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Paper short abstract

This presentation draws a perspective from an ongoing digital archive initiative, the Organ House Documentation and Digitization project, at Mountain Top University, Ibafo, Nigeria, to show processes of reconfiguring the notion of archive through digital epistemologies in Nigeria.

Paper long abstract

Archives are spaces of power. They perpetuate uneven power relations, privileges and colonial structures. In many African societies, archives and frameworks for documentation still maintain colonial epistemologies. This reproduction of colonial structures is embodied and performed through principles and strategies archivists and scholars have adopted. Thus, the concept of archives remains a colonial epistemology. What might it mean to reconfigure the idea of an archive in Africa? What might decolonial digital epistemologies mean for rethinking archives and documentation in contemporary Africa? This presentation draws a perspective from an ongoing digital archive initiative, the Organ House Documentation and Digitization project, at Mountain Top University, Ibafo, Nigeria, to show processes of reconfiguring the notion of archive through digital epistemologies in Nigeria.