Listening to Colonial History
Echoes of Coercive Knowledge Production in Historical Sound Recordings from Southern Africa
by Anette Hoffmann
ISBN 9783906927398
Basler Afrika Bibliographien 2023
European archives hold historical voice recordings that were produced by linguists, ethnologists
and musicologists during colonial rule in African countries. While these recordings reverberate
with the polyphonic echoes of colonial knowledge production, to date, acoustic collections
have rarely been consulted as sources of colonial history. In this book Anette Hoffmann
engages with a Southern African audio-visual collection, which is located in five different
institutions across Vienna, Austria.
Several recordings collected by the anthropologist Rudolf Poech in August 1908 have been
retranslated for this book. These translations provide new insights into Poech’s collecting expe-
dition to the Kalahari. Poech’s narrative of his heroic journey is called into question by the Naro
speakers’ comments, which address colonial violence and criticise the research practices of the
anthropologist. By attending to the spoken texts on the recordings and reconnecting them to
photographs, ethnographic objects, archival documentation and Poech’s travelogue, Hoffmann
offers a different reading of this research trip into a war zone.
Anette Hoffmann is a senior researcher at the Institute for African Studies and Egyptology, Uni-
versity of Cologne, currently working on a project on German linguists‘ concepts of language
and race in relation to Southern African languages.
