Part V Making histories: introduction

From Canada, Jean-Pierre Wallot and Normand Fortier begin with an overview of the troubled relationship between archivists and oral history. Steeped in documentary sources, traditional archivists (unlike librarians) have been slow to recognize the potential that oral history has for what Jim Fogerty has referred to as ‘filling the gaps’ in archival collections.1 Not so in the developing countries of the South, where archivists have readily embraced oral testimony as a substitute for the lack of written archives.2