IDASA stands for Institute for Democracy in South Africa and was formed in 1986 by Frederik van Zyl Slabbert and Alex Boraine. The institute was dissolved in 2013 and some of its documents and other material were donated to the Special Collections Manuscripts Section. In 2018 Special Collections started with the initiative of digitising the IDASA collection, starting with photographs. The collection consists of photographs, articles, correspondence, newspaper clippings, Dakar tape recordings, video interview recordings and voter education material, just to mention a few. A few of the IDASA materials were digitised and are hosted on SUNDigital Collections. This is a platform that showcases digital content from the Library and Information Service’s unique digital collections and repositories. IDASA is one of the few digital collections hosted on SUNDigital which are from our manuscript collections in Special Collections. More photographs are currently being digitised and will later be uploaded onto the platform. The reason why we put our collections on an open-access repository such as SUNDigital Collections is so that our clients will be able to access our collections without physically visiting our building and from the comfort of their own homes.

Below are images from the IDASA collection:

IDASA Citizen Leadership Course, Waterberg District

Photograph of Gay Rosenblum, Di Oliver, Richard Joseph from UNOMSA, Black Sash and the Carter Institute.

Author: Patricia Khati