Makerere University Klaus Wachsmann Audio-visual Music Archive (MAKWMA)

Founded in 2009, Makerere University Klaus Wachsmann Audio-visual Archive (MAKWAA) is a multi-media archive and resource centre for traditional, popular and art music, recited word, dances and stories and recollections of musicians and dancers of Uganda.

MAKWMA’s history dates back to June 2004 when the organizers of the International Seminar on Popular Cultural Materials and Public Spheres at Roskilde University in Denmark asked Dr. Sylvia Nannyonga Tamusuza to present a paper on the “Challenges of Archiving Popular Music in Uganda.”

This paper has since been published twice in a South African Journal in 2007 and as a chapter in a book published by Seagull in 2009. The research on archiving music in Uganda revealed a pathetic situation. Generally, archiving music in Uganda is left to the private sphere: to the personal collections of individuals and a few private organizations.

The state-owned institutions, namely the Uganda Museum, the National Archive at Entebbe, public libraries and university libraries, preserve other archival materials, but not music recordings.

Although Uganda Radio and Uganda Television (now all under one umbrella: Uganda Broadcasting Corporation) have archived music since their founding in 1953 and 1963, respectively, researchers and the general public have no access to their collections except through the occasional broadcast of a few songs during the “Music to Remember” programs on radio.

Through the research at the Uganda Museum, Dr. Nannyonga-Tamusuza discovered that Klaus Wachsmann, its first curator, an ethnomusicologist, teacher and researcher on music of the Ugandan people, had made music collections in the 1940s and 1950s.

Specifically, he collected 1575 from 26 ethnic groups in Uganda and while he had deposited copies of this collection at the Uganda Museum, they were not accessible at all.

The Archive also offers internships to MA in Music and Bachelor of Arts in Music graduates who took courses in music archiving depending on availability of funds. The internship offers these graduates practical skills in the functioning of an audio-visual archive.

Music Archive Interns collect music in the field recordings and process it for archiving. They also organize public exhibitions about their field collections as well as participating in reviewing the documentation of the repatriated collections.