It is fitting that our final volume as the History in Africa editorial team features articles that reconceptualize classic archival sources and reimagine new forms of narrating the past.

While there is a new order of threats to the teaching of history’s full, rich narrative, African and African diaspora archives have long been problematic sites of knowledge production. Even with the increased interest in decolonizing sources of knowledge, scholars and archivists of African and African diaspora studies have had to revisit that concept. Because the drive to decolonize knowledge can reinscribe colonial dynamics, this newer decolonial scholarship emphasizes collaboration and practice-based approaches.Footnote ¹ Toyin Falola’s theory on ritual archives also provides a framework to define and analyze orality and performance as part of the historical documentation at the disposal of scholars.Footnote ² Recent articles in History in Africa have underscored components of these new archival practices. A special section in the 2020 volume of History in Africa on digitization and the archival turn, questioned narrow definitions of the archive that have facilitated digitization drives without giving attention to the production of the archive and attitudes toward it.Footnote ³ Similarly, the idea of the community archive can recognize material that may not be written but embodied. Rather than see these archives that do not conform to the expected definition of the archive as a supplement, what would it mean to see these archives as integral to the writing of history?Footnote ⁴

The articles in this year’s volume engage the archive and the research derived from it while offering perspectives that echo long-standing approaches to the archival document and signal new directions. We begin the volume with an article that asks us to consider seriously the history of animals and material objects alongside people. The next group of articles take on the written archive born of the colonial encounter and turn the archive upside down to propose new findings and new narratives on old events. Finally, we end the volume with a two pieces that test the boundaries of historical writing. Both invite a degree of imagination as part of the interpretation process in the form of a screenplay, in one case, and family history in the other. While each article is tethered to the African context, they offer compelling interdisciplinary theoretical framing to the field of history. Even with all of the discussion of decolonizing the archive, the final frontier is the writing itself and who we are writing for: the audience. The creative approach to each article has potential appeal to a broader public interested in engaging with the African past and with all of our histories.

We begin our volume with an article that pushes at the boundaries of history through different epistemological approaches including philosophy and ritual practices. In “African History and the Thingly Past: A Yoruba Example,” Shina Alimi brings the rich corpus of Yoruba cosmology to bear on the burgeoning field of more-than-human histories. Alimi considers the importance of animals and material objects as more than mere props and backdrops of history. For Alimi, Yoruba culture provides particularly suggestive examples of how humans, animals and things are “interrelated and relational” rather than hierarchically positioned on scales of importance. “Without things,” Alimi asserts, “we are nothing.” In “Aɖaʋatram (madness has led me astray): Ritual Archives and Ewe Identities on the Ghana-Togo Borderlands,” Edem Adotey analyzes the role of the Aɖaʋatram ritual drum among the Nyive, an Ewe-speaking community that lives on both sides of the Ghana-Togo border. While the border complicates their ritual practices, Adotey demonstrates that the drum provides a means for the community to maintain their identity. Mobilizing Toyin Falola’s concept of the “ritual archive,” the author provides a compelling account of the ways in which ritual objects mediate identity formation while fostering connection and community.

Our next set of contributions proposes new ways to view and utilize archive through reinterpretation of old sources or introduction of new ones. In her article, “Archival Patchwork: Stitching Social Relationships in Colonial South Africa,” Laura Mitchell seizes on the creative metaphor of patchwork to describe a method of engagement that she has found particularly suited to working in the voluminous colonial archives of the Western Cape in South Africa. Picking apart, piecing, seaming, stitching, and pinning – these are all useful descriptions of Mitchell’s advocacy of a nonlinear archival practice. It “builds across scraps of evidence scattered amongst different collections” to remake representations of peoples and communities considered unimportant or unworthy of regular, consistent documentation in mainstream colonial correspondence. The method is employed to explain why, for example, in 1825, one particular farm incubated one of the only two revolts against chattel slavery in Western Cape history. Patchworking partial bits of evidence provides more depth and detail of perspective of the rebels than a unilateral use of, for example, the legal records of the revolt. This method, Mitchell suggests, should be productive in other settings as well.

Matheus Pereira and Ricardo Roque’s article, “African and Asian Writings from Mozambique: Uncovering Indigenous Records in a Portuguese Colonial Archive” should give great encouragement to anyone who might think that documentary sources on the African past have been well-mined. The authors argue, on the contrary, that interspersed among the colonially authored texts in the Overseas Historical Archive in Lisbon, Portugal, there is a plethora of handwritten documents in Portuguese and Arabic authored by indigenous Africans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The existence of these “new” texts has been obscured by colonial archiving practices. A survey of holdings and a reexamination of colonial cataloguing practices have in this case, and perhaps would also elsewhere, establish exciting possibilities of “new research pathways” in African history.

In “Steering the Nation: Drivers, Nationalism, and the Writing of History,” Jennifer Hart examines the Shifimo Kpee, an understudied Ga opposition movement that emerged in Ghana shortly after independence to express the frustrations of the Ga people. Using oral histories and newspaper reports, Hart produces a complex story that challenges foundational academic accounts of the movement by pointing to its diverse membership that cut across occupational lines. More broadly, Hart complicates the history of Ghana’s independence era by demonstrating the complex struggles in which Ghanaians engaged to define their new nation.

Cristofaro Domenico’s archival report titled “A Note on Photographic Archival Collections on Northern Ghana” provides an important survey of neglected archival holdings. While several recent archival reports published in this journal have addressed Ghanaian archives, they have not focused on materials related to northern Ghana. This region has faced many forms of marginalization within the nation’s colonial and postcolonial history that complicate its historical study, making the mapping of available archival materials all the more important. At the same time, existing archival reports have focused predominantly on textual documents rather than on photographic materials. By identifying a wide range of archives that hold photographic materials related to northern Ghana, the author has provided interested researchers with an invaluable opportunity to pursue new avenues for historical inquiry.

The final articles in this volume suggest two very different ways to engage with the historical past through public performance or by mining personal histories. Both approaches suggest new ways to connect with the audiences through a process generally shunned in history: emotion. In “Towards a Dramatization of the Anglo-Ijebu Conflict of 1892: Creating a Script,” Tunde Oduwobi and Femi Adedina, offer a unique opportunity to think differently about the infamous Anglo-Ijebu War of 1892 that set the stage for British colonial expansion in Nigeria. Historical drama is well-documented as a form of art in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa. Viewing the dramatization process as an educational opportunity, the authors provide a detailed breakdown of primary documents recording daily events as the conflict unfolded. Readers are invited to develop a script from the raw materials, giving diverse groups an opportunity to create as a part of commemoration. Not only are the possibilities endless, but this process could suggest other ways to bring historical events to life for a broad audience by starting with the historical record as part of the foundation.

Madina Thiam challenges herself and her audience to read the past through intimate patterns of migration and marriage in “The Century’s Firstborn: Intimate History in the Aftermath of Nineteenth-Century Islamic Revolutions in Central Mali.” Beginning with an unusual clause in the marriage contract her grandfather drew up for his daughter, who was Thiam’s aunt, Thiam traces the history and aftermath of the nineteenth-century revolutions of Umar Taal through her grandfather’s migrations. At the same time, she discusses the different emotional registers that shaped her ability to write about a grandfather whom she never met in contrast to writing about her aunt and grandmother “whose smell, touch, and voice” she remembered. In these moments, Thiam is considering the ethics of how we write about the lives of strangers. But she also raises the question of how we receive history as the reader. I (Lorelle Semley) still remember hearing Elizabeth Alexander read from the essay “My Grandmother’s Hair,” at a conference fifteen years ago.Footnote ⁵ Alexander recounted how her aunt, Caroline Bond Day, was one of the first Black women to earn a graduate degree from Harvard University (then Radcliffe College). As an anthropologist, Day had done a years-long study on race, particularly mixed-race people, in America. Day’s painstaking research included clippings of hair from over 2,000 Black and mixed-race people, including Alexander’s own grandmother. Alexander described being in the hallowed Harvard Peabody Museum with this unfathomable feeling of holding a piece of her grandmother from before Alexander’s mother was even born. As she was giving this talk at a conference, the room was silent with over a hundred women (if I can picture the room correctly). How many wondered about the gift that Alexander had experienced? How many readers wonder about glimpsing their ancestors in the historical record or in an archive? All histories cannot be written in this way as all historians cannot have this experience. Instead, I am talking about the telling of the story. People we write about had a smell, touch, and voice that someone once knew. May the histories we write help us all remember that.

With this volume, Lorelle Semley, Teresa Barnes, Bayo Holsey, and Egodi Uchendu sign off after a five-year stint as HiA’s first all-women-of-color, transcontinental editorial team. This has been a turbulent period in publishing, academic life, and historiography, but we have found shepherding articles through the submission and production processes and bringing new scholarship to light to be consistently rewarding. We have kept up with technological changes in manuscript review, have endeavored to present additional authors based on the African continent, and to highlight historiographies of and from African institutions. With both special thematic and general volumes, we have upheld HiA’s standards of producing relevant, in-depth, and provocative reexaminations of the African past.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the African Studies Association for its continuing commitment to excellent scholarship; to almost one hundred authors for entrusting us with their work; to our Editorial Board for its support; to Cambridge University Press for its guidance; and to a worldwide corps of willing peer reviewers on whom the entire enterprise rests. We entrust HiA to its new editorial team, Professors Paul Bjerk and Andrew Wegmann at Texas Tech University with confidence and our thanks.