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Mèhèza Kalibani, 2024

Colonial rule was not only characterised by territorial occupations. The appropriation of knowledge from and about the colonised also contributed significantly to Europe's colonial project. Thus, colonizers, missionaries, ethnologists, and practitioners from other disciplines have, for example, ‘studied’ cultural and religious artifacts as well as parts of the bodies of colonised people.

With the invention of the phonograph by the American physicist Thomas Edison (1847-1931) in 1877, voices and sounds could be recorded on wax cylinders and played back at a later date. In the following years, recordings were also made in colonial contexts.

Today, there are historical recordings in German sound archives, many of which were produced in contexts of injustice. Similar to the appropriation of ethnographic artefacts, these were often used as authentic sources in scientific studies on music, culture and language.

To this day, the violent circumstances are often ignored, as is the fact that the sound recordings were part of colonial knowledge production. This article focuses on these recordings and the contexts in which they were made.

Stationen

The first recordings

From the colony to the prisoner-of-war camp

Thinking and working methods in ethnomusicology

Colonial knowledge production

Photographs from the first Hamburg “South Sea Expedition”

Recordings from German colonies

The 'Phonetics Nerd'

Karl Atangana

Mohammed Hussein - a double victim

Muhamed Nur, the War and Grammar

Workshop ‘The voices of our ancestors’

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