When we are conceived, long before we scream, crawl, smile, walk and mimic in our perfect child-state confusion, our world is defined, made up and constructed for us by those beings and things that mediate our arrival and entry on Earth and in society. The midwife delivers us into a world whose reality is shaped by prevailing circumstances, the primary networks of consanguinity that we are born into; the cultural, social, political and economic spheres. We are incepted into a world and context of things, both animate and inanimate, and become part of—according to pre-existing power relations—a defined, known, interpreted and continuing world. We become part of the present which is built on a concrete tapestry that is bound together through the threads of social and collective memory. Berger and Luckmann (1966, p. 13), in The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, make the point that “reality is socially constructed”.

As is the case with archives and records, memory—in its cultural, social and political expression—preserves and nourishes, and becomes a powerful repository of heritage in its material, spiritual and intangible manifestations, and acts as a potent tool for social construction. Social and collective memory means to know, to remember, to carry forward and to have a foundation for life. In African oral traditions, naming becomes crucial. Naming, labeling, categorising, organising—wars, drought, famine, abundance, victories, defeats, disasters—and all matters of the human condition that shape, form and shake the collective, are named and cast into memory.

In De Anima, Aristotle (1976) posits the notion of tabula rasa (a blank writing tablet) and the English empiricist John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) posits that “all the materials of reason and knowledge derived from experience” are attempts at accentuating the pre-eminence of this social force that humans are not born with, that are socially constructed, as Berger and Luckmann (1966) inform us.

The question is: On tabula rasa, who imprints? The naming of things, which nurtures memory, is not a neutral exercise. Naming is a contested terrain and therefore a political project. Naming signifies our relationship with the world as we see, interpret and explain it.