Digital innovation is likely to have an even stronger impact across Africa than in the West, simply because of the historic lack of access to books..… - Bibi Bakare-Yusuf

The archive as a reservoir of and for memory is the place where ideas and material culture of historic interest or social relevance are stored and ordered. It is where society warehouses what it wants to remember and what it sees as worthy of remembrance, especially for the future. Whether that archive is of literature, music, visual art, film, plastic art, buildings, I am interested in what future people will find that gives them a record, a sense of this present moment.

We need to produce our own data in awesome, saturating quantities so that our own archives come to drown out the noise and the interpretive bias of the excessively confident outsiders who have little regard for our multi-tongued, polyrhythmic, polytheistic and metaphysical horizon.

My research was going to be substantive, thorough and deliciously juicy and it would preoccupy me for the next few years. But, I was confounded by the empty bookshelves or lack thereof, in the middle-class homes I visited. As an avid reader who loved to talk about books, I looked into people’s shelves to get a sense of who they are and more importantly, their politics. Instead, many of the places I visited had empty bookshelves or when stocked at all, were filled with business, religious and self-help motivational books with titles like: ‘The Purpose Driven Life’, ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’, ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’. And the few times I spotted fiction it was Dan Brown or John Grisham.