Digitising an African Studies Audiovisual Archive: Moves, Setbacks, Lessons

As a subset of the well-known increasing subordination of the humanities in the academy, there have always been recurrent attempts to territorially contain the discipline of African Studies on the continent. The attempts at containment are sometimes informed by factors that include concerns about contiguous disciplines within the same institution and the formal identification of African Studies with institutes which signs difference to orthodox university faculties and departments. I will cite two examples, temporally separated from each other by almost one century, to illustrate the currency of this internal suspicion. In the decade before independence, one of the earliest attempts at starting an academic department in the discipline at the University College, Ghana, was stymied by the territorial apprehension that “any new institute should not replicate work in the [other] disciplines… and that a new institute should not ‘usurp the research side of all relevant departments’” (Allman, 2013:185).