Below is a plan of a homestead from a private archive of Indigenous architectures in South Africa, Eswatini, and Lesotho. This archive, currently held in the South African province of KwaZulu Natal, consists of an extensive collection of sketches, architectural drawings, and photographs, produced and gathered by Professor Franco Frescura, during the 1970s and 1980s.¹ Heavily marked with dimension lines in contrasting red ink, the drawing is a setting-out plan, typically produced to depict site conditions as precisely as possible for material production. In this instance, Frescura employed layers of triangulation to capture the homestead’s metric layout. The drawing appears laborious and overly intricate. However, it aptly serves as an allegory for the complexities of producing globalized historiographies, illustrating the intersection of two distinct architectural traditions: Western and that of this Ndebele tribe.

The Frescura Archive was established to document vanishing Indigenous building practices in the (now former) South African homelands during apartheid.¹ Several factors contributed to the rapid transformation of the social and architectural landscapes of these homelands in the late twentieth century. These included industrial expansion plans that brought white urban industries into tribal territories, increased migration to urban areas, and a growing preference for non-traditional building materials, all of which contributed to the decline of Indigenous construction methods.²

Frescura’s drawings captured two stages of settlement production: the initial construction process and its subsequent reconstruction as detailed architectural plans. These artefacts act as a shorthand for the intricate network of social exchanges developed over generations, shaped by knowledge systems, environmental interactions, demand, and ownership. Architectural archives encapsulate this enduring social praxis through the interactions of creators, archivists, curators, and consumers, all of whom negotiate what is preserved and by whom.

Analyzing an Indigenous architectural archive presented in the traditionally Western format of technical drawings and annotations primarily involves examining interorganizational exchanges: the relationship between institutions and those who represent them. This anthropological framework can be applied to all Indigenous knowledge systems incorporated into the global (Northern) academic canon. These systems, treated as cultural commodities, are imbued with philosophies of reciprocity, traditions of consensus, divisions of labour, and stratified expertise. As the plan demonstrates, navigating the inevitable intersections between these Indigenous knowledge systems and Western institutional frameworks is a complex process that often privileges dominant biases and serves the interests of professional patrons.³

To address the challenges posed by these interorganizational exchanges, it is essential for the discipline of architectural history to embrace the multiplicity of interpretations inherent in the production of Indigenous architectural archives. Peter Blau suggests a framework for merging artefacts and interorganizational ecosystems (the environments where these exchanges take place):

“Relationships between the parts or elements of the structure create emergent processes that evolve from the interaction of the parts, but are not reducible to properties of the individual elements.”¹

Despite some bold, experimental interpretations of African architectural artefacts in recent years, the volume of what has entered the archive remains tentative, geographically limited, and subject to ongoing development.² The selection of what is preserved—and who benefits from such preservation—has long been influenced by local cultural dynamics. Traditionally, the architectural artefacts, which are selected for archiving are qualified by their antiquity, scarcity, and the monumentality of the project or its author. While this approach is valid, fostering a relationship between these characteristics requires leveraging the infrastructure and resources of Western institutions and adapting their principles to suit local contexts. This revised approach has the potential to form foundational principles for equitable and comprehensive architectural archive practices.

Fundamental to the development of an archive are its historiography and dissemination. How are these physical artefacts understood, interpreted, and shared? These two processes provide a model for facilitating inter-institutional dependencies while respecting their distinct contexts. They rely on individuals or groups to curate and maintain archives and oversee the public’s engagement with them. Cultural institutions that hold archives, for instance, depend on custodians, researchers, and disseminators, a model also employed by Professor Frescura.

Frescura first developed this archive as part of his postgraduate research at University of the Witwatersrand. For this purpose, it was a pre-requisite to present his case studies and empirical data in accordance with conventional architectural standards of the time. He continued his research with external funding and occasional assistance from student researchers. He also relied on a translator and local “informants”—residents and experts—who contributed valuable technical information to the database by way of demonstration and descriptive explanations. As the archive grew, so did the sophistication and consistency of its methods, encompassing site access, spatial data collection (both infrastructural and behavioural), and the creation of drawings of the settlement. Frescura published his findings and integrated them into his teaching at the University of the Witwatersrand and later the University of KwaZulu-Natal where they were included in his history curriculum.³

Multiple social exchanges shaped the process of selecting, collecting, and converting spatial historiographies into an Indigenous architectural archive. For instance, Frescura, a white man, conducted research in the segregated homelands, often within the intimate spaces of family residences within the compounds. These settings likely presented initial uncertainties for both the researcher, and I assume, the researched participants.

Such situations require committed exchanges to “reduce the power inequalities both within the exchange relation and within the network in which the relation is embedded.”¹ While mutual trust is crucial for these relationships, the associated risks and burdens often disproportionately affect Indigenous communities. Unequal exchanges at the outset of creating interorganizational harmony will inevitably result in unequal outcomes and beneficiaries. Further, they produce incomplete or misinterpreted archives and artefacts that are subsequently “legitimized” within the global historical canon, reinforcing a revised variant of the echo chamber the process initially sought to dismantle through integration.

Corrective historiographical practice, therefore, must be intricately entwined with dissemination efforts that foster solidarity within the framework of Indigenous archives. This requires broadening the definition of who constitutes an architectural professional, in addition to embracing the narratives prioritized by local custodians and historians, in all their varied forms. To produce and rehabilitate repositories of underrepresented narratives, credible collections of evidence-based stories entrusted to local experts for use as references could support and supplement new productions of architectural histories. Such an approach should ideally be applied not only to the creation of new archives but also retrospectively to existing Western archives of non-Western architecture, thereby scrutinizing canonized knowledge produced under unequal conditions.

We are, as a discipline, currently in an experimental phase of defining the structures and boundaries of inter-organizational archives. Establishing mediums and conduits for broader dissemination represents the first step towards reforming traditional archival institutions. As with historiography, dissemination is people-centred and operates through its own systems of reciprocity and exchange.

Karen Cook highlights the relational cohesion inherent in exchange theories, particularly those studying social commitments and order, as outlined by Edward J. Lawler, a social exchange and group process scholar:

“Lawler and his collaborators (e.g., Lawler et al., 2008) have explained how various types of exchange (reciprocal, negotiated, generalized, and productive) result in different levels of ‘microsocial order,’ reflecting the nature of the recurrent social interactions, emotional responses, perceptions of being a group, and affective sentiments directed at the group or network and subsequent attachment to the group. These are the elements of social order as it emerges at the microinteractional level. It is strongest when activities are joint (as is the case with productive exchange) and when the tasks involved generate a shared sense of responsibility (strongest in productive exchange and weakest in generalized exchange).”¹

Access is a significant component in the development of an Indigenous architectural archive. The common objective of improved access is to prevent omissions and losses in the artefact production process while making them available to a wider user and contributor community.

Architectural drawings currently serve as the primary representation for standard architectural artefacts. However, they are crafted in a professionally coded language intended for a specialized audience of trained analysts. Such drawings should not be excluded from Indigenous archives but should be produced alongside custodians of local spatial practices, who can in turn incorporate forms of drawing-based artefacts in their own archives. These are to include the local systems of measurement and preferred annotations. However, the aim is not to reduce a complex, interorganizational archival system to a collection of drawings, but to structure an intersection that can support “emergent processes.” Spatial practice drawings can be a shared, foundational language to facilitate an exchange of knowledge, and do not have to bear the same credence. What is considered a primary spatial artefact in an Indigenous archive should reflect the valued and prioritized system of knowledge-keeping. What is considered private, is to remain that way.

Developing mutually accessible platforms, however, remains a more complex challenge. Despite the widespread use of digital and cloud storage, online access to artefacts remains a privilege that is not available to many communities. It is therefore imperative for architectural institutions to establish sustained relationships to share archival developments and ensure that original artefacts remain in their consulted repositories. Institutions should also observe and conform to existing communal storage practices of Indigenous communities.

Adopting an anthropological approach for this project was driven by frustration with the false starts and performative, ineffective responses to integrating Western and non-Western knowledge systems into inclusive global archives. The concept of knowledge production from cultures and spaces considered “other” is perhaps a daunting exploit but should not be at the expense of inclusive and accurate scholarship. In fact, it may be time to retire the term “other.” Its etymology is a product of its time and a landmark of the methods of social exchange than are no longer effective. Further, now being a catch-all term that has, over years, acquired politically correct semantics that do not reflect its direct interpretation that very clearly describes the perceived proxemics from the west and the rest.

Outdated perspectives of the nature of Indigenous architecture and its archives have unfortunately been perpetuated by individuals and groups who cling onto outdated social identities, that profit from marginalization through curated optics. However, an encouraging number of architectural professionals are committed to reform and are actively contributing alternative practices and representation. Moving forward, the priority must be to embrace equitable social exchanges through the evidence and narratives.