sp-mujuni/mizizi

Mizizi is an AI-powered cultural preservation and knowledge platform that captures, protects, understands, and passes Africa’s stories, languages, songs, traditions, and collective memory to future generations. # Mizizi — The Living Memory of Africa > *So the stories don't disappear.* **Mizizi** (Swahili for **roots**) is an AI-powered living archive for African oral culture. It preserves original recordings of stories, songs, riddles and proverbs — never altering the source — and makes them responsibly discoverable and transmissible across generations. > **Mizizi Archive** remembers. **Mizizi AI** interprets. **The community** decides. This repository contains **Mizizi v0** (Alpha), the foundational implementation of the Mizizi Cultural Object: the atomic, provenance-aware, rights-aware, multimodal digital representation of one piece of cultural memory. ## Core principles 1. **The original recording is never altered.** Everything the AI produces is a derivative layer on top of an immutable source. 2. **Cultural consent is a first-class system.** Permissions, consents and access levels are enforced in code, not policy documents. 3. **Provenance is immutable.** Every significant event in an object's life is recorded. 4. **The archive outlives any AI model.** The schema is designed so vector search, knowledge graphs and AI pipelines can be added later without rebuilding the core. ## MVP scope (Alpha 0.1) - **3 languages**: Luganda, Runyankole-Rukiga, Acholi - **4 content types**: stories, songs, riddles, proverbs - One complete Cultural Object lifecycle: create → upload original → checksum → transcribe → review → translate → permissions → provenance → publish → search → adapt (permission-aware) ## Repository layout ``` mizizi/ ├── backend/ # FastAPI + SQLAlchemy + Alembic + PostgreSQL │ └── app/ │ ├── core/ # config, database, storage, enums │ ├── models/ # SQLAlchemy ORM models │ ├── schemas/ # Pydantic schemas (API representation) │ ├── routers/ # API routes │ ├── services/ # business logic │ └── seed/ # seed data ├── frontend/ # Next.js (App Router) + React + Tailwind │ └── src/ …