Lessons Learned: Old Documents Exist in Old Buildings

Several weeks ago, a friend introduced me to the Assistant Director of Mali’s National Archives. He and my friend went to college together, and my friend insisted that it would be a good idea to meet with him. Eh, I thought. Can’t hurt. I told him a bit about my research, and he immediately asked: “Have you been to the old Grandes Endemies? L’Ancien Institut Marchoux?” No, I said. I spent much time last summer trying to track down historical public health-related documents at the current National Health Management Office and the Ministry of Health—wondering why the only centre de documentation at either place seemed to be a small room filled with pamphlets published by the Malian government and the WHO. No, no, no, he explained. Those are new buildings. They won’t have the old documents. I am beginning to understand.

At the Ancien Institut Marchoux, now called the National Center for the Fight Against Disease, I found the archivist chatting in a courtyard in the Center’s large compound. He took me over to an old-looking building tucked into a corner of the compound, and opened the door, warning me about the dust. Unfortunately, it seems, old documents in old buildings are rarely in good condition. Boxes spilling over with old papers littered the floor. In the next room, shelves sagged under the weight of so many years of paper. My most striking find was large stacks of photographs of lepers posed so as to show off their most unsightly leprous features to the camera, and to us. Next to these was a copy of the collected works of Vladimir Lenin—perhaps a remnant of Mali’s strong Socialist ties during its First Republic in the 1960s. These next to hundreds of copies of old medical journals—the Tropical Diseases Bulletin, Annales de Medecine et de la Pharmacie Coloniale, Bulletin Medicale de l’AOF—sitting on shelves underneath shelves of unlabeled boxes of papers covered in dust and animal feces. Then, in the National Archives several days later, I found a file with the order slips for these scientific journals. So many copies of the Bulletin de Pathologie Scientifique and the Annales de l’Institut Pasteur, ordered in 1946, and now sitting in the same building where they were likely initially deposited, collecting dust.

The Grandes Endemies “archive” is even more disordered—both the product of neglect and, apparently, an administrative turf war that relegated archival space to a too-small, otherwise unusable room at the edge of the compound, where the light has since stopped working and the dust is quietly taking over. Boxes upon boxes of documentation surrounding the creation and extension of the privatized health care system in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the reams of paper created surrounding World Bank and USAID-financed development projects in the mid-1980s (accounting for every last US Dollar spent), dominate the most accessible part of the building. But, strewn on the floor and buried behind and beneath unused storage boxes are inspection reports from the Hygiene Service in the early 1980s, and descriptions of the visit of an Israeli team of doctors to Mali in the early 1970s. Here, it seems, the archive was moved at some point—but not far. Just far enough to create desperately needed work-space as the public health bureaucracy expanded beyond the imperatives of its colonial origins.