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For much of the winter of 2012, communities in shack settlements across Cape Town took to the streets in some of the most active civil disobedience protests since 1994. Knowing that the mainstream political terrain often seeks to obfuscate and mislead the public about the true nature of these protests, this paper investigates claims by politicians from the Democratic Alliance (DA) that these protests were being coordinated by the Youth League of the African National Congress (ANCYL). These big political players moralize the debate, shifting the focus from the perfectly legitimate issues of service delivery and demands for meaningful engagement. Speaking directly to community members of Sweet Home Farm, an informal settlement of 15,000 people in the Philippi area, revealed a yawning chasm between what official players are saying about Sweet Home and the actual realities on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Inspired by recent scholarship that calls for a more critical engagement with archives and knowledge production, this article plots the biography of an archive in Cape Town. Unravelling the layers of paperwork, it locates the origins of the archive in a repressive state project of excluding Indian immigrants and controlling those within the borders of the Cape Colony. The paper trail reveals documents of identity and the state’s attempts to verify identity. In seeking to answer the question as to how the historian should approach such an archive of control and surveillance, it concludes that a social history and gendered approach to migration is possible and the real treasures are those documents that enter the archive beyond the limits of state intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]