Image 1 ~ © Larry Herman; image 2 ~ Hernando Fernandez papers; image 3 ~ Scottish Anti-Apartheid Movement papers; image 4 ~ © Bob Starrett; image 5 ~ Robert Climie papers

Michael Chaiken, Archivist and Curator of the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma, recently wrote that the “archivist’s impulse…affirms that what has come before can be made eternally alive and present, provided, as Nietzsche reminds us, that what we are celebrating in our own history is not an end in itself, but a means of serving life through a fundamental continuity with the strengths of our past.”

To this end, as a neat visual rendering of this impulse, our Archivist, at the tail end of a year in which some posited that we needed to be reminded of our collective past in the light of certain re-emergent nihilistic tendencies, decided that our shiny, new (but very stark, white) Reading Room required a frieze to adorn it’s walls. A series of images, illustrating the depth and breadth of GCU’s Archives & Special Collections, were then carefully selected, and in the week before Christmas the stars at our Print Design Services worked their magic on our walls.

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In 2016 Sandy Hobbs added a large cartoon/comic related deposit to his existing collection at GCU. Our debut exhibition of 2017 is ‘Free to Draw: Cartoonists and their Politics’, which draws from both Sandy’s material and from Bob Starrett’s papers. As an introduction Sandy has kindly penned a blog for us ~

In the 1990s, when I moved material from my home to GCU to form what became the Sandy Hobbs Collection, the basic loose principles of selection were that  what was included would be POLITICAL  and from my PAST. Some of what I retained at home might well have gone, but other considerations were at work. Some correspondence with my still living friend Jean McCrindle seemed more personal than political. Writings by E. P. Thompson I kept by me because I still felt the need to consult it regularly. Continue reading →

Eight months ago when I first began working on the Scottish Committee of the Anti-Apartheid Movement Archive I thought that I would largely be working on papers that had either a focus on South Africa, or Scotland and the UK’s efforts to draw attention to and end the apartheid regime. Naturally, these papers did form an extensive part of the collection, however I found a significant amount of files and papers related to Namibia and a group of countries that formed the Frontline States which bordered, or were in close proximity, to South Africa, these included Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. These countries all played their part in helping to support the global anti-apartheid movement and bring an end to the terrible regime.

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This October will see Glasgow Caledonian University take part in the UK wide Black History Month. During this month organisations across Britain will remember and celebrate important people and events in the history of the African diaspora. It has been running yearly in the UK since 1987 where it was first celebrated in London, but has now spread across the country with a huge range of fascinating events taking place. It is also celebrated annually in the United States and Canada but during the month of February.

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