How we work, and what we account for.

What this archive is

African Archive is the digital catalogue of a private European collection of African art. This page sets out the rules we document by — what we take our bearings from, how we name objects, how we handle data, and where our limits lie.

What we take our bearings from

Four frameworks shape our documentation:

• The ACASA Best Practice Guidelines (Arts Council of the African Studies Association, ratified August 2024) for provenance research and restitution. Central for us: Free, Prior and Informed Consent, and the willingness to name gaps in knowledge openly rather than paper over them.
• IEEE 2890-2025, the first international standard on the provenance of indigenous peoples' data, published in November 2025 and aligned with the CARE principles of the Global Indigenous Data Alliance. It describes how provenance can be recorded tamper-proof, downstream use restricted, and consent verified by machine.
• The Open Restitution Africa data platform, online since March 2025, founded by Chao Tayiana Maina and Molemo Moiloa. It shows what African data sovereignty looks like in practice.
• The Digital Heritage Lab of the Museum of West African Art in Benin City, as a model for Africa-led digitisation.

How we name objects

The aim. Where scholarship documents a term from the culture of origin — nkisi, byeri, kanaga — it should come first, with the western generic term alongside it.

Where we actually stand.This catalogue grew out of a collection appraisal written over several decades. Part of the holdings therefore still carries labels from the European collecting tradition, including the colonially loaded word "fetish"; most titles are western generic terms such as "mask" or "figure". We have not quietly deleted those labels — they stand that way in the source, and anyone tracing the collection has to be able to find them again. We are replacing them step by step with the documented indigenous term, keeping the historical word only as a pointer to the source. That work is not finished, and we would rather write this here than claim the opposite.

Spiritual provenance. The ceremonial biography of an object — which rites consecrated it, which ancestors or deities were addressed, what cosmic or social role it held in its original context. Where the scholarly literature documents this layer we record it; where it is unknown, we say so.

Data sovereignty. The CARE principles — Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics — guide how we handle data on culturally significant objects.

An ethics of care (Temi Odumosu). Sensitive material — identifiable individuals, objects under royal restriction, cases following a restitution, photographs from colonial acquisition contexts — is reviewed before publication rather than published by default.

How the object texts are written

The object texts rest on documents. Three sources feed each entry: the collection appraisal, written by an independent expert, which records material, dimensions, acquisition and — where known — provenance; the object photographs commissioned for this catalogue; and our own research dossiers on the people and region concerned.

From those sources a draft is composed with AI assistance and carried into the other two languages the same way. The collection owner checks the factual core, material above all. Where appraisal and draft diverge, we correct in favour of the appraisal.

A draft can put the weight in the wrong place — elaborating on a making technique that is not in fact documented. We therefore check the texts against the documents and rewrite the passages affected. Notes on inaccuracies are welcome; the route for that is below.

Where the data sits

Database

Frankfurt am Main, European Union.

Delivery

Pages are rendered and served from the Frankfurt region (Vercel hosting).

Image files

The master files stay with the collection owner. All photographs were commissioned for this archive; all rights reserved.

Release

Full-resolution images go to third parties only with the owner's express consent.

Generative AI

We ask operators of AI training systems not to ingest ritual or sacred-object content from this archive. We will publish machine-readable data-sovereignty fields once a stable standard for them emerges.

Rights of use

The photographs were commissioned by the collection owner. All rights reserved: no third-party use, no distribution via Wikimedia Commons.

The texts on africanarchive.org are summaries of our sources, cited in the running text and produced by the process described above. Quotation from them is welcome under CC-BY-SA 4.0 with attribution.

Documenting provenance

We have drafted a nineteen-point framework for provenance — twelve technical fields plus seven stewardship fields drawn from the African scholarly debate. It exists as a draft and is under internal review. The provenance notes in the collection appraisal have since been transcribed; carrying them through to the object pages is the next step.

Corrections

Mistakes are ours. We are grateful for corrections, scholarly input and enquiries from libraries — the contact address is on the About page. Where we reach our limits, we write that down. This page will be revised as the underlying standards or the state of research change.