Historians need to start listening. This argument has been made repeatedly by scholars of sound and sensory history. Yet most historians have stubbornly continued to privilege written texts and visual images, treating audio recordings as a niche interest. With the publication of Listening to History, Anette Hoffmann adds her voice to the call on historians to listen with a focus on colonial history. The book’s main arguments are that, listening provides insights into mechanisms of colonialism that cannot be gained from other sources; and that when sound recordings are considered as vital to the colonial archive, subaltern speaking positions emerge from within it. As Hoffmann writes: “the inclusion of thousands of sound documents not previously perceived as historical sources explodes our current understanding of the colonial archive” (p. 34).
Listening to Colonial History, published by the Basler Afrika Bibliographien in 2023, is a translated and revised version of Hoffmann’s book Kolonialgeschichte hören, which was published by Mandelbaum Verlag in Vienna in 2020. The book explores listening to historical sound recordings as sources for studying colonial history. Its case study is a collection of audio recordings by the Austrian anthropologist Rudolf Pöch (1870–1921) of Naro speakers in 1908 in the Kalahari. During Germany’s colonial war, Pöch travelled through southern Africa and produced photographs, film and sound recordings, and acquired objects, including human remains he robbed from graves. He brought this collection to Vienna, where it was split up according to disciplinary categories across five separate collecting institutions. The sound recordings were kept in the Phonogrammarchiv, which in 2003 published them as a CD.
Hoffmann conceptualises listening to sound archives as akin to listening to “echoes” (p. 7). Echoes are heard with a delay and over distance, distorted, and filled with gaps of meanings. The methodologies Hoffmann deploys for engaging historical sound archives are “close listening” and “reassembling”. Close listening “means actual listening, instead of reading the index and/or the transcriptions the archive provides” (p. 32). Close listening is often a collective task that involves collaboration with people who understand the speakers’ languages. For this, Hoffmann collaborated with Naro speaker and San rights activist Job Morris and others, who (re)translated and (re)interpreted the recordings. Close listening further means focusing on “everything that is audible on a recording”, including non-verbal expressions and background noises, to glean information about recording moments. Reassembling means the systematic reconnection of the sound recordings with photographs, texts, and objects that were acquired at the same time, but scattered across various disciplinary collecting institutions.
The first chapter discusses how an engagement with sound challenges understandings of the colonial archive. Postcolonial scholars conventionally understand the colonial archive as a discursive formation that determines who can speak and what can be said, and which excludes subaltern speaking positions. Hoffmann challenges this by suggesting that the colonial archive no longer appears as site where subaltern speaking positions are totally absent once historical sound recordings are considered integral to it. Anthropologists like Pöch produced sound recordings to “collect” linguistic samples. Despite the coercive context of colonial knowledge production, speakers also used recording moments to voice disagreements, even to proffer critiques of colonialism. These critical statements were “swallowed” by the colonial archive, as they were not mentioned in transcripts, summaries or indexes. Yet, because they were preserved in the archive, they can be listened to again. According to Hoffmann, these “sound recordings can provide a more direct, though not necessarily the direct, access to subaltern enunciative positions” (p. 37).
The second chapter is concerned with how processes of colonial knowledge production selectively made narratives disappear. In August 1908, Pöch recorded two men, Kubi and | Xosi Tshai, who spoke about the deterioration of the environment and changes in their way of life caused by colonialism. Seeing Kubi gesticulating when recording into the phonograph, Pöch decided to film him. In 1984, Dietrich Schüller combined Pöch’s film and audio recordings into a short film, Buschmann spricht in den Phonographen (“Bushman speaks into the phonograph”), which became known as an example of early ethnographic film. The film presents Kubi’s narrative as incomprehensible. The loss of narrative happened gradually and as the result of decisions, including Pöch’s use of a broken wax cylinder for the recording which was used for the film, and not preserving the spoken words in written documentation. Job Morris could only retranslate one sentence that had previously not been translated: “This is white man’s land” (p. 94). Despite context missing, this one sentence echoes the colonial logic of silencing.
The third chapter analyses the difference between acoustic recordings and their written documentation. One of the recordings that it focuses on is described in the index of the Phonogrammarchiv and the booklet of the CD as “Bushman speech”. However, unmentioned in any written record, it contains a recording of Pöch’s voice. Probably recorded to demonstrate the technique of phonography, Pöch can be heard addressing his assistants in a mix of English, German, Dutch and Afrikaans. The recording contradicts claims about his linguistic competence and communication skills. He can further be heard asking his assistant if he was afraid of him. Fear is not mentioned in the index. Yet, Hoffmann emphasises, in the context of colonial war, people had reasons to be afraid of Pöch and the soldiers who assisted him. Close listening here provides a more nuanced understanding of colonial knowledge production.
Chapter four focuses on recordings, retranslated by Job Morris, of a speaker who criticises Pöch’s practice of colonial collecting. In one recording, a man referred to as | Kxara the Elder criticises Pöch for not sharing his food. In another recording, he complains about Pöch having taken away his knife. In the written text accompanying the collection, these complaints are not noted in detail, be it because the translators withheld information from Pöch, or Pöch decided to ignore it. According to Hoffmann, this is the only known audio recording to date that explicitly criticises the ethnological appropriation of objects. However, it is likely “that a more systematic study of historical audio recordings of the colonial archive would unearth more such statements” (p. 147).
The publication of Listening to Colonial History is highly relevant for scholars of colonial history, postcolonial studies, and everybody interested in questions of restitution of colonial collections. With the book’s first publication in German in 2020, and its 2023 English publication, it can be hoped that it will reach the publics for which it is most relevant both in Europe and in southern Africa. The book is well-written and captivating to read. Some readers might object the use of the term “deafness” to describe colonial listening practices (p. 103, 112), as disability scholars criticise the metaphorical use of deafness to describe deliberate ignorance as ableist language.
Overall, what stands out is the book’s strong multi-media storytelling. Where available in the digital catalogue of the Phonogrammarchiv, references are included for readers to listen to the discussed audio recordings. The book further includes photographs taken during Pöch’s travels, which were carefully selected to break with the ethnographic stereotyping for which they were initially deployed. Curating the book in this way, what Hoffmann achieved is to not only theoretically write about close listening and reassembling but to demonstrate how these practices unfold and invite readers to participate in them. Crucially, while this is not a book that makes an announcement to decolonise colonial collections, it actually does the work and, while doing so, sets a high standard.