#african-archives

#african-archives

The inaugural edition is organized around the central theme "Shifting the Center: From Fragility to Resilience," reclaiming African architecture's place as a site of spatial intelligence and cultural memory.

The United Nations resolution categorically states that slavery is the gravest crime against humanity, emphasizing the need for global acknowledgment and action.

A commemorative bronze head, from around 1850, is a representation of the ancestor of a chief and would have been placed in the king's ancestral shrine.

The significant number of ancestors held in UK museums is extremely distressing and symbolic of the colonial origins of these collections. We hope that the responses gathered by The Guardian will be shared with the relevant communities to support them in bringing their ancestors home.

The Arctic World Archive (AWA) is a data storage unit where organisations and individuals can deposit records kept on specialist digitised film called Piql that lasts up to 2,000 years. On 27 February, Nigeria became the first African country to place archives at the facility 300 metres beneath a mountain where the cold, dark, dry conditions are perfect for preservation.

In the park's center is an eye-catching bronze statue of a larger-than-life Nkrumah, clad in royal kente cloth, with an outstretched hand pointing ahead and one foot in front of the other as if he were advancing forward. Erected on top of a pedestal at the spot where Nkrumah stood to declare Ghana's independence from Britain, it channels the slogan of Nkrumah's political party: 'Forward ever, backward never.'

On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron appeared before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland the annual Alpine gathering of the global elite to declare that now is not a time for new imperialism or new colonialism. This, of course, was a reference to the current ambitions of Macron's counterpart in the United States, Donald Trump, who, in addition to recently kidnapping the president of Venezuela and repeatedly threatening to seize the Panama Canal,

Down a steep, narrow staircase, the basement of the McMillan Memorial Library in Nairobi holds more than 100 enormous, dust-covered bound volumes of newspapers. Here too are the minutes of council meetings and photographic negatives going back more than a century. Here lie some of the minute-by-minute recorded debates from the time British colonial powers ruled Nairobi, when it was a segregated city, says Angela Wachuka, a publisher. Seconds later, a power cut plunges the room into darkness.

Following presidential custom, Trump issued a National Black History Month proclamation on Feb. 3 that maintained "black history is not distinct from American history - rather, the history of Black Americans is an indispensable chapter in our grand American story." Yes, but: Its rhetoric, critics say, stands in tension with the Trump administration's recent actions, raising questions about whether commemoration without context ultimately obscures more than it honors.

Gomis told DW the film includes a tribute to his late father. Part of the production was filmed in the village where his father was born, in the Cacheu region of Guinea-Bissau. "The grave you see in the film, the one the two characters speak to and touch that is my father's grave. The photograph of that man in the film that is my father," he said.

There is little doubt that this is what African countries need if they are serious about universal health coverage - ensuring that every member of their populations has access to this fundamental human right. But such an approach has never been implemented in Africa. Some of the reasons for this are outlined in a report on health financing by the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), the continent's public-health agency based in Addis Ababa, published last week (see go.nature.com/3o9wxfc).

The librarian sat me in front of a microfilm reader and brought out roll after roll of film. I stayed there for hours, squinting to decipher the archaic handwriting in the Free Negro Book, which was published annually in South Carolina before the Civil War. The names in each year's edition were alphabetized, but only roughly-all of the surnames starting with A came before all of the surnames starting with B, but Agee might come before Anderson, or it might come after.

The extermination of the Palestinian people must end, the chairman of the African Union Commission, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, has said, as dozens of heads of state gather for the regional body's 39th summit in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. In the Middle East, Palestine and the suffering of its people also challenge our consciences. The extermination of this people must stop, said Youssouf, who was elected to head the institution a year ago, declared on Saturday.

History is full of Black Francophone figures who have shaped politics, culture, science, and resistance across continents. Yet too often, they remain invisible in school textbooks. These individuals challenged colonial power, redefined identity, confronted racial hierarchies, and transformed intellectual and political life in the Francophone world and beyond. From West Africa to the Caribbean, in scientific research and political activism, they forged new paths in the face of oppression and erasure, leaving legacies that continue to inspire freedom, dignity, and solidarity.

Walking through Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imaginationat the Museum of Modern Art, I noticed that the exhibition didn't have definite sections or texts, and the wall labels abstained from naming the nationalities of the photographers. It was an invigorating experience to be in a show that eschews geographic boundaries set up by Western nations, as well as rejects a cause-and-effect narrative that centers Western colonialism as a framework for understanding African aesthetic production.

When I enter a museum, I'm not looking for what's on the walls, I'm looking at what's behind them.