The Centre for Popular Memory (CPM) is an innovative public service organization attached to the Department of Historical Stud

‘Your memories live longer than your dreams. Memories never fade, if you got a good memory. Those years will never come back again. But if you have memories like me, you can’t be lonely, because you have your memories.’ (Mrs. G.J.)

Listening to the power of memory, as expressed through oral testimony, is a central motive that drives the Centre for Popular Memory (CPM). The CPM is an innovative public service organization attached to the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past have left complex and painful legacies, which continue to affect the country into the present. As the CPM’s mission statement puts it, ‘People in South Africa have a dynamic but largely unrecorded heritage. The Centre creates spaces for these stories to be heard, seen and remembered’. Heritage studies, institutions and public history projects are growing in South Africa. The CPM is part of this growth, but also contributes in ways that mainline heritage organisations, such as museums and archives, are not able to. The Centre has the following core aims:

Building partnerships: The Centre for Popular Memory and the Matrix Center By:Sean Field
‘Your memories live longer than your dreams. Memories never fade, if you got a good memory. Those years will never come back again. But if you have memories like me, you can’t be lonely, because you have your memories.’ (Mrs. G.J.) Listening to the power of memory, as expressed through oral testimony, is a central motive that drives the Centre for Popular Memory (CPM). The CPM is an innovative public service organization attached to the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. South Africa’s colonial and apartheid past have left complex and painful legacies, which continue to affect the country into the present. As the CPM’s mission statement puts it, ‘People in South Africa have a dynamic but largely unrecorded heritage. The Centre creates spaces for these stories to be heard, seen and remembered’. Heritage studies, institutions and public history projects are growing in South Africa. The CPM is part of this growth, but also contributes in ways that mainline heritage organisations, such as museums and archives, are not able to. The Centre has the following core aims:
	Training: The CPM contributes to capacity building by providing specialised training in oral and visual history methods ofresearch, dissemination and archiving. · Research: The CPM conducts research through oral and visual recordings of people telling stories about their memories. · Dissemination: The CPM contributes to strengthening the public voices of disadvantaged people through the popularisation of their stories. · Archiving: The CPM conserves people’s stories for current and future generations through conventional and digital archiving methods.
These aims are fulfilled through building partnerships with local and international organisations. The partnership between the CPM and the Matrix Centre has been central to building the CPM in general terms, and more specifically to developing a digital audio-visual archive. The CPM has over 1000 hours of analogue audio interviews and 200 hours of video interviews. Most of these interviews are about community histories and anti-apartheid struggles in the Cape Town area. Since 2001 the Matrix Centre has trained the CPM staff in ways to digitise audio and audio-visual collections. Interviews will be digitised and in future clips of all these interviews will be available for listening and reading on our website: http://www.popularmemory.org. Furthermore, by the early 2003 a detailed archival catalogue of our collections will be available on the site. The digital preservation of these invaluable oral narratives, and their dissemination are entirely due to the partnership between the two Centres. While the Centres are at the opposite ends of the Atlantic Ocean, across several time zones, they have successfully built a partnership, which will continue to deliver useful and evocative outcomes for worldwide audiences.