Nigeria, Oct. 8 -- I was impressed by the youth-dominated audience that attended my lecture on archives on 6 October, hosted by the G.A.S. Foundation in Lagos, as part of the MOWAA in Residence fellowship. Space does not allow me to speak elaborately on this public lecture, which attracted significant questions and concerns.

Before engaging with the history in an archive, it is first necessary to come to terms with the history of the archive. In other words, the question is not one of ownership alone. It is, more broadly, a question of power, memory, representation, evidence, silence, and authority. The temptation on approaching an archive looking for Africa's history is to see the archive as nothing more than a repository of facts. But ...