Our Philosophy
For Records Sake (FRS) is a digital storytelling platform that understands archives as a self-determined medium for truth-telling and narrative justice. This initiative is an extension of, and solidarity piece in collaboration with, Goma based cultural centre Yole!Africa. Here and now, FRS has a specific focus on Goma and the Eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Systemically targeting memory has the power to shape how people, places and histories are understood. Eastern DRC’s story is one of many that has been distorted, simplified and told through external lenses for decades. Much of the world has come to understand the region primarily through narratives of conflict, violence and crisis.
Through this external lens, narrative shifts become inevitable. When a place is predominantly represented through conflict, the communities intimately connected to it can become reduced to the circumstances surrounding them, positioned as passive subjects rather than active narrators of their own histories. The impacts of conflict reach further that land, bodies and communities; it also affects memory. The distortion, disappearance and displacement of memory are further consequences of conflict. When the ability to preserve and define one’s own memory is diminished, so too is the ability to shape one’s own narrative.
In this sense, targeting memory becomes a form of power and narrative control, a tactic that has been used throughout history. This can occur through the destruction, removal, suppression or adaptation of archives and other repositories of knowledge.
This demonstrates that violence does not only operate through the destruction of bodies, land or physical infrastructure. It can also operate through the destruction and manipulation of memory, by determining what can be remembered, what can be known, and whose version of history survives.
This knowing sits at the basis of For Records Sake. The platform is grounded in the belief that retaining and reclaiming memory is itself a form of resistance.
Archives are resistance.
Yole!Africa
Yole!Africa is a cultural centre, movement and philosophy which has been an epicentre within Goma and beyond for over 25 years. Yole collaborates with young people, artists, activists and communities within the region and abroad. Through harnessing storytelling and the principles of ancestral ecology, Yole!Africa responds to crises that centre self-determination and community.
With a vault full of archives, FRS has the privilege to be able to share these stories with the broader community, with the intention of cultivating knowledge that transcends negative and often incorrect portrayals of the region.
"Let war be our problem and peace be our emblem" - Yole!Africa
The Future
Over the coming year, FRS will focus on cultivating and testing this philosophy in a digital space.
We have ambitions to grow into a platform built around reciprocity, where knowledge is not just moving outward, rather in multiple directions.
This could take the form of online lectures, workshops, resources and, eventually, opportunities for members of the wider digital community to contribute their own submissions in alignment with our philosophy and approach.
Based on this intention, the immediate future will therefore be a period of trial, learning and listening.
We want to welcome feedback, remain open to change and allow the project to develop organically rather than deciding in advance what it must become.
Asante Sana!