Restoring African Feminist Indigenous Knowledge in the Southern African Human Languages Technologies project: An action research case study of the San tsî Khoen Digital Archive 2020-2022

The United Nations declared 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages for the promotion of language development, peace, and reconciliation. One of the stated aims of the awareness campaign is the integration of indigenous languages into standard settings, bringing about empowerment through capacity building and through the elaboration of new knowledge. The San tsî Khoen Digital Languages Application & Archive is a project based in the San & Khoi Centre at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Established in 2020 and funded by the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture, it is informed by a co-design digital curation process with the community. The project archives the endangered and erased languages of the indigenous San and Khoi communities of southern Africa, with an initial focus on N|uu and Khoekhoegowab. To obtain this, the project integrates decolonial scholarship within a digital environment of human languages technologies that creates a visibility of not only erased and endangered languages but also indigenous African feminist knowledges that have been lacking in scholarship. The digital archive hopes to provide support for the case for these languages to become South African official languages. With this purpose in mind, its co-design digital curation process challenges the insular and fragmented nature of academic output, thereby allowing for a greater degree of critical analysis. This action research and digital curation process is not without its challenges, as co-creating knowledge in an attempted decolonial framework that aims to foreground African indigenous feminist knowledge (such as that of last fluent Nluu speaker, Ouma Katrina Esau) in a region of historical linguicide that was subjected to epistemic violence, as a consequence of colonialism and neo-colonialism, is in itself not without its various contestations. This paper critically discusses this collaborative research and co-design knowledge production process engaged with over a process of forty research workshops, over the past two years. The analysis and discussion in this paper are derived from a thematic analysis of this co-design digital curation process facilitated by the San & Khoi Centre between 2020 and 2022. We provide a critical perspective on how the San tsî Khoen Archive was developed from the unique point of view of the women project members (as senior researcher and curation research interns on the project) and their consideration of decolonial imperatives in addressing the complex challenges for co-design processes in feminist indigenous digital archive language restoration.