Novices in the Archives: Restoring, Preserving and Digitising an African Archive

Extract

In 2013, I traveled to the Khama III Memorial Museum in Serowe, Botswana, to deliver a paper at a conference honoring the fortieth anniversary of the publication of southern African author Bessie Head's celebrated novel A Question of Power. This was my first visit to the museum that houses the author's archives which contain most of her correspondence with literary agents, publishers, historians, anthropologists, literary critics, and other writers - including Alice Walker, Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. They also include some of her original manuscripts, agricultural notes, and publishing contracts.

All the scholars who presented papers on this occasion, except for one, were Africanists who focused on the literatures of the Continent. The outlier who specialised in African American drama delivered a comparative study between Head's short fiction and works by Black Atlantic writers.