- The NFT project will use five of Mohamed Amin’s images to raise $250,000.
- The funds will go toward the creation of an archive for African cultural work and history.
- Mohamed’s son, Salim Amin, is working on the project alongside NFT artist Osinachi.
Mohamed Amin, a Kenyan photojournalist famous for filming Ethiopia’s 1984 famine, is set to become the face of a new non-fungible token (NFT) project. This project aims to use five of the late Amin’s images to raise awareness and $250,000 in startup funds. These funds will finance the creation of an archive for African cultural work and history.
According to Salim Amin, Mohamed’s son, Africa has few archivists. As a result, most of the continent’s history gets lost because no one is interested in compiling it. This is seen even in the case of Amin, who is mostly known for filming Ethiopia’s 1984 famine. However, he did so much more.
For instance, he documented the wars and coups that accompanied the rise and fall of many African leaders. Before his death in 1996, which resulted from his plane being hijacked and crashing in the Indian Ocean, Amin also documented Ethiopia’s 1991 civil war and lost an arm in an explosion while at it.
To prevent such information from getting lost, Salim and the Mohamed Amin Foundation teamed up with Osinachi, a renowned Nigerian artist, to launch the NFT project. Osinachi was a natural choice considering he is well-versed with the NFT space, and his work has already sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
A strategic partnership with a SocialStack co-founder
Apart from joining hands with Osinachi, Salim collaborated with Andrew Berkowitz, a web3 entrepreneur who co-founded Socialstack. This deal involves creating a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) dubbed AfrofutureDAO.
This DAO seeks to support African NFT artists by commissioning them for work and offering a platform for distribution. According to Salim, a fraction of the profits from this initiative will go toward preserving Africa’s historical artifacts.
Explaining why it is vital to create an archive for African artifacts, Salim said there are a lot of valuable items in museums or families which are not archived and risk getting lost because the museums or families do not know what to do with them.
Salim added that the archive he is working on seeks to collect, digitize, and monetize such items. He plans to start with his father’s work, which he claims will need $3 million to archive.
His long-term plan for the archive is to make it available for educational purposes across the African continent.
