References

The Artificial Intelligence Bill, 2026

Unknown Author

RD Congo. Tensions entre la Belgique et les États-Unis sur les archives minières - Analyse

Colette Braeckman

Analyse · L’accès aux archives minières congolaises, qui datent de l’époque coloniale et qui sont conservées au musée royal de l’Afrique centrale de Tervuren, en Belgique, est revendiqué par une société états-unienne soutenue par Jeff Bezos et Bill Gates. Mais Bruxelles (comme l’Europe) n’entend pas se faire doubler sur l’accès aux minerais stratégiques dont regorge le sous-sol de son ancienne colonie.

Toward AI Governance Alignment in Africa, Middle East, and Türkiye (AMET) Region

Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem, Fola Adeleke, Jake Effoduh, Kebene Wodajo, Nagla Rizk, Olubayo Adekanmbi, Rachel Adams, Rami Alkarmi, Seani Rananga, Seydina Ndiaye, Shikoh Gitau, Tami Koroye

Africa's leading voice in AI policy and governance, working globally to shape fair and inclusive technologies.

Is Anthropic building Rwanda's AI future — or its dependence?

Eden Harris

Experts say the partnership could expand AI access in health and education, but warn it may deepen vendor lock-in, data risks, and reliance on foreign tech.

Data centers are racing to space — and regulation can’t keep up

Damilare Dosunmu

Experts warn the move could shift critical infrastructure beyond national laws — deepening digital dependence for much of the developing world.

"Tintin au pays des archives" : pourquoi les millions d'archives belges de l’Africa Museum intéressent Bill Gates et les Américains

Eric Boever, Alice Dulczewski, Damien Roulette

C’est une histoire qui pourrait s’intituler "Tintin au pays des archives" ! Les tonnes d’archives qui sommeillent à l’Africa Museum, l’ancien Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale à Tervuren, sont au cœur d’un bras de fer entre la Belgique, la République démocratique du Congo et une société privée américaine. Au cœur du débat, la numérisation de ces archives censées contenir d’inestimables informations sur les richesses minières de l’Afrique centrale et sur leur localisation. L’Etat belge entend mener lui-même la digitalisation de ce trésor afin de le rendre accessible au plus grand nombre mais une société américaine, qui a l’appui des autorités congolaises, souhaite numériser les documents et profiter au passage de la primeur des informations qu’ils contiennent. Un différend aux enjeux économiques autant que diplomatiques.

On AI, Creativity and Human Development

Rachel Adams

A Handwritten Text Recognition Dataset for Ajami Manuscripts in Fulfulde and Hausa

Oreen Yousuf, Abdulmalik Aminu, Musa Salih Muhammad, Bashir Usman, Mustapha Kurfi Hashim, Joakim Nivre, Beáta Megyesi, Christian Høgel

We present the first ever dataset of manually segmented and transcribed Ajami manuscripts written in Fulfulde and Hausa. The term Ajami refers to modified Arabic-script orthographies in Africa. Existing handwritten text recognition (HTR) and optical character recognition (OCR) models for Arabic-script languages perform poorly on West African manuscripts due to a lack of these manuscripts representation in the models’ pre-training. This leads to models struggling to adapt to Ajami style calligraphy, being unequipped to recognize Ajami specific characters, and being unable to extract certain Arabic-script diacritics which are present in Ajami manuscripts but lacking in many manuscripts for other Arabic-script languages like Arabic and Persian. The latter poses a significant challenge to Ajami HTR. We release the following as an open-source dataset: an ALTO formatting of high-quality images of Fulfulde and Hausa manuscripts, manual segmentation (region and line), and manual transcriptions. Our HTR dataset is also the first to diplomatically transcribe newly Unicode-encoded, special Quranic recitation characters. We evaluate a suite of Arabic-script recognition models specifically for historical manuscripts and find that they produce character error rates of 65–84% when attempting to automatically transcribe our curated manuscripts. Transcriptions produced by the evaluated models are released as well.

Wikipedia as an Open Access Tool for Restituting Knowledge on African Past

Anaïs Wion

The Langarchiv project, officially titled “Language as Archive: European Linguistics and the Social History of the Sahara and Sahel in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century,” is an ambitious research initiative funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Its primary goal is to explore how African languages can serve as archives for writing the social history of the Sahara and Sahel regions during the 18th and 19th centuries. The project is hosted by the Institut des Mondes Africains (IMAF), Paris, and led by historian Camille Lefebvre (CNRS / EHESS), in collaboration with Ari Awagana (Leipzig University) and with a team of linguists, historians, and anthropologists.

WAXAL: A Large-Scale Multilingual African Language Speech Corpus

Abdoulaye Diack, Perry Nelson, Kwaku Agbesi, Angela Nakalembe, MohamedElfatih MohamedKhair, Vusumuzi Dube, Tavonga Siyavora, Subhashini Venugopalan, Jason Hickey, Uche Okonkwo, Abhishek Bapna, Isaac Wiafe, Raynard Dodzi Helegah, Elikem Doe Atsakpo, Charles Nutrokpor, Fiifi Baffoe Payin Winful, Kafui Kwashie Solaga, Jamal-Deen Abdulai, Akon Obu Ekpezu, Audace Niyonkuru, Samuel Rutunda, Boris Ishimwe, Michael Melese, Engineer Bainomugisha, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Andrew Katumba, Claire Babirye, Jonathan Mukiibi, Vincent Kimani, Samuel Kibacia, James Maina, Fridah Emmah, Ahmed Ibrahim Shekarau, Ibrahim Shehu Adamu, Yusuf Abdullahi, Howard Lakougna, Bob MacDonald, Hadar Shemtov, Aisha Walcott-Bryant, Moustapha Cisse, Avinatan Hassidim, Jeff Dean, Yossi Matias

The advancement of speech technology has predominantly favored high-resource languages, creating a significant digital divide for speakers of most Sub-Saharan African languages. To address this gap, we introduce WAXAL, a large-scale, openly accessible speech dataset for 21 languages representing over 100 million speakers. The collection consists of two main components: an Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) dataset containing approximately 1,250 hours of transcribed, natural speech from a diverse range of speakers, and a Text-to-Speech (TTS) dataset with over 180 hours of high-quality, single-speaker recordings reading phonetically balanced scripts. This paper details our methodology for data collection, annotation, and quality control, which involved partnerships with four African academic and community organizations. We provide a detailed statistical overview of the dataset and discuss its potential limitations and ethical considerations. The WAXAL datasets are released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/google/WaxalNLP under the permissive CC-BY-4.0 license to catalyze research, enable the development of inclusive technologies, and serve as a vital resource for the digital preservation of these languages.

Silicon Elsewhere: Nairobi, Global China, and the Promise of Techno-Capital

Andrea Pollio

Heralded as Africa’s “Silicon Savannah”—a cradle of innovation—Nairobi has become a technology and innovation capital for Kenya and for the continent at large. With a national strategy that has prioritized digital technology for the last two decades, many Chinese digital champions, smaller start-ups, and investors have since chosen Nairobi as their African landing pad. Mapping the interface between Nairobi’s innovation scene and China’s digital presence there, Silicon Elsewhere tells a unique story of ingenuity and adaptation, failure and speculation, and hopefulness and pragmatism. Andrea Pollio’s ethnography draws on interviews with cautious venture capitalists, renegade entrepreneurs, dedicated bureaucrats, and ambitious data scientists to explore the competing meanings of contemporary techno-capital. Moving between leafy coworking spaces and the temperature-controlled rooms of brand-new data centers, Pollio locates Nairobi among the experimental capitals, not peripheries, of technological change in the early twenty-first century. “This is an unparalleled, empirically rich, multiscalar contribution to the archive of Nairobi and its techno-capital aspirations, by a powerful storyteller.” — Wangui Kimari, American University Nairobi Abroad Program “Written with grace and insight, this book tells the unique story of the rise of Nairobi as Africa’s ‘Silicon Savannah,’ thanks to its Chinese connections. A bold and original contribution to the study of Global China, techno-capital, and the Global South.” — Ching Kwan Lee, Professor of Sociology at University of California, Los Angeles, and author of The Specter of Global China and Forever Hong Kong Andrea Pollio is Assistant Professor of Political and Economic Geography at the Department of Urban and Regional Studies of the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, and Research Associate at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in African and Islamic Studies

Elisa Nobel-Dilaty, Frédérick Madore

Dr. Frédérick Madore, postdoctoral research fellow at ZMO Berlin, works at the intersection of African Studies, Islamic Studies, and the digital humanities. Building on fieldwork and archival research conducted since 2013, he is developing the Islam West Africa Collection—an open-access digital archive of more than 14,500 documents on Islamic print culture and Muslim life in West Africa. In this episode, we explore how artificial intelligence is transforming research practices: How can AI support historical and anthropological research—and where are its limits? And how might AI change the future of the humanities—opening up new possibilities while also raising pressing questions about language equity, digitisation gaps, and academic responsibility?

Use and Application of ChatGPT-4o by Cataloguers and Bibliographers from Botswana, Nigeria, and South Africa

Bolaji David Oladokun, Festus Enameguono Irivike, Rexwhite Tega Enakrire, Yusuf Ayodeji Ajani

The integration of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT-4o is redefining traditional workflows in library technical services, particularly in cataloguing and bibliographic functions. This study, therefore, investigates the awareness, use, and perceived challenges of ChatGPT-4o among cataloguers and bibliographers in Botswana, Nigeria, and South Africa. Using a phenomenological research design, six professionals attending the 5th Biennial International Conference of the Department of Library and Information Studies at the University of Botswana were purposively selected. Structured interviews were conducted, and data were analyzed through narrative analysis to uncover participants’ experiences. Findings revealed that all participants were aware of ChatGPT-4o and demonstrated varying degrees of self-taught application in cataloguing and bibliography. The tool was frequently used for MARC record generation, subject indexing, citation formatting, and bibliographic compilation. Participants highlighted substantial benefits, including enhanced speed, reduced workload, and improved thematic coverage. However, notable limitations such as AI hallucinations, lack of contextual sensitivity, internet dependence, and digital literacy gaps were also identified. The significance of this study lies in its empirical exploration of real-world experiences with ChatGPT-4o from cataloguing professionals in an African context, filling a crucial gap in existing literature. The study concludes that ChatGPT-4o holds significant promise as a complementary tool for technical service delivery but must be used with human oversight. It recommends policy development, staff training, and ethical guidelines for responsible integration into library workflows.

Revolutionizing Library Services: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Cataloguing and Access to Information in Nigeria Academic Libraries

Olabisi Docars Ogungbenro, Ugwunwa C. Esse, Isaac Olowoporoku, Abraham Christopher

This research investigates the transformative function of artificial intelligence (AI) in improving cataloguing and access to information in Nigerian university libraries. The use of AI technology in library operations has resulted in considerable breakthroughs, including meeting the changing needs of digitally savvy users and optimizing the management of massive information resources. Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform cataloguing operations, improve information access, and position academic libraries as key knowledge hubs. Nigerian academic libraries may greatly improve their service delivery by adopting AI technologies that support research, teaching, and learning in the digital age. By analyzing the historical backdrop of cataloguing, the study emphasizes the limitations of traditional methods as well as AI-driven solutions. This paper investigates key AI tools like machine learning, natural language processing, and robotic process automation, providing examples of their use in automating metadata extraction, enhancing search capabilities, and personalized user experiences. The study outlines significant AI implementation issues, such as data consistency, ethical considerations, and technical training requirements, and makes solutions for overcoming these obstacles. Recommendations such as Continuous training, collaboration, user engagement, ethical considerations, and infrastructure investment were made in other to increase the influence of AI on library services.

Preparedness of Librarians for AI-Generated Metadata Management: A Case Study of University Librarians in South–West, Nigeria

Temitope Oluwabunmi Mabawonku, Olayinka Buraimo

This study investigates the preparedness of university librarians in South–West Nigeria for managing AI-generated metadata. Using a mixed-method approach, the study examines librarians’ awareness, skills, and attitudes toward adopting AI tools for metadata management. Data were collected from 150 librarians across 19 public universities via structured questionnaires and semistructured interviews. The findings reveal that while there is moderate awareness of AI tools, with GPT-4 being the most recognized, familiarity with other tools like Vision AI and AutoML remains low. Librarians demonstrated moderate proficiency in organizing and curating AI-generated data but lack advanced technical skills in areas such as AI integration and problem-solving. Despite these skill gaps, librarians expressed a positive attitude toward AI adoption, showing readiness to learn and adapt. However, concerns were raised about the reliability of AI-generated metadata compared to traditional methods. The study concludes that targeted training programs and improved infrastructure are necessary to enhance librarians’ technical capabilities and fully leverage AI for metadata management. Recommendations include comprehensive AI training, expanding awareness of diverse AI tools for metadata management, and fostering collaboration with AI specialist.

Unravelling the web: exploring the dynamics of online disinformation and its impact on democracy in Africa

Kira Alberts

The article looks at the influence of social media disinformation campaigns on voter behaviour in the national elections in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa in the period 2017–2023. By examining the various communication efforts, propaganda and political marketing, the article shows how the digital revolution – with the help of such tools as artificial intelligence, algorithms, deepfakes and bots – has amplified the potential for disinformation to an unprecedented degree. By comparing three African countries in their respectively distinct stages of democratic consolidation, the article sheds light on how disinformation techniques impact the democratic fabric of these nations and to what extent disinformation influences voter attitudes, choices and overall electoral outcomes in the three countries.

Islam West Africa Collection: Dataset, Distant Reading, and Uses of AI for Discourse Analysis

Anaïs Wion

Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), created and maintained by F. Madore, is an open-access database that provides access to press clippings from the mainstream press in West African (Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Benin, Togo, Niger, Nigeria) as well as Islamic publications, and video recordings, all of those documents related to Islam. Complex tools enable discourse analysis and answer various scientific questions through keywords mapping, topic modelling, sentiment analysis and spatial visualization.

AI and the New (geo)Politics of Knowledge

Rachel Adams

The Future of the University

AI and Language Data Flaring in Africa: Addressing the Low-Resource Challenge

Ife Adebara

African languages are under-represented in artificial intelligence (AI) systems due to limited language data, excluding millions from digital participation in their native languages. Factors such as multilingual complexity, foreign-language-dominant policies, weak institutional backing and lack of digital infrastructure contribute to the low-resource classification of African languages. “Language data flaring” — paralleling gas flaring — captures the systemic neglect and poor management of African language data leading to data undercollection, poor storage and limited use in AI. Addressing the gap requires policies that integrate African languages into national digital agendas, support documentation, fund projects and foster inclusive, collaborative AI development. Community-led documentation, open-source tools and growing recognition of linguistic diversity in AI offer promising paths forward.

Teaching Digital Humanities in Nigerian Universities: Principles, tools and pedagogy for success

Frank Onuh

This presentation explores the critical yet underdeveloped field of Digital Humanities (DH) in Nigerian universities, spotlighting how AI, digital tools, and African epistemologies can bridge the educational digital divide. I also provided practical strategies for integrating DH into the Nigerian curriculum while confronting resource scarcity and infrastructural limitations. Through real-world examples and culturally rooted digital tools like Voyant Tools, NotebookLM, and NLP systems adapted for African languages, the presentation challenges dominant Western models and emphasizes DH as a transformative methodology for preserving cultural heritage and amplifying Black scholarly futures.

Decolonial Prompting: Rewriting AI Toward Black Futures

Frank Onuh

This presentation develops a theory of decolonial prompting as a method of engaging large language models (LLMs) and other AI systems from the perspective of Black studies and decolonial thought. It argues that prompting is not a neutral technical skill but a political act situated within the coloniality of power, where race, knowledge, and humanity have been historically organized through Eurocentric hierarchies. Drawing on Quijano, Mignolo, and Wynter, the talk traces how modern AI systems inherit and reproduce colonial logics in their training data, defaults, and interfaces. It then introduces decolonial prompting as a practical method for Black scholars and communities to contest erasure, expose algorithmic anti-Blackness, and rewrite machinic outputs toward Black futures. Using case studies from my experience with OpenAI’s Sora and Canva, alongside mainstream chat and image models, the presentation shows how visual and textual outputs often encode Blackness as deficit or pathology. It maps the layered subject positions involved in prompting such as colonized subjects, programmers, validators, and corporate/state actors—and argues that every prompt is a negotiation between subject, object, and frame. The slide deck was prepared for the African Studies conference panel on AI, race, and decoloniality with the full paper published by the Cambridge University Press in the African Studies Review in 2026. It is intended both as a conceptual intervention and a practical resource for those seeking to engage AI critically and strategically, and in solidarity with Black and other marginalized communities.

Who Will Own and Control Africa's AI Energy Future?

Imad Musa

As Africa races to power its digital future with Chinese solar panels and AI-ready data centres, it risks becoming both the supplier of critical minerals and the dumping ground for toxic waste in a new form of green extractivism, wrapped in the language of digital and climate progress.

The Geopolitics of Digital Technology in Africa

Otobong Inieke

As the world leans into the fourth industrial revolution, Africa has become a frontier for the geopolitical power play of China and the United States. Amid this, African governments must take control of their digital development or end up as pawns, again.

How Technology Preserves the Legacy of Colonialism Across Africa

Elias Gbadamosi

The parallels between colonialism and bias in modern technology offer an instructive analysis that reveals how contemporary digital infrastructures perpetuate colonial power even as they claim to connect the world and advance social justice issues.

Africa's AI Path to Health Impact

Ebele Mọgọ

AI is opening the door to health systems that can learn, adapt and act. Can Africa harness it to leap ahead?

‘Who Do We Imagine AI Is Built By and Built For?’

Wale Lawal

With AI proponents promising to ‘save’ Africa, Nanjala Nyabola asks an urgent question: what happens when a continent’s future is outsourced to someone else’s imagination? We discuss the politics of technology, the myth of the ‘cloud’, and why the next digital revolution must begin with African women.

Africa's Role in the Future of Artificial Intelligence

Dawn Chinagorom-Abiakalam

As artificial intelligence transforms global systems, Africa remains sidelined in its design; even as its labour and resources power the very infrastructure that makes AI possible. The emergence of AI on the continent raises urgent questions about equity, inclusion and how to ensure Africans benefit from the technologies they help sustain.

En Afrique, prendre le train de l'intelligence artificielle

Pape Abdou Ndour

The Hidden Cost Of AI: How Africa Fuels Global AI While Being Left Behind

Uchechukwu Ajuzieogu

An investigation reveals how African children mine cobalt for AI data centers while university graduates develop PTSD training ChatGPT's safety systems for under $2/hour—exposing the hidden human cost of artificial intelligence.

African Ontologies in the Face of Machine Learning: Reinventing Educational Paradigms in the Age of AI

Cosmas Gabin Mbarga Asseng

The article develops an Afrocentric critique of the dominant paradigms of educational artificial intelligence (AI), unveiling how Cartesian dualism and methodological individualism underpin their conception. This analysis demonstrates how these epistemic foundations, foreign to African ontologies and contexts, generate significant cultural biases in learning algorithms, compromising their effectiveness and relevance for African learners. Faced with these tensions, the paper proposes an ontological reinvention of educational paradigms through three complementary axes: the reconceptualization of educational AI systems inspired by Ubuntu, developing a relational approach to machine learning (ML); the integration of oral epistemologies into adaptive systems; and the development of a theoretical framework to evaluate and advance ontologically inclusive educational AI technologies. The research emphasizes epistemic justice by centering African knowledge systems, while addressing technological decolonization through culturally grounded design.The study presents case studies of pioneering African educational initiatives that mobilize AI from a local ontological perspective, demonstrating the feasibility and benefits of such an approach. It further articulates concrete strategies to implement this vision, including training teachers and designers at the intersection of traditional knowledge and emerging technologies—a key aspect of techno-pedagogy—as well as participatory methodologies for the co-creation of culturally relevant AI systems. By foregrounding African ontologies as foundational to ethical AI development, the work challenges Eurocentric paradigms and advocates for inclusive, contextually transformative educational technologies.

L'intelligence artificielle en Afrique, entre avancées et difficultés

Unknown Author

Le Nigeria accueille les 13 et 14 août 2025 la Conférence sur l'économie numérique et l'inclusion (AFDEIC). Un grand rendez-vous qui réunit décideurs politiques, chefs d’entreprises, universitaires et autres partenaires, pour débattre de l’avenir de l’économie numérique africaine et du rôle-clé que l’intelligence artificielle (IA) pourrait y jouer. Le thème de cette édition est « L’IA et l’économie numérique africaine : ne laisser personne de côté ». Entre startups innovantes et stratégie régionale, aussi bien le public que le privé se lancent dans la course à l'IA sur le continent.

An African Perspective to Ethical Questions Posed by Artificial Intelligence and the Intersections with Climate Justice, Resilience, and Equity

Adam Kyomuhendo

Explosive and unprecedented developments in information and computing technology and the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) are bringing both opportunities and challenges to all mankind. However, for historical and sociological reasons, and current design of global power, the African continent will arguably be the most affected by the use and deployment of AI in all spheres of human endeavor ranging from the political, cultural, scientific, educational, societal, legal and regulatory, among others. Undoubtedly, one area that will be affected by the speed, impact, and complexity of AI will be climate, which is very pivotal to African life and existence. Already, it is anticipated that AI will further aggravate the effect of the crisis on Africa. With particular emphasis on Africa’s Indigenous people, this article analyzes current debates in technology ethics, infusing them with a special African characteristic and flavor. The utility of the Indigenous concept of Obuntu is highlighted as an alternative to Western conceptualizations of how AI technology should be approached right from development, through use to regulation. This article has interdisciplinarily deployed legal, political, and decolonial methodologies with the objective of contributing to and further enriching ongoing discussions for the development of a comprehensive continent-scale regulatory framework that judiciously recognizes the utility and great potential of AI systems as a climate resilience tool but also its multi-dimensional and enduring threats associated with the perpetuation of the climate crisis and inequalities involved.

Bridging the AI Divide: Advancing Language Equity and Data Governance for Generative AI in Africa

Fola Adeleke

While the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in Africa is growing, the disparities in use persist along various dimensions. This article aims to address how enabling governance frameworks can make large language models (LLMs) more inclusive through representation of low-resource languages in training data sets to enable equitable access to information and services. This article assesses emerging governance ecosystems in Africa from the perspective of coloniality and representation in generative AI and the extent to which LLMs can be used to tackle power asymmetries between African data subjects and AI developers to reduce inequalities that the adoption of generative AI may induce in Africa. By assessing the emerging national AI strategies in Africa, this article identifies a gap in AI governance frameworks across Africa specifically in relation to inclusivity in AI development. The countries briefly reviewed are Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria due to the size and importance of their economies in sub-Saharan Africa and the recent efforts by the governments in these countries to adopt a governance framework to maximize AI technologies in their economies. With the use of case studies and developments across Africa, this article identifies three main data governance areas that will enable equitable generative AI in Africa. These are data generation and collection, regulatory sandboxes, and policy prototypes as well as data sharing. The issues addressed in this article center on data justice and the necessity for visibility, fairness, and representation in the adoption of generative AI across Africa.

Fostering African Data Commons: Embracing the Philosophy of Ubuntu

Simon (Chieh-Jan) Sun, Marie Muhadia Shabaya, Nai Lee Kalema

This research envisions an African data commons regime, rooted in the philosophy of Ubuntu, where training data for AI is pooled and shared as a common-pool resource. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gaining traction in Africa but it is still in its nascent phase. While investment in Africa’s AI infrastructure has become a battleground in the U.S.–China race for influence, Africa suffers from a scarcity of high-quality training data. Currently, data governance centers on the notion of “privacy,” emphasizing the rights of individuals with respect to their personal information, resulting in data that is predominantly controlled by companies located outside of Africa, a phenomenon some describe as “data colonialism.” To foster a localized, African AI data ecosystem, the article proposes constructing a data governance regime rooted in the essence of collective responsibility. This approach fosters data sharing, given the intertwining of the philosophy of Ubuntu with the governance of commons. To highlight the importance of the infrastructural component of data governance, the article, grounded in Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom’s theories of the commons, proposes to treat training data as a common-pool resource. In this view, the analysis of various data commons will center on the physical components of data governance, specifically through the lens of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. The goal is to provide an analytical framework to decide what must be undertaken to cultivate a localized data ecosystem, drawing upon a governance system deeply embedded in an African worldview.

Artificial Intelligence and Religion: Investigating Perceptions: Ethics, Practices and the Role of Religious Actors in Senegal

Rachid ID Yassine, Khalifa Diop

The advent of artificial intelligence and the ethical issues and concerns that arise from it constitute a major challenge in today's digital revolution. While discussions are more advanced in countries with higher levels of digitization, those questions are also moving up the institutional and scientific agenda of African countries. As an example, on May 2, 2023, UNESCO organized a meeting of researchers and decision-makers in Dakar to support legislation on artificial intelligence. These initiatives enable us to look at issues that have already been identified, in order to implement best practices and anticipate possible transpositions to different African realities. It is in line with this approach that the Artificial Intelligence for Africa's Development (AI4D) program piloted by the African Observatory on Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AORAI) was developed. The research presented in this report involved 296 religious authorities across 4 cities in Senegal and was carried out by LASPAD, which was chosen as the French-speaking West African laboratory. The main focus of this study lies on AI applications, legislation and ethical responsibility. What are the main ethical challenges? How, according to religious actors’ perception, can we get leads on AI regulation? What role could religious authorities play in this regulatory project? These are the questions that this study seeks to address

Naming Slavery in a Digital Public History Project in Mali in the Context of Increased Violence Against Those Who Refuse to Be Called Slaves

Marie Rodet, Mamadou Séne Cissé

Digital public history has emerged as a powerful tool for addressing difficult pasts with concerned communities in an ethical way. This paper focuses on the ethical issues at stake in co-producing digital historical knowledge about resistance to slavery in a web documentary that involved identifying and naming marginalised populations in Mali, increasingly at risk of violence. The web documentary aims to bridge the gap between endogenous historical resistance to slavery and modern anti-slavery activism, while also addressing issues of funding, authority tensions, and asymmetrical relations, in which the digital gap presented specific challenges. In the process, we report on a case of dialogue among researchers, practitioners, and village participants, and we expose the ethical implications of digital research and citizen intervention related to past and present slavery in Africa.

Is Rejecting AI Art Becoming a Conservative Position?

Boluwatife Oyediran

The growth of generative AI has led to debates about its acceptability in art and whether artists are being conservative for rejecting its use.

Implications of Open-Source Large Language Models for Responsible AI Development in Africa

Scott Mahoney, Rachel Adams

Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools capable of advancing Africa’s socio-economic development and bridging global AI disparities. This executive brief provides a comprehensive overview of the opportunities these models present. particularly their ability to enable African-led innovation, support local language inclusion, and reduce dependence on proprietary systems. At the same time, the paper addresses pressing challenges, such as inadequate computing infrastructure, lack of inclusive datasets, opacity in training data, and gaps in national and regional AI governance frameworks. It aligns the discourse with key African policy instruments including the AU’s Continental AI Strategy, Agenda 2063, and data governance frameworks like the Malabo Convention. To support responsible adoption, the brief offers ten strategic recommendations. These include building pan-African AI infrastructure, improving transparency in AI model development, creating inclusive AI education programs, forming an ethics board, and leveraging regional networks such as the African Observatory on Responsible AI. The authors call for coordinated efforts by governments, civil society, research institutions, and the private sector to develop AI ecosystems that reflect African values and priorities. By framing open-source LLMs as both a technical and governance challenge, this brief makes a strong case for Africa’s proactive engagement in shaping the future of AI globally.

An African Manual for Debugging Empire

Wale Lawal

Our latest issue, An African Manual for Debugging Empire, confronts the erasure of Africans in global tech debates and highlights the ways the continent is actively shaping, contesting and redefining the futures of AI.

Almost Human? The Quiet Politics of Frontier AI

Leah Junck

Africa's leading voice in AI policy and governance, working globally to shape fair and inclusive technologies.

The Unnamed Fugitive and the Unknown Maroon: Anonymity and the Limits of Repair in Black Atlantic Historical Recovery

Annette Joseph-Gabriel

Rethinking AI ethics through an Akan ontology: advancing an ethics of becoming for sustainable AI

Husein Inusah

This paper reconceptualizes artificial intelligence (AI) ethics by integrating insights from the Akan understanding of person and mind. Current AI ethics discourse is divided into ethical AI (EIA), which examines the social impacts of AI, and responsible AI (RAI), which focuses on the ethical responsibilities in AI design and sustainability. The paper argues that these frameworks are limited, rooted in a Eurocentric perspective from the Enlightenment era. Instead, it proposes an alternative framework based on Akan concepts, which can enrich ongoing discussions about AI sustainability. By embracing a more inclusive and non-anthropocentric approach, this perspective offers valuable insights for developing a comprehensive understanding of AI ethics that transcends traditional paradigms.

The State of Large Language Models for African Languages: Progress and Challenges

Kedir Yassin Hussen, Walelign Tewabe Sewunetie, Abinew Ali Ayele, Sukairaj Hafiz Imam, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Seid Muhie Yimam

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming Natural Language Processing (NLP), but their benefits are largely absent for Africa's 2,000 low-resource languages. This paper comparatively analyzes African language coverage across six LLMs, eight Small Language Models (SLMs), and six Specialized SLMs (SSLMs). The evaluation covers language coverage, training sets, technical limitations, script problems, and language modelling roadmaps. The work identifies 42 supported African languages and 23 available public data sets, and it shows a big gap where four languages (Amharic, Swahili, Afrikaans, and Malagasy) are always treated while there is over 98\% of unsupported African languages. Moreover, the review shows that just Latin, Arabic, and Ge'ez scripts are identified while 20 active scripts are neglected. Some of the primary challenges are lack of data, tokenization biases, computational costs being very high, and evaluation issues. These issues demand language standardization, corpus development by the community, and effective adaptation methods for African languages.

Descendants and Ethical Considerations when Documenting the Names of Enslaved People in Datasets on the Internet

Walter Hawthorne

This paper examines the ethical implications of public, internet-based history projects that list enslaved people by name. It does so by considering the appropriateness of the ethics statement written by the Principal Investigators at Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade (or Enslaved.org). Enslaved.org directly addresses the urgent call to document the history of people of African descent more fully. Housed at Michigan State University, the project centers the Black experience globally, with most projects to date focused on North America. Contributors to Enslaved.org tell the stories of named enslaved individuals by extracting what is often fragmentary information (names, ages, skills, injuries, African ethnicities, etc.) from a vast range of primary source documentation and by assembling that data into datasets. The Enslaved.org team makes the datasets available, searchable, and understandable on its open-source platform (https://enslaved.org/) and through its peer-reviewed journal, The Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (https://jsdp.enslaved.org/). The Principal Investigators are committed to identifying by name as many enslaved people as possible and to representing individual and collective experiences in an international, humane, and ethical frame and to working collaboratively with researchers and descendant communities to continually develop and follow practices that respect the lives of enslaved people. The paper considers the appropriateness of the Enslaved.org ethics statement for datasets focused on slavery in a variety of places and concludes with a call for historians to work closely with descendant communities in compiling and publishing data that names enslaved individuals.

Saving Nigeria, the Piggyvest Way

Oyindamola Depo-Oyedokun

In today’s digital age, history-making lightbulb moments don’t always strike in boardrooms or after soul-searching mountain hikes. Sometimes, they unfold casually on the X timeline. Piggyvest, now one of Africa’s leading wealth management platforms, began exactly with that: a tweet, a conversation and a simple idea that would quickly revolutionize Nigeria’s fintech industry.

Digitizing Guardianship Registers in Senegal (1895-1910): Naming as Evidence and Ethical Concern

Kelly M. Duke Bryant

Drawing from research on liberated minors, formerly enslaved children whom the colonial state in Senegal entrusted to guardians following their emancipation, this article describes the process of building a database consisting of identifying information about formerly enslaved children in early colonial Senegal based on data originally collected in the early twentieth century, and it uses the database to ask both historical and ethical questions about naming practices and aliases, experiences of unfreedom, and the agency of marginalized African children. Of the 1,324 liberated minors who entered guardianship in Saint-Louis from 1895 to 1910, for example, at least 114 of them took on another name at some point, a fact that raises interesting questions about naming, name changes, and agency. I argue that names contain fragmentary evidence about their bearers' cultural or linguistic background or geographic origin, and, more importantly, that aliases can offer insight into social networks or self-fashioning. Yet reproducing names from colonial inventories in digital history projects could reinscribe oppression and violence and, in some circumstances, could contribute to stigma and shame among descended communities. As such, scholars should include them in databases and other digital history projects, but only if ethical concerns can be addressed and resolved.

Strengthening Africa's AI Ecosystem Through Open-Source Innovation and Policy Alignment

Sumaya Nur Adan

This executive brief presents a strategic analysis of how open-source innovation can serve as a powerful lever for building a robust and inclusive AI ecosystem across Africa. Drawing on global and regional trends, the brief outlines the practical ways in which governments, civil society, and the private sector can collaborate to align open-source technologies with local policy goals. It argues that by adopting open-source approaches, African countries can accelerate AI development in ways that promote transparency, reduce dependency on proprietary tools, and strengthen regional knowledge production. The brief highlights the role of harmonized policy frameworks, inclusive standards, and cross-sector partnerships in enabling Africa to chart a sovereign path toward responsible and equitable AI innovation. This work forms part of a wider research effort under the African Observatory on Responsible AI (AORAI), supported by Meta.

The State of AI in Africa: A Landscape Study

Rachel Adams, Fola Adeleke, Leah Junck, Samuel Segun, Ayantola Alayande, Selamawit Engida Abdella, Mark Gaffley, Fabio Andrés Díaz Pabón, Funbi Salami

Africa is uniquely positioned to benefit from the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence, but realizing its full potential requires addressing complex socio-economic challenges. In the report, AI in Africa: A Landscape Study, the Global Center on AI Governance (GCG), through the African Observatory on Responsible AI, takes a closer look at the continent’s AI ecosystem. This study outlines the significant opportunities AI holds for Africa’s growth, identifying immense opportunities for AI to drive economic growth, improve public services, and create new socio-economic opportunities. The study also highlights challenges that require thoughtful, context-driven solutions. It identifies key drivers and actionable recommendations to ensure AI serves Africa’s development goals while safeguarding its social, economic, and cultural landscapes. For AI to truly benefit Africa, it must be built for Africa. The continent’s dynamic, youthful, and increasingly tech-savvy population presents an opportunity to develop AI solutions that are not just imported but designed with African realities in mind. Achieving this requires robust investments in local talent, infrastructure, and policies that ensure AI serves Africa’s needs rather than reinforcing global inequalities. One of the major takeaways from the study is that AI’s increasing role in key sectors—such as health, education, finance, agriculture, and public services—demands a collaborative approach to governance. AI’s transformative potential can only be fully realized if the governance frameworks around it are well-developed, regionally relevant, and uphold ethical standards. Yet, Africa faces persistent challenges such as infrastructure deficits, limited regulatory frameworks, and a shortage of skilled professionals. The power of open-source AI lies in its ability to democratize innovation, especially in Africa, where local startups can leverage it to build solutions that address pressing societal challenges. However, to fully harness its potential, it is crucial to tackle challenges related to data governance, privacy, and responsible AI deployment.

Toward an African Agenda for AI Safety

Unknown Author

Artificial intelligence is reshaping economies, politics, and societies worldwide, and Africa is no exception. While AI promises benefits for health, education, agriculture, and economic growth, this report highlights how its risks are especially acute on the continent given fragile institutions, limited infrastructure, and geopolitical dependencies.

"We know what we are doing": the politics and trends in artificial intelligence policies in Africa

Thompson Gyedu Kwarkye

In the last decade, several actors have encouraged African countries to establish standards, policies and strategies that maximise the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) and reduce risks. African countries appear to be adopting this regulatory path, yet their motivations and political contexts for actively engaging in AI policies vary, as do the values, principles and ethical issues woven into these policies. With qualitative evidence from Rwanda and Ghana, the paper explores the complex interplay of politics, power and local ecosystems in policy development on the continent. It unpacks the strategies of mobilising knowledge through stakeholder engagements, agenda setting and valid public and political engagements that lead to the final AI policy. A comparative analysis of the policies in the two countries finds that while reproducing identical initiatives, there are differences in AI vision, practicality and data sovereignty based on political, economic and historical contexts.

Introduction: The Politics and Ethics of Naming the Names of Enslaved People in Digital Humanities Projects

Walter Hawthorne, Richard Roberts, Fatoumata Seck, Rebecca Wall

This introduction provides a broad overview to the context of digital humanities projects dealing with enslaved people and frames the debate over the ethics and politics of using the names of enslaved people. For some descendant communities, listing the names of enslaved people contributes to searches for genealogical connections; for other communities where the stigma of enslaved descent still prevails, such projects may do harm. This introduction explores these issues in relationship to the articles included in this special collection.

Annotating The New Union Club: A Case Study on Critical Praxis for Digital Art Histories

Temi Odumosu

Founded in 2002, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide is a scholarly, refereed e-journal devoted to the study of nineteenth-century painting, sculpture, graphic art

AI in Africa: 5 issues that must be tackled for digital equality

Rachel Adams

Policy-makers must grapple with an uncomfortable truth: without deliberate action, AI will magnify global divides.

Designing Artificial Intelligence for Public Policy and Governance in Africa

Gedion Onyango (ed)

This book examines the relationship between artificial intelligence and public policy in Africa. Bringing together academics and experts from multiple governance sectors, it assesses the ways in which AI is being utilised to achieve policy goals, the challenges and opportunities it presents, and how it is being governed. The book adopts a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on insights from political science, law, economics, data science, linguistics and engineering, to explore how national AI strategies are being adapted in different governance sectors across the continent. These include areas such as public safety, economic growth, electoral administration and public accountability. Attention is also given to feminist approaches to AI, and the likelihood of realising responsible AI for future public policy and governance in Africa. Practical policy recommendations are also highlighted, making this an important book for both practitioners and academics interested in African governance, public policy and AI.

Decolonizing Archival Narratives: Exploring Digital Bias in the Catalogs of Portuguese-Colonized African Territories

Agata Błoch, Guillem Martos Oms, Clodomir Santana

This study discusses the intersection between Black/African Digital Humanities, and computational methods, including natural language processing (NLP) and generative artificial intelligence (AI). We have structured the narrative around four critical themes: biases in colonial archives; postcolonial digitization; linguistic and representational inequalities in Lusophone digital content; and technical limitations of AI models when applied to the archival records from Portuguese-colonized African territories (1640–1822). Through three case studies relating to the Africana Collection at the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, the Dembos Collection, and Sebestyén’s Caculo Cangola Collection, we demonstrate the infrastructural biases inherent in contemporary computational tools. This begins with the systematic underrepresentation of African archives in global digitization efforts and ends with biased AI models that have not been trained on African historical corpora.

Developing an Artificial Intelligence Maturity Assessment Framework for South Africa: First Annual AI Maturity Assessment 2025

Unknown Author

Kenya's Data Workers: The $2/Hour Labor Force Training Western AI

Uchechukwu Ajuzieogu

How Silicon Valley's AI revolution is built on the backs of exploited workers in Africa's "Silicon Savannah"

How Africa Builds The Future It Cannot Use

Uchechukwu Ajuzieogu

Dorsen was 8, mining cobalt for 10 cents daily. His labor powers AI systems he'll never use.

The Ghost Workers Building OpenAI's Empire: A $10 Billion Monument To Digital Colonialism

Uchechukwu Ajuzieogu

At 3 AM in Kibera, Grace processes torture and murder for $1.32/hour while OpenAI raises $40 billion. This is the hidden human cost of AI supremacy.

The Mind Miners: How Silicon Valley's AI Gold Rush Is Built On African Trauma

Uchechukwu Ajuzieogu

Mercy earned $1.32/hour training ChatGPT by watching child abuse videos. Her PTSD is AI's hidden cost.

When AI Doesn't Speak Your Language: The Hidden Cost Of Building Tomorrow's Technology

Uchechukwu Ajuzieogu

While GPT's dazzles English speakers, it recognizes only 10 percent of sentences in Hausa, spoken by 94 million West Africans.

Africa and the Big Debates in AI

Rachel Adams

For some years a debate has ensued among the AI community regarding how seriously we should be taking the risk of AI systems usurping human control. Experts wildly disagree about the potential of a super-intelligence going rogue and removing human oversight and control. Yet, in recent months, this debate has taken on a greater urgency with the release of AI models seemingly demonstrating new capabilities and human-like behaviour.

Resilience and Preparedness in AI Governance: The African Perspective

Fola Adeleke

Africa's leading voice in AI policy and governance, working globally to shape fair and inclusive technologies.

TWAILing AI Governance: Will Third World Countries Be Left Behind?

Jake Okechukwu Effoduh, Miracle Okumu Mudeyi

Jake Okechukwu Effoduh and Miracle Okumu Mudeyi interrogate the coloniality of AI, the extractive political economy of data, and the structural inequalities embedded in algorithmic decision-making, arguing for a decolonial approach to AI policy to escape a cycle of technological dependency.

Beyond the Hype: South African Attitudes to AI and the Future

Leah Junck

This report details the findings from a nationally representative survey on public attitudes toward AI in South Africa, conducted between February and March 2025. The primary objective was to understand how a diverse population perceives and interacts with AI technologies.

African Countries Are Racing to Create AI Strategies - But Are They Putting the Cart Before the Horse?

Selamawit Engida Abdella, Ayantola Alayande

African countries are increasingly establishing policy frameworks for emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI). In the last seven years, at least eight African countries have adopted national AI strategies, while five have either completed a draft or are in the process of developing one (Figure 1). Our recently published report with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) discusses in detail the key trends in emerging tech governance on the continent, focusing on AI, digital public infrastructure (DPI) and connectivity in five countries — South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, and Zambia.

Reflections on the Ethics of Research with the Registers of Liberated Africans in the Indian Ocean

Matthew S. Hopper

This paper examines ethical issues related to the use of the registers of liberated Africans in the Indian Ocean for historical research. The registers provide rich details about the physical appearance (height, age, facial scarification, brands, tattoos) and origins (language, ethnicity or “caste”, mother's name, father's name) of liberated Africans. They also reveal aspects about their treatment at the hands of colonial officials, including the individuals to whom the Africans were indentured, the work they performed, and the new names that were assigned to them. Such details make these registers invaluable sources for historians, but they also present ethical challenges. In the Indian Ocean world, some descendants may take pride in their liberated African ancestors, and claims to liberated African ancestors can have important implications for claims to land and status, yet others may prefer that information be lost to what Pier Larson called “the countervailing forces of historical amnesia” [Larson 1999]. Containing intimate personal information that may permit investigation into both the origins and the descendants of enslaved Africans, registers may also be considered sources of biometric data. As such, should they be subject to the ethical standards applied to biometric data in the sciences? This paper explores a model for the ethical use of historical biometric (DNA) data from Australia as an example of what historians might consider emulating when making use of registers of liberated Africans in the digital humanities.

The Pedagogical Innovations and Ethical Challenges of Integrating an Online Version of the Registers of the Liberation of Senegal (1857-1903) into the Teaching of History in the Senegalese Middle Cycle Public Schooling

Mamadou Yéro Baldé, Djibrirou Daouda Ba, Ismaïla Mbodji

This article analyzes the possibility of a pedagogical renewal in the teaching of the history of the slave trade and slavery in middle cycle (four years of study that can begin at the age of twelve) public school classrooms in Senegal. It does so by proposing that aspects of middle cycle curricula be built around an open-source, online version of the Senegal Registers of Liberation (1857-1903) in order to achieve the National Education Orientation Law of 1991 and the Consolidated History Program of 2006. In this article, we identify the current limits of teaching about the slave trade and slavery and propose new approaches, taking into account innovative pedagogical perspectives that are essential to the training of students congruent with the evolution of historical methodologies in the digital humanities. Beyond this, the article shows the importance of addressing ethical questions around the public use of names of enslaved people which appear in the Senegal Registers of Liberation. In sum, the article explores and proposes revisions in the teaching of the slave trade and slavery in Senegal using digital resources.

Naming Names of Enslaved People in the Senegal Liberations Project

Richard Roberts, Rebecca Wall

Enslavement is linked to enduring and systemic inequalities, hierarchies, and to the erasures of enslaved people's histories, including their names. Such erasures meant and continue to mean different things to different populations of formerly enslaved people. Descendants of enslaved people, especially in the diaspora, turned to well-established means of genealogical research and new forms of DNA research to trace their ancestors. However, in West Africa and in other parts of the world where obvious racialized markers do not automatically hint at an enslaved ancestor, many former enslaved people “would rather forget” their enslaved past or that of their ancestors, precisely because descent from enslaved ancestry remains stigmatized. Ethical considerations of conducting digital historical research on slavery and emancipation have been hotly discussed for a number of years, and given the public-facing character of many of these digital projects, the stakes of naming versus anonymity are high. This article suggests a way forward for those people recorded in the Registers of Liberation in colonial Senegal.

An intellectual history of digital colonialism

Toussaint Nothias

In recent years, the scholarly critique of tech power as a form of digital colonialism has gained prominence. Scholars from various disciplines—including communication, law, computer science, anthropology, and sociology—have turned to this idea (or related ones such as tech colonialism, data colonialism, and algorithmic colonization) to conceptualize the harmful impact of digital technologies globally. This article reviews significant historical precedents to the current critique of digital colonialism and further shows how digital rights activists from the Global South have been actively developing and popularizing these ideas over the last decade. I argue that these two phenomena help explain why scholars from varied disciplines developed adjacent frameworks simultaneously and at this specific historical juncture. The article also proposes a typology of digital colonialism around six core features. Overall, this article encourages historicizing current debates about tech power and emphasizes the instrumental role of nonscholarly communities in knowledge production.

A digital cold war in Africa? Capitalist multiplicity, digital transformation, and shifting dependencies amid US–China tech rivalry

John H. S. Åberg, Motolani Peltola

Is a ‘digital cold war’ turning Africa, yet again, into a geopolitical battleground for great powers? It is said that African countries now risk becoming incorporated into different ‘technological spheres of influence’ as US–China rivalry increasingly revolves around digital technology. It is believed that China has the upper hand in this struggle given its structural power in African Information and Communications Technology (ICT) networks. Yet we question this understanding. Rather than Manichaean cold war antagonism and bifurcated technology domains, Africa’s digital development is primarily taking place within the context of the uniformity of global capitalism. China is not dominating African ICT networks; instead, the technology stack displays multiplicity, and many governments wish to diversify their ICT suppliers as they make choices around digital investments on pragmatic and non-geopolitical grounds. We observe how multiple stakeholders – public and private actors, global and local firms, both beyond and inclusive of Chinese entities – compete and collaborate across scales for profit and for the digital transformation of African societies. We illustrate our argument of ‘capitalist multiplicity’ by investigating two cases – Nigeria and Ethiopia.

Attributes of Digital Sovereignty: A Conceptual Framework

Mauro Santaniello

This paper explores digital sovereignty as a pivotal element of contemporary politics. Drawing upon a constructivist perspective, it proposes a conceptual framework for studying the policy discourse on digital sovereignty. The framework is structured around five core attributes – adversariality, multiversity, latency, instrumentality, and hypocrisy – that characterise sovereignty claims in the digital sphere. These attributes serve as analytical categories to understand digital sovereignty as a discursive resource employed in political struggles over the control of digital networks. Digital sovereignty emerges as a contested concept, central to competition among nation-states, regional blocs, corporate entities, epistemic communities and social groups. The study highlights the contradictory and often fragmented nature of digital sovereignty claims, revealing how they intersect with broader geopolitical ambitions and challenges. By situating digital sovereignty within global power rivalries and historically-determined social relations, this analysis develops a critical understanding of digital sovereignty, which embraces its inherently contested and evolving nature.

Imagine Lagos: Mapping History, Place, and Politics in a Nineteenth-Century African City

Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi

Written from a digital humanities perspective, this book combines historical sources, maps, and a walking cartography to create new perspectives on the nineteenth-century history of Lagos, West Africa’s most populous city. What traces do people leave in the places where they live, and even where they die? This book addresses the spatial history of nineteenth-century Lagos, rebuilding its past as a series of encounters: between men and women, between past and present, between enslaved and free, between living and dead, and finally between land and lagoon. In Imagine Lagos, Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi argues that the invention, destruction, and reinvention of spatial markers in Lagos—the streets, markets, roads, squares, palaces, and lagoons where these encounters occurred—was crucial to negotiations over identity, power, and freedom. Research for this book combines oral and archival sources from three countries with the experience of three summers of walking the streets of Lagos. Contrary to historical interpretations that render the physical city as a blank, featureless space in desperate need of constant repair, this book offers a variety of visual and textual narratives to push readers to imagine the old city. Throughout Imagine Lagos, historical maps join other texts—including colonial correspondence and reports, missionary letters, oríkì (Yoruba praise poetry), and newspaper articles—to create a complex collage of urban life in Lagos. Streets emerge as sites of historical memories, and Adelusi-Adeluyi’s maps of the mid-nineteenth-century city reveal and catalog layers of change. A focus on the city as a whole—as both a physical and social landscape—brings us closer than ever to understanding the lives of Lagosians between 1845 and 1872. In old Lagos, the streets keep their histories. The story maps and full-resolution maps for this book are available at https://newmapsoldlagos.com and https://imaginelagos.com.

Out of the ashes: rethinking loss in the African archive

Edwina D. Ashie-Nikoi

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.

Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back

Ulises A. Mejias, Nick Couldry

A compelling argument that the extractive practices of today’s tech giants are the continuation of colonialism—and a crucial guide to collective resistance. Large technology companies like Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet have unprecedented access to our daily lives, collecting information when we check our email, count our steps, shop online, and commute to and from work. Current events are concerning—both the changing owners (and names) of billion-dollar tech companies and regulatory concerns about artificial intelligence underscore the sweeping nature of Big Tech’s surveillance and the influence such companies hold over the people who use their apps and platforms. As trusted tech experts Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry show in this eye-opening and convincing book, this vast accumulation of data is not the accidental stockpile of a fast-growing industry. Just as nations stole territories for ill-gotten minerals and crops, wealth, and dominance, tech companies steal personal data important to our lives. It’s only within the framework of colonialism, Mejias and Couldry argue, that we can comprehend the full scope of this heist. Like the land grabs of the past, today’s data grab converts our data into raw material for the generation of corporate profit against our own interests. Like historical colonialism, today’s tech corporations have engineered an extractive form of doing business that builds a new social and economic order, leads to job precarity, and degrades the environment. These methods deepen global inequality, consolidating corporate wealth in the Global North and engineering discriminatory algorithms. Promising convenience, connection, and scientific progress, tech companies enrich themselves by encouraging us to relinquish details about our personal interactions, our taste in movies or music, and even our health and medical records. Do we have any other choice? Data Grab affirms that we do. To defy this new form of colonialism we will need to learn from previous forms of resistance and work together to imagine entirely new ones. Mejias and Couldry share the stories of voters, workers, activists, and marginalized communities who have successfully opposed unscrupulous tech practices. An incisive discussion of the digital media that’s transformed our world, Data Grab is a must-read for anyone concerned about privacy, self-determination, and justice in the internet age.

Addressing AI Bias in News Reporting: Challenges and Strategies for African Newsrooms

Frank Onuh

This presentation explores the intersection of artificial intelligence and journalism in Africa. This comprehensive work examines the types of AI biases affecting media narratives, such as algorithmic and data biases, and their impact on public trust and representation. It provides actionable strategies for mitigating these biases, including ethical AI usage, improving media literacy, and fostering institutional collaboration. Featuring case studies, practical prompts for AI bias analysis, and a forward-looking perspective, this research is an essential resource for understanding and improving AI's role in African media. Keywords: AI bias, African journalism, media ethics, algorithmic fairness, newsroom challenges, AI strategies in Africa.

Introduction to the Special Issue: "Digital Humanities for Inclusion"

Johannes Sibeko, Menno van Zaanen

It is with immense pride and anticipation that we introduce the fifth volume of the Journal of Digital Humanities Association of Southern Africa (JDHASA), centred on the theme “Digital Humanities for Inclusion.”

Review: Pollicy

Titilola Aiyegbusi

A review of Pollicy, a digital initiative that aims to bridge the gap between government and citizen in southern and eastern African countries, directed by Irene Mwendwa

Responsible AI Governance in Africa: Prospects for Outcomes Based Regulation

Fola Adeleke, Funbi Akinwale

The imperative for responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) governance is becoming increasingly evident as advances in AI technology and the relevance of these technologies in tackling various global challenges continue to unravel. This paper explores the model of outcomes-based regulation as a governance framework for fostering responsible AI practices. Drawing on a review of legal and technological perspectives, this paper investigates the implications of outcomes-based regulation on the development and deployment of AI-based systems in Africa. The paper explores the role of regulatory bodies, corporate actors, and public participation in shaping and enforcing outcomes-based AI regulation at a national and transnational level in Africa. Through an analysis of emerging AI regulatory frameworks globally, this paper analyses the design of outcomes-based AI regulation and the need to embrace a flexible and adaptive regulatory approach that is centred on sustainable and inclusive development. Finally, this paper addresses opportunities for governments to consider AI regulation that involves a clear definition of the outcomes (the what) while the regulated institutions participate actively in designing the means to achieve the outcome (the how).

The Outsized Role of African Civil Society and Universities in Advancing Responsible AI

Rachel Adams, Ana Florido

Across Africa, civil society organizations working on AI are taking on an outsized role in advancing responsible AI practices despite facing significant challenges. This article presents findings from the Global Index on Responsible AI, showcasing the efforts of African civil society groups and academic institutions in the AI sector. We also examine the unique challenges these groups encounter in scaling their work and amplifying their impact.

Geopolitics of AI: Africa's Role in a Shifting Global Landscape

Rachel Adams

The geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is shaping the future of global power, economic development, and international relations. As AI becomes an increasingly critical tool for technological advancement, economic growth, and geopolitical influence, countries are racing to establish dominance in this space. Central to this competition are the United States and China, two global superpowers locked in an ongoing AI arms race. What are the impacts for Africa of this AI arms race, and what place does Africa hold in the geopolitics of AI? These issues are explored in detail in my new book The New Empire of AI: The Future of Global Inequality. Some key points are set out below, and were highlighted in a recent webinar on Africa and the Geopolitics of AI, organised by the Oxford University Blavatnik School of Governance and the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

The 2024 DH Symposium at the University of Ghana: A Report

Unknown Author

Editors' Note: April 2024

Jennifer Guiliano, Roopika Risam, Leah Junck, James Yékú

Editors' note on the April 2024 issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities, guest edited by Leah Junck and James Yékú

Review: Open Restitution Africa

Dominique Somda

A review of Open Restitution Africa, a data platform focusing on the repatriation of African artifacts, directed by Chao Tayiana Maina and Molemo Moiloa

Review: Paint Me Black

Frank Onuh

A review of Paint Me Black, a project exploring African fractals, directed by Augustine Farinola

Review: African Digital Heritage

Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu

A review of the African Digital Heritage Project, a Nairobi-based non-profit organization at the intersection of storytelling, culture, and technology , directed by Chao Tayiana Maina

De la cassette au fichier numérique : enjeux de l'archivage, du partage et de la restitution des archives orales enregistrées au Niger

Véronique Ginouvès, Ibrahim Moussa

L’article, coécrit par un sociologue de l’université André Salifou (Zinder, Niger) et une archiviste de la Médiathèque de la Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’homme (Aix-en-Provence, France), explore les multiples façons de redonner vie aux archives sonores enregistrées sur le territoire nigérien par des chercheur·e·s de diverses disciplines des sciences humaines et sociales. Un bref historique des méthodes d’enregistrement sur le terrain africain met en évidence l’importance de documenter le contexte de leur production et de leur archivage pour assurer leur audibilité et faciliter leur exploitation. Tout en envisageant la restitution sur le terrain des collections enregistrées sur le territoire nigérien et conservées en France, les auteurs adoptent une approche transversale et continue pour prendre en compte un changement de paradigme décisif : la compréhension des archives analogiques converties au format numérique et leur fabrication dans un contexte colonial en vue d’une utilisation postcoloniale. Dans cette entreprise, les humanités numériques jouent un rôle de facilitateur en favorisant l’analyse, la comparaison et le partage des archives sonores par tous les acteurs concernés. La cartographie des archives patrimoniales et scientifiques qui pourrait ainsi être créée offrirait de nouvelles perspectives sur la culture et l’histoire du Niger, facilitant le processus de restitution des archives orales pour une utilisation scientifique, culturelle et créative.

Social Media Images as Digital Sources for West African Urban History

James Yékú

The web has become an important source for understanding the African past. As African cultural and historical records become digital, they specifically invite an intellectual scrutiny of the nature of digital sources of West African urban history. And with more historical scholarship in Africa responding to digitized and born-digital sources, there is an appreciation of how digital infrastructure shapes many aspects of historical study, including the historical development of cities and how urban subjects make sense of the complexities of their urban identities. In this article, social media–based digital projects that are focused on images and other regimes of visuality and that function as public humanities scholarship are recruited to make the case for photographic images from the participatory web as primary sources of African history. While not discountenancing the continued value of printed work and the traditional archive, West African urban history becomes focalized through digital platforms and methods of visual history that foreground African voices and their insights into the historical evolution of West African cites and their urban subjectivities.

Double-edged sword: Navigating AI Opportunities and the Risk of Digital Colonization in Africa

Naome Etori, Maurice Dawson, Maria Gini

The recent evolution of Generative AI technologies has ushered in digital transformative potentials across various sectors around the globe; Africa is making steps towards a faster uptake of Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI stands at the forefront of solving critical African issues, from farming to the health sector. However, this wave of technological innovation has also raised concerns about digital colonization, particularly in low-resource settings such as Africa, where the digital divide and external control over digital resources can exacerbate existing inequalities. This paper aims to dissect the multifaceted relationship between AI development and digital colonization in Africa, highlighting the emerging strategic challenges and opportunities. We highlight the dual nature of AI as both a beacon of opportunity and a harbinger of risk, particularly the threat of digital colonization—a phenomenon where the control and benefits of AI technologies are disproportionately held by foreign entities, potentially exacerbating existing inequalities and fostering new dependencies.

Decolonizing global AI governance: assessment of the state of decolonized AI governance in Sub-Saharan Africa

Gelan Ayana, Kokeb Dese, Hundessa Daba Nemomssa, Bontu Habtamu, Bruce Mellado, Kingsley Badu, Edmund Yamba, Sylvain Landry Faye, Moise Ondua, Dickson Nsagha, Denis Nkweteyim, Jude Dzevela Kong

Global artificial intelligence (AI) governance must prioritize equity, embrace a decolonial mindset, and provide the Global South countries the authority to spearhead solution creation. Decolonization is crucial for dismantling Western-centric cognitive frameworks and mitigating biases. Integrating a decolonial approach to AI governance involves recognizing persistent colonial repercussions, leading to biases in AI solutions and disparities in AI access based on gender, race, geography, income and societal factors. This paradigm shift necessitates deliberate efforts to deconstruct imperial structures governing knowledge production, perpetuating global unequal resource access and biases. This research evaluates Sub-Saharan African progress in AI governance decolonization, focusing on indicators like AI governance institutions, national strategies, sovereignty prioritization, data protection regulations, and adherence to local data usage requirements. Results show limited progress, with only Rwanda notably responsive to decolonization among the ten countries evaluated; 80% are ‘decolonization-aware’, and one is ‘decolonization-blind’. The paper provides a detailed analysis of each nation, offering recommendations for fostering decolonization, including stakeholder involvement, addressing inequalities, promoting ethical AI, supporting local innovation, building regional partnerships, capacity building, public awareness, and inclusive governance. This paper contributes to elucidating the challenges and opportunities associated with decolonization in SSA countries, thereby enriching the ongoing discourse on global AI governance.

NLP Tools for African Languages: Overview

Joaquim Mussandi, Andreas Wichert

The New Empire of AI: The Future of Global Inequality

Rachel Adams

As AI takes hold across the planet and wealthy nations seek to position themselves as global leaders of this new technology, the gap is widening between those who benefit from it and those who are subjugated by it. As Rachel Adams shows in this hard-hitting book, growing inequality is the single biggest threat to the transformative potential of AI. Not only is AI built on an unequal global system of power, it stands poised to entrench existing inequities, further consolidating a new age of empire. AI’s impact on inequality will not be experienced in poorer countries only: it will be felt everywhere. The effects will be seen in intensified international migration as opportunities become increasingly concentrated in wealthier nations; in heightened political instability and populist politics; and in climate-related disasters caused by an industry blind to its environmental impact across supply chains. We need to act now to address these issues. Only if the current inequitable trajectory of AI is halted, the incentives changed and the production and use of AI decentralized from wealthier nations will AI be able to deliver on its promise to build a better world for all.

Le projet Archives des femmes : archiver, numériser et diffuser les luttes des femmes maliennes

Madina Thiam, Devon Golaszewski, Moussa Beïdy Tamboura, Oumou Sidibé, Gregory Mann

Le Projet Archives des femmes du Mali (PAF), initié en 2016, comprend deux volets. Il s’agit, d’une part, de l’élaboration d’une archive digitale de milliers de documents appartenant à des femmes maliennes engagées dans diverses luttes sociales, de 1950 à nos jours ; et d’autre part, du mentorat d’étudiantes maliennes et de leur formation à la recherche au sein de l’archive PAF, dans le but d’encourager son utilisation par le public et de vulgariser ses contenus. Cet article dresse un bilan du projet, en revenant sur sa genèse et les progrès accomplis, ainsi que les défis rencontrés et les questionnements soulevés.

Researching post-independence Africa in regional archives: possibilities and limits in Benin, Cabo Verde, Ghana and Congo-Brazzaville

Alexander Keese, Annalisa Urbano

Africa’s regional archives offer crucial records to explore the continent’s postcolonial past. Although these archives are often difficult to locate and access and are exposed to several challenges that might even threaten their existence, this article presents a solid case for reconsidering their importance. Recent trends, aptly labelled ‘postcolonial African archival pessimism’, have mainly pointed to problems and often to the limited accessibility of state archives in some regional and local contexts. This article instead engages with their potential, discussing four case studies in Benin, Cabo Verde, Ghana and Congo-Brazzaville. Results stemming from these case studies are brought into contact with wider debates on custodial cultures and the regional archives’ role in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. The intention is to provide a more positive and empirically based overview of research possibilities at regional archives and ultimately to change the nature of our approach to these resources.

Algorithmic power and African indigenous languages: search engine autocomplete and the global multilingual Internet

Peter Chonka, Stephanie Diepeveen, Yidnekachew Haile

Predictive language technologies – such as Google Search’s Autocomplete – constitute forms of algorithmic power that reflect and compound global power imbalances between Western technology companies and multilingual Internet users in the global South. Increasing attention is being paid to predictive language technologies and their impacts on individual users and public discourse. However, there is a lack of scholarship on how such technologies interact with African languages. Addressing this gap, the article presents data from experimentation with autocomplete predictions/suggestions for gendered or politicised keywords in Amharic, Kiswahili and Somali. It demonstrates that autocomplete functions for these languages and how users may be exposed to harmful content due to an apparent lack of filtering of problematic ‘predictions’. Drawing on debates on algorithmic power and digital colonialism, the article demonstrates that global power imbalances manifest here not through a lack of online African indigenous language content, but rather in regard to the moderation of content across diverse cultural and linguistic contexts. This raises dilemmas for actors invested in the multilingual Internet between risks of digital surveillance and effective platform oversight, which could prevent algorithmic harms to users engaging with platforms in a myriad of languages and diverse socio-cultural and political environments.

Chat GPT and the future of African AI

Leo Komminoth

With limited training data matching African cultural and economic realities, the output of ChatGPT could be skewed toward reinforcing Western cultural and ideological hegemony.

Developing Crosslingual Ontologies in WissKI: Transcontinental Research Collaboration in the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence

Philipp Eisenhuth, Myriel Fichtner, Britta Frede, Rüdiger Seesemann

Since July 2019, the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth has been funding a project dedicated to the creation of an Islamic Cultural Archive (ICA), a database designed for collaborative research in English, French and Arabic connecting researchers based in Germany and four African countries. The ICA project pursues individual but interconnected studies revolving around Islamic learning in Africa. Supported by IT specialists, we develop a digital platform that meets the related requirements. The ICA seeks to develop new approaches to the handling of data through establishing an ontology-based digital research environment building on WissKI, a set of modules that extends the content management system Drupal with semantic web technology. The chapter sheds light on the technical implications of our endeavor to connect diverse alphabets and data from various digital and digitized media. The research team members connect their diverse data sets to create synergies between various research foci and interests, ranging from the nexus of Islamic knowledge production, dissemination, and acquisition to the socio-religious, political-economic, and cultural dimensions of Islamic learning. The chapter shows how our system allows us to collect and archive different types of data, generate metadata through an ontology, and connect data beyond language barriers. Most notably, our data description method links the data through multilayered and multilingual tags, as well as through comprehensive cross-references, thus constituting an innovative way of data handling that can benefit researchers in Islamic Studies as well as cultural and literary studies more broadly.

History Uploaded: Digital Archives After Thirty Years of Democracy

Duane Jethro

This article provides an overview of digital archival projects and online databases developed by scholars and archival practitioners in South Africa since the early 1990s. It sketches key shifts in theory and practice over this period, including the economic and practical perils of digital conservation as heritage and of increasing civic archival activism. It shows that the outlook, aims, and successes of these projects have changed in tune with shifts in the state’s archival legislation, changing publishing economics, decreasing cost of digitisation and equipment, and widening access to the internet. Recent archival projects, such as the Five Hundred Year Archive and EMANDULO Project, illustrate a pioneering trend in South African digital archival practice and are suggestive of the formation of a distinct digital epistemic culture. The article argues that South African scholars and archival practitioners have often been at the forefront of key turns in debates taking place in digital archival practice globally and in Africa.

African ʿAjamī in the Digital Environment: Typographic and Technological Challenges

Mark Jamra, Neil Patel

With Africa poised at the threshold of a typographic renaissance, its writing systems often face unique challenges when entering the digital environment. This chapter offers an overview of the current state of technical support for the digitization and creation of African ʿAjamī texts, the fonts and input methods currently available for that task, and the technical challenges remaining to be resolved to fully accommodate scholars and creators of textual content in African languages written with the Arabic script. The considerations that went into the design and production of the typeface family Kigelia Arabic are also briefly outlined, showing the challenges in creating fonts that address traditional sub-Saharan, Sahelian forms in all their variations and alternatives. This will be accompanied by an overview of the development of ʿAjamī-specific keyboards and methods for expanding features and key layouts for different language communities.

African ʿAjamī Library Project: A Ten-Year Retrospective

Eleni Castro

This article provides an in-depth look at the past ten years of the African ʿAjamī Library project, founded and led by Dr. Fallou Ngom, Professor of Anthropology and former Director of the African Studies Center at Boston University, with the goal to serve as a digital continental open access public repository of aggregated digitized ʿAjamī texts from non-Europhone Africa. With over 31,400 pages of manuscripts – hosted at Boston University’s institutional repository, OpenBU – the African ʿAjamī Library has had over half a million individual views and downloads to-date. The article examines the types of manuscripts digitized; manuscript impact, visibility and usage; fieldwork locations and methodologies; the importance of local project teams and partnerships, and what the next ten years might look like for this project.

Digital Humanities research in Africa

Emmanuel Ngué Um

by Emmanuel Ngué Um The main challenge facing Digital Humanities research in Africa is the race to catch up with […]

Algorithmic Colonization of Africa

Abeba Birhane

This chapter examines how Western tech monopolies, with their desire to dominate, control, and influence social, political, and cultural discourse share common characteristics with traditional colonialism. Traditional colonialism has been driven by political and government forces; algorithmic colonialism, on the other hand, is driven by corporate profits. While the former used brute force domination, colonialism in the age of AI takes the form of ‘state-of-the-art algorithms’ and ‘AI solutions’ to social problems. Not only is Western-developed AI unfit for African problems, but also the West’s algorithmic invasion simultaneously impoverishes development of local products while leaving the continent dependent on Western software and infrastructure. By drawing examples from various parts of the continent, this chapter illustrates how the AI invasion of Africa echoes colonial era exploitation. This chapter then concludes by outlining a vision of AI rooted in local community needs and interests,

Review: Islam Burkina Faso Collection

Robert Launay

A review of the Islam Burkina Faso Collection, a database of materials on Islam, directed by Frédérick Madore

Postcolonial Digital Humanities Reconsidered

Roopika Risam

Introduction: The Questions of Minimal Computing

Roopika Risam, Alex Gil

Training of Digital Language Resources Skills in South Africa

Martin Hennelly, Langa Khumalo, Juan Steyn, Menno van Zaanen

Global Debates in the Digital Humanities

Domenico Fiormonte, Sukanta Chaudhuri, Paola Ricaurte (eds)

Often conceived of as an all-inclusive “big tent,” digital humanities has in fact been troubled by a lack of perspectives beyond Westernized and Anglophone contexts and assumptions. This latest collection in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series seeks to address this deficit in the field. Focused on thought and work that has been underappreciated for linguistic, cultural, or geopolitical reasons, contributors showcase alternative histories and perspectives that detail the rise of the digital humanities in the Global South and other “invisible” contexts and explore the implications of a globally diverse digital humanities. Advancing a vision of the digital humanities as a space where we can reimagine basic questions about our cultural and historical development, this volume challenges the field to undertake innovation and reform.

Black beyond Data

Julie Scharper

Historian Jessica Marie Johnson leads several teams tapping into the power of datasets to uncover new truths about Black history

The Digital Humanities as a Framework for Refining and Retooling the Humanities in Africa: A Case Study of the University of Lagos, Nigeria

Tunde Ope-Davies

This study argues that, potentially, digital humanities (DH), though an emerging research and disciplinary orientation, has the capacity to refine and retool the humanities and liberal arts. Beginning with some theoretical issues in DH, still in its infancy in Africa, the study focuses on the activities at the Centre for Digital Humanities, University of Lagos (CEDHUL) as a case study. The methodology adopted included eliciting relevant data from some of the ongoing DH projects at the Centre. In the discussion section, I demonstrate the use of some digital tools such as SketchEngine, MAXQDA Voyant Tools and AntConc in some discourse-based projects. The study submits that, with the deployment of digital tools for research projects and the sustenance of capacity programmes such as the Lagos Summer School in Digital Humanities (LSSDH), the prospects of DH in Africa offer rewarding possibilities for retooling humanities disciplines in different regions on the continent. Our DH works also offer some fresh perspectives and understanding of underexplored and understudied social data in Africa.

Guest Editors' Introduction: The Current State of Digital Humanities in Africa

Emmanuel Ngué Um, Rhonda Jones

Developing a Rule-Based Machine-Translation System, Ewondo–French–Ewondo

Emmanuel Ngué Um, Émilie Eliette, Caroline Ngo Tjomb Assembe, Francis Morton Tyers

Machine translation (MT) significantly contributes to democratizing access to textual information across multiple languages and is established as a dynamic language service in the global multilingual society. Not surprisingly, the attractiveness of the MT market has stirred up spectacular innovations, driven by artificial intelligence in the digital technology industry. The commercial stakes of the industry has led to massive investments in the development of automatic translation systems for languages of wider communication and an increased marginalization of minority languages in this avenue. This article reports on the on-going development of a low-tech, rule-based MT system for Ewondo, a Bantu low-resourced language spoken in Cameroon. The project aims to fill the gap in access to MT services in the target minority language community and to generate parallel corpora from and into the Ewondo language.

Monitoring of Encroachment of Wetlands in Kenya: A Digital Solution through a Participatory Approach

Fredrick Mzee Awuor, Benard Opaa

Wetlands are part of public lands. Article 61 of the Constitution of Kenya (2010) classifies all land into Public, Community and Private, and these are defined in Articles 62, 63 and 64, respectively. Globally, they occupy about 6 per cent of the Earth’s surface, yet the exact extent of Kenya’s wetlands is unknown due to lack of a wetlands inventory. They are, however, estimated to occupy 3–4 per cent of Kenya’s landmass, although this can increase to 6 per cent during the rainy seasons. Despite this small geographic extent, they provide many benefits, critical to people’s socio-economic well-being and nature’s survival. They are severely threatened and degraded and some have been even lost, largely due to human encroachment – settlement, agriculture, and industrial and infrastructural development. Lack of an effective and efficient monitoring framework for wetland encroachment compounds the challenge. Sessional Paper No. 12 of 2014 of the Kenya Wetlands Policy obligates the state to put in place monitoring frameworks for the maintenance of wetlands integrity. This article proposes a framework that leverages participatory sensing and crowdsourcing techniques, built on digital tools, to support the public in detecting and reporting incidences of encroachment into wetlands in Kenya, besides empowering public agencies.

Refiguring the Archive for Eras before Writing: Digital Interventions, Affordances and Research Futures

Carolyn Hamilton, Grant McNulty

In most of Africa there are written materials from the eras before colonialism that offer a view of the kinds of ideas, cultural life, and currents of political thought, as well as practices and events, that predate substantial European engagement. In the present-day South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, and bordering provinces and countries, there are no equivalent discursive materials that predate a European presence. With colonialism, much knowledge about the remote past was stitched up in imperial and colonial knowledge systems and recording practices. In this paper, we discuss what digital interventions and affordances offer in terms of researching the history of the material used as sources for the remote past, and of releasing that material from distorting or anachronistic colonial classifications and categories. We consider the capacities and significance of digital interventions in calling out sequestered and lost materials, in convening innovative new assemblages of material, in creating conditions conducive to the restoration of neglected details of provenance, in documenting the twists and turns involved in the shaping of materials into sources, and in formally recognizing the archival potential of materials, notably the writings of early African literati, long positioned as being something other than sources and as “not-archive.”

Towards a Yoruba Indigenous Model of Communication for Software Development in Digital Humanities

Paul Akinmayowa Akin-Otiko, Augustine Akintunde Farinola

Drawing insight from Toyin Falola’s call for African scholars to Africanize knowledge, this article argues for reviewing the digital technological tools used for African Studies research to process and present African data properly. To achieve this, the inadequacies of digital humanities (DH) for specific areas of African Studies will be highlighted, especially in the deployment of digital humanities tools. The major challenge is the distortion and constraint experienced in processing and presenting research through DH means of translation and communication. The article argues that such technological limitation has its root in the incompatibility of the epistemological frameworks within which those digital tools were developed. The article discusses Ojú lòrówà (‘discussion is in the eye’), that is, ‘communication takes place when we see physically’ – a theory of communication in African society used as a model to highlight the importance of African context to African scholars in their exploration of African history, technology, culture, philosophy and tradition. The indigenous theory is an appropriate model for developing digital and virtual software for African scholars in human communication. The article concludes by urging scholars in African Studies to ensure that the digital tools employed in African Studies can collect data and process and present data adequately without losing the original meaning or sense.

Connected Ogres: Global Sources in the Digital Era

Dzovinar Kévonian, Philippe Rygiel, Jennifer Edmond, Jo Guldi, Jean-Pierre Bat

Avril 2020. Le monde est à l’arrêt. La pandémie mondiale de COVID-19 a provoqué la fermeture non seulement des frontières, mais également de la plupart des entreprises, des écoles, des universités ou encore des bibliothèques. Dans ce contexte inédit, le comité de rédaction de Monde(s), première revue francophone d’histoire globale, a souhaité célébrer son dixième anniversaire en organisant une grande rencontre entre des spécialistes des cinq continents. Face à l’impossibilité d’échanger directement, nous avons renoué avec une pratique ancienne : l’art de la conversation. Ce dossier aborde cinq domaines de recherches – environnement, genre, histoire des techniques, défi numérique, inégalités – qui suscitent aujourd’hui de stimulants débats historiographiques. Ces conversations passées et à venir, focalisées sur les pratiques ordinaires et la diversité des expériences, pourront contribuer à une véritable mondialisation de l’histoire globale.

Thoughts on a Changing Landscape for Research Archiving in the Cloud Era: A Critical Perspective from South Africa

Valmont Layne

This article reflects on humanities research and archival futures in Southern Africa in the Cloud era—those collections that support research on an institutionalised basis, including sound and related collections. Since the 1990s, for comparably smaller, lesser resourced institutions in South Africa, a scramble for digital Africa amid a technological divide piled upon other inequities. This condition has manifested in today’s big technology stacks and stakes. What then, does it mean for archives and their work of helping to produce the conditions for a meaningful engagement with the past and the present, indeed the future? A major challenge for research archives, it seems, may be to do the work of enabling epistemic access, which includes an orientation to ethics from the south, with the new set of vocabularies of digital sovereignty on the other hand. It is also crucial to redefine archival restitution as a social process in which the sovereignty of local communities, digital and otherwise, matters.

Mapping Senufo: Process, Collaboration, and Generous Thinking

Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi

A Template-Based Approach to Intelligent Multilingual Corpora Transcription

Moses Effiong Ekpenyong, Eno-Abasi Essien Urua, Aniefon Daniel Akpan, Olufemi Sunday Adeoye, Aminu Alhaji Suleiman

Emerging linguistic problems are data-driven and multidisciplinary, requiring richly transcribed corpora. Accurate corpus transcription therefore demands intelligent protocols that satisfy the following important criteria: 1) acceptability by end-users, computers/machines; 2) conformity to existing language standards, rules and structures; and 3) representation within the context of the intended language domain. To demonstrate the feasibility of these criteria, a template-based framework for multilingual transcription was proposed and implemented. The first version of the developed transcription tool, also called SCAnnAL (Speech Corpus Annotator for African Languages), applies signal processing to pre-segment waveforms of a recorded speech corpus, into word, syllable and phoneme units, resulting in a pre-segmented TextGrid file with empty labels. Using preformatted templates, the front-end or linguistic aspects/datasets (the text corpus, vowels inventory, consonants inventory, and a set of syllabification rules) are specified in a default language. A Natural Language Understanding (NLU) algorithm then uses these datasets with a data-driven syllabification algorithm to relabel subtrees of the TextGrid file. Tone pattern models were finally constructed from translations of experimental data, using the Ibadan 400 words (a list of basic items of a language), for four Nigerian tone languages. Integration of the tone pattern models into the transcription system is expected in a future paper. This research will benefit emerging digital humanists and computational linguists working on language data, as well as open new opportunities for improved African tone language speech processing systems.

Rebalancing the Historical Narrative or Perpetuating Bias? Digitizing the Archives of the Mineworkers' Union of Zambia

Duncan Money

This article examines the project to digitize and preserve the archives of the Mineworkers’ Union of Zambia and has two aims. The first aim is to discuss the process of cataloguing and digitizing an archive that has undergone significant deterioration, and the theoretical and practical challenges to achieving this. The second aim is to relate making this archive more accessible to questions of knowledge production. Despite its limitations, the value of this archive is that it is primarily composed of documents produced by Africans about the world as they saw it. These are not the records of external powers, colonial officials, or those studying African peoples.

The promise of digital humanities pedagogy: Decolonizing a diverse classroom in Ghana

Kajsa Hallberg Adu

Higher education operates in a quickly changing, progressively more globalized, cosmopolitan, and interconnected world (Bauman, 2000, Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York/Chichester: Columbia University Press; Appiah, 2006, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton & Co; Zuckerman, 2013, Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection. New York: W. W. Norton & Company). At the same time, substantive inequalities between people and places mean that this connectivity and knowledge is unevenly spread (Hallberg Adu, 2014, What is the opposite of a knowledge society? A critical reflection from Ghana. In Amoah, L. (ed.), Impacts of the Knowledge Society on Economic and Social Growth in Africa. IGI Global). For our students, the future leaders of this unequal world, critical reasoning becomes a key skill, and perhaps especially so for students in the Global South. This paper argues that digital humanities (DH) can provide both a theoretical framework for decolonizing the academy and technological solutions to hurdles in this process. The paper argues that assignments, their theoretical underpinnings, and implementation are key to decolonizing higher education. It describes three accessible technology-driven assignments with DH pedagogy created for diverse classrooms at Ashesi University in Ghana and discusses their outcomes.

Digitality and Decolonization: A Response to Achille Mbembe

Victoria Bernal

This article explores questions of decolonization, in part through analyzing Belgium’s Africa Museum. Bernal considers the role of academia and knowledge production, as well as the technological developments that may create new concentrations of power faster than decolonial projects can dismantle established hierarchies. She concludes that decolonization must address material questions of reparations and restitution, and that digital media have been transformative in ways that bring northern models of social existence closer to African ones. Having lived under colonizers, despots, and states of exception, Africans bring important knowledge and experience to twenty-first-century global struggles.

Editors' Introduction: "The Future of the African Past"

Lorelle Semley, Teresa Barnes, Bayo Holsey, Egodi Uchendu

We signed on as the new editorial team of History in Africa (HIA) without knowing that we all sat on the precipice of tumultuous times. After over a year of the COVID-19 pandemic, global unrest calling for a reckoning on racial justice, and events that exposed the limits and fragility of democratic institutions, we are reminded of the importance of how people experience, remember, and chronicle the past. It is a weighty and fortuitous time to think about our craft as historians and how we develop methods for analyzing and revisiting sources. How do we want to highlight our unique approaches as historians of Africa, and how do we want to push our field of African history and our discipline of history, more broadly, in new directions? We salute and thank the previous team of HIA editors – Jan Jansen, Michel Doortmont, John Hanson, and Dmitri van den Bersselaar – for their excellent stewardship of the journal over many years.

Digitizing the Humanities in an Emerging Space: An Exploratory Study of Digital Humanities Initiatives in Nigeria

Tunde Opeibi

Digital historical research and the repositioning of Africa in knowledge production

Bernard Kusena, Miriam Zhou

Africa’s historical knowledge production has exhibited promising signs of progress, particularly in strengthening the continent’s weak link in the global knowledge network. While such knowledge ought to intersect and interact with other bodies of knowledge from the rest of the world, the terrain is shifting quickly due to changing historical circumstances. This study deploys a case study of Zimbabwe to illustrate how the slow digital transformation in historical research has hindered efforts to confront the overarching question of constrained knowledge production in Africa. The over-reliance of economic history, archaeology, or history on the use of centralised state archives poses complex methodological challenges, particularly for the study of the recent African past. Despite the advantages offered by digital humanities, the research options for these disciplines continue to shrink in the face of serious discomfort by academics in embracing digital sources of data that complement paper-based archival evidence and re-gear the continent’s research performance. The article stresses that the sources of historical data, particularly on Africa’s post-colonial history, can be found in digital form outside state repositories.

Sorting and Seeing: Digitization and Ways of Reading the Archives of French West Africa

Emily Burrill

This essay provides a brief overview of themes that emerge in historical research when we consider the low-technology and simple methods of digital photography in archives of empire. A brief consideration of how to incorporate aspects of digital capture in the classroom is also discussed. The core of the article is a case study of gun permit applications and the circulation of guns between France and French West Africa in the 1950s. The increased capacity to amass material through digital technologies—namely, digital photography in archives—pushes historians to develop sorting methods that open up new analytical terrain in histories of the French empire. Deconstructing the deceptively straight-forward and formulaic gun permit as the primary text in question, the essay explores the following question: what is the relationship between close reading and aggregate methods, and how do we use them together to see different angles on historical process?

African Digital Stoytelling: A Post-Symposium Report

Unknown Author

As the new field builds on the important foundations and gains made by scholars in the Black DH community in the United states and other parts of the world, Africa-based scholars and DH practitioners in particular had occasion at the African DH gathering to bring postcolonial cultural productions and heritage on the continent into conversation with the affordances of digital media. The African Digital Storytelling Symposium, organized at the University of Kansas on October 8 and 9 in 2020, presented a opportunity to showcase emerging projects and perspectives in African Digital humanities to an international audience. The major theme of the symposium was storytelling and its digital iterations. As Africa’s rich storytelling performance tradition is informing diverse experimentation with digital media hardware and software, the symposium offered what Caitlin Tyler-Richards referred to on Twitter as a variety of voices and perspectives.

Defining Regions of Pre-Colonial Africa: A Controlled Vocabulary for Linking Open-Source Data in Digital History Projects

Henry B. Lovejoy, Paul E. Lovejoy, Walter Hawthorne, Edward A. Alpers, Mariana Candido, Matthew S. Hopper, Ghislaine Lydon, Colleen E. Kriger, John Thornton

Regionalizing pre-colonial Africa aids in the collection and interpretation of primary sources as data for further analysis. This article includes a map with six broad regions and 34 sub-regions, which form a controlled vocabulary within which researchers may geographically organize and classify disparate pieces of information related to Africa’s past. In computational terms, the proposed African regions serve as data containers in order to consolidate, link, and disseminate research among a growing trend in digital humanities projects related to the history of the African diasporas before c. 1900. Our naming of regions aims to avoid terminologies derived from European slave traders, colonialism, and modern-day countries.

Freedom Narratives: The West African Person as the Central Focus for a Digital Humanities Database

Érika Melek Delgado

This article discusses the methodology behind the development of new tools of research for African history that are a user-friendly source for public engagement. The focus is on biographical profiles of West African people during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which is an innovative approach to social history. The representation of enslaved Africans has typically been numbers recorded in logs and accounts compiled by slave merchants and captains. Freedom Narratives is an open-source relational database that reveals the people who constitute those numbers.

The Usambara Knowledge Project: Place as Archive in a Tanzanian Mountain Range

Chris Conte

The essay chronicles the early phases of a digital history project on landscape change in the mountains of eastern Tanzania. In collecting sources for a land and culture narrative, the project aims ultimately to create an archive that is locally produced in Tanzania and maintained by Utah State University Library’s Special Collections and Archives division. The project draws on more than thirty early twentieth-century landscape photographs from the Usambara Mountains in northeastern Tanzania by Walther Dobbertin, a professional photographer living in German East Africa. In the fall of 2015, team members scouted the sites for repeat photographs. The following summer, the project team began repeat photography and expanded the range of local collaborators to develop an oral history collection tied to the region’s landscape history. The essay lays out the problems, pitfalls, and successes of the preliminary collaborative work among academics, university students, archival specialists, and elders’ groups intent on collecting and preserving knowledge., RésuméCet article relate les premières phases d’un projet d’histoire numérique sur le changement de paysage dans les montagnes de l’est de la Tanzanie. En collectant les sources sur les récits liant terre et culture, ce projet vise à terme à créer une archive qui soit localement produite en Tanzanie et maintenue par la Special Library de l’Utah State University (département des collections et des archives). Le projet s’appuie sur plus de trente premières photographies de paysages du XXe siècle des monts Usambara dans le nord-est Tanzanie par Walther Dobbertin, un photographe professionnel vivant en Afrique de l’Est sous domination coloniale allemande. À l’automne 2015, les membres de l’équipe ont exploré les sites pour reproduire les mêmes photographies. L’été suivant, l’équipe du projet a commencé à refaire la même chose en élargissant l’éventail des collaborateurs locaux pour développer une collection d’histoire orale liée à l’histoire paysagère de la région. Cet article expose les problèmes, les pièges et les succès des travaux préliminaires de collaboration entre universitaires, étudiants, des spécialistes des archives et des groupes d’anciens soucieux de recueillir et de préserver ces connaissances.

Leza, Sungu, and Samba: Digital Humanities and Early Bantu History

Catherine Cymone Fourshey, Rhonda M. Gonzales, Christine Saidi

In 2016, with the support of a three-year National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Collaborative Research Grant to research and write a precolonial African history of family, generations, and gender, we began building the Bantu Ancestral Roots Database (BARD). BARD is a digital repository of word-roots related to gender and life stage practices from over sixty Bantu languages. We developed it to assist us in our analysis of this large corpus of data that we used to write histories of people’s material and ideological inventions that cover the longue durée across multiple regions. BARD allows researchers with internet access to search for terms by entering at least three consecutive phonemes. If phonemes exist in that sequence in any of the 64 Bantu languages that BARD holds, those words and their meanings appear as results. In this article, we discuss the usefulness and complexities of Digital Humanities (DH) as research tools. We explain our methodology and research process using three reconstructed word-roots pertinent to our research on family and generations. The three word-roots we examine invite scholars to probe how to recover deep connections and linkages between people’s pasts in Africa and its Diasporas, particularly in ways that move beyond histories of the slave trade and enslavement. As we developed our open-access website African Social History and Data Across Bantu Matrilineal Communities (ASH-DABMC) and our database, BARD, we gained greater insight into the meanings encoded in our data even as we faced challenges. We hope the discussion of our experiences will provide an intellectual framework and inspire others considering digital projects., RésuméEn 2016, avec le soutien d’une subvention de recherche collaborative de trois ans du National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) pour rechercher et écrire une histoire africaine précoloniale de la famille, des générations et du genre, nous avons commencé à créer la base de données Bantu Ancestral Roots (BARD). BARD est un référentiel numérique de racines de mots liées au genre et aux pratiques des étapes de la vie de plus de soixante langues bantoues. Nous l’avons développé pour nous aider dans notre analyse de ce vaste corpus de données que nous avons utilisé pour écrire des histoires d’inventions matérielles et idéologiques d’individus sur la longue durée à travers plusieurs régions. BARD permet aux chercheurs ayant accès à Internet de rechercher des termes en saisissant au moins trois phonèmes consécutifs. S’ils existent dans cette séquence dans l’une des 64 langues bantoues présentes dans BARD, ces mots et leurs significations apparaissent comme des résultats. Dans cet article, nous discutons de l’utilité et de la complexité des humanités numériques (DH) en tant qu’outil de recherche. Nous expliquons notre méthodologie et notre processus de recherche en utilisant trois racines de mots reconstruites qui sont pertinentes pour notre recherche sur les familles et les générations. Les trois racines des mots que nous examinons invitent les chercheurs à retrouver des connexions et des liens profonds entre le passé des peuples d’Afrique et de ses diasporas, en particulier d’une manière qui va au-delà des histoires de la traite des esclaves et de l’esclavage. Au fur et à mesure que nous développions notre site Web en libre accès African Social History and Data Across Bantu Matrilineal Communities (ASH-DABMC) et notre base de données BARD, nous avons acquis une meilleure compréhension des significations encodées dans nos données alors même que nous faisions face à des défis. Nous espérons que la discussion sur notre expérience fournira un cadre intellectuel et inspirera d’autres personnes envisageant des projets numériques.

Mapping Senufo: Reframing Questions, Reevaluating Sources, and Reimagining a Digital Monograph

Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, Constantine Petridis

Mapping Senufo: Art, Evidence, and the Production of Knowledge – an in-progress, collaborative, born-digital publication – will offer a model for joining theories about the construction of identities and the politics of knowledge production with research and publication practice. In this article, we examine how computational methods have led us to reframe research questions, reevaluate sources, and reimagine the form of a digital monograph. We also demonstrate how our use of digital technologies, attention to iteration, and collaborative mode of working have generated fresh insights into a corpus of arts identified as Senufo, the nature of evidence for art-historical research, and digital publication. We posit that the form of a digital publication itself can bring processes of knowledge construction to the fore and unsettle expectations of a tidy, authoritative narrative.

La Collection Islam Burkina Faso : promesses et défis des humanités numériques

Frédérick Madore

Cet article propose une réflexion sur les possibilités inédites qu’offre le numérique pour développer de nouvelles méthodes de recherche et de diffusion de données sur l’histoire de l’islam en Afrique de l’Ouest, ainsi que quelques considérations méthodologiques, technologiques et éthiques soulevées par de telles initiatives. Au centre de ces considérations se trouve la Collection Islam Burkina Faso. Ce projet de base de données numérique en libre accès, que j’ai lancé en 2021 et qui est hébergée par les bibliothèques George A. Smathers de l’Université de Floride (UF), contient actuellement plus de 2 500 documents d’archives, articles de la presse généraliste, publications islamiques sous diverses formes et photographies, en plus de 200 références bibliographiques liées à l’islam et aux musulmans du Burkina Faso (https://islam.domains.uflib.ufl.edu/s/bf-fr). Le texte propose également un bref état des lieux des humanités numériques dans le champ des études africanistes et plus spécifiquement sur l’islam.

Potentials of Digital Humanities in Africa and Impacts to the world - Dr. James Yeku

Digital Humanities Association of Nigeria

DH2.0 Symposium: "Digital Humanities & Digital Scholarship: Exploring Opportunities & Possibilities for African Scholars". This is a programme, jointly organised by the Centre for Digital Humanities, University of Lagos & Digital Humanities Association of Nigeria, as one of the planned (quarterly) activities (virtual symposium, networking, collaborative project conception and execution, workshop, etc) towards the promotion and expansion of DH scholarship and research globally but with particular focus on Nigeria, Africa and the Global South.

Archives, the Digital Turn, and Governance in Africa

Fabienne Chamelot, Vincent Hiribarren, Marie Rodet

With the rise of information technology, an increasing proportion of public African archives are being digitized and made accessible on the internet. The same is being done to a certain extent with private archives too. As much as the new technologies are raising enthusiasm, they have prompted discussion among researchers and archivists, on subjects ranging from matters of intellectual property to sovereignty and governance. Digital archiving disrupts archival norms and practices, opening up a field of reflection relatively little explored by historians. This article therefore seeks to reflect on the digital turn of African archives as a subject for study in its own right, located at the crossroads of political and economic interests.

Africa and the Digital Savior Complex

Bhakti Shringarpure

This article examines the phenomenon of ‘digital humanitarianism’ that originates in and is practiced by the international community, and has found particular impetus through the ways in which it has engaged African people, places, and issues. Digital humanitarianism presents new technological approaches to ameliorate humanitarian work but I argue that there has emerged a ‘Digital Savior Complex’ which not only transforms complex crises into quotidian cyber realities but also furthers existing colonial hierarchies between the savior and the saved. The article argues that the Save Darfur movement was, in fact, the first example of the Digital Savior Complex in action. However, the unfair representations it tends to foreground have not gone unnoticed by a particularly influential Africa-centric digital media. I draw attention to the attempts to push back at the Digital Savior Complex by using the example of Kony 2012, a case that proved to be an effective unmasking of the modes of digital solidarity that were hitherto unchecked. This enabled an epistemic and discursive shift in the conversation about the misrepresentation of Africa and Africans, and insisted on corrective, resistant and decolonized approaches to depict and reflect upon events on the continent.

Digital Humanities Scholarship in Africa: Prospects and Challenges

Augustine A. Farinola

This research addresses the issues surrounding the low level of Digital Humanities (DH) technological consciousness among students and academics in the humanities discipline in Africa (Nigeria). The study, using online questionnaires, shows that despite the wide acceptance of DH Technological tools among some African scholars in the humanities, there are still challenges experienced by these Scholars in the course of using some of these DH tools to capture African realities. These difficulties include low level of training for users of DH technologies in Africa, as well as the designers' failure to optimize those tools for use in the analysis of data, texts, and images extracted in Africa. To address these constraints, this research enjoins African scholars to come up with epistemological and ontological frameworks that would aid software developers in creating tools which capture the unique aspects of African history, techne, culture, philosophy and tradition.

Reflections on African DH

Unknown Author

#AfricanDH2020 and the Promise of An African Digital Humanities

Introduction: Digital History in African Studies

Jennifer Hart

This brief introduction to a special section on Digital History in African Studies situates three articles on recent digital humanities initiatives among African historians within the broader histories of the use of digital methodologies in the study of Africa. In particular, it highlights the way that Africanist digital scholarship sits at the intersection of digital historical representation, community engagement, and academic research. While Africanist digital history builds on the work of a much broader digital humanities community, historians of Africa also draw on their discipline’s long history of methodological innovation to raise important questions about the potential contributions and limitations of digital technologies in academic research., RésuméCette courte introduction à cette section spéciale porte sur la place de l’histoire numérique dans les études africaines et situe les trois articles parmi les initiatives récentes en humanités numériques adoptées par les historiens de l’Afrique qui utilisent des méthodologies numériques pour l’étude de l’Afrique. Cette introduction souligne tout particulièrement la façon dont le travail scientifique numérique sur l’Afrique se situe à l’intersection de la représentation historique et numérique, de l’engagement des communautés étudiées et de la recherche universitaire. Alors que l’histoire numérique africaniste s’appuie sur le travail d’une communauté des humanités numériques beaucoup plus large, les historiens de l’Afrique s’appuient également sur la longue histoire d’innovation méthodologique de leur discipline pour soulever des questions importantes sur les contributions et les limites potentielles des technologies numériques dans la recherche universitaire.

Tournant archivistique et tournant numérique en Afrique : entretien avec Vincent Hiribarren

Vincent Hiribarren

Historien et enseignant au Kings’s College de Londres, Vincent Hiribarren a soutenu une thèse sur l’histoire du Bornou à l’Université de Leeds en 2012, publié en 2017 sous le titre A History of Borno: Trans-Saharan African Empire to Failing Nigerian State (Hiribarren 2017). Ses travaux s’inscrivent dans une perspective de longue durée pour retracer l’histoire de cette région ouest-africaine, située dans le nord-est du Nigéria, de l’époque moderne de l’empire du Bornou (xive–xixe siècle) jusqu’à l’histoire récente du groupe terroriste Boko Haram. Il mobilise des sources singulièrement diverses, entre histoire et anthropologie : archives, entretiens, données géographiques. La revue Sources a souhaité lui ouvrir les colonnes de ce premier dossier. Investi dans de nombreux projets de collectes et de numérisations archivistiques, il nous confie son expérience en matière d’histoire, d’archives et d’humanités numériques.

Algorithmic Colonization of Africa

Abeba Birhane

By Abeba Birhane. We live in a world where technological corporations hold unprecedented power and influence. Technological solutions to social, political, and economic challenges are rampant. In the Global South, technology that is developed with Western perspectives, values, and interests is imported with little regulation or critical scrutiny. This work examines how Western tech monopolies, with their desire to dominate, control and influence social, political, and cultural discourse, share common characteristics with traditional colonialism. However, while traditional colonialism is driven by political and government forces, algorithmic colonialism is driven by corporate agendas. While the former used brute force domination, colonialism in the age of AI takes the form of ‘state-of-the-art algorithms’ and ‘AI driven solutions’ to social problems. Not only is Western-developed AI unfit for African problems, the West’s algorithmic invasion simultaneously impoverishes development of local products while also leaving the continent dependent on Western software and infrastructure. By drawing examples from various parts of the continent, this paper illustrates how the AI invasion of Africa echoes colonial era exploitation. This paper then concludes by outlining a vision of AI rooted in local community needs and interests.

Beyond African orality: Digital preservation of Mandinka ʿAjamī archives of Casamance

Fallou Ngom, Eleni Castro

This article focuses on the digital preservation of African sources written in Mandinka ʿAjamī, i.e., the enriched form of the Arabic script used to write the Mandinka language for centuries. ʿAjamī writing has been utilized to document intellectual traditions, histories, belief systems, and cultures of non-Arab Muslims around the world. ʿAjamī texts have played critical roles in the spread of Islam in Africa and continue to be used for both religious and nonreligious writings. However, African ʿAjamī texts such as those of the Mandinka people of Casamance in southern Senegal are not well known beyond local communities. ʿAjamī texts in Mandinka and other Mande languages are among the least documented. Only a few Mande ʿAjamī texts are available to scholars. Thanks to the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme (EAP), Africa's rich written heritage in ʿAjamī and other scripts previously unavailable to academics is being preserved and made universally accessible.

Redefining African Regions for Linking Open-Source Data

Henry B. Lovejoy, Paul E. Lovejoy, Walter Hawthorne, Edward A. Alpers, Mariana Candido, Matthew S. Hopper

In recent years, an increasing number of online archival databases of primary sources related to the history of the African diaspora and slavery have become freely and readily accessible for scholarly and public consumption. This proliferation of digital projects and databases presents a number of challenges related to aggregating data geographically according to the movement of people in and out of Africa across time and space. As a requirement to linking data of open-source digital projects, it has become necessary to delimit the entire continent of precolonial Africa during the era of the slave trade into broad regions and sub-regions that can allow the grouping of data effectively and meaningfully.

Les humanités numériques en Afrique vues par une conférence à l’IFRA-Nigeria (10-11 juin 2021)

Vincent Hiribarren

Vincent Hiribarren. Les ordinateurs et Internet ont radicalement changé notre façon d'étudier, d'apprendre, de rechercher et d'écrire. Il n'est pas surprenant que ce phénomène-même ait déclenché une vague de recherches et de publications au cours de ces trente dernières années. Il n’y a pas de raison que cette transformation n’ait pas touché le continent africain.

Digitalization and the Field of African Studies

Mirjam de Bruijn

Urbanization in Africa also means rapid technological change. At the turn of the 21st century, mobile telephony appeared in urban Africa. Ten years later, it covered large parts of rural Africa and – thanks to the smartphone – became the main access to the internet. This development is part of technological transformations in digitalization that are supposed to bridge the urban and the rural and will make their borders blurred. They do so through the creation of economic opportunities, the flow of information and by influencing people’s definition of self, belonging and citizenship. These changes are met with huge optimism and the message of Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D) for Africa has been one of glory and revolution. Practice, however, reveals other sides. Increasingly, academic publications show that we are facing a new form of digital divide, in which Africa is (again) at the margins. These technological transformations influence the relation between urban and rural Africa, and between ‘Africa’ and the World, and hence the field of African Studies both in its objects as well as in its forms of knowledge production and in the formulation of the problems we should study. In this lecture, Mirjam de Bruijn reflects on two decades of research experience in West and Central Africa and discusses how, for her, the field has changed. The author was forced to decolonize her thinking even further, and to enter into co-creation in knowledge production. How can these lessons be translated into a form of critical knowledge production and how does the study of technological change inform the redefinition of African Studies for the 21st century?

Toward a Critical Black Digital Humanities

Safiya Umoja Noble

Digital colonialism: US empire and the new imperialism in the Global South

Michael Kwet

This article proposes a conceptual framework of how the United States is reinventing colonialism in the Global South through the domination of digital technology. Using South Africa as a case study, it argues that US multinationals exercise imperial control at the architecture level of the digital ecosystem: software, hardware and network connectivity, which then gives rise to related forms of domination. The monopoly power of multinational corporations is used for resource extraction through rent and surveillance – economic domination. By controlling the digital ecosystem, Big Tech corporations control computer-mediated experiences, giving them direct power over political, economic and cultural domains of life – imperial control. The centrepiece of surveillance capitalism, Big Data, violates the sanctity of privacy and concentrates economic power in the hands of US corporations – a system of global surveillance capitalism. As a feature of surveillance capitalism, Global North intelligence agencies partner with their own corporations to conduct mass and targeted surveillance in the Global South – which intensifies imperial state surveillance. US elites have persuaded people that society must proceed according to its ruling class conceptions of the digital world, setting the foundation for tech hegemony. The author argues for a different ecosystem that decentralises technology by placing control directly into the hands of the people to counter the rapidly advancing frontier of digital empire.

The Internet and Social Media as Sources

Aubrey Bloomfield, Sean Jacobs

The Internet and social media increasingly are becoming sources about the African past and present in ways that will influence to some extent how history will be learnt and the form that methods of historical research will take. Social media have increasingly dislodged print journalism as “the first rough draft of history” and tended to democratize and hasten information sharing and communication. Historians are working through difficult debates about the Internet as a source archive, the usability of websites, and related matters. The debate over online resources and their use in historical and other studies on one level remains unresolved. Nevertheless, online sources add another rich layer to narratives, stories, and perspectives that are already being recorded or told, and in this regard they will add to the storehouse of empirical data to be crunched by future historians.

Reading the Archives as Sources

David M. Gordon

Archives used in Africanist historical research include those of the colonial state, postcolonial national archives, missionary archives, personal papers, political party archives, and the archives of corporations and international agencies involved in African affairs. Africanists historians generally accept that these archives are not transparent renditions of the past; they represent and even reproduce power relations related to colonialism and its legacies. Nonetheless, careful readings have enabled Africanist historians to understand the structural order and logic these archives (the archival grain), and thus demonstrate colonial (or other) power relations implicated in the collections. Reading archives against the grain can also reveal alternative voices and agents, however. Even as discussions of archival methodologies have been limited, archives have remained crucial sources for key trends in Africanist historical writing, including the representation of colonial hegemonies as well as African voice and agency. To advance such readings, Africanist historians develop post-positivist readings of archives that appreciate silences, dissonances, and conflicts within archives and documentation. Through a process of archival fieldwork, including a careful combing of archives, reading of files, and transcribing of select documents, historians have become adept at appreciating the grain of archives and reading the archive against this grain. The digitization of archives and digital research methods, including electronic search engines, full-text searches, online archives, and digital photography, challenge aspects of traditional archival fieldwork, holding benefits and potential setbacks for the critical appreciation of archival documentation. These challenges have sharpened with the changing role of physical documentation along with an increase in smaller archives that enable serendipitous and hodgepodge archival investigations.

Digital Sources in Europe for African History

Marion Wallace

There are copious resources for the study of African history on the internet. They include manuscripts and documentary archives, maps, museum collections, newspapers, printed books, picture collections, and sound and moving images. The websites of European institutions provide a good proportion of this content, reflecting the long, entangled, and troubled histories that connect Europe and Africa, as well as new partnerships with African institutions.This plethora of digital resources enables both specialized researchers and the public to access information about Africa more quickly and easily, and on a larger scale than ever before. Digitization comes with a strong democratic impulse, and the new technology has been instrumental in making libraries, archives, museums, and art galleries much more open. But all is not smooth sailing, and there are two particular aspects of which researchers should be aware.The first is that there are still huge collections, or parts of collections, that have not been digitized, and that resources have been—on the whole—most focused on items with visual appeal. The twin brakes of cost and copyright restrain the process, and researchers need to understand how what they can get online relates to what still exists only in hard copy.The second consideration is that digitized resources can be difficult to find. Information about the riches of the web in this area is very fragmented, and exclusive use of one search engine, however dominant, is clearly not enough. As a counter to this fragmentation, a listing of the major websites for African history in Europe is given in a handy guide for researchers, which covers these resources by format and by region of Africa. The listing also provides websites in two particular areas of interest to historians and to the public: the transatlantic slave trade, and the liberation struggles in southern Africa.

Digital Approaches to the History of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Daryle Williams

The robust, sustained interest in the history of the transatlantic slave trade has been a defining feature of the intersection of African studies and digital scholarship since the advent of humanities computing in the 1960s. The pioneering work of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, first made widely available in CD-ROM in 1999, is one of several major projects to use digital tools in the research and analysis of the Atlantic trade from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth century. Over the past two decades, computing technologies have also been applied to the exploration of African bondage outside the maritime Atlantic frame. In the 2010s, Slave Voyages (the online successor to the original Slave Trade Database compact disc) joined many other projects in and outside the academy that deploy digital tools in the reconstruction of the large-scale structural history of the trade as well as the microhistorical understandings of individual lives, the biography of notables, and family ancestry.

New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy

Roopika Risam

The emergence of digital humanities has been heralded for its commitment to openness, access, and the democratizing of knowledge, but it raises a number of questions about omissions with respect to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and nation. Postcolonial digital humanities is one approach to uncovering and remedying inequalities in digital knowledge production, which is implicated in an information-age politics of knowledge. New Digital Worlds traces the formation of postcolonial studies and digital humanities as fields, identifying how they can intervene in knowledge production in the digital age. Roopika Risam examines the role of colonial violence in the development of digital archives and the possibilities of postcolonial digital archives for resisting this violence. Offering a reading of the colonialist dimensions of global organizations for digital humanities research, she explores efforts to decenter these institutions by emphasizing the local practices that subtend global formations and pedagogical approaches that support this decentering. Last, Risam attends to human futures in new digital worlds, evaluating both how algorithms and natural language processing software used in digital humanities projects produce universalist notions of the "human" and also how to resist this phenomenon.

Decolonizing the Digital Humanities in Theory and Practice

Roopika Risam

Digital Sources for the History of the Horn of Africa

Massimo Zaccaria

The Horn of Africa has an exceptional cultural heritage, starting with its manuscript sources, which are among the most important on the continent. It is a heritage that is rich but scattered throughout the region and not always easily accessible, prompting researchers to rely on cutting-edge technology. Since the 1970s, photography and microfilm have been key for preserving this especially valuable heritage. In the Horn of Africa, the “digital turn” has been the latest development in the close relationship between technology and research. For Ethiopian manuscript studies, the advent of digitization has meant more than simply improving old techniques. A new generation of projects is experimenting with innovative methods of research made possible by digital technology. The purpose is no longer just to provide digital copies of manuscripts but to explore the possibilities that computerization offers to study documents and other historical sources.Increasingly competitive prices and low operating costs have made the digital revolution attractive even for African institutions, which, in recent years, have sought answers to the pressing needs of preserving and enhancing their historical sources. These technological developments have significantly broadened the range of sources investigated. While important, manuscripts represent only a part of the documentary heritage of the Horn of Africa. Numerous archives and a long-overlooked print culture offer equally interesting access points for studying the region.The experience gained, though temporally circumscribed, has highlighted a number of more or less predictable problems. The projects to date, although they have often yielded only partial results, have highlighted the wealth of sources still present in the Horn of Africa and the way in which digital technology is making a valuable contribution to their preservation. Access remains perhaps the most critical issue. In the Horn of Africa, as in other African regions, digitization does not necessarily lead to Internet access.

Decolonizing Digital Humanities: Africa in Perspective

Babalola Titilola Aiyegbusi

Interview with Rosalind I. J. Hackett on Religion and Digital Media Trends in Africa

Rosalind I. J. Hackett, Frédérick Madore, Pamela Millet-Mouity

On October 21st, 2017, the editors of this special issue conducted an interview with Rosalind I. J. Hackett, one of the pioneering scholars in the field of media and religion in Africa. The interview took place via Skype and consisted of five questions on the study of religion and digital media in the African context.

Why Researchers Should Publish Archive Inventories Online: The Case of the Archives of French Equatorial Africa

Vincent Hiribarren

This short report gives the rationale behind the creation of the website https://archivescolonialesbrazzaville.wordpress.com/, dedicated to the colonial archives of French Equatorial Africa in January 2015. It is argued that researchers and archivists can build highly useful websites in Africa even with a limited Internet connection.

Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities

Kim Gallon

Muslim Societies in West Africa: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives in Digital Form

David Robinson

Over the past decade, Matrix, the Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Michigan State University, has developed digital galleries blending text, sound, and image to portray the history of islamization and the practice of Islam in West Africa with support from NSF, TICFIA, and the NEH. The featured areas have been Ghana (as a Muslim minority country), and Senegal (as a Muslim majority area), as well as Gambia and Mauritania. The emphasis has been on the diversity, tolerance, and pluralism of Islamic practice in historical and contemporary terms, on female and male practitioners, and on laypeople as well as clergy. We have used European archives, Arabic and ajami documents, interviews, and a range of other sources to tell stories and show practices. The portal for this material is www.aodl.org. This article outlines some of the galleries that we have built; others will be added over the next two years. The authors of the galleries are faculty at Indiana University, Michigan State, Harvard, Boston University, and James Madison University. The designer of the galleries has been Catherine Foley, Director of Digital Library and Archive Projects at MATRIX, and the author of "Developing Materials for a Digital Library Gallery" in this issue of Islamic Africa.

The Politics of the Parallel Archive: Digital Imperialism and the Future of Record-Keeping in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Keith Breckenridge

This paper takes as its subject the fact that digital archival production ? of existing materials and born-digital records ? has collapsed in contemporary South Africa, and it offers some arguments about why it is important to reverse this process. The current situation can be explained by the fact that digitisation has been widely described as a form of intellectual imperialism, a characterisation that echoes influential strands of postcolonial theory and South African nationalism. The reasons for this unusual understanding lie in the difficult history of the last major digitisation effort, the Mellon-funded collaboration between Aluka and the Digital Imaging Project of South Africa (DISA). The paper reconstructs that project in some detail in an effort to understand what went wrong, arguing that in place of the geopolitical explanation that many participants adopted, most of what went wrong was much more narrowly technological. Yet, the same technological issues have already been great assets to South African researchers, holding out the promise of solutions to some pressing local difficulties of digital preservation and archival assembly. The last section of the paper takes up some of the reasons why scholars need to take digital record-keeping much more seriously than they have to date ? chief amongst these being the fertile possibilities of forgery and impersonation.

African Studies in the Digital Age: Dis/Connects?

Terry Barringer, Marion Wallace (eds)

African Studies in the Digital Age. Dis/Connects? seeks to understand the complex changes brought about by the digital revolution. The editors, Terry Barringer and Marion Wallace, have brought together librarians, archivists, researchers and academics from three continents to analyse the creation and use of digital research resources and archives in and about Africa. The volume reveals new opportunities for research, teaching and access, as well as potential problems and digital divides. Published under the aegis of SCOLMA (the UK Libraries and Archives Group on Africa), this new work is a major step forward in understanding the impact of the Internet Age for the study of Africa, in and beyond the continent.

Open Sourcing the Colonial Archive – A Digital Montage of the History of Fernando Pó and the Bight of Biafra

Enrique Martino

The archival sources gathered for my PhD research have all been posted to a blog, www.opensourceguinea.org. Among other things, the sources trace the migrants and laborers in and around the plantation island of Fernando Pó, moving through numerous empires and societies in Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Cameroon and Gabon for most of the twentieth century. Having sources “speak for themselves” to the “public” and even “amongst themselves” contributes not only to an expansionary information commons, but also to a methodological reorganization and pluralization. When a multiplicity of sources are displayed and interlinked as hypertext, the static conceptual lenses of traditional social and cultural history dissolve.

The politics of digital "reform and revolution": towards mainstreaming and African control of African digitisation

Peter Limb

Current challenges regarding the frame of reference and control of African digitisation projects pose serious questions about their future direction. The author suggests practical strategies aimed at mainstreaming resources and increasing African control, including the need for readers of Innovation – librarians, information scientists, archivists, and historians – to engage in the "politics" of securing this control. By maintaining ethical approaches and flexibility, by listening closely to priorities of African partners, by continuing to initiate worthwhile projects in the North yet also practically supporting African initiatives and by directing limited-end pilot projects towards mainstreaming, we can help to turn expropriation of African resources towards the harvesting of African (and Northern-based) resources for mutually beneficial use.

The Digitization of Africa

Peter Limb

Globalization and technological change are driving new developments in electronic publishing and learning-developments that are dominating the transmission of educational information. African studies in the North are harnessing these developments to enhance the study of Africa. While control of, and profits from, these trends largely bypass Africa, there is growing evidence of successful African digital ventures. A new "scramble for Africa," for information resources to digitize, suggests a new process is unfolding: the digitization of Africa. This article outlines these trends and discusses priorities and principles underpinning evolving partnerships. The challenge for all involved in the digitization of African resources is to ensure access, sustainability, and fairness in the sharing of these resources. These goals can be furthered by close cooperation with and listening to African partners, and by the design and implementation of models that effectively deliver information resources over the long term in mutually beneficial ways.

Note conceptuelle

Unknown Author

Mise en contexte La pratique des humanités numériques se diffuse progressivement en Afrique. Au cours des cinq dernières années (2017-2021), les événements scientifiques et de formation sur les humanités numériques dans le monde ont...

The Africa Declaration on Artificial Intelligence

Unknown Author