By 
By Matone Ditlhake, CEO, Corridor Africa
Africa’s heritage is one of the world’s greatest cultural endowments, yet much of it remains fragile, undocumented, and at risk. As time, climate change, conflict, and globalisation accelerate loss, the question is no longer whether Africa should digitise its heritage, but how quickly it can act.
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The urgency is undeniable. Across the continent, manuscripts decay in under resourced archives, artefacts disappear through theft and illicit trade, and indigenous languages fade as elders pass on without their knowledge being recorded.
Oral traditions, core of African history, are at risk in a world that prioritizes the written word
Oral traditions, which sit at the heart of African historiography, are especially vulnerable in a digital first world that privileges written and online content. Without deliberate intervention, entire knowledge systems risk vanishing within a generation.
Digitisation offers a powerful response. It enables the documentation, preservation, and safeguarding of cultural assets before they are irreversibly lost. Digitising heritage does not replace physical artefacts or living traditions.
It creates high quality digital records, including images, audio, video, text, and three-dimensional models, that preserve cultural memory even if originals are damaged, destroyed, or inaccessible.
Digital Archives: The Last Refuge of Heritage in Crisis Zones
In regions affected by conflict or environmental degradation, digital archives may one day be the only surviving record of a people’s history. In this sense, digitisation becomes cultural insurance rather than convenience.
For centuries, Africa’s story has been documented, interpreted, and stored outside the continent. Digitising heritage under African leadership allows Africans to reclaim authorship of their own narratives.
Digitised collections can support more accurate education, challenge colonial distortions, and allow African youth to engage directly with their history rather than through second hand accounts. Cultural preservation becomes an act of dignity and self-definition.
Democratizing Heritage: Digital Access Erases Barriers to History
Technology also transforms access. Digital heritage transcends geography, allowing a student in a rural village to explore ancient artefacts, listen to ancestral stories, or study historical manuscripts through a phone or computer.
Diaspora communities can reconnect with their roots, and researchers can collaborate across borders. Heritage shifts from static relic to living resource.
There is also economic potential. Digitised heritage fuels film, animation, gaming, fashion, tourism, publishing, and immersive media when cultural assets are owned and governed locally.
Instead of exporting raw cultural value, Africa can build creative industries that generate jobs, innovation, and global influence rooted in its own identity.
Digitization Demands Caution: Mitigating the Risks of Exploitation and Misuse
Digitisation, however, carries risks. Cultural assets can be extracted, commercialised, or misused if governance is weak, and sacred knowledge may be exposed without consent. For this reason, digitisation must be community led, consent based, and ethically governed, with strong protections for cultural rights, intellectual property, and data sovereignty.
Ditlhake
Preserving heritage at scale requires investment in skills, infrastructure, and institutions. Archivists, historians, technologists, linguists, and creatives must work together to build secure, resilient digital repositories. This is not a short-term project. It is a long-term commitment to memory, identity, and continuity.
Preserving Africa’s legacy cannot be left to chance or external actors. Governments, universities, museums, traditional authorities, and private partners all have a role to play through coordinated continental action.
Africa should digitise its heritage not simply to archive the past, but to empower the future. When done with care, respect, and African ownership, it ensures the continent’s legacy is not only remembered, but lived, shared, and carried forward in the digital age.
COVER IMAGE: The Creative Brief
