More Process, Less Product

In their introduction to the 2014 edited volume African Studies in the Digital Age, Terry Barringer and Marion Wallace reflect on the transformative impact of digitisation on both access to and the study of African collections.These transformations, they argue, had not all been positive: imbalances in training and wealth had deepened geographical inequalities in collection development; commercial actors had prioritised collections in and from the Global North; and changing research practices had created conditions in which African collections were just as hidden as everif not more so.It is in these contexts that the Making African Connections project sought to make a digital archive whose ends were to investigate, and make investigable, our process of making a digital archivethat is, what we did in the making rather than the outputs of that making. 1 This article explores key aspects of that workforgoing detail, foregrounding multivocality, collapsing hierarchies, digitising with careand documents what we found as principles became actions, as product succumbed to process, and as tensions and conflicts arose in the making of a digital archive.Throughout, the question of whether or not our archive could be 'decolonial' was hardly at stake: to Roopika Risam's urgent provocation 'if the archive itself is a technology of colonialism, can the creation of new [digital] archives resist reinscribing its violence?' we answered a resounding no. 2 Instead, by removing displaced African 'archives' from 'business as usual' practices, by differentiating them from, and making them less subject to, the needs of the whole, our work sought to foreground the