By PHOEBE RUGURU

When the European colonisers wanted to justify their colonial endeavours, they propagated the claim that Africans were a people without history, reflecting an image of Africa as a blank canvas that any imperialist could impose their personal goals on. The idea that we were a people without a history meant that it could be concluded that we were also a people without a future.

During the colonial conquest, most records of African history were burned and destroyed, several pieces robbed and shipped to overseas territories, where the colonisers could showcase, with pride, the souvenirs from their violent wins. This, in line with the other often propagated claim that history is always told by the hunter, meaning for majority of the hunted, their realities and dreams will often be overlooked and confined to the periphery in the memories of our heritage.

Archiving, the process of preserving and conserving living and found tools that can mirror the pasts back to us, revealing clues on who we are and who we were, is a natural human behaviour. Historically, it has taken many forms, through written formats such as articles and stories, to folktales as expressed through song and poetry. Archiving has also in the recent centuries been practised through more visual formats such as through documentaries, photography and films.

Preserving and archiving has historically been greatly a role more emphasised for historians, archaeologists and anthropologists. But in this age, it is apparent that archiving cannot be left alone to the scientists and artists; archiving should be everyone’s responsibility.

Existing academically-recognised literatures, especially those in the form of ethnographies, have often been a task for the privileged, able to travel distances away, embed and accommodate themselves in other cultures, be able to publish their works, and without protest, have their short-hand observations be considered with great merit as true knowledge, even erasing or not recognising the role of informants in giving information.

Racist and sexist views in the archiving process have meant that our histories have greatly marginalised the voices of many of the world’s communities, identities and realities. In our own country, this can be reflected in the way that many of the African places and features are recalled in the names of the European colonisers, as opposed to the names and language of the local community members.

Marginalisation is also highlighted in the lack of attention to the role of African women in resisting colonial invasions. Though some truths have already been lost, there is still the opportunity for us to take our history to our own hands.  History has not always been in written form, it has also been in audio forms, such as through songs and storytelling. 

Older generations would pass on their history as told by those before them. In the case, for example, of those who fought for freedom during the colonial times, much of their experiences are not recorded in the books, especially since most of the ones available are written or interpreted by foreign academics. In attempting to fill the gaps in the recollection of our country and communities in the colonial period, there is still hope for us in gathering this information from the living veterans who still hold these stories in their memory.

The task of simply sitting with the elderly, recording them and engaging them in conversation, listening to them like they listened to those before them, would be an opportunity that enables us to save the libraries of memories erased from the books that we read. More so, by capturing the lives of our elderly, we can also record their languages, those that are often overwritten by the tongues of foreign languages and dialects. To know the ways of the old, it is our responsibility to sit with the old, and to embrace them and their stories.

Through the use of modern technology, we can rediscover our history, record our present, and save it for the future. In several ways, we are already doing this without recognising it. With over half a billion mobile users in the continent, most of them with access to social media, are constantly uploading snippets for archive purposes.

Through posts that reveal people’s own thoughts and opinions, or through vlogs and live-video that record and capture current moments and actions, the modern mobile user is recording material that can be used in the future to reveal parts of our future histories.

For this reason, the use of modern technologies as a means of preserving and representing ourselves is an avenue that assists in democratising the process of archiving personal journeys. Granted, access to internet and power can undermine the ability for all communities to be truly present digitally, hindering the opportunities to stand out globally.

Everyone deserves the liberation to tell their own story as they want to tell it. In a world that pays attention to some and not to others, we, as Africans, have to write our own stories, write our own songs, speak our own languages, live our own values, and let whatever we choose, be accessible to our futures. We have grown in the world as a lost people, separated and isolated from the history that made us. To stop this from happening to others, we have to ensure that we preserve our present, so that the future can know it also.