Writing in stone

Makare is Shona for the distant past: long ago, the time of the ancestors. It is the word you reach for when something happened further back than anyone alive remembers.

Houses of stone

Between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, Shona ancestors built a city of dry-stone walls in what is now Masvingo. No mortar holds them; the stones simply fit. They are still standing. The country took its name from them. Zimbabwe, from dzimba dza mabwe, houses of stone.

Those builders left a record that outlived every empire that came afterwards, and they did it without writing a word. The medium was the message: build it so it cannot be edited, and it will still be there to argue with in six hundred years.

Stone was not enough

But durability alone did not protect the truth. For most of the last century the colonial government of Rhodesia insisted the ruins could not have been built by Africans, and pressured archaeologists who said otherwise. The stones survived intact while the account of who made them was actively falsified.

That is the lesson this archive is built on. A record that lasts is not the same as a record that can be trusted. What makes it trustworthy is knowing where it came from, who held it, how it reached you, and what is missing. That is why nothing is accepted here without that account attached, permanently, to the thing itself.

What this archive promises

Makare preserves documents by recording, permanently, that a specific file existed at a specific time with a stated methodology attached. The record is written to Arweave and timestamped against Bitcoin. Neither can be edited afterwards, by us or by anyone.

What it does not promise

It does not promise the contents are true. Nothing here has been peer reviewed or subjected to the scientific method, and every record says so in its own permanent text. Read the methodology before you rely on anything.

Why the files live on ordinary storage

Documents are served from our own storage; only the record of them is permanent. That is a deliberate limit, and it is also what lets us stop serving material that turns out to be illegal. The permanent record persists, our servers stop republishing it.

Withholding and removal

What we can do

Stop serving documents from our own storage, and delete them from it entirely.

What we cannot do

Remove the record from Arweave or Bitcoin. Nobody can, including us. That is the point of the archive and also its risk.

What we record

Every withholding and deletion is logged with a reason and an actor, including reversals.

What stays visible

Normally the methodology stays public even when documents are withheld, so the fact of the record, and of the takedown, remains part of the public account. It is hidden only when the metadata is itself the harm.

For whoever reads this later

Everything here is addressed by the hash of its own contents, so any copy anywhere can be checked against the original without asking us, or needing us to still exist. If this site is gone by the time you find a record from it, the record is still verifiable. That was the point.