About Us

Decolonising the Archive (DTA) is a Pan-African “living” archive based in the United Kingdom, that seeks to facilitate heritage-based therapeutic interventions for people of African heritage rooted in our archives, cultural principles and technologies.

Our Beginnings

Decolonising the Archive (DTA) started 15 years ago and began as a theatre and memory practice endeavour. We worked with elderly groups, drawing on cultural and traditional practices to revive and inform our workshops. Our experiences challenged the notion of a didactic approach and as such, we incorporated a decolonial practice method into our pedagogy. We recognise that an alternative, more inclusive learning method and ways of expressions was imperative for our delivery.

We have worked with and trained hundreds of groups across Britain and the globe. As we grew as archive specialists, the lived experience we garnered contributed to our scholarship and knowledge base. This foundation underpins our methodological practice in creating and facilitating therapeutic components into an archive intervention. Our purpose is to use these methods to inform and energise under served communities.

meet the team

Legacy Building Programmes

Decolonising the Archive (DTA) has successfully built legacy and resilience training programmes that support community cohesion, narrative ownership, disciplinary archive skills, alternative communal therapy and good practice, not only within communities, but within archive and museum spaces.

Community Archivist Outreach team with Professor Patricia Rodney and Connie Bell at the Walter Rodney Book Launch of ***Kofi Badu: Out of Africa*** & **Lakshmi: Out of India** (September 2023)

Our training programme Correcting Our Collecting has so far, in its two and half year existence, trained and graduated 60 persons from the African heritage community in Britain to be Community Archivists and Repository Specialists. Currently the best of our graduates are now part of our Community Archivist Outreach team and network, who we can confidently refer to work with the community and institutions in supporting the building of a personal archive or offering advice on the matter.

Summer 2022 - Correcting Our Collecting cohort of trainee Archivists at the Black Cultural Archives

Under our University of Repair training programme we have facilitated for over 700 community members in building resilience and best practice in the area of self repair, reparations and restitution.

Summer 2022 - Public Exhibition at BCA curated by our graduates

In our Emotional Emancipation Community Healing programmes we have trained 20 community members to be able to hold self repair circles within their communities.

Archive and Theatre Pedagogy

Decolonising the Archive has also built theatre and archive infused programs to address the dearth in African Heritage Theatre practice spaces and sites within Britain and to widen the conversations around Black Theatre in Britain that includes its artists and community.

Most notably DTA revived and staged the work of the formidable Writer/ Feminist/Activist Una Marson's acclaimed and almost forgotten play, Pocomania, for the first time on British shores and is now permanently a fixed archive repertoire at the The National Theatre's Black Play Archives.