The Struggle for Justice Programme (SFJ) is dedicated to preserving and creating access to archival collections that document the struggle against apartheid as well as the continuing struggles in the making of democracy in South Africa. Through the search, retrieval and preservation of hidden or forgotten stories in a variety of forms, SFJ places an emphasis on giving voice to marginalized histories.
The SFJ programme is responsible for ensuring SAHA’s archival collections are made available for consultation by researchers and other interested individuals who visit the SAHA offices in Johannesburg. Through the ongoing development of various projects and publications, often in partnership with other heritage, civil society and educational organisations, SFJ is also committed to bringing materials out of the archive and making them accessible in new and innovative ways both to researchers, and to communities who would not ordinarily make use of archives. By using archival materials as tangible evidence of memory to promote debate and interrogate grand narratives in South Africa, the function of archives moves beyond preserving only certain versions of the past into a role of prompting and documenting acts of remembering (thus creating new archive) on an ongoing basis.
Within the formal educational sector, SFJ is particularly interested in developing products that make use of primary source materials (including oral history and audiovisual material) to frame both historical and cross-disciplinary discussions about history, identity, memory, citizenship and democracy.