‘Any person may, for the purpose of reference or research, inspect any public archives or recordings made available to the public subject to any conditions or restrictions imposed by the office, officer or person from whom the public archives or recordings were acquired’ – National Heritage Board Act (Chapter 196A).
‘30 years after our independence, the archives are starting to be opened, and the documents for this period are becoming available to historians. Progressively, a more complete picture will emerge’ – DPM Lee Hsien Loong 1997 at launch of National Education.
‘What we speak of here as the makers and keepers of Singapore history are broadly defined, signifying how the two terms are fluid and interchangeable. The PAP government, in its unquestioned role as the ‘victors of history’, falls clearly into the category of the ‘makers’. Perhaps less obviously, it also inhabits the role of the ‘keepers’, holding the keys to researching the past: it is the state through which access to government archives or even individual memories is mediated, whether explicitly or otherwise’ – Loh Kah Seng, ‘Encounters at the Gates’.
In exploring issues of gatekeeping, the contributors accept the basic premise that knowledge of the past helps cultivate a sense of belonging to Singapore and forge what political scientist Benedict Anderson has called an ‘imagined community’. It is through history that the citizen of the state which is deeply concerned with the pursuit of modernity recognizes that they are the leaves of a young tree. Or to use an analogy which perhaps will strike a more familiar note in a developmentalist context, in driving a car, one needs to check the rear-view mirror every now and then as a necessary safety measure when moving forward at high speed. – Loh Kah Seng, ‘Encounters at the Gates’.
‘The a2o public database on the university lists as many as 2,690 photographs but only a paltry seven government records in July 2007. Two years later, this set of statistics has been adjusted to 2,408 photographs and 24 textual files … The original seven textual records on offer for reading were extraneous files on proposed lecturers’ flats, a water pump house, the library’s electrical installation, and the setting up of plastic signboards. The recently added textual files opened for public access turned out to be mostly newspaper cuttings sourced from the Nanyang University itself but jealously hoarded all these years’ – Huang Jianli, ‘Walls, Gates and Locks: Reflections on Sources for Research on Student Political Activism’.
‘This essay attempts to continue the dialogue Loh has started and argues that there is a far more complex and complicated issue on using the archival records as evidence for the writing of history than getting past the ‘Keepers’ to the archival records they guard. The essay suggests reasons why even if historians get pass the ‘Gatekeepers’ they may not find the grail they seek’ – Kwa Chong Guan and Ho Chi Tim, ‘Archival Records in the Writing of Singapore History: A Perspective from the Archives’.
