Aljoscha Tillmanns, a PhD student in history at the University Duisburg-Essen, Germany, visited the Alan Paton Centre and Struggle Archives from 29 September to 13 October 2017. In Essen, he is part of the postgraduate programme “Precaution, prevision, prediction: managing contingency” funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). His PhD project is about Inkatha and their political action during the 1980s, for which the APC holds great archival material. In the past years, he also conducted some research on cooperation of the German Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (Konrad Adenauer Foundation) and other German institutions with Inkatha. His broader interests are South Africa’s history during the 20th century, especially Apartheid and resistance to Apartheid, but also the history of Zimbabwe and Namibia. At the APC, Aljoscha Tillmanns consulted the collections of former members of the Buthelezi Commission and the KwaZulu Natal Indaba, but also the magnificent Natal Room collection compiled by Gerhard Maré. During his stay in South Africa, he visited the Campbell Collections and the Durban Archives Repository as well as several libraries of UKZN and the UNISA archives. Due to the rare collections of the APC, he plans to return to the APC in 2018.
