Paper short abstract:

African intellectuals initiated and invested in archival collections during Namibia's colonial past. Hidden from the apartheid state´s control, the paper, tape and image collections envisioned post-colonial futures, spoke to the colonial archive and today map out decolonial research agendas.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I review the political agendas of some African intellectuals during Namibia´s past as a South African colony in the 20th century by initiating and investing in written and audiovisual collections. The paper focuses on two examples: firstly, the ´secret´ archives of Otjiherero-speaking intellectuals with mission church backgrounds as formed in the late 1940s by means of notebooks; secondly, attempts by liberation activists in the 1950s to deploy the tape recorder and the camera. In both cases, some of the documents circulated/migrated purposefully amongst particular local and/or international audiences. In both cases, post-colonial visions informed their creation, material nature, usage and content. This paper examines some of these aspects and concludes with reflections about methods and practices of knowledge creation attached to and reflected in the documents under review. Whilst largely ignored by post-colonial archivists and western-trained scholars, their very nature and content, despite now partly informing post-colonial Namibian politics, map out decolonial research agendas, amongst the latter issues concerning relational knowledge production, alternative documentation and archive practices and the need for cooperative archival/research/translation projects.

Paper short abstract:

A couple of years ago, colonial photographs of Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba resurfaced in the Senegalese public sphere. This paper examines the subsequent debate on the Internet and explores the epistemic doubts evoked by alternative readings of the images that unsettled canonical beliefs in the saint.

Paper long abstract:

A couple of years ago, photographs of the Sufi saint Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba resurfaced in the public sphere. While the cult around this Senegalese saint habitually focuses on one colonial mug shot that is infinitely reproduced in various media -- from graffiti to behind-glass paintings – thus providing a canonical image of the saint, the found photographs presented the saint in new contexts. The circulation of the photographs on the Internet raised a public debate in Senegal about the authenticity of the images.

The found images offered possibilities for new imaginaries of the saint but also posed a threat to his iconic image that has authorised a decolonial imaginary of the saint’s life. In this paper I will explore to what extent certain conventional understandings and beliefs around the Sufi saint were challenged. I will argue that the new discoveries did not only present a challenge to established Sufi epistemology, but to the hierarchy of the Sufi order and to Sufi aesthetics. This will lead us to question the relationship between the colonial archive, Muslim epistemologies, and the decolonization of colonial heritage.

In my recent book I argued that decolonization is not a unilinear process (De Jong, Decolonizing Heritage, 2022). In this paper, I will demonstrate that every decolonization of the colonial archive inflicts its own epistemic doubts, casting doubts upon received decolonial histories. These doubts, I argue, are grounded in deeply held racialised convictions on the trustworthiness of the colonial archive.

Paper short abstract:

This paper puts forward an approach to exploring an deeply complex archival subject: the ruined film archives of Kwame Nkrumah’s postcolonial project. Through my recent co-produced film project, I argue for a collaborative praxis that also addresses the historical needs of Ghanaian filmmakers today.

Paper long abstract:

One of the most important goals in politics is capturing people’s imaginations of what change looks like. This lesson was not lost on the politicians that led the continent’s emancipatory and modernizing projects of decolonization in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah believed film was central to achieving this goal of inspiring popular belief in his vision for the future. To this end, he established Anglophone Africa’s first and most extensive postcolonial film industry as a key pillar of his project to politically transform the country and Africa at large.

This political project, however, came to a dramatic end when Nkrumah was removed from office by a military coup in 1966: his filmmakers were sacked and the industry was stripped of its funding. In the years that followed, Ghana’s celluloid film archives were left to rot or destroyed. This paper explores the archival practices and innovations that can be used to explore this lost history. In doing so, I share an approach to the historical practice of film history rooted in a collaboration with a new generation of African artists, filmmakers and archivists who are reckoning with history in their own emancipatory projects. To this end, we creatively re-imagine what the film archive is and what it can be.

Paper short abstract:

The reluctance of the church and the state, which among other things is caused by researchers’ local value mishandling, challenged Northern Ethiopian manuscript preservation; a versatile number of archaic materials, like in the Tigray Crises, are lost before being digitized and archived.

Paper long abstract:

An estimated 750,000 Gǝʿǝz manuscripts, like the Gospels of Abba Gärima dated to 330-650 CE are preserved in Ethiopian churches and monasteries, museums, and libraries. Except for a few thousand manuscripts digitized by European research projects, more than 90% of them are kept in the wilderness exposed to damage and prowling as the archival practice and preservation are exceedingly inadequate. Not only does the conflict of interest for ownership between the government heritage authorities and the church makes digitizing bureaucratic, but also the secluded monasteries are autonomous from the church’s administrative structure itself; under the same dogma, each cloister may have its own monastic cult. The technophobic, but humble Orthodox monks, don’t mostly trust the urban people because digitized manuscripts are not easily accessible, nor are their copies left, in the local archives; it is also presumed that researchers manipulate and devalue religious traditions and cultural norms. Ethiopian stories about looted objects found in western archives, and narratives (also sentimentalized) on the issue corroborated the strong stand of the church (supported by the state) against digitization. The late Ethiopian patriarch Abunä Ṗaulos announced in a circular letter, in 2009, not to digitize a manuscript. On top of that, the lack of infrastructure and inaccessibility of the mountainous monasteries frustrate researchers; on our experience of manuscript assessment and digitization in various monasteries, some of them take a day’s travel on foot. Thus, both the practice and attitude towards manuscript digitization in Ethiopia have affected cultural heritage preservation. During the Tigray crisis, thousands of manuscripts among cultural heritage objects were damaged and looted before they were digitized and archived. Many of them today are observed in e-commerce and antiquity shops. The objective of this paper, therefore, is to investigate the challenges of manuscript digitization and its imprecision on heritage damage and loss.