Audio-visual heritage preservation and the changing dynamics of Ghana’s historical film archives

Abstract

ABSTRACT Current discourse on restitution and repatriation of Africa’s cultural heritage from Europe often eschews the large quantum of audio-visual materials kept in European archives. However, nation state sovereignty issues and concerns over easy access to film archives have attracted some level of scholarly attention, especially focussing on questions of ownership and its ramifications. From a historical perspective, this article draws attention to storage and preservation practices of Ghana’s audio-visual archives and suggests that current practices impede greatly on public access to film materials. Emphasis is placed on post- independent Ghanaian films, produced by the Ghana Film Industry Corporation and currently stored with a UK laboratory. rely on data from correspondence between the government of Ghana and storage organizations as well as interviews with key actors within the Ghana film industry to posit that in spite of debates in favour of digitization as the solution to access, the technology must be adopted cautiously where issues of ownership, copyright and the place of the tangible materials take centre stage beyond the digitization process for a sustainable access to Ghana’s archived audio-visual materials.