I’m looking forward to presenting A Women’s Oral History Of West Africa at the G.A.S. Foundation‘s re:assemblages Symposium in Lagos, Nigeria, next month. This will be the first time I’ll be speaking about the project on the African continent and in West Africa, no less:

Keynote Panel: Rematriating the Archive

This keynote panel examines how the practice of rematriation, conceptualised by Indigenous women of Turtle Island in contrast to the patriarchal framing of repatriation, offers a framework for returning cultural property and knowledge to their rightful custodians, or, in rematriation terms, returning the sacred to the mother. The panel explores how repatriating archives creates practices that resists colonial and patriarchal logics, foregrounding care, orality, embodiment, kinship, and collective memory. In these spaces, rematriation is not a verb and a practice of listening, responding, and nurturing women’s presences in archives.

Sylvia Arthur presents A Women’s Oral History of West Africa, a living counter-archive centred on women elders, where stories circulate through orality, performance, and embodied practice, creating cycles of memory that resist erasure and foreground women’s voices.

Hon. Aisha Adamu Augie reflects on the FESTAC ’77 archive at CBAAC, tracing women’s presences across photographs, recordings, and documents often overlooked in institutional memory. She considers the work of seeing and being seen in the archive, addressing historical gaps, and preserving women’s contributions as living, resonant presences shaping Black and African cultural memory.

Dr. Jareh Das traces the living legacy of Ladi Kwali, Nigeria’s master potter, whose gestures, kinship, and material practice transform vessels into archives in motion. Kwali’s craft, transmitted across generations, embodies a continuous dialogue between past, present, and future, illustrating how women’s embodied knowledge keeps archives alive.

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