African Music Archives (AMA)

Bio

Located in Mainz, Germany and founded in 1991 by Dr. Wolfgang Bender, the African Music Archives (AMA) contains a collection of modern African music. The collection includes shellacs and vinyl-records, audio and videotapes, CD’s and DVD’s. At present, there are approximately 10 000 sound carriers, part of them dating back to the 1940’s. Countries well represented include Ethiopia, Ghana, Cameroon, Congo (Ex-Zaire), Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania but inventories from almost any sub-Saharan Country can be found in the collection. Newspaper clippings are preserved, sorted by country, genre and artist. The articles, reports, interviews, reviews, etc. contain a great amount of background material that is immediately available for inspection.

Through an ongoing process of the cataloguing of all archival holdings in the OPAC online catalogue of the University Library of Mainz, the entire collection shall be available for online research in the near future.

The archive may be visited on Mondays from 4 PM to 6 PM, Wednesdays from 1 PM to 2 PM and Thursdays from 2 PM to 4 PM.