Indaba – from Zulu and Xhosa meaning “a matter for discussion”; also used in South African English to mean “conference.”

Most of our digital indabas take place over Zoom. You can view the recording at the links below.

March 12, 2026

Decoding Emotions in African Historical Texts: AI Analysis of Colonial Nigerian Newspapers

How did African editors voice opposition under colonial censorship? Drawing on editorials and reader submissions from Lagos newspapers (1882–1921), this talk uses AI to detect emotional patterns and trace how editorial discourse evolved over four decades of colonial rule. The presentation explores both the potential and the challenges of applying AI to African historical texts, considering how more collaborative and equitable approaches might strengthen this emerging field.

Speaker: Dr. Nozomi Sawada (Komazawa University, Tokyo)

No video available

November 5, 2025

Digital Justice and the Global South: Decolonizing Archives through Gold Coast Novels

Speaker: Akua Agyeiwaa Denkyi-Manieson (Ph.D. Candidate, University of Nebraska)

No video available

September 17, 2025

Black Orpheus Digitally Revisited with Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún

Writer and linguist Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún presents on Black Orpheus, a landmark literary journal of African and African American literature and arts. Originally published between 1957 and 1967, Black Orpheus was founded by German scholar Ulli Beier and played a significant role in Africa’s artistic awakening by curating and platforming works by mid-20th-century Francophone and Anglophone African writers, as well as African American artists. Túbọ̀sún’s project revisits this historic cultural journal, using various digital tools and methods to bring its legacy to a new generation. He will discuss how digital humanities tools can be employed to analyze, preserve, and reinterpret historical publications like Black Orpheus.

The talk is moderated by Brigid Enchill, a former fellow at the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities (IDRH).

November 12, 2024

Imagine Lagos: Mapping History, Place, and Politics in a Nineteenth-Century African City

Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi in conversation with the history and STS scholar Dr. Damilola Adabayo of York University.

The first in a series of African digital humanities conversations this academic season is a book discussion on Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi’s Imagine Lagos. This groundbreaking book provides a historical exploration of Lagos, Nigeria’s economic capital and West Africa’s most populous city, from a digital humanities perspective. Adelusi-Adeluyi utilizes historical sources, maps, and walking cartography to create new perspectives on the nineteenth-century history of Lagos. Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi will be in conversation with the history and STS scholar Dr. Damilola Adabayo of York University.

No video available

April 20, 2022

Yorùbá NLP and Machine Learning: A Discussion with Ife Adebara and David Ifeoluwa Adelani

Speakers

  • Ife Adebara – PhD Candidate, African Languages, Computational Linguistics, & Deep Learning, UBC; ATLI
  • David Ifeoluwa Adelani – PhD Candidate, Africa NLP, Universität des Saarlandes; Masakhane NLP

December 27, 2021

Biafran War Memories: A Digital Archive of First-Hand Accounts of the Nigerian Civil War

Speakers

  • Chika Oduah – Vice News, Dakar, Senegal
  • Dr. Arthur Chigbo Anyaduba – University of Winnipeg, Canada

September 28, 2021

African Literature in the Digital Age

Speakers

  • Shola Adenekan – University of Amsterdam
  • Grace A. Musila – University of Witwatersrand

April 29, 2021

Digitizing Onitsha Market Literature

Speakers

  • Onookome Okome, University of Alberta
  • Elspeth Healey, University of Kansas Libraries
  • Daniel Rebossin, University of Florida Libraries
  • Ken Lohrentz, formerly of University of Kansas Libraries

Moderator: Liz MacGonagle, Kansas African Studies Center

In the context of the growing African digital humanities initiatives at the University of Kansas, this panel discussion is based on the digitization of the Onitsha pamphlets by libraries around the world and speaks specifically to the significance of the pamphlets as digital materials. Onitsha market literary pamphlets, integral texts of African popular literature, refer to a body of stories, plays, didactic discourses, and other publications produced by local presses in 1960s Onitsha in Nigeria. These important works emerged as symbolic expressions of the immense social and economic change taking place in the years before and after political independence from British rule and enhance our understanding of the modernizing dynamics of the period.

The Onitsha Collection in the Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas (KU) is one of several digital archives of the pamphlets in the US and offers a unique assemblage that represents some of the most representative works in market literary tradition in Africa. During this panel, librarians from the University of Kansas and the University of Florida speak to the making of the collections from their respective institutions, highlighting the processes of collecting and digitizing their present archives. Other speakers also reflect on the cultural significance and aesthetic value of the pamphlets from a non-digital context, focusing on the important role of market literature as texts of Nigerian popular culture.

December 10, 2020

Mapping Detention Centers

This inaugural edition of the African DH Indabas features Kenyan digital archivist Chao Tayiana, joined by Sylvia Fernández and Maira Álvarez to discuss their projects on the digital mapping of detention camps.

April 9, 2020

African DH Web Forum, Spring 2020

What is the current state of DH in Africa, and Africa in DH? What should an African Digital Humanities look like? Should it replicate Euro-centric patterns of DH research or could there be alternative theoretical approaches that recognize the centrality of Africa’s cultural record?

This web forum took place on April 9, 2020 with over 25+ participants and attendees from at least nine countries.