We are very excited to welcome Sylvia Arthur to the Women’s History Network, who will be giving a paper titled, ‘Unleashing the Tides of Muteness: A Women’s Oral History of West Africa’. The seminar will take place on Zoom on Tuesday 30th June, 4pm-5pm BST, with a Q&A session following Sylvia’s talk. Register for the event here.

We’re delighted that Dr Annabelle Gilmore will be chairing the session.

Between 2022 and 2025, National Geographic Explorer Sylvia Arthur travelled along the West African coast, documenting the lives of women aged 60 and over. At 59, women in West Africa have the lowest female life expectancy in the world. The objective was to create an extensive oral archive of African women’s stories, placing them at the forefront as protagonists in their own lives and in postcolonial African history. 

In this seminar, Sylvia will share audio excerpts from 100 conversations with women in four countries – Benin, Togo, Sierra Leone, and The Gambia – that offer a fresh perspective on the lives and histories of older African women, providing insight into how they live, love, survive, and thrive, defying stereotypes and capturing the joys and challenges of West African womanhood. She will discuss her practice and methodology and explore the potential for expansion that the archive offers, beyond preservation, for the afterlives of West African women elders.

Sylvia Arthur is the founder of the Library of Africa and The African Diaspora (LOATAD), a pioneering library, archive, research institute, and writers’ residency dedicated to the production, preservation, and dissemination of African and diaspora literature. Established in 2017 from her personal collection of 1,300 books, LOATAD has grown into one of Africa’s leading literary institutions, supporting writers from across the continent and the global Black diaspora. Sylvia is the creator of A Women’s Oral History of West Africa, a National Geographic-supported project documenting the life stories of 100 women aged 60 and above across Benin, Togo, Sierra Leone, and The Gambia. The project seeks to preserve voices, narratives, and histories often excluded from official archives and to create one of the largest oral archives of African women’s stories.

Tagged Benin, Life expectancy for women, oral history, Sierra Leone, summer seminar series, The Gambia, Togo, west africa, Women's History