The work of translating German colonial archives opens up a still largely under-explored field of research on the history of precolonial African art. By making descriptions, sketches, architectural plans, and photographs produced in the colonial period accessible in French and English, it becomes possible to reconstruct, at least in part, African visual worlds from before the conquest – their forms, materials, and ritual and political uses.

These documents are of course not neutral: they carry the gaze, biases, and symbolic violence of the colonial project. Yet it is precisely by reading them critically, and by confronting them with local knowledge, oral traditions, and contemporary African research, that they can become sources for a history of African art that emerges from the archives, but is reinterpreted from the standpoint of Africa.

My translation work is rooted in this perspective: shifting these documents from a colonial use toward a scholarly, educational, and memorial use that serves the concerned communities and today’s researchers. In this section, I present only a selection of these visual materials: images of sculptures, architectural surveys (such as plans of huts or palaces), photographs of ritual sites, everyday objects, and ornaments.

These images are not meant to offer an exotic illustration of a “lost past,” but to serve as starting points for new investigations: reconstructing contexts of creation, identifying artists and workshops, understanding the political, religious, or social functions of these forms, and tracing the trajectories of objects now dispersed in Western museums and collections.

The aim of this section is therefore twofold:

• To reinvigorate research on precolonial African art by making visual and textual materials available that have long been difficult to access;

• To offer a space for critical reflection on how these images were produced, archived, captioned, and sometimes distorted, in order to better reinsert them into African histories of art, memory, and heritage.

Recontextualized and accompanied by rigorous translations, these images are meant to support the work of researchers, students, artists, and curators, but also to enable African and diasporic audiences to reclaim fragments of their visual history, long confiscated by colonial languages and institutions.