The Mara Cultural Heritage Digital Library : The Implications of Repatriating Oral Tradition in Digital Media

Since 1995 I have been interviewing elders, both men and women, in the Mara Region to collect oral traditions. This research has resulted in a number of books and articles published by academic presses. But people in the Mara Region often want access to the original interviews, audio, video and photos, with their now deceased relatives. In some cases these are the only representations their grandparent s generation. Yet it is also clear that youth who did not sit with their grandparents have less and less connection to this material. The Tanzanian Department of Education secondary school curriculum mandates teaching local histories. Yet, particularly for isolated regions like Mara, few resources have been published for this purpose. The Mara Cultural Heritage Digital Library (MCHDL) is a project that aims to digitize and make available to people in the Mara Region my own research materials. This will form the basis for adding other collections and interesting youth in recording community stories as a constantly evolving database. Either Secondary Schools or Community Resource Centers (CRC) might serve as the access point for the digital library. This project has been in process for three years on a limited budget with a prototype of sample material on the Greenstone platform available on a restricted website. The paper will explore the broader theoretical approaches and problematic aspects of using digital media for repatriating oral knowledge, as well as the practical challenges in producing, funding and making it usable in rural Tanzania, including intersection with educational and community institutions. A digital library has the possibility of providing multiple versions of and perspectives on cultural heritage rather than the unified account required for paper publication. It is thus less susceptible to being co-opted by particular interest groups or power struggles and more available for multiple and complex reinterpretations of the past. Yet the biggest challenge is in providing access in a way that honors the heritage of those who produced these materials