Where The Dikan library collected and built a repository, the Dikan Center is bringing history back to life.
On a quiet, suburban street in the heart of Accra, Ghana, the Dikan Center sits inside a tall, mud-colored building complex. Inside, a hum sits in the air — spliced through occasionally by office chatter and the mundane clicks of office equipment. Sitting on three floors, a team of mostly young people buzz around the white walled-rooms that house the machinery and manpower of the Dikan Center’s new archive section called the Awo Institute.
Awo Institute (Awo means a wise old grandmother in Twi, and represents a repository of wisdom) is an extension of the work that Dikan, founded by Paul Ninson, has been doing in storing and collecting archival materials. Ninson first began his foray into archives with a photography library in 2022, the first of its kind in Ghana.
“When I started, it was very difficult to find a library, which leads to the bigger conversation of knowledge accessibility,” Ninson tells OkayAfrica.
Ninson says the lack of adequate access to African history and knowledge systems on the continent can be traced back to the colonialist plundering of the continent’s historical materials to have them studied in the West. Ninson’s way of course-correcting the issue was by building a library, but he understood that that alone would not be enough. An entire system of restoring and preserving heritage through archives was needed.
“The photography library was the seed of Dikan, but the center has expanded its role into a much broader cultural and educational hub,” Ninson says. “The library is no longer just a place for books; it now connects with exhibitions in our gallery, archival research in Awo Institute, community programs through Ahenfie, and our fellowships. By bringing music, oral histories, and visual culture together, we’ve transformed the library into a living space where knowledge is not only stored but shared, debated, and reimagined. It has given the library a new energy, making it part of a larger ecosystem for African creativity and education.”
So, while the Dikan library collects and builds a repository, Awo Institute brings history back to life. “Everything is centered around education,” Ninson explains.
“Everything is centred around education.” - Paul Ninson.
Photo by Dikan Center
The dirty work
As Dikan embarked on a mission to begin working in archives and broadening access to African history, the major question was, “Who funds archives? Who funds the dirty work?” It’s a tough question to answer, as many African countries still provide little support or investment to archival or historical preservation efforts. It’s a problem that African researchers and archivists have been grappling with for decades now.
“Many of the archives were all dirty, they were kept in a basement which was never shared with anybody, so who's going to fund [the restoration of that]?. The questions for us were ‘how do we build a system, how do we build capacity, how do we train people, how do we make it sustainable?’”
A major challenge that came with building an archive center boiled down to the cost of machinery. In countries where archival efforts and research are adequately funded, they typically have access to machinery and manpower that can cost up to $400,000. To work around that, Ninson decided it was best to “build our own machines that work for Africa, and are sustainable.”
To save cost, Ninson used different technological parts and processes to build machinery that captures and collects archival materials to be digitized. “I realized that I don't have the resources to buy the $400,000 machine, but I have the resources to buy parts of machines and put them together,” he says.
“My background is in photography, so I understood how you can process negatives. I applied the same thing, bought cameras, and then retooled the cameras. Then a friend helped me build some software, and somebody else helped me weld some of the things together, and then lastly, I bought a paddle that captures archival materials with the tap of a foot.”
To ensure it worked, Ninson tested the makeshift machine himself for 6 months, tweaking and figuring out how to make it faster and more effective.
“The least amount of archives per station is a thousand. The highest we've recorded so far is 2,300 a day.” With the highlife archive being 6.5 million and Kwame Nkrumah’s being 82 million, Ninson is determined to create a system that completes the archiving process in a year.
The archive center is sectioned into different teams that work around collection, restoration, preservation, and digitization.
Photo by Dikan Center.
Building systems
At the beginning, there was also the problem of archival policies, as well as convincing institutions and academic bodies to part ways with their archival materials to democratize access.
“You have to build everything from scratch,” Ninson admits. “We have a conservation lab that does preservation and paper conservation. We have to find chemicals from the U.S. and ship them to Ghana. We brought professors in, we brought people who donated the archives to us, we have vinyl records, CDs, cassettes, VHS, and all these things.”
The vision for the new Dikan archival center began two years after the launch of the Dikan Library. “At that stage, it was more feasibility studies and analysis of the state of archives in Ghana and Africa as a whole,” Ninson says. His team conducted copious amounts of research, down to the selection of the building they now occupy. According to him, everything was given immense consideration.
“We've built a workflow system like a literal machine. When the archive comes in, we document every single detail. We have a checklist of every single thing.”
The team at the archive centre comprises 42 people. They are all multi-skilled and can handle more than one aspect of the archival process. To deepen its work in African music history, Dikan brought on the renowned music scholar and archivist Professor John Collins, who also donated millions of rare African music archives from his personal collection.
Professor Collins has been helping the Awo Institute with digitizing and preserving his vast collections that range from photographs, field recordings, vinyls, cassettes, and written manuscripts.
As Ninson puts it, “This work is especially timely as we approach the centenary of highlife music in 2025. The collaboration goes beyond preservation; we are developing exhibitions, fellowships, and research programs.”
At the moment, the center has also been working with the Ghanaian Military to digitize their archival materials and train personnel on archival processing skills. There are also storage rooms where archival materials are kept at specific temperatures until they are ready to be shipped back to where they came from. In other corners of the space, cameras, worktables, and laptops sit on table tops, ensuring the smooth transfer of physical archival materials to the cloud. It’s a process, as Ninson explains, that places emphasis on information and skill exchange.
“If the archive is damaged, it goes to conservation; if it's not damaged, it goes straight to digitization. There's another team that is responsible for quality assurance, there's another team that's responsible for metadata, there's another team that's responsible for audiovisual, there's another team for collection management, and lastly, there's another team in our Awo lab that is in charge of putting them on the platform for accessibility,” Ninson says, adding that all digitized archives are sent to the Dikan Library, and will be available from November.
The materials being preserved at Dikan Center include vinyls, photographs, CDs, and printed materials.
Photo by Dikan Center
The work that Dikan has taken on through Awo Institute is ambitious and continues to require even more support to keep it sustainable. “One of the biggest challenges is sustainability. Building an institution like Dikan requires significant financial and infrastructural investment, but arts and cultural education in Africa is still underfunded. We are constantly working to balance our vision with limited resources. Another challenge is access — how do we make sure our library, archives, and programs are not just for Accra, but for communities across Ghana and the continent?”
None of this, as Ninson says, is about legacy. “It's rewarding. I love history. I love education. I read a lot. The point is that if I can contribute to the knowledge system in Africa, nothing is more rewarding than that.”
Still, with new space, the Dikan Center is also positioning itself as a multidisciplinary space for community and education. They’ve set up journalism fellowships and other initiatives that support journalists, women in media, young graduates looking to enter the art industry, as well as workshops, talks, and exhibitions which are open to everyone.
“Our mission is not just to preserve knowledge but to activate it to make it usable and
impactful for African creatives, leaders, artists, general public, and storytellers,” Ninson says.
Ninson sees a future where the coming generation of Africans knows more about themselves and their history because of the increased access to information and education. “We can build systems like the Western institutions that can take care of us.”