What Is Exactly “An Archive”

A remarkable enthusiasm for archives as an object of study has kept many scholars busy in the last decades, scholars from a wide range of disciplines in the humanities, from philosophy to the arts. Numerous academic debates and discussions on archives have been prompted in the light of Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge ^{Footnote 7} and Derrida’s Archive Fever,^{Footnote 8} and postmodernism more generally. Indeed, the “archival turn” in cultural studies has recently stretched the meaning of the word “archive” and shifted “archives as concrete places to archives as more abstract – but just as real – conditions of knowledge.”^{Footnote 9} From that perspective the concept of “archive” (in the singular) seems to be able not only to encapsulate a variety of objects and entities such as oceans for example, but could also be “performed.”^{Footnote 10} Nevertheless, Michelle Caswell reminds us that “the archive is not an archives,” and that work and research from the field of archival studies are often omitted from recent scholarship on archives.^{Footnote 11} The very word “Archive” has come to be used to describe an all-encompassing notion, and in the process has perhaps lost some of its clarity, to the point that Kate Theimer argued in 2014 that confusion exists between the term “archives” and what could simply be called “historical representation” based on a selection of documents from the past.^{Footnote 12} As a result, the term “archives” now tends to be vaguely defined and is often overused in relation to legacy, narrative, and knowledge.

However, or maybe for that reason, the echo of postmodernism in the field of archival science and some of the debates over it contrasted one another.^{Footnote 13} As stated by Rachel Hardiman: “Although postmodernist ideas have their origins in fields external to the recordkeeping world, their impact and pervasiveness is such that, accepted or rejected, they cannot be simply ignored.”^{Footnote 14} The postmodernist critique, when specifically directed at the production of knowledge and historiography and especially but not only in relation to Africa, has uncovered the limits of a “positivist” approach to knowledge and demonstrated the relevance of examining and re-examining the making of archives as well as of history. “Archives” have themselves become a subject of study going beyond the professional activities of archivists and historians. Antoinette Burton, for example, has written about evidence, narrative, and the archive.^{Footnote 15} Anthropologists like Ann Laura Stoler have begun to use archives in their own research and have theorized their use.^{Footnote 16} Many researchers have engaged with the subject and have produced thought-provoking works about the articulation between colonial narrative and archives.^{Footnote 17} Archivists themselves of course, explore the topic and are able to further the theoretical reflection from their concrete, practical perspective.^{Footnote 18}

The works of those writers, and the whole field more broadly, are essential to the examination of the production of knowledge. Such writers focus on content and narrative, and therefore engage with archives as documents. Yet another notion, often overlooked by historians, defines archives as the fonds, which is the basic unit for their classification rather than documents or records. When designing classification systems, archivists work to identify and bring to light the function of the governing body that produced a given document, and they consider that function within its larger administrative framework. In short, they seek the “why” of the documents and not the “what.” Anyone might file documents in a specific and personally suitable manner, depending perhaps on equipment, habits of work, or some particular approach. In the same way, a governing body will order documents in a way specific to its own organization and rationale.

That is an essential feature of archives and understanding it is crucial to being able to grasp the difference between archival science and library and information science:

That definition of archives is not intended to mean that archival stewardship is by any means neutral.^{Footnote 20} However, it does imply that an archive is as much a structure as a gathering of documents. The digital turn that archives are taking is therefore of huge significance because it might affect the nature of the fonds as well as their arrangement. It is in fact a reflection of a broader shift in structures of power and governing dynamics.

With that in mind, we can see that the process of digitization therefore consists not simply of making digital copies of paper documents, for it is more than “digital photocopying.” Rather, the whole structure of any archive ought to be preserved and conveyed so as to reflect the rationale of the administration that created it. Such information is essential to the historical contextualization of sources and to understand the structures of power and governance.

That is even more true of the African case. There, many countries have developed archive institutions only relatively recently and certain of those have moved directly to “digital archives” without necessarily converting existing material, practices and processes from paper to a digital format. In other cases on the African continent digitization processes have been designed not only to classify but to “salvage” numerous endangered documents. The making of a detailed and hierarchically arranged listing of documents to be digitalized might then be favored at the expense of preserving the fonds and structure of that archive. From that perspective the metadata of the archive can potentially become de facto an archival index with the attendant risk that basic archival standards such as provenance and respect des fonds (original order) are lost in the process.

The making of metadata is certainly accompanied by its share of challenges. As a structuring norm metadata tends to follow standards which might not always meet the structure of the fonds and might be dictated by the requirements of computer programming. For example, it might not always be possible to apply AToM standards to African archives created in the first half of the twentieth century even if the International Council of Archives, as the body responsible for the creation of the international ISAD(G) norms, was the first to support AToM.^{Footnote 21} Moreover, because it is in many instances incomplete, digitization of existing archives tends to flatten a classification process which might actually have taken months or even years to create.

By privileging a loose definition of “archives” as being mainly an index of documents/items/artefacts rather than a constituted fonds, the importance of the physical structure in the making of archives can come to be overlooked. That can in turn put at risk the long-term preservation of the physical fonds, jeopardizing the information and knowledge it conveys about the governing body or entity that produced it.

Scramble for Archives

The shift from paper to digital formats does not therefore consist solely of technicalities, although it certainly represents an epistemic “digital turn” in the history of archival practices and usage. First, the volume of and even the very structure of digital sources and data raise questions about the legitimacy and neutrality of the management of archives. Secondly, it consists in a reflection of the reconfiguration of worldwide power dynamics on the local and the global scales. In a “dematerialized” world, how can archives be controlled, both as part of a legacy but also as a record of the tools of government? Third, while the potential of unlimited access to sources by the public all over the world creates numerous opportunities, those very opportunities are accompanied by ethical and methodological problems.

As a consequence, the current wave of digitization is also radically changing the nature of research for scholars, archivists, and governments. Scholars can now read documents without the cost of travelling to different archive centres and are able therefore to produce research results based on “remote African” documents. At the time of writing this introduction, examples are countless, but it is worth mentioning that since the 1960s many documents have been duplicated by means of the microfilming of entire collections by universities – such as Syracuse University^{Footnote 22} – or by governments. However, the digitization and the subsequent uploading of considerable amounts of data to servers has made large amounts of material available virtually everywhere on the planet, at least to institutions or individuals who can afford an Internet connection. The pioneers were the Digital Imaging South Africa team (DISA) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban in South Africa in 2002. Funded by the Andrew Mellon foundation, the project’s aim was to digitize periodicals concerned with the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa from 1960 to 1994. DISA also inaugurated a pattern which is still recognizable fifteen years later where a Northern institution, or in the case of the Andrew Mellon foundation a private foundation, provides funds for a digitization project actually based in Africa. Aluka is an online platform created in 2003 on the same model, to gather documents on the liberation struggles of southern Africa during the second half of the twentieth century.^{Footnote 23} Funded initially by the US Mellon, Hewlett, and Niarchos private foundations it became an important archival repository before being integrated into JSTOR in 2008.^{Footnote 24} Incidentally both Aluka and JSTOR are sub-branches of the not-for-profit Ithaka organization, also a US initiative. Aluka specifically became one of the first collaborative platforms whereby archivists and researchers tried to develop a new narrative of the recently-won battles for liberation. Indeed it was no coincidence that all those projects were hosted in South Africa and the publication in 2002 of Refiguring the Archive illustrates the phenomenon particularly well.^{Footnote 25} Peter Limb, a scholar of South Africa, was among the first to develop a critical understanding of that first wave of digitization and all his publications show that his original insight was accurate: “Twenty-first century missionaries carry not Bibles but scanners.”^{Footnote 26}

The hope of this featured section of History in Africa is at least to further the debate. The last twenty years have witnessed the multiplication of digitization programmes in Africa.^{Footnote 27} Many projects are now available online despite their being difficult to find via most search engines. Because there are so many it would be nearly impossible to draw up a full list of all the projects undertaken by charities like the Mormons, universities,^{Footnote 28} governments (French “cooperation”), private companies like Arkhênum and Google^{Footnote 29} – or individuals.^{Footnote 30} In response to calls from international Northern institutions like Blue Shield, Archivistes Sans Frontières-International, British Library Endangered Archives Programme;^{Footnote 31} the Foundation Mário Suarez, the Prince Claus fund^{Footnote 32} or Modern Endangered Archives Programme,^{Footnote 33} since the beginning of the twenty-first century archivists and historians have embraced digital solutions to preserve documents in their areas of expertise. Admittedly, Africa is not the only continent on which digitization programmes have taken place, but it is worth noting that African archives have been disappearing at an alarming rate not only because of political factors but climatic ones too. Consequently, a very large share of the money invested in digitization has been spent on programmes actually in Africa.

The phenomenon may be partially explained by technological advances, in the first instance. Inversely following Moore’s Law which predicted that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every two years, the price of the IT equipment necessary to undertake digitization programmes has fallen dramatically. Digital cameras for example have become much more affordable and in certain application have replaced cumbersome scanners. More crucially, hard drives, on which thousands of files of professional quality may now be stored, are considerably cheaper than they were in the 2000s as are Internet connections. Large-scale digitization programmes are therefore now increasingly feasible using relatively smaller amounts of money. One collateral symptom of the technological evolution is that many scholars have been able to store on hard drives many gigabytes of photographs of archives taken in Africa using their mobile telephone cameras. One could argue that the often un-coordinated efforts of massive digitization projects extend the concept of an “archive” so that virtual and dispersed collection as in the case of “anticolonial archives” may be genuinely labeled “archives.”^{Footnote 34}

Finally, there is still the widespread positivist belief that holds science – in this case digitization – to be the solution to all the problems faced by historians, archivists, or governments. Furthermore, the “complex of the white savior” seems sometimes to have been turned into the “complex of the digital savior” in a humanitarian African context, as so many Northern governments, institutions, or individuals have wished to join hands with African archivists to work on digitization projects.^{Footnote 35} There again, the idea of Western science being a panacea for the problems of development and governance faced by the African continent, is far from new.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – better known as the Mormon Church – has assumed responsibility for the microfilming and digitization of birth and death registers in numerous African countries.^{Footnote 36} In their case the “savior complex” is explicitly Christian and based on the belief that the dead may be baptized in order to “redeem” and “save” any who die “with no knowledge of Jesus.”^{Footnote 37} While the number of documents digitized by the Mormon Church remains unclear, their genealogy database FamilySearch contains data obtained from thousands of documents digitized in Africa.^{Footnote 38}

Beyond the “Digital Savior”

The 2010s were the decade when the “complex of the digital savior” affected historians and archivists most spectacularly. Conflict-ridden regions have become archetypal places where traces of the past need to be preserved. A striking example is Mali, where historians-cum-saviors have digitized manuscripts from Timbuktu.^{Footnote 39} Captured in 2012 by members of Ansar Dine and the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, Timbuktu has become the reluctant symbol of African culture under attack by jihadist obscurantists. The need for Timbuktu’s manuscripts to be saved was not new and had actually been at the origin of the creation of the Ahmed Baba national archives in Timbuktu. However, the crisis of 2012 in Mali added new urgency to the situation. New private archive entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to place under the spotlight a series of mostly private emergency rescue and digitization projects, which required enormous and urgent worldwide fundraising campaigns.

Strikingly, the sustainability of such large-scale digital projects is not always thoroughly considered. Terabytes of data are now held on hard drives and to a lesser extent on memory sticks and DVDs. Hard drives (external Solid State Drives) are usually designed to survive for ten years if they are used as cold storage. Funding bodies in many Western countries actually ask their successful candidates to provide a data management plan to manage data files in the immediate future but no one yet knows how to preserve digital data for much longer times without constantly duplicating it. Surely it is far from fanciful even now to think of future projects being needed to save endangered digital files, perhaps in just a few decades? After all, in many archive centres today microfilms are urgently being digitized.

Already accused of fetishizing written documents even in an African context, many historians appropriated the discourse on “endangered archives.” They have chosen to save “their” archives, sometimes joining forces with private archiving entrepreneurs while dismissing the role played by professional archivists working in the public sector. The trend of private initiatives can prove extremely problematic when historians disregard what archivists have previously done or are currently doing to preserve the documents in question – even if more slowly and within a national institutional framework. In the French context Yann Potin has already explored the “divorce” between historians and archivists and stressed that most historians ignore what archivists have accomplished in creating, classifying, cataloguing, and preserving “their” archives.^{Footnote 40} Such ignorance of the archivist’s work is often exacerbated by the fact that some digitization projects have dealt only vaguely with historical “archives,” such projects certainly tending to reinforce a form of disciplinary arrogance, as Michelle Caswell argued in 2016:

The digital files we see on our computer screens give the false impression that the documents were discovered and “harvested” easily, like large nuggets littering the floor of an archival gold mine. All the archival work undertaken before, during, and after digitization is being made invisible, as the term “archive” has come to designate not the physical documents any more, but what appears on the screen. Such obliteration, as it were, of the work of African archivists coupled with the “digital imperialism” already observed in the 2000s might yet have dramatic consequences for the future of African archives, which are already underfunded. Most current digitization projects rely on money from Northern institutions, and they tend to focus on the final product, which of course is the digital material. Many if not most digitization projects therefore concern archives which have already been classified and inventoried. As a noticeable result, only increasingly limited funding is being provided for what is practically needed to support the physical salvaging of genuinely endangered archives. Such things as acid-free paper, boxes, shelves, air conditioned rooms in suitable buildings, and so on are scarce, expensive, and undervalued, it seems. There is now a greater risk that archives which have not been previously classified and inventoried will be lost because the slow work of digitization projects monopolizes the time of many archivists. There is then the very real prospect that the process of digitizing will endanger not only the activities of archivists but to a certain extent even their very profession. In other words, Northern digital aspirations, with the complicity of Southern governments driven by short-term financial interests, might ruin longer-term Southern efforts at analogue preservation. Paradoxically all this will have been done in the name of enhancing good governance in the South.^{Footnote 42} When on top of that digitization programmes are conducted by private companies or “heritage entrepreneurs” whose aim is financial profit, one can understand the sense of pillage being experienced by local populations and certain public experts in the sector. They are powerless to do more than deplore the increasing sub-contracting strategy of an under-resourced state. They can only deprecate neglectful or sometimes ill-intentioned politicians for whom archives are certainly not the priority, despite the fact that archives are a central public service, a state prerogative, and a crucial government instrument which can ensure accountability and good governance.

Structure and Content of this Special Issue

Stockreiter’s article clearly shows the potential of private partnerships between local initiatives and international heritage entrepreneurs when the state is absent, as in the case of the Djenné Manuscript Library. As such initiatives can be funded almost solely by external means (The British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme in that case) their drawbacks are immediately obvious, with the risk that digitization programmes will be ill-equipped to deal with local tensions and conflicting political interests, and will lack the necessary research experience to understand local contexts in order to secure access to the archives. Consequently there then arises the question of the outcome of the programme once the external heritage entrepreneurs and their funding have left. The inability of such projects to build digital sustainability and long-term development strategies is certainly one of the greatest limitations to the success of private partnerships driven from outside – if there will be no local and central government involvement in the long-term.

Keese and Owabira’s article is another that shows the limits of digitizing programmes which, as with many greatly endangered archives in Africa, tend to overlook the necessity of first salvaging physical archives many of which have never been classified nor even inventoried. There is in such cases an immediate risk of disappearance. For example, in the case of the postcolonial regional archives in Pointe Noire highlighted in this article, the number of files digitized is not a sufficient benchmark to assess the success of preserving similar such endangered archives. Cooperation between archivist and historian is here central to ensuring that the actual work done by archivists on the ground with very limited means does not suffer the endangerment which is always a possible side-effect of mostly externally driven digitization projects and “digital humanitarianism.”

Schneider and Weinberg’s article discusses directly and at length what constitutes the African photography archive and its contradictions, and how digitization might actually change the very nature of the photographs digitized. Increased accessibility globally might also and paradoxically accelerate the digital divide, as internet accessibility remains notably low in Africa. Who are the global audience, indeed? To whom are the digital contents made accessible? How can the whole dimension of a photograph be rendered in a digital collection? Which brings us back to the fundamental questions, “What is an African photography digital archive?” and “To what extent does the digitization process disrupt archival norms, practices, and definitions while as asserted by the authors ‘There is no way back!?’”

El Qadim’s article explores what a modern service of archives centred on digitization means and implies as in the case of the Archives du Maroc created in 2011. Has digitization become the new seal of approval for an archive to be considered modern in Africa? That is indubitably what the Archives du Maroc services claim and a central policy that they pursue at every level despite the onerous costs. But in a context of limited resources and while that institution is still in a fragile legitimation state, it is also probably a strategic “necessary evil” to secure more resources and funding in future.

Losch’s article shows that the digitization processes targeting broadcasting archives at risk in West Africa since the beginning of the century have to do with pre-existing technical cooperation networks, which are themselves connected to colonial history. Losch also questions the practical implications for digitization in former French colonies in West Africa which do not retain digital copies of their oldest audio-visual heritage. The vast majority of that heritage is still in France, more specifically in the hands of its Institut National de l’Audiovisuel which has placed the material behind a pay wall. One consequence of that is an accrued postcolonial digital divide which has limited the national broadcasters” leeway, as in practice, safeguarding and preservation cannot be separated from the logics of restitution and sharing of already digitized audio-visual resources pertaining to a supposedly “shared” history.

Finally, Lawrance, Corcoran and Hooper’s article more broadly questions the matter of “digital dispersal” of archives when that occurs simultaneously and haphazardly, whether accidentally or intentionally as in the case of asylum documentation. They consider what that implies for the archives of the future history of forced international migration as it applies to countries such as Togo. They refer again to questions about the dangers of digital documentation where there are no physical copies and the possible consequences of that situation for future access, and thus for transparency and ultimately its effect on governance.