Africa's Hidden Archives: What Old Letters, Manuscripts and Records Reveal

Picture a mud-brick house in Djenné, Mali. A family opens an old metal trunk. Inside, wrapped in cloth and leather, are hundreds of handwritten pages: Qur'ans, works of law and astronomy, letters between traders, notes on medicine. Some were copied by the family's ancestors centuries ago, and few people outside the household have ever read them.

Scenes like this are repeated across Africa. Yet for a long time, the outside world believed that Africa's past was mostly unwritten, known only through oral tradition and the reports of foreign visitors. The truth is very different. Africa's archives are huge, scattered and, in many places, still waiting to be discovered.

Not one archive, but thousands

When people hear the word "archive", they picture a grand building full of boxes. Africa has those too, from national archives in cities like Ibadan, Nairobi and Pretoria to university libraries across the continent. But much of Africa's written heritage sits elsewhere:

• Family libraries in Mali, Mauritania, Niger, northern Nigeria and Senegal, passed down through generations of scholars and merchants.
• Monasteries and churches in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where parchment books in the Ge'ez script have been copied and kept for centuries.
• Mosques and Qur'anic schools, which hold teaching texts, poems and records written in Arabic and in African languages using Arabic letters, a tradition called Ajami.
• Mission stations, which kept baptism registers, school records and letters from African converts and teachers.
• Private homes, where old photographs, newspapers, land papers and family letters lie in cupboards and suitcases.

These collections rarely appear in official catalogues. Finding them depends on trust, local knowledge and patience.

The manuscripts of the Sahel

The most famous example is Timbuktu, whose families protected hundreds of thousands of manuscripts through centuries of change, and smuggled many of them to safety when armed groups occupied the city in 2012. We told that story in The Librarians of Timbuktu.

But Timbuktu is not alone. Djenné, Gao, Chinguetti in Mauritania, Kano and Sokoto in Nigeria all have strong manuscript traditions. These writings show that West Africa had scholars debating law, theology, mathematics and astronomy long before colonial rule, and that ordinary people wrote contracts, letters and records of their own lives.

Ethiopia's parchment libraries

In the highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea, thousands of churches and monasteries keep handwritten books on parchment made from animal skin, many beautifully illustrated. They include Bibles, lives of saints, prayer books, royal chronicles and land grants, some of them hundreds of years old.

These books are not museum pieces. Priests still read from them in services. That makes them precious and vulnerable at the same time: daily use, damp, insects and theft all take their toll. Read more about the script they are written in, in our story on Ge'ez.

The files that were hidden

Some of the most important African archives were hidden not in Africa, but in England.

As Britain's colonies gained independence in the 1950s and 1960s, colonial officials were told to sort their records. Papers that might embarrass the British government, the police, the army or local informers were not to be handed over to the new African governments. Some were burned. Others were secretly shipped to Britain.

For decades, the British government said little about them. Then, in 2011, a group of elderly Kenyans who had been detained and tortured during the Mau Mau emergency of the 1950s took the British government to court. During the case, it emerged that thousands of colonial files had been kept out of sight at a government site called Hanslope Park. The foreign secretary admitted their existence, and over the following years about 20,000 files from dozens of former territories were transferred to Britain's National Archives, where historians can now read them.

The documents confirmed much of what Kenyan survivors had been saying for decades. In 2013, the British government agreed to pay nearly £20 million to more than 5,000 Kenyan victims and expressed regret for the abuse. Historians such as Caroline Elkins, whose research on the Kenyan detention camps had been fiercely criticised, found that the hidden files supported much of her work.

Reading the record carefully

Archives do not simply tell the truth. Every document was written by someone, for a reason.

Colonial records, for example, were mostly written by officials who saw Africans as subjects to be managed. They can tell you how much tax a district paid, or what a district officer thought of a local chief, but they often leave out what Africans themselves thought, felt or wanted. Historians call these gaps "silences". Yet African voices do sometimes break through: in the 1520s, King Afonso I of Kongo wrote to the King of Portugal protesting against the slave trade, and many of his letters still survive.

That is why the best historians combine written records with oral history: the memories of elders, songs, praise poems and family traditions. A colonial report might describe an uprising in two paragraphs; the grandchildren of those who took part may remember far more. We explored how oral memory works in When an Elder Dies, a Library Burns.

A race against time

Many of Africa's archives are in danger. Heat, humidity and termites destroy paper. Fires and floods have wiped out collections. Many national archives are underfunded, with too few trained staff and too little money for proper storage.

There is good news too. Since 2004, the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme has funded local teams around the world to photograph fragile collections. Its African projects include manuscripts in Djenné, monastery books in Ethiopia and old studio photographs from Mali. The programme has put millions of images online, and the original documents remain with their owners. African universities, libraries and private foundations are running digitisation projects of their own.

Questions remain about ownership. Some African records still sit in European archives, and some scholars argue they should be returned, much like the debate over the Benin Bronzes. Others say that free digital copies, shared fairly, may matter more than where the paper is kept.

Why it matters

Archives decide whose stories can be told. For centuries, Africa's history was written largely from outside, using records kept by traders, missionaries and colonial governments. Africa's own manuscripts, letters and family papers offer something different: the voices of Africans describing their own world.

Every trunk of manuscripts in Djenné, every parchment book in an Ethiopian monastery and every colonial file opened in London adds a little more to that picture. The work of finding, protecting and reading these records is far from finished, and it may change how we understand Africa's past for generations to come.

Further reading

• School of Advanced Study, University of London — Hidden histories: Britain's secret stash (2015)
• Hyperallergic — Four Million Images from the World's Endangered Archives (2015)
• The Elephant — Unhistories: Kenya's Mau Mau, a walk through the archives (2021)
• Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt, 2005)