Ntama is a web journal about African music and popular culture which was originally created in 1998 at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz by a group of students and the director of the African Music Archives Prof. Wolfgang Bender. Ntama moved to the University of Hildesheim when Prof. Bender became director of the newly established Center for World Music in 2008. A couple of years later Ntama went offline.
Ntama has now become an independent project. The first milestone is the re-publishing of all articles which had appeared between 1998 and 2008.
The name Ntama originated in a combination of the two acronyms NT, the operating system Windows NT of the first computer of the project at Mainz University, and AMA, the Archives of the Music of Africa, the original host institution of the web journal, thus, becoming NT-AMA.
At the same time Ntama reminds of the small Senegalese talking drum Tama, which is played so virtuously by artists such as the famous Assane Thiam.