and diaries in boxes and suitcases at home.
Some families know only fragments – a father who left as a teenager and came back a soldier, without ever explaining the years in between.
The archive will collect interviews, documentaries, photographs, maps, written testimonies and digitised documents, and make them available to families, schools, journalists, historians and researchers.
CITE is raising money through a membership scheme rather than waiting on donor cycles. Contributions of $50, $100 or any other amount can be made through the Paynow platform.
People who join before the end of October 2026 become Foundational Members. Those who sign up within the first 60 days of the launch are named founding members for life, with their names carried on the archive and acknowledged in its first collections.
Members will get a monthly newsletter, early sight of material before publication, invitations to conversations with veterans and historians, and a say in which stories the archive pursues next.
The money will pay for recording trips, documentary production, digitisation and the training of young researchers across the region.
Ndebele said the material would not be locked away.
“The archive will never disappear behind a paywall,” he said. “This history belongs to everyone. Membership is not about owning it – it is about helping to preserve it.”
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