Gender, challenges and slow research in archival projects. Lessons from the survey project “The archives of the women’s movements in Sudan (1940-2010)”

Résumé En

This intervention proposes to reflect about the results of an archival survey project on the private archives of several women’s associations that developed in Sudan after the Second World War, sponsored by the Modern Endangered Archives Project (UCLA). The project started from the observation that Sudanese historiography, especially in English language, is marked by a rarity of works on all aspects of women’s history. For us, one of the multiple causes of this overarching exclusion was their absence in colonial and national official archives that would collect, organise and centralise information about them. In other words, Sudanese women lacked an “archive on their own”, and we wanted to begin to palliate to this absence.After 16 months of survey project, it is time to review its lessons. First, we discovered an gap between the enthusiasm of the staff and the cautious reaction of the activists. Second, our interlocutors did not show their archive unless they trusted the staff. This trust, related to gender issues in Sudan, went beyond political affiliations or the security situation, and was related to the building of reciprocal affective links. After gender, other elements that affected the survey were the belonging to different social classes, the ‘historical capital’ of a family, and the different degree of vulnerability of the interlocutors. Perhaps, the main lesson we learnt from this project is that if we want to build a women’s archive in Sudan, we need to accept slower archiving, slower research, but also greater personal implication and affects.