Although the project started at the beginning of 2023, it has actually been running since 1 January 2024.
Three PhD students have been hired so far (one from Ghana, one from Tanzania and one from Ethiopia; two from the African continent and one from Europe; two hired in January 2023 and one in November 2024) and a fourth is to be hired to work on a Kenyan case study. A post-doc has been recruited for four years to work on the Ghana case study.
The project began with a three-day international kick-off conference entitled "Creative Methodologies: Writing the stories of working women from popular classes in African urban milieus, 1920-1970', which took place in January 2024. The conference included presentations by some members of the project advisory board, all junior and senior project staff, and leading international scholars specialising in innovative approaches to African history (photography, literary studies, oral history, etc.). Another international workshop specifically on photography as a tool for oral history will follow in May 2024.
In July 2024, the whole team (PhD students, post-docs and senior staff) visited relevant European archives together, most of them based in the UK. Some of the archives visited (not exhaustive) are: The National Archives, London, the British Library, the SOAS Archives, the Archives and Library of the London School of Economics, Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian Libraries of Oxford University, the Archives of the Church Missionary Society in Birmingham, the Sudan Archive of Durham University; and in Europe: the Archives of the Social History Institute in Amsterdam, the ILO Archive in Geneva and the White Fathers Archive in Rome. Finally, as planned, the first two PhD students left in September 2024 for their own fieldwork, where they will stay for a year, and the post-doctoral researcher went to Ghana in February 2025 for two months; the three are collecting oral histories and visiting national archives.
The other senior staff (those working on the 20% of the project) are planning to travel later. As for me, having had to cancel my year-long fieldwork in Khartoum due to the war, I am now concentrating on photographic and textual archival material before traveling to Cairo in late 2025 to meet with the Sudanese diaspora there.
In short, a very large amount of oral, textual and photographic data is being collected by the project staff, with thousands of pages copied and dozens of hours of interviews recorded. With the exception of an initial one-year delay and the delay in hiring the third and fourth Ph.D. students for reasons beyond our control, the project is on schedule and meeting its goals.
With regard to the other actions described in the DoA that we were able to implement, in October 2024 we held our first ERC Summer School, which aimed to train students in the methodology and historiography of labour and women's history in Africa. It took place in Addis Ababa at the French Centre for Ethiopian Studies (CFEE). The project included a scholarship and tuition for 10 African students, mostly women, from 6 different African countries (Ghana, Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa), selected on the basis of a project proposal, while the teaching staff included African historians along with all the senior staff of the project. This first summer school was a test that will allow us to build better and more efficient summer schools in the coming years.
Finally, the fourth and last scholarly activity described in the project has been the support and promotion of researchers on the continent working on issues related to the project. This has been realised through a system of visiting fellowships for writing retreats in Paris, at the IMAF, from the winter of 2024. So far, three scholars have been invited to IMAF with WomatWork funding: Prof. Salvatory Nyanto, University of Dar es Salaam; Eliud Biegon, Kenyatta University and Nathaniel Chimhete, University of Zimbabwe. The action was very successful and the researchers developed draft articles on the history of working women in their respective countries and received feedback from ERC staff. Publication of their research will be the next step.
