Walking through postcolonial archives in Tamale, Northern Ghana

Abstract

This article asks what the practice of walking might reveal about archival research in postcolonial contexts. Through an exploration of walking in its many iterations in the city of Tamale, Northern Ghana—including seeking directions to state archives, talking with others while walking toward archives, and observing the exchange of archival data within communities as citizens walk—I explore the relationship between Tamale’s colonial, state, indigenous and community-led archival spheres. As a sensory, relational, and embodied practice, walking affords unique insights into different experiences of and relationships to archives. Walks toward state archives reveal sensorial histories of colonial power enacted through space for Tamale’s Dagbamba and Hausa residents, while also highlighting the foreign research networks who continue to draw upon this archival material. At the same time, documents within state archives—including maps and files—provide new possibilities for “virtual walks” through the colonial city, revealing insights into the positioning of both state and indigenous archives as they relate to the colonial production of space. Ethnographic reflections on walks to indigenous areas of the city in search of postcolonial archives afford insights into other archival spaces that are firmly situated within sites of resistance to colonial urban planning schemes. Walking lends new insights into the ways that archives are accessed and circulated outside of the state, as archival cassette recordings were made by Dagbamba recordists as they walked through indigenous neighborhoods during the postcolonial period. Subsequently, these recordings have been digitized and are now circulated between community members via mobile phones as they walk through their neighborhoods each day. Walking thus provides a framework for thinking across archival spaces in postcolonial contexts, encouraging dialogue between these seemingly unrelated archival spheres and communities.