Archives can vanish without falling silent. Scattered references, missing originals, copies, seals, and memories may still reveal what a lost repository contained and why it mattered. The Chiriguana archives show how Indigenous communities preserved political correspondence and legal guarantees through mobile collections and knowledgeable intermediaries.
This post follows our research trip to Maputo, where we explored the depths of colonial archives and sought out voices rarely captured in official records. Faced with the limits of written sources, we turned to oral histories, weaving these stories into Tramas Coloniais, our podcast that reimagines how African histories can be shared. It’s an invitation to rethink colonial legacies through voices and perspectives beyond the written pages.
A young researcher’s experience in the African archives of Angola, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau.
Why are people so sure that women are not in the archives?
This question serves as a starting point for a reflection on archival institutions and the challenges of uncovering women’s traces and voices within their collections. Drawing from my experience, the archival research provided me different flavors and at least one undeniable truth: women are always present in the sources, even in periods when efforts were made to silence them.
A researcher’s experience visiting an archive in Samoa with holdings from the German colonial period.
A brief itinerary of a young legal historian on his trip to Lisbon`s archives.
A brief itinerary of a young legal historian on his trip to Lisbon`s archives.
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