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 perhaps 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Archival loss
• J.H. Kwabena Nketia Archives
• Likpe traditional area community archives
• African studies

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Drs Alírio Karina and Duane Jethro, co-convenors of the After the Fire: Loss, Archive and African Studies Symposium for organising and facilitating these really stimulating and interesting conversations. I would also like to acknowledge support from the institutional sponsors of the symposium at University of Cape Town and from the University of Ghana’s Conference Grant Scheme. Lastly, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Other traditional area archives exist in Ghana, for example, the Akyem Abuakwa State Archive (Ofori Panyin Fie) at Kibi and the Manya Krobo Traditional Council (Mate Kole) Archives at Odumase, both in the Eastern Region. However, as their names suggest, these archives primarily keep records relating to the activities of the traditional rulers. On the other hand, as shall be discussed below, the Likpe Traditional Area Community Archives was initiated by a member of the community as a repository to document the community’s traditions, culture and history.

2. For example, closely studying and exploiting the chieftainship systems for the implementation of indirect rule. Still, Njabulo Khumalo’s (2019) emphatic proposition that colonial powers used the system of records and archives to dismantle indigenous African governance systems which transmitted economic, political and social entitlements orally is worth noting.

3. These fire disasters afflicting African archives have resulted both from unintentional carelessness and suspected arson. Additionally, although fire events are listed here, Ngulube et al. (2011) assess water related disasters to be the most common affecting archival institutions.

4. As Ellen Namhila (2015) notes, the South African government did the same with Namibian documents as well as destroying large volumes of apartheid related documents in South Africa prior to the finalisation of the negotiated democratisation process.

5. The disadvantage continues in the present day. Africa’s migrated archives and other stolen objects remain far removed from their place of provenance. Archival scholar Nathan Mnjama has written extensively on this category of items in the last 40 years and notes the irony that African nations, archives and scholars often have to purchase, at high cost, copies of materials which rightfully belong to them (see, for example, Mnjama 2020). This is another aspect of archival loss that plagues the continent. Still, others like Francis Garaba (2021) see opportunity here for African archives to decolonise and focus on indigenising Africa’s archives and making them an empowering space.

6. The records of the colonial state were also more consistently preserved, with the many coups and infrequency with which state and parastatal agencies deposited their records at national archives contributing to gaps in the post-colonial era’s archival record.

7. There is a parallel ignorance about archives and their relevance among the general populace. Both are examined in some detail in Ashie-Nikoi et al. (2023). Another level of loss in the African archive is created here as well, as people, who do not perceive that the letters, photographs, journals etc they have in their homes to be of significance and interest, discard and destroy them.

8. Samuel Ntewusu (2017) advises researchers who come up empty at the national archives in Ghana to hang around the ministries or agencies dealing with their area of study and to buy from the food vendors in the area! Musamba’s contribution reports a similar situation in Uganda.

9. Due to a project with which I am involved, I am aware that some interrogations are beginning to happen; but again, these are mainly among non-archival practitioners and scholars.

10. By deploying the term “archives” in relation to Africa’s rituals, Falola insists on expanding our understanding of the term and challenges the boundaries of conventional Eurocentric archives, especially regarding what is considered preservation worthy. Relatedly, the collection of essays in Hamilton and Leibhammer (2016) signals how the “marooned archive” of material culture (including objects, which are often significant elements of rituals) may be probed as “archive.” By doing so, the contributions “challenge the organisational structure and limits of what is understood epistemologically to be the pre-colonial archive or perhaps, more accurately, the lack of a pre-colonial archive” (Hamilton and Leibhammer 2016, 14).

11. Convocation speech at the Institute of African Studies. The reel-to-reel audio of the speech is available at the Nketia Archives.

12. Nketia operated at the nexus of a few disciplines. He was initially taught European music theory at the Akropong Presbyterian Training College (one of his teachers was Ephraim Amu, famed Ghanaian musician and composer of the national anthem in local languages). He was awarded a scholarship to study Linguistics at School of Oriental and African Studies, also taking classes at the Trinity College of Music and Birkbeck College, University of London. Although Nketia is often identified as an ethnomusicologist, his research into African music, dance and folklore began before the discipline, emerging out of comparative musicology, formally developed. Furthermore, Nketia considered his disciplinary preoccupations diverged from Western counterparts: “The core knowledge of the discipline, the traditions, and the problems in the country in terms of people learning their own cultures were issues that concerned us … Our problems are truly different from what people in the Western world seem to be concerning themselves with” (Djedje 2012). These comments provide interesting perspective into the archives Nketia established.

13. These fieldwork recordings range from live performances to analytical recordings in which individual parts were demonstrated (Harper and Opoku-Boateng 2019).

14. For a detailed account of Nketia’s engagement of Osei Kwame Korankye’s services to teach the seperewa at ICAMD, see Papa Kow Mensah Agyefi (2021).

15. Upon its formation, the Nketia Archives became the second archives for which the Institute of African Studies (IAS) at the University of Ghana has oversight; the other is the Manhyia Archives in Kumasi, which began as the Ashanti Research Project, an IAS initiative and garnered the support of the then-Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Agyeman Prempeh II and his successors. For more information, see https://ias.ug.edu.gh/content/manhyia-archives. The IAS case, like the Center for African Studies’ African Studies Library and Special Collections at UCT, demonstrates the vital role African Studies centres in African can play in the preservation of the African archive.

16. Recent scholarship that has used materials at the Nketia Archives or discussed its work include Agyefi (2021), Kwasi Ampene (2020) and Daniel Salem (2020).

17. At the APEX training, staff were shown how to “conserve, digitize and make accessible 400 hours of audiovisual heritage materials” (Opoku-Boateng et al. 2020). See also Opoku-Boateng (2023).

18. My work on a documentation project in Ghana’s Upper West region sensitised me to the possibilities of archival silencing and erasure along class, ethnic and regional lines (Ashie-Nikoi 2021).

19. In Ghana, traditional areas are the defined territory under the rule of a traditional authority, usually a chief.

20. SAADA does not accept physical custody of records, but rather borrows records from individuals, families, organisations, and academic and government repositories and digitises them. After digitisation, the physical materials remain with the individual, family, organisation or repository where they originated. The digital objects are described “in a culturally appropriate manner” and linked to related materials in the archives (www.saada.org, see also Caswell, Cifor, and Ramirez 2016).

21. It is significant to note that Onai faces this situation even as an actively involved insider of the community.

22. Chiefs are respected as custodians of cultural knowledge (Alhassan 2006). The chief’s decision to donate his papers to the community archives is an interesting variation of this role. Although there isn’t a precedent to gauge whether community members would follow the chief’s example and donate materials to a community archives, studies from the context of community development projects (Kleist 2011; Osei-Tutu et al. 2019; Tieleman and Uitermark 2019) suggest that this is highly likely. Community members’ decision to do so might be interpreted by those unfamiliar with the culture as coercion but must not be misconstrued as such. Onai and his team have made clear that donation to the archives is completely voluntary and there are no repercussions for not doing so.

23. In a conversation with an archivist after the seminar, they revealed that whereas previously they had been under the impression that this was a requirement from the funding agencies, they since found out that it is often, in fact, a condition imposed by the “third parties” – the European libraries, archives and institutions that the funding agencies often contracted to provide assistance to the African archives. The archivist had recently pushed back on an approach from one such European institution and suggested that funding agencies either ensure such mirroring demands are not made of African institutions or consider funding South/South collaborations so these institutions could be each other’s backup. These, the archivist insisted, would be more equal and sustainable partnerships.

24. Mendisu and Yigezu (2014) make the concomitant and important point that languages, themselves, are “archives of social memory.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Edwina D. Ashie-Nikoi

Edwina D Ashie-Nikoi (ORCID 0000-0003-4341-8055) is a Lecturer in the Department of Information Studies, University of Ghana and affiliated with UG’s Institute of African Studies. Broad areas of interest include Black archival traditions and memory work, decolonising archival knowledge and practice, and “alternative archives” in Africa and its diaspora. Current projects consider archival silence, archival activism and community archives in the African context and undertake Pan-African interrogations of the Archive. She has published in peer-reviewed journals and edited books and has presented at local and international conferences.