What is the regional archive about?

The combination of colonial rule and the production of archival documents by European colonial administrators in the first place gave archives a particular character; in many administrative posts, practices of archiving usually dated from that earlier period.Footnote ⁵ They presented future archivists with blueprints of what was relevant to keep and also potentially introduced them to specific cultures of secrecy, which Taylor highlights for the Ugandan case. There, the British colonizers came with ideas of what might subsequently be hidden or destroyed. This approach could then lead to the withholding or removal of information lingering from the late colonial period into the practices of the postcolonial decades, practices that could later be reinforced by repressive state policies, for example under Idi Amin’s Ugandan regime. Archivists might thus be the heirs to colonial traditions in distrusting researchers and removing files (Taylor Reference Taylor2021: 540–1).

Derek Peterson systematically explains, again for Uganda, how specific conditions and priorities of political regimes after independence – and also material constraints – have influenced decisions about what is kept, how access is given to these archival holdings, and who might seek access to these archives (Peterson Reference Peterson2021: 6). Taylor puts the relations between the archivist and her or his visitors at the heart of the current realities of postcolonial archival practices, both in Uganda and in Africa more generally. In that vision, the archivist carries out ‘the delicate work of anticipating how a visitor will read and use archival documents’ (Taylor Reference Taylor2021: 542–3). Therefore, access to archives could be constrained by the archivist’s perception of risk; or, as Benedito Machava and Euclides Gonçalves have pointed out for Mozambique, it could be conditioned by regimes of uncertainty, in which archivists have an incentive to classify most files as secret and to withhold them as much as possible from visitors, in a quest to avoid committing mistakes (Machava and Gonçalves Reference Machava and Gonçalves2021: 564–5).

However, our four case studies differ from those considerations. First, the focus is not on national archives but on provincial archives, at the level of the district or the municipality. The complex custodial cultures Caroline Hamilton refers to when speaking of archives, calling them ‘artefacts’ and suggesting that they should be treated as entities with their own history and biography (Hamilton Reference Hamilton2013: 5, 12), do not quite fit with the picture of postcolonial Africa’s ‘dead archives’ analysed here. These ‘dead archives’ are large series of historical documents from the first postcolonial decades, stored at the margins of small, functioning, administrative archives. In officially French-speaking African countries, they are effectively known as ‘archives mortes’; in Lusophone countries, they are the ‘arquivo morto’ – and we take up the sense of this expression. Second, not every case shares the dramatic historical context that applied to Uganda’s archives after the Idi Amin regime, or the Nigerian provinces affected by the Biafran War. As Samuel Fury Childs Daly illustrates, Nigerian Biafran bureaucrats did not feel committed to record keeping, and some civilian administrators deliberately saw the lack of record keeping as a method to defend society against authoritarian rule and repression (Daly Reference Daly2020: 21–2). This important observation, however, is specific to one of the harshest civil war experiences in postcolonial Africa.

As we will show, not all provincial archives were affected by such logics and constraints; in fact, many were not. In our case studies, the treatment of the ‘dead archive’ remained conditioned by it being an inconvenient but necessary product of bureaucratic culture; while that bureaucratic culture might have been rooted in colonial practices (Awenengo Dalberto and Banégas Reference Awenengo Dalberto, Banégas, Awenengo Dalberto and Banégas2021; Awenengo Dalberto Reference Awenengo Dalberto2020), it proved to be powerful enough to preclude the destruction of the holdings of provincial archives. This explains why reports about the destruction of such archives by officials wishing to clean up their place of activity (Machava and Gonçalves Reference Machava and Gonçalves2021: 557) and circulating stories about files from the archives being sold to street vendors for wrapping up merchandise are not the general experience. In many cases, records in the ‘dead archive’ might be inconvenient as they occupy storage space; often, they are not consulted for a long time or they are never consulted; but while they are certainly not intentionally well kept, there is an underlying notion that they cannot be removed either, as, even in their ‘dead’ nature, they remain part of bureaucratic modernity.

A third issue concerns the role of the national archives in postcolonial African countries in relation to administrative archives at the provincial level; this also links to questions of access. In our four case studies, the national archives are either responsible for or involved in the conservation of provincial archives, in ways comparable to the case of the 1992 legislation in Mozambique commented on by Machava and Gonçalves (Reference Machava and Gonçalves2021: 556, 558). Archivists from the central structure might be involved in preserving local archives; however, normally, there is no resource base for such engagement. For the four case studies discussed here, there have been moments in which the link played a role for conservation only in Ghana, with its very specific structure that defines the historical parts of regional archives as regional branches of the national archives, and in Cabo Verde, where in rare cases the Arquivo Nacional was able to mobilize funds to intervene in regional archives – but, as we point out, this role was often ambivalent. However, in terms of access, reference to the national archives is essential in all cases: for the international and national researcher to enter the ‘dead archive’, they need to be known at the level of the national archives and be recommended and supported by these archives. At the provincial level, this recommendation is more powerful than any other credentials, as held by Machava and Gonçalves (Reference Machava and Gonçalves2021: 566–7) with regard to their Mozambican case study.

Postcolonial African archival pessimism: another obstacle for research?

From the 1950s, scholars began addressing the problematic nature of archival sources and their association with the distorted views of Africa produced by earlier colonial and imperial scholarship. As the limitations of colonial sources were taken as a methodological given, scholars turned to other sources of evidence, such as oral traditions and life histories, using them notably for themes within social and precolonial history (Cooper Reference Cooper1994; Miller Reference Miller1999). Even so, the use of archival sources has obviously remained a standard practice in research on the colonial period, which is mostly based on records from the national archives of African countries, combined with interpretation of documents found in the colonial archives of former metropoles.

Within these trends, research opportunities in regional archives tend to receive little attention. Only rather rarely have scholars emphasized the importance of carrying out research in smaller and less-explored archives.Footnote ⁶ For colonial archives, recent scholarly work has pointed to possibilities in Uganda, Ghana and Mali (Mann Reference Mann1999; McConnell Reference McConnell2005; Ntewusu Reference Ntewusu2014; Rodet Reference Rodet2010). We have already noted the importance of vital new insights on regional archives relating to issues of custodial cultures and material challenges, but the question of their research potential remains unaddressed; in other words, it is mostly unclear what these archives are able to provide for historical research.

For the study of postcolonial Africa, a pessimistic approach towards the archives seems even more established and, in certain ways, more radical. Historians have argued that records from the national archives of different countries are unlikely to provide a useful picture (White Reference White2015: 310–3). Other key studies focus on the nature of ‘fragmented archives’, arguing that alternative approaches to exploring post-independence themes are inevitable (Bernault Reference Bernault2015: 275–6; Ochonu Reference Ochonu2015: 290–2). This debate often ignores the regional archives, which remain outside the picture; if they are mentioned at all, comments focus on their limitations, and not on opportunities stemming from their systematic – or even unsystematic – use.Footnote ⁷

The ‘global turn’ in historical research has also contributed to endorsing a search for further archival records outside Africa (Zimmerman Reference Zimmerman2010; Keller Reference Keller2018; Allman Reference Allman2013: 106). The two trends together have worked as a disincentive to seek new archival resources on the African continent. In a particularly influential article, Jean Allman argued for the importance of the ‘transnational archive’ based on a variety of different archives in a wide range of countries.Footnote ⁸ The evidence this author presents for her specific case is very clear; however, drawing from one single case study to make broader generalizations can be risky and problematic. Consider also the principal monograph on the Biafran War, a landmark event for both Nigeria’s postcolonial history and the history of (West) Africa after independence, recently published by Daly (Reference Daly2020). Daly’s monograph and related research activity constitute exactly what the field of African history needs: new studies of excellence engaging with important research questions through meticulous analysis of various types of primary sources. In the case of the Biafran War, this was a milestone.Footnote ⁹

However, in a way, the author’s impressions also contributed to the generally negative image of the potential of archival resources in Africa, including regional archives at district level – which in Nigeria are known as regional branches of the national archives (Daly Reference Daly2017a: 313–14). Despite relying on archival records in the Enugu branch of Nigeria’s national archives for legal cases and achieving interesting results (Daly Reference Daly2017b), the overall comment on the potential of (regional) archives remains pessimistic: the limited amount of archival evidence documenting the civil war available within Nigeria led the author to suggest that ‘the sources of post-colonial African history are increasingly found outside of state archives’ (Daly Reference Daly2017a: 311–12). The problem here is twofold: on the one hand, as already pointed out, Daly’s is an exceptional case where an absence of archival resources in Nigeria might be expected; on the other, as he argued in a related research note, this case study does not provide a ‘general survey’ from which it might be possible to generalize (Daly Reference Daly2017a: 311). In our view, a general survey must examine a significant number of case studies. If not, it inevitably carries a series of intrinsic limitations. What is at stake here is thus not only the reputation, so to speak, of archival research on post-independence Africa. It also affects the way in which scholars conceive of the archival space and plan future research, and our discussion hopes to change decisions taken in this area.

Land issues, regionalism and local religion: the municipal archives of Ouidah and the provincial archives of Abomey, Benin

Benin’s national archives, the Archives Nationales du Bénin (ANB) in Porto-Novo, hold important records on the period after independence. The presidential series, the Archives présidentielles, are especially important as they contain essential sources, for example in the form of numerous boxes of petitions sent to Mathieu Kérékou’s presidential office from the period between 1972 and 1990, when Benin was ruled by an authoritarian regime defining itself as Marxist-Leninist from 1974 (Keese Reference Keese2020a; Reference Keese2020b). The ANB also holds the single party’s newspaper Ehuzu, another important resource (see, for example, Phelan Reference Phelan2014). In terms of regional archives, the team at the national archives has oversight over archival activities in the public sector (Lawson Reference Lawson2017), and archivist Patricia Bachabi guided us through the system and put us in contact with local archivists in Abomey and Ouidah.

In both Abomey and Ouidah, older archival collections lack any clear inventory; in Ouidah, there simply is no organization of the ‘dead archive’, and researchers first need to engage in that task, starting at random points. In Abomey, where archival sources are particularly relevant for research on taxation and its organization in Benin’s Zou region, records are arranged into different folders and filed under certain series labels. However, these labels remain extremely general, giving only the principal period.

In Abomey, the part of the regional archive that contains documents from between the 1960s and the 1990s is usually not organized for specific purposes, although there is particular interest in keeping files on issues of taxation and tax resistance from that period. There is no particular culture of obscuring the existence of files. It seems obvious to the archival team that the files need to be kept because of their relationship to the administrative functions of the state – even if they end up in a ‘dead archive’.Footnote ¹⁰ In Ouidah, the records from that period are kept in much more precarious conditions; the fact that they are ‘dead’ clearly means that nobody is expected to actually need to consult them – but they remain expressions of state routines and are to be preserved as such. They thus cannot be removed or destroyed, but need to be kept, without much thought being dedicated to their existence.

Guided by the local team in Abomey, or working totally at random as in Ouidah, researchers can find abundant and compelling sources in these archives. For instance, it became evident that the archive at Ouidah is a key place for studying the social effects of Vodun practices, related to local Beninese religion, and for understanding the wider administrative debate that developed during the Kérékou regime to control them.Footnote ¹¹ Past studies have demonstrated how regional cases can help in understanding the broader history of the persecution of some religious beliefs after independence.Footnote ¹² For Benin, Jeffrey Kahn has used the newspaper Ehuzu and oral evidence to reconstruct the persecution of so-called ‘sorcerers’ in the Zou region in 1976 and 1977 (Kahn Reference Kahn2011). The municipal archive at Ouidah offers different types of evidence on similar issues, as well as links to petitions within the presidential series at the ANB regarding ‘witchcraft’ and the government’s attempts to suppress Vodun-connected communities accused of such practices.Footnote ¹³

Local archival collections also tell us a great deal about issues related to land possession, rural organization and hierarchies in rural areas.Footnote ¹⁴ Themes include opposition to the imposition of taxes and refusal to pay taxes, a trend noticeable throughout the 1970s, and local reactions to the state’s efforts to reform land and agricultural regimes.Footnote ¹⁵ As an example, these developments are reflected in the history of the land conflicts between the family of Carlos Domingo Cerqueira Lima and the tenant Gnagassi Ahouandjinou Boukari, and between Sounlingbé Dolè and the Boukassi family. These individual conflicts offer a long-term view of broader clashes over land spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s. Understanding such processes can be very important to appreciate changes in land-use schemes and export agriculture from the late colonial period until the Kérékou regime, the two issues being closely related.Footnote ¹⁶ For Benin’s coastal south, archival sources at Ouidah are therefore key to conducting further research on post-independence land conflicts, a topic that is mostly absent at the ANB in Porto-Novo, and to analysing the regional implication of these conflicts. In practical terms, clearly such research initiatives in rural and religious history create a dialogue with the archivists in place – and at the ANB – and appear in Benin as a crucial step towards bringing the ‘dead archive’ back into local view and putting the basic need for preservation onto the table.

Understanding complex social reform and local resistance: the municipal archives of Ribeira Grande and Paúl in Cabo Verde

With its late decolonization experience in 1974–75, Cabo Verde’s transition to independence is usually considered as part of a trajectory common to several Lusophone African societies. In other Portuguese colonies, the history of decolonization was characterized by an armed anti-colonial struggle against the authoritarian colonial government between the early 1960s and 1974; in the Cape Verdean case, there was no such struggle, despite repression by the colonial regime and attempts by anti-colonial movements to operate in the archipelago (Chabal Reference Chabal and Chabal2002). At the same time, while Cabo Verde’s experience of colonial contact and settlement history set it apart from other African societies, giving it a ‘Creole’ character, its historical trajectory still integrates it within the larger group of West African societies after independence (Fêo Rodrigues Reference Fêo Rodrigues2003). One principal distinction lies in the long-lasting legacy of colonial land regimes – which included different systems of sharecropping and tenancy under extremely dire climatic conditions, subject to frequent and severe droughts and marked by local revolts – which generally lack good historical analysis for the whole of the twentieth century and certainly for the post-independence decades.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, the period between 1975 and the early 1990s, coinciding with the authoritarian one-party regime, remains, to date, practically unresearched, and the few studies that do exist reproduce the glorifying rhetoric of the anti-colonial struggle (Vicente Lopes Reference Vicente Lopes2002).Footnote ¹⁸ Local interviews demonstrate that land conflict was a huge issue in the first years after independence.Footnote ¹⁹ Oral testimonies and the rare critical contemporary media reports regarding the late 1970s and 1980s point to traumatic episodes of repression such as the violence that occurred during the campaign for agrarian reform in Santo Antão in 1981.Footnote ²⁰ Historical discussions of the fall of the regime in the early 1990s and the opposition’s rise to power do not exist at all.Footnote ²¹ As we will see, sources stored in municipal archives in Cabo Verde are particularly important as they lead us to the complicated realities and to local resistance on the ground after 1974.

Following decentralization in the archipelago after the end of the authoritarian regime in 1991, and the shift away from single-party politics towards elected municipalities controlling local issues, including responsibility for local archives, the role of historical holdings has changed. The ‘dead archives’ are not consulted; normally, no one expects them to be consulted. Yet, the local caretakers in charge of the archives see their preservation, if sometimes in complicated contexts, as being part of an improved and improving ‘modernized’ state. In Ponta do Sol, for example, this idea of bureaucratic modernity is seen as being achieved if the files are at least kept in folders indicating the year of their production.Footnote ²² Moreover, there is an idea that these holdings are part of a historical past that belongs to the municipality – and town councillors in charge of social or cultural affairs regard them as potentially important for future engagement with that past.Footnote ²³ This is still a vague project. However, it has led to the Arquivo Nacional de Cabo Verde (ANCV) being considered as a legitimate second custodian of these records, which might be ceded to the national archives – while some local authorities worry that records removed to the national archives for restoration and subsequent safekeeping might be ‘lost forever’ for the communities of the more outlying islands, thus depriving them of a part of their historical artefacts.

As in Benin, not only regional archives but also the postcolonial holdings of the national archives in the capital are practically unknown to researchers and thus unused. The ANCV in Praia holds some postcolonial series, while others can be found in the ‘dead archives’, even partly classified, at the Archive of the Ministry of Agriculture (Keese Reference Keese2017: 297). At the same time, archivists such as José Évora in the ANCV are of immense help in contacting municipalities in the different island districts, and, where these authorities are open to granting access, as in Santo Antão, the research opportunities are substantial.

For instance, in Ponta do Sol, on the island of Santo Antão, the municipal archives store important reports covering questions related to land, and they also provide insights about the conflicting ways in which the regime of the Partido Africano da Independência de Cabo Verde (PAICV) attempted to exercise control over the island’s population.Footnote ²⁴ In Ponta do Sol, more recent records are kept together with those from between 1975 and 1991, some indicating the year. As a result, questions of a merely technical and bureaucratic nature are stored together with reports drafted by administrators in the field discussing local reforms, with protocols produced by deliberative council sessions, or with correspondence from the single party’s local units. Sometimes – but not always – they also contain documents coming from the PAICV.Footnote ²⁵

In Paúl, where the ‘historical’ – pre-1990 – archives were once located in a remote storage space, the whole collection was moved to the ANCV for restoration and reclassification. While not being actively advertised, these records are now available in Praia, and the hundreds of boxes can be explored through a rather convoluted ‘pre-inventory’. In spite of their underlying rhetoric that emphasizes PAICV revolutionary success, these documents give much detail on the difficulties postcolonial administrations experienced in Santo Antão when confronted with episodes of local resistance.Footnote ²⁶ Thanks to these local sources, researchers can better understand issues related to land conflicts and changes of land regime, which are ultimately key to the study of postcolonial Cape Verdean society beyond life in the two urban centres of Praia and Mindelo.Footnote ²⁷

Cape Verdean regional archives held by the municipalities offer the possibility to explore new and diverse avenues for historical research on the post-independence era. Those avenues include questions related to environmental history, changes and conflicts over access to land and water, and the local and social effects of regime change. Some more ‘classified’ files produced by the single political party PAICV might be missing, but Cabo Verde’s municipal archives offer important insights. Some current local administrations, such as those of the three municipalities in Santo Antão, devote a great deal of attention to Cape Verdean history and culture and are keen to welcome and assist researchers; this creates opportunities both for research and for the provincial archive, with the ANCV as a second custodian.

The Ghanaian opportunity: interpreting local histories through a regionalized (branch) archival system in Ghana

Ghana is very different from all the other cases discussed in this study and from most African countries (although Nigeria, where Daly worked, follows a similar administrative logic), in that it has a decentralized archives system with regional branches – but even those, while separated from the current administrative archive, do not attract sufficient attention. The Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD) guarantees in principle that local archival records do not remain in the possession of the regional administration as ‘dead archives’; instead, it obliges the regional branches of the PRAAD to organize the storage of such regional historical documentation (Akussah Reference Akussah2002). Most of these branches hold collections related to the postcolonial period. In theory, their direct link to the national archives makes them much easier to access than archives kept by administrative services (Akussah Reference Akussah2003). They can also have – though only in particular instances – a much more practical function in using archival evidence than in the three other public cultures discussed here: in Ghana, archival evidence is actively sought in land conflicts and conflicts regarding ‘traditional rule’;Footnote ²⁸ individuals and, especially, representatives of traditional authorities use the regional archives to find administrative records that give information on land possession and precedence in conflicts between ‘traditional rulers’. Therefore, at least rudimentary access to the ‘dead archive’ needs to be guaranteed, because provincial archives can maintain this function only with the help of inventories and with files being kept somewhere where they can be found. The legislation of 1996–97 that established the PRAAD with its regional branches was meant to prepare local repositories for that task.

Yet in spite of easier access conditions, the availability of comparably more elaborate inventories, and a vibrant and growing research community working on Ghanaian history, research at regional archives (or PRAAD branches) remains uneven.Footnote ²⁹ While the PRAAD branch in Tamale is much frequented for research on northern Ghana (Lentz Reference Lentz2006; Kunkel Reference Kunkel2018), others are much less consulted. Among the latter is the PRAAD branch in Ho, in Ghana’s Volta Region, which was in a poor material situation for a long time, and even affected by floods in the rainy season. Only recently have the archivists at Ho organized important external funding, which allowed for better storage conditions.Footnote ³⁰ The archivists also insist on updated inventories as a key instrument for a quality archive.Footnote ³¹ Nevertheless, the branch at Ho has always remained accessible to the public throughout the last two decades, even during the earlier, more difficult phases. In principle, many scholars are interested in the area, as the Volta Region was at the centre of a number of ambitious and seminal studies on Ewe-speaking ethno-nationalism, on smuggling and on border identities. The timeframe of these studies spans from the 1940s and 1950s – i.e. before the 1956 referendum that led to the integration of the Volta Region (then known as British Togoland) into independent Ghana – to later decades (Amenumey Reference Amenumey1989; Nugent Reference Nugent2002; Lawrance Reference Lawrance2006; Skinner Reference Skinner2015; Keese Reference Keese2016a). Documentation held at the PRAAD branch in Ho, the focus of which also touches on different decades, specifically from 1945 to 1978, offers yet more important new evidence on these topics. Existing studies have relied on archival documents only in part and, with the notable exceptions of Akyeampong, Nugent and, to an extent, Skinner, have not used archival sources for the period after Ghana’s independence (Akyeampong Reference Akyeampong2002; Skinner Reference Skinner2015; Nugent Reference Nugent2019). What is more, collections at Ho can serve as a fundamental source for certain, rather neglected, themes relating to the social history of the region and add nuance to others whose study relies on collected oral evidence, including for the difficult relations between the governments of Ghana and Togo, for example (Skinner Reference Skinner, Grilli and Gerits2020).

Holdings at Ho consist of hundreds of boxes whose rich materials contain detailed reports and correspondence on smuggling operations between 1957 and 1977, and security files dealing with various constituencies in the region, as well as documents on several land disputes between different figures and communities.Footnote ³² Collections also shed light on other issues, such as the effects of the Aliens Compliance Order (which led to the expulsion of West African immigrants from Ghana between 1969 and 1972), episodes of xenophobia in the Volta Region, the organization of communal labour, and the National Service Corps during the short-lived period of the Busia government.Footnote ³³ In Ho, the organization of the records is frequently a continuation of colonial logics focusing on ‘traditional affairs’ by chieftaincy division; this is more visible in the regional branch than in the RG (Record Group) files (postcolonial series) held at the PRAAD headquarters in Accra.Footnote ³⁴ Many dossiers on the 1960s and 1970s to be found in Ho are labelled in the ‘colonial’ way.

Research at the branches of the PRAAD, on its own, does not suffice to study the political histories of the Nkrumah, Busia, Acheampong and Rawlings presidencies, the histories of Ghana’s coups d’état and the longer phases of military rule. As Allman suggested, for these perspectives on the broader political history of post-independence Ghana, the researcher might require a multi-archival approach towards documents scattered across different continents (Allman Reference Allman2013: 119–20). Still, the regional branches of the PRAAD are not only a useful and important addition to Allman’s research strategy if paired with oral accounts, as proposed by Jeffrey Ahlman (Reference Ahlman2017: 25–6). Regional archives should in many cases be the first port of call for carrying out research on certain (numerous) themes within Ghana’s social history that had a clear effect on societies in specific regions, and even for larger questions, such as, for example, the effects of economic austerity during Acheampong’s rule from 1972 (most notably during ‘Operation Feed Yourself’; see Lemmenmeier Reference Lemmenmeier2012), or the effects of the Aliens Compliance Order (Kobo Reference Kobo2010). Safeguarding these regional depositories, as in the case of Ho, is thus extremely important for future research. Historians wishing to write the histories of Ghana’s postcolonial past may not have exploited the regional branches of the PRAAD in full, but those holdings ought to become a principal resource.

Rehabilitating the regional archive: finding a systematic approach towards the Pointe-Noire and Kouilou prefecture archives, Republic of Congo

The Republic of Congo is yet another type of case study. It is characterized by a recent violent past (affected by the civil war of 1997), which we do not find in the other three cases, and it is interesting to assess what small regional archives can provide in that case.Footnote ³⁵ It appears as the stereotypical context where one would imagine records to be widely destroyed, or where administrative caretakers and archivists might routinely refuse to give access to files. However, as the case of Pointe-Noire shows, important holdings at the regional level are indeed quite accessible.

‘Dead archives’ stored in the prefectures and in the municipalities of the Republic of Congo are associated either with representing a complicated, problematic past before the civil war or even with going back to the colonial period and thus being remote (although they are rarely as old as that). At the same time, from the point of view of local caretakers, the archives cannot be destroyed, as their holdings again belong to ‘correct’ bureaucratic routines. The rigid hierarchies of Congolese political life sustain this idea: it is generally held that the Ministry of Culture, represented by the national archives, has a particular interest in the existence of these records.Footnote ³⁶ Therefore, while they are stored in complicated conditions and nobody consults them, they are not directly threatened, at least in the case of Pointe-Noire. In the case of the municipal archives in the two principal cities, Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire, the situation is different again, because the archivist Eugène Loubou has created a kind of professional pride in the archival teams for preserving these archives, making them especially well-kept (and inventoried) resources.

Compared with the provincial archives, the Archives Nationales de la République du Congo have few resources to offer on postcolonial contexts, with some records on the period between 1966 and 1968 to be found in their PR (Affaires présidentielles) series (Keese Reference Keese2016b). The two principal cities of the country, Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire, have their municipal archives in good shape, offering records on a variety of themes including urban social policies and police activities.Footnote ³⁷ As collections of primary sources on postcolonial social history, they remained widely untouched by the civil war. Few historians have ever profited from these municipal archives.Footnote ³⁸

The prefectures hold impressive amounts of documentation, covering many themes in social history. However, research in the ‘dead archive’ can be realized only as part of a safeguarding activity, involving the national archives and the caretakers on the spot who are usually sympathetic to such measures, if they are endorsed by the hierarchy of the Ministry of Culture.Footnote ³⁹ This case study was based on a project of the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) 844, originally striving to safeguard other, colonial types of records, but ultimately classifying roughly 10 per cent of a mostly postcolonial historical collection for Pointe-Noire and the surrounding Kouilou district. These include dossiers of very diverse natures, such as detailed security files from 1961, reports on trade unions and on immigration from Congo-Léopoldville (Kinshasa) and Kabinda (in Portuguese Angola), as well as on religious trends in the south-western region of Congo-Brazzaville. Documents produced during the ‘Marxist-Leninist’ period of the postcolonial state, between 1969 and 1992, constitute a relevant if smaller part of these postcolonial holdings, and they address issues of different phases of the regime, including social control and the creation of a compulsory civil service for the youth.Footnote ⁴⁰

Such newly accessible archival collections therefore hold the potential to revitalize the stagnant research on Congo-Brazzaville’s history. They would allow a deepening of Florence Bernault’s important analysis (Reference Bernault1996), which included the regime changes of the 1960s, through the use of new local archival material. It could open doors to the study of postcolonial society beyond the dominant approaches of colonial memory on the one hand, and the early independent state’s neocolonial entanglements on the other (Melphon Kamba Reference Melphon Kamba and Obenga2010; Mberi Reference Mberi and Obenga2010). Certainly, in light of the archival records already reorganized and analysed at Pointe-Noire, it also seems clear that the social historical studies resulting from their interpretation will by far surpass, in terms of empirical depth, the odd economic (if certainly interesting) history article of the 1980s dedicated to Congolese post-independence society (Sanders Reference Sanders1983).

As in Ouidah, but perhaps even more compellingly considering the size of Pointe-Noire, the state of this regional archive points to the wider question of what measures are needed to safeguard archival holdings in Africa today (Keese and Owabira Reference Keese and Owabira2020). Often, these archives have very basic facilities, and their depositories consist of rooms full of piles of papers frequently placed together without a coherent order. As became clear during the EAP 844 project, the combined efforts of local archivists and researchers, together with support provided by state administrations, in this case by the Archives Nationales de la République du Congo, are essential to achieve positive results. Yet, as in Ouidah, the possibility of carrying out further research might depend on the continuation of interventions aimed at protecting the physical state of the files. In that context, physical safeguarding is currently much more relevant than visionary ideas of digitization.

Conclusion: acknowledging the value of regional archives and preserving their essential resources

Regional archives in postcolonial Africa are often difficult to locate and access and are exposed to a number of challenges that might threaten their existence. However, the results presented here demonstrate their importance: local archives provide crucial records to explore Africa’s postcolonial past. To simply dismiss their accessibility, or their importance, or even to question their existence, is highly problematic. For some themes, they clearly provide by far the most important kind of evidence, while in other cases, they are useful in combination with globally dispersed archives such as the ones illustrated by Jean Allman as well as with oral evidence. Nevertheless, they always remain essential resources.

Postcolonial archival pessimism or the lack of initiatives to explore regional repositories might result, consciously or unconsciously, in a non-engagement with such research paths. This may have dramatic consequences for future research. What is more, local records could give studies a necessary social historical dimension and provide researchers with pools of evidence that might help us understand how political transformations affected people’s everyday life histories. In some cases, evidence from regional archives may also be complementary to oral information in challenging those nationalist historiographies that use history to defend specific ideas of national communities while excluding the struggles and experiences of others.

Custodial cultures and the need of the archivist to anticipate the researchers’ goals and make decisions about the risk of giving access, paired with traditions of secrecy, might all play a role in decisions not to keep or to obscure records, or not to allow researchers to consult them. However, as we pointed out, there is a world of the regional archive beyond those cases that involve especially troubled histories of repressive regimes or civil war experiences. In Benin, Cabo Verde and the Republic of Congo, archivists and caretakers hold the ‘dead archive’ as something that is mainly part of administrative modernity; in Ghana, while being kept by regional branches of the PRAAD, they receive yet further recognition as part of archival professionalism. Under these circumstances, there is no impetus to prevent historical research, especially if the national archives endorse the initiative and facilitate contacts in accessing the regional archives.

Engagement with regional sources also has a very practical relevance for the preservation and improvement of the regional archives and, more generally, for hindering their decay. As the ‘dead archive’ is no longer relevant for everyday administrative use and is considered to be irrelevant for consultation, while it needs to be kept as part of an administrative past, large parts of this ‘dead archive’ do survive in decaying storerooms. Its destruction is not imagined nor imaginable, but its deterioration could have the same effect. The teams of national archives recognized the importance of safeguarding local records in all cases. However, as long as the value of regional archives is not acknowledged by the sustained presence of a national and international research community, national archives’ staff are left alone. Researchers can support this custodial culture by bringing in suggestions for joint efforts of conservation and classification. They are in turn rewarded with access to collections of records that have probably never been explored. Only through creating a widespread consciousness about the importance of such material for writing the history of local societies, which would also mean getting the support of administrators and public officials responsible for these resources, can those records acquire status, gaining respect and the effort necessary for safeguarding them in a context where resources at the regional level are sometimes scarce, and where the archives frequently do not receive even the minimum needed to preserve older documents.

The experience of the regional archives of Kayes in Mali visibly demonstrates what can happen if this consciousness is missing. During riots in May 2020, following widespread frustration about what were perceived to be rigged elections, the archives were set on fire. Thanks to the efforts of Marie Rodet with local partners and archivists, the Kayes archives had become a model for the preservation of (colonial) archival records, which also explains why their destruction was documented (Rodet et al. Reference Rodet, Mbodj-Pouye, Sène Cissé and Coulibaly2020). Certainly, not all regional archives in West and Central Africa are currently threatened by extreme incidents of that kind. But such episodes point to the dangers of what might happen to resources that are seen as unimportant in terms of historical value and that are associated with state power. Therefore, if researchers wish to write adequate histories of post-independence societies, they will need to take the potential of these archives seriously. Using them for research may serve to demonstrate their essential role for fostering further discussion about the past and, in turn, help support regional archives’ preservation.Footnote ⁴¹ Time invested and ongoing interest in the ‘dead archives’ are certainly invaluable for that struggle to come.