For Whom and For What Purpose? A Position Paper on Digital Humanities and AI in African Studies

African Studies scholars have been involved in Digital Humanities (DH) projects since the 2000s. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in large language models (LLMs), have expanded the possibilities for textual analysis and archival research, but implementation raises difficult questions: who controls access, whose data is used to train AI without consent, and whose languages remain underserved. This position paper is the collective work of a Volkswagen Foundation–funded scoping workshop held in Hannover, Germany in February 2026, with twenty-six scholars from sixteen countries. Across four working groups — language technologies; archives and visual heritage; infrastructure, governance and access; and epistemologies, decoloniality and ethics — we develop a shared vocabulary for ownership and sovereignty, access, sustainability, and standardisation as transversal questions, in dialogue with critiques of data colonialism and data extractivism. Drawing on our collective experience across these fields, we propose situated rather than universal practices: digitisation agreements as living documents, ontologies built collaboratively, design grounded in access, governance, and sovereignty, and ethics treated as a process rather than a deliverable. The paper argues for placing African systems of knowledge or epistemologies and decolonial critique at the centre of DH and AI in African Studies, and for rethinking who shapes these technologies.