Tag: Books

My Unpackable Library: AI Erasures and the African Archive 

Text of Keynote Remarks delivered at the Africana Librarians Council’s 2026 spring meeting on April 16, 2026.

About a year ago, Kodjo and I sat somewhere in Accra with Brian Rosenblum and the KU Dean of Libraries Carol Smith. I think the discussion was something about the similar challenges of library work we had observed in Ghana.  As the only non-librarian in the midst, I was happy to listen, making observations that, in fact, appeared obvious to everyone, which is to say I had little to offer, and my colleagues were being generous. This morning, while I leave the technicalities of the library craft to you experts in the room, the question I want to begin with is less technical than personal: what does it mean to travel and leave your books behind with only the faintest hope of any reunion? When I left Lagos in 2013 for doctoral studies in the cold prairies of Canada, I did not just leave the lagoon, colors and energy of the city behind. I left my library. I left hundreds of books and volumes, collected over many years, annotated in margins, marked with memories of where I had bought them, where I had read them, and what they meant to my intellectual formation.  

Leaving Lagos without my books was, of course, not the preferred choice, but a decision the realities of a harsh Nigerian economy demanded. Like so many African scholars who have travelled away from their homeland for education, I had to confront what I would later call the crisis of the unpackable library. In a famous 1931 essay on his book collections, Walter Benjamin wrote beautifully about unpacking his library, describing the “chaotic memories” that overwhelm a collector when reunited with their beloved books. But Benjamin wrote from a position of eventual reunion, which invites us to reflect on those moments in which the condition of unpacking is endlessly deferred. 

What happens when our books as physical objects of knowledge have to remain in Lagos, Accra, or Rabat, rendered precarious in some humid storage or gifted away because the cost of shipping exceeds the stipends of graduate studentship abroad? Or, what happens when African scholars must choose between survival and their personal archives? The unpackable library, with its material loss, serves as a powerful metaphor for the larger crisis of African studies in the age of AI, namely the systematic erasure and marginalization of African knowledges in the very digital infrastructures that claim to democratize access to information. And this is the focus of my remarks today. 

I want to sit with these questions because they are not simply subjective queries about the anguish of abandoned personal libraries, but they are professional questions that many of us are familiar with in different contexts. And in 2026, with AI systems being trained on datasets that reflect precisely these histories of departure, loss and archival neglect, these are also urgent problems, having deeply political stakes,  

I speak to you today, therefore, as a collector who, at some point in my journey, could not collect all the books I had acquired, and as a scholar whose library is in two places and, therefore, in a symbolic sense, in neither of those places. And I address you as experts who have dedicated your professional lives to the very challenge I am describing – the problem of what survives as knowledge, what enters the intellectual record, and what gets valued for cataloguing and digital preservation. Because the crisis of the unpackable library is much intensified with the entry of Large Language Models into the informational landscape, this topic is relevant today. 

So,  how does a library become unpackable? Sometimes, an immigrant scholar must confront economic logics that impose choices on their quest for knowledge outside their homeland. Their book collection in the new location is almost never complete, with their library constantly vulnerable to absence, and to the archive that was never packed. We want to travel light, or we promise ourselves to retrieve our books later, but only a few of us get the opportunity to return home after our studies, never reclaiming what the Nigerian sociologist Ebenezer Obadare calls “a library languishing” somewhere else.

Benjamin’s observation that the acquisition of books is by no means a matter of money is fair, but I also think there is a class dimension to book buying and the ability to transport hundreds of books to new distant locations. To put it simply, our libraries are unpackable because of the forces of capital, something to which the bourgeois class may be impervious. Benjamin is right, though, that “the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner,” in this case, as it loses its African owner to another location. In the real sense of things, the libraries we left, and which appear to have left us, remain as past traces of our present intellectual engagements. They emerge as the symbolic objects of our disconnection from a home that, as the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire renders it, is “the mouth of a shark,” “the barrel of a gun.” Every act of packing and unpacking we perform anew in our latest location bears traces of a past habit of collecting – signs of the collection that was unpackable. To inquire about the significance of the African academic’s travels and the meanings encoded in their book collection is to demand answers the archive was never designed to provide. And now we pose the same questions in an era when that same archive, with its loud silences and gaps, is the training data for machines indifferent to the nuance and granularity of African ways of knowing. 

There is a deeper problem underneath the personal question of leaving our collections behind in Africa, though. We are invited to ask, for instance, why African intellectuals even leave their countries in the first place.  One of several answers may be the relationship of many people to knowledge as symbolized by books themselves or their lack in different places on the continent.  

Until recently, it was constantly observed that books written about Africa were sometimes not available in most African libraries. It makes sense, then, that some of the best African thinkers are pushed away by a culture that misrecognizes the value of books; this is a culture that is increasingly unfair to books, and to the book culture that molded an earlier generation of anticolonial and postcolonial African intellectuals. Even the idea of a public library or an institutional archive, as supposedly critical infrastructures of knowledge and memory, are anchored on weak systems, lacking support from the political class. This is why it was easy in 2018 for the French journalist Caroline Broué, to ask Chimamanda Adichie in Paris whether bookstores even exist at all in Nigeria. 

Despite Nigeria’s national library, its actual impact on the country’s sociopolitical landscape remains questionable. And this is not only a Nigerian problem; it is a continental issue, which is deeply historical, and rooted in the colonial policies that built archives to serve extraction rather than communities and which determined what could be valued as knowledge and what could not. It goes without saying, then, that the physical library and archive were already disadvantaged, their materials endangered, and, of course, you know that this process did not happen accidentally. It was organic and structural, the outcome of historically deliberate decisions about whose knowledge was worth preserving.  

With the work of scholarship in the age of digital reproduction, these silences and absences become amplified. It is a good thing that some libraries and archives are digitizing their holdings, and here I can think of the defiant work of recovery at the Nketiah Archives at the University of Ghana, or the work of the African digital heritage in Nairobi, as well as other digital initiatives across the continent. At the same time, many African institutional collections, especially repositories of African-language materials remain undigitized, with much oral tradition and indigenous knowledge invisible to today’s AI infrastructure.  

Yet, as the unpackable library migrates into the digital age, carrying all of its absence with it, it is necessary to signal how the digitization of the African archive makes it vulnerable to extractive AI practices and platform capitalism;  Here is a paradox we have to live with.  On the one hand, the lack of digitization means the African library is not machine-readable; on the other hand, to digitize it means AI companies can access and scrape it in a capitalist maneuver that undermines African data sovereignty. Although hinted earlier, we may extend this observation more fully into the digital present, and specifically into the moment we are now in — a moment in which AI systems are being trained on data of almost incomprehensible scale, and deployed as though they represented the full spectrum of human knowledge. Without being a minor epistemological gap, these sociotechnical systems learn from what was digitized, and never from what is not there. It is now well established that African languages, in their oral and written forms, as well as their distinct literary, philosophical and intellectual traditions, are hardly represented in the training data of most large AI models. This has huge epistemic implications, given the massive amount of data that has not been transcribed, as well as the community knowledge that has not been digitized. In fact, a grim picture emerges when you consider the personal libraries and private collections of diaspora scholars whose books are still on dusty shelves in Lagos, Kumasi or Kampala, waiting for an owner who may never return. 

When an AI system is asked to speak to African culture and history, it draws on a dataset that privileges and reinscribes the Western intellectual heritage that constitutes its very ontology. When it is asked to generate text in Kikuyu or Twi, its underrepresentation of these marginalized lingustic contexts becomes visible. Rather than the fundamental details of these languages and their histories, what it generates is a simulacrum of reality, with the silence of the AI archive not just a mere shadow, but a replacement that distorts Africa. African history in today’s AI systems becomes unwanted hallucinations in the mouth of new digital platforms speaking the old languages of colonial technologies. Disturbingly, the most dangerous thing about this reality is not that the model is always wrong when it writes Africa; rather it is that the AI assemblage hardly comprehends the limits of its own knowledge, not knowing it is wrong and generating information that excludes a significant part of the African archive. I may be well aware of what is missing in my collection because of my unpackable library, but the most authoritative language models are designed to obscure their ignorance.

To put it in the Adichiean sense, the AI library on Africa exemplifies the danger of a single story. As Adichie explains, the power of the single story is not that it is wrong; it is that an incomplete story becomes the definitive story of an individual or group. A model trained on incomplete data cannot identify its own incompleteness, offering answers with equal authority whether drawing on a rich corpus or an incomplete one. To acknowledge that what it has generated is an approximation built from an accumulated body of intellectual gaps is to work against its own epistemic protocol. Rather than a systemic breach, this single story is the natural outcome of building AI systems on data sources derived from what Mudimbe trenchantly calls the colonial library and its invention of Africa. And it means that unless deliberate and corrective ethical work is undertaken, both at the level of collection and digitization, as well as at the level of metadata development and community partnership, these systems will continue to reproduce the marginalization of African knowledge at a speed and scale unprecedented in previous technology. Indeed, if the unpackable libraries of the AI landscape are never complete, to unpack the library has to be seen beyond a symbolic ritual of remembrance and performative re-identification with the books we love. It is a political act, since what we failed to unpack and the knowledge we left behind, the books we never catalogued or made machine-readable, revive problematic intellectual histories that rehash a persistent image of Africa as the antithesis of the rational world.

As I bring these remarks to a close, we must face the hard realities and understand that we may buy new books and replace old ones, but the libraries we have left still speak across the Atlantic. They whisper the necessity of becoming knowledge societies that take technological transformations seriously. This work cannot remain trapped in the private realm, even if that is where the most innovative African labor currently lives. As private, informal and community archival and library work intensifies on the continent, they remind us of the failures of the political class that do not value this kind of work, including the weight of postcolonial memories. I mention these private initiatives lest the discussion elide the ongoing work of various African digital actors, such as Masakhane, which promotes grassroots NLP for African languages, and Archivi.ng, which focuses on historical preservation in Nigeria. 

Many of you may understand this as well. In your professional capacity as African studies librarians working in the United States, you are custodians of two different layers of libraries and archives. You work within an American institutional infrastructure that has its own preservation mandates, cataloguing standards and, frankly, its own priorities, yet you have also chosen, by virtue of your field, to take responsibility for a body of knowledge that some of your colleagues and administrators do not fully understand and do not always evaluate effectively. You spend time justifying the relevance of your Africana library work to institutional heads withholding funding, with some of you carrying that responsibility from lived experiences and proximity to these intellectual heritage and traditions; others have come to it through the rigorous scholarly and professional commitments that define your work. 

Either way, what this position gives you in a most unique manner is the capacity to identify what is missing and absent from the physical collections in our libraries, as well as what is erased from the cultural record that now dominate AI platforms. Many of you know which languages are absent from the training corpus, and which community archives are still unknown to many digitization initiatives. You can help reclaim what has been left behind, particularly in the sense of advocating for its digital recovery and preservation and facilitating its meaningful inclusion in the record on which AI is being trained today. I am not suggesting there are easy answers or any tidy solution. But every collection effort and metadata development decision you make, every argument for why your institution should fund digitization of African-language materials or collect more African materials are arguments about what AI systems should know, not just for the African present but for future moments. Things like cataloguing standards must, therefore, be seen for what they are as sites of epistemic struggle and politics. The same can be said of the metadata often attached to digitized African materials, which forms a significant part of what AI systems use to understand the African context.  On the assumption that bad metadata ultimately produces bad outputs, advocating for culturally informed cataloguing and metadata schemas is insisting on better AI models. 

For us to make the knowledge from our African networks part of current computational systems requires us to build even more organic relationships and have a willingness to let communities determine the terms of their own representation in the digital record. In line with its extraction of labor, OpenAI might be more interested in precarious wages for content moderators in Africa than in building these relationships, but the work of meaningful, community-accountable digital preservation belongs to African studies librarians, archivists, and scholars of professional standing and the scholarly seriousness to insist on something accountable and ethical. We may say that unpacking never ends, and that we never can truly unpack a library that was never indeed packable. But with AI, the ethical thing is to unpack the erasures and silences of these advanced technologies, knowing that this is not just a matter of speculative futurity. If AI is writing Africa out of the present, we must seize today as the moment of resistance. 

Finally, those of us whose libraries are still unpacked in Nigeria will probably gift once-prized possessions to an institutional library eventually; for now, we must continue to contemplate how our books must be unpacked. This story is that of every African scholar who departed without their archive, and those of every community whose knowledge is yet to enter the digital ecosystem.  I know that libraries, whether culturally informed and digitally sovereign or not, are never truly complete. Yet, we must build the African library in an AI age with the full awareness that what we preserve, and what we allow to remain unpreserved, is never a neutral act. When Kodjo, Brian, Carol, and I sat in Accra a year ago, I was a silent observer of your craft. But today, I see that our work is the same, which is to reclaim the archive that was never packed for a sophisticated digital age, and to finally begin the long journey to a home that is not the mouth of a shark.  

The Panenka’s Paradox

A slightly different version of this article was first published by Olongo Africa.

At the Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium during the 2026 AFCON final, Morocco’s Brahim Díaz attempted something almost unheard of in the 68-year history of the Africa Cup of Nations: a Panenka penalty. Rather than diving early as the technique’s logic dictates, Senegal’s Edouard Mendy chose to stay put, unmoved by the vociferous roar of the home crowd. As the ball arced gently towards him, Mendy arrested the deception, catching the ball, much to the delight and euphoric cheers of the Senegalese contingent in the stadium. Except for Zinedane Zidane’s cheeky chip in the 2006 World Cup final, a Panenka is rare in any high-stakes final; at AFCON, it is virtually nonexistent, a fact that makes this particular gamble in an already controversy-laden match all the more remarkable. With disputed refereeing decisions and a chaotic 17-minute walk-off protest by Senegal on its heels, Diaz’s Panenka was a performative act that felt iconic in the history of the beautiful game. Whether intended to bring calm to chaos or crown his stellar tournament in refulgent style, the Real Madrid forward reminded fans that beauty and tragedy are inseparable when we gamble on grace over certainty.

Photo by Omar Ramadan on Pexels.com

Historically, the Panenka comes to us from the exploits of Czech footballer Antonín Panenka, after whom it was named. He attempted it for Czechoslovakia in the 1976 European Championship final against West Germany. The idea is to prioritize the gentle chip of elegance over the familiar force of the spot kick, gently dinking the ball into the center of the goal as the goalkeeper thinks you’re aiming hard for one of the corners of the goalmouth. 

The word ‘panenka’ in Czech literally means “little doll” or “puppet,” contains a suffix (-anka) that transforms the base word panna (young girl/maiden) into an affectionate, smaller form. The word panenka is itself a diminutive, giving the move its characteristic sense of softness and delicacy, which linguistically mirrors the physical execution of the penalty as a soft and gentle chip rather than a forceful strike. Antonín Panenka’s clever execution was so elegant that France Football called him “a footballing poet,”  a sentiment echoed by Pelé, who remarked that anyone “who takes a penalty like that must be either a genius or a madman.”  But there are certain elements of a perfect Panenka, as Antonin Panenka himself would later describe it in an interview with Ben Lyttleton:

The main ingredient is to do with your own behaviour – your body language and your eyes – to ensure the goalkeeper doesn’t think that you want to kick the penalty in a different way. My run-up was always longer to gain a bit of extra time; and faster so the goalkeeper doesn’t have a chance to change direction.

The shot should not be too fast, you have to chip the ball so it glides. Also you have to send the ball directly to the centre because even if it is one metre from the centre on the right or left, the penalty loses its beauty. When the ball is crossing the line, it should be already dropping. Even better if the ball reaches its peak height before the goal-line and then goes down.

In defiance of its technical brilliance, the Panenka sculpts its own narrative by going against the grain of penalty conventions; it reconfigures nonchalance and its slow, cheeky casualness into a delicate yet creative force that delights the senses.  Framing the Panenka in these artistic terms means we can appreciate it as a sublime gesture of bodily skill on the soccer pitch, effecting an aesthetic spectacle whose greatness crystallizes in the instant the goalkeeper dives the wrong way, and the ball crosses the line. Our sensory encounters with such a beauty, or our perception of it as an artwork in the immediacy of the penalty moment, produce an emotional intensity, an affect that rings across the supporters’ stands and echoes in the language of the most electrifying commentary.  

In the sense described by the Romantic poet John Keats, Díaz’s Panenka penalty might be said to have generated a negative capability for fans who, during that AFCON finale, watched the Panenka moment while suspended between hope and dread, unable to resolve the unfolding tension until the ball dropped in the safe arms of Mendy. From the letters of Keats, negative capability describes “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Logic and reason may fail any attempt to account for the nervy seconds leading to the penalty or why the safety of the power-shot offered no seductions, but the audacity of Díaz’s penalty, mirroring that of legends like Lionel Messi, Zinédine Zidane, Francesco Totti and Andrea Pirlo, suggests that, with the penalty taker – much like Keats’ great poet, “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” For the spectator, the mystery of it all is confounding and the uncertainties of a fleeting footballing magic are rather satisfying. We don’t doubt what we have just beheld, but the fact of its risk befuddles us. 

Keats might have written about the observer’s tolerance for ambiguity in his letters, rather than the mindset of those in an athletic event; yet there is something about the poetry of the moment he might find familiar, particularly as logic surrenders to the sensational triumph of feeling and imagination as the Panenka demands.  Indeed, Keats wasn’t alone in this approach to poetic beauty. Edmund Burke, for his part, contrasted beauty with the sublime, arguing that the passion caused by something truly great is astonishment, “that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” This moment of performing the Panenka, when time stands still, and awe and wonder seize the observing spectator, is similarly one of horror, presenting a free play of beauty and horror enacted at once. Seen through Burke’s analyses, Diaz’s miss isn’t just a dagger to the heart of a nation; it manifests the darker edges of the sublime.

Photo by Hassan Omar Wamwayi on Pexels.com

Beyond Burke’s sublime, the Panenka also transcends the thresholds of extreme confidence and signifies the human propensity to impose order on the chaos of existence, to find splendor in the intensities of competitive life. Its significations go beyond football, then, as it represents our need to choose the poetic arc over the pragmatic force. The Panenka comes to symbolize our quest for agency in an uncertain universe that doesn’t always follow our scripts. The poetry of the Panenka, like the verses of the Romantic age, shapes football at a deeply sublime level, but this inclination for beauty often courts tearful horrors like a fan’s agonizing reaction to the brilliance of a missed chance that eliminates their team.

Those seconds leading up to the Panenka are indeed bound up with thoughts colored by the likelihood of failure and the possibility of spectacular success. What a player does at that point is not only a function of their mental fortitude but also of our need for control. As both a curse and a blessing, a duality Díaz discovered firsthand in Morocco, the Panenka manifests our natural inclinations to enact the struggles of everyday life from a place of optimism. And the fact that this hope can either kill a nation’s eternal wait for another AFCON trophy, as in this case, or produce the kind of climactic brilliance he ventured is what makes the Panenka distinctive as football’s quintessential gamble.

There are probably other meanings to Díaz’s Panenka. It may have been intended to humiliate Senegal and inflict a psychological wound, but its horrible failure both left the striker distraught and exposed the perils of a delicious skill. And I am not suggesting here that the Panenka is inherently disrespectful; rather, in its manifested ambiguity, we see ourselves in the beautiful risks that repulse the opponent, and the risky beauty that none of us can resist. What was supposed to be an assured statement of psychological dominance in a fraught and thrilling encounter became an account of how the desire for control can often be messy. Only a select number of players have dared the Panenka in major finals. The fact that Díaz chose a crucial moment of Africa’s most prestigious tournament, with Morocco’s 50-year trophy drought on the line, and in front of a home crowd, only amplifies the risks that come with Panenka’s gamble.

Perhaps its failure even had unintended benefits. Nigerian journalist Ayomide Oguntimehin, present in the stadium, suggested that the miss may have diffused the fury and tensions in a volatile atmosphere, sparing African football from disaster. Whether or not this is true, the moment’s complexity, simultaneously tragic for the host nation and relieving for Senegal, who went on to lift the trophy after a 1–0 scoreline, only reinforces the Panenka’s essential ambiguity as a delectable skill that offers both salvation and, in Díaz’s case, suffering. Indeed, an AFCON Panenka is an exceptional occurrence – in fact, very few, if any, are documented – and that is not because African players lack any technical ambition compared to their counterparts elsewhere. Yet its now-famous failure at the 2026 final signals more than the artistry of a special technique. It reminded the world that a Panenka’s vulnerability is at the same time football’s most human moment, defined by beauty inextricable from risk. 

When Senegal’s Mendy caught that ball that night, he didn’t just save a penalty in the most stoic display of composure, he preserved the Panenka’s fundamental paradox, denying the victory of its poetic graces. By staying still, Mendy essentially became the critic who refuses to be seduced by the poet’s aesthetic maneuvers, rewriting the grammar of a heated moment for pragmatism. Had it succeeded, handing Morocco its first AFCON trophy since 1976 (the year we first learned of Panenka, both the man and his skill), we would remember only Díaz’s audacity – more so because the same technique which birthed what many might call Morocco’s greatest footballing joy when Achraf Hakimi pulled off a Panenka to eliminate Spain at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar became the source of its greatest heartbreak in 2026.  

The paradox of this tragic symmetry couldn’t be more textured. In the crushing failure, we’re reminded that Panenka’s beauty lies not in any fantasies of certainty, but in its necessary risk. Every Panenka contains the possibility of this, with a ball either caught by the keeper or sailing home, and a daring player either shattered or ecstatic. Ultimately, we are confronted with a technique that can be both sublime and fragile, more like the human ambitions it so quietly represents. To contemplate the Panenka, therefore, is to behold beauty and embrace its inherent messiness and contradictions.

2025 AFCON: Football as Signifier

You may read my reflections on the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations here. The first essay, “The Intimate Moments of Football Solidarity”, captures the intimacies we encounter on the pitch. My argument is that, beyond the politics and nationalism football often stages, the African Cup of Nations’ most powerful moments show the bonds between those on the field. Find the article on Sean Jacobs’ Substack, Eleven Named People:

I am not suggesting that intimate spaces are absolutely devoid of the political nor that football is all pleasure and genial encounters. While the personal can indeed be political, sometimes, intimate moments want to signify something other than politics. To the second point, forever standing in the shadow of this spirit of solidarity is, of course, its subliminal opposite, namely a propensity for violence among sporting actors and fans. While both arguably come from and are produced by the same ardor, the game truly mesmerizes us when its communal bonds prevail. At the same time, these intimate moments are not always centered on the tragic and awful. There are many instances during a game when players from opposing teams share laughter on the turf, or simply banter and humanity, despite the playful seriousness of their momentary adversarial contest. In these instances, the antagonistic drums of rivalry sound less forcefully than the sonic affections of human connections.

The second essay, “AFCON, Literature, and Distant Kilns,” brings Nigerian literature into conversation with its football, examining both as parallel cultural productions that enact the tensions between home and diaspora. My main focus is to ask what gets lost when “home” becomes invisible and a Nigerian football identity, like its literary establishment, is consecrated abroad. It is on OlongoAfrica.

The country’s broader sociopolitical decline suggests we are not just exporting our best people; we have outsourced the very parameters for determining what it means to be a Nigerian. I don’t endorse any needless binarism between home-based talents and their diasporic colleagues that often erupts on online football forums, but I am also asking about how footballers lay claims to places they inhabit from afar, and how local football administrators who have relinquished the development of local players ask of legitimate outsiders to sing the songs of a foreign nation.  Yet, the tragic irony is that we mustn’t misrecognize the agency of the diasporic subject who left home or was born abroad but still chooses to sculpt the narratives of their being and subjectivity through a Nigerian homeland that sometimes suffocates. For those in the former group, exile is effected by the realities of collapsed dreams and infrastructure and leaving home is not a question of desire, but of practical necessity and common sense. The best of Nigerian writers and players do not leave Nigeria because they want to, but because home becomes the place dreams are buried in a nightmare of perpetual stasis and untold confusion. They did not leave because home became the mouth of a shark, but because they abhorred the future fantasized for them by the jaws of rotten mouths.

Diaspora and My Unpackable Library

The loss of books is often one of the many effects of the mobility of African scholars, especially when they travel permanently for education in the West. I reflect on this, thinking with Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library”

What does it mean to travel and leave your books behind with only the faintest hope of any reunion? I did not leave only Lagos behind in 2013 when I travelled to Canada for doctoral education; like many people, I left my books too, a forced decision that still haunts today. But isn’t one of the often-overlooked conditions of migrancy the loss of books and personal libraries? Or to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, don’t the diasporic trajectories of the African scholar sometimes involve the loss of piles of volumes that may never see daylight again after years of darkness because of the collector’s willful displacement?

It does not have to be the case, but most of the times, certain economic anxieties impose choices on the African scholar who seeks knowledge outside the continent. His book collection in his new location is almost never complete; his library constantly vulnerable to absence. We don’t want to carry too much luggage when we travel, or we promise ourselves to retrieve them later, even if we never do. As genuine collectors and book lovers, when we pack our bags for the west to study, we want to take along the best of a collection that contains our memories and that catalogues our scribbles and communion with texts, but the uncertainties ahead often mean we must prioritize other symbols of survival, of arrival.

Markus Clemens, Unsplash.

Some must wonder if African urban spaces even have leisurely subjects that worry about the many pleasures of books and bookstores, or that walk in the city as a practice of everyday life; whether there exist flâneurs that delight in sauntering around public spaces in which they encounter different objects. In their many instances of subversive loitering, the flaneur, in moments of walking contemplation of cities like Lagos, produces narratives that are often based on the ancient habit of collecting used books from the dusty grounds of street bookstores and highbrow book spaces But what happens when as academics, they have to travel abroad? How should we read the meanings encoded into the collecting of books, a process that is sometimes the pastime of cosmopolitan African subjects? And how must we unpack, or perhaps recover, “a library languishing” in the homeland, in the words of a Nigerian scholar in the US academe? Are there any meanings to the hastily discarded books in our personal collection just before we left home for study elsewhere?

The art of collecting books and building a library are longings of the soul for many a woman of letters but at the moment we decided it was sacrosanct we leave home to study abroad—often permanently—most of us often leave behind books so meticulously packed after many years of sentimental collecting. So, with a stab to the heart, we are forced to forgo the cherished texts collected over the years, together with the memories, histories, and attachments they evoke. And the economic calculus that determines what we must pack remains long after we have settled in our new location and faced again with a dialectical tension between the poles of order and disorder, in Benjamin’s memorable phrasing. And he adds, “thus is the existence of the collector.”

In his 1931 short essay, “Unpacking My Library: A Speech on Collecting,” Benjamin explores readers’ relationship to their books, using the occasion of unpacking his many books from their boxes to offer insights on a reader’s possessions and on the art of collecting itself. Being then “at the threshold of forty and without property, position, home or assets,” Benjamin assigns usefulness and agency to his books as they provoke critical reflections through the process of unpacking them. The “chaotic memories” that is the passion of the collector overwhelm the room, with memories of cities and bookstores, of bookshelves at conference venues, of the disorder of used books on the streets of Ibadan or Accra. The ownership of these books, the most intimate entanglements that one can have with objects, invites us to disappear into them. Not that the books possess us, but that we own them sufficiently for the renewal of the self, or our existence each time the moment of packing and unpacking reveals itself.

Of course, like Benjamin I speak here of my own close scrutiny of books and the social facts that organize our relations with, and memory of, them. Although when Benjamin notes that the acquisition of books is by no means a matter of money, I would think there is a class dimension to book buying and the ability to transport hundreds and thousands of books to the West when one has to leave. Our libraries are unpackable because of the forces of capital, something to which the bourgeois class is impervious. My meditation chiefly applies to the mostly, young scholar who leaves home for the first time to study in the West. Unable to pack all of his books or any of them for that matter, he sets out on a journey of knowledge, with gaps and silences in his personal archive screaming from behind; with his best books left behind, so are the memories of his collecting and collection. Benjamin is right, “the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner,” in this case, as it loses its owner to another location.

And when books become unpackable because of the pressures of long-distance travel and economic costs, the act of unpacking is infinitely deferred and incomplete. There is no doubt the matter of book collection and leaving them behind press other sociological questions, including why African intellectuals leave their country? One possible answer to this specific problem may be the lack of books themselves, besides other glaring social indices. For instance, until recently, it was constantly said that books written about Africa were sometimes not available in most libraries on the continent. It makes sense then that some of the best African thinkers are pushed away by a culture that misrecognizes the value of books, a culture that is increasingly unfair to books the book fairs that molded an earlier generation of intellectuals. Even the idea of a public library or an institutional archive—supposedly infrastructures of knowledge—are anchored on weak systems. Hence, others are made to question whether bookstores and libraries even exist at all.

Although a country like Nigeria has a national library, one wonders how that space truly governs or contributes to the country’s social and political dynamics. We may buy new books and replace old ones, but the libraries we have left—and which appear to have left us—actually remain as fragments of our past, symbolic objects of our dissociation from the home that, as the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire poetically renders it, is the “mouth of a shark,” the “barrel of a gun”. So it is that every act of packing and unpacking we perform again in our new location necessarily bears traces of a past habit of collecting, having signs of the collection that was unpackable.

Unpacking is not just a symbolic ritual of remembrance and performative identification with books, therefore, it is also a site of loss, of rememory and affective belonging. But as we disappear into new collections and memories in the West or elsewhere, the markings of the past yet unfurl themselves to us. In new editions that contain emendations. In new copies that remind us of past annotations. This too is chaos. One wonders if the few among us who truly able to leave home behind do indeed leave their books too. We may say then that unpacking never ends. And we never can truly unpack a library that was once never indeed packable.

What happens when African scholars travel for education in the West? One of the many costs of this mobility is the loss of books, and we need to talk about this more. So, having collected and accumulated more books by now, my colleague whose library is still languishing in Ibadan will probably gift his once-prized possessions to an institutional library. For now he must continue to contemplate how his books must be unpacked.

Reading Shola Adenekan’s African Literature in the Digital Age

Shola Adenekan’s African Literature in the Digital Age characterizes itself as “the first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media.” For a fascinating and inventive volume, this description is both apt and reticent, even if a reminder of the tad neglect of an area of African literary studies that still appears to have a tentative and uncertain reputation among scholars of African literature. This is, however, not a denial of the evident strides made in literary digital humanities in Africa in the last several years. For instance, there has been a growing body of publications exploring these topics  in the last 5 years, including a recent special issue at Postcolonial Text co-edited by Shola Adenekan himself, together with some of the other prominent scholars in the field—Rhonda Cobham-Sander, Stephanie Bosch Santana, and Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang. A survey of some of the most important volumes of African literary and cultural productions, however, seems to suggest we still encounter the role of digital media hardware and software in African writing as peripheral scholarship to the “serious” work critics are doing in other areas. I can immediately point to three excellent edited volumes that precede Adenekan’s book, all of which either entirely omit or offer a paltry space for a robust engagement with African literary DH.

For instance, the outstanding 2021 volume, A Companion to African Literatures edited by the literary scholar Olakunle George, offers a single chapter which, despite its writer’s characteristically brilliant analyses, appears to be, quite frankly, an afterthought that is supposed to reconstellate the literary forms and meanings in more supposedly ‘serious’ and stable forms like print. Although this gesture is consistent in several other instances, it makes a publication such as Adenekan’s a timely and refreshing work that calibrates and potentially refigures the theoretical canons of African literary criticism.

While studies in the intersections of “new media technologies” and African literary and cultural productions are not uncommon, this lack of sustained engagement with the specific ways computer technology influences and transforms literature is also glaring. In its nuanced attention to the form and aesthetics of the digital, therefore, Adenekan’s book takes seriously the discursive implications of the affordances of digital media for both established African writers and a new generation of young writers using the participatory web and blogging to circulate literary forms. This important book recognizes how the digital age enables new writerly possibilities and an era of openness, while making legible the agency of new literary voices and sensibilities.

One accomplishment of the book is the analytical space it constructs for the enunciation of the digital articulation of literary works that invite us to rethink how a new regime of digital visibility enables novel understandings of quotidian political and cultural processes. For instance, the inaugurating chapter on network thinking, draws on Adenekan’s previous scholarly background in computing and builds on the work of Manuel Castells and Patrick Jagoda to signal the many layers of relationship and literary networks between the analogue terrain of print publication and that of the digital. Although the philosophical notion of the “rhizome,” developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, could have greatly enriched Adenekan’s explications of the assemblage of literary connections and authorial multiplicities in African digital spaces, the author makes up for this by invoking oral poetics, which center on the Anansi trickster spider. Symbolizing how oral networks operated long before print technology, Anansi’s web in Adenekan’s theorizing signifies how networks come into being “through information architecture as well as through the metaphors provided in oral productions and creative writings” (22). In this integration of orality, Adenekan’s volume promotes an understanding of digital media through its connections to the aesthetic strategies of ‘old’ media.

By foregrounding analysis of digital literary networks and their importance to our understanding of literary history in Nigeria and Kenya, African Literature in the Digital Age addresses an important aspect of African literature, expertly explicating the online literary networks that enable an appreciation of global politics, class and literature. Adenekan demonstrates how the digital both rearticulates the metaphors of print and connects to oral tradition through the fluidity of textual forms and the dialogic participation of readers in their production and transmission. As rich and middle-class queer Kenyans and Nigerians create communities and find new online platforms for their work, they not only transcend the conservative politics of traditional publishing but also inspire the author’s argument that African digital spaces are marked by class consciousness and sexual politics. Therefore, we encounter imbricating links between discourses of class, sexuality and the body politic in digital texts that center on queerness, and erotic pleasures, born-digital literary forms that challenge the dominance of hetero-normative analyses in African literature. Hence, the volume’s significant dilation on queer politics means we can read it as an important intervention in queer digital studies.

In his closing chapter on social media, the digital emerges as a quotidian zone for the performance of class identities among the literary publics he analyzes. For writers in particular, everyday online experiences are as real and tangible as the dailiness of non-digital spaces. As the author astutely argues, social media for writers such as Chimamanda Adichie and the late Binyavanga Wainana functioned as the location for the free play of literary circulations, personal status updates, and stories conveyed to thousands of followers who may or may not be fans and ‘friends.’ In Adenekan’s brilliant explanation, literary fandoms and friendships as generative sites of artistic practices online often mean that African writers and their publics online socialize both through the written word and through emoticons, emojis, GIFs, and images. Although the book contends that, like linguistic texts, these visual forms of “digital communication all possess aesthetic value” (145), it probably misses a chance here to show the overlapping relations between the ontological visuality of social media and the performative assertion of literary agency among writers. In other words, if African literature online is a class affair among African digital subjects as Adenekan suggests, how are other cultural producers outside of that elite space using selfies, GIFS and other images to equally perform the quotidian? While this question may not be of immediate concerns to the author, it very likely reveals how a disposition for the performative on social media cannot be divorced from both the expression of quotidian aesthetics in literature and the theatrical constructions of comic selves that form a huge archive of political speech on the social web. As the reference to Adichie’s Instagram post in the book’s opening shows, social media offers a playful arena of self-fashioning for writers that suggests that these two latter layers of representation are worthy of more scrutiny.

While this important book restates, and almost romanticizes, the popular idea that “cyberspace represents freedom and democracy” and that “fictional narratives reflect both the restrictions of the printed word and the freedom of online publishing (14), it sometimes takes for granted the extractive relations that exist between the corporate owners of the net’s infrastructures and African digital subjects using these ‘free’ platforms. Indeed, Adenekan recognizes that digital environments are “capitalist commercial mechanisms” and social media are “money-making ventures” that bring artistic practices and commercialization in a “symbiotic relationship” (6). As the author himself might be quick to admit, there is certainly more to be said here. We may ask, who is documenting the large data being produced on social media by African writers and for whom? Also, how does ephemera on social media affect the type and function of the archives produced by writers online?

These questions aside, Adenekan’s African Literature in the Digital Age matters as a field-defining work. It impels the reader to refuse the single story of Africa as a continent that is perpetually confronted with an increasing digital divide and its class politics. Although the digital divide is real, and restates one of Adenekan’s central arguments on class, this book excellently reveals many other stories and narratives. These stories foreground erotic archives, queer subjectivities, the disruptive figure of the modern girl, and other digital subjects whose artistic representations online Adenekan astutely renders legible. The author has done the excellent work the rest of us must now build upon.