The Anton Wilhelm Amo Heritage Audio Archive (Amo Talks & Walks) is a bilingual, translocal sound walk and growing digital archive that transforms the fragmented traces of Anton Wilhelm Amo into a shared geography of listening.

Born in Axim in present-day Ghana and brought to Europe as a child, Amo became the first known Black philosopher to study and teach at German universities. Yet his life and intellectual legacy have been preserved unevenly—in university records, court archives, urban landscapes, monuments, street-renaming debates and community memories. The sound walk asks: Who is entitled to narrate this history? Whose voices enter the archive? What becomes audible when we listen from the places themselves?

Rather than following one prescribed route, the project connects sites of memory in Wolfenbüttel, Braunschweig, Halle, Wittenberg, Jena, Göttingen, Hanover and Berlin, with further connections to Ghana and the Netherlands. Each station combines site-specific narration with oral histories, archival sources, images and multiple contemporary perspectives. Voices of activists, scholars, artists, students, cultural practitioners, local initiatives and traditional authorities accompany listeners through streets, squares, university sites, archives and memorial landscapes. Place is not treated as a backdrop, but as an active historical source.

The archive draws on selected material from almost 100 interviews conducted across Germany, the Netherlands, Ghana, Senegal and South Africa. It also preserves the knowledge of civil-society initiatives that have worked for many years to make Amo’s history visible, including groups that are no longer active.

Listeners can follow individual local routes, create their own path between the stations or access the archive remotely. This portable structure makes participation possible across different locations and levels of mobility. The archive is free, open access and available in German and English; QR-linked stations further connect the digital material with public space.

Initiated, conceptualised and coordinated by cultural scholar Andrea‑Vicky Amankwaa‑Birago, the independent, Black-led project emerged from a translocal civil-society network established in 2019. It was realised in 2026 by the Anton Wilhelm Amo Heritage Society e.V., with support from the Berlin Senate, Wikimedia Germany and Stiftung die Schwelle.