Terry Bell: In "ANC archives were 'properly stored'" (September 5) Dr Mvoyo Tom is correct in stating that the archives were housed in the Howard Pim Africana Library in the basement at Fort Hare University.

What he does not say is that there was a room in the archive in which "sensitive" records were kept; records that were deemed inopportune to open for at least 30 years.

I know this because I and my researcher and wife, Barbara, spent considerable time in the archive on several occasions while researching books and articles. That was when I came to hear of the "other" records, kept under lock and key, but was refused access to them.

These "closed" records, together with the rest of the archive, were moved earlier this year to the new liberation movement archive in a building sponsored by the Anglo American Chairman's Fund and the DeBeers Fund. It was here that some of the previously inaccessible material was apparently accessed. And it is this "closed" section of the archive that has again been made inaccessible following reports in the Sunday Times.

But the "Mandela documents" quoted in your newspaper are only a tiny part of the thousands of documents relating to various aspects of the ANC in exile that the powers that be in Luthuli House have decreed should not be seen by this generation. Among these documents are references to what happened at various times at the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College (Somafco) in Tanzania, the "rehabilitation centre" at Dakawa, also in Tanzania and, apparently, some extremely sensitive reports about the goings-on in Angola.

What is there to hide? And why should anything from that time be hidden? These are the questions that should - and must - be asked.

If, as I hold to be true, the shape of the shoots of the future are dictated by the roots of the past, we had better have access to these closed archives in order to purge our future from possible corruption and corrosion that could be seeping in from that past.