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 Kotéba, who were based in Abidjan. Other materials of interest included television programs Théâtre Chez Nous, Ce soir au village and Mensonge d’un soir. These are programs that cinematically staged theatrical performances (Théâtre Chez Nous), record oral renderings of tales, myths and legends (Mensonge d’un soir) and portray oratures in their local setting (Ce soir au village).
ALMEDA researcher Nicklas Hållén has been granted funding for a 3-year project titled “Reading beyond the close/distant divide: Nairobi’s formal and informal literary field.” His project investigates how the informal and formal sectors of the literary field shape each other in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. Hållén will explore ways of mapping how formally…
Mbũgua wa Mũngai (Kenyatta University) has compiled a ‘Gĩkũyũ Lexicon of Literary Terms’ for the ALMEDA project (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17507422). We are seeking Lexicons from as many languages as possible for the purposes of making our database multilingual. Read more about contributing a lexicon and publishing it with us here.
We have just published three new datasets on East African Little Magazines Darlite and Umma, as well as Transition Magazine (the Ugandan years). All our data is freely downloadable and reusable. Van Loenen, M. (2025). Content from Darlite Magazine, Dar es Salaam, 1966 – 1970 [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17433216 Runefelt, M.…
ALMEDA in collaboration with the Centre of African Studies, Copenhagen University invites you to an online workshop on Thursday 4 September at 13:15 – 16:00 (Central European Summer Time). In this workshop scholars will discuss the implications approaching street preaching as performance and oral literary genre. Viewing publicly delivered sermons…