La revue malienne _Sankoré_ pourrait être considérée comme reflétant un processus de valorisation des langues et littératures africaines dans le cadre du projet de décolonisation des années 1970. Sankoré – une revue de vulgarisation scientifique avec, entre autres, des sections consacrées aux nouvelles, légendes, proverbes, poèmes, devinettes, est un produit initial de l’Institut Ahmed Baba de Tombouctou et publié au cours de cette décennie avec le soutien de l’Institut des Sciences Humaines de Bamako (ISH). À travers des exemplaires récupérés en juin 2024 avec l’aide des archivistes et des stagiaires de l’ISH, on peut retracer les débuts de Sankoré en français, avec de courtes sections traduites en bambara (n° 2, 1973) ou en tamasheq (n° 5, 1974), jusqu’à des numéros entièrement en bambara par exemple en 1976 (n° 9, 1976).
The Malian magazine _Sankoré_ could be viewed as an attempt to valorize African languages and literatures as part of decolonization agenda of the 1970s. Sankoré – a popular science journal with some sections dedicated to short stories, legends, proverbs, poems, riddles, is a product of the Ahmed Baba Institute in Timbuktu and was published in the 1970s with the support of the Institut des Sciences Humaines de Bamako (ISH). From some of the copies retrieved this June 2024 together with archivists and interns at the ISH, one can trace the beginnings of Sankoré in French, with short sections translated in Bambara (No 2, 1973) or Tamasheq (No 5, 1974), to issues fully in Bambara for example by 1976 (No 9, 1976).
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…
ALMEDA was officially launched with a meeting of all team members and some of the members of our distinguished advisory board. We were also joined by Tinashe Mushakavanhu, who presented a lecture titled ‘Metareading a Country’, in which he spoke about the value of “rogue archival” methods, which create “interference”…