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Welcome to the LOATAD Oral Archive

Gathering the oral stories of Africa and the African Diaspora, one audio at a time

Listen In

Our Archives


Women Reading Women: A crowdsourced audio archive of African women’s stories read by African women from across the continent.

Women Speaking Women: An archive of undocumented oral stories gathered from across the coastal regions of Ghana.

Other Archives: A collection of audio and video stories that capture the perspectives of underrepresented peoples.

Know the Archive

The Oral Archive in Numbers


68

stories

18

countries

26

writers

400

listeners

Add your voice to the Women Reading Women archive

Record yourself reading a 5-minute extract from a book by an African woman writer from your country and send it to us to be added to the archive.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

“Penda Wewe”

A beautiful poem of love written and read in the lyrical language of Kiswahili.

Invioletta, Tanzania

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Akuvi Awuye

A heartfelt conversation about migration, spoken in Ewe.

Nuhale Ada (Greater Accra Region)

Rating: 5 out of 5.

“What It Does Mean To Be A Woman In Ghana?”

A compelling video polemic about being a Muslim woman in Ghana.

Sabena, 28, Accra

NEWS

Stories from the archive


Meet the experts working to preserve LOATAD’s archives

Since August 2021, we’ve been working with a team of UK-based archivists to develop a framework for preserving our archives.  Led by Dr Etienne Joseph, co-founder of Decolonising The Archive, with Information Management Specialist, Lydia Julien and Archivist, Kaitlene Koranteng, the aim is to employ best practices to create a system that works within an…

Meet the newest members of #teamLOATAD

Mae A. Miller-Likhethe is a US-based scholar, curator, and museum educator. Her projects explore questions of decolonisation, infrastructure, aesthetics, and technology. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and is curating an exhibition, A Thousand Secrets, at ApexArt (NYC). Mae has previously held roles as Curatorial Fellow at Elizabeth Foundation…

Welcome to the LOATAD Oral Archive

In November 2020, LOATAD was honoured to receive a grant from the Goethe-Institut Ghana to deliver our Women Speaking Women (WSW) project, the sister project of Women Reading Women.  Whereas the latter focusses on collecting oral recordings of published works by African women writers, Women Speaking Women is concerned with formalising African women’s 𝘶𝘯𝘸𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘯 stories…