- Collection
African Music Archives
- Humanities and Social Sciences
The African Music Archives (AMA) were founded in 1991 by the cultural anthropologist Wolfgang Bender at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies. It is home to Germany’s only collection of its kind and contains modern African music on formats from shellac and vinyl to tapes, CDs, and DVDs. The archive’s current holdings comprise around 20,000 sound recordings, some dating back to the 1940s. Key regions represented in the collection include Ethiopia, Ghana, Cameroon, Congo (formerly Zaire), Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Madagascar. Beyond its regional strengths, the collection spans nearly all of sub-Saharan Africa—and it keeps growing through regular new acquisitions. Today, the AMA is part of the “Archives and Collections” of Mainz University Library.
