The history of African art is not written solely in museums and universities. It is also documented in private collections, commercial archives, auction records, dealers' catalogues, and countless individual initiatives that have preserved information long before systematic digital documentation became possible. Together, these sources constitute an important—though often underestimated—part of the empirical foundation upon which future scholarship depends.

The purpose of this essay is not to argue that private archives should replace public institutions. Rather, it is to suggest that they should be recognized as complementary sources of knowledge. If scholarship seeks to reconstruct the historical trajectories of African objects, it cannot afford to ignore the documentation generated outside museums and publicly funded research projects.

The Jaenicke–Njoya Archive emerged from this conviction. Over the past two decades, it has developed into an independent documentation project based on several hundred thousand photographs of African artworks collected from the international art market. Every documented object is assigned a permanent reference number, allowing its provenance within our archive to remain verifiable long after it has changed hands. Although the archive was not created within an academic institution, it pursues a scholarly objective: to preserve empirical evidence that might otherwise disappear from the historical record.

The reflections presented here were also shaped by one particular experience. Although we openly introduced the international African art market in Lomé, Togo, and Berlin, Germany, to the Translocation Project at the Technical University of Berlin and facilitated contacts between Felicity Bodenstein and experienced art dealers in Lomé, we were subsequently excluded from the DIGITAL BENIN platform. Despite repeated attempts over several years to understand this decision and to establish a constructive dialogue, the exclusion remained unchanged.

Initially, this appeared difficult to reconcile with DIGITAL BENIN's stated commitment to transparency. We had been prepared to disclose the locations of the Benin, Ife, and Tada objects documented in our archive according to the same principles of openness and accessibility that the project publicly advocates.

Only gradually did it become apparent that the disagreement reflected more than differing views on documentation. It pointed to a broader methodological question: What kinds of knowledge count as legitimate in the study of African art, and who is recognized as a legitimate producer of that knowledge? This question extends far beyond a single project. It concerns the relationship between museums and private archives, between academic institutions and the art trade, and ultimately between competing interpretive paradigms that shape how African art history is written today.

This essay is offered in that spirit—not as a personal response to exclusion, but as a contribution to a broader discussion about documentation, transparency, and methodological pluralism in African art research.

for more information, please write us to

wolfgang.jaenicke@jaenicke-njoya.com

with the Jaenicke-Njoya Archive number