Out of the ashes: rethinking loss in the African archive

Abstract

African archives were predominantly outgrowths of the colonialist machinery, essential armoury in the mechanisms of control which paid little attention to comprehensively documenting the cultures and pasts of the subjugated peoples. Consequently, the genesis of conventional African archives was constituted by loss, a fact per haps dramatically signified by the string of fires and other disasters to have hit African archival repositories from as early as 1919. Yet still, the embers of these conflagrations provide opportunities for critical reconsiderations of loss that would lead to theoretical and practical gains in the African archive. Archival loss can prod African archivists towards new ontologies of praxis and conceptions of archive that would enable recovery of all the varied registers of the African archive. Specifically, the paper examines the creation and work of the J.H. Kwabena Nketia Archives (at the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies) and the Likpe Traditional Area Community Archives as archival sites of resistance and challenge to loss that leverage community and institutional partnerships to build and recover the African archive. Ultimately, these archives’ work, and the general “African archival turn” advocated for here, have implications for African Studies and the decolonising of knowledge production in and about Africa.