Archives, the Digital Turn, and

Governance in Africa
Fabienne Chamelot, Vincent Hiribarren and
Marie Rodet

Abstract: With the rise of information technology, an increasing proportion of public

African archives are being digitized and made accessible on the internet. The same is
being done to a certain extent with private archives too. As much as the new technol-
ogies are raising enthusiasm, they have prompted discussion among researchers and
archivists, on subjects ranging from matters of intellectual property to sovereignty
and governance. Digital archiving disrupts archival norms and practices, opening up
a field of reflection relatively little explored by historians. This article therefore seeks
to reflect on the digital turn of African archives as a subject for study in its own right,
located at the crossroads of political and economic interests.

History in Africa, Volume 47 (2020), pp. 101--118

Fabienne Chamelot is a PhD student at the University of Portsmouth. Her research
explores the making of colonial archives in the twentieth century, with French
West Africa and the Indochinese Union as its specific focus. She has an MA in
Social Sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the
École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Before embarking on her PhD she worked
in non-fiction publishing in France. E-mail: [email protected];
Vincent Hiribarren is Senior Lecturer in Modern African History at King’s
College London. He is the author of two monographs on the history of Borno.
Interested in Digital Humanities, he has obtained three grants from the British
Library “Endangered Archives Programme” and is on the board of the UCLA
“Modern Endangered Archives Program.” E-mail: [email protected];
Marie Rodet is Senior Lecturer in the History of Africa at SOAS University of
London. Her research interests lie in the field of migration history, gender
studies and the history of slavery in West Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. From 2008 to 2010 she managed a project to salvage archival materials
in Kayes, Mali covering hundred years of its history. In 2016 she initiated a similar
pilot project with the support of the British Library Endangered Programme to
digitize archives in Kita, Mali. In 2018 she secured a British Library major grant to
digitize the entire colonial collection (1889–1960). E-mail: [email protected]

© African Studies Association, 2019

doi:10.1017/hia.2019.26
101

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 102 History in Africa

Résumé: Avec l’essor des technologies de l’information, de plus en plus d’archives

africaines publiques (et dans une certaine mesure privées) sont numérisées et
rendues accessibles sur Internet. Même si ces nouvelles technologies suscitent
l’enthousiasme, elles génèrent également des discussions entre chercheurs et archi-
vistes, qui vont de la propriété intellectuelle à la souveraineté en passant par la
gouvernance. L’archivage numérique perturbe les normes et les pratiques archivis-
tiques et conséquemment ouvre un champ de réflexion relativement peu exploré
par les historiens. Cet article cherche à offrir une réflexion sur le virage numérique
pris par les archives africaines en le considérant comme un objet d’étude à part
entière situé au carrefour d’intérêts politiques et économiques.

Introduction1

As information technology has become more significant, steadily more

African archives, both public and – at least to an extent – private ones,
are being put into digital formats and made accessible on the internet.
The gathering wave of digitization is usually seen as progress, as ambitious
initiatives help to apply new technologies to cultural heritage, such as
the rescue of the manuscripts of Timbuktu or the Endangered Archives
programme at the British Library. Yet as much as the new technologies
have raised enthusiasm, they have caused debate too among researchers
and archivists, who are having to address concerns about intellectual prop-
erty rights, and things like sovereignty and governance.
The digitization of archives has opened technical opportunities to
negotiate tension between African and European countries on matters
related to colonial archives, their ownership, and legacy. The questions
relate to the challenges of “shared memory” and “shared history” as well
as to “decolonization,”2 or at any rate that has been the rationale for the
presentation of digital copies on the international political scene and in
various media. As an example, digitization has meant that the colonial
archives kept in the Museum of Tervuren in Belgium might now be given
back to the Rwandese government,3 while in 2014 a digitized copy of the

1 The authors would like to thank Yann Potin, along with the scholars who

kindly suggested changes to our introduction at the European Conference of African

Studies (2019) and those who agreed to participate in the peer-review process.
2 Abdoulaye Imorou, “Thiaroye, Oradour-sur-Glane et les défis d’une

mémoire partagée. Une lecture croisée de Camp Thiaroye et du Vieux Fusil,” Études
Littéraires Africaines 40 (2015), 61–76; Osmane Mbaye, “Le CAOM: Un Centre
d’Archives Partagées?” Afrique & Histoire 1–7 (2009), 291–299; John Lagae, “From
‘Patrimoine Partagé’ to ‘Whose Heritage?’ Critical Reflections on Colonial Built
Heritage in the City of Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Afrika
Focus 21–1 (2008), 11–30.
3 “La Belgique va rendre au Rwanda les archives de la période coloniale,”

RTBF.be (8 September 2018), https://www.rtbf.be/info/belgique/detail_la-

belgique-va-rendre-au-rwanda-les-archives-de-la-periode-coloniale?id=10031374,
accessed 7 February 2019.

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 Archives, the Digital Turn, and Governance in Africa 103

records of the 1944 massacre in Thiaroye could be presented to Macky

Sall, President of Senegal, by then French President François Hollande.4
However, such initiatives do not go without controversy and debate,5
which shows that beyond the strict technical aspects, archives carry with
them their share of political issues. In that sense, debates over digitization
are to be understood as a continuation of long-running problems and
controversies over archives, notably colonial archives and microfilming.6
At the same time, expectations are great among scholars who might
see the overall digitization process as an opportunity to “dematerialize”
access to archives and to lay firmer hold on their sources without always
exploring the implications and complexity of such a process as applied to
archives. The focus in scholarly debates more often revolves around the
production of knowledge and the reliability, or “truth,” of sources, and
while those aspects are essential to contemporary research, the whole subject
of the politics of the making of conventional archives – let alone that of
digitized ones – is less often addressed.
The first point to make, in the digital era, is that the question of own-
ership of documents is a crucial one, since the very definition of archive
is challenged. The unique “hard copies” of paper documents can now exist
in a variety of formats potentially reproducible at will. New possibilities
have arisen for potential partnerships, and those possibilities bring their
own challenges with them in terms of access and accountability. Secondly,
various technical and economic matters at stake are equally essential to
the discussion and are intertwined with the matter of sovereignty. African
institutions elaborating a digitization programme might be doing so at

4 Martin Moure, “Thiaroye 1944. Histoire et mémoire d’un massacre,” Africa4,

Libération (16 August 2017), http://libeafrica4.blogs.liberation.fr/2017/08/16/

thiaroye–1944-histoire-et-memoire-dun-massacre/, accessed 7 February 2019.
5 Stéphanie Trouillard, “Massacre de Thiaroye: 70 ans après, les zones

d’ombre demeurent,” France24.com (1 December 2014), https://www.france24.

com/fr/20141128-massacre-thiaroye-commemoration-senegal-dakar-tirailleurs-
armee-france-polemique-historien, accessed 7 February 2019; Stéphanie Trouillard,
“Massacre de Thiaroye en 1944: A quand la fin de l’obstruction à la manifesta-
tion de la vérité?” Le Monde Afrique (1 December 2016), https://www.lemonde.
fr/afrique/article/2016/12/01/massacre-de-thiaroye-en–1944-a-quand-la-fin-de-l-
obstruction-a-la-manifestation-de-la-verite_5041553_3212.html, accessed 7 February
2019.
6 Jean-Pierre Bat, “Les Archives de l’AEF,” Afrique & Histoire 7 (2009), 301–311;

Todd Shepard, “‘Of Sovereignty:’ Disputed Archives, ‘Wholly Modern’ Archives,

and the Post-Decolonization French and Algerian Republics, 1962–2012,” American
Historical Review 120–3 (2015), 869–883; Nathan Mnjama and James Lowry, “A Proposal
for Action on African Archives in Europe,” in: James Lowry (ed.), Displaced Archives
(London: Routledge, 2017), 101–113; Vincent Hiribarren, “Hiding the Colonial
Past, A Comparison of European Archival Policies,” in: James Lowry (ed.), Displaced
Archives (London: Routledge, 2017), 74–85.

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 104 History in Africa

the initiative of donors or non-African scholars, so that such archives are

affected by negotiations that go far beyond the simple technical and scien-
tific aspects.
In the field of history, archives are usually addressed as sources for
research and are questioned as such because of their documentary and
historical aspects. More rarely are they approached as historically con-
structed systems combining intellectual and physical dimensions in the
way archival science theorizes them. Digital archiving therefore disrupts
archival norms and practices, so opening up a field of reflection relatively
little explored by historians. The digital turn of African archives is therefore
an object of study in its own right, standing at the crossroads of political
and economic interests.
In addressing the wave of digitization of archives in Africa over the last
fifteen years, this featured section of History in Africa therefore seeks to
reflect on the practices of digitization of archives in Africa and to engage
with both history and archival science.

What Is Exactly “An Archive”

A remarkable enthusiasm for archives as an object of study has kept many

scholars busy in the last decades, scholars from a wide range of disciplines
in the humanities, from philosophy to the arts. Numerous academic debates
and discussions on archives have been prompted in the light of Foucault’s
The Archeology of Knowledge7 and Derrida’s Archive Fever,8 and postmod-
ernism more generally. Indeed, the “archival turn” in cultural studies has
recently stretched the meaning of the word “archive” and shifted “archives
as concrete places to archives as more abstract – but just as real – conditions
of knowledge.”9 From that perspective the concept of “archive” (in the
singular) seems to be able not only to encapsulate a variety of objects and
entities such as oceans for example, but could also be “performed.”10
Nevertheless, Michelle Caswell reminds us that “the archive is not an

7Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972).

8Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1996).
9 Jussi Paprikka, “Archival Media Theory. An Introduction to Wolfgang Ernst’s

Media Archaeology,” in: Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archives (Minneapolis/
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1–22, 4.
10 Renisa Mawani, “Archival Legal History. Towards the Ocean as Archive,” in:

Markus D. Dubber and Christopher Tomlins (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Legal History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 291–310; Maëline Le Lay, “Performer
l’archive pour réécrire l’histoire: l’exposition Congo Far West au Musée royal de
l’Afrique centrale de Tervuren,” in: Maëline Le Lay, Dominique Malaquais and
Nadine Siegert (eds.), Archive (Re)mix. Vues d’Afrique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
Rennes, 2015), 107–123.

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 Archives, the Digital Turn, and Governance in Africa 1
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archives,” and that work and research from the field of archival studies
are often omitted from recent scholarship on archives.11 The very word
“Archive” has come to be used to describe an all-encompassing notion, and
in the process has perhaps lost some of its clarity, to the point that Kate
Theimer argued in 2014 that confusion exists between the term “archives”
and what could simply be called “historical representation” based on a
selection of documents from the past.12 As a result, the term “archives”
now tends to be vaguely defined and is often overused in relation to legacy,
narrative, and knowledge.
However, or maybe for that reason, the echo of postmodernism in the
field of archival science and some of the debates over it contrasted one
another.13 As stated by Rachel Hardiman: “Although postmodernist ideas
have their origins in fields external to the recordkeeping world, their
impact and pervasiveness is such that, accepted or rejected, they cannot be
simply ignored.”14 The postmodernist critique, when specifically directed
at the production of knowledge and historiography and especially but not
only in relation to Africa, has uncovered the limits of a “positivist” approach to
knowledge and demonstrated the relevance of examining and re-examining
the making of archives as well as of history. “Archives” have themselves
become a subject of study going beyond the professional activities of archi-
vists and historians. Antoinette Burton, for example, has written about evi-
dence, narrative, and the archive.15 Anthropologists like Ann Laura Stoler
have begun to use archives in their own research and have theorized their
use.16 Many researchers have engaged with the subject and have produced
thought-provoking works about the articulation between colonial narrative

11 Caswell, Michelle L., “‘The Archives’ is not an Archives: On Acknowledging

the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies,” Reconstruction: Studies in Contem-

porary Cultures 16–1 (2016), 10–11, <https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7bn4v1fk>,
accessed 13 June 2019.
12 Kate Theimer, “A Distinction Worth Exploring: ‘Archives’ and ‘Digital

Historical Representations,’” Journal of Digital Humanities 2–3 (2014), http://

journalofdigitalhumanities.org/3–2/a-distinction-worth-exploring-archives-
and-digital-historical-representations/, accessed 20 December 2018.
13 For an article providing a comprehensive summary of the postmodernist

debate within the archive science community as well as an extensive bibliographic

reference list, see: Terry Cook, “Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formu-
lations for Old Concepts,” Archival Science 1–1 (2001), 3–24.
14 Rachel Hardiman, “En Mal d’Archive: Postmodernist Theory and Record

Keeping,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 30–1 (2009), 27–44.

15 Antoinette M. Burton, Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History

(Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

16 Ann Laura Stoler, ”Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the

Content in the Form,” in: Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G. Rosenberg (eds.),
Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory Essays from the Sawyer Seminar
(Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 267–279.

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 106 History in Africa

and archives.17 Archivists themselves of course, explore the topic and are
able to further the theoretical reflection from their concrete, practical
perspective.18
The works of those writers, and the whole field more broadly, are
essential to the examination of the production of knowledge. Such writers
focus on content and narrative, and therefore engage with archives as
documents. Yet another notion, often overlooked by historians, defines
archives as the fonds, which is the basic unit for their classification rather
than documents or records. When designing classification systems, archi-
vists work to identify and bring to light the function of the governing
body that produced a given document, and they consider that function
within its larger administrative framework. In short, they seek the “why”
of the documents and not the “what.” Anyone might file documents in
a specific and personally suitable manner, depending perhaps on equip-
ment, habits of work, or some particular approach. In the same way, a
governing body will order documents in a way specific to its own organi-
zation and rationale.
That is an essential feature of archives and understanding it is crucial
to being able to grasp the difference between archival science and library
and information science:

An archival collection is an organic whole, a living organism, which

grows, takes shape, and undergoes changes in accordance with rules. If
the functions of the body change, the nature of the archival collection
changes likewise. The rules which govern the composition, the arrange-
ment and the formation of an archival collection, therefore, cannot be
fixed by the archivist in advance; he can only study the organism and
ascertain the rules under which it was formed. Every archival collection
has, therefore, as it were, its own personality, its individuality, which the
archivist must become acquainted with before he can proceed to its
arrangement.19

17 To name a small selection: Abena P.A. Busia, “Creating the Archive of

African Women’s Writing: Reflecting on Feminism, Epistemology, and the Women

Writing Africa Project,” Meridians 17–2 (2018), 233–245; Shiera S. El-Malik and
Isaac A. Kamola (eds.), Politics of African Anticolonial Archives (London/New York:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2017); Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, “Archival Fever,” Dipsaus podcast
(30 December 2018), https://www.dipsaus.org/exclusives-posts/2018/12/29/
ihbijoa397wfc7xsghodvlr2l6wlvn, accessed 7 February 2018.
18 Ellen Ndeshi Namhila, “Content and Use of Colonial Archives: An Under-

Researched Issue,” Archival Science 16 (2016), 111–123; Ellen Ndeshi Namhila,

“Archives of Anto-Colonial Resistance and the Liberation Struggle (AACRLS),
An Integrated Programme to Fill the Colonial Gaps in the Archival Record of Namib-
ia,” Journal for Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences 4–1/2 (2015), 168–178.
19 Samuel Muller, Johan A. Feith and Robert Fruin, Manual for the Arrangement

and Description of Archives (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1940), 19.

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 Archives, the Digital Turn, and Governance in Africa 1
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That definition of archives is not intended to mean that archival steward-

ship is by any means neutral.20 However, it does imply that an archive is as
much a structure as a gathering of documents. The digital turn that archives
are taking is therefore of huge significance because it might affect the
nature of the fonds as well as their arrangement. It is in fact a reflection of
a broader shift in structures of power and governing dynamics.
With that in mind, we can see that the process of digitization therefore
consists not simply of making digital copies of paper documents, for it
is more than “digital photocopying.” Rather, the whole structure of any
archive ought to be preserved and conveyed so as to reflect the rationale
of the administration that created it. Such information is essential to the
historical contextualization of sources and to understand the structures
of power and governance.
That is even more true of the African case. There, many countries have
developed archive institutions only relatively recently and certain of those
have moved directly to “digital archives” without necessarily converting
existing material, practices and processes from paper to a digital format.
In other cases on the African continent digitization processes have been
designed not only to classify but to “salvage” numerous endangered doc-
uments. The making of a detailed and hierarchically arranged listing of
documents to be digitalized might then be favored at the expense of
preserving the fonds and structure of that archive. From that perspective
the metadata of the archive can potentially become de facto an archival
index with the attendant risk that basic archival standards such as prov-
enance and respect des fonds (original order) are lost in the process.
The making of metadata is certainly accompanied by its share of chal-
lenges. As a structuring norm metadata tends to follow standards which
might not always meet the structure of the fonds and might be dictated by
the requirements of computer programming. For example, it might not
always be possible to apply AToM standards to African archives created in
the first half of the twentieth century even if the International Council
of Archives, as the body responsible for the creation of the international
ISAD(G) norms, was the first to support AToM.21 Moreover, because it is in
many instances incomplete, digitization of existing archives tends to flatten

20 Katherine Kim, “‘Archives Have Never Been Neutral:’ An NDSA Interview

with Jarrett Drake,” Digital Library Federation (DLF) (15 February 2017), https://
www.diglib.org/archives-have-never-been-neutral-an-ndsa-interview-with-jarrett-
drake/, accessed 7 February 2019; Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G. Rosenberg,
“Introduction to Part II,” in: Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G. Rosenberg (eds.),
Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory (Ann Arbor MI: University
of Michigan Press, 2005), 85–88, 87.
21 AToM (Access to Memory) is a web-based archive description norm, ISAD(G)

(General International Standard Archival Description) is an international standard

used to describe archives in numerous countries.

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 108 History in Africa

a classification process which might actually have taken months or even

years to create.
By privileging a loose definition of “archives” as being mainly an index
of documents/items/artefacts rather than a constituted fonds, the impor-
tance of the physical structure in the making of archives can come to be
overlooked. That can in turn put at risk the long-term preservation of the
physical fonds, jeopardizing the information and knowledge it conveys
about the governing body or entity that produced it.

Scramble for Archives

The shift from paper to digital formats does not therefore consist solely of
technicalities, although it certainly represents an epistemic “digital turn” in
the history of archival practices and usage. First, the volume of and even the
very structure of digital sources and data raise questions about the legiti-
macy and neutrality of the management of archives. Secondly, it consists in
a reflection of the reconfiguration of worldwide power dynamics on the
local and the global scales. In a “dematerialized” world, how can archives
be controlled, both as part of a legacy but also as a record of the tools of
government? Third, while the potential of unlimited access to sources by
the public all over the world creates numerous opportunities, those very
opportunities are accompanied by ethical and methodological problems.
As a consequence, the current wave of digitization is also radically
changing the nature of research for scholars, archivists, and governments.
Scholars can now read documents without the cost of travelling to different
archive centres and are able therefore to produce research results based
on “remote African” documents. At the time of writing this introduction,
examples are countless, but it is worth mentioning that since the 1960s
many documents have been duplicated by means of the microfilming of
entire collections by universities – such as Syracuse University22 – or by
governments. However, the digitization and the subsequent uploading of
considerable amounts of data to servers has made large amounts of mate-
rial available virtually everywhere on the planet, at least to institutions or
individuals who can afford an Internet connection. The pioneers were
the Digital Imaging South Africa team (DISA) at the University of KwaZulu-
Natal in Durban in South Africa in 2002. Funded by the Andrew Mellon
foundation, the project’s aim was to digitize periodicals concerned with the
anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa from 1960 to 1994. DISA also inau-
gurated a pattern which is still recognizable fifteen years later where a
Northern institution, or in the case of the Andrew Mellon foundation a

22
Syracuse University microfilmed most of the archives hosted by the National
Archives of Kenya in the 1960s: https://surface.syr.edu/archiveguidekenya/9/,
accessed 11 April 2019.

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 Archives, the Digital Turn, and Governance in Africa 1
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private foundation, provides funds for a digitization project actually based

in Africa. Aluka is an online platform created in 2003 on the same model,
to gather documents on the liberation struggles of southern Africa during
the second half of the twentieth century.23 Funded initially by the US
Mellon, Hewlett, and Niarchos private foundations it became an important
archival repository before being integrated into JSTOR in 2008.24 Incidentally
both Aluka and JSTOR are sub-branches of the not-for-profit Ithaka orga-
nization, also a US initiative. Aluka specifically became one of the first col-
laborative platforms whereby archivists and researchers tried to develop a
new narrative of the recently-won battles for liberation. Indeed it was no
coincidence that all those projects were hosted in South Africa and the
publication in 2002 of Refiguring the Archive illustrates the phenomenon
particularly well.25 Peter Limb, a scholar of South Africa, was among the
first to develop a critical understanding of that first wave of digitization and
all his publications show that his original insight was accurate: “Twenty-first
century missionaries carry not Bibles but scanners.”26
The hope of this featured section of History in Africa is at least to
further the debate. The last twenty years have witnessed the multiplication
of digitization programmes in Africa.27 Many projects are now available
online despite their being difficult to find via most search engines.
Because there are so many it would be nearly impossible to draw up a
full list of all the projects undertaken by charities like the Mormons,
universities,28 governments (French “cooperation”), private companies

23 Allen Isaacman, Lalu Premesh and Thomas Nygren, “Digitization, History,

and the Making of a Postcolonial Archive of Southern African Liberation Struggles

the Aluka Project,” Africa Today 52–2 (2005), 55–77.
24 https://about.jstor.org/whats-in-jstor/primary-sources/struggles-freedom-

southern-africa/partnerships/, accessed 15 January 2018. See also: Deirdre Ryan,

“Aluka: Digitization from Maputo to Timbuktu,” OCLC Systems & Services 26 (2010),
29–38.
25 Lalu Premesh, “The Virtual Stampede for Africa: Digitization, Postcoloni-

ality and Archives of the Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa,” Innovation 34–1
(2007), 28–44 or Keith Breckenridge, “The Politics of the Parallel Archive: Digital
Imperialism and the Future of Record-Keeping in the Age of Digital Reproduction,”
Journal of Southern African Studies 40 (2014), 499–519.
26 Peter Limb, “The Politics of Digital ‘Reform and Revolution’ towards Main-

streaming and African Control of African Digitisation,” Innovation 34–1 (2007), 18–27,
23. See also: Peter Limb, “The Digitization of Africa,” Africa Today 52–2 (2005), 3–19.
27 Jean-Pierre Delva, “Un autre regard sur les archives en Afrique,” Comma

2015 (2016), 113–118.

28 See the tremendous work done by Derek Peterson over the years in Uganda:

https://derekrpeterson.com/archive-work/, accessed 4 November 2018. See also:

Edgar Taylor, Ashley Rockenbach and Natalie Bond, “Archives and the Past: Catalogu-
ing and Digitisation in Uganda’s Archives,” in: Terry Barringer and Marion Wallace
(eds.), Dis/Connects: African Studies in the Digital Age (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 163–178.

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 110 History in Africa

like Arkhênum and Google29 – or individuals.30 In response to calls

from international Northern institutions like Blue Shield, Archivistes
Sans Frontières-International, British Library Endangered Archives
Programme;31 the Foundation Mário Suarez, the Prince Claus fund32 or
Modern Endangered Archives Programme,33 since the beginning of the
twenty-first century archivists and historians have embraced digital solu-
tions to preserve documents in their areas of expertise. Admittedly, Africa
is not the only continent on which digitization programmes have taken
place, but it is worth noting that African archives have been disappearing
at an alarming rate not only because of political factors but climatic ones
too. Consequently, a very large share of the money invested in digitization
has been spent on programmes actually in Africa.
The phenomenon may be partially explained by technological advances,
in the first instance. Inversely following Moore’s Law which predicted that the
number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every two years,
the price of the IT equipment necessary to undertake digitization programmes
has fallen dramatically. Digital cameras for example have become much more
affordable and in certain application have replaced cumbersome scanners.
More crucially, hard drives, on which thousands of files of professional quality
may now be stored, are considerably cheaper than they were in the 2000s as
are Internet connections. Large-scale digitization programmes are therefore
now increasingly feasible using relatively smaller amounts of money. One col-
lateral symptom of the technological evolution is that many scholars have been
able to store on hard drives many gigabytes of photographs of archives taken
in Africa using their mobile telephone cameras. One could argue that the
often un-coordinated efforts of massive digitization projects extend the con-
cept of an “archive” so that virtual and dispersed collection as in the case of
“anticolonial archives” may be genuinely labeled “archives.”34

29 In 2015, Google launched a programme of digitization of cultural artefacts,

including archives, with the Kenya National Archives: https://artsandculture.goog-

le.com/partner/kenya-national-archives, accessed 20 June 2019.
30 Enrique Martino, “Open Sourcing the Colonial Archive – A Digital Montage of

the History of Fernando Pó and the Bight of Biafra,” History in Africa 14 (2014), 387–415.
31 https://eap.bl.uk/, accessed 23 January 2019. Two co-authors of this

introduction (Marie Rodet and Vincent Hiribarren) have obtained major grants
from the British Library. Jody Butterworth, “Saving Archives through Digitisation:
Reflections on Endangered Archives Programme in Africa,” SCOLMA (2017), 2–14
(SCOLMA is the UK Libraries and Archives Group on Africa).
32 The Prince Claus fund is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a

Dutch National Lottery, and private individuals and corporations.

33 https://www.library.ucla.edu/partnerships/modern-endangered-archives-

program, accessed 15 September 2019. A co-author of this introduction (Vincent

Hiribarren) is a member of the international board of UCLA’s Modern Endangered
Archives Programme, funded by Arcadia.
34 El-Malik and Kamola, Politics of African Anticolonial Archive.

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 Archives, the Digital Turn, and Governance in Africa 111

Finally, there is still the widespread positivist belief that holds

science – in this case digitization – to be the solution to all the problems
faced by historians, archivists, or governments. Furthermore, the “complex
of the white savior” seems sometimes to have been turned into the “complex
of the digital savior” in a humanitarian African context, as so many Northern
governments, institutions, or individuals have wished to join hands with
African archivists to work on digitization projects.35 There again, the idea
of Western science being a panacea for the problems of development and
governance faced by the African continent, is far from new.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – better known as the
Mormon Church – has assumed responsibility for the microfilming and
digitization of birth and death registers in numerous African countries.36
In their case the “savior complex” is explicitly Christian and based on the
belief that the dead may be baptized in order to “redeem” and “save” any
who die “with no knowledge of Jesus.”37 While the number of documents
digitized by the Mormon Church remains unclear, their genealogy data-
base FamilySearch contains data obtained from thousands of documents
digitized in Africa.38

Beyond the “Digital Savior”

The 2010s were the decade when the “complex of the digital savior” affected
historians and archivists most spectacularly. Conflict-ridden regions have
become archetypal places where traces of the past need to be preserved.
A striking example is Mali, where historians-cum-saviors have digitized
manuscripts from Timbuktu.39 Captured in 2012 by members of Ansar

35 Bhakti Shringarpure, “Africa and the Digital Savior Complex,” Journal of

African Cultural Studies (2018), https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2018.1555749,
accessed 29 October 2019.
36 See an example in Sierra Leone https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/

article/church-preserves-precious-records-of-african-nation, accessed 20 June 2019.

37 https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/new-era/2017/08/why-baptisms-

for-the-dead?lang=eng, accessed 20 June 2019.

38 https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/list/?page=1&recordType=

Migration&ec=region%3AAFRICA, accessed 20 June 2019.

39 See in particular the South Africa funded Timbuktu manuscripts project:

https://www.tombouctoumanuscripts.org/, accessed 29 October 2019. On an early

critique of fundraising campaigns to salvage the “Timbuktu manuscripts”, see Bruce
H. Hall’s op-ed on H-West-Africa: “Timbuktu Manuscripts Fundraising Response”
https://lists.h-net.org/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-West-Africa&month=1
306&week=b&msg=Ba8ZfluKZ7AYy3J52KZBBw, accessed 29 October 2019. On the
genealogy of West African Arabic Manuscript projects, see also: Graziano Krätli,
“West African Arabic Manuscript Heritage at a Crossroads: Dust to Digital or Digital
Dust?,” Anuari de Filologia. Antiqva et Mediaevalia 5 (2015), 41–66, http://revistes.
ub.edu/index.php/AFAM/article/viewFile/15232/18463, accessed 29 October 2019.

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 112 History in Africa

Dine and the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, Timbuktu
has become the reluctant symbol of African culture under attack by jihadist
obscurantists. The need for Timbuktu’s manuscripts to be saved was not
new and had actually been at the origin of the creation of the Ahmed
Baba national archives in Timbuktu. However, the crisis of 2012 in Mali
added new urgency to the situation. New private archive entrepreneurs
saw an opportunity to place under the spotlight a series of mostly private
emergency rescue and digitization projects, which required enormous
and urgent worldwide fundraising campaigns.
Strikingly, the sustainability of such large-scale digital projects is not
always thoroughly considered. Terabytes of data are now held on hard
drives and to a lesser extent on memory sticks and DVDs. Hard drives
(external Solid State Drives) are usually designed to survive for ten
years if they are used as cold storage. Funding bodies in many Western
countries actually ask their successful candidates to provide a data man-
agement plan to manage data files in the immediate future but no one
yet knows how to preserve digital data for much longer times without
constantly duplicating it. Surely it is far from fanciful even now to think
of future projects being needed to save endangered digital files, per-
haps in just a few decades? After all, in many archive centres today
microfilms are urgently being digitized.
Already accused of fetishizing written documents even in an African
context, many historians appropriated the discourse on “endangered
archives.” They have chosen to save “their” archives, sometimes joining
forces with private archiving entrepreneurs while dismissing the role
played by professional archivists working in the public sector. The trend
of private initiatives can prove extremely problematic when historians
disregard what archivists have previously done or are currently doing to
preserve the documents in question – even if more slowly and within a
national institutional framework. In the French context Yann Potin has
already explored the “divorce” between historians and archivists and
stressed that most historians ignore what archivists have accomplished
in creating, classifying, cataloguing, and preserving “their” archives.40
Such ignorance of the archivist’s work is often exacerbated by the fact
that some digitization projects have dealt only vaguely with historical
“archives,” such projects certainly tending to reinforce a form of disci-
plinary arrogance, as Michelle Caswell argued in 2016:

There seems to be little understanding in the humanities that professional

archivists have master’s degrees, that archival standards and best practices
are culturally constructed artefacts, and that behind every act of archival
practice is at least a century-old theoretical conversation.41

40 Yann Potin, “Intervention de Yann Potin,” Gazette des Archives 225 (2012), 49–53.
41 Caswell, “‘The Archive’ Is Not an Archives,” 11.

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 Archives, the Digital Turn, and Governance in Africa 113

The digital files we see on our computer screens give the false impression
that the documents were discovered and “harvested” easily, like large nug-
gets littering the floor of an archival gold mine. All the archival work under-
taken before, during, and after digitization is being made invisible, as
the term “archive” has come to designate not the physical documents
any more, but what appears on the screen. Such obliteration, as it were, of
the work of African archivists coupled with the “digital imperialism” already
observed in the 2000s might yet have dramatic consequences for the future
of African archives, which are already underfunded. Most current digitiza-
tion projects rely on money from Northern institutions, and they tend to
focus on the final product, which of course is the digital material. Many if
not most digitization projects therefore concern archives which have already
been classified and inventoried. As a noticeable result, only increasingly
limited funding is being provided for what is practically needed to support
the physical salvaging of genuinely endangered archives. Such things as
acid-free paper, boxes, shelves, air conditioned rooms in suitable buildings,
and so on are scarce, expensive, and undervalued, it seems. There is now a
greater risk that archives which have not been previously classified and
inventoried will be lost because the slow work of digitization projects
monopolizes the time of many archivists. There is then the very real pros-
pect that the process of digitizing will endanger not only the activities of
archivists but to a certain extent even their very profession. In other words,
Northern digital aspirations, with the complicity of Southern governments
driven by short-term financial interests, might ruin longer-term Southern
efforts at analogue preservation. Paradoxically all this will have been done
in the name of enhancing good governance in the South.42 When on top
of that digitization programmes are conducted by private companies or
“heritage entrepreneurs” whose aim is financial profit, one can understand
the sense of pillage being experienced by local populations and certain
public experts in the sector. They are powerless to do more than deplore
the increasing sub-contracting strategy of an under-resourced state. They
can only deprecate neglectful or sometimes ill-intentioned politicians for
whom archives are certainly not the priority, despite the fact that archives
are a central public service, a state prerogative, and a crucial government
instrument which can ensure accountability and good governance.

Structure and Content of this Special Issue

Stockreiter’s article clearly shows the potential of private partnerships

between local initiatives and international heritage entrepreneurs when
the state is absent, as in the case of the Djenné Manuscript Library. As such

42 For example, see: John Abdul Kargbo, “The Connection between Good
Governance and Record Keeping: The Sierra Leone Experience,” Journal of The
Society of Archivists 30 (2009), 249–260.

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 114 History in Africa

initiatives can be funded almost solely by external means (The British

Library’s Endangered Archives Programme in that case) their drawbacks
are immediately obvious, with the risk that digitization programmes will be
ill-equipped to deal with local tensions and conflicting political interests,
and will lack the necessary research experience to understand local con-
texts in order to secure access to the archives. Consequently there then
arises the question of the outcome of the programme once the external
heritage entrepreneurs and their funding have left. The inability of such
projects to build digital sustainability and long-term development strat-
egies is certainly one of the greatest limitations to the success of private
partnerships driven from outside – if there will be no local and central
government involvement in the long-term.
Keese and Owabira’s article is another that shows the limits of digi-
tizing programmes which, as with many greatly endangered archives in
Africa, tend to overlook the necessity of first salvaging physical archives
many of which have never been classified nor even inventoried. There is in
such cases an immediate risk of disappearance. For example, in the case of
the postcolonial regional archives in Pointe Noire highlighted in this arti-
cle, the number of files digitized is not a sufficient benchmark to assess the
success of preserving similar such endangered archives. Cooperation
between archivist and historian is here central to ensuring that the actual
work done by archivists on the ground with very limited means does not
suffer the endangerment which is always a possible side-effect of mostly
externally driven digitization projects and “digital humanitarianism.”
Schneider and Weinberg’s article discusses directly and at length
what constitutes the African photography archive and its contradictions,
and how digitization might actually change the very nature of the pho-
tographs digitized. Increased accessibility globally might also and para-
doxically accelerate the digital divide, as internet accessibility remains
notably low in Africa. Who are the global audience, indeed? To whom are
the digital contents made accessible? How can the whole dimension of
a photograph be rendered in a digital collection? Which brings us back
to the fundamental questions, “What is an African photography digital
archive?” and “To what extent does the digitization process disrupt archi-
val norms, practices, and definitions while as asserted by the authors
‘There is no way back!?’”
El Qadim’s article explores what a modern service of archives centred
on digitization means and implies as in the case of the Archives du Maroc
created in 2011. Has digitization become the new seal of approval for an
archive to be considered modern in Africa? That is indubitably what the
Archives du Maroc services claim and a central policy that they pursue at
every level despite the onerous costs. But in a context of limited resources
and while that institution is still in a fragile legitimation state, it is also
probably a strategic “necessary evil” to secure more resources and fund-
ing in future.

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 Archives, the Digital Turn, and Governance in Africa 1
0 15

Losch’s article shows that the digitization processes targeting broad-

casting archives at risk in West Africa since the beginning of the century
have to do with pre-existing technical cooperation networks, which are
themselves connected to colonial history. Losch also questions the prac-
tical implications for digitization in former French colonies in West Africa
which do not retain digital copies of their oldest audio-visual heritage. The
vast majority of that heritage is still in France, more specifically in the hands
of its Institut National de l’Audiovisuel which has placed the material
behind a pay wall. One consequence of that is an accrued postcolonial
digital divide which has limited the national broadcasters” leeway, as in
practice, safeguarding and preservation cannot be separated from the
logics of restitution and sharing of already digitized audio-visual resources
pertaining to a supposedly “shared” history.
Finally, Lawrance, Corcoran and Hooper’s article more broadly
questions the matter of “digital dispersal” of archives when that occurs
simultaneously and haphazardly, whether accidentally or intentionally
as in the case of asylum documentation. They consider what that implies
for the archives of the future history of forced international migration as it
applies to countries such as Togo. They refer again to questions about the
dangers of digital documentation where there are no physical copies and
the possible consequences of that situation for future access, and thus for
transparency and ultimately its effect on governance.

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