Magister Artium - MA / This thesis is concerned with an uprising which occurred during the early morning hours of the 22nd of November 1962 in Paarl- a small agricultural town some 60 kilometres northeast of Cape Town. On this occasion a group of about 250 men, armed with axes, pangas and other home-made weapons, marched from the nearby Mbekweni township to the police station in the town's centre. An event, which lasted no more than three hours, left seven dead and several wounded in its wake. This uprising was a comparatively small event, with comparatively few casualties but it took place against the backdrop of the turn to armed struggle which followed the banning of the African National Congress (hereafter the ANC) and the Pan African Congress (hereafter the PAC). However in the sense that it seemed to directly threaten white civilians, this was an event constructed as most closely resembling the anti-colonialist Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya between 1952 and 1960 during which time press reports focused most often of the brutal killings of white women and children by groups represented as violent "terrorist gangs." Informed by this kind of over-simplified propaganda of the war in Kenya, the events in Paarl, particularly the killing of 17 year old Rentia Vermeulen and 21 year old Frans Richard, as well as the attack on an elderly couple in their bed, by men with "primitive weapons," incited massive latent white anxieties throughout South Africa and intensive repressive measures.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The work of the International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF) conducted between 1956 and 1991 gave rise to a collection of records that traverse 35 years of support work. As a solidarity organisation IDAF provided support to liberation movements in South Africa through their legal and welfare assistance programmes. Equally significant, IDAF also sought to highlight the oppressive machinery of the apartheid government through the deployment of their research, information and publications programmes as a way of creating awareness and ‘keeping the conscience of the world alive.’ When the administrative records of IDAF were relocated to South Africa, with the Mayibuye Centre for History and Culture as chosen location, they were turned into an archival collection which also became a memorial to IDAF’s resistance work located in the foremost anti-apartheid university and politically in a new project that intended to create a museum about apartheid. Later the collection was incorporated into the Robben Island Museum (RIM) through an agreement between the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and the Museum. The dissertation examines the cultural history and the political life of the IDAF archival collection and the processes through which it was made and continues to be remade.

The aim of this thesis is to introduce the The National Archival Collection of the Czech Republic (CR NKF). The library collection is absolutely unique in its main objective that is to collect all Czech and foreign bohemical printed and non-printed documents, including journals since 1901. This thesis aims to introduce this collection both in a historical and current context, especially via library line or through ongoing projects in cooperation with the CR NKF. In the end, the work exaplains long-term protection and preservation of modern library collections in foreign countries and compares it with the situation in the NKF in the Czech Republic.