The Khanga/Kanga/Leso is a traditional cotton cloth with mixed designs, colors and messages worn by women along the coastal regions of Kenya, Tanzania and Zanzibar. The popularization of the Khanga can be traced back to 1887, when the Kaderdina family founded the Hajee Essak Limited company, which pioneered the mass…
Between 1–4 October, team member Nicklas Hållén visited Machakos University, where he and Dr. Charles Kebaya ran a second of three planned PhD and MA student workshop on popular cultural production in Kenya. The student participants have been working diligently on six different projects which will be collected in a…
ALMEDA will be offering two project-related PhD courses in 2025. One on the methods of Distant Reading and its implications for African Literature, and the other on Literary Metadata and the Digital Humanities and their importance for the future African literary archive. Please spread the word. These courses are free,…
The ALMEDA project is proud to be working with the NGO, FEMRITE (https://femrite.org) a Ugandan Women Writers’ Association that has inspired, supported and published African women writers from across the continent. FEMRITE has published numerous anthologies of poetry, short stories and Creative Non-Fiction, as well as novels, autobiographies, translations and…
By Max van Loenen and Malin Runefelt During the spring of 2024, we collected metadata on African literary magazines published during the decolonization period of the 60s and 70s. ALMEDA creates data on and then links these ephemeral works. An important aspect of the collection process has been linking authors…