Paper short abstract:

This paper highlights the differences in accessibility of Tanzanian and Kenyan (governmental and media) archives. It will discuss the implications of these different archival policies for research practices and outcomes.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to draw attention to the role of policies and governmental attitudes towards archives in shaping the availability and accessibility of archival sources in East Africa. When I conducted research on labour relations in the flower industry in Kenya, I could consult a variety of archival sources for gaining a detailed understanding of the development of this industry. Examples were a physical provincial archive, the digitized archive of the Nation Media Group - accessible in their office in Nairobi -, and several types of governmental documents that have been made available online, such as court case rulings and parliamentary records. My experiences in a subsequent research project in Tanzania were different. I could not identify a publicly-accessible regional archive and unluckily the National Archives closed for the public due to the start of the pandemic. I moreover found that Tanzanian governmental documents have not been made available online to the same extent as they have been in Kenya. Finally, online archives of Tanzanian newspapers go back only a decade or so, and moreover, some newspapers were temporarily suspended by the government and their archives made unavailable at the time I conducted my research.

This paper will interrogate the different policies with regards to the access to and availability of archives between these neighboring countries. It will also discuss the differential effects of these policies on my research outcomes and will more broadly discuss implications for carrying out research in and on these countries.

Paper short abstract:

The private library of Lamu poet and imam Ustadh Mau can be regarded as a unique yet overlooked archive where local epistemologies are collected and produced. This paper will discuss how to enhance its accessibility and findability through digitization, accurate metadata and OA platforms.

Paper long abstract:

Counter to the idea of “restricted literacies” on the African continent, a thirst for knowledge has stimulated the making of local and private libraries and archives in various parts of Africa. Despite the relatively abundant Swahili-language collections in East Africa and Europe, it has nevertheless also been highlighted how the local collections housed in university libraries and/or private households in East Africa are in fact, fragmented, difficult to access and often endangered, and/or on the verge of disappearing. The private library of living poet and imam Ustadh Mau from the Indian Ocean island of Lamu (Kenya) can be regarded as a representative contemporary example: a unique yet overlooked and at-risk site where local epistemologies composed in the regional language variety of kiamu are collected and produced. In 2022, the Ustadh Mau Digital Archive (UMADA) was among the 29 international cultural preservation projects that received a grant from the Modern Endangered Archives Program at UCLA Library. In this paper, we will present the collection, made of roughly two thousand fragile materials that we aim to document and digitize, among which: handwritten manuscript poetry in Arabic script, letters, printed texts, biographical photos and audio cassettes of his Friday sermons, delivered since 1986. We will also discuss how to enhance the archive's accessibility and findability through accurate metadata. Providing the materials via multiple OA platforms opens them up for new audiences and readers and will enhance new research into overlooked local productions and literary canons from postcolonial contemporary Kenya.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the extent to which small digitisation projects can change the historian's craft as well as the production of academic knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

Many historians (and I am one of them) feel more and more the urge to do more with the documents they collect during their research. We can now publish online and make numerous sources available to our readers in the same way that scientists publish their data. After all, isn’t it the founding principle of science? Discrete projects such as 'Open Source Guinea' (Enrique Martino), the Islam Burkina Faso Collection (Frédérick Madore) or Naija Archives (IFRA-Nigeria) can now be undertaken rather easily. Unlike larger digitisation programmes such as the Endangered Archives Programme (British Library) or the Modern Endangered Archives Program (UCLA), these projects are specifically tailored to the needs of one scholarly project, that of one researcher or one relatively small team of scholars. The publication of these sources online often means that historians learn (too?) rapidly to become archivists and metadata specialists. What is the impact of this phenomenon on digital documents? Does it change the nature of our craft as historians? More importantly, to what extent is academic knowledge impacted by this new trend?

Paper short abstract:

This article examines the various political roles played by the archives - and the process of archiving- of a Sudanese civil society organization that has collected documents about the purges of the former autocratic regime in Sudan (1989-2019).

Paper long abstract:

This article examines the various political roles played by the archives - and the process of archiving- of a Sudanese civil society organization named the Excutive Committee of the Dismissed. The Committee, established in 1997, has collected thousands of documents about people who claim to have been unfairly dismissed from the civil service during the former authoritarian regime of Omar al-Bashir (1989-2019).

Based on interviews with the members of this organization conducted in 2019, analysis of their documentation, and secondary sources, the paper demonstrate how those archives turned from a discrete practice of contention under the authoritarian regime into a tool for governance during the political transition kickstarted by the fall of Omar al-Bashir in April 2019. It also reflexively analyze the process of digitization of those archives I engaged in as a foreign researcher in Sudan, explaining how the meanings and potential impacts of this project were also transformed by political events, including the brutal interruption of the transition by a military coup in October 2021.

To conclude, this paper aims to contribute to the current reflexion on African archives and on a "digitization rush" by highligting how those archives on a little investigated topic provide us not only with insight into how people navigated the regime and opposed it in various ways, but also on how researchers become embedded into political processes that question their role and ethics.

Paper short abstract:

This intervention is a reflection of the results of an archival survey project on the private archives of several women’s associations that developed in Sudan after the Second World War, and discusses slow archiving, slow research, and affective links.

Paper long abstract:

This intervention proposes to reflect about the results of an archival survey project on the private archives of several women’s associations that developed in Sudan after the Second World War, sponsored by the Modern Endangered Archives Project (UCLA). The project started from the observation that Sudanese historiography, especially in English language, is marked by a rarity of works on all aspects of women’s history. For us, one of the multiple causes of this overarching exclusion was their absence in colonial and national official archives that would collect, organise and centralise information about them. In other words, Sudanese women lacked an “archive on their own”, and we wanted to begin to palliate to this absence.

After 16 months of survey project, it is time to review its lessons. First, we discovered an gap between the enthusiasm of the staff and the cautious reaction of the activists. Second, our interlocutors did not show their archive unless they trusted the staff. This trust, related to gender issues in Sudan, went beyond political affiliations or the security situation, and was related to the building of reciprocal affective links. After gender, other elements that affected the survey were the belonging to different social classes, the ‘historical capital’ of a family, and the different degree of vulnerability of the interlocutors. Perhaps, the main lesson we learnt from this project is that if we want to build a women’s archive in Sudan, we need to accept slower archiving, slower research, but also greater personal implication and affects.

Co-authors of the paper: Eman al-Hassan, Elena Vezzadini, Mahassin Abduljalil, Safa Osman