Bamuturaki Musinguzi
9 November 2009
opinion
Nairobi — The world's audiovisual heritage, excluding cinema, is estimated at 200 million hours, divided equally between television and radio.
However, eight per cent of this memory is endangered, Unesco warns.
These unique collections have cultural, linguistic and historical significance.
In most cases, they are the surviving original recordings of the time.
However, audiovisual memory suffers from a form of deterioration that cannot be seen or heard by the general public, the International Federation of Television Archives observes.
This is acute in Africa.
The continent holds a lot of audiovisual materials which are at the risk of disappearing, deteriorating, becoming obsolete or being damaged due to poor planning and lack of funds to purchase the required technology to migrate the archives -- magnetic tapes, gramophone records, shellac records, vinyl records, film and video material -- to latest formats.
Elsewhere in the world, effort has been made over time to conserve, preserve and restore these materials.
Unfortunately, this is a complex undertaking which often requires specialised guidance, skills, infrastructure and research -- resources most African countries may not have.
The Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC) holds approximately 10,000 hours of analog magnetic tapes; 11,000 hours of 45 revolutions per minute (rpm); 20,337 hours of long playing (LP) vinyl records; and 3,600 hours of 78 rpm shellacs.
These, accumulated over 80 years of broadcasting history in Kenya, include material about the struggle of independence, post-Independence political speeches by local and international personalities, rallies and commentaries, folk music, sports commentaries, profiles, national music and celebrations among others.
Unfortunately, like other many African countries, Kenya has not witnessed any deliberate effort to enable preservation of its audiovisual materials, the African Woman and Child Feature Service and the Kenya Archival Study Group have observed.
"This has constrained efforts to research and document work in areas such as music, film and other artistic forms as well as maintenance of a record of the various social historical perspectives and technological developments in the area of audiovisual media," the Archival Study Group argues.
Other than the diminishing effect this has on a country's collective public memory, the Archival Study Group adds: "The lack of a concerted effort to preserve audiovisual heritage has created space for foreign institutions to make profit out of what is rightfully our heritage."
It is these concerns which led to the formation of an archives study group that has been meeting since the last quarter of 2007 to plan and explore possibilities and mechanisms for systematically preserving, restoring and exhibiting audiovisual media in Kenya.
"The huge amount of valuable audiovisual material in our custody does not guarantee long term access of information contained due to ever changing information carriers and playback," the chief librarian at KBC, Mr Joseph Kirui writes in a paper titled, "Present Conservation, Preservation and Restoration Challenges: The Case of Kenya Broadcasting Corporation."
"It is therefore important to embark on a preservation strategy of materials in libraries and archives from the current analog to digital because of the increasing obsolescence of the traditional analog broadcasting formats and systems in favour of digital," Mr Kirui writes in his paper presented at the Conservation, Preservation and Restoration of Audio-Visual Media in Kenya Conference held in Nairobi, recently.
To address the issue of digitisation, KBC is drafting a Digitisation Policy and Strategy to map out digitisation activities for the next three years
Among the dangers facing archives are fluctuating tropical temperatures, high and low humidity, and dust which has manifested itself in analogue audio recordings which have not been rewound for a long time.
Lack of controlled climatic storage facilities and trained staff on this specialised field means the institution has to invest in facilities to arrest the situation and consider other preservation measures for survival of both old and current carriers," Mr Kirui writes.
The departure of multinational recording companies like EMI, CBS, Phillips and Polygram in the mid 1980s in most African countries, left the continent poorer for these companies took with them the master reels of the music recordings done at that time - a rich heritage of popular music of close to eight decades is kept in their archives in the west.
But all is not lost.
In November 2008, the digitisation and archiving project at the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) was launched.
In one-and-a-half years, the gramophone library's treasures will be transferred from all kinds of originals to several digital formats, like hard disk, CD and mp3.
The important aspect of this exercise, funded by the Cultural Preservation Fund of the German Foreign Office in Berlin and jointly conducted by the GBC and the Centre for World Music of the University of Hildesheim in Germany, is the safeguarding of the musical documents of this particular collection.
It renews the possibility to make use of these records saved into digital era by the radio station itself. Researchers will also be able to access the material.
"Everywhere one speaks of digitization - it has become the order of the day. If we look more closely at it, digitising by itself cannot be an aim or is not an accomplishment as such," the director of the Center for World Music of the University of Hildesheim, Dr Wolfgang Bender argues in his paper, "Conservation, Preservation and Restoration of Archival Material: Is it a worthy endeavour?" presented at the Audio-Visual Media in Kenya Conference.
"The digital copy made might be less durable than the still existing original like in the case of GBC. The shellac discs, some are more than 70 years old, the majority are around 50 years of age. They will easily continue to function for another century or more if well kept," Dr Bender adds.
But there is a catch: What we have in most of our archives are the unwanted, the least liked.
"Regular stocktaking took place in most archives every year. In the process a number of breakable records were lost. What is left is interesting in itself. Often an archive is the negative imprint of what was important at a particular time. The records mostly played disappeared, the famous titles might have been the ones that were stolen. No archive is complete, archives are always fragments. This fragmentation means that all archives are complementary to each other," says Dr Bender.
The GBC gramophone library was established as a service institution for the journalists working at the station.
"In 1993, the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation lost a large amount of their audio-visual material when fire broke out in the audio-visual library. This was a collection of the only existing copies. Irresponsible, we would argue today, considering the value as part of Ghana's and the world's cultural heritage," Dr Bender laments.
With Digital technology, however, our audiovisual heritage can be assured of a long and renewable life.
What is more, by physically disconnecting the archive medium from the user, digital makes this memory accessible.
Once compressed, sound and images can accompany, with perfect definition, all of the current vectors, be they artistic or cultural, educational or research-oriented," Emmanuel Hoog, president of Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA) suggests.
"Entering schools and universities, audiovisual heritage gives a new dimension to basic education. It is also a tremendous media working tool for researchers and becomes a source of inspiration, innovation and re-appropriation for creators. Ensuring the physical storage of audiovisual archives is the same thing as restoring our cathedrals."
According to Hoog, the widespread implementation of a legal deposit for audiovisual documents in each country appears to be the best way to remedy this problem for the future: "It would ensure the well-planned creation of true audiovisual libraries, which, combined with encryption techniques and copy protection systems, would provide future access, by all, to all the memories of the world."
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2009 The East African. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
