In the first part, I will outline the global dimensions of the politics of digital cultural heritage with a particular focus on developments within and between Europe and Africa, framed within the broader context of the politics of heritage and its preservation and recent debates about ‘postcolonial digital humanities’ (Risam 2019). In the second part, I will discuss the history and current state of digitisation in Europe and Africa. Here I will partly draw upon the the IFLA/UNESCO Survey on Digitisation and Preservation that was conducted in 1998, at the dawn of the era of (mass) digitisation, and the web archive of the accompanying IFLA/Unesco Directory of Digitised Library Collections (2002-2006), as well as recent global and European digitisation surveys.