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

In this episode, Prof. Terence Ranger (Emeritus, University of Oxford) discusses his many contributions to African Studies and African History, how these themes have developed, and also his 17th book, Bulawayo Burning (2010). This is the first of three podcasts recorded at the‘Making History: Terence Ranger and African Studies’ conference, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign October, 2010.

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In conjunction with the Department of History at Michigan State University, MATRIX conducted a three-day training workshop and nearly one week post-workshop consulting at the National Records Service in Banjul, The Gambia.  Professor Walter Hawthorne, Chair of the Department of History; Scott Pennington, Head of Digitization at MATRIX; and Bala Saho, The Gambia’s Director General of the National Counsel for Arts and Culture, coordinated with local archive staff to assess and begin preservation and digitization of important 19th century government records.

This work is made possible by generous funding from the Endangered Archives Program at the British Library, and was featured on The Gambian Television and Radio Services News Broadcast.

Partnering with the Department of History at Michigan State University, MATRIX will be consulting at the archives of the Department of State for Justice in Banjul, The Gambia later this summer.  Professor Walter Hawthorne from MSU History, Scott Pennington, head of digitization at MATRIX, and Ph.D. Candidate Bala Saho will coordinate with local archive staff to assess and begin preservation and digitization of important 19th century government records. This work is made possible by generous funding from the Endangered Archives Program at the British Library.

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.