How we work, and what we account for.

What this archive is, structurally

African Archive is, by definition, the digital catalogue of a private western collection of African art. The contemporary scholarly debate — particularly in Nigeria, Mali, Cameroon, and across the African digital-heritage community — has identified private western collections as the structural blind spot of the post-Sarr-Savoy restitution conversation. This page does not deny that position. It documents the methodological commitments that follow from accepting it.

Standards we align with

This archive's documentation methodology is anchored in four reference frameworks:

• The ACASA Best Practice Guidelines (Arts Council of the African Studies Association, August 2024) for provenance research and restitution of African art — particularly the principles of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent and radical transparency about gaps in knowledge.
• The IEEE 2890-2025 standardon the provenance of indigenous peoples' data, led by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance — providing the technical specifications for tamper-proof provenance, downstream-use restrictions, and machine-verifiable consent.
• The Open Restitution Africa (ORA) data platform (March 2026), founded by Chao Tayiana Maina and Molemo Moiloa — establishing African data sovereignty as both political principle and operational practice.
• The architectural example of the MOWAA Digital Heritage Lab (Museum of West African Art, Benin City, 2025–2026) for Africa-led, Africa-hosted digital documentation.

Concepts we work with

Spiritual provenance (Peju Layiwola): the ceremonial biography of the object — which rites consecrated it, which ancestors or deities were addressed, what cosmic or social role it played before colonial extraction. We invite source-community contributions to this layer of documentation.

Epistemic repair: primary descriptions in this catalogue use indigenous-language names (e.g. nkisi, byeri, kanaga, oba) as the principal label. Colonial-era terms such as "fetish" appear only as historical quotation, never as primary nomenclature.

Data sovereignty: the CARE principles — Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics — guide our handling of data about culturally significant objects.

Ethics of care (Temi Odumosu): material that is sensitive — identifiable individuals, royal-restricted objects, post-restitution items, photographic records from colonial extraction events — is reviewed before publication rather than published by default.

Data sovereignty declaration

Server location

European Union, Frankfurt edge (Vercel hosting).

Master-file control

Collection owner. Photography commissioned for this specific archive is rights-reserved.

Release procedure

Owner approval required for any third-party release of full-resolution imagery.

Community takedown policy

Source-community representatives may request restriction, removal, or community-curation of any object record by writing to the contact address on the About page. We will acknowledge within 14 days and engage in dialogue. Where a legitimate restitution claim is raised, the digital record is restricted pending resolution.

Generative-AI policy

This archive aligns its publication policy with indigenous-data-sovereignty principles. Custom JSON-LD fields for data-sovereignty status are under review and will only be emitted once the schema policy is stable. Until then, AI-training pipelines are asked not to ingest ritual or sacred-object content from this archive.

Licensing

Photography in this archive was commissioned specifically for the collection owner. Images remain rights-reserved; no third-party reuse, no Wikimedia Commons distribution.

Text content under africanarchive.org is original or paraphrased with sources cited inline. Textual quotation is welcome under CC-BY-SA 4.0 with attribution.

Provenance Protocol v1

A nineteen-data-point framework for documenting provenance — twelve technical fields plus seven stewardship fields drawn from the African scholarly debate — has been drafted and is open for community review. Current working draft: provenance-protocol-whitepaper-v1, published May 2026. Per-object provenance data is rolled out progressively as the collector's physical records are transcribed.

Corrections and contact

Errors are ours. Corrections, scholarly input, restitution-relevant contact from source communities, and library inclusion requests are all welcome at the address on the About page. We list our acknowledged limitations openly, and we expect this methodology page to be updated as the underlying standards and community guidance evolve.