Introduction^{Footnote 1}

The archival sources gathered for my PhD research have all been posted to a blog, www.opensourceguinea.org. The site is a small and somewhat fraught experiment situated in the anarcho-communist wing of open-source Digital Humanities, on board the pirating, leaking and whistleblowing Zeitgeist, and waving the banner of a post-colonial social history.^{Footnote 2} What started as a compulsion to digitize and a simple politics of sharing has turned into a methodological gesture with many associated complications. All the ethical and legal dubiousness could be stopped at once by making the website password protected,^{Footnote 3} but that would fulfill but half the first purpose of the website: verification. It is only when sources begin to circulate in democratic digital spaces, freed from their professional representatives and gatekeepers, historians and archives, that the website becomes productive of new audiences and destructive of neo-colonial writing and research practices. Openness is often a problematic term as it is so easily co-opted by the reigning ideologies of transparency and efficiency that pre-date the internet. Yet in the details, opening up sources can bring about a sensible methodological reorganization and pluralization, and contribute to the nascent relationships based around the information commons.

Beyond the initial description of the design of the website and the theoretical post-structuralist groundwork, the text begins by traversing three “states of the colonial archive.” The first is related to a type imperial historiography that is detached from the multiplicity of the archive, the other two emerge in connection with the national archives of Spain and Nigeria. There follows a tour of a digital montage of a few of the sources when discussing “hyperlinking as method,” to which are attached some reflections on the associated dissolution of disciplinarily pure categories. Finally there is a space to see “some welcomed effects,” which is to say the effects of public appropriations and the undermining of the expert, something that can take place only when archival materials are redeployed as the “sources of the commons,” which is also the subtitle of the conclusion to this article.

Theory and Montage

On www.opensourceguinea.org there is no wholesale transplanting of any part of the archive online, no consistent “big data,” as that would entail a great many resources and a feeble confrontation with the interests of various juridico-editorial states. The blog contains some four years’ worth of research, about a thousand and two hundred items and rising, some a single page, others running to hundreds of pages, from twenty archives, libraries and fieldwork sites in nine countries. Among other things, the sources trace migrants and laborers in and around the plantation island of Fernando Pó, people who moved along the intersections of the Spanish, British and French empires and through numerous societies in Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Cameroon and Gabon, for most of the twentieth century. The website contains a collage of the heterogeneous sources cited along the footnotes of my entire PhD thesis and of the sources that are, in turn, an internal reference to those that are cited – whatever I could get my hands on or happened to select. To use the exact wording of Walter Benjamin: “Method of this project: literary montage” which appears in the final margins of the many thousand excerpts of nineteenth-century sources Benjamin gathered for the posthumously published Arcades Project. That declaration is followed by this: “I have nothing to say. Only to show. I won’t extract for myself any spirited expressions, I won’t pilfer their value. But the tatter, the waste, the waste: These I don’t want to describe, just to show.”^{Footnote 4}

Figure 1.

Screenshot of www.opensourceguinea.org

The homepage is like one of those many undersea vents, with all the sources bubbling up together in one go, as if from a tiny portal above the magma of the archive. On the screen, each source lies behind one of the cascading tiles that contain images of the disparate material used, as well as the actual process of reaching those sources; maps, conceptual maps, newspapers, letters, books, graphs, footage, oral histories, interviews, archival reading rooms, indices, fieldwork locations, and the rest. Images in which people make an appearance – in pictures selected from a vast repository of an ambivalent photographic archive – tend to involve individuals staring back in autonomous poses. The absence of an immersive confrontation with past multitudes is often followed by the “enormous condescension of posterity,”^{Footnote 5} a position from which subjected peoples are seen to be without gaze or desire. That “looking back” is unsettling and stands for a critique of the type of reading that contents itself with single colonial interlocutors, whether they vindicate or demolish them, but each of whom bypass the massive depots of colonial bureaucracies to exclude the traces of the subaltern – surprising traces, stuck in the catacombs of archival structures.

By clicking on any mosaic in the patchwork of images one sees the source unfurl itself, as if on a scroll. Clicking again folds the text back up to the surface, the source is shown to be entangled in its surrounding. Clicking through the embedded hyperlinks and attached tags is a “simple and mundane gesture, that can produce very complicated curves,” recalling the pathways of inscription of colonial domination.^{Footnote 6} “The colonized are caught in the tightly knit web of colonialism” – the priests, the administrators, the guards, merchants, planters, judges, geographers and ethnologists, who in weaving their “fragile spider’s web (...) paralyzed all the other worlds, ensnared all the islands and singularities, and suffocated all the networks and fabrics.”^{Footnote 7} That is only an aesthetic interpretation of imperialism. The practical use of the website comes from the search box that can mine the entire text of the website instantly. The constant scrolling and clicking serves to recreate the common feeling of “panic” when entering an archive, a disorienting sense of overwhelming and unmanageable super-abundance: “I saw before me the thousands of documents I could indent, the books I could read, the files I had to wade through. I tried to imagine which index to consult, what department to decipher, how best to control the chaos of what seemed an infinite chain of documents.”^{Footnote 8}

Sources as Voices or Circulating Agency

The website is not solely an academic instrument to facilitate checking of evidence. Other researchers and those out for proper verification will find themselves gripped by archive fever, “in need of the archive,” a “compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire” to return to the irreplaceable locus, to the absolutely safe location of the archive, etymology: arkhē, meaning “origin,” “housed.”^{Footnote 9} The blog is a practical application of what Derrida referred to as the deconstruction of the archive, and an attempt to show the possibility – or rather the impossibility – of escaping this archive fever. Recounting the archeological parables that Sigmund Freud used in explaining psychic topology by way of envisaging the spectral figure who left a long-lost footprint in the volcanic ashes of ancient Pompeii, Derrida mocks this “ecstatic instant,” as a “properly hallucinatory form at the moment Freud sees himself obliged to let the phantoms speak for the duration of the archaeological dig (…) live, without mediation and without delay.” This hallucination is a moment that breaches the practical limit of the feverish “laborious deciphering of the archive” undertaken on site by the archeologist-archivist. It is a longing for the “effacement of the archivists: the origin then speaks by itself. The arkhē appears in the nude, without archive. It presents itself and comments on itself by itself. ‘Stones talk!’ In the present.”^{Footnote 10} And this happens! – although of course, not without being withdrawn and then re-enveloped in further acts of inscription and mediation.

Most of the properties of the website consist of translating this “speaking” onto the hyperlink. One of the virtues of much of social history is that, rather than having fallen for other linguistic or positivist clichés by which authors either construct or deduce their pacified subjects and facts, faith has been maintained in the idea of allowing sources to “speak for themselves.” The website seeks to reaffirm that tradition but it is only when sources become widely distributed and accessible – if they acquire a certain critical mass and velocity in the hyperlink – that this semblance of autonomy not as voice, but as agency, can be fully realized.^{Footnote 11} Once the source escapes its locus in the act of translation, by way of being re-inscribed through the hyperlink, it becomes merely a trace of the original in the archive, mediated without the gigantic apparatus of institutional gate-keeping. The trace of agency comes from re-dispatching sources along the vectors of their production and unfolding, an immanent sequence that is multiple and discontinuous and is thus impossible to track down in the dispersed piles of former colonial bureaucracies. The “anchor-text,” the clickable label of the hyperlink, allows a tracing of the sources along their own networks, to see what they claimed or relied on, to detect how they translated their sources, how they referenced legal articles, plagiarized texts, ignored figures, relayed experiences, proliferated images, revived and extended tropes, for the making of court cases, correspondences, statistics, controversies, ideologies, in short, their historical effectivity.

In an amusing passage, unaware of the incipient world wide web that had been put into the public domain months earlier by the physicists in Geneva who developed it to share laboratory data, Derrida speculated in 1994 that “electronic mail today, and even more than the fax, is on the way to transforming the entire public and private space of humanity.” These “turbulences,” affecting “nothing less than property rights, publishing and reproduction rights,” are a mutation archives will not be riding out of intact.^{Footnote 12} But prosthetically reviving sources by means of the hyperlink – with the pace of retrieval and interrelation being of a quasi-instantaneous nature – will come to haunt not only the national archive as a locked down atrium, but the pulpit of scholarly privilege itself. The circulation of sources as hypertext opens them up to unsettling approaches from all directions, and of course to appropriation. The irreplaceable methodological and legal functions of the state-run archive – the guaranteeing and authorizing of constantly reproducible authenticity – remains unfazed, the procedures for their main source of income are not disturbed. Yet, the indefinite technical reproduction of sources, as an “archiving trace, this simple possibility, can only divide the uniqueness.” The “possibility of its fission,” as Derrida says, “haunted [the archive] from its origin. The faithful memory of such a singularity can only be given over to the ghost.”^{Footnote 13} This specter coincides with the insistence of post-colonial theory, to resist leaving the bygone linear past in its place and instead to gesture “towards the past, or rather, to a past, that of slavery and the mute, non-dialectical violence of colonial domination [that] obstinately resists being consigned to the past, and populates the present with ghosts.”^{Footnote 14}

Honestly! What about everyone else?! The whole host of potential appropriators and confabulators, busy with activism, fiction, education, writing scripts, curating, studying, unable to circumvent visa regimes or to apply for more grants, those who never in their right mind would even consider going to an archive, being happily oblivious of the inane bureaucracies, the opaque catalogues, and the erratic opening hours and locations.

States of the Colonial Archive

Academic disciplines have footnotes to establish chains of reference that hypothetically lead to scientific verifiability, to objects becoming known. The retrievable object that a source is supposed to stand for dissolves when it is suddenly seen to have been constituted by its own chain of references and translations. It is when these translations cannot be traced far enough, when the sources of the sources are made to disappear, that an African history made from imperial archives becomes neo-imperial.

To be fair, in some archives, for example the colonial office records at Kew in London, one is not given the possibility of seeing papers spread out and conflicting. Dossiers tend to be neatly filed and filtered, for this is the same meagre paperwork that high-level administrators forwarded to each other. Paperwork for the ruling elites was cut from the less articulate paperwork, the fragmentary trails to other places, from the raw machinery of rule. Taking a page from this time-honored bundle, imperial historians can be seen to have fulfilled the cliché that “history is written by the victors” only because they have over-relied on the tone and layout of this abbreviated, easy-to-reach, archival blurb. In the real-time chaos of the archive, the type of source that induces their dependency is usually of a tempting nature: authoritative, structured, with headings and subheadings, almost ready-made, emitted by well-educated and professionally detached figures as likely as not all holding degrees from the same universities. Sure, this rashly comfortable era of African history has already been rendered non-credible, but even in the current hegemonic trope of describing colonialism as negotiated, or “subject to contestation” as Frederick Cooper might say, how can powerful agents be unsettled and new ones be accounted for in the reports sent to the ministries housed in the archives of the capital cities of defunct empires, when what was at stake for the majority of the colonized population was life or death, pressures of entire socio-technical edifices, intricate drudgery, horrors and wonders?^{Footnote 15}

An experiment to assess the academic acceptability of knowledge exclusively formatted by imperial rulers might take a colonial report, strip away the indicators of its original function, add the obligatory nod to a non-controversial analytical category, and, in the tradition of academic hoaxes, submit it largely intact to a semi-reputable journal and await its publication;^{Footnote 16} having cited sources in plain sight would finally relegate a still residually present mechanical mode of scholarly publishing to the expendable genre of the Reader’s Digest.^{Footnote 17} The problem with relying on only one sort of archival artifact – the synthetic bureaucratic write-up that always arrives late onto the historical scene on which it is trying to report – is that it completely misrepresents the reality of the archive as an eminently bureaucratic entity with endless piles, shuffled, drawn from and re-stacked, copied and stapled; full of fears of indeterminacy and non-administrative insurgent scenes.^{Footnote 18} For where no proper archival work or field research is undertaken, there emerges a litany of colonial repetition, in both apologist and critical forms. Thoroughness or its absence is largely a matter of which sources are accessible. Publications of colonial rule produced for and edifying “the politics of the police” are open to dissemination or merely easier to reach.^{Footnote 19} If the compelling and defying sources are also distributed, students might try to trace their trials and agencies with further research and enroll them in the battles of representation, rather than attempting yet another detached recapitulation of what was already being expressed in the discursive sources or yet another post-modern critical rehash of official propaganda that cannot be disarmed from within.

A critique of the whole array of codes and discourses forming around colonial power has been made in many other instances^{Footnote 20} but the issue that needed emphasizing was how the actual material structuring of the archive feeds into this state of becoming enveloped or exclusively engaged with the same discursive frameworks that held sway for enlightened colonial administrators; of being seduced by classical political economy, figures of authority, the reliability of law, the false insight of the traveler, the ease of demography or the linear maps of the surveyor. In some sense spotting and denouncing repetitive tropes has been made very easy now, but the empirical challenge, the work to be done, lies in tracing the steps, the gaps and the consistencies of the assemblages of colonial knowledge and practice. That should likely involve an astronomical amount of phenomena, millions of masses and innumerable devices.

Sources of the Plasma in Spain

By far most of the material on the website is from Spanish archives, extracted from over a hundred boxes. I say “Spanish” but the administrative depots of the Hispanic empire dragged back all the colonial records from Guinea and most of those from North Africa and the early Americas too, even the district files, every last inventory, blueprint and correspondence. The cascade of mediated palavers, police interrogations and fines, the entire deluge of the accounting and listing of prisoners, contract workers, residents and immigrants, almost nothing was left in place or discarded – or for that matter indexed. The case of the colonial archives of Equatorial Guinea is unusual but pressing. The little that remained after Independence went up in flames during a cultural revolution-type fervor by the youth militias of the first president Francisco Macias Nguema or was left to decay on the sidewalks during the recent building renovations fueled by the oil-boom. The bulk of archival materials has been subjected to a sort of “bureaucratic destruction” in an archive near Madrid, lurking there along a kilometer of pages spread across about 4,000 boxes. On www.opensourceguinea.org, one can merely see single artifacts extracted from a torrent of correspondences and seriality. The website is, to use an archeological analogy, merely an invitation to continue and increase the digging. The surface has barely been scratched. Once you leave the gates of the site and sign whatever they make you sign, it’s something else.^{Footnote 21}

I would estimate that 97 percent of the Spanish colonial files relating to Equatorial Guinea and the Bight of Biafra have never been reopened by historians since the day they were archived. Most facets of life under colonial rule have not only been under-researched but completely ignored, as has been the case with the immigrant groups from Nigeria, who from the 1930s to the 1970s constituted the majority of the population of Fernando Pó. If that period of half a century is covered in the academic literature, the details are taken from prolific Franco-era academics. As the books and articles of everyone active in the colonial period are also treated as sources, well over a hundred have been digitized and uploaded, which has served partly to counteract an unusually powerful strand in Spanish-language publications that has taken its image of colonial society from the pages of published ideologues, demographers, agronomists, legal scholars, economists and anthropologists. Following up on a citation usually leads to the pages of these colonial publications where, only with rare exceptions, strikingly blank re-inscriptions of colonial ideologies are recorded, often consisting only of a few of the stereotypes circulating in colonial towns and metropolitan areas and a scribe-like copying of statistics and legislation into sentences.^{Footnote 22}

Being wary of the closed loops of the ready-made packages of top-tier sources as well as the self-sustaining references to either a gray canonical literature that is pushed into the background or to a demonized antiquated colonial tract, is only a way to increase esteem for fieldwork, going out again, to ask and to dig. Because, as has been widely noted, sectarian groups of scholars without anything external to draw from quickly degenerate into self-referential and repetitive factions. Latour, in the final chapter of Reassembling the Social, calls this area outside of existing networks of knowledge production, both inside and outside the academy, the “plasma, namely that which is not yet formatted, not yet measured, not yet socialized, not yet engaged in metrological chains, and not yet covered, surveyed, mobilized, or subjectified.”^{Footnote 23}

The traditional expense associated with photocopying can also lead to a false reductionist impression of the archive, as usually only the prominent and less diffuse sources can be paid for. The free, or practically free, use of “self-service” digital cameras in archives – a relatively recent boon in the national archives of the UK, France, much of Francophone Africa, Ghana, the US, etc., but still banned in Spain and Germany – is indispensable to dissolving the colonial modality of the single domineering voice.

Sources of Money and Law in Nigeria and Elsewhere

The relationships between researchers, state-run archives and permission to disseminate sources, should not be construed as a moral one. It is a question of decrees and enforcement. Whether or not everything written down and stowed away by governments falls within the public domain, and when it does so, or whether it is put under “crown” or state copyright, varies immensely and the intricacies across time-zones and countries are mind-boggling.^{Footnote 24} Obviously, without proper licensing the pirating of unique material held by differently authorized and funded repositories of non-state entities is a completely different matter that for every occasion would need an ethnographic reflection on the different sensibilities of different repositories and sources.^{Footnote 25} But the overall point can be reiterated, that the structure being addressed, the type of archival material most used by social historians, is administrative files, absorbed in one stroke and then either obliterated or locked up and condemned – and their spectral flight made extremely difficult and expensive. The materials brought to the screen are selectively assembled and wrested from the bureaucratic debris; they are excisions from longer correspondences, samples of serial court files, specimens of bureaucratic logging systems, lumps taken from the kaleidoscope of colonial regulations, single tissues from uninterrupted military dispatches, batches of statistics. The sources reassembled in hypertext, with photographic images of their lifelessness, bound, stuffed, and tied up in a box after having become redundant to rulers, are fragmented but autonomous, what Latour would call irreducible. They can never be integrated into the narrative exercise of a write-up, nor should they be condemned to personal hard drives or to be hostages to extortionists, the courts and the police. Pirated priceless artifacts from the ruins of colonialism do not seem to be the object of state desire. Or, if they are, prosecutors will never be able to keep up with the swarm.

To take the case of an African state, let us examine Nigeria. The documents produced by the British colonial administration were projected to be in the public domain by now^{Footnote 26} and thus, as one of the anonymous peer-reviewers of the journal quite rightly suggested, my blog is, in a sense, “hyper-imperial.” The sovereign Nigerian National Archives Act of 1992, and especially the section on publication, is a word by for word copy of Singapore’s “National Archives and Records Act” of 1967, and both were passed under periods of military dictatorship and closely based on the dying British Empire’s Public Records Act of 1957.^{Footnote 27} The whole post-colonial bureaucracy seems still to be neo-imperial; the question is how to decolonize without reproducing the colonial relationship of plunder.

The Nigerian National Archives Act clearly states that: “No person may publish the whole or part of any public archives, without the written permission of the Director-General.”^{Footnote 28} However, there are no extra clauses regulating online reproduction, fees are prescribed only for services performed within the archive. When the heads of archival reading rooms were consulted, in Nigeria and in other archives across the continent, many admitted frankly that the question of licensing material for website use has not been addressed yet, nor is it of much concern; and informally some suggested I just go ahead… At any rate express written permissions were hard to come by. Having a few fragmented dossiers on marginal topics such as Fernando Pó on a website is not an issue for any of the African archives because that is not what an archive lives by, their revenues come from elsewhere, the highest fees by far being for the certification of copies and for the delegated in-house work of delicate retrieval. State archives contain vast series of extremely boring documents relating to the judicial machinery such as property deeds, contracts, court records, antecedents to millions of disputes which could never be digitized anyhow without large-scale agreements and resources. Most users of African archives, like those in many other regions, are officials pursuing administrative actions or are legal professionals making cases, and people looking for the “legal integrity of the individual, organization, and families including [for] entitlements.”^{Footnote 29} What is indispensable for these paying users is a specialist staff and the “authentication of copies with official seals as evidence of such copies,” this stamp the state wields to mark the irreplaceable origin and its law-preserving functions, and it largely sustains African archives financially.^{Footnote 30}

When the infrequent foreign historian working in African archives arrives on the scene, they, often in alliance with some government agents and budget administrators, sometimes feel uneasy at the prospect of seeing sources online, because “outsiders [will] no longer have to travel” and “pay for copies.”^{Footnote 31} Total digitization of all the historical records in the public domain is still many decades away and cameras make the copy-shop obsolete only for the sojourning academic historian. What is at stake is not patronage, but the rite of passage of a disciplinary identity. Derek Peterson writes about the experience of accessing the archive in “Uganda [which] is not a place of faceless institutions and impersonal procedures. There is an intimately human set of connections that need to be developed and nurtured in order for research to take place.”^{Footnote 32} But this archive fever – the rush of discovering the subtlety of finding one’s way around, the pace of retrieval, the warmth and alliances of the reading room, of being a welcomed patron detecting and signaling obligation to the rules of hospitality, all to unlock unheard of shelf-space for a wave of glimpses and pleasures – remains present for those who feel the rush, as does the physical archive, because of the legally and methodologically inscribed compulsive “need” to see the “irreplaceable singularity of a document [which is] at once offered and unavailable for translation, open to and shielded from technical iteration and reproduction.”^{Footnote 33}

For everyone else, Roy Rosenzweig, founder of the Center for History and New Media, has suggested that “in the absence of state action, historians should take steps individually and within their professional organizations to embrace a culture of abundance made possible by digital media and expand the public space of scholarship – for example, making their own work available for free on the web, cross-referencing other digital scholarship, and perhaps depositing their sources online for other scholars to use.”^{Footnote 34} Public dissemination requires the selection and curating of sources – adding meta-data and the like. This is an area where historians could reunite with their archivist selves or with other archivists and take up a lost disciplinary tradition; indeed a few generations ago “historians saw themselves as having a responsibility for preserving as well as researching the past.”^{Footnote 35}

Exactly the sources it seems most worthwhile to share are the absolutely singular ones – the delicate testimony, an astounding letter or the explosive meeting or drama in a courtroom. This “dust,” as Carolyn Steedman calls it, does not form part of the money-making seriality of archives – especially African ones. Such inimitable sources are often labeled under “miscellaneous papers,” uncategorized at the end of an administrative sequence or located in appendices. They are the serendipitous finds, the confiscated dead-end manifesto, a particularly brutal dispatch, the research notes of an unusual administrator. It is from such artifacts that dozens of stories can and need to be retold.

Hyperlinking as Method

Drawing from the whole expanse of the archive and scattering a few of its traces online would contribute to “decolonizing” the academy– the attack on and abandonment of colonial frameworks of explanation. This methodological move would besiege old forts and ivory towers, not in the aimless sense that might be associated with the term decoloniality, but by making clear that the hangovers of a colonial episteme – universal only in the minds of its perpetual foes and of those wearing its masks – has been merely the result of not consulting and considering enough sources, of not taking into account multiplicity, endowed with autonomy.

Access to a wide array of sources should further propel researchers to follow the backward-facing trails – before the ideologues and missionaries discursively produced conquered peoples as “pre-political,” “pre-commercial,” or pre-anything, before a judge decided on the likely chain of events, before the governor ratified law, before the statistician had distilled the numbers, before a scholar broke them down and wrote them up. Through the hyperlink, the website attempts to arrange for the elaborate tracing of archival-historical trails. For example, the reports sent to the Colonial Office in London in the late 1930s by the Governor of Nigeria about the illegal recruitment of workers for and emigration to Fernando Pó are quite clearly just a specific rhetorical moment in the translation of other data produced by the fragmentary or specialized reports of the district officers and military consultants who in turn drew on material extracted by their census takers and police-officers; or from claims submitted by residents and local newspapers.^{Footnote 36}

There is no introduction or branch-like side-bar that allows classification, one stumbles onto busy junctions. “Nothing starts in the Archive, nothing, ever at all, though things certainly end up there. You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught halfway through: the middle of things; discontinuities.”^{Footnote 37} There are mostly trials of agency, but there are of course also irruptions, despotic forces, voids, nodes that seem to unleash the rearranging of the entire historical field. One such event was a letter by Samuel Babington Macaulay – educated in Lagos but working on his own farm in Fernando Pó – published in the West African Review of May 1936 and entitled “Slavery in Spanish Guinea.” It says:

The text not only produced a controversy, a whirlwind that framed a whole genre of media scandals and, after the story was picked up by Nnamdi Azikiwe himself at the African Morning Post, Nigerian nationalist demands; but it sent a few British colonial administrators, some oozing with Quaker sentimentalism, rushing to investigate, to confirm and dispel. The piece also incited a whole wave of resurgent Spanish fascist ideologues who felt singled out as particularly cruel colonialists, through the revival of the early modern leyenda negra. The letter set in motion a barrage of Anglo-Spanish labor treaties, whose negotiated format was brought in from the ILO in Geneva and mid nineteenth-century Cuba, which ended up regulating the steamships that in turn forced clandestine labor recruiters to hire canoe smugglers or to co-opt the staff and compromise the paperwork of the new surveillance, ticketing and contract systems.

The following of such routes is a staple of empirical argument but the full and bottomless drift of their networks becomes clear only when their exact passages are interlinked and their flow put on display. Instead of a figure being inserted here, there is a link to a video recording in the following footnote.^{Footnote 39} Only when something is framed along a conceptual bottom line can the coordinates of structure/agency, micro/macro, lifeworld/system, or local/global be distilled, purified and superimposed.^{Footnote 40} Within the specific textures of the archives of colonial states, which after all represent just one way among many of containing historical sources, one can approach the trajectories of colonial market organization in formation and the displacements of the subaltern – people whose self-representation is rendered absent but who are still forced to yield a trace. At every step one can see the condensations and reformulations for superiors, as experience is transformed into drafts, facts, cases, media stories, petitions, witness statements, to be fed in as translations into new trajectories. Some of these dispersed trails gathered from different archives are interconnected on the website, their purposeful routes through the material and the immaterial being refracted in the hyperlink.

Sources are an Assemblage

Hyperlinks were not used only for convenience, to help alleviate the archival daze of trying to connect a discontinuous sequence of correspondences, the recurring and notorious “in reply to your letter” or “regarding the incident.” Rather, hyperlinks that lead to collated search results or to meta-data tags of larger categories were coded for also, enabling tracing of, for example, the elaborate socio-economic relations that surrounded the activities of the recruiters, which mostly relate to a set of sprawling paperwork and dynamic objects: taxes, debts, bride-wealth and divorces. While I shall not go into the historical details here,^{Footnote 41} these immanent hyperlinks suggest a methodological reorientation. Following a multiplicity of domains and disciplines should be absolutely indispensable for social history – especially when the sources themselves are seen to be located in dispersed and disparate processes, always already “entangled.”

When trying to account for agency, the conceptual spectacle-lenses that academic and folkloric social theories have manufactured and that are worn by social and cultural historians – the purification of concepts around economics, classes, laws of kinship and state, power or culture as such and projected identities and discrete places and other multiple scales – should be cast off, not retained even as a static backdrop, especially not when the sources themselves indicate that these sociological abstractions were fictions of distributed historical practices that did not require a critical or detached conceptual eye to be shown how to make, extend themselves, operate, yield and react. The elaborate structure of the website, the performativity of single clicks along specifically unfolding vectors, along the slippage of always dis-localized and usually sprawling networks, suggests that on entering the archives one finds no abbreviations or shortcuts to the final word, the hidden structures, or to phenomenological interiorities - an analytical phantom Latour has conveniently called the “double-click:” the instant appearance of solid facts and subjects that can seemingly be recalled in one move, as if without historical mediation or technical translation.^{Footnote 42}

Historians, as re-assemblers of the social, have to thread a course through the step-wise multiplicity of the archive, and of actual historical practice, and while a written published product of course redirects a source for its own argumentative effect, the primary data should be meticulously highlighted, ideally with full-color images and the stroke of the hyperlink, so as to give anyone perusing them a sense of their immanent references and attachments before and after they were piled up and laid to rest. The cardinal rule for archivist and source criticism is to preserve the “original” filing of the archival material, after the sources were taken out of circulation. But what the hyperlinks and the tags allow is multiple types of clamps that enable the sources of history to be suspended and rearranged in an online medium, as well as to see them collapsed back into their irrevocably place-bound and safe-guarded sequence.

Admittedly, this type of network-centrism excludes the not yet understood conditions that went into producing archival artifacts or were involved in and imagining historical constellations. To merely trace what governed linking, while bringing a promise of totality into the archive is misleading and wholly inadequate because, since that satisfies itself with whatever is present and citable, it neglects the colonial legacies of lexicon itself – the exclusionary formatting in which the Wikipedia style website is embedded. But at least software and the internet contain the tools to present, arrange and inter-relate the true plurality of sources. For what is being called “augmented” research, but should really be considered epistemologically explosive digital space, contains the potential for heterogeneous combinations, a capacity to straddle ontological plateaus, to link the different mediums of the routes of inscription and the references as well as the gaps of translation that are not just footnotes – the layout of a report, or a plagiarized paragraph – but are or can be documentary, mythical, aesthetic, performative, participatory, or even secret, password-protected. What is at issue here is “(…) nothing less than the future;” the future of a discipline as “techno-science, science, [that] in its very movement, can only consist in a transformation of the techniques of archivization, of printing, of inscription, of reproduction, of formalization, of ciphering, and of translating marks.”^{Footnote 43}

It is an ethico-political gesture, a leap even, to side with the sources, with the specters of the histories in the plasma, with the ghosts of collectivities.^{Footnote 44} Other than the exceptional synthesizers, masterly narrators, and formidable persuaders, the “good chiefs,” sources often tend to be exceedingly more interesting than what historians offer when they dissect and dismember them. Sources profusely bleed not only an authorial or authentic voice, but many modes of enunciation and splattered traces within which blatant certainties, outrageous lies, and volatile desire and mediated pain can be detected. Making this palette of historical actualities accessible to other researchers, students, and to anyone with an internet connection is probably the most significant effect of open-sourcing the archive.

Some Welcome Effects – Sources Might Not Need Experts

When sources circulate they become attached to a host of different audiences and appropriators. The multiplication and multiplicity of sources that are let loose online and redistributed offline should be fundamental for any decolonizing methodology that by negating the origin of the archive releases the methodological and political ghosts that are not cast solely from the clauses and habits of transient legal and institutional formations. Historians have sources to rejoice in them, and, as reputable excavators, to make them speak or to engage in battles to expose them. It’s everyone’s loss if sources are treated only as a secured pile of proof that allows experts to propagate an intimidating mastery. Yet historians, more than the other data gatherers, are very much inclined to surround themselves with informal intellectual property rights, even after two decades of an open internet, at a time when already more mathematical, bio-chemical, juridical and literary disciplines have made the move online.

When historians are asked for copies of their own sources, a common response, a performative stance, is that of cold self-preservation or a possessive and evasive entitlement. This stance seems to depend on a strangely-assumed, almost regal principle of hierarchical precedence and even a structural opportunism – “après moi le déluge.” Notwithstanding, it is painfully obvious that access to “acquired” sources, like the ones on the website, is indeed the outcome of a measure of luck and the innate patience of sitting in an archive, but mostly of a structural privilege and a crass global inequality in funding that results in unevenly distributed capacity to enter and decipher the mazes of catalogues and the colossal bureaucracies of colonial states.^{Footnote 45} But the fear of a loss of one’s “deserved” sources is somewhat senseless, even paranoid, because after all academia still has certain codes that encourage borrowing and stigmatize bad faith and the unoriginal contribution. It may be assumed too that scholars have a polite culture of acknowledgment, or otherwise easy access to forums for denunciation; or in any case no one would use the same source to make the same point. Unless the scholar relies on the one self-certain colonial source, there is no collision, no one ever steps twice into the same stream of sources, which are rearranged and approached differently every time.

The aversion from sharing, from the commons, seems to take hold also from a perceived threat to the position of the expert, the scholar who becomes the gatekeeper, the official contextualizer and spokesperson of a topic, “the man of the archives who stands at the source of science and transforms the ever-deceptive letter into an exact reserve of knowledge.”^{Footnote 46} Experts sometimes imagine they have a shamanistic capacity to take off at high speed and see the forest for the trees, hovering over the treetops discerning their own brushstrokes, however – to try to be as preposterously profound, perhaps more flamboyantly – it is only amongst the trees that one can see the wind blow and the rain fall. This whole scene though needs to be set on fire, smoke clouds the visions of the eagle, and on closer inspection smoke is made up of perfectly irreducible particles. A source, or for that matter time “is paradoxical; it folds or twists; it is as various as the dance of flames in a brazier- here interrupted, there vertical, mobile, and unexpected, (...) predictable and unpredictable, [and] will no doubt someday be explainable by complicated notions of fluctuations, strange attractors… Someday we will perhaps understand that historical time is even more complicated.”^{Footnote 47}

Having a source stand alone and circulate without interpretative guidance means resizing the analytical self to the same tangible scale as the sources. This is not about taking them at face-value but about connecting them properly and witnessing consistencies and new connections: a “beautiful tangle ensues.”^{Footnote 48} The practice of open data would necessarily spurn scholarly exercises that merely depend on a monopoly of access, colonial repetition, or the pure phantom of the first and only reading, and help further spin praiseworthy and varied forms of historiographical surplus value, whether through framing, following, tallying, very close reading, attaching theory, focusing on writing style or curating and representing multiplicities.

Sources Acquire a Life of Their Own

The experience and topology of the housed archive wards off approach by differently trained onlookers. Even when an official online catalogue is uploaded online with the same inventory of the classifications as was made in print, consisting of only top-tier descriptions, it seems unreasonable to expect someone who could possibly make good use of a source to have to first decrypt the varying subdivisions of a defunct empire in order to find smaller-scale information. To counteract the inertia of the archive the words of a source have been extracted or transcribed, ideally in their entirety. While it has enabled many things technically, the most important consequence of hypertext is that it is searchable.^{Footnote 49} Imagine someone looking in an archive for a specific plantation owner or landmark or neighborhood (Maximiliano Jones, Monte Alen, Barrio de los Hausa), for the concrete existence of a big word like capitalismo, for a liquor, an epidemic, or an undercurrent, brandi, sífilis, prostitución, for an unannounced spectacle, or a traditional building technique, balele, casa de nipa, never standardized or indexed by colonial administrators or archivists. How, for example, would Mami Wata, the mermaid apparition that spread with the migration of Liberian workers throughout coastal West Africa in the late nineteenth century, be found – on a single point along a Euclidian administrative space – in a national, chronological or departmental secular sequence even though she indeed makes her presence known in reports, newspapers and testimonies? Not every source can be a revolutionary constitution purged of its networks, put on pedestals and always made available to the populace. The mass of sources produces plural subject positions.

A multitude of historical sources online is a much more efficient mediator when trying to link the type of research done at universities with the cultural and intellectual productions undertaken by journalists, curators, documentary filmmakers, activists, bloggers, artists, teachers or cultural centers. Historians imagine themselves as potentially valuable collaborators, but if academic texts are the main outlet for archival material, and through them sources are redirected for largely internal purposes of filling empirical gaps and fulfilling theoretical premises, then sources are held back from full participation in circuits where, as has already happened in the case of my website, they can speak to, for example, Wikipedia^{Footnote 50} editors and activists and political bloggers who find antecedents with which to position and legitimate themselves historically. Several authors looking for inspiration in dramatic scenarios or real-life settings have absorbed some of the sources, others have presented them to a television audience through a program produced in Malabo, while a locally written petition has been printed and deposited in a cultural center on the island where it can be studied and appreciated; a petition that declares: “Our motivation or desire is not to offend, but to speak the truth and to candidly confess our feelings and our way of thinking.”^{Footnote 51} Once sources become mobile online, they can disembark in different places, and circulate where archival remainders can be reactivated and made meaningful, not only by, for or through professional historians.^{Footnote 52}

For those who dig, there remains some sort of responsibility to reanimate those voices silenced by the intimidation of imperial domination and to highlight the intermittent but recurrent subaltern interrogations, court appearances and petitions and especially the continuous streaks of autonomous activity being carried on beyond the logic of the state-controlled economy and that administrators kept trying to track down and suppress.^{Footnote 53} The most dramatic, dissenting or revealing documents must be selected and enlisted publicly to do battle again to rectify the historical record. If the possessor of a source cannot find the yielding of subaltern traces, a differently attuned observer might detect the trail of some individual or some other entity in combination with a multitude of sources. In all likelihood life under colonial domination was for most people less about strategic negotiation, and more about

In relation to the colonial history of Equatorial Guinea the little information that has been made openly findable is dominated by amateur military enthusiasts, missionary newspapers, old settler forums and apologist journalists.^{Footnote 55} Unlike the idealized academic, students and others make use of Google, gather impressions, and cobble up material for assignments from whatever is accessible. Populating online search results with sources, infusing the open internet with a plurality of historical sentiments, automatically entails a distance and a challenge to the hegemonic retrospectives of an imperial core ridden with amnesia, whitewashing and militarism. The dilemma is: either train and fund a number of specialists to use exclusive databases, and thereby recreate the completely asymmetrical infrastructure of research facilities on the ground, or make them free – “free, as in freedom” as the anarchist programmer Richard Stallman would say. The latter might be located in the intravenous paths of American corporate cloud empires, but the search engine is just a parasitic mediator of collective desire and social fora. The commons spewing from imperial fissures might even bring about the mutation of a privileged caste of oracular scholars and administrators of interpretation to a type of democratic ancestor worship in digital cosmopolitan neighborhoods and possibly a kind of “Tele-Kommunismus.”^{Footnote 56}

Conclusion: Sources of the Commons

By “the commons” is meant that venerable scene, that space that emerges when “the narrow horizon of bourgeois right [is] crossed in its entirety” and containing only that one munificent rule: each to one’s abilities, and for all, their needs! ^{Footnote 57} Imagine researchers sharing their sources at an archival spring in a mythical meadow somewhere in the Rhineland, a constant gush where one goes to collect what one perceives as valuable according to a tradition and a disciplinary disposition. If I spot and take away a file, a quotation, and while sifting for specks of gold in a stream of loose sheets, someone else detects a glistening emerald or titanium nugget, or even objects that from certain positions cannot be made valuable, like jade or amber, then I offer it, take it, make whatever you need with it! If a structuralist goes fishing for myths or numbers, then the remaining data could be made into a beautiful observation by someone more interested in seemingly superfluous adornments, or the layout of an index. Don’t imagine sources as a dry lump of coal, subject to the logic of exhaustion, and thus to be quickly fenced in or bought up. Sources are enriching and multivalent creations – if they circulate.

Historians really need to change their accustomed methodological metaphors: one does not mine the archives but encounters within them, both in the archival atriums and online are always a source of uncertainty, a surprise; spectral presences in the plasma of the archives find you – inside and outside the academy, they become attached to a multiplicity of scripts, passions, and ghosts, and direct the distributed endeavors of knowledge production: that which is formatted, measured, socialized, mobilized, or subjectified.

Inequality is rifer than ever, politics is always about uneven distribution, one can never be without or outside of it, and the idea that a mass redistribution of sources will redress anything is tremendously facile. However, online sharing is also easy to do and it is the new common sense.^{Footnote 58} Steps toward a real research commons drawing from a profuse plasma might even bring about a minor flourishing – some slight socio-political, representational, and academic changes in bleak landscapes, especially necessary in the case of the patchy historiography and knowledge of Equatorial Guinea’s past. There is no scarcity of the colonial archive and there is no reason for informal privatization nor for state monopoly. The paperwork emitted by European states in their colonial drive for resources, and imperial control was relentless. On www.opensourceguinea.org, scrolling all the way down, some eleven meters and counting, one encounters Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, whom Benjamin made even more famous by imagining him as the angel of history, in the midst of the “storm” of capitalist “progress:” “where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet (...) The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, the rubble-heap before him grows sky high.”^{Footnote 59}