Africa Past and Present, the podcast about history, culture, and politics in Africa and the diaspora, is featured on today’s AHA blog. Produced by Matrix and hosted by MSU faculty members Peter Alegi and Peter Limb, Africa Past and Present highlights interesting and significant people, ideas, and discussions in African Studies from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives.

Africa Past and Present is hosted by Michigan State University historians Peter Alegi and Peter Limb and produced by Matrix.

In this 31st episode, part 2 (of 3) in a series on African Diasporas, hosts Peter Alegi and Peter Limb discuss Dr. Robert Vinson’s (History, College of William and Mary) work on the spread of Garveyism in South Africa and its political and cultural impact. Vinson joins the discussion and explains how black men and women in the 1920s and 30s appropriated Garvey’s ideas of racial pride, pan-Africanism, and modernity to sustain themselves and to propel South Africa’s struggle for freedom.

In August the MATRIX/History Department Africa Past and Present podcast, co-hosted by Peter Alegi and Peter Limb, set new records for unique visitors and for total number of visits in a single month. With four months left (and six more shows) in 2009, download stats are already nearly double the downloads from all of 2008. Thanks for listening!

MATRIX in cooperation with MSU’s Department of History and African Studies Center, has won a $750,000 award from the US Department of Education to partner with African scholars to collect oral histories, folklore, and songs from Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania.  Over a four-year period, the African Oral Narratives project will digitize and provide free web access to 20 collections of oral narratives in 16 African languages.  These audio and video materials can be used by students, teachers, and researchers to document indigenous knowledge and democratize history by representing the voices of ordinary men and women often left out of the official written record.

To learn more about the African Oral Narratives project, see MSU News.

A $250,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant will fund a new MATRIX digital library project on Islamic Practices in West Africa.  Four scholars, including MSU’s University Distinguished Professor David Robinson from the Department of History, will conduct research on various aspects of Muslim life in Ghana and Senegal.  Collaborating scholars will conduct video interviews and collect photographs and archival documents.  MATRIX will publish four case studies on the web organized in thematic galleries that will feature each scholar’s research materials and documentation.

Typically intellectual work–like that planned for this project–is published in academic journals most often consulted by content experts and specialists.  In designing this project MATRIX and its scholarly collaborators deliberately chose a web publication outlet in order to ensure broad public access to the content.  As a result, other researchers can use primary-source materials in the digital collection to develop new scholarship.  Teachers can also use the resources in the classroom, for example by having student look at the documents and photographs, and listen to the voices of regular men and women from an important part of the world.

Access to the Islam in West Africa digital collection is free and accessible through the African Online Digital Library (http://aodl.org).

In April, the African Language Materials Archive (ALMA) launched a new website.  The ALMA site, hosted by MATRIX, contains African language video recordings, documentary video, translation work, and bibliographies.  African Immigrant Voices Project, one of several AMLA treasures available through the new website, captures the plight and the lives of African diaspora emigrés.  This project features a dozen interviews in nine African languages.

MATRIX and the MSU African Studies Center have launched the redesigned and expanded African Activist Archive website. The more than 1300 photographs, posters, historical documents, political buttons, T-shirts, and streaming audio and video are a strong beginning at documenting the U.S. movement supporting freedom and justice in Africa, especially Southern Africa. The project is preserving records and memories of activism on Africa during the past 50 years and welcomes people with materials and personal remembrances to add them to the online archive.

KORA 1.0.0 has been released. This full version release includes bug fixes from the KORA 1.0.0-beta release and additional features, including fixity checking and enhanced documentation.

You can obtain KORA 1.0.0 from sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=212072

MATRIX and African Studies Center at Michigan State University hosted a ribbon cutting Friday May 2, 2008 at the Kellogg Hotel & Conference Center in honor of their recently launched websites Overcoming Apartheid and Community Video Education Trust.

Among the guests was MSU Trustee, Melanie Foster, who spoke on MSU’s dual missions of African studies and digital humanities. Trustee Foster described the work as “…interdisciplinary research, scholarship, and outreach at its best.”

Yusef Omar, previous South African Consul General in Chicago, spoke of the importance or recording memories and teaching about the struggle against apartheid. Omar is interviewed on the Overcoming Apartheid website.

Both websites contribute to MATRIX and African Studies Center engagement of preserving and providing access to materials about the struggle for freedom and democracy in Africa. Please browse these sites at http://overcomingapartheid.msu.edu and http://cvet.org.za

Please visit http://www.overcomingapartheid.msu.edu/promo.php to view the Overcoming Apartheid promotional video.

Included in photo (from left to right; click on photo to enlarge): Jeffrey Riedinger, Dean of MSU’s International Studies and Programs; Satish Udpa, Dean of MSU’s College of Engineering; Melanie Foster, MSU Trustee; Yusef Omar, former South African Counsul General in Chicago, IL; Mark Kornbluh, MATRIX Director; and David Wiley, MSU’s African Studies Center Director