Archives at the service of African nations and societies

Econometric interpretations of the effects of modern colonial domination based on colonial statistics, and research questioning the interactions between colonial empires, colonized populations and international institutions, are sparking renewed interest in imperial statistical production. However, little is known about it.

Discover the third session of "Encrypting and deciphering empires, XVIII-XXIth centuries” seminar: "FIDES figures and the development of Cameroon's economy and society" with Édouard Vasseur, an archivist and paleographer (2001), a graduate of the Institut national du patrimoine (2002), and holds a PhD in modern and contemporary history from the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne, with a thesis on “L'exposition universelle de 1867 à Paris : analyse d'un phénomène français au XIX^e siècle”, under the supervision of Professor Dominique Barjot (2005), which was published in a revised form in 2023 by Perrin. He was successively head of the Contemporary Archives Management Department at the French National Archives (2002), head of the Archives Mission at the French Ministry of Culture (2006), deputy head of the Archiving and Information Lifecycle Management project at the French Ministry of Defense (2012), and functional head of the VITAM interministerial electronic archiving program, at Ministry of the Armed Forces (2015). Edouard Vasseur is currently Professor at the Ecole Nationale des Chartes, holding the Chair of Archivistics, Diplomacy and History of Institutions in the Contemporary Era, as well as the UNESCO Chair “Archives in the Service of African Nations and Societies”. He is also one of the vice-presidents of the Association des archivistes français (2022-2025) and a director of Archivistes sans frontières - section France.

While archival practices may have existed in Africa before colonization, the latter played a major role in the creation of archive services in Africa based on the model of those that existed or were being developed at the same time in colonial countries, while adapting those that did to the constraints and needs of the colonial environment. This paper will review the creation and history of these services in countries formerly controlled by France, as well as their specific features, right up to their current situation.