"Reframing Africa is at root a project about the African archive broadly defined. It asks questions pertaining to this archive as a repository of historical knowledge, its systems of classification, and what strategies should be developed to ensure its preservation in light of state negligence. In addition, this project also seeks to explore how audio-visual artists, filmmakers and scholars can use archival materials to enrich their creative work. In the process it seeks to offer African audiences a sense of how their historical location has, in part, been shaped by the archives through systems of representation. This raises the question of what might happen if Africans were to imaginatively project themselves into the future as custodians of the African archive. The thorny issue of the conservation of African archival materials is today even more urgent in light of the devastating fire at the University of Cape Town in April 2021 in which approximately 20 000 films were destroyed. This incalculable loss underscores the urgency with which the digitisation of archival materials must be integrated into every aspect of archiving practice and why it is important that Africa produces a new generation of dedicated archivists who will become the custodians of the continent’s material culture. Finally, we have begun to consider how we might discharge our duty to the archive of the future. The present book tends to have an overall focus on the South African cultural formation, and in particular cinema in relation to the archives. This is not an accidental occurrence as the project itself was first conceived in South Africa and, as we have already explained, the first Reframing Africa workshop was held at Wits, with the majority of participants being from South Africa. However, since its inception the project has rapidly evolved to acknowledge the undesirability of what are, after all, artificial borders, as it seeks to make deeper connections across the continent and the African diaspora." (Preface, page viii)