The Art of Politics in Africa

Establishing a Digital Archive of African Political Ephemera

Welcome to this website which is a pilot website for the DAAPE (Digital Archive of African Political Ephemera) project.

African political life is vibrant, colourful and intense. Recent decades have seen the emergence of powerful political reform movements and NGO campaigns. Yet the material culture of these movements is ephemeral – posters, pamphlets, and t-shirts are rapidly consumed, but rarely preserved. The goal of this project is to protect and preserve some of this material, with a view to enabling contemporary researchers, future historians, and the interested public to gain a richer and more diverse understanding of Africa’s public life. Generations of activists, VSO co-operants and researchers have brought back small but significant pieces of African political history. Through our archive, the work of political activists can receive recognition and be celebrated for its creativity, humour and incisiveness, while also forming an important contribution to scholarly research.

Post-colonial political ephemera is seldom collected or catalogued by archives. Where such material has been collected, it is rarely catalogued or available, owing to funding limitations, staff shortages etc. Moreover, in the UK we are beginning to experience the departure of colleagues whose entire academic career was spent researching post-colonial Africa. The immediate focus of this project is ensuring the preservation and accessibility of material they have accumulated in the course of their research. With assistance from funders we hope to be able to grow the project and network with other archives and libraries.