Staffrider was a South African literary magazine that ran in 37 numbers from 1978 to 1993, published by Raven Press, Johannesburg. The magazine has been digitised and made freely available by Digital Innovation South Africa at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal (see the full collection here)
The ALMEDA project is cataloguing each individual literary contribution to Staffrider. By making individual contributions visible and searchable in our metadata, we hope to give a better representation of the hundreds of excellent poets, short story writers, dramatists and novelists who were contributing to the magazine during these crucial 25 years of apartheid South Africa. The full dataset is available on request.
On 10-21 February 2025, postdoctoral fellow Oulia Makkonen visited the Audiovisual Archives of Radio-Télévision Ivoirienne (RTI) in Côte d’Ivoire. Oulia’s ALMEDA case study focusses on remediations of Kotéba theatre performances. The archive includes some of the works of the famous Ivorian playwright, film director and musician, Souleymane Koly and his Ensemble…
A new dataset is the outcome of a collaboration with the Centre for Creative Arts, UKZN. This dataset includes biographical information on all the poets who performed at the Poetry Africa festival from 1997 to 2022. The dataset builds on data compiled by University of Kwa-Zulu Natal’s Centre for Creative Arts,…
This article provides a case study of the history of the cataloging system at Makerere University Library and discusses how this has come to shape the body of African literature housed there. The article is available as an open access publication. Harris, Ashleigh. “African Literary Metadata and Makerere University’s Library.” Research…
We’re delighted to share the completion of a project carried out by poet and Swahili lecturer (at the Centre for African Studies, Copenhagen University) Lisa Mumbi Macharia. This dataset documents over 10 years of spoken word poetry performances in the city of Nairobi. Mumbi recorded 628 performances from between March…