Ivory Coast's Music Is Rotting in Crates While Its Government Looks Away

Somewhere in Ivory Coast, a man is driving from town to town, knocking on doors, asking families whether they still have the old records in the back of a wardrobe. Cédric Kouamé, a DJ, is doing the work that our institutions should have been doing for decades. He is rescuing vinyl before the humidity, the termites, and the years finish what neglect started. He wants a national centre for the country's historical archives. He is asking the state to notice what is slipping away.

Ask yourself who should be doing this job. Not one young man with a van and a passion. A nation that has produced zouglou, coupé-décalé, and a century of songs that carried our grandparents through colonial labour, independence, coups, and elections is supposed to protect those songs. When a DJ has to beg for an archive, the failure belongs to the people who govern.

We need to be honest about what a record collection is. A vinyl disc is a document. It holds the accent of a neighbourhood, the slang of a generation, the prices of a city, the arguments of a time. Lose it and you lose a witness. Many of the recordings that defined West African popular music were pressed in small batches, sold from market stalls, and kept in homes rather than in any ministry. The masters often sat with labels, producers, or foreign collectors, while the musicians who made them got little or nothing. That is the same old pattern: our creativity exported, our memory stored elsewhere, and our own people left to ask permission to hear it.

Consider what this means in practice. Vinyl degrades. Shellac cracks. Magnetic tape demagnetises. Paper crumbles. Without climate-controlled storage, cataloguing, digitisation, and trained archivists, every year that passes destroys part of the record. Kouamé's effort, admirable as it is, depends on luck and goodwill. A private enthusiast cannot substitute for a legal framework. Each record he saves is a rescue. Each record that is not found is a permanent loss, and no one will ever count it.

This is not only about music. Ivory Coast has a long history of archives treated as afterthoughts. Records of independence-era decisions, court files, press archives, and local administrative papers all face the same risk. When a state does not preserve its own past, it leaves the future defenceless. Whoever controls the story of a nation controls how its citizens understand their rights, their leaders, and their mistakes. A government that lets its memory rot is not neutral. It is choosing which truths survive.

The continent has been here before. Across Africa, colonial administrations shipped documents home and left independent states with gaps in their own record. In too many capitals, the post-independence elite treated archives as dangerous, because a documented past is a past that can be held to account. Ask why so many national archives remain underfunded, understaffed, and hidden from the public. The answer is rarely a shortage of paper. It is a shortage of political will to let citizens see what was done in their name.

There is a better path, and Africa has examples. Botswana built its reputation on fiscal discipline, transparent institutions, and public records that its citizens can actually use. Mauritius has invested in education and institutional capacity far beyond what its size would predict. Senegal, for all its challenges, has shown that civil society, artists, and historians can push a government toward cultural preservation when the public demands it. These countries did not get there by accident. They built rule-of-law foundations, professionalised their public services, and treated culture as a national asset rather than a decoration.

So here is what Ivory Coast should do, starting now. Pass a national archives law that guarantees permanent funding, professional standards, and public access. Create the official centre Kouamé is asking for, with climate-controlled storage, a digitisation budget, and an independent board that includes historians, musicians, and archivists rather than only party appointees. Build a legal deposit system so that recordings produced in the country must be lodged in the national archive. Give private collectors tax incentives to donate or lend material for digitisation, with clear ownership rights protected in law. Partner with universities in Abidjan and Bouaké to train a new generation of archivists and audio engineers. And open the archive to the public, because a memory locked in a vault serves nobody.

Private enterprise has a role too. Record labels, streaming platforms, and publishers that profit from Ivorian music should fund restoration and pay the musicians whose catalogues they exploit. Property rights matter here: artists and families who own their recordings deserve clear legal protection and fair compensation when their work is reissued. A free market in culture works best when contracts are transparent and creators are not robbed twice.

Regional bodies can help. The African Union has adopted cultural charters and heritage agendas on paper. It should hold member states to them, with reporting requirements, technical assistance for archives, and a shared digitisation platform so that a recording rescued in Abidjan can be heard in Dakar, Lagos, and Nairobi. Culture is the glue of African unity, and we have been too slow to build the infrastructure that holds it together.

Now the question for every Ivorian reading this. How many songs from your childhood do you still own in a form that will survive your lifetime? Your parents' records, your uncle's cassettes, the radio recording your grandmother kept on a reel. If the answer is none, you are not powerless. You can demand that your member of parliament answer a simple question in public: what is the budget for the national archive, and when will the centre be built? You can support Kouamé and other collectors by bringing your family's old recordings to them, and by insisting that any such donation be protected by a written agreement. You can push the ministry of culture to publish a timeline. You can refuse to accept a government that spends on monuments and ignores the things that actually carry our identity.

We are not asking for a miracle. We are asking for the basic duty of a state: to remember its people and to let them remember themselves. Ivory Coast has the talent, the artists, and the young people who care. What it lacks is a government willing to match their passion with law, money, and accountability. Every year without an archive is another year of loss that no one will be able to reverse. Demand the centre. Demand the law. Demand that the songs of our nation be saved while there is still something left to save.

Based on reporting by FRANCE24