Your commitment to building archives and preserving memories is feverish, although you approach this work with a gentle touch. With an eye to the future, you are concerned with how the past has been documented and shaped by those with the power to do so. You also challenge other archivists to re-imagine their work and be more receptive to new ideas and ways of knowing. Like a jazz musician, you improvise on familiar archival methods to develop a more robust practice that places the pursuit of social justice at its core.



Verne Harris has been the archivist for the papers of Nelson Mandela since 2004, as Head of the Memory Programme at the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Centre of Memory and Dialogue.