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 2015 and November 2024, extracting much of this data from posters and social media sites. The dataset highlights the creative voices shaping Nairobi’s urban culture, featuring poets’ names, performance dates, languages used, and links to many performance videos and posters.
If you are interested in this dataset, you can request a copy from almeda@uu.se. The data will be uploaded to the ALMEDA data repository, which will be available for searching towards the end of 2025.
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…
Click here to read more about our activities in 2024
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…