AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	46. Shaping collections, producing alternative histories: The example of Namibia as a contested research entity
Paper ID	390
Author(s)	Hoffmann, Anette
Paper	No paper submitted
Abstract	The study of the colonial encounter in Namibia (and elsewhere) is complicated by the absence of the voices/accounts of the colonised population in the archives. Recently recovered and digitalised recordings from 1931 in Namibia provide an extraordinary source for the analysis of local discourses and cultural strategies that dealt with the colonial situation. My paper will explore the contents of the recordings that are a product of Hans Lichtenecker’s 1931 excursion to Namibia, were he, on behalf of Eugen Fischer (the notorious German “raciologist”), produced materials - life casts, photographs, blood, hair and colour samples - for the taxonomic categorisation of “Aussterbende Negerrassen” (vanishing “negro-races”). In the recordings, Namibians express their complaints about the colonial regime, comment on the praxis of categorisation and, most astoundingly, directly address an anticipated German audience. The situation of the recordings was remarkable: Lichtenecker was not interested in the content or genres of speech and song that were being performed, nor was he able to understand what people were saying or singing during the sessions. This “relative freedom of speech” constrained by a colonial epistemological praxis, produced accounts of Namibian history that can be heard today, with a delay of 75 years. In other words, the “self-policing regime” of Lichtenecker’s epistemological paradigm – that of the “disinterested” recording of voices – led to a situation in which the flow of information was reversed: “the natives” addressed “the Germans” as their anticipated audience, taking the opportunity to “smuggle” messages to Germany. The recordings, which were intended as “voice samples” of the different “races”, thus document the reaction of the speakers to the epistemic but also physical violence of the project of taxonomic categorisation. Other accounts speak of colonial wars and the duress of life under apartheid. Addressing “the Germans” directly, the speakers convey messages from Namibians under apartheid, while at the same time providing a subtext or comment on the immediately experienced colonial violence in the situation of the attempted objectification. In this way, the production of the visual and aural material for the classification of racial difference is “dubbed” or commented on by speech acts that stress the social - not racial - identity of the speakers. Consequently, these speech acts are resonant with a critique of the colonial praxis in situ. Furthermore, the cultural specificity of a voiced history “frozen” by the recording may allow for an analysis of people’s understanding of their living conditions in 1931 in addition to an understanding of the immediate process of history being made within the speech acts. The proposed paper will analyse some first translations of these voices and performances of the Namibian past in terms of their capacity to transmit historiology from a subaltern position.

Subaltern interventions: representing history, smuggling messages to Germany