Inside Baoulecore, Abidjan’s Underground Archival Pulse and Cultural Hub

Baoulecore isn’t just a record store. Nestled on the edge of Cocovico market, a women-led space that embodies the vibrance of Abidjan, Baoulecore is a repository of memory. Vinyl, cassettes, zines, faded photographs and rare books—each one a fragment of a life, a story refusing to fade. A nexus where music, art and history collide. It's a vault where DJs, writers, artists, and anyone chasing culture come to dig, to experiment, to connect. 

Established in 2023 by Cédric Kouamé, an avid collector and lover of anything archaic and historic, Baoulecore is the home he built for his memorabilia. It is an eclectic medley of items he inherited, hunted, and preserved, a space where they can be shared with people who are eager to time-travel to yesteryears.

“Being the only guy in the city collecting records is boring, so building a community was important and to spark interest in people's minds,” he tells OkayAfrica. “Some don't necessarily have record players at home but are just curious to find out about these stories. So the space is about bringing this heritage alive and building a community. I have the center not for the records but for the stories they carry, because records are tangible but the music and memories aren't,” he adds.

In a digital-first world, Kouamé insists on the tactile. “It’s important to have parts of our lives and history that we can hold, touch, and feel. Often African history has been oral, and that has led to a lot of confusion over the years. So for me books, cassettes and vinyl are mediums that host lives of people who came before us. It’s important to preserve our history and package it for future generations.”

What began as a personal obsession now pulses as a cultural hub. A space where sound, image, and artifact refuse to die quietly — where they gather, breathe, and tell their stories again.

His obsession with collecting any and everything archival isn't just a hobby, it's tracing narratives and identities long gone. “I like collecting things. This obsession led me to a project I embarked on called The Gifted Mold Archive. It started out with me seeing my family's molded photographs from the ‘70s and ‘80s and once I laid out all the discarded photographs I collected, I saw beauty. So I visited an old photography lab in Abidjan searching for old photographs that were molding and negatives that had been sitting there for decades.”

This relentless quest to trace Ivorian history in photo labs became the genesis of what Baoulecore represents today. When his uncle passed away, Kouamé inherited his vinyl collection. “It wasn’t a large collection, but among the collection, there was old Ivorian music, Congolese and everywhere else on the continent. But the most important thing about this collection is that it taught me about different genres,” he says, adding, “because I was collecting from a Western perspective from the days of me being introduced to producing and sampling through an LA internet station back in 2012 while living in Europe.”

By 2023, Kouamé had amassed a substantial collection of vinyl, cassettes, photographs, and art pieces. “I decided to open a space where I could share my archive with a broader community. And that’s how Baoulecore was born,” he says.

The name Baoulecore is adulation to the Baoulé people, Kouamé’s ancestry — who trace back to Ghana in the 17th and 18th century. Their origin story centers on Queen Abla Pokou, who sacrificed her child so her people could cross the Comoé River. From her cry, “Ba ouli” (“the child is dead”), came their name. It’s a story of loss and rebirth — the same cycle Kouamé channels into his work.

“I wanted the space to represent history, memory, and narrative, so I collaborated with different artisans to bring the space to life. I was deliberate about how I wanted the space to look and feel, from the custom-made furniture, the books, art and objects we sell in the store, everything is representative of a 360 archive center.”

Baoulecore’s location is “perfectly situated in a place where spaces of this nature aren’t really found,” Kouamé says, adding that it is accessible to the people whose history is being told through its archives.

This philosophy extends to publishing. Baoulecore recently released its first hand-bound zine. “Often you’d find old records with no sleeves and covers, or just covers with no records. Instead of just throwing those covers away, my partner and I decided to repurpose some of [them] and make them book and zine covers instead. For our first zine, we collaborated with friends who are writers and poets from different parts of the world who gave us stories. We wanted to create a manifesto of our current time as history unfolds and juxtapose it with our personal stories. I used some analog photographs that I took and developed here in Côte d’Ivoire to complete it.”

At its heart, Baoulecore is about community, memory and collaboration — with archive and history itself, with artisans building its furniture, with writers across continents contributing to its zine, old photo labs donating photographs and strangers as well as patrons alike donating vinyl and cassettes.