Making African Connections

Making African Connections, developed between 2019 and 2021, was a digital humanities project spearheaded by Professor JoAnn McGregor and Dr. James Baker, with support from the University of Sussex, the School of Global Studies, the Sussex Humanities Lab, and the Sussex Africa Centre and funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK. Additionally, partners and collaborators include historians and museums in England, Botswana, and Namibia. The initial goal for Making African Connections was to enliven discourse around decolonizing museums by focusing on cultural geography, art history, museum studies and digital humanities.

        One of the strengths that Making African Connections has is its archival search functions. Users enter the website through the Index page, and by opening the table of contents tab in the top left corner, one is directed to the Browse or Map Browse search functions. The Browse option is the standard search: sort images by title, date created, identifier, or class; in ascending or descending order. The Map Browse option offers a much more intriguing interactive. With the Map Browse option, users can view where the items uploaded to this archive are located geographically on whichever digital map they prefer (Streets, Grayscale, Satellite). This function arguably enhances the users understanding of the artifact by spatially locating them within the world, or in this case, Southern Africa or England. Either browsing option will then take users to the easy-to-use Dublin Core metadata pages of whichever artifact is selected. For example, if someone were interested in discovering interviews of the Botswanan people; they would open the Map Browse page and the map would distinguish how many exhibition items were located in each area. Once a person selects Botswana, a pin will distinguish which location the item was found. Selecting the pin will redirect you to the Dublin Core page providing the interview and summary of, say, “Making Botswana: Interview with Mopati Seropola.” Once the Dublin Core page is open, scroll down to the “Other Media” subtitle and click the “.mp4” link and the site will redirect anyone to the interview with Seropola.

        Making African Connections is a good source that can provide an introduction to fields of colonization, African studies, museum studies, or digital history. Making African Connections can even be used as an corrective to the histories taught in the classroom, offering up a nontraditional, non-Eurocentric view of the same subjects that are being taught in class.