{"id":42574,"date":"2025-01-23T06:53:12","date_gmt":"2025-01-23T06:53:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/activist\/from-oral-traditions-to-digital-archives\/"},"modified":"2025-01-23T06:53:12","modified_gmt":"2025-01-23T06:53:12","slug":"from-oral-traditions-to-digital-archives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=42574","title":{"rendered":"From Oral Traditions to Digital Archives"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Co-authored by Jacquelyne Jasper-Ikpendu and Loui Mainga<\/b><\/p>\n

The preservation of collective memory in Africa has a rich history that dates back centuries, with Indigenous communities passing down knowledge and history through oral traditions, storytelling, art, and music. A key element of preservation in African culture has been the emphasis on storytelling as a means of capturing and transmitting important information from one generation to the next. Many African societies did not have a tradition of a written language but instead relied on oral storytelling, art and music to preserve their history, cultural practices, and traditions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While modern archiving methods are important for documentation and preservation, oral traditions, art, and music continue to play essential roles in ensuring that African heritage is passed down to future generations.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The evolution of archiving in African communities has seen a transition from traditional methods of storytelling, art, and music to embrace more formally structured approaches like, memorialisation, transitional justice archiving, cultural heritage archiving and other forms of institutional archiving. This shift reflects the changing needs of communities to record and preserve crucial information, including human rights violations which has been a recurring issue on the African continent, spanning a range of situations, from oppressive authoritarian regimes to civil wars, armed conflicts, revolutions, refugee crises, violent extremism, insurgency, and the spread of misinformation and disinformation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Archiving for human rights serves as a vital tool for promoting accountability and preserving evidence of abuses. It allows for the <\/span>identification of patterns of abuses<\/span><\/a>, which can be crucial for understanding the context and scale of human rights violations. Furthermore, archiving enables the future use of evidence for legal proceedings, truth-seeking initiatives, and historical research.<\/span><\/p>\n

Role of Community-owned archives<\/b><\/h2>\n

Archiving has become crucial in both preserving the past and empowering the future in many different ways and regions. Video stands as one of the most potent tools for storytelling and documenting human rights violations, as it captures the voices and images of affected communities, vividly telling the story of their pain, struggles, and enduring hopes in the face of injustice. However, without proper archiving and preservation, these videos may be lost forever, along with their messages. Here are some organizations working to preserve human rights content in Africa, ranging from institutional to more grassroots archives.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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The <\/span>Refugee Law Project<\/span><\/a> in Uganda, a community outreach initiative associated with Makerere University, houses a <\/span>digital archive<\/span><\/a> that serves as a<\/span> comprehensive repository dedicated to safeguarding and preserving the voices and experiences of forced migrants, primarily from Uganda. This digital archive encompasses a diverse collection of oral history documentation, research papers and publications, heritage-promoting objects, multimedia resources, and educational materials.<\/span><\/p>\n

Patrick Otim of the\u00a0 Refugee Law Project cites how archiving has provided support with memorialization to compare and tell stories, social therapy, educational tools, advocacy, conflict resolution in communities and other different justice goals.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The <\/span>Genocide Archive<\/span><\/a>, located at the Kigali Memorial Center in Rwanda, is a digital collection of over 8,000 photographs and videos documenting events before, during and after the Rwanda genocide including reconciliation and recovery efforts. <\/span><\/p>\n

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Connect HUB Nigeria<\/span><\/a> is a grassroots initiative that collects and shares videos depicting state violence in Nigeria using social media platforms like Instagram and X (formerly known as Twitter). Through the use of video documentation, the platform aims to bring visibility to instances of human rights abuses, shed light on the lived experiences of those affected, and advocate for accountability and change. Further to that, the organization is developing approaches to ensure the long-term preservation of this important documentation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Challenges faced by archives in Africa<\/b><\/h2>\n

WITNESS sent out a survey to some of the community-owned archives globally including in Africa and <\/span>they told us<\/span><\/a> that archiving and preserving videos has not been easy. There is limited funding support for archive projects leading to a variety of negative consequences like insufficient infrastructure that have impeded the progress of the development and implementation of community-owned archiving models.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While social media platforms are not designed to function as archives, many communities use them to\u00a0 share and preserve evidence of human rights violations. Unfortunately, the increasing practice of content removal by social media platforms in the name of enforcing community standards has led to the erasure of crucial evidence related to human rights abuses.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Other challenges enumerated are around security, safety, privacy and a lack of technical capacity to set up and run formal archives.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Additionally, <\/span>watch our huddle<\/span><\/a> on You Tube on Community-based archiving practices<\/span><\/p>\n